Joined Feb 3, 2009
1,759 Blog Posts
Take Notice Gun Owners: Stock Up Later
Comments »Responding to two Democratic senators representing outraged private gun owners, the Department of Defense announced last night it has scrapped a new policy that would deplete the supply of ammunition by requiring destruction of fired military cartridge brass.
The policy already had taken a bite out of the nation’s stressed ammunition supply, leaving arms dealers scrambling to find ammo for private gun owners.
Mark Cunningham, a legislative affairs representative with the Defense Logistics Agency, explained in an e-mail last night to the office of Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., that the Department of Defense had placed small arms cartridge cases on its list of sensitive munitions items as part of an overall effort to ensure national security is not jeopardized in the sale of any Defense property.
The small arms cases were identified as a senstive item and were held pending review of policy, he said.
“Upon review, the Defense Logistics Agency has determined the cartridge cases could be appropriately placed in a category of government property allowing for their release for sale,” Cunningham wrote.
The Defense Department liaison was responding to a letter yesterday to the Defense Logistic Agency’s Vice Admiral Alan S. Thompson from Tester and fellow Montana Democrat Sen. Max Baucus. The senators argued “prohibiting the sale of fired military brass would reduce the supply of ammunition – preventing individual gun owners from fully exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. We urge you to address this situation promptly.”
Learn here why it’s your right — and duty — to be armed.
One of the companies that brought attention to the issue is Georgia Arms, which for the last 15 years has been purchasing fired brass casings from the Department of Defense and private government surplus liquidators. The military collects the discarded casings from fired rounds, then sells them through liquidators to companies like Georgia Arms that remanufacture the casings into ammunition for the law enforcement and civilian gun owner communities.
But earlier this month, Georgia Arms received a canceled order, informed by its supplier that the government now requires fired brass casings be mutilated, in other words, destroyed to a scrap metal state.
The policy change, handed down from the Department of Defense through the Defense Logistics Agency, cut a supply leg out from underneath ammunition manufacturers.
The policy compelled Georgia Arms to cancel all sales of .223 and .308 ammunition, rounds used, respectively, in semi-automatic and deer hunting rifles, until further notice. Sharch Manufacturing, Inc. had announced the same cancellation of its .223 and .308 brass reloading components.
“They just reclassified brass to allow destruction of it, based on what?” Georgia Arms owner Larry Haynie asked WND. “We’ve been ‘going green’ for the last dozen years, and brass is one of the most recyclable materials out there. A cartridge case can be used over and over again. And now we’re going to destroy it based on what? We don’t want the civilian public to have it? It’s a government injustice.”
WND Exclusive WEAPONS OF CHOICE
Feds undercut ammo supply
But Defense policy reversed after intervention by 2 Montana senators
Posted: March 17, 2009
9:00 pm EasternBy Drew Zahn
© 2009 WorldNetDailyFired brass shell casings
Responding to two Democratic senators representing outraged private gun owners, the Department of Defense announced last night it has scrapped a new policy that would deplete the supply of ammunition by requiring destruction of fired military cartridge brass.
The policy already had taken a bite out of the nation’s stressed ammunition supply, leaving arms dealers scrambling to find ammo for private gun owners.
Mark Cunningham, a legislative affairs representative with the Defense Logistics Agency, explained in an e-mail last night to the office of Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., that the Department of Defense had placed small arms cartridge cases on its list of sensitive munitions items as part of an overall effort to ensure national security is not jeopardized in the sale of any Defense property.
The small arms cases were identified as a senstive item and were held pending review of policy, he said.
“Upon review, the Defense Logistics Agency has determined the cartridge cases could be appropriately placed in a category of government property allowing for their release for sale,” Cunningham wrote.
The Defense Department liaison was responding to a letter yesterday to the Defense Logistic Agency’s Vice Admiral Alan S. Thompson from Tester and fellow Montana Democrat Sen. Max Baucus. The senators argued “prohibiting the sale of fired military brass would reduce the supply of ammunition – preventing individual gun owners from fully exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. We urge you to address this situation promptly.”
Learn here why it’s your right — and duty — to be armed.
One of the companies that brought attention to the issue is Georgia Arms, which for the last 15 years has been purchasing fired brass casings from the Department of Defense and private government surplus liquidators. The military collects the discarded casings from fired rounds, then sells them through liquidators to companies like Georgia Arms that remanufacture the casings into ammunition for the law enforcement and civilian gun owner communities.
But earlier this month, Georgia Arms received a canceled order, informed by its supplier that the government now requires fired brass casings be mutilated, in other words, destroyed to a scrap metal state.
The policy change, handed down from the Department of Defense through the Defense Logistics Agency, cut a supply leg out from underneath ammunition manufacturers.
