Sept 22
Wall Street’s Financial Meltdown
Last Monday morning I called Terry, and as soon as he picked up the phone, he said, ”I know what you want to talk about.” He knew that I closely follow the financial world, so the events of the preceding weekend were on my mind. Little did we know there would be more disastrous days to come. The bottom of this economic freefall was not reached until Thursday.
We literally came within a hair’s breadth of seeing the whole financial system in America come crashing down. For the first time ever, the whole banking system simply froze. It took an infusion of a trillion dollars by the Fed to get Wall Street’s financial heart beating again.
September 2008 will easily go down as the darkest month in U.S. financial history. We have never seen so many large financial institutions falter in such a short period of time:
1. Mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the U.S. government.
2. Lehman Brothers holdings succumbed to the subprime mortgage crisis. It is the biggest bankruptcy filing in history.
3. Merrill Lynch was saved from bankruptcy by a shotgun merger with Bank of America.
4. The world’s largest insurer, American International Group, was saved from certain collapse by an $85 billion federal loan.
The most troubling part of the financial crisis is the federal government being forced to become the lender of last resort. In March, the Federal Reserve pledged $30 billion to help JP Morgan buy Bear Sterns. This month, it used $200 billion to take over Fannie and Freddie, and it agreed to loan AIG $85 billion. On Friday came the news of a much larger bailout that could cost $700 billion. The government will create a new entity that will buy up bad loans. Just for giggles, the Treasury also decided to guarantee the $3 trillion that sits in money market accounts.
Most people don’t understand what the Federal Reserve and Treasury folks are doing. Because the taxpayers are the ones who are funding the federal government, any risk taken by the Fed ultimately falls on us. When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over, we assumed responsibility for $5 trillion in mortgage bond obligations. The debt load is equal to each of us co-signing for a $50,000 loan. When AIG was given $85 billion, it was like us writing this company a check for $850.00. The proposed $700 billion trust fund would obligate each taxpayer to a loan amounting to $7,000. Money market funds are regarded as very secure, but to fulfill that new guarantee, you and I are saddled with a $30,000 commitment.
At some point, the rest of the world may wake up and realize that America is funding its standard of living through an endless issuance of debt securities. The indication of his would be a crash in the value of the dollar. The events of this past week have done enormous damage to our nation’s credit with the rest of the world. The German magazine Spiegel reflected this growing view when it said, “It really does look as if the foundations of US capitalism have shattered.”
Several foreign banks and investment trusts have lost billions from buying our sub-prime debt securities. The days of easy money are over. Wall Street is now left to beg nations rich in cash for loans to fund their operations.
This financial bloodbath plays into Bible in many ways. The most important factor would be the shifting of financial power away from America . A few months ago, I read a news report that said London was poised to become the financial capital of the world. Now that so many financial firms have either been totally wiped out or lost huge percentages of their capital base, Wall Street should consider itself lucky if it only slips into second place.
Seeing how easily financial firms can collapse, one right after another, has made me all the more certain of how much more devastating the rapture will be to the American economy. The removal of millions of people from the most Christianized nation on earth will create a huge economic black hole.
Right now, banks are losing around three cents for every dollar invested in mortgage securities. In the aftermath of the rapture, losses will be at least 25 percent. When one out of every ten houses suddenly becomes vacant, the value of homes across the nation will simply implode. Because every bank leverages its holdings by an average of 14 times, it would only take a drop of 8 percent to wipe them out.
Terry and I believe the financial system will likely hold together until the rapture occurs. Jesus said He would come at a time when the Church is not expecting Him. If America fell into a deep economic depression, interest in prophecy would soar, which in turn would create a conflict with the prediction of apathy at the time of the rapture.
I see this record level of economic chaos as a warning sign from God. Money is the greatest idol that people worship. By bringing Wall Street to its knees, the Lord is clearly trying to get the world’s attention. If man ignores this latest warning, as he has done with all the other ones, we are certain to proceed towards judgment.
