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

Bankers Will Be Jailed in the Next Financial Crisis

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Jesus College, Cambridge hosted, once more, the world’s leading Symposium on Economic Crime, and over 500 distinguished speakers and panelists drawn from the widest possible international fora, gathered to make presentations to the many hundreds of delegates and attendees.

What became very quickly clear this year was the general sense of deep disgust and repugnance that was demonstrated towards the global banking industry.

I can say with some degree of certainty now that a very large number of academics, law enforcement agencies, and financial compliance consultants are now joined, as one, in their total condemnation of significant elements of the global banking sector for their organised criminal activities.

Many banks are widely identified now as nothing more than enterprise criminal organisations, who engage in widespread criminal practice and dishonest conduct as a matter of course and deliberate commercial policy. 

– From the excellent article: The Banking Criminals Exposed

My prediction is that bankers will be jailed in the next economic/financial crisis. Lots and lots of bankers.

It may seem to many that those working within this profession will remain above the law indefinitely in light of the lack of any accountability whatsoever since the collapse of 2008. It may seem that way, but extrapolating this trend into the future is to ignore a monumentally changed political environment around the world. From the ascendancy of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders here in the U.S., to Jeremy Corbyn becoming Labour leader in the UK, big changes are certainly afoot.

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Iraq War Veteran Blows the Whistle on Shameless Propaganda Being Taught at Police Academies

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Before getting into the meat of this post, I want to start off by stating a fact: There is no “war on police” happening in America today. What is happening is a growing movement of people who want police accountability, profess a desire to reform the justice system so that we stop incarcerating people for the  oxymoron of “victimless crimes,” and an end to the widespread thieving of the public without due process via a practice known as civil asset forfeiture.

I’ve covered these topics extensively over the years. Here are just a few examples:

The United States: 5% of the World’s Population, 25% of its Prisoners

Don’t Mess with Texas – Police Raid and Shutdown Lemonade Stand Run by 7 and 8-Year-Old Girls

Chart of the Day – America’s Prison Population Over the Past 100 Years

Denver Police Arrest “Jury Nullification” Activist for Passing Out Informational Pamphlets

Land of the Unfree – Police and Prosecutors Fight Aggressively to Retain Barbaric Right of “Civil Asset Forfeiture”

The DEA Strikes Again – Agents Seize Man’s Life Savings Under Civil Asset Forfeiture Without Charges

Asset Forfeiture – How Cops Continue to Steal Americans’ Hard Earned Cash with Zero Repercussions

The public grievances listed earlier are reasonable demands which any civilized culture would insist upon. Nevertheless, many police departments across the country are taking these criticisms as part of some imagined “war on police” which simply doesn’t exist. Rather than showing even a sliver of introspection by looking inward at the mistakes policing has made in recent years, many officers are becoming defensive, combatant and have resorted to lies in order to dismiss the concerns of the public.

This is precisely what an Iraq war veteran witnessed recently while training at a police academy. He shared his story with the Daily Beast under the pseudonym Clayton Jenkins. Here are some excerpts:

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Further Details Emerge on the Epic U.S. Foreign Policy Disaster that is Syria

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With all the U.S.-trained fighters dead, captured or missing and their leader in the hands of Al Qaeda, top U.S. commanders are scrambling this week to determine how to revive the half-billion dollar program to create a moderate Syrian army to fight the Islamic State.

The outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, who viewed the force as a critical element of the military strategy in both Syria and Iraq, is conferring with top Pentagon officials behind closed doors to figure out what options are left for what is widely considered a policy and military failure, according to senior defense officials.

Sen. Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat who sits on the Appropriations Committee, returned from a trip to the region last week where he was briefed on the effort. His assessment of the program: “a bigger disaster than I could have ever imagined.”

– From the the Politico article: The Pentagon’s Syria Debacle

American “leaders” have the anti-Midas effect when it comes to foreign policy. Everything they touch turns to shit. Everything.

