Today, some of the most celebrated individuals and institutions are ensconced within the financial industry; in banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms. Which is odd because none of these firms or individuals actually make anything, which society might point to as additive to our living standards. Instead, these financial magicians harvest value from the rest of society that has to work hard to produce real things of real value.

While the work they do is quite sophisticated and takes a lot of skill, very few of these firms direct capital to new efforts, new products, and new innovations. Instead they either trade in the secondary markets for equities, bonds, derivatives, and the like, which perform the 'service' of moving paper from one location to another while generating 'profits.' Or, in the case of banks, they create money out of thin air and lend it out – at interest of course.

Josiah Stamp – Bank of England Chairman, 1920s (wrote)

“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take away from them the power to create money, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money.”

Money is power. And history has shown that power is never ceded spontaneously or willingly.

Director of Military Intelligence Major General Aviv Kochavi warned that Syria is posing a regional threat as it attracts thousands of global jihadists and Muslim extremists from around the world. "A center of global jihad of vast proportions is developing on our very doorstep," Israeli media quoted Kochavi as saying. "It is liable to affect not only Syria or Israeli borders, but also the borders of Lebanon, Jordan and the Sinai Peninsula, and have implications for the region as a whole," he said at a graduation ceremony for Military Intelligence commanding officers.

Kochavi argued that the extremists will not stop at toppling Assad, but will go further and try to establish a state based on Islamic religious law, or Sharia law. The UN reported in July that the Syrian conflict is “drastically deteriorating” with up to 5,000 people a month dying and the total death toll reaching 100,000 people in over two years.

The sanctions bill requests that the US president, under his authority provided by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, come up with a strategy within two months to cut Iran’s remaining export sales of roughly a million barrels a day.

After a year, exemptions granted to countries such as China, Japan, Turkey and South Korea – which continue to import Iranian oil – will no longer be granted. Companies in those countries doing business with Iran previously given a pass will be cut off from the US economy.

American officials are confident there is spare capacity in the global market to replace Iran’s exports. Libya is back to producing oil since its revolution ended in 2011, and Saudi Arabia is prepared to accommodate Iran’s customers, with spare production capacity of 2 million to 2.5 million barrels a day.

Previous US efforts cut Iranian oil exports by more than 65 percent, devastating the economy of the Islamic Republic.

Earlier this year, a company called Linc Energy announced that tests had revealed that there was a minimum of 3.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent sitting under more than 65,000 square kilometres of land that it owns in the Arckaringa Basin. But that is the minimum number. It has been projected that there could ultimately be up to 233 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the area.

If that turns out to be accurate, the oil sitting under that land is worth approximately 20 trillion dollars, and it would be roughly equivalent to the total amount of oil sitting under the sands of Saudi Arabia. In essence, it would be a massive game changer.

The fast-track process allows the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) to "make a determination of nonregulated status for crops with GE traits that have already been approved in another crop" without a new review, allowing for a more "timely and predictable review process," according to Mike Firko, APHIS Acting Deputy Administrator for biotechnology regulatory services. "As expected, the fast-track approval process has made it all that much easier for the USDA to rubber-stamp a host of new GE crops," Katherine Paul, Associate Director of the Organic Consumers Association, told Common Dreams.

The first products to come down the speedy new pipeline are a host of canola seeds resistant to the "dangerous" herbicide glyphosate, which a recent study linked to a litany of health disorders and diseases including Parkinson’s, cancer and autism. Already approved is a glyphosate-resistant canola from Pioneer, with other pending petitions for deregulation including Monsanto's glyphosate-resistant canola and hybridization system corn, as well as Genective's glyphosate-resistant corn.

"For years, scientists have warned about the hazards of glyphosate," continued Paul, who noted that the FDA recently raised the allowable limit of glyphosate residue on fruits and vegetables. "But with the stranglehold that agribusiness has on the FDA... and the USDA, consumers are being exposed to greater and greater amounts of glyphosate on food, and in our groundwater. It's clear that these federal agencies are working on behalf of corporate agribusiness, not US taxpayers and consumers," she added.

One of the world's most valuable art treasures is being stored in an extremely ugly place, a six-story concrete building known as the Geneva free port. Instead of windows, much of the façade of this giant safe for the world's wealthy is covered with gray panels.

Anyone hoping to get into the walk-in lock boxes of this very special Swiss tax haven must first surmount a number of hurdles. At the first door, an employee has to type the right combination of numbers into a small screen. The next hurdle is a large steel barrier that has to be rotated counter-clockwise until it snaps into place, followed by a heavy steel door that resembles a submarine bulkhead. Behind it is a drab corridor with doors on both sides. Only the renters have keys to these doors.

The employee of Geneva Free Ports & Warehouses Ltd remains discreetly in the background while the owners of the locked-up treasures count their gold bars or examine their collection of paintings being stored in the warehouse. The Nahmad dynasty of art dealers reportedly has 300 Picassos in storage in Geneva. Countless Degas, Monets and Rothkos are also stored on the inhospitable premises. The estimated value of the works is in the billions. Hardly any museum can boast such a valuable collection.

Francis celebrated the first public Mass of his trip to Brazil after praying before the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida, Brazil's patron saint. His eyes welled up with emotion as he stood silently in deep prayer before the tiny dark-skinned statue.

In his homily, Francis appealed for the faithful to not seek out false idols of money and success that he said take the place of God. Rather, he called for Brazilians to keep Christian values of faith, generosity and fraternity.

