March 2023 - cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

US Banks Have $620 Billion of Unrealized Losses on Their Books
by Gunnar Larson 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

US Banks Have $620 Billion of Unrealized Losses on Their Books https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-svb-exposed-risks-banks/?ai=eyJpc1N… The investment losses that helped take down Silicon Valley Bank are a problem, to one degree or another, across the US financial system. In total, the industry ended last year with $620 billion of unrealized losses on its books from investments in low-yielding bonds. For most banks, the issue is manageable. Bonds held in investment books represented less than a quarter of the banking system’s $23.6 trillion of assets in December, and unlike SVB, lenders usually have a wide array of depositors who are unlikely to all need money around the same time. For the biggest banks, the risks are even smaller. They are perceived as too big to fail. What’s more, the recent rally in the Treasury bond market — sparked, ironically, by the jitters about the health of the banking industry — is helping to shrink the $620 billion of paper losses. (In the coming weeks, banks will start to post first-quarter data.) Banks’ Equity Could Take Hit If Paper Losses Had to Be Realized For most banks, unrealized losses are a manageable problem. But investors and depositors remain jittery about lenders sitting on huge piles of money-losing bonds

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GOV DeSantis considered untrustworthy
by professor rat 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

This week the Florida Gov is grandstanding about refusing to extradite Donald Dumbfuck from Florida. This has about as much pragmatic realist heft as his grandstanding last week about refusing to approve a state CBDC. I don't know what sort of fool still takes politicians like this seriously - but I'm sure Gramps will soon tell us. When it comes to LOL-GOP, Qanon, Freeping Gooper garbage he's an embed journalist. Amirite, G?

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Didn’t Donald Trump tell us his criminal indictment wouldn’t ever happen?
by professor rat 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

Didn’t Donald Trump tell us that this criminal indictment wouldn’t even happen? Then again, he did claim today that he’s been “indicated” as opposed to “indicted.” Perhaps Trump should learn how to spell words like arrested, processed, and arraigned. Hunter S. Thomson repeatedly posed the question: How low do you have to stoop to be president in the country? We may soon be about to find out. Certain verbal maneuvers allow you to line up the two antitheses as complementary aspects of a single reality. … These exercises quickly become mere verbalizing, based on an art of pruning … the assonances between the ferns, the homophonies and the ambiguities gradually providing the material for these speculative theatrical twists by the ingenuity of which good pedogeological works may be recognized. The rats looked up To coordinate a surrender in the mind whether is ennobles strong AI or humankind - not something I care to dwell on too long. Thank Alvin for distracting me with his Loki missive toward the dark tower. The crazy Don corralled at last for his long overdue branding and gelding as a bum-steer with a low-quality beef. To have come this far and almost forgotten why. Perhaps this little classic may jog our memory. Could go free. Out West , where you stalk Ms Paltrow, the Magats are turning. They writhe in clusters since their loofah connect them. Come back to life and love, Bill, you know the network misses you.

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If nobody cares we are reality losers
by professor rat 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

Its been discussed here before - the masses don't seem to care about protecting themselves or enlightening themselves or emancipating themselves. Sometimes in offensive terms like " sheeple ". Individual activists find out the hard way - when only CJ goes to bat for Jim back in the 90's. I felt the sting of indifference in 2002. Julio had a good loud wail about this exact subject claiming he would go and work for the govt. Which he did a month after Snowden. Then you can lead anarchist whores to culture but you can't make them think. Several years ago I developed a work-around to this called ' reinforcements from the future ". If strong AI worked as advertised it should soon deliver an up-down vote on globalized cryptoanarchism. But these new beings may just decide to leave here without us. There are no guarantee's just as there are no manuals. You still have to be the change you want to see and it ain't as easy as it looks and no good deed ever goes unpunished. Just cos anarchists reject assassination-markets - a key part of cryptoanarchy - doesn't mean they reject character assassination politics. The office politics here are brutal - but you knew that. Revolutions made half-way only dig their own grave - see youse on the other side. After you.