Yet there they remain. Firmly in positions of power, pulling the strings and goose-stepping the world into military-industrial complex oblivion. Before getting to the meat of this post, I want to reiterate my overall thesis on U.S. foreign policy and what it means for our nation. From the post, The Forgotten War – Understanding the Incredible Debacle Left Behind by NATO in Libya:

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How I Remember September 11, 2001

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I wrote the following two years ago. It is as relevant today as it was then. Enjoy.

I remember 9/11 like it was yesterday. I was one year into my Wall Street career. I got up that morning just like every other morning and headed toward Union Square station to get on the subway down to 3 World Financial Center, the headquarters of Lehman Brothers. I had just purchased breakfast in the cafeteria when I saw one of the human resources folks from my floor yelling to evacuate. I was confused but I got my ass downstairs fast. When I got down there I joined the hundreds of others staring in awe skyward at the gaping hole in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. People speculated that a helicopter had hit the building, but I said no way. It looked like a bomb went off to me.

Shortly afterward, the ground started shaking and I heard an enormous explosion and saw fire and debris shooting out from behind the North Tower. The herd starting running and I was trampled on. We all retreated to safer ground, at which point I ran into some co-workers. I mentioned that I was a bit worried these things could fall, but I was ensured by a higher-up at the firm that this was impossible. It was at that point that some co-workers and I decided to take the long walk home to my apartment on east 12th street. As we walked, we saw people jumping from the buildings, and ultimately we saw the first one collapse in front of our eyes as we traversed through Soho.

In the days following the collapse, all I wanted was for the towers to be rebuilt just like before. I wanted the skyline back to what I had know since the day I came into this earth at a New York City hospital to be restored exactly as I had always known it. Career-wise, I felt I should leave Wall Street. I thought about going back to graduate school for political science, or maybe even join the newly created Department of Homeland Security (yes, the irony is not lost on me). I read a lengthy tome on Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. I was an emotional and psychological mess, and it was when I was in this state of heightened distress that my own government and the military-industrial complex took advantage of me.

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More American Cronyism – U.S. Government Selling Visas to Fund Luxury Apartment Buildings

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Merging, on paper, the affluent midtown neighborhood and the struggling one uptown placed Hudson Yards in a community with an overall high unemployment rate, positioning developer Related Cos. to gain low-cost financing from foreigners seeking green cards.

The program through which that happens, known as EB-5, enables foreign nationals to obtain U.S. permanent-resident status by putting up money for new business ventures that create American jobs. It gives ventures in high-unemployment and rural areas a special status to encourage investment. But as the program’s popularity has soared in recent years, the bulk of immigrant investment is going to projects that are located, like $20 billion Hudson Yards, in prosperous urban neighborhoods.

At least 80% of EB-5 money is going to projects that wouldn’t qualify as being in Targeted Employment Areas without “some form of gerrymandering,” estimates Michael Gibson, managing director of USAdvisors.org, which evaluates projects for foreign investors.

Increasingly, the money appears to be flowing to the flashiest projects, which the investors often see as safest, EB-5 professionals say. Among those getting EB-5 money are an office building set to host Facebook Inc. near Amazon.com Inc.’s Seattle headquarters, a boutique hotel in high-end Miami Beach, and a slim Four Seasons condo-hotel in lower Manhattan that sports a penthouse with an asking price above $60 million. In all of them, geographic districts were crafted to include higher-unemployment areas. 

– From the Wall Street Journal article: How a U.S. Visa-for-Cash Plan Funds Luxury Apartment Buildings

Another day, another story highlighting just how completely corrupt and sleazy the U.S. economy has become.

I’ve covered the issue of EB-5 visas before, and how a program that was initially supposed to help high unemployment neighborhoods attract investment, has become another scheme to further enrich America’s crony capitalist class.

Before we get into the meat of this post, here are a few excerpts from last year’s piece, How NYC’s Biggest Real Estate Project in a Generation is Being Financed by Selling Green Cards to the Chinese:

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Is the Justice Department Finally Ready to Jail Corporate Criminals?

