The Detroit bankruptcy is looking suspiciously like the bail-in template originated by the G20’s Financial Stability Board in 2011, which exploded on the scene in Cyprus in 2013 and is now becoming the model globally. In Cyprus, the depositors were “bailed in” (stripped of a major portion of their deposits) to re-capitalize the banks. In Detroit, it is the municipal workers who are being bailed in, stripped of a major portion of their pensions to save the banks. Continue reading →
NEW YORK—The federal government has launched a rare criminal prosecution of a major Wall Street firm: SAC Capital Advisors, a hedge-fund operator that investigators have long suspected of illegally trading on inside information, ironically reported by the L.A. Times. Continue reading →
Ben Bernanke’s May 29 speech signaling the beginning of the end of QE3 provoked a “taper tantrum” that wiped about $3 trillion from global equity markets—this from the mere suggestion that the Fed would moderate its pace of asset purchases, and that if the economy continues to improve, it might stop QE3 altogether by mid-2014. The Fed is currently buying $85 billion in US Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities per month. Continue reading →
Before you panic that your online purchases will be tagged with the added cost of state sales tax, rely on the complexity of reporting sales to all the jurisdictions as your prime safeguard from forking over a percentage on every purchase. The Senate bill, Summary: S.336 provides a succinct description of the requirements. For a comprehensive resource on all you want to know about Marketplace Fairness Act Information, check out the details. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte in the article, Online sales tax bill may be dead on arrival in House, identifies concern that the practical difficulties remain with implementation. “I do not believe legislation like the Marketplace Equity Act is sufficiently simplified yet. While it attempts to make tax collection simpler, it still has a long way to go.” Continue reading →
This question is one of the most relevant questions that could be posed to US citizens and their elected representatives, which, if answered correctly, could possibly restore the fiscal health and happiness of the US. Continue reading →
The Virgin birth. The Chosen people. The Resurrection of the dead. The Free Market. Which of those is unsupported by material evidence but exists by virtue of practice based on fervent, coerced, or simply uncritical belief and is thus subject to failure at any moment when the belief is shaken to its roots by experienced reality? All of them. Continue reading →
The “Federal Reserve Bank” (Fed) is not part of the United States Government. The Fed is a private, for-profit corporation ultimately owned by eight elite banking families. Continue reading →
First of all, who is Jack Lew, nominated for Treasury secretary by Barack Obama? He’s a Citibank alumnus, a former White House budget director, under Clinton and Obama, then became Obama’s chief of staff. Continue reading →
In a shameless display of putting politics before human needs, Congress began 2013 still scrapping over a $60 billion Hurricane Sandy relief bill fully nine weeks after the disaster hit. And if the Katrina experience is any indication, the bill may not bring adequate relief to struggling and displaced homeowners even when it is finally passed. Continue reading →
The “fiscal cliff” is another hoax designed to shift the attention of policymakers, the media, and the attentive public, if any, from huge problems to small ones. Continue reading →
Japan’s massive government debt conceals massive benefits for the Japanese people, with lessons for the U.S. debt ‘crisis.’
In an April 2012 article in Forbes, titled “If Japan Is Broke, How Is It Bailing Out Europe?,” Eamonn Fingleton pointed out the Japanese government was by far the largest single non-eurozone contributor to the latest Euro rescue effort. This, he said, is “the same government that has been going round pretending to be bankrupt (or at least offering no serious rebuttal when benighted American and British commentators portray Japanese public finances as a train wreck).” Continue reading →
The Virgin birth. The Chosen People. The resurrection of the dead. The free market. Continue reading →
Two landmark developments on August 16 give momentum to the growing interest of cities and counties in addressing the mortgage crisis using eminent domain. Continue reading →
I was just on Press TV with Gabriel Talmain, professor of economics, and Shabbir Razvi, economist. Both men are based in London, a fact that explains a linguistic mishap I had that was baffling, infuriating, then finally amusing. We’ll get to it. Continue reading →
Shades of the 2008 Hank Paulson, three-page ransom note to the Treasury for a $700 billion bailout for banks or the world economy would collapse. This time the LaRouche Political Action Committee reports that “Capitol Hill sources confirmed that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are demanding that Congress prepare emergency legislation for yet another hyperinflationary bailout of the hopelessly bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system.” Continue reading →
Who else but Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders would have the courage to blow the whistle on the $4 trillion Fed scam involving near zero-interest Federal Reserve loans and other financial assistance that went to banks and businesses of at least 18 current and former Federal Reserve regional bank directors in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, all documented in the Government Accountability Office records? Continue reading →
When Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase Bank, appeared before the Senate Banking Committee on June 13, he was wearing cufflinks bearing the presidential seal. “Was Dimon trying to send any particular message by wearing the presidential cufflinks?” asked CNBC editor John Carney. “Was he . . . subtly hinting that he’s really the guy in charge?” Continue reading →
Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and quantitative easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy. Without the artificially low interest rates, the debt service on the national debt would be so large that it would raise questions about the US Treasury’s credit rating and the viability of the dollar, and the trillions of dollars in Interest Rate Swaps and other derivatives would come unglued. Continue reading →
The sobs we have in mind are neither short, audible gasps of breath of those who are invested in Facebook stock, nor are they intended as a bastardly reference of those who, inside and/or outside of the company, put together and took to fruition this much-awaited IPO (Initial Public Offering). These mnemonic sobs we have in mind represent simply Shares-Of-Bubbly-Stock. For that’s what those 421.2 million shares of Facebook were: Overpriced, bubbly stock. Continue reading →
The US financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, like the police, no longer serves a useful social purpose. Continue reading →
“The Social Security program . . . represents our commitment as a society to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute.”—President Jimmy Carter, December 20, 1977. Continue reading →
Growing up Protestant in a small town in upstate New York, the commemoration of Lent was not as major an event as it would be in, say, a Catholic household. We didn’t give up chocolate or gum or anything else for those forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter, nor did most of the grown-ups we knew forsake any of their particular pleasures or bad habits. Continue reading →
The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again earlier this month, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing op-ed published in the New York Times. In other recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates—the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps—were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default” requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt. Continue reading →
An electronic database called MERS has created defects in the chain of title to over half the homes in America. Counties have been cheated out of millions of dollars in recording fees, and their title records are in hopeless disarray. Meanwhile, foreclosed and abandoned homes are blighting neighborhoods. Straightening out the records and restoring the homes to occupancy is clearly in the public interest, and the burden is on local government to do it. But how? New legal developments are presenting some innovative alternatives. Continue reading →
What follows is a shockingly revealing interview conducted by James J. Puplava CFP, President and Chief Investment Strategist at PFS Group in San Diego. On his radio show, Financial Sense Newshour, he speaks with broker Ann Barnhardt, who pillories Jon Corzine for his unprecedented theft of MF Global investor accounts. She claims, and rightly so, that Corzine committed the most egregious financial crime when he comingled client monies with company monies in high-risk investments, without informing clients, literally stealing their money. This occurred while the Chicago Mercantile Exchange [the “Merc” duh] looked on and did nothing. Continue reading →
Bankers have seized Europe
On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35% of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of the debt. Continue reading →
Among the demands of the Wall Street protesters is student debt forgiveness—a debt “jubilee.” Occupy Philly has a “Student Loan Jubilee Working Group,” and other groups are studying the issue. Continue reading →
Presently, one has the net impression that today’s governments, both in Europe and in the United States, have their fingers plugging the holes in the financial dike, but fear that that the entire dam could collapse in the not too distant future with dire economic consequences. Continue reading →
Martin Luther King said in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. You may well ask: ‘Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” Continue reading →
Why did gold and silver stocks just get hammered, at a time when commodities are considered a safe haven against widespread global uncertainty? The answer, according to Bill Murphy’s newsletter LeMetropoleCafe.com, is that the sector has been the target of massive short selling. For some popular precious metal stocks, close to half the trades have been “phantom” sales by short sellers who did not actually own the stock. Continue reading →
The issue of tax has never held such widespread public attention. Following the global financial crisis in 2008, tax issues that had been campaigned on at the margins for decades suddenly became the subject of high-level intergovernmental deliberations. Global tax regulation has turned into a priority in the G20 agenda, while global forms of tax are today the subject of major civil society campaigns. At the same time, direct action groups such as UK and US-Uncut are taking the call for tax justice onto the high street. And now the billionaire investor Warren Buffett has forced the issue of tax code loopholes into the political mainstream. But there is another side to the not-so-gritty subject of taxation that lends itself less readily to the popular imagination, even though it remains critical to poverty eradication in developing countries – the issue of domestic tax collection. Continue reading →
Good luck, Lloyd. You’ve had a hell of a run. Should I remind readers that this story was reported in the LA Times? I’ll remind them also that Goldman Sachs and the other big investment banks got $1.2 trillion in easements in 2008 and that profits soared subsequently, along with bonuses. In short, we the people rescued the same guys that crashed the system and did practically nothing for the homeowners who were gamed and lost their homes and money and are still suffering foreclosure. Continue reading →
