Michael Krieger

My name is Michael Krieger, and I am the creator and editor of Liberty Blitzkrieg. I'm originally from New York City.

As far as my academic and professional background, I attended college at Duke University where I earned a double major in Economics and Spanish. After completing my studies in 2000, I took a job at Lehman Brothers where I worked with the Oil analyst in the Equity Research Department.  In 2005, I joined Sanford C. Bernstein where I served as the Commodities Analyst on the trading floor. About halfway through my time there, I started to branch out and write opinions on bigger picture "macro" topics that no one else at the firm was covering. These opinion pieces were extremely popular throughout the global investment community, and I traveled around providing advice to some of the largest mutual funds, pension funds and hedge funds in the world.

I loved my job, but as time passed I started to educate myself about how the monetary and financial system functions and what I discovered disgusted me. I no longer felt satisfied working within the industry, and I resigned in January 2010.  At that point, I started a family investment office and continued to write macro pieces on economic, social and geopolitical topics. That summer, I drove cross country for six weeks and ultimately decided to leave the crowded streets of Manhattan for the open spaces of Boulder, Colorado, where I currently reside.

In the years that followed, I gradually recognized that my true passion centers upon writing on issues of significant societal importance given the extremely challenging times we live in. This realization culminated with me losing interest in financial markets and eventually launching this website in early 2012.

If you are interested in a more detailed description, replete with colorful anecdotes, of how I ended up making this bizarre professional transition, take the time to watch the video below.

https//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DcqMN-FXCIE?rel=0

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

How Freddie Mac is Subsidizing the Real Estate Transactions of Billionaires

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Once the American oligarchs saw the ease with which they were able to loot the U.S. taxpayer via the banker bailouts and get away with it, they knew it was the perfect opportunity to declare open season on the general public. As such, the last several years has been little more than an ongoing crime scene in which the rich and powerful have relentlessly preyed on the poor, weak and ignorant with no remorse whatsoever.

Today’s piece is just the latest in an almost endless series of incidents demonstrating how the entire economy is systematically rigged to benefit very small group of people at the expense of everyone.

Bloomberg reports:

Who do billionaires turn to when they want to buy apartment complexes? The U.S. taxpayer.

Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group and Stephen Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group LP are in talks with Freddie Mac to finance two transactions totaling more than $10 billion, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. Those discussions come after the government-owned mortgage giant already agreed to back Lone Star Funds’ $7.6 billion deal to buyHome Properties Inc. and Brookfield Asset Management Inc.’s $2.5 billion takeover of Associated Estates Realty Corp.

“They wield a very big stick,” said John Levy, a principal at a real estate investment banking firm in Richmond, Virginia, that bears his name. “It takes more time and it’s going to be more expensive” to get transactions done without the two companies, which can lend at rock-bottom rates because their deals have implicit government backing.

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Two Trains Derail in Wisconsin Shortly After Warren Buffett’s BNSF Beats Back Railroad Regulations

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Last week, under pressure from companies including Buffett’s BNSF Railway Co, which has spent more money lobbying Congress this year than any other railroad, U.S. legislators passed, and President Obama signed, a law that delays the so-called positive train control mandate for at least three years, with the possibility of an additional two-year delay.

That means railroad operators can put off having to buy and install equipment that safety advocates say would have prevented accidents that have claimed more than 245 lives and caused over 4,200 injuries since the National Transportation Safety Board began calling for the technology in 1969. 

– From the Reuters article: Buffett’s BNSF Helped Lead Fight to Delay Train Safety Technology

A freight train derailed near Alma in western Wisconsin, spilling thousands of gallons of ethanol. BNSF Railway said crews continued Sunday to transfer ethanol from the derailed cars and get the cars back on the tracks.

The BNSF train derailed at 8:45 a.m. Saturday about two miles north of Alma, a town along the Mississippi River. Some of the 25 derailed cars were empty auto racks and tanker cars.

BNSF said railroad crews stopped the leaks from five tanker cars and placed containment booms along the shoreline. One tanker released an estimated 18,000 gallons of ethanol, and the other four released an estimated 5 to 500 gallons each.

