Economy
Related: About this forumSTOCK MARKET WATCH -- Tuesday, 22 May 2012
[font size=3]STOCK MARKET WATCH, Tuesday, 22 May 2012[font color=black][/font]
SMW for 21 May 2012
AT THE CLOSING BELL ON 21 May 2012
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Dow Jones 12,504.48 +135.10 (1.09%)
S&P 500 1,315.99 +20.77 (1.60%)
Nasdaq 2,847.21 +68.42 (2.46%)
[font color=red]10 Year 1.74% +0.02 (1.16%)
[font color=black]30 Year 2.81% 0.00 (0.00%) [font color=black]
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[font size=2]Market Conditions During Trading Hours[/font]
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[font size=2]Euro, Yen, Loonie, Silver and Gold[center]
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Market Data and News:[/font][/font]
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Economic Calendar
Marketwatch Data
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Yahoo Finance
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Daily Job Cuts
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Economic Blogs:[/font][/font]
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The Big Picture
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Government Issues:[/font][/font]
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LegitGov
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[/center][font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Videos:[/font][/font]
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Charlie Rose talks with Roubini
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William Black: This Economic Disaster
Bill Moyers with Kevin Drum and David Corn
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Financial Sector Officials Convicted since 1/20/09 = [/font][font color=red]12[/font]
2/2/12 David Higgs and Salmaan Siddiqui, Credit Suisse, plead guilty to conspiracy involving valuation of MBS
3/6/12 Allen Stanford, former Caribbean billionaire and general schmuck, convicted on 13 of 14 counts in $2.2B Ponzi scheme, faces 20+ years in prison
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[font size=3][font color=red]This thread contains opinions and observations. Individuals may post their experiences, inferences and opinions on this thread. However, it should not be construed as advice. It is unethical (and probably illegal) for financial recommendations to be given here.[/font][/font][/font color=red][font color=black]
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westerebus
(2,976 posts)westerebus
(2,976 posts)Either they did so to catch up on real life or the dreaded black helicopters with their swarms of agents have gitmo'd them.
Stand by for updates as they become available.
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)I took the Kid to dinner at a real restaurant, and then the live broadcast of Phantom of the Opera.
In other words, I spent the last 5 hours being cursed and reviled, because I wouldn't buy her soda pop.
I'm not doing it again. I don't care if she's autistic. There are some things that must be learned, and one of them is that enough IS enough and one is grateful for it. Or it goes away and one has nothing. Motherhood in the raw.
westerebus
(2,976 posts)The President supports this decision.
There were no other comments although the lights at the Pentagon were still on.
We will keep you informed as news breaks of this positive development.
Markets in Asia reacted affirming the possibility of the REIT potential by Mr Burton, who could not be reached for comment.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Did I miss something, while trying to do the impossible?
westerebus
(2,976 posts)Law enforcement officials have not been able to confirm the links between a radical feminist marxist believed to be living in the southwestern portion of the United States and co-conspirators which at this time are within driving distance of the Canadian border.
The development of such long distance communication and the elaborate system employed by the alleged parties supports the need for additional funding, said a source close to the investigation.
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)Shit I can do what Benny Arnold done, and just hoof it.
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)Maybe it's Benny Hill.
Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts)over the hill.
Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts)You mean Mr. Burton as in the late Richard, or Mr. Burdon as in Eric of the Animals? I remember when that song was first released, summer of '65. I always remember songs by who i was dating at the time.
And remember, PO'd, you ain't the only one in easy driving (or less) distance of the Great White North. Michigan is also a border state. . . .
Demeter
(85,373 posts)or just plain weird.
Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts) Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)That's the point!
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)Like the interest on me CD's and COH in the MM
Demeter
(85,373 posts)westerebus
(2,976 posts)Commenting on the need to go kayaking off the Florida coast, left authorities no choice in their determination to launch an extensive investigation into the migration patterns of a sting-ray kissing male figure known to have associates with a notorious reputation in the counter culture wars.
The US navy has requested an additional billion in preparation funding as both kayaking and sting-rays fall under their jurisdiction. Meanwhile, the State Department met with Canadian authorities over concerns a well known woodsman had completed something called "the kitchen project".
It is possible the "kitchen project" was not connected to an outcropping of coded messages referring to a French speaking member of the Breakfast at Tiffany's club who's last location was somewhere in North Carolina. The white house refused to comment when asked if croissants were served during the last G8 meeting.
Member's of Congress went on record as saying they have grave concerns as to the state of the Nation during these trying times.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I'm not sure the Greater Public gives a care, though. Profits will be slim.
Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts)No, I take that back. We're the GREATEST public.
And it's been rumored that at least one and possibly more Parisian streetwalkers have moved into Florida and may be colluding with the stingray kisser, who is alleged to be in hiding. Unnamed officials are reporting off the record that the White House is unsure which agency to send to investigate this latest speculation. Obviously the secret service can't be trusted if streetwalkers are involved, nor the DEA. . . . so who's left?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The connection to Down East grows stronger...
Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts)And the leader of this other cell is reported to have been seen standing in front of the home of a notorious 19th C propagandist for the poor and miserable. . ...
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)They're coming to town in August, and somebody's got to keep all those hookers busy until then.
And believe me, after you've seen a few of them (especially the ones I'm saving for Louis Gohmert and Mitch McConnell), you'd be more than happy to kiss a stingray.
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)But getting the attention of those spare drones not in the custody of Iran.
The 'garden plot' is now seeding the feeble minded ranks, determined to weed out domestic insurgents.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)Ie: maximum danger. Heads down.
kickysnana
(3,908 posts)11 year olds annoy the hell out of everyone but they do help. Twelve year olds are pretty into themselves and start to stop helping without an argument. Thirteen year old girls start to get downright mean and self-centered until 16. 16 year old girls are calmer but very immature up to 18. Some start helping being responsible, some go wild and some just go boy crazy. At 18 it is over all that is left is years of snark and everyone knows more than the parental units until about 24. At about 24 enlightenment. Unfortunately in our family enlightenment comes to the males at about 32.
At least that is how it goes in our dysfunctional family with about 60% Aspergers, dyslexia, ADHD, depression, bipolar etc.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)And there isn't going to be any enlightenment for the Kid. The best I can hope for is sufficient structure to protect her from herself.
AnneD
(15,774 posts)in character. They have an 8 track mind, but it is all on the one track. And with or without autism, it is human nature not to appreciate and be grateful for what one has. I use to grumble about paying bills, but after I was unemployed, I love paying bills. It means I have a job and money coming in.
That is why I have no sympathy for the billionaires that grip about paying taxes. They need to lose a significant portion of their income before they can truly know the true nature of happiness.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Over 1,000 of us from 25 states took over three Wells Fargo branches and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) in Washington D.C today.
At Wells Fargo, we spoke about how the bank is a major investor in the two largest private prison operators in the country–the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group. These companies fill their prisons by spending millions of dollars on lobbying to keep the immigration and criminal justice systems broken.
At FHFA, hundreds of families facing foreclosure and community leaders from across the country delivered giant "pink slip" to Ed DeMarco, its acting director. DeMarco, a Bush-era bureaucratic holdover, oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which hold over half of mortgages in the U.S. He is harming millions of underwater homeowners by refusing to support mortgage principal reduction and restore the housing market. Every day that DeMarco doesn't act, another 6,296 homes get a foreclosure notice in the mail.
If you're inspired by what we did today to stand up for everyday families and our communities, consider making a donation today.
Just as we challenged Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner yesterday, we came to Washington D.C. to challenge abusive corporations and their allies who consistently choose to side with Wall Street, and not the people.
We believe in a simple but powerful idea: Corporations, elected officials, and people who represent them, need to put people and communities first.
https://npa.ourpowerbase.net/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=11
MAYBE IT'S ANCESTRAL MEMORY, BUT I SEE CAVALRY ON HORSES, SABERS DRAWN, RUNNING US DOWN IN THE STREETS...THESE PEOPLE ARE BRAVER AND CRAZIER THAN I'LL EVER BE....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...But here is a better bipartisan reform: Graduated eligibility. Instead of having a fixed age at which people can get Social Security and Medicare, we should link the age of eligibility to lifetime wealth. The richer you are, the older you would have to be to be eligible for Social Security and Medicare. Here’s how it would work. People in the bottom half of the lifetime earnings distribution would become eligible for normal retirement benefits at age 65 for Medicare and 66 for Social Security, just as they are today. But people in the next quarter of the lifetime earnings distribution would become eligible for the respective programs at 67 and 68, and those in the top quarter would become eligible at 70 and 71. All eligibility ages would increase over time, as they are scheduled to now.
In all income brackets, those choosing to retire later than the standard age would still receive higher Social Security benefits, called delayed-retirement credits. For those choosing to retire earlier and accept reduced benefits, on the other hand, nothing would change in the lower bracket, while the minimum age would increase in the two higher income brackets. And wealthier older people would have the choice of buying into Medicare at age 65, though they would have to pay for it before the age of 70.