Over 99% of “analysts” are missing this, but it is a fact. If you ignore the ridiculous GDP numbers (which even China’s Premiere has admitted are a joke in the past) and look at more accurate metrics, it’s clear China is collapsing at an alarming rate. Case in point, electrical consumption rose by just 2.9% in the first quarter of this year.

How on earth can you generate GDP growth of 7% when your electrical consumption is rising by just 2.9% is beyond me. And when you consider that China is experiencing this weak growth despite having pumped over $1 trillion into its economy in the same quarter (an amount equal to 14% of China’s total GDP) you begin to understand the scale at which things are imploding in the People’s Republic.

This is a Black Swan that few are noticing. If you look around the mainstream financial media in the US, you see talk of Bernanke tapering, discussions of rising interest rates and even the occasional story about how Europe is not fixed. But you won’t find stories about China facing ZERO growth.

This will all end very badly.

The knock-on effects are already being felt farther afield - from a slowdown in Japanese export growth despite a weaker yen, to Apple Inc lamenting a rare drop in Chinese demand for its premium brand of gadgets. "China's slowdown is starting to become more dangerous," warned Yasuo Yamamoto, a senior economist at Mizuho Research Institute in Tokyo.

Since taking office in March, China's new leaders have said they are prepared to tolerate tamer growth and push a restructuring of the economy toward domestic consumption, but there have been mixed messages on how much of a slowing they would tolerate.

The flow of data suggests their task of changing the shape of the massive economy will only get harder.

On the face of it, history is about to repeat itself. The new prince will be greeted tomorrow by what will almost certainly be strong second quarter GDP figures and many will be hoping that these will mark the end of the crisis. But that, sadly, is implausible.

UK Plc has been patched-up but not cured and no amount of Royal magic can hide that depressing reality. The economy is in remission – drugged up on cheap money, subsidised credit and rock-bottom interest rates – and out of immediate danger thanks to some limited, emergency surgery by the Coalition. But it would be deeply irresponsible to give it the all-clear and premature to celebrate any uptick in the official statistics.

It is true that almost every single survey released during the past few months has shown a strengthening UK economy. Yet the big lesson from the bubble of the 2000s is that what statisticians deem to be growth can actually turn out to be an unsustainable mirage.

We appear to be falling at least partly into the same trap again, with the Coalition striving to engineer a debt-driven upturn based on the indefinite delaying of any sort of meaningful rebalancing. Rather than this being a genuine recovery, we are merely entering the latest stage in an ongoing bubble that began at the start of the previous decade and which keeps being reflated, with the painful but inevitable denouement still at least another crisis away.

Right now, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are hitting the age of 65 every single day, and this will continue to happen every single day until the year 2030. As a society, we have made trillions of dollars of financial promises to these Baby Boomers, and there is no way that we are going to be able to keep those promises.

The money simply is not there.

Yes, I suppose that we could eventually see a "super devaluation" of the US dollar and keep our promises to the Baby Boomers using currency that is not worth much more than Monopoly money, but as it stands right now we simply do not have the resources to do what we said that we were going to do. The number of senior citizens in the United States is projected to more than double by the middle of the century, and it would have been nearly impossible to support them all even if we weren't in the midst of a long-term economic decline.

Tens of millions of Americans that are eagerly looking forward to retirement are going to be in for a very rude awakening in the years ahead. There is going to be a lot of heartache and a lot of broken promises.

The Examiner used the Census Bureau's 2011 Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll to rank every US city with a population of 200,000 or more. Some of those cities managed to get along fine with comparatively few municipal employees, such as San Diego, which has 9,501 employees for 1.3 million residents, or one for every 137 residents.

But others like San Francisco had a bureaucracy seven times as large, with one of every 28 of the city's 800,000 residents on the city payroll. Remarkably, the Census Bureau excluded from these figures all teachers and education professionals, which make up the largest group of local government employees.

Already bigger than the Pentagon in square footage, the NSA’s footprint will grow by an additional 50 percent when construction is complete in a decade. And that’s just at its headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland.

The nation’s technical spying agency has enlarged all its major domestic sites - in Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Texas and Utah - as well as those in Australia and Britain. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, its civilian and military workforce has grown by one-third, to about 33,000, according to the NSA. Its budget has roughly doubled, and the number of private companies it depends on has more than tripled, from 150 to close to 500, according to a 2010 Washington Post count.

The story of the NSA’s growth, obscured by the agency’s extreme secrecy, is directly tied to the insatiable demand for its work product by the rest of the US intelligence community, military units and the FBI.

The decree, which still needs to be published in the official gazette to become binding, targets Monsanto’s MON810 maize, one of two genetically modified organisms (GMO) allowed in Europe and the only one currently grown commercially.

The ban was also signed off by the health and environment ministries, with the agriculture ministry citing the crop’s “negative impact on biodiversity”. “Our agriculture is based on biodiversity, on quality, and those we must continue to aim for, without games that even from an economic point of view would not make us competitive,” the ministry said.

The reality of Schmallenberg Virus is explained by Mark Thomas, who runs 150 South Devon pedigree cows and 250 ewes at Treguddick Farm, South Petherwin. He is a Council Member of the South West National Beef Association.

“Financially it is devastating. Ewes which lambed before Christmas suffered the most. A hundred ewes, on average, would have reared 150 lambs between them. When ready to market, these Easter-trade lambs fetch say £90 each. That’s £13,500 return – excluding production costs.

Half of the lambs were deformed, either dead or I had to dispatch them for humane reasons. So 100 ewes are leaving the lambing shed with 75 lambs, to return £6,750 at market. There is no [government] compensation. This is the third year Schmallenberg has visited our shores, and we still have no clear answers.”