– From ABC News: 2nd Train Derails in Wisconsin in 2 Days, Spills Crude Oil

Last week, a friend of mine sent me an Reuters article titled: Buffett’s BNSF Helped Lead Fight to Delay Train Safety Technology. It immediately caught my attention, because I am of the unconventional belief that Warren Buffett’s entire public persona of a gentle, kind and caring grandfatherly-type investing guru is a complete and total act.

Granted, I think Warren Buffett is a brilliant man, I just don’t think he’s a good guy. In fact, when you look in particular at his behavior through the banker bailout period, it becomes clear that the man is only concerned about his own bottom line, and merely feigns a bleeding heart for the long-term welfare of the nation.

All you have to do is see how the man morphed into a Obamanomics cheerleader in exchange for following a bailout of his financial investments, and continues to support economic policies that have done little other than transform this nation into a total Banana Republic oligarchy in less than a decade.

But I digress. Let’s get into the heart of this post by showing how his railroad company, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, successfully lobbied to delay certain regulations.

From Reuters:

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From Protesting Vietnam to Demanding “Safe Spaces” – What Happened to America’s College Kids?

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I grew up hearing stories of protest. About those years, a decade or so before I was born, during which America’s youth rebelled against the prevailing establishment, and forever changed the nation’s course in some meaningful ways.

Of course, many of you will accurately state that not much about the imperial state has actually changed since those days of protest, and that in fact, the out of control abuse of power both abroad and at home has gotten far worse in the subsequent decades. I will concede this point, but want to add a caveat. Certain things really did change, particularly with regard to racial discrimination in these United States. Not to say things are perfect, but to discount the significant gains achieved in this regard would be unfair.

Nevertheless, as far as the “shadow government” is concerned, not much has changed. Other than the fact that the status quo learned important lessons from those years of rebellion, and was forced to operate even more secretly than it did before. As an example, the military-industrial complex learned that it couldn’t have genuine journalists running around war zones after images taken in Vietnam shocked the nation and helped turn popular sentiment against it. As such, reporters in war zones these days are nothing more than propagandists and imperial shills. Indeed, increasingly effective propaganda and a captured corporate media has probably been the single most important tool used by the shadow government to maintain and consolidate control over all these years. In a nutshell, people have been dumbed down, as well as mentally and emotionally castrated, to the point of being almost unable to rebel against anything of real importance.

Which brings me to the point of this post. The reason I brought up the civil disobedience and activism of the 1960’s, is because it did at least represent a true conflict with that generation’s status quo, and it did in fact attempt to tackle some of the pressing issues of power, justice and freedom that existed at the time. This is in stark contrast to what passes as “activism” on college campuses today, which essentially amounts to “pro-censorship” students vigilantly defending an entirely invented and unconstitutional right to “not be offended.” Whereas the 60’s movements, for all their failings, were at least ostensibly about freedom (of the mind and body), today’s college movements are strikingly focused on shackling the mind, and turning campuses in unintellectual, zombie-filled wastelands.

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Nanny States of America – Parents Arrested for Letting Kids Play on Beach, Girl Given Detention for Hugging Friend

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I haven’t covered the American nanny state in a while, but two articles recently caught my eye and I simply have to share.

The first one relates to two parents charged with “reckless endangerment of a child,” for letting their two boys play on a Cape Cod beach for an hour unsupervised.

From Reason:

Parents who let their boys, ages 7 and 9, play on their own for an hour at a family beach will be arraigned later this month on charges of reckless endangerment of a child.

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Not a Joke – Japan Hired Girl Band to Help Sell Government Bonds

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*Note:  This story is old. In fact, it’s from 2012, but I had already hit publish by the time I recognized this oversight. So while this is NOT a new story, it is true, and the sentiments I share remain valid. 

Japan is the prime example of what happens to a nation when lunatics are permitted to centrally plan an economy for several decades. As many of you will remember, the following advertisement was a real pitch used by the finance ministry several years ago to sell JGBs, i.e., Japanese government bonds.