Demographic changes since Social Security was first enacted are a good argument for raising the retirement age. In 1935, a man who reached the age of 65 was likely to live almost 13 more years (and a woman, almost 15). But today, Americans who reach 65 are likely to live nearly 19 more years. But graduated eligibility also accounts for the fact that the rich live longer than the poor, and that the longevity gap is increasing. In 2007, the Social Security Administration did a study of mortality and income. Among 65-year-old men born in 1922, those with income in the top half lived an average of 2.2 years longer than those in the bottom half. But among 65-year-old men born in 1941, those with income in the top half were projected to live an average of 5.3 years longer. Thus, requiring wealthier Americans to wait five more years to claim Social Security and Medicare has the effect of giving an average rich and an average poor person nearly the same number of years of benefits.
This reform also combines several important values. The main reason Social Security and Medicare have such strong public support is that they are universal benefits; they are not just for the poor. With graduated eligibility, all Americans will still get benefits, regardless of income; the only thing that changes is when. And because the rich, on average, would live longer and get the same number of years of benefits as those in lower income brackets, the plan should appeal to those who still feel strongly that everyone should pay their fair share. It also makes practical sense. Americans in the bottom half of the income distribution are more likely to have jobs in manual labor, which is more physically difficult for older people to perform. White-collar workers in the upper bracket don’t face the same physical demands. And their greater earnings mean they should be able to save more to support themselves longer. Graduated eligibility should be based on lifetime earnings instead of any particular year’s income, which can be quite volatile. It would be administratively simple to determine each citizen’s lifetime earnings, because the Social Security Administration already has all this data. And this measure would have the benefit of encouraging personal responsibility; people making more than the median income would have an incentive to save. Anyone who earned a lot at one time but frittered it away would have to continue working longer.
WHAT A ROMANTIC! ALL THAT COMES TO MIND IS THE LYRICS FROM FAGIN'S SONG:
You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two
[FAGIN (spoken)]
You see, Oliver...
[sung] In this life, one thing counts
In the bank, large amounts
I'm afraid these don't grow on trees,
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two, boys,
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two.
[BOYS]
Large amounts don't grow on trees.
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two.
[FAGIN (spoken)]
Let's show Oliver how it's done, shall we, my dears?
[sung] Why should we break our backs
Stupidly paying tax?
Better get some untaxed income
Better to pick-a-pocket or two.
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two, boys
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two.
[BOYS]
Why should we all break our backs?
Better pick-a-pocket or two.
[FAGIN (spoken)]
Who says crime doesn't pay?
[sung] Robin Hood, what a crook!
Gave away, what he took.
Charity's fine, subscribe to mine.
Get out and pick-a-pocket or two
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two, boys
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two.
[BOYS]
Robin Hood was far too good
He had to pick-a-pocket or two.
[FAGIN]
Take a tip from Bill Sikes
He can whip what he likes.
I recall, he started small
He had to pick-a-pocket or two.
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two, boys
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two.
[BOYS]
We can be like old Bill Sikes
If we pick-a-pocket or two.
[FAGIN (spoken)]
Stop thief!
Dear old gent passing by
Something nice takes his eye
Everything's clear, attack the rear
Get in and pick-a-pocket or two.
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two, boys
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two.
[BOYS]
Have no fear, attack the rear
Get in and pick-a-pocket or two.
[FAGIN]
When I see someone rich,
Both my thumbs start to itch
Only to find some peace of mind
We have to pick-a-pocket or two.
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two, boys
You've got to pick-a-pocket or two.
[BOYS]
Just to find some peace of mind
[FAGIN AND BOYS]
We have to pick-a-pocket or two!
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Executives at Romney's old private-equity firm have donated more to the Democratic Party than the GOP. Why?(THE MIND BOGGLES) We all know that Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s former firm, is the paragon of capitalist evil, destroying the middle class in order to enrich greedy vulture oligarchs. We also all know that the Democratic Party is the defender of the middle class and the bold adversary of corporate pillaging. That’s why these facts generate so much cognitive dissonance:
During the last three election cycles, Bain employees have given Democratic candidates and party committees more than $1.2 million. The vast majority of that sum came from senior executives.
Republican candidates and party committees raised over $480,000 from senior Bain executives during that time period.
While Romney himself has received more contributions from his former firm than Obama has, “President Obama received a sizable share as well.” More generally, “campaign finance records show that Democrats collect more money from Wall Street than does the GOP.”
Why would these cunning Master of the Universe villains want so robustly to fund a party that is so adverse to their interests? The only coherent answer is that the party which they’re funding is anything but adverse to their interests...
AS I SEE IT, THE PROBLEM IS, THEY GET WHAT THEY PAY FOR....AND WE DON'T
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The ultra-rich betray America and it comes in many forms. Here are a few of the more outrageous, and destructive, examples:
Evasion: Corporations Suddenly Stopped Meeting Their Tax Responsibilities
Delusion: Technology Companies Won't Admit That Much of Their "Innovation" Is Due to Public Assistance
Desertion: The People Who Benefit Most from Government Are Renouncing Their Citizenships to Avoid Taxes
Denial: Traders Feel It's Inappropriate to Pay Even a Tiny Tax on a Quadrillion Dollars in Sales A quadrillion dollars sounds like a fake amount. But it's all too real. That's a thousand trillion dollars of derivatives transactions which, along with the high-frequency computer-generated transactions (5,000 per second) that make up over half of U.S. stock trades, contributed to a financial meltdown and a $3 trillion bailout for reckless trading.
But there's no tax on these transactions.
While average Americans pay a 10% sales tax on necessities, millionaire investors pay just a .00002% SEC fee (2 cents for every thousand dollars) for a financial instrument. And their supporters claim, inexplicably after the disastrous trading frenzy in 2008, that a tax would increase volatility.
Illusion: The Media Leads Us to Believe We Should All Be Cheering When the Stock Market Is Booming
Conclusion
The issues are difficult to address with Congress largely on the side of the wealthy. At the very least:
(1) Eliminate the tax break on unearned income (capital gains). The richest Americans, who own most of the stocks, should not pay a smaller tax than everyone else.
(2) Implement a small financial transactions tax. It would be easy to administer on computer trades, it would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, and it would help guard against the reckless speculation that devastated the financial markets and our country.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)The markets did nothing but drop, all over the planet, while the biggest bank in America lost real money and fired people.
But I woke up today, and it's warm and sunny and the markets are all up, and everything is hunky-dory! 
What do you mean they aren't?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)ISN'T THAT ERIC SCHNEIDERMAN'S NEW GIG?
....A serious investigation would start at the bottom and work up. It would find offices where many of the especially bad mortgages were issued. The investigators would question the mortgage agents about how so much false information ended up on loan forms.
After scaring some number of mortgage agents into talking, they would then talk to the branch managers. If they got two to three branch managers to acknowledge that they had pushed such agents to falsify information, they would then press them to reveal how they decided to engage in mortgage fraud. This practice could lead to the top levels of the bank.
The same policy could be followed with securitization. There have been enough emails uncovered and public statements from insiders to know that some people within the major investment banks knew that many of the mortgages that they were securitizing were fraudulent. It is, of course, against the law to deliberately pass on fraudulent mortgages. It is also against the law to ignore clear evidence of fraud when rating these issues, as appears to have been the practice of the bond-rating agencies.
In short, it seems that there was a lot of crime here, but not much effort at enforcement. In its first three years, the Obama administration did almost nothing to investigate criminal practices that contributed to the bubble and the subsequent meltdown. The attorneys general settlement on robo-signing in January called for a task force to be headed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
Almost four months later, there is little evidence that this task force is making much progress. For example, if someone wanted to contact the task force to report evidence of fraud, they would certainly have a difficult time surfing the web to find a phone number to call or an email address....
IT IS, IT IS SCHNEIDERMAN'S NEW GIG! 
Demeter
(85,373 posts)French President Francois Hollande and like-minded euro zone leaders are expected to promote the idea of mutualised European debt at an informal summit in Brussels this week, increasing pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to drop her opposition to the proposal.
Senior EU and U.S. officials said Hollande raised the topic of euro area bonds - bonds jointly underwritten by all euro zone member states - during G8 talks at the weekend and would again push it when EU leaders meet in Brussels on May 23.
He is expected to have backing from Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the European Commission, which has long been a backer of euro area bonds, producing a feasibility study on them late last year before the initiative was pushed to the background....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has joined French and EU officials in calling for a move towards jointly-guaranteed eurobonds at a time it sees as perilous for the global economy.
In its twice-yearly economic outlook, the Paris-based international organisation which specialises in economic policy for advanced economies, warned of a vicious circle in the eurozone, “involving high and rising sovereign indebtedness, weak banking systems, excessive fiscal consolidation and lower growth”.
It said that the “global economy is, once again, trying to return to growth” with the US, Japan and emerging economies showing steady recoveries, but the progress is threatened by the new crisis in the eurozone.