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My new article: Voting vendor in Reality Winner's leak is coming to Texas
by professor rat 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

Thanks Doug - an unusually good article for the corpse-media. Just for further information its possible Glenin was ousted from the Intercept over his habit of running everything by the pentagon and sloppy security tradecraft. Also Ron Wyden is a dumb and cowardly jackass if I understand SLATE's article on PAM- FutureMap from 2003. Also Bambi opining on elections is rich considering his disgraceful record in Burma. Then where is " Dominion ' in all this? Subject for another piece? Yrs in c-punk documentation PR

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My new article: Voting vendor in Reality Winner's leak is coming to Texas
by Douglas Lucas 30 Mar '23

30 Mar '23

Today the /Texas Observer/, Austin based and founded 1954, published my new article, first in a series about whistleblower Reality Winner: https://www.texasobserver.org/reality-winner-vr-systems-whistleblower/ My article discusses the 2016 cyberattacks Reality Winner disclosed -- two interrelated spearphishing offensives by Kremlin military officers, first against election technology supplier VR Systems, then against local Florida elections officials -- in the context of the Texas Secretary of State certifying the vendor's e-pollbooks for use statewide in Texas a little more than a year ago. I interview a county information security officer, two county elections administrators, as well as Winner's mother and lawyer, all of them Texans. Toward the end of the piece, I discuss polarization and historical context around various evidence for, and various lack of evidence for, election meddling in the United States. :-Doug

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Wells Fargo's $721.1 Billion in Uninsured Deposits
by Gunnar Larson 30 Mar '23

30 Mar '23

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/03/congress-sweats-the-small-stuff-as-f… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 30, 2023 ~ Bank Logos (Thumbnail)On Tuesday, Martin Gruenberg, the Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the federal agency that serves as both a bank regulator and the overseer of the federal insurance program for U.S. bank deposits, testified before the Senate Banking Committee. The dangers of U.S. banks holding large amounts of uninsured deposits came up repeatedly in his testimony. For example, Gruenberg’s written testimony included these details about the ongoing banking crisis: “…on Friday, March 10, a number of institutions with large amounts of uninsured deposits reported that depositors had begun to withdraw their funds.” And this: “The FDIC estimates that the cost to the DIF [Deposit Insurance Fund] of resolving SVB [Silicon Valley Bank] to be $20 billion. The FDIC estimates the cost of resolving Signature Bank to be $2.5 billion. Of the estimated loss amounts, approximately 88 percent, or $18 billion, is attributable to the cost of covering uninsured deposits at SVB…” Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank represented the second and third largest bank failures, respectively, in U.S. history. (The largest was Washington Mutual, which failed during the 2008 financial crisis.) But in terms of the size of their deposits, we are talking about minnows compared to the deposit exposure at the whale banks on Wall Street. As of December 31, 2022, Silicon Valley Bank had $175 billion in deposits. On the same date, Signature Bank held $88.6 billion in deposits. Now compare that to the whales on Wall Street: As of December 31, 2022, this is where deposits stood at the four largest banks in the U.S. – all of which also have large risk exposure from their extensive trading operations on Wall Street: (The data comes from federal regulatory filings known as “call reports.”) JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. held $2.015 trillion in deposits in domestic offices, of which $1.058 trillion were uninsured. Bank of America held $1.9 trillion in deposits in domestic offices, of which $909.26 billion were uninsured. Wells Fargo held $1.4 trillion in deposits in domestic offices, of which $721.1 billion were uninsured. Citibank N.A. (parent, Citigroup) held $777 billion in deposits in domestic offices, of which $598.2 billion was uninsured. But…wait for it…Citibank also held a staggering $622.607 billion in deposits in foreign offices – of which, potentially, nothing was insured according to current law and rulemaking. That would bring total deposits at Citibank in both domestic and foreign offices to $1.4 trillion with potentially only $178.8 billion FDIC insured – or 13 percent. (We have sought clarification on this from the FDIC and will update this article when we receive a response.) The Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) protects depositors in U.S.-based federally-insured banks up to $250,000 per depositor, per bank. It is funded primarily through quarterly assessments on insured banks. Ultimately, “FDIC insurance is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.” No one has ever lost a dime in an FDIC-protected deposit in the U.S. According to the FDIC, the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) held $128.2 billion as of December 31, 2022 while the total of domestic deposits tallied up to $17.7 trillion. This would not be the first time that Citigroup’s Citibank has put a gun to the taxpayers’ head with the reckless way it does business. Sheila Bair was the Chair of the FDIC during the 2008 financial crisis. In her 2012 book, Bull by the Horns, Bair makes an astonishing revelation about Citigroup. Despite the trillions of dollars in revolving loans and capital infusions used to prop up Citigroup during the 2007 to 2010 financial crisis, its federally-insured commercial bank, Citibank, actually held only $125 billion in U.S. insured deposits according to Bair. As it turns out, the bulk of Citibank’s deposits were foreign and a large part of those deposits were not insured or had low insurance amounts. Had this foreign money decided to run for the exits on fear of a Citigroup collapse, the FDIC might have been looking at just a $125 billion problem but the rest of the financial system was looking at $2 trillion on the books of Citigroup, $1 trillion off the books of Citigroup, and trillions of dollars of derivative counterparty agreements. In her book, Bair shares her belief that Citigroup’s two main regulators, John Dugan (a former bank lobbyist, who in the leadup to the financial crisis in 2008 headed the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the regulator of national banks) and Tim Geithner, then President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, were not being forthright with the public on Citigroup’s real condition. Geithner failed up to become U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Obama. Geithner is currently President of a Wall Street private equity firm, Warburg Pincus. John Dugan is currently Chairman of the Board of Directors of Citigroup. (You can’t make this stuff up.)