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Fast forward a few years, and we have this…

From the Telegraph:

Japan’s cash-strapped government is reportedly turning to popular music group AKB48 to help it sell government bonds, as interest in the low-yield paper wanes.

The debt campaign will see AKB48 – comprising about 90 performers, ranging in age from early teens to mid-20s – joined by sumo wrestling’s champion Hakuho and female football star Homare Sawa, Japan’s Jiji press agency reported. 

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Business as Usual – Paul Ryan Pushes Through Multiple Wall Street Giveaways in the Highway Bill

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It was always going to be a seamless transition from John Boehner to Paul Ryan. These men are cut from the exact same cloth, which is worshipping at the altar of crony capitalism. They talk a good game about about “free markets” and “entrepreneurship,” but at the end of the day, are both staunch defenders of statist, centrally planned economies, as long as the subsidies go to mega-corporations.

David Dayan, who’s excellent work I’ve covered many times here at Liberty Blitzkrieg, just published an article at the Fiscal Times outlining the plethora or Wall Street giveaways recently added onto the “Highway Bill.” One of these relates to something I’ve covered previously, the 6% annual dividend paid by the Federal Reserve to its member banks. Here’s some background from a previous post, Banks Squirm as Congress Moves to Cut the 6% Dividend Paid to Them by the Federal Reserve:

Have you looked at your checking or money market bank statement lately from JPMorgan Chase or Citibank? How about the statement showing the interest you’re earning on your mortgage escrow account with the big banks? While the country suffers through the lingering effects of the Great Recession caused by the biggest Wall Street banks, the public typically receives less than 1 percent on their deposits at the big banks, while the government has legislated a permanent, risk-free 6 percent guarantee to the Wall Street banks for their capital on deposit at the Fed.  Now that’s an entitlement program that needs to die!

This corporate welfare program gets even better: if the shares of stock were acquired prior to March 28, 1942, the 6 percent risk-free dividend is tax exempt and the bank doesn’t have to pay corporate taxes on it.

There had been a Senate proposal in the Highway Bill to reduce this payout to 1.5% for all banks with more than $1 billion in assets. Naturally, the Republicans in the House, led by Paul Ryan, killed it. Wall Street always gets it way in Congress. Always.

From the Fiscal Times:

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Vaccine Whistleblower Gave Congress Thousands of Documents, Claims CDC Destroyed Proof of MMR-Autism Link

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I want to start off this post by making it clear that I’m not remotely anti-vaccine. Personally, I chose to receive a Hepatitis A shot prior to my Asia travels last winter, and I also recently received a TDAP booster in order to reduce the risk of transferring pertussis to my newborn son, which can be quite dangerous if contracted by babies.

While I’m not anti-vaccine, I am anti-ignorance, and there’s a lot of ignorance and bluster out there when it comes to this subject. I know this, because I spent a lot of time researching the topic over the past nine months, after finding out that my wife was pregnant. It’s a complicated topic, which is why this is the first time I’ve ever written about it.

I came to realize that what Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote in an Alternet article earlier this year is undoubtably true. He noted:

Vaccines are big business. Pharma is a trillion dollar industry  (1) with vaccines accounting for $25 billion in annual sales. (2) CDC’s decision to add a vaccine to the schedule can guarantee its manufacturer millions of customers and billions in revenue (3) with minimal advertising or marketing costs and complete immunity from lawsuits. High stakes and the seamless marriage between Big Pharma and government agencies have spawned an opaque and crooked regulatory system. Merck, one of America’s leading vaccine outfits, is currently under criminal investigation for fraudulently deceiving FDA regulators about the effectiveness of its MMR vaccine. Two whistleblowers say Merck ginned up sham studies to maintain Merck’s MMR monopoly. (4)

Big money has fueled the exponential expansion of CDC’s vaccine schedule since 1988, when Congress’ grant of immunity from lawsuits (5) suddenly transformed vaccines into paydirt. CDC recommended five pediatric vaccines when I was a boy in 1954. Today’s children cannot attend school without at least 56 doses of 14 vaccines by the time they’re 18. (6)

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A Warning to Indian Citizens – Your Government Wants Your Gold

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The notion that the Indian government considers its citizens’ gold “idle” and would like to get its hands on personal holdings of the metal, as well as bullion held in temples, has been circulating in the media for several years now. What’s interesting about today’s article, is that Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has introduced concrete plans to make it happen.