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/0QSDPP/HYCQVM/T10SH/TU28ML/2ON3FH/OS/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=22
SHAKES HEAD SADLY
Demeter
(85,373 posts)French president includes concept as part of growth measures to be debated at an informal summit, while US calls on Europe to resolve its debt crisis
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/VKY5JJ/U1YT6R/ULCJB/XHM85Q/EXOGXB/FW/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=22
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Extensive use of ‘emergency liquidity assistance’ to help banks in weakest economies has been one of less-noticed features of the eurozone crisis
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/VKY5JJ/U1YT6R/ULCJB/XHM85Q/L9729F/FW/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=22
Demeter
(85,373 posts)When Wall Street giant JPMorgan Chase announced this week that it had lost an estimated $2 billion (now upped to $3 billion) on risky trades, Republican and Democratic members of Congress rushed to make their political cases: Either this was something that more regulation couldn't have prevented, or this was exactly what stronger government rules could have thwarted.
None of them, however, mentioned whether they had a financial stake in JPMorgan Chase.
Usually, the money-in-politics conversation is about how much money a company has invested in a politician via campaign donations. In this case, while JPMorgan Chase has plenty invested, it also goes the other way: at least 38 members of Congress owned shares in the bank...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31388.htm
girl gone mad
(20,634 posts)I wouldn't expect our betters in Washington to be any smarter with their own money than they are with the nation's money.
JP Morgan shares tumbled 82 cents or 2.45 per cent to a new six month-low of $32.67. The bank's value has fallen by a quarter in a year. Mr Dimon insisted that the decision to cancel the buyback was not linked to fears about a possible increase in losses. "You should not interpret this as anything about the size of the loss," he said.
But as doubts persisted that the crisis has not yet abated, speculation was mounting that Mr Dimon could be forced to give up at least one of his dual boardroom roles. He has previously been regarded as the savviest banker on Wall Street as JP Morgan survived the credit crunch without a bailout.
Rival traders reckon that the losses could be as high $7bn. "The markets know pretty much what JP Morgan has and in what sizes," said one trader.
The main index on which Mr Iksil's credit default swaps trades were based has calmed down in recent days, which suggests that JP Morgan has decided to trade out of its positions gradually rather than take one massive hit. Mr Dimon originally said the bank would deal with the positions to "maximise economic value". But there is a danger in taking the long view. Mr Iksil was betting on the credit-worthiness of corporate America and if that starts to fall JP Morgan's losses could mount further.
It also emerged that Ina Drew, the head of the chief investment office where the losses occurred and who quit four days after they were revealed, was out of the office for long periods after she contracted Lyme disease in 2010.
According to JP Morgan traders, in her absence there were regular shouting matches between her subordinates in New York and London. "The strife distracted everyone because no one could push back," one trader told The New York Times. Ms Drew was seen as the key executive alongside Mr Dimon who steered JP Morgan through the 2008-9 financial crisis. But she became more hands off in the past couple of years, traders claimed.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Unless, of course, they want to advertise their total lack of actual value...
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)A) The CEO knows the fall ain't over yet..That JPM (common shares) are going to be a better bargain near future. (And likely will need to get propped up with the buyback)
B) The potential losses surpass the so-call 'stress test' limit
C) All of the above
Demeter
(85,373 posts)"It also emerged that Ina Drew, the head of the chief investment office where the losses occurred and who quit four days after they were revealed, was out of the office for long periods after she contracted Lyme disease in 2010.
According to JP Morgan traders, in her absence there were regular shouting matches between her subordinates in New York and London. "The strife distracted everyone because no one could push back," one trader told The New York Times. Ms Drew was seen as the key executive alongside Mr Dimon who steered JP Morgan through the 2008-9 financial crisis. But she became more hands off in the past couple of years, traders claimed."
Demeter
(85,373 posts)JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) may face even bigger losses on faulty bets in credit markets if Europe’s debt crisis worsens, according to one of the hedge funds that took the other side of the trades.
“They’re not out of those positions,” Michael Platt, co- founder and chief executive officer of BlueCrest Capital Management LLP, said today in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Inside Track.” “If we end up with a catastrophe in Europe in the short run, they’re probably not positions that anyone would want to have.”
MORE
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)IF??? if????
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)might be a good WE theme if we haven't done it before ... seems apt enough these days
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)...Jamie Dimon sits on the Board of the Federal Reserve of New York. This is the most important position of the US financial system because this is the reserve system that holds the foreign reserves of 60 per cent of the economies of the world. JP Morgan Chase is a particularly critical financial institution, since in addition to its vast holdings; it serves as one of the two main clearing banks in New York City, along with Bank of New York Mellon, handling financial transactions for all other banks. Any challenge to its solvency immediately puts a question mark over the whole financial system. Central bankers all over the world are following with interest the call for Jamie Dimon to be removed from the Board of the Federal Reserve of New York because of conflicts of interest. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York carries out foreign exchange-related activities on behalf of the Federal Reserve System and the U.S. Treasury. In this capacity, the bank monitors and analyzes global financial market developments, manages the U.S. foreign currency reserves, and from time to time intervenes in the foreign exchange market. The bank also executes foreign exchange transactions on behalf of customers.
Tim Geithner now Treasury Secretary was the former President of the Federal Reserve Board of New York. It was under Geithner when billions were handed over to the bankers after 2008. Then Geithner was trying to save the US financial system so that foreigners will not pull their reserves out of the dollar. As Treasury Secretary, Geithner was reported to have had secret meetings with Jamie Dimon in March this year when news first surfaced of the synthetic trades.
Elizabeth Warren, now running for a Senate seat in Massachusetts, has called for the resignation of Jamie Dimon from the Federal Reserve Board of New York. Every citizen will understand that there is a conflict of interest between sitting on a board that is supposed to regulate the operations of JP Morgan Chase. But conflict of interest has never been a problem for the US capitalists. They changed the rules to suit themselves. However, this was before the era when other societies had alternatives. From China to Venezuela and from Argentina to Japan, central bankers are seeking ways to exit from the contagion of the speculative trading of US bankers.
Last year the world was exposed to the realities of the insolvency of the US financial system when there was the debate on the debt ceiling. Now it has been revealed that the debt ceiling will have to be raised again. This is sending shudders down the spine of financial institutions around the world...The political struggles over the future of the US financial system are maturing. In order to pre-empt utter disaster the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has called for the big banks to be broken up. The big banks continue to act on the assumption that the US dollar will be the reserve currency of international trade, especially now that the Euro is in disarray. These big banks are of the view that the US government will continue the devaluation of the US dollar without a response from the rest of the world. It is this understanding which has influenced the bankers to believe that the US government will intervene to bail them out when they make speculative bets that the US economy will improve. Many refuse to accept that this is a depression...
MORE MUSINGS AT LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The US financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, like the police, no longer serves a useful social purpose.
In the US the police have proven themselves to be a greater threat to public safety than private sector criminals. I just googled “police brutality” and up came 183,000,000 results. (Here are two recent brutal assaults, one deadly, by police on hapless individuals: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/05/kelly-thomas-video-dad-they-are-killing-me-.html and http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31364.htm )
The cost to society of the private financial system is even higher. Writing in CounterPunch (May 18), Rob Urie reports that two years ago Andrew Haldane, executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England (the UK’s version of the Federal Reserve) said that the financial crisis, now four years old, will in the end cost the world economy between $60 trillion and $200 trillion in lost GDP. If Urie’s report is correct, this is an astonishing admission from a member of the ruling elite.
Try to get your mind around these figures. The US GDP, the largest in the world, is about 15 trillion. What Haldane is telling us is that the financial crisis will end up costing the world lost real income between 4 and 13 times the size of the current Gross Domestic Product of the United States. This could turn out to be an optimistic forecast...
MORE REALITY AT LINK
Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts)Paul Craig Roberts writes:
Try to get your mind around these figures. The US GDP, the largest in the world, is about 15 trillion. What Haldane is telling us is that the financial crisis will end up costing the world lost real income between 4 and 13 times the size of the current Gross Domestic Product of the United States. This could turn out to be an optimistic forecast...
Tansy Gold replies, as she always has,
But this is just as much scare tactics as anything coming from Faux Snooze, MSNBC, or the freakin' White House. None of the money tied up in the "crisis" is real. When the collapse comes, all the dominoes will fall. One player will default, the rest will in turn call in their markers, the markees will default and call in their markers, and someone will be left holding the entire bag for gazillions of dollars/euros/drachmai/rubles/pesos/blinis/whatevers, and there will be major chaos.
But this kind of rhetoric makes it appear that the collapse has to be prevented because it will cost all of us all kinds of "money." BUT THAT MONEY DOESN'T EXIST AND IT NEVER DID. It's all gonna domino through to the end, and someone, yes, will end up holding the Old Maid card or whatever. That's the way the game works. But all the losses get passed along. They don't all have to paid at once as a cumulative amount, because they're all bets that have been placed against each other.
Let the suckers fail. All they're doing anyway is pulling resources out of the economy, not putting anything in. LET THE SUCKERS FAIL.
Or as one of those idiot self-help gurus put it 20+ years ago, Feel the fear and do it anyway.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I think he's talking about the squandered lives, lost futures, bloody conflicts, unnecessary poverty, ignorance, disease and early death due to the hoarding of the labor exchange markers by the Obscenely Wealthy. He's using "money" to represent the unrealized labor in current labor exchange markers.