-- Todd
The Perfect Prophetic Storm
Part 1
Producers of programming for the networks like The History Channel, Discovery, and National Geographic air documentaries from time to time that are titled something like “The Perfect Storm.” The documentaries look at the several large storms in the northeast United States in 1991 that coalesced off the coast of New England in the Atlantic and swept onshore as one, massive blow. The video shows then-President George Herbert Walker Bush’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine, being assaulted by the turbulent Atlantic.
The “perfect storm” was raging along the northeastern U.S. coast at the same time the Bush administration was involved in negotiating Israel’s future in Spain. Here we are, almost two decades later, and another Bush administration is in the middle of Israel’s business, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice trying to get Israel to divide its land and the city of Jerusalem in order to create a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state. It seems another perfect storm is coalescing while this American interference in God’s plan is taking place. It is a storm that is part geophysical, part socio-economic, and totally spiritual, in the view of many of us who analyze eschatological matters.
Many see as a miracle Israel’s being back as a nation-state with its own language. Hebrew was once thought lost to the Jewish people as a common language following the last diaspora around 135 A.D., when the Roman emperor Hadrian put down the Jewish insurrection and scattered the Jewish people. Yet it is again Israel’s national language, just as foretold for the time near Christ’s return.
America has been at the forefront of Israel’s birth into modernity. There can be no doubt, upon looking into the history of Israel’s coming back into its God-given land, that the U.S. has been first the midwife at its birth, then its protector–in human terms—assuring its right to exist among the nations of the world.
If I may again do a mini-commercial for my book coming out with Harvest House Publishers in February of 2009, titled The American Apocalypse: Is the United States in Prophecy? I must say that while preparing the manuscript, my research brought home to me the stunning proof of America’s God-ordained destiny. No one can explain to any degree of satisfaction why America isn’t mentioned by name in the Bible. There are many speculations and postulations, but the answer to the question about why the United States is not mentioned in Bible prophecy continues to elude. The answer will have to await the unfolding of history. However, modern Israel is living proof that America was established for God’s great purposes. Those are: 1) the capability to preach the gospel message to the whole world; and 2) to bring Israel to birth on May 14, 1948, then to act as its protector as the Jewish state stood on its feet, as prophesied by Ezekiel, chapter 37.
America is living testimony to the absolute truth of God’s faithfulness to fulfill His prophetic Word. America is the most materially and spiritually blessed nations ever to exist. God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:3 is thus 100 percent validated: “I will bless those who bless thee, and curse those who curse thee.”
The United States has been the recipient of the first part of that promise. Israel’s satanically driven enemies have been recipients of the second part of that promise, and lie strewn in abject desolation along the dark corridors of history. The proof of America’s coming to birth with a foreordained destiny planned by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, leaps from recent history in fashion that is thunderous. The United States has blessed Israel, and as a result, this nation has brought mankind from the dark recesses of the past to the brightness invented by its illuminated genius. Since the time Benjamin Franklin was shocked by lightning while he experimented with a kite and a key, thus--I am convinced--infusing the soon-to-be founding father with special ideas directly from the finger of God, this nation has electrified –literally—the whole world.
The flip side of America’s comportment as of late, however, is as frightening as its brilliant inventiveness and contribution to modern man has been electrifying. This country, so key to bringing fulfillment of end-times prophecy into focus in human, earthly terms by helping put Israel at stage center on the global scene, at present is now key to setting in motion the time of tribulation –the last seven years of human history preceding Christ’s second advent. The “Roadmap to Peace,” the brain-child of geopolitical strategists in America and the European Union, is pushing forward the, perhaps, predecessor to what God calls "the covenant made with death and hell”.
As a result, God’s perfect prophetic storm of forewarning of wrath to come is blowing across this nation. Wrath and judgment could be just around the corner of the next crisis. We will look more deeply next week into the tempest that is sweeping America and the world toward a destiny foretold by Jesus and the Old and New Testament prophets.
--Terry
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