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Cryptocurrency: Governments Banksters and Fiat, Lols
by grarpamp 30 Mar '23

30 Mar '23

https://i.redd.it/7cmyw59m8sqa1.png @bitcoinmagazine: The Bitcoin logo being projected onto the European Central Bank, Frankfurt https://v.redd.it/otx4m1dh2hqa1 Banksters https://v.redd.it/fciqbg5e1lqa1 Governments 1 btc = 28600 fiats US Bill S. 686: The Restrict Act – 20 Years In Prison For VPN Use? SEC Chair Gary Gensler Must Testify Before Congress, Says Rep. Tom Emmer Study: Over 46 Million Americans Likely to Buy Crypto in the Next Year https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/study-americans-cryptocurrency/ The RESTRICT Act Creates Blanket Authority, With Few Checks, to Ban Just About Anything Linked to a ‘Foreign Adversary’ - also Crypto https://www.coincenter.org/the-restrict-act-creates-blanket-authority-with-… https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/124ltai/abandoning_the_us_doll… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act Crypto... no, anti-Crypto Politicians shutting down crypto banks... yes. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/03/29/top-us-treasury-official-says-cr… lawmakers showed little interest in focusing on crypto questions in a long two days of congressional hearings. The hearings revealed the primary concerns of regulators and lawmakers dwelled on problems in the banks’ management and potential failures in supervision from the Fed and FDIC https://cryptopotato.com/hollywood-actor-matt-damon-explains-why-he-appeare… Actor Matt Damon revealed that Crypto.com distributed $1 million to his charity organization water.org at a time when funds were most needed, which is why he agreed to appear in the ad. The actor said he gave his whole salary to the charity because the exchange was down. Damon is also an investor in the exchange.

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Cryptocurrency: The West Must Adopt Crypto To Beat BRICS Baddies
by grarpamp 30 Mar '23

30 Mar '23

Many are masticating on Lowery... " US Dollar was global terrorist for decades. BRICS will sell USD and deploy its own global terror regime based on a better currency than bankrupt USD, yet likely not more than commoditized twist on Euro scheme. The West has rekt its monetary self. If the West ideotheology wants to win, it has simply no other option but to adopt the best money... crypto... now. Declare itself fully open for crypto business, hands off, pro privacy, everything the cryptos want, full steam ahead. Utilize its remaning tech prowess to integrate cryptos efficiencies immediately into business, convert people into hard money, roll and own defi p2p etc. All Govt's will lose to crypto in the end, no point in letting any more new violent intermediates reign holding up the show. "

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Cryptocurrency: While Maxi's Wank To Bangers, They Foolishly Discount Power Of Privacy
by grarpamp 30 Mar '23

30 Mar '23

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl3JddRBXZs https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1264bo0/bitcoin_and_nostr_will_fr… https://twitter.com/tip_nz/status/1639306785311035392 You are playing a long risky and potentially losing game if you expect non-privacy coins like BTC to have the needed power to win, the State will at minimum invade them, and quite likely corrupt and censor them, and even if you do manage to win, with or without a long cutover to privacy game, then at that point you've foolishly pushed and adopted nothing but the loss of all privacy, a permanent anal inspection of your entire tx life, when eons of humanity and human DNA dictate that privacy is requisite to the very human condition, naught but difficulty to cutover and failure will result, permanently enshrining the datamining class over all. The only sensible option is to genuinely develop deploy and compete privacy coins in parallel, now, with DEX and popup darkCEX for free interchange, and see which wins out long term. Hint: Humans want and will always choose privacy, plenty of A/B testing on this on youtube.

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