The only way to stop that is 1) Make Economic, Political or Military War on the Wealthy 2) Coax Taxes out of the Wealthy 3) Change the monetary marker for labor exchanges to something they don't have, or 4) some combination of the previous three.
Nature abhors an imbalance. And after all, a vacuum is the biggest kind of imbalance there is.
Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts)and what his "audience" infers may very well be two different things.
He's still talking about "money," and that has a very specific meaning to most people. That's why this whole Ponzi scheme has lasted so long. People believe that if the banks fail, there will be no "money." If the hedge funds go poof, there will be no groceries. If the stock market goes down, there won't be gas for the cars. If the the rich have to pay taxes, there won't be any schools.
People need to know that this isn't about the real day to day economy that we all live with and within. The banksters have made too many people believe that it is about the day to day economy, and we all know there are people right here on DU who believe it.
Yes, the collapse of the Ponzi scheme would cause chaos, very very messy chaos. And that's because all of those who have bought into the fear would do anything they can to prevent what they believe would happen. To be honest, I don't think there's any practical way to stop the messy chaos. TPTB are too much in control, and the only way to stop the cataclysm would be to wrest control away from them -- but doing so would be a cataclysm of its own.
It's not a matter of preventing the collapse. It's a matter of ameliorating its effects and surviving the results.
Far too few "economists" are pointing that out.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The UK bank plans to sell its stake in the US fund manager in a move to dispose of a non-core investment as capital requirements become stricter
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/DHGUVV/VLIHWR/MJTKN/5VI53H/HYVOK5/VU/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=22
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Joaquín Almunia, the EU competition commissioner, gives Google a deadline of a ‘matter of weeks’ to settle charges of antitrust behaviour
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/DHGUVV/VLIHWR/MJTKN/5VI53H/L972QP/VU/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=22
IT WILL BE INTERESTING TO SEE WHICH DOG WINS THIS FIGHT...
xchrom
(108,903 posts)
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Didn't get enough rain to wash a bug's ear yesterday...and no serious chance until Friday at earliest....
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)And dry as a bone.
I've got to get out here and get all my yard work done before noon. I won't be able to do any for about a week. I'm having this procedure done in the morning, and I have to avoid sunlight, and bright indoor light for at least 48 hours. Maybe longer, if I wind up looking like Anne D after a week long drunk at a mixed martial arts convention.
Translation: "I'm going to be stuck in a bedroom for several days with bottles of vodka and a computer. You people are in trouble!"
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)How did you get those photos. I thought I bought up all the negatives. You just can't trust anyone these days
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)Glad you enjoyed your trip, and congratulations to the daughter!
AnneD
(15,774 posts)California is a nice place to visit and even stay a while; but it is good to be home.
PS. How are you doing, on the mend I hope.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It usually is for medical procedures.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)PARIS (AP) -- The 17-country eurozone risks falling into a "severe recession," the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned on Tuesday, as it called on governments and Europe's central bank to act quickly to keep the slowdown from dragging down the global economy.
OECD Chief Economist Pier Carlo Padoan said the eurozone economy could contract as much as 2 percent economic this year, a figure that the Paris-based think tank had laid out as its worst-case scenario in November.
In its twice-yearly global economic outlook, the OECD - which comprises the world's most developed economies - said its average forecast was for the eurozone economy to shrink 0.1 percent this year and grow a mere 0.9 percent in 2013.
"Today we see the situation in the euro area close to the possible downside scenario" in the OECD's November report, "which if materializing could lead to a severe recession in the euro area and with spillovers in the rest of the world," Padoan told reporters before the report's release.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Countdown to pullout begins despite lack of deal to allow troops to leave via Pakistan and fears of attack after national forces take control
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/VKY5JJ/U1YT6R/ULCJB/XHM85Q/NJ5Z95/FW/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=22
AFGHANS 8
REST OF WORLD 0
IS IT TEN? I'VE LOST COUNT
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It has become an exclusive, expensive elite networking experience. Strip away the hype and you're left with a reasonably good video podcast with delusions of grandeur... There was a bit of a scandal last week when it was reported that a TED Talk on income equality had been censored. That turned out to be not quite the entire story. Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist with a book out on income inequality, was invited to speak at a TED function. He spoke for a few minutes, making the argument that rich people like himself are not in fact job creators and that they should be taxed at a higher rate...The talk seemed reasonably well-received by the audience, but TED “curator” Chris Anderson told Hanauer that it would not be featured on TED’s site, in part because the audience response was mixed but also because it was too political and this was an “election year.”
Hanauer had his PR people go to the press immediately and accused TED of censorship, which is obnoxious — TED didn’t have to host his talk, obviously, and his talk was not hugely revelatory for anyone familiar with recent writings on income inequity from a variety of experts — but Anderson’s responses were still a good distillation of TED’s ideology.
In case you’re unfamiliar with TED, it is a series of short lectures on a variety of subjects that stream on the Internet, for free. That’s it, really, or at least that is all that TED is to most of the people who have even heard of it. For an elite few, though, TED is something more: a lifestyle, an ethos, a bunch of overpriced networking events featuring live entertainment from smart and occasionally famous people...Before streaming video, TED was a conference — it is not named for a person, but stands for “technology, entertainment and design” — organized by celebrated “information architect” (fancy graphic designer) Richard Saul Wurman. Wurman sold the conference, in 2002, to a nonprofit foundation started and run by former publisher and longtime do-gooder Chris Anderson (not the Chris Anderson of Wired). Anderson grew TED from a woolly conference for rich Silicon Valley millionaire nerds to a giant global brand. It has since become a much more exclusive, expensive elite networking experience with a much more prominent public face — the little streaming videos of lectures...It’s even franchising — “TEDx” events are licensed third-party TED-style conferences largely unaffiliated with TED proper — and while TED is run by a nonprofit, it brings in a tremendous amount of money from its members and corporate sponsorships. At this point TED is a massive, money-soaked orgy of self-congratulatory futurism, with multiple events worldwide, awards and grants to TED-certified high achievers, and a list of speakers that would cost a fortune if they didn’t agree to do it for free out of public-spiritedness...
MORE AT LINK
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)now I know not to bother. Time being precious as it is, I'm grateful.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I was curious, too.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)
xchrom
(108,903 posts)
Fitch Ratings-Hong Kong-22 May 2012: Fitch Ratings has downgraded Japan's Long-Term Foreign and Local Currency Issuer Default Ratings (IDRs) to 'A+' from 'AA' and 'AA-' respectively. The Outlooks on both IDRs are Negative. The Country Ceiling is downgraded to 'AA+' from 'AAA'. The Short-Term Foreign Currency IDR is affirmed at 'F1+'.
"The downgrades and Negative Outlooks reflect growing risks for Japan's sovereign credit profile as a result of high and rising public debt ratios," said Andrew Colquhoun, Head of Asia-Pacific Sovereigns at Fitch. "The country's fiscal consolidation plan looks leisurely relative even to other fiscally-challenged high-income countries, and implementation is subject to political risk."
Japan's gross general government debt is projected to hit 239% of GDP by end-2012, by far the highest for any Fitch-rated sovereign. This debt ratio would also have risen 61pp since the global financial crisis. This compares with a median of 39pp for OECD economies and 8pp for 'A' range sovereigns. Japan is less of an outlier when account is taken of its large pile of sovereign financial assets (worth about 80% of GDP on Fitch's calculations), but net indebtedness is still rising strongly.
Japan's Fiscal Management Strategy envisages declines in the government debt/GDP ratio only from FY21. Fitch regards this as a slow pace of consolidation given the scale of Japan's debt. Moreover, Japan's consolidation strategy is subject to political risk. The government's key revenue-raising plan is to hike the consumption tax to 10% by FY15 from 5% now. The measure is back-loaded (planned to start in FY14) and remains highly politically controversial.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/fitch-downgrades-japan-2012-5#ixzz1vavFSH6O
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The ILO report will raise fears the economic crisis has created a “lost generation” of young people that could threaten social cohesion
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/VKY5JJ/U1YT6R/ULCJB/XHM85Q/GDC6DT/FW/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=22
I WOULDN'T BET ON IT...THE DEVIL FINDS WORK FOR IDLE HANDS
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Man charged with criminal damage of a crop genetically modified by Rothamsted Research, a week before a protest by Take the Flour Back
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/IOCBMM/16RO9B/FDFZE/5VI53R/OR47SC/HK/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=22
Demeter
(85,373 posts)
love it.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Alexis Tsipras, the man who will very likely emerge again as the winner of the upcoming Greek parliamentary election, is campaigning throughout the country primarily under one slogan: "We won't pay any more."
He doesn't say what would replace the "barbarism of the austerity dictates," which he maintains that the European Union partners, above all German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have forced upon his country. He argues that the Europeans are only bluffing -- and he promises that they will continue to help, even if the Greeks no longer service their debts. He says: Elect me and all this misery will come to an end.
