New Report Reveals Pentagon Missing 8.5 Trillion Dollars

""Yahoo Money' The Daily Ticker  is reporting that is has discovered a Reuters investigation that reveals $8.5 trillion – that's trillion with a "T" – in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never been accounted for.

You read that right. While Republican politicians  rush to slash food stamps for the 47 million Americans living in poverty – the highest amount in nearly two decades –  Republican U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has the audacity to complain that $20 billion dollars in automatic sequester cuts to the massive and secretive $565.8 billion Defense Department budget are " too steep, too deep, and too abrupt," all while the Pentagon and the Defense Department are overseeing massive fraud, waste, and abuse.

For anyone wondering, Reuters reports that the D.O.D.'s 2012 budget totaled $565.8 billion, more than the annual defense budgets of the 10 next largest military spenders combined, including Russia and China.

In an interview, Linda Woodford, an employee at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service – the Pentagon's main accounting agency – reveals to Reuters that she spent the last 15 years of her career simply "plugging in" false numbers every month to balance the books;

"A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate. We didn't have the detail ... for a lot of it."

In the REAL WORLD, that would be called MASSIVE FRAUD.

Woodford's involvement in the fraud doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. The report also reveals that "a single DFAS office in Columbus, Ohio, made at least $1.59 trillion – yes, trillion – in errors,  including $538 billion in plugs, in financial reports for the Air Force in 2009."

Yahoo Finance lists some additional findings, including;

• The DOD has amassed a backlog of more than $500 billion in unaudited contracts with outside vendors. How much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn't known.
• Over the past 10 years the DOD has signed contracts for provisions of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury is a mystery.
• The Pentagon uses a standard operating procedure to enter false numbers, or "plugs," to cover lost or missing information in their accounting in order to submit a balanced budget to the Treasury. In 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in these reconciling amounts. That was up from $7.41 billion the year before.""
  
  
  
  
  
• http://crooksandliars.com/2015/06/report-reveals-85-trillion-missing

Moratorium on American Cash Notes Paves Way for Cashless Society Agenda

""Paul Joseph Watson: Some JPMorgan Chase customers are receiving letters informing them that the bank will no longer allow cash to be stored in safety deposit boxes.

The content of a post over on the Collectors Universe message board suggests that we may be about to see a resurgence of the old fashioned method of stuffing bank notes under the mattress.

The letter, entitled “Updated Safe Deposit Box Lease Agreement,” was sent out to customers at the beginning of the month.

“Hide your wallets, the banksters are on the move,” warns the Economic Policy Journal.

As of last month, Chase has also instituted a new policy which, “restricts borrowers from using cash to make payments on credit cards, mortgages, equity lines, and auto loans,” writes Professor Joseph Salerno of the Mises Institute.

The news arrives on the back of comments by Citi’s Willem Buiter, who recently advocated abolishing cash altogether in order to “solve the world’s central banks’ problem with negative interest rates”.

Last month we also reported on how the Justice Department is ordering bank employees to consider calling the cops on customers who withdraw $5,000 dollars or more.

Efforts to impose restrictions on the use of cash by banks are seen by many as an attack on anonymity and an example of how financial institutions are positioning themselves to handle the fallout of the next economic crash – at the expense of customers.

According to reports which emerged last year, HSBC is now interrogating its account holders in the UK on how they earn and spend their money as well as restricting large cash withdrawals for customers from £5000 upwards.

Banks in the U.S. are also making it harder for customers to withdraw and deposit cash, with Chase imposing new capital controls that mandate identification for cash deposits and ban cash being deposited into another person’s account.""

http://etfdailynews.com/2015/04/22/war-on-cash-intensifies-jpmorgan-chase-to-prohibit-the-storage-of-cash-in-safety-deposit-boxes/2/

Unprecedented Easter Weekend Several Hundred Million Dollars Bank Heist, Mazed in the Underworld of London's Jewellery Quarter

""There is a complex and hidden geography to the jewellery quarter of Hatton Garden, unknown even to those who have been working there for decades, that is sure to receive more attention since it became the scene of the biggest heist recorded in British history.

A labyrinthine network of subterranean spaces exists deep below the area: abandoned railway platforms buried far underground, decommissioned bunkers, ancient passageways rumoured to be built by the monks of Ely, and the remains of London’s second-largest river – the Fleet, which still flows through Joseph Bazalgette’s sewers underneath Farringdon Road.