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The single greatest travesty to afflict American society in the 21st century has been the abandonment of the rule of law and accountability. It’s worse than the attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent loss of privacy and civil liberties. It’s even worse than the economic devastation unleashed by the financial crisis.

The reason it’s worse is because dynamic, complex and diverse cultures such as these United States will always be flawed and some of its leaders, both corporate and political, will always fall to the temptation of corruption and criminality. The key to preventing such bad behavior from multiplying and ultimately destroying the entire civilization, is the rule of law.

Edward Snowden leaked the information he did in order to inform the American public of what its government was doing in cahoots with large tech companies. He saw Constitutional violations and he held up his oath to protect the founding document from “enemies foreign and domestic.” Nevertheless, no one in a position of power has been held accountable.

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Welcome to the Recovery – Two Out of Five American Children Experience Poverty

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The last seven years of American history will be remembered for the unprecedented oligarch crime scene that it is. Branding what has occurred during the Obama administration an “economic recovery,” represents little more than a vicious assault on human intelligence.

I’ve spent a lot of time on these pages proving this to be the case, and have even dubbed it the “oligarch recovery” (see links at the end). Here’s the latest proof.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Childhood poverty is far more prevalent than annual figures suggest, a new paper says, with nearly two in every five U.S. children spending at least one year in poverty before they turn 18 years old.

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Video of the Day – Donald Trump is Asked About Libertarianism

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*Note: This post originally maintained Trump was saying “be careful” to Nick Gillespie, when in reality he seems to have been talking to others walking with him in the crowd with equipment. The post has been changed to reflect this realization.

Reason’s editor in chief Nick Gillespie recently caught up with Donald Trump on the campaign trail and asked him about libertarianism. This is what ensued:

This exchange is troubling from several different angles. First off, Trump does his typical dance in which he avoids questions he doesn’t want to answer by giving a simplistic jingoistic response. He is also clearly uncomfortable with the question. Why?

Overall, the above exchange is kind of unnecessary anyway since it’s abundantly clear Trump is anti-liberty and anti-freedom. Let’s recall what he said should be done with Edward Snowden. From a Washington Times story in 2013:

Edward Snowden, the man at the heart of the NSA information leaks, is nothing but a “traitor” — and America ought to recreate history in dealing with him, real estate mogul Donald Trump said on a “Fox & Friends” interview.

In other words, execute him, Mr. Trump implied.

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Guardian Op-Ed – The City of London Has Turned Britain Into a “Civilized Mafia State”

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Liberty Blitzkrieg has seen an uncharacteristically strong focus on London-centric posts today. Go figure.

While the earlier post related to the likely bursting of the London real estate bubble, this one highlights a blistering critique of the role the City of London has played in transforming Great Britain into what George Monbiot calls a “civilized mafia state.” But that’s just an appetizer. This extremely well written and informative article is a must read for anyone still in the dark regarding London’s central role within the global financial crime syndicate.

Here are a few excerpts from the Guardian:

To an extent unknown since before the first world war, economic relations in this country are becoming set in stone. It is not just that the very rich no longer fall while the very poor no longer rise. It’s that the system itself is protected from risk. Through bailouts, quantitative easing and delays in interest-rate rises, speculative investment has been so well cushioned that – as the Guardian economics editor, Larry Elliott, puts it – financial markets are “one of the last bastions of socialism left on Earth”.

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Luxury London Home Sales Plunge 26% – Has this Mega Real Estate Bubble Finally Burst?

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It appears the music may have finally stopped for one of the world’s largest luxury real estate bubbles: London.

It’s well known that foreign oligarchs love London real estate as a means to launder funds, typically “earned” by soaking their host countries dry via corruption and fraud. This has caused absurd and irrational spikes in high-end residential real estate in the English capital, as well as a flood of new construction.

With emerging markets now completely collapsing, the seemingly endless flood of foreign money is drying up, and with it, London real estate.

So has the London real estate bubble popped? Probably.

From Bloomberg:

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