Stavros Lygeros, 59, is sitting in a café in the posh Athens neighborhood Neo Psychiko. Lygeros is a political commentator and a bourgeois intellectual. He's endeavoring to explain why the Greeks are following Tsipras in droves, although this young politician is clearly a seductive new star and his successful radical left-wing Radical Left Coalition (Syriza) cannot explain who will pay the future salaries of civil servants, doctors and nurses. Lygeros says that many Syriza voters don't even believe that this party has a solution.
The tragedy is that Greeks don't really have a choice when they return to the polls on June 17 -- their only option is refusal and protest. Suddenly all of Europe is demanding that they vote once again for, of all people, the very politicians who brought them all this misery in the first place, namely the socialists under Evangelos Venizelos and the conservatives under Antonis Samaras.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Austerity doesn’t just lead to unemployment and misery. If it goes on long enough, it will inevitably lead to the emergence of “swamp thing” extremists into positions of power. Take the situation in Greece, a country which until recently was a wealthy Western democracy with a relatively stable political system. After five years of depression, voters in Greece just fired their equivalent of the Democrats and Republicans, and replaced them with anti-bailout groups, mostly on the left (Syriza and Communists), but also with the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn on the right.
This should be a wake-up call to political elites globally, because Greece could simply be the start of a trend of collapsing centrist politics and the rise of dangerous political actors. 7% of Greeks, including a substantial number of the police, voted for a fascist anti-immigrant party whose platform is a mixture of economic populism and xenophobic racist lunacy. 21 Golden Dawn members were elected to Parliament. Golden Dawn political machine includes roving gangs of thugs that routinely beat up immigrants, and its political platform includes placing mines on the border between Greece and Turkey to prevent immigrants from coming into the country.
This is what austerity produces – extremism. Fortunately, Golden Dawn only got 7% of the vote, and only 21 seats in Parliament. And mostly, the Greeks voted for parties on the left who reject austerity. Greeks don’t want neo-Nazi groups running the country, they just don’t want corrupt bankers running it either. The man who garnered the most power from the election, leftist Alexis Tsipras of Syriza, has called the situation in Greece a “humanitarian crisis”. That’s just reality. Greece has a large, untouchable patronage system, a big defense sector, wealthy who escape from taxation – and yet international bankers are demanding radical cuts in wages, pensions, and jobs for honest workers.
So people voted for the political parties who rejected the banks. Greek leftist leader Alexis Tsipras is proposing to actually deal with the country’s problems head-on.
By not paying its debts, the country would have enough cash to pay its workers and retirees, he said. He also proposes cuts in defense spending, cracking down on waste and corruption, and tackling tax evasion by the rich.
“Whatever we do, things will be difficult. But it will also be difficult at the same time for all of Europe because the euro will collapse” if Greece’s funding is cut off, said Mr. Tsipras. Both sides should step back “before we reach that point,” he said, and find a “European solution.”
…
Mr. Tsipras, an engineer by training, recommends a stimulus package to boost the Greek economy and has called for tearing up the country’s existing austerity-for-loans program. He has suggested scrapping plans to lay off 150,000 public-sector workers by 2015, and repealing recent measures to push down private-sector wages. He favors nationalizing the banking system so as to better direct lending policies, and speaks favorably of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Depression-era New Deal program and President Barack Obama’s stimulus package—something Mr. Tsipras said is lacking in Europe.
Given the dire situation in the country, this is a sensible, even moderate, set of proposals. And in fact, all of the anti-bailout parties, from Golden Dawn to Independent Greeks (right-wing but not fascist) to Syriza, share the goal of having the Greek state take control of its political order and move on a populist economic platform.
MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Last edited Tue May 22, 2012, 10:44 AM - Edit history (1)
I'D LIKE TO SEE THEM STOP GREECE, IF IT GETS UP THE NERVE...
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/why-the-germans-probably-wont-allow-greece-to-exit-the-euro.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29
Well, there’s been a lot of talk recently about a potential Greek exit from the Eurozone. Some, like Marshall Auerback, have been calling this a lot of hot air and in seems that, in light of recent events taking place from deep within the bowels of the Eurozone banking system they may indeed be correct...Yesterday, Gavyn Davies over at the Financial Times blog ran an excellent piece on the silent bank run that has been taking place across Europe since the sovereign debt crisis began. It would seem that the bank run has sped up somewhat, as many will likely be dimly aware of from recent articles about bank deposits moving out of Greece. The extent to which it has accelerated, however, is quite interesting and can be seen in the following chart which tracks the Target2 interbank lending system in the Eurozone:
As the reader can see the flight out of the ‘dodgy banks’ in the periphery has increased quite a bit.
The reason for this, as Davies points out, is not the type of reason classically associated with a bank run. In a typical bank run depositors get nervous that the bank will not be able to fork over their cash should they want it...So, all the central bank has to do to counteract it is to step in and provide the liquidity. Then depositors will come to see that their money is guaranteed to be safe because the central bank — which prints money — is standing behind their bank ready to meet their desire for hard cash. The ECB, for whatever else it has done wrong, has performed this role perfectly throughout the recent crisis. However, the bank runs nevertheless continue. Why?
Because this is not, as Davies points out, a typical bank run. The reason that people are moving their deposits from peripheral banks to core banks is not because they are concerned about the peripheral banks’ ability to repay. Instead they are concerned that their government might exit the euro and reissue its own currency. In that case there is a good chance that if their deposits were sitting in a bank in their own country they would be converted into the new currency and, hence, automatically devalued vis-a-vis the euro (or neo-Deutschmark if the whole thing fell apart). If the depositor moves their money to a German bank, however, this shouldn’t be a problem — and given that there are no capital controls in Free Europa, moving your money is pretty easy. The real problem — for the Germans, that is — is that, as Davies points out, in preventing a bank run the ECB is loading up on some pretty serious risk:
See the dilemma here — at least from a German point-of-view? This silent bank run is seriously stacking risk upon risk onto the ECB balance sheet. Now, as long as the currency union stays together this isn’t really a problem. But if one of the links in the chain snaps, the ECB balance sheet takes a hit — a big hit. Now, since the ECB issues its own currency this is not really a problem from an operational point-of-view. Central banks, after all, can never really go bankrupt. However, the Germans hate the idea that the ECB might allow its balance sheet to take significant losses. So, what does all this mean? Well, it looks like the Greeks have just got a rather massive bargaining chip handed to them by the citizens of the periphery voting against the Germans by removing their deposits from peripheral banks. A classic case of subversive European democracy in action, it would seem!
AND THERE'S MORE AT THE LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Given this set of circumstances, if the Greeks are to exit it will be a major headache for the Germans and the ECB. And so it looks like Mr. Tsipras, who has recently come out talking eminent sense about what is going on in the Eurozone at the moment, is holding far more cards than many in Germany and Europe are likely to be comfortable with. And so the only people that are looking ring-fenced these days are Merkel and her political allies. Schadenfreude, much?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Given the German electorate’s long standing aversion to “fiscal profligacy” and soft currency economics (said to lead inexorably to Weimar style hyperinflation), one wonders why on earth Germany actually acceded to a “big and broad” European Monetary Union which included countries such as Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy. Clearly, this can be better understood by viewing the country through the prism of the Three Germanys, which we’ve discussed before:Germany 1 is the Germany of the Bundesbank: the segment of the country which to this day retains huge phobias about the recurrence of Weimar-style inflation, and an almost theological belief in sound money and a corresponding hatred of inflation. It is the Germany of “sound finances” and “monetary discipline”. In many respects, these Germans are Austrian School style economists to the core. In their heart of hearts, many would probably love to be back on an international gold standard system.
Germany 2 is the internationalist wing of the country, led by Helmut Kohl. Kohl and his successors are probably the foremost exponents of the idea that Europe can rid itself of the “German problem” once and for all if Germany firmly binds itself to a “United States of Europe” and continues to construct institutions that broadly move the EU in this direction. It is questionable whether this vision has survived significantly beyond the tenure of Helmut Kohl himself. One can see the inherent tension between these two Germanys. Bundesbank Germany would never allow vague, internationalist aspirations to dilute the goal of sound money, low inflation and fiscal discipline. One could envisage most looking askance at the Treaty of Maastricht and the corresponding threats to these ideals.
Which brings us to the key third variable in German politics: Germany 3, Industrial Germany, the Germany of Siemens, Daimler, Volkswagen, the great steel and chemical companies, the capital goods manufacturers. Clearly, these companies benefited substantially from the economic stewardship provided by institutions such as the Bundesbank, along with the broad adherence to Erhard’s social market economy. But they also recognized the benefits entailed by a completely open and integrated European market (still the largest component of their sales). Currency union, even if it meant admission of fiscal profligates such as Italy and Spain, also minimized the threat of competitive currency devaluation, given the implementation of a European wide euro (as opposed to the narrow currency zone which represented the limits of the Bundesbank’s internationalism). Industrial Germany rightly perceived that a broadly based euro zone which incorporated chronic currency devaluers such as Italy, permanently entrenched their competitive advantage. And with the support of this key component of German society, Chancellor Kohl, was able to embark on the huge institutional transformation embodied in the Maastricht Treaty.