The policy compelled Georgia Arms to cancel all sales of .223 and .308 ammunition, rounds used, respectively, in semi-automatic and deer hunting rifles, until further notice. Sharch Manufacturing, Inc. had announced the same cancellation of its .223 and .308 brass reloading components.
“They just reclassified brass to allow destruction of it, based on what?” Georgia Arms owner Larry Haynie asked WND. “We’ve been ‘going green’ for the last dozen years, and brass is one of the most recyclable materials out there. A cartridge case can be used over and over again. And now we’re going to destroy it based on what? We don’t want the civilian public to have it? It’s a government injustice.”
(Story continues below)
Click Here
As WND reported, firearm sales have spiked since the election of a perceived anti-gun president, and Americans stockpiling bullets have produced a stressed ammunition market.
The Orlando Sentinel reports months of steady, heavy buying have left gun dealers in Florida facing shortages of ammunition.
“The survivalist in all of us comes out,” John Ritz, manager of a Florida shooting range, told the Sentinel. “It’s more about protecting what you have.”
“People are just stockpiling,” said a spokeswoman for Georgia Arms, which has seen bullet sales jump 100 percent since the election. “A gun is just like a car. If you can’t get gas, you can’t use it.”
WND contacted the Defense Logistics Agency, the Department of Defense’s largest combat support agency, several times seeking comment or explanation for the policy change but received none.
The National Rifle Association confirmed to WND that the DLA had been instructed to require the scrapping of the brass casings but declined further comment.
Other gun advocates, however, sounded off on the issue, eyeing the change in government policy with suspicion and filling the blogosphere with speculation that the effects of the policy change may be deliberate.
“It is an end-run around Congress. They don’t need to try to ban guns – they don’t need to fight a massive battle to attempt gun registration, or limit ‘assault’ weapon sales,” writes firearm instructor and author Gordon Hutchinson on his The Shootist blog. “Nope. All they have to do is limit the amount of ammunition available to the civilian market, and when bullets dry up, guns will be useless.”
A writer named Owen at the Boots & Sabers blog suspected the policy change was an effort by an anti-gun administration to raise the cost of ammunition.
“This policy didn’t come out of the blue,” wrote Owen. “The Commander in Chief is clearly sending a message to gun owners that they should be paying more for ammunition. If he can’t do it through regulatory action, he’ll do it by forcing ammunition manufacturers to spend more on production.”
Hutchinson reports Georgia Arms was manufacturing over 1 million rounds of .223 ammunition every month, but without the ability to purchase expended military ammunition, the company might have been forced to lay off up to half its workforce.
The Fed is Throwing Money Around Like a Virgin in a Strip Club
$300 billion in long term treasury paper to start
Comments »March 18 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve plans to buy $300 billion in Treasury securities and acquire more mortgage and agency debt in an effort to bolster housing and hasten the end of the recession.
“To provide greater support to mortgage lending and housing markets, the Committee decided today to increase the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet further by purchasing up to an additional $750 billion of agency mortgage- backed securities,” the Federal Open Market Committee said after a unanimous vote in Washington today. “Moreover, to help improve conditions in private credit markets, the committee decided to purchase up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months.”
Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is opening a new front in monetary policy after unemployment climbed to 8.1 percent and economists forecast the economy will shrink through the middle of the year. Fed officials also kept the benchmark interest rate at between zero and 0.25 percent and said it will consider expanding the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to include “other financial assets,” the statement said.
“We are not even close to the bottom and therefore the Fed is engaging in a massive quantitative easing,” William Poole, former president of the St. Louis Fed, said in an interview today with Bloomberg News. “We still have a very serious recession in front of us,” said Poole, now a senior economic adviser to Merk Investments LLC in Palo Alto, California, and contributor to Bloomberg News.
Historic Rally
Treasuries surged, sending benchmark 10-year note yields down to 2.50 percent from 3.01 percent late yesterday, the biggest decline since 1962. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index jumped 2.9 percent to 800.66 at 2:54 p.m. in New York.
Bernanke is trying to prevent the credit contraction from deepening what already may be the worst recession in 60 years. The U.S. jobless rate jumped to the highest level in more than a quarter century last month. Industrial production fell 1.4 percent, the fourth consecutive decline, while factory capacity in use slumped to 70.9 percent, matching the lowest level on record.
“Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in January indicates that the economy continues to contract,” the FOMC said in the statement. “The committee anticipates that policy actions to stabilize financial markets and institutions, together with fiscal and monetary stimulus, will contribute to a gradual resumption of sustainable economic growth.”
Global Contraction
The global economy will contract this year for the first time since World War II, the World Bank predicts, forcing central banks to keep pumping money into their economies when conventional interest rates are at, or close to, zero. The Bank of England is buying government bonds and corporate debt, the Bank of Japan is snapping up government notes and making subordinated loans to banks, and the Swiss National Bank is intervening to weaken the franc.
