The shadow-banking component that adds to the risk of non-regulatory oversight just deepens the mystery behind the most powerful banking institution that runs roughshod over global finance. In order to gain an insight into the complexity of deception, examine the function of the BIS. The granddaddy of all central banks, the Bank for International Settlement, latest BIS Annual Report 2011/2012, foretells future financial consolidation. Continue reading
According to both the Mayan and Hindu calendars, 2012 (or something very close) marks the transition from an age of darkness, violence and greed to one of enlightenment, justice, and peace. It’s hard to see that change just yet in the events relayed in the major media, but a shift does seem to be happening behind the scenes; and this is particularly true in the once-boring world of banking. Continue reading
Dear Mr. CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Mr. Jamie Dimon: There you are sitting with egg on your face and $2 billion plus going deep into the red on bad bets. You, the guy who fought for less and not more regulation is now in the middle of a major mess. You, the guy who hates the Volker rule named after ex-Fed Chief, Paul Volker, and says it went too far and that “if you want to be trading, you have to have a lawyer and a psychiatrist sitting next to you determining what ‘was your intent’ every time you did something.” That was some expensive exaggeration, wouldn’t you say? Continue reading
Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the president signs it into law. But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law. Continue reading
Public sector banking is a concept that is relatively unknown in the United States. Only one state—North Dakota—owns its own bank. North Dakota is also the only state to escape the credit crisis of 2008, sporting a budget surplus every year since; but skeptics write this off to coincidence or other factors. The common perception is that government bureaucrats are bad businessmen. To determine whether government-owned banks are assets or liabilities, then, we need to look further afield. Continue reading
Facts are stubborn things, said founding father John Adams, a basic truth Ronald Reagan famously mangled at the Republican National Convention in 1988, when he tried to quote Adams and declared, “Facts are stupid things,” before correcting himself. Continue reading
Just a few months after public outrage forced Bank of America to drop a planned $5 fee for using debit cards to make purchases, the financial institution is at it again. Continue reading
Seventeen states have now introduced bills for state-owned banks, and others are in the works. Hawaii’s innovative state bank bill addresses the foreclosure mess. County-owned banks are being proposed that would tackle the housing crisis by exercising the right of eminent domain on abandoned and foreclosed properties. Arizona has a bill that would do this for homeowners who are current in their payments but underwater, allowing them to refinance at fair market value. Continue reading
In an article titled “Still No End to ‘Too Big to Fail,’” William Greider wrote in The Nation on February 15: “Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end ‘too big to fail’ but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled ‘systemically important’ that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.” Continue reading
The Wall Street Journal reported on January 19 that the Obama administration was pushing heavily to get the 50 state attorneys general to agree to a settlement with five major banks in the “robo-signing” scandal. The scandal involves employees signing names not their own, under titles they did not really have, attesting to the veracity of documents they had not really reviewed. Investigation reveals that it did not just happen occasionally but was an industry-wide practice, dating back to the late 1990s; and that it may have clouded the titles of millions of homes. If the settlement is agreed to, it will let Wall Street bankers off the hook for crimes that would land the rest of us in jail—fraud, forgery, securities violations and tax evasion. Continue reading
The campaign to “move your money” has gotten a groundswell of support. Having greater impact would be to “move our money”—move our local government revenues out of Wall Street banks into our own publicly-owned banks. Continue reading
“To some people, the European Central Bank seems like a fire department that is letting the house burn down to teach the children not to play with matches.” So wrote Jack Ewing in the New York Times last week. Continue reading
Publicly-owned banks were instrumental in funding Germany’s “economic miracle” after the devastation of World War II. Although the German public banks have been targeted in the last decade for takedown by their private competitors, the model remains a viable alternative to the private profiteering being protested on Wall Street today. Continue reading
At the Wall Street protest, a young woman carried a sign, “REVOLUTION IS FUN,” and I don’t doubt that she was having a great time, because it can be exhilarating to engage in a just and noble fight, and to feel that you are an agent of change, a participant in history even, and not just one of its faceless victims, as is the common lot. So fun, yes, at least for her, and at least up to that moment, until the violence explodes, as nearly always happens in anything approaching a political revolution. Continue reading
AB 750, California’s bill to study the feasibility of establishing a state-owned bank that would receive deposits of state funds, has passed both houses of the legislature and is now on the desk of Governor Jerry Brown awaiting his signature. Continue reading
Where did all the jobs go? Small and medium-sized businesses are the major source of new job creation, and they are not hiring. Startup businesses, which contribute a fifth of the nation’s new jobs, often can’t even get off the ground. Why? Continue reading
The Wall Street bailout of 2008 has radically altered the banking business. The bailout was supposed to keep credit flowing to Main Street, but it has wound up having the opposite effect. Small and medium-sized businesses have traditionally been the main engines for increasing employment, and they need bank credit for their working capital; but today credit to local businesses has collapsed nearly everywhere. Continue reading
Fresh from writing Wall Street and the Fed’s stranglehold on America, based on A Study of the Federal Reserve and Its Secrets by the legendary Eustace Clarence Mullins, I thought it would be of great value to follow the money (in this case the gold) in the FED’s 1925 scheme to take down the stock market to cast the U.S. into the havoc of the Great Depression. This is all the more to increase the value of Mullins’ book and readers’ awareness of this nefarious act and organization. Continue reading
Whether it is Europe’s PIGS [Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain] or the United States of America’s crazies, unlike them all Iceland’s populace chose not to bailout foreign or domestic domination of their would-be banksters. And that is laudable, an existential act of choosing freedom, i.e., life versus financial strangulation under outrageous debt and usurious interest. Continue reading
After a tense week with world markets teetering on the edge of collapse, Angela Merkle finally met with her French counterpart Nicholas Sarkozy and they ended the seventh month chill in their once cozy relationship. According to The Independent, they faced a serious impasse regarding bank haircuts in the “déjà vu all over again” Greek financial crisis. Continue reading
Four days before President Obama made the unilateral decision for war with Libya, under the innocuous banner of a humanitarian NATO action to prevent civilian deaths, the African Union met in Ethiopia to discuss Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi’s proposal to unite the African continent with Arab states in a confederation called the United States of Africa. [1] Both our president and the lapdog U.S. press failed to inform the American people why this just might be of interest to them. Continue reading
Countries everywhere are facing debt crises today, precipitated by the credit collapse of 2008. Public services are being slashed and public assets are being sold off, in a futile attempt to balance budgets that can’t be balanced because the money supply itself has shrunk. Governments usually get the blame for excessive spending, but governments did not initiate the crisis. The collapse was in the banking system, and in the credit that it is responsible for creating and sustaining. Continue reading
“Ford to New York: Drop Dead,” said a famous headline in 1975. President Ford had declared flatly that he would veto any bill calling for “a federal bail-out of New York City.” What he proposed instead was legislation that would make it easier for the city to go bankrupt. Continue reading
California is the eighth largest economy in the world, and it has a debt burden to match. It has outstanding general obligation bonds and revenue bonds of $158 billion, largely incurred for infrastructure. Of this tab, $70 billion is just for interest. Over $7 billion of California’s annual budget goes to pay interest on the state’s debt. Continue reading
RSS