One could argue that “Germany #3? made a bad bet, but is this really so?
MUCH MUCH MORE MACHINATION...AND A CHILLING TAGLINE CONCLUSION:
So who holds the gun now?
AnneD
(15,774 posts)and the new underground economy was what Adam Smith was referringto when he talked about 'the invisible hand'.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Citgroup's outgoing chairman Dick Parsons' career is the perfect example of how 1 percenters reward utter failure at the expense of the rest of us...
Photo Credit: koya979 via Shutterstock.com
Last month, shareholders finally rebelled against Citigroup, the worst of the Too Big To Fail bailout disasters, by filing a lawsuit against outgoing chairman Dick Parsons and handful of executives for stuffing their pockets while running the bank into the ground.
Anyone familiar with Dick Parsons’ past could have told you his term as Citigroup’s chairman would end like this: Shareholder lawsuits, executive pay scandals, and corporate failure on a colossal scale. It’s the Dick Parsons Management Style. In each of the three companies Parsons was appointed to lead, they all failed spectacularly, and somehow Parsons and a handful of top executives always walked away from the yellow-tape crime scenes unscathed.
This past April, for his final act as Citigroup’s chairman, Dick Parsons made sure that Citi’s top executives were handsomely rewarded for their failures. He arranged a pay package for CEO Vikram Pandit amounting to $53 million despite the fact that Citi’s stock plummeted 44% last year, and has woefully underperformed other bank stocks even by their low standards. Citigroup, as you might recall, got the largest bailout of any banking institution, larger than BofA’s– $50 billion in direct funds, and over $300 billion more in “stopgap” federal guarantees on the worthless garbage in Citi’s “assets” portfolio. Those are just the most obvious bailouts Citi received—this doesn’t take into account the flood of free cash, the murky mortgage-backed securities buyback programs, the accounting rules changes that allowed banks like Citi to decide how much their assets “should be worth” as opposed to what they’re really worth on their beloved free-market, and so on…
So just as Dick Parsons stepped down as Citigroup chairman last month, shareholders finally rebelled, suing Parsons, CEO Pandit and a handful of executives for corporate plunder”....MORE
THIS IS AN UNBELIEVABLE STORY OF UPWARD FAILURE--MUST READ (BUT WITH A BASIN NEARBY FOR DIGESTIVE UPSETS)
xchrom
(108,903 posts)When the head of Greece's central bank, George Provopoulos, recently met with his European counterparts, the session turned into a confession. His fellow Greeks had just withdrawn €800 million ($1.022 billion) from their bank accounts, within just a few days. Consequently, at a meeting of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) last Tuesday, Provopoulos had to ask for money -- once again.
Most Greek banks are currently cut off from the usual ECB lines of credit. They no longer have sufficient collateral. A number of banks are even currently operating without sufficient capital as a risk buffer for their activities. Indeed, Provopoulos had to accept last week that yet another crop of Greek banks were branded as unfit for ECB refinancing.
These zombie banks are being kept alive with help from the so-called Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) -- a rescue aid program managed by Provopoulos. At every session of the Governing Council, he has to have these special allocations approved.
For the time being, he has succeeded. Last Tuesday, the ceiling for the amount of aid that Provopoulos is allowed to give his banks was even raised again, from roughly €90 billion to €100 billion. But the Council is harboring increasing doubts about this permanent subsidy.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)There has been no official announcement. No terms or conditions have been disclosed. But Greece’s banking system is being propped up by an estimated €100 billion or so of emergency liquidity provided by the country’s central bank — approved secretly by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. If Greece were to leave the eurozone, the immediate cause might be an ECB decision to pull the plug.
Extensive use of “emergency liquidity assistance” (ELA) to help banks in the weakest economies has been one of the less-noticed features of the eurozone crisis. Separate from normal supplies of liquidity and meant originally as a temporary facility for national authorities to use when banks hit problems, ELA proved a lifesaver for the financial system Ireland and is now even more so in Greece. As such, it has given the ECB — which has ultimate control over the facility — considerable power to determine countries’ fates.
Whether that power would ever be exercised is unclear. ELA is a subject on which the ECB is deeply reluctant to provide information — even on where or when it is provided.
“You don’t say when you are in an emergency situation, because then you make the situation worse. So I really don’t see the usefulness of being more transparent,” Luc Coene, Belgium’s central bank governor, explained in a Financial Times interview this month. The ECB’s guard slipped a little late last month. Its weekly financial statement published on April 24, showed an unexpected €121 billion increase in the innocently titled heading “other claims on euro area credit institutions,” the result of putting all ELA under the same item. By definition, €121 billion was the minimum amount of ELA being provided by the “eurosystem” — the network of eurozone central banks. By scouring ECB and national central bank statements, analysts have since pieced together more details. Analysts at Barclays, for instance, reckon Greece is now using €96 billion in ELA, with Ireland accounting for another €41 billion and Cyprus €4 billion. If correct, total ELA in use has exceeded €140 billion — more than 10 per cent of the amount lent to eurozone banks in standard monetary policy operations. Because of the risks of extra liquidity creating inflation, ELA in excess of €500 million requires approval by the ECB’s 23-strong governing council: its use can be stopped if two-thirds of the council oppose an application.
MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Albert Lord, CEO of Sallie Mae, the student loan behemoth, has recently been quoted denying claims of a student loan debt crisis.
At a time when an entire generation is going bankrupt, this notion not only seems dishonest, but also irresponsible. Especially considering that since 1999, student loan debt has grown by 511%. Indeed, student loan debt has reached an unprecedented level. On average, students are graduating with about $25,000 in loans. Nationally, student loan debt has reached $1,000,000,000,000, outpacing national credit card debt, with an additional $1 million being added every six minutes. Sallie Mae currently holds over $150 billion of the $1 trillion, making them the largest private lender profiting off of student debt.
And while students drown in their debt, Lord reaps the benefits. According to a Center for American Progress report, between 1999 and 2004, the Sallie Mae CEO made over $225 million in the student loan debt business. Further, in 2008 alone, “as profits declined, Lord received $4.7 million in total compensation.”
As if his flagrant earnings weren’t enough, a portion of that compensation went toward building his private, 335-acre, 18-hole golf course. Why? Because he was too impatient to be a patron at a regular club. In Lord’s own words, “I hate rules.”
MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)..."You look at the Arab Spring ... what looked like very stable regimes across the Arab world were suddenly shown to be completely vulnerable and brittle and I think that we may see the same kind of thing in our economy," said Marjorie Kelly, a fellow at the Tellus Institute and author of the new book Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution. "What looks massive and permanent and invulnerable, may show itself quite suddenly to be brittle."
Maybe this doesn't sound heartening but it should. The corporate model we have today hasn't always been around and it doesn't need to remain the dominant way we do business. There is no reason we should be swabbing the decks of a sinking ship -- alternatives already exist and they are flourishing.
"What's underway is an ownership revolution. It's about broadening economic power from the few to the many and about changing the mindset from social indifference to social benefit," Kelly writes. "We're schooled to fear this shift, to think there are only two choices for the design of an economy: capitalism and communism, private ownership and state ownership. But the alternatives being grown today defy those dusty 19th-century categories. They represent a new option of private ownership for the common good. This economic revolution is different from a political one. It's not about tearing down but about building up. It's about reconstructing the foundation of ownership on which the economy rests."...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The trading blunders that have cost J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. at least $2 billion are shaping up as a boon for some of the bank's biggest rivals.
A group of about a dozen banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp., have scored profits that collectively could total $500 million to $1 billion on trades that sometimes pit them directly against J.P. Morgan's Chief Investment Office, according to traders and people close to the matter.
The banks made money in various ways. Some sought to trade directly with the J.P. Morgan unit and Bruno Iksil, the trader whose large bets earned him the nickname "the London whale." These banks built positions for either themselves or for clients in the insurance-like products called credit default swaps that J.P. Morgan spent much of this year selling. The banks' expectation was that the swaps would rise in value, earning a profit.
Others acted as intermediaries between their clients and the J.P. Morgan unit, according to traders and people close to the matter. Some of these banks purchased positions from J.P. Morgan intending to sell them to clients but weren't able to, according to traders and people familiar with the matter. These banks ended up with a serendipitous windfall when the swaps rose in value, leaving J.P. Morgan's trades with losses...
MORE
xchrom
(108,903 posts)The city of Alcalá de Henares is set to become the first area of Spain to charge the Catholic Church municipal taxes on the properties it owns within its jurisdiction. On May 15, the City Council approved the measure on the tax — which is known in Spanish as IBI — with votes in favor from the Socialists, United Left-Greens coalition, UPyD and the Popular Party (PP).
It now falls to PP Mayor Bartolomé González to amend the local tax code so that the annual IBI can be collected on Church properties in the Madrid-region muncipality of 204,000 residents. Following the move in Alcalá, the Madrid Socialist Party (PSM) in Móstoles — south of the capital — announced it will propose a similar measure in the coming days.