“It amazes me the place doesn’t cave in,” said Mitzy, a former ring-maker from Hatton Garden. “With the weight of gold and heavy metal above and all those ancient, watery passageways honeycombing the ground underneath.”

Just above these underground spaces there is another level of concealed rooms – heavily guarded underground vaults filled with safety deposit boxes and stores of gold and silver; workshops lined with steel where specialist items are painstakingly made to order by master craftsmen; secure basements where goldsmiths work using methods and tools that are centuries-old; small locked rooms where precious-gem dealers operate and Hasidic diamond merchants sit examining glittering stones; as well as state-of-the-art offices with the latest hi-tech equipment and security systems.

On Hatton Garden itself there are over 60 retail jewellery shops. There are hundreds of other small workshops and offices dotted around the area. These places can only be accessed by those in the trade. Dark stairwells lead to tiny rooms above. Security to get into these places is tight. If you are recognised on the CCTV monitor, the first of three steel doors might open; each has to lock shut before the next can be accessed.

Inside these rooms, deals are still often sealed with a handshake and the Yiddish words “Mazel und broche” (luck and blessing). This is the way business has taken place in Hatton Garden for over a century. It is a hidden world that operates according to unspoken laws based on trust.

There is a village atmosphere within “the Garden”. Everyone knows each other within this tight-knit community, still reeling from the news of the recent robbery – particularly as this is not the first time a major heist has taken place at the safety deposit premises on Hatton Garden.

In 2003 diamonds and jewels worth over £1.5m were stolen from there. At first this theft appeared to have been conducted by a Jewish diamond dealer. The imposter, who went by the names of Goldberg and Ruben, spent months integrating himself into the Orthodox Jewish diamond community, opening up safe-deposit boxes, acting like the other dealers, slowly gaining their trust until they began to deal with him, buying and selling stones.

One Saturday this man entered the building and CCTV footage shows him leaving the vault shortly afterwards, carrying a black holdall. The robbery was not discovered until the Monday morning when a customer found his strongbox glued shut.

Alongside many other hidden security measures, a network of constant electronic contact exists now between the guards, the shops, the trading floors, vaults and workshops. Anyone or anything that looks out of place and everyone in the Garden will know about it in seconds. 

One of the elderly dealers I spoke to, who did not want to be named, told me: “Things have changed so much already and now security will become much tighter again.” He remembered a different time, before the war, when diamond deals would be conducted openly on street corners or across tables in the many little kosher cafés that once existed in the area. “That would never happen now.”

He was concerned about the small craftsmen still working in the area, people like Mitzy who operated from a dusty attic room near Clerkenwell Green. My father remembers visiting his workshop before he died: “It was at the top of a steep flight of stairs and very run down. You could barely move in there because there was stuff everywhere: files, papers, boxes, rolls of gold thread, tools.""

Read On:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/hatton-garden-jewellery-burglary-extraordinary-underworld-of-londons-jewellery-quarter-10169054.html

Foreigners Dump $74 Billion In Treasurys In 6 Consecutive Weeks: Biggest Sequential Outflow In History

""Over the weekend, we observed the perplexing sell off of $56 billion in US Treasurys courtesy of weekly disclosure in the Fed's custodial account (source: H.4.1) and speculated if this may be due to an asset rotation, under duress or otherwise, out of bonds and into stocks, to prevent the collapse of the global ponzi (because when the BRICs tell the IMF to boost its bailout capacity you know it is global). We also proposed a far simpler theory: "the dreaded D-day in which foreign official and private investors finally start offloading their $2.7 trillion in Treasurys with impunity (although not with the element of surprise - China has made it abundantly clear it will sell its Treasury holdings, the only question is when), has finally arrived." In hindsight the Occam's Razor should have been applied. Little did we know 5 short days ago just how violent the reaction by China would be (both post and pre-facto) to the Senate decision to propose a law for all out trade warfare with China. Now we know - in the week ended October 12, a further $17.7 billion was "removed" from the Fed's custodial Treasury account, meaning that someone, somewhere is very displeased with US paper, and, far more importantly, what it represents, and wants to make their displeasure heard loud and clear.""

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/foreigners-dump-74-billion-treasurys-6-consecutive-weeks-biggest-sequential-outflow-history