The Fed has cut the benchmark rate from 5.25 percent, beginning in September 2007, as credit froze and the economy buckled. Policy makers are now focused on how to further channel money to the economy. The Fed has already committed to buying $600 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds sold by government-sponsored housing agencies.
Home-Loan Rates
The Fed’s actions pushed the average rate on a U.S. 30-year fixed rate mortgage to 5.03 percent on March 12, down from 5.15 percent the previous week. Still, rates are high relative to benchmark Treasury issues: Prior to today’s meeting, the difference between rates on 30-year fixed mortgages and 10-year Treasuries is 2.1 percentage points, Bloomberg data show. That’s up from an average of 1.75 percentage points in the decade before the subprime mortgage market collapsed.
Through emergency loans and liquidity backstops, U.S. central bankers have expanded Fed credit to the economy by an unprecedented $1 trillion over the past year. At the same time, forecasters at Macroeconomic Advisers LLC in St. Louis predict a 5.2 percent decline in first-quarter gross domestic product, following a 6.2 percent drop in the fourth quarter.
‘Choked Off’
“It is the worst credit crunch since the Great Depression,” Laurence Meyer, a former Fed governor and vice chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, said before the decision. “The banking system is reeling, credit is being choked off, it is dramatic in size.”
Banks worldwide have posted $1.2 trillion in write downs and credit losses on mortgage loans and other assets. U.S. Treasury officials will put the largest 19 banks through “stress tests” and decide whether they need more capital. The banks can raise equity privately or seek more government funds. Officials are also looking at ways to remove bad assets.
Bernanke, 55, told CBS Corp.’s “60 Minutes” on March 15 that he sees “green shoots” in some financial markets, and that the pace of economic decline “will begin to moderate.”
The Standard and Poor’s 500 index is up 11.5 percent this month. Chief executive officers from Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Citigroup Inc. said their banks made money in the first two months of the year.
Coca-Cola Co., health insurer WellPoint Inc. and more than 30 other companies are tapping longer-term credit markets and paying down their short-term IOUs, a sign of some investor confidence.
Retail Sales
Sales at U.S. retailers in February fell less than forecast and a gain in January exceeded the previous estimate, indicating the biggest part of the economy may be starting to stabilize.
Housing starts in the U.S. unexpectedly snapped the longest streak of declines in 18 years in February, adding to the series of data that suggest the pace of the economy’s decline may be easing.
Consumer prices rose 0.4 percent in February from a month earlier, the Commerce Department reported today. The annual core inflation rate increased to 1.8 percent, within the range most Fed officials say is their objective, easing concern about a deflationary spiral.
“There are always going to be some signs of revival; this is a resilient country,” said Julian Mann, who helps manage $4 billion in bonds at First Pacific Advisors LLC in Los Angeles. “But consumers are fearful, and when they are fearful they aren’t going to spend.”
U.S. Considering Expanding the TALF Program
The administration is trying to expand consumer lending
Comments »March 18 (Bloomberg) — The Obama administration is considering using a new Federal Reserve program designed to spur consumer lending to help remove distressed assets from banks’ balance sheets, according to people familiar with the matter.
Officials may meld the Treasury’s plan to set up private investment funds to buy frozen assets with a Fed program originally aimed at spurring consumer loans, the people said. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. may also get a wider role, the people said.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner may use an array of approaches to maximize the likelihood of cleansing banks’ balance sheets so they can start lending again. The next announcement, which may come as soon as this week, will be critical after Geithner’s first unveiling of the strategy caused a sell-off in financial stocks.
“The markets are just getting increasingly nervous, the longer they wait to announce the plan,” said Stephen Myrow, a former Treasury official in the Bush administration who helped create the Fed’s program.
The Fed’s Term Asset-Backed Loan Facility, or TALF, would provide loans to investors and agree to take illiquid debt as collateral, the people said. It would be used alongside the Treasury’s planned public-private investment funds.
Current TALF
As it’s currently set up, the TALF may lend as much as $1 trillion to investors from hedge funds to pension funds and insurance companies to buy recently created securities backed by loans for car purchases, college education and real estate. Applications for its first loans are due tomorrow.
Broadening the TALF to include older, illiquid and lower- rated securities could allow the participants in the public- private investment funds to potentially repackage assets and sell them on to a wider group.
The FDIC’s role may also expand to help finance the administration’s initiative, and perhaps to run an aggregator- type unit that would purchase whole loans — those not packaged into other securities — three people said. FDIC officials have extensive experience dealing with nonperforming loans from their role in taking over failed banks.
Treasury spokesman Isaac Baker, Fed spokeswoman Michelle Smith and Andrew Gray at the FDIC declined to comment.