The new regulation, however, is expected to be challenged in court. Under agreements signed between the Vatican and Spain during the transition to democracy after the death of Franco, the Spanish government agreed not to collect IBI or other taxes on Church property. But the Socialists say that those treaties have their limits.
For example, they argue that under current regulations, IBI can be collected on Church-owned properties that are not used as places of worship, especially if they are rented out to third parties, as this would constitute economic activity.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Set a new precedent for the world!
xchrom
(108,903 posts)i'm a little surprised the spanish beat the french.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)More than six months ago, a 37-year-old worker here named Juan was laid off from his job delivering and assembling furniture for customers of Ikea, joining the legions of unemployed in Spain. Or so it would seem. Since then, Juan has continued doing more or less the same work. But instead of doing it on the payroll of Pantoja, a transport subcontractor to Ikea, he hovers around the parking lot of the megastore, luring customers of his own by offering not only to deliver their furniture but also to do “general work,” like painting and repairs, all for the bargain price of €40, or $51, a day. “I will do anything except electricity and plumbing, where I really don’t have enough expertise to guarantee a safe and decent job,” said Juan, who did not want his full name used because he does not declare his income and did not want to run afoul of the tax authorities.
As Spain’s recession deepens, more workers like Juan are being shunted into an underground economy that amounts to as much as a fifth of Spain’s gross domestic product, according to some estimates, with broad implications as the country tries to revive itself, reform its labor market and keep at bay the kind of wrenching crisis that now threatens to push Greece out of the euro zone. The happy news is that the size of the underground economy means that more Spaniards are working than it might seem, and that the official unemployment figure of 24.4 percent — the highest in Europe — may be overstated by as much as five to nine percentage points, economists say. That has given the Spanish government an important safety valve. “Without the underground economy, we would be in a situation of probably violent social unrest,” said Robert Tornabell, a professor and former dean of the Esade business school in Barcelona. “A lot of people are now staying afloat only thanks to the underground economy, as well as the support of their family network.”
The downside is that fewer workers are being taxed, even as many also collect unemployment and social assistance benefits, placing Spain’s government in a tightening pincer of shrinking revenue and expanding outlays. The missing revenue may be as much as €37 billion, economists estimate. The dynamic is accelerating wage and price deflation, as workers do the same jobs for less, cutting the costs of services but also reducing the amount of money they earn to put back into the economy as well as the government coffers. Many of these undeclared workers, in fact, compete directly with their former employers, undercutting official rates for services like delivery and electronics repair work by as much as 50 percent. Juan, for instance, now earns about half the salary of €800 a month he once made.
Many of those interviewed said they had no qualms about cheating the Spanish treasury, arguing that avoiding social security and other tax payments is their only way to make ends meet. “Some people might think that I’m abusing the system, but I really see myself as a victim of a completely faulty economic model,” said Belen, a 34-year-old graphic designer whose Seville-based company closed down last year. She continues to design logos for a sportswear company and other customers, but off the books, and did not want her full name to be used for fear of the tax authorities...
xchrom
(108,903 posts)the people have to survive and thrive -- otherwise it's all bull shit.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)Work is work. Taxes are taxes.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)World that has sprung up.
One still has to keep body, soul & family together - even if it means doing the cheap wage thing.
I don't like it - but neither me nor they made this world.
Besides they still pay taxes on stuff they buy.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The relationship between Greece and the rest of the eurozone is increasingly reminiscent of the cold war’s balance of terror. We are of course speaking only of financial terror and Greece is not the Soviet Union, but the mechanics are strikingly similar.
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/S4XZQQ/AMHX9G/LSLXF/OR6LEF/XH9SUV/28/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=22
xchrom
(108,903 posts)If you look it up in the archives, the expression marca España, or Spanish brand, appeared in this newspaper for the first time in 1985, in a column written from the United States by writer, journalist and economist Vicente Verdú. In it, he predicted that the country would soon be in vogue. "Spain is an entire world ready to be sold," he wrote. The Catalans were promoting their cavas abroad, and La Rioja wines and Lladro figurines were establishing a presence in international markets. Nancy Reagan was photographed dancing flamenco on an official visit to Madrid. "Everything counts in defining a brand, but it's also crucial to break away from the old stereotypes of Easter week and Hemingway to offer something new and surprising," said Verdú.
This period was followed by the Barcelona Olympic Games, which marked the beginning of the internationalization of larger Spanish companies and a period of economic development that turned Spain into a positive example for countries joining the European Union. Per capita income reached the EU 15 average, the population swelled by six million people, the number of universities skyrocketed and for 14 consecutive years, starting in 1995, the economy grew by an average of 3.5 percent a year. The grand finale was the housing boom, when international experts officially christened Spain's "economic miracle."
Now, Spain is in its fourth year of crisis, with 5.5 million people unemployed and a second recessionary dip. The economy is also witnessing the deterioration of the intangible: its brand. This can be seen in concrete figures in the financial markets but also in more indeterminate aspects, such as the reemergence of the old clichéd images of wine and flamenco, or in the disdain of European leaders such as Nicolas Sarkozy and Mario Monti for their Spanish neighbor. Spain is no longer in vogue; Spain is trading low.
"Nobody wants to be like Spain now. Spain is only good for flamenco and red wine," Richard A. Boucher, the deputy secretary general of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), said a few weeks ago. He made the comments at a seminar in Marseille organized by NATO's Parliamentary Assembly, and in the presence of Socialist lawmaker Diego López Garrido, the Spanish representative in the forum. "At a cocktail gathering later, representatives of various countries, including Canada, Germany, Portugal and France, approached me to express their condemnation of his words, and Boucher later sent a letter of apology. There is a disparity between Spain's economic woes and the deterioration of the country's international image, of its credibility, and this loss of prestige is costing us a lot of money," says López Garrido, former secretary of state for the European Union. Garrido called for greater "non-partisan solidarity" in defense of Spain.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)Ya hay un español que quiere
vivir y a vivir empieza,
entre una España que muere
y otra España que bosteza.
Españolito que vienes
al mundo, te guarde Dios.
Una de las dos Españas
ha de helarte el corazón.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)In the run-up to Facebook's $16 billion IPO, Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter on the deal, unexpectedly delivered some negative news to major clients: The bank's consumer Internet analyst, Scott Devitt, was reducing his revenue forecasts for the company.
The sudden caution very close to the huge initial public offering, and while an investor roadshow was underway, was a big shock to some, said two investors who were advised of the revised forecast. They say it may have contributed to the weak performance of Facebook shares, which sank on Monday - their second day of trading - to end 10 percent below the IPO price. The $38 per share IPO price valued Facebook at $104 billion.
The change in Morgan Stanley's estimates came on the heels of Facebook's filing of an amended prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in which the company expressed caution about revenue growth due to a rapid shift by users to mobile devices. Mobile advertising to date is less lucrative than advertising on a desktop.
"This was done during the roadshow - I've never seen that before in 10 years," said a source at a mutual fund firm who was among those called by Morgan Stanley.
MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Let the Facebook Inc. (FB) finger-pointing begin.
After one of the most anticipated initial public offerings in history, Facebook’s 11 percent drop yesterday prompted investors to fault everything from Morgan Stanley’s role as lead underwriter, to the company’s greed and the Nasdaq Stock Market.
“It was like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” said Michael Mullaney, who helps manage $9.5 billion as chief investment officer at Fiduciary Trust in Boston. He said he placed Facebook orders for clients. “The underwriters mis- estimated what actual demand was, and there was pure execution failure coming out of the Nasdaq.”
Taking the most heat is Morgan Stanley, said Mullaney. The bank was lead underwriter among the 33 firms Facebook hired to manage the $16 billion sale of stock. The bank decided with Facebook executives to boost the size and price days before the May 17 IPO, ignoring advice from some co-managers, said people with knowledge of the matter, who declined to be identified because the process was private. Morgan Stanley (MS) talked with few of its fellow underwriters aside from JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) throughout the IPO, one person said.
“They overplayed the enthusiasm and probably just misread the atmosphere of the marketplace,” said Keith Wirtz, who oversees $15 billion as chief investment officer at Fifth Third Asset Management in Cincinnati and bought some stock in the IPO. Facebook increased the number of shares being sold in the IPO by 25 percent last week to 421.2 million and raised its asking price to a range of $34 to $38 from $28 to $35. Had Facebook kept the original terms, investors may have had a better shot at a first-day pop. Instead, the stock was little changed in its debut because Morgan Stanley intervened to prevent it from falling below the IPO price. The shares closed at $34.03 yesterday...
MORE WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH AT LINK
just1voice
(1,362 posts)1st -- corrupt bankers picked to sell the stock.
2nd-- corrupt bankers fill media with sales/corporate propaganda.
3rd-- corrupt bankers make IPO unavailable to anyone but the rich.
4th--corrupted market claims "technical difficulties" for first 2 hours stock is traded.
5th--corrupt banks dump stock leaving customers/investors with huge losses.
6th-- corrupt banks spread propaganda supposedly explaining what happened.