Bloomberg reports:

There’s about 20,000 metric tons of gold stashed away in India’s temples and households — more than four times the amount that’s held in Fort Knox in Kentucky — and Narendra Modi wants to get his hands on it.

India’s prime minister on Thursday unveiled three state-backed plans to try to tap the stockpiles of the precious metal to trim physical demand and reduce imports by providing people with alternative avenues for investment. At an event in New Delhi, Modi announced the formal start of a gold-deposit plan, a sovereign-bond program linked to the metal’s price and introduction of locally minted coins, some bearing the face of Mahatma Gandhi.

Also known as the “please trade in your gold for paper promises and government tokens” plan.

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God’s Work – How Goldman Sachs Scammed a Utah Program Meant to Help Preschool Children

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Goldman Sachs announced last month that its investment in a Utah preschool program had helped 109 “at-risk” kindergartners avoid special education. The investment also resulted in a $260,000 payout for the Wall Street firm, the first of many payments that is expected from the investment.

Yet since the Utah results were disclosed, questions have emerged about whether the program achieved the success that was claimed. Nine early-education experts who reviewed the program for The New York Times quickly identified a number of irregularities in how the program’s success was measured, which seem to have led Goldman and the state to significantly overstate the effect that the investment had achieved in helping young children avoid special education.

Goldman said its investment had helped almost 99 percent of the Utah children it was tracking avoid special education in kindergarten. The bank received a payment for each of those children.

The big problem, researchers say, is that even well-funded preschool programs — and the Utah program was not well funded — have been found to reduce the number of students needing special education by, at most, 50 percent. Most programs yield a reduction of closer to 10 or 20 percent.

– From the New York Times article: Success Metrics Questioned in School Program Funded by Goldman

Just when you think “Too Big to Fail and Jail” Wall Street can’t stoop any lower, they go ahead and exceed expectations. The following story is so base, so disgusting, and so completely void of any semblance of ethics, it could only have been achieved by the Vampire Squid itself.

The scheme revolves around a crony practice that is increasingly being embraced within our Banana Republic economy: Public-Private Partnerships. I’ve warned about these previously, for example, in the post, Meet Cyber P3 – The U.S. Military’s Public-Private Partnership to Create Corporate/Government “Cyber Soldiers,” I wrote:

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that whenever you hear the term “public-private” partnership, brace yourself for a screw job of epic proportions.

It makes perfect sense if you think about it. If you’re a large corporation, there’s nothing better than guaranteed profits; and there’s no better way to guarantee profits than by going into business with the one entity that can do this: government. On the other hand, if you are an ambitious and greedy politician, what better way to earn a fortune while ostensibly engaging in “public service” than by lining the pockets of big corporations, which will then line your pockets in return in various opaque ways. Extraordinary fees for speeches is one preferred way of doing this, as is the classic revolving door that gives the person a cushy corporate job after leaving government.

Or put more simply, these “partnerships” are merely schemes by which clever corporate executives figure out how best to loot taxpayers without anyone noticing. Enter Goldman Sachs.

From the New York Times:

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New Poll Shows 60% of Americans Think Hillary Clinton is Untrustworthy and Dishonest

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The real interesting part of the latest Quinnipiac University National Poll, is not the fact that 60% of Americans think Hillary Clinton is dishonest, but that 40% of Americans don’t.

You’d truly have to be a certified zombie, or living your life entirely under a rock, to not recognize how completely shady and corrupt this woman is. Fear not, I’ll provide a plethora of links at the end of this post, but here’s a recent example that went completely under the radar.

In a desperate attempt to appear populist, Clinton tweeted the following last week:

She tweeted that, seemingly completely unconcerned that any of her lobotomized followers would ever connect the dots to this story, which I highlighted over the summer: How Progressive – Private Prison Company Lobbyists are Raising Funds for Hillary. Here’s an excerpt:

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