7th-- corrupt financial professionals/economists/writers all invent more lies fitting their corrupt paradigm.
8th-- corrupt politicians feign concern, collect more campaign money.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Corrupt business sells corrupt goods. There cannot be any good reason to be on Facebook. It will be suborned and abused by the Feds, and then it will only be good for business advertising.
Eugene
(61,937 posts)Source: Reuters
Exclusive: Massachusetts subpoenas Morgan Stanley for Facebook
By Jessica Toonkel
NEW YORK | Tue May 22, 2012 6:22pm EDT
(Reuters) - Massachusetts Secretary of Commonwealth William Galvin has issued a subpoena to Morgan Stanley over an analyst's discussions with investors on Facebook
"The Securities Division has put out a subpoena to Morgan Stanley in connection with the analyst's discussion with certain institutional investors about the revenue prospects for Facebook," a spokesman for Galvin's office said on Tuesday.
"Morgan Stanley followed the same procedures for the Facebook offering that it follows for all IPOs. These procedures are in compliance with all applicable regulations," a Morgan Stanley spokesman wrote in an e-mailed statement.
The analyst's revisions came after Facebook revised its prospectus on May 9, which the firm forwarded to all of its retail and institutional clients, according to the statement.
[font size=1]-snip-[/font]
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/22/us-facebook-galvin-idUSBRE84L1BS20120522
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Forty years ago, corporate America was bloated, sluggish and losing ground to competitors in Japan and beyond. But then something astonishing happened. Financiers, private equity firms and bare-knuckled corporate executives initiated a series of reforms and transformations.
The process was brutal and involved streamlining and layoffs. But, at the end of it, American businesses emerged leaner, quicker and more efficient.
Now we are apparently going to have a presidential election about whether this reform movement was a good thing...
BROOKS IS DEFENDING BAIN CAPITAL, ROMNEY AND VULTURE CAPITALISM!
STARTING FROM A PREMISE LIKE THAT, THERE'S NOWHERE TO GO BUT INTO THE SNAKE PIT...BROOKS SHOULD BE DRUGGED AND INVOLUNTARILY COMMITTED FOR HIS OWN PROTECTION.
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)If there is a bigger asshole on the planet, it's named Gingrich or Stephen Moore. Or Romney.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)"But then something astonishing happened ... reforms and transformations" (!)
Sounds like the blurb for a bodice-ripper!
I'm not using my last free NYT article this month to read this drivel, but what you posted is enough .... more than enough (gag....retch....)
Remember those "Masters of the Universe" commercials they were having on just before the crash? "Steely-eyed" financial execs - men and women both - stalking down the corridors of power? They disappeared right after the melt-down, then made a brief re-appearance, then disappeared for good as the Banksters switched to commercials that tried to be warm and fuzzy.
They used to make me laugh, those commercials - I thought they were so blatant in their imagery - but evidently Mr. Brooks was enamoured .....
He really should be ashamed to bare his teen-crush fantasies like that ... a grown man for goddess sake!
Okay, I tried to be light --- but can't sustain - Brooks, you are a pathetic tool, a groveling 1%er groupie, an empty suit so full of shit it dribbles out your mouth. Go out and break pavement on a road crew all day you delusional puppet. Or stand behind a cosmetic counter all day in high-heels, you pathetic pretender.
They will keep it up - they have no shame, no limits to their corruption. When it comes to FRSP don't say we didn't warn you up there in your bubble, you groveling lackey.
On edit - should have said "like a BAD bodice-ripper." Nothing wrong with bodice-rippers - they can be good fun - as long as one knows one is reading FICTION. Unlike Mr. Brooks, who evidently can't tell the difference.
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts)before I saw your post!
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I see the G8 has a brilliant solution to the problems of the eurozone. President Obama says it’s time for “growth and jobs”. Jolly good. That’s the stuff. Let me show you how to create employment – the Brussels way.
Come with me through the streets of Athens, not far from Syntagma Square, and your mind will reel with the horrified realisation that history is not a one-way ratchet, that human progress is not guaranteed, and that a proud country can be reduced – by years of torture and bullying – to a state verging on total political, economic and moral collapse.
You will see businesses boarded up and windows smashed because no one has the money or the energy to fix them, and on almost every wall a riot of graffiti full of poisonous hatred for politicians. You will see people sitting on cardboard, heads down, hands out, or pushing trolleys full of scrap metal...
SOUNDS LIKE DETROIT SINCE 1967
I'M JUST SAYING--YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)Time to wake up.
Roland99
(53,342 posts)Roland99
(53,342 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)From its first use, there has been debate as to whether the guillotine always provided a swift death as Guillotin had hoped. With previous methods of execution intended to be painful, there was little concern about the suffering inflicted. As the guillotine was invented specifically to be humane, however, the issue was seriously considered. The blade cuts quickly enough so that there is relatively little impact on the brain case, and perhaps less likelihood of immediate unconsciousness than with a more violent decapitation, or long-drop hanging.
Audiences to guillotinings told numerous stories of blinking eyelids, speaking, moving eyes, movement of the mouth, even an expression of "unequivocal indignation" on the face of the decapitated Charlotte Corday when her cheek was slapped.
The following report was written by a Dr. Beaurieux, who experimented with the head of a condemned prisoner by the name of Henri Languille, on 28 June 1905:
Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. This phenomenon has been remarked by all those finding themselves in the same conditions as myself for observing what happens after the severing of the neck …
I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased. […] It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: "Languille!" I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions – I insist advisedly on this peculiarity – but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts.
Next Languille's eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. After several seconds, the eyelids closed again […].
It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement – and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.[22]
Anatomists and other scientists in several countries have tried to perform more definitive experiments on severed human heads as recently as 1956. Inevitably, the evidence is only anecdotal. What appears to be a head responding to the sound of its name, or to the pain of a pinprick, may be only random muscle twitching or automatic reflex action, with no awareness involved. At worst, it seems that the massive drop in cerebral blood pressure would cause a victim to lose consciousness in a few seconds....WIKIPEDIA
AS TO WHY I FOUND THIS GEM...MY SISTER ASKED ME TO LOOK UP THE LAST DEATH BY GUILLOTINE IN FRANCE, SINCE WE WERE DISCUSSING THE TENDENCY OF BANKSTERS TO LIVE IN FRANCE AND COMMUTE TO THE CITY OF LONDON...
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)I think we all understand this.
Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts)Yes, the venerable textbook publisher. . . . .
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/52040-houghton-mifflin-files-for-bankruptcy.html
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt officially filed for pre-packaged bankruptcy Monday morning, citing debts and liabilities of over $1 billion. The filing is part of a restructuring of its finances that will cut its debt by $3.1 billion largely by having its lenders exchange debt for equity.
The comments are especially interesting. I personally have long thought that the traditional print publishers were nothing but dinosaurs, but having had a conversation a couple of days ago with a friend who is on the local school board, I learned more about the ossification of an industry that should have been at the forefront of technological change and innovation.
As a side note, friends visiting AZ from the Netherlands were highly amused at how slow our "high speed" internet connections are.
Roland99
(53,342 posts)and we can have really high speed internet here, too...just costs about $100-125/mo.
ridiculous.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Yes, America is STILL the laughingstock of the global 1%. And now, there's not even a lamp beside that Golden Door, anymore, the lamp that brought your ancestors and mine to these benighted shores: liberty, equality, justice, and social mobility.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)In 1990 Sweden suffered a severe financial crisis provoked by the bursting of a housing bubble, which was sorted out to some extent by creating a “bad bank” for each entity in difficulty. The government took swift action to rescue troubled banks, whose losses came to 12 percent of GDP. After the financial crisis came a recession that saw real growth (adjusted for inflation) fall by four percent. It would be another four years before the Swedish economy returned to pre-crisis GDP.
History teaches that prosperity cannot be had without a financial system that works normally (generating credit to households and businesses), and that the mere fact of stabilising the financial system is no guarantee of prosperity. What is needed is a rescue plan for the real economy to boost production and create jobs that is at least as intense in its goals as the bailout.
This has been forgotten in Europe over the past two years, with results obvious to everyone: the risk premiums of countries in trouble have not dropped, nor have those states cut their deficits as expected. Almost all of them have increased the public debt and have seen rises in unemployment, in the impoverishment of the middle classes, and in business mortality.
The G-8 Summit at Camp Davis is now trying to stave off total collapse and generate support for banks and for citizens too. Is the intellectual climate of our times truly changing, shifting from austerity to growth? That's what the final communiqué of the meeting says. It is time to escape the Minsky moment (named after the economist of the same name) in which debtors cannot pay, creditors do not want to pay, and everyone is trying to write off the debt at the same time.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)and we don't have any "bad banks" or ring-fencing or prosecutions or regulations or...stimulus!
xchrom
(108,903 posts)MADRID (AP) -- Teachers and students from every level of Spain's education system went on strike Tuesday to protest wide-ranging government spending cuts, erecting makeshift tombs at university campuses to symbolize what they claim will be the death of the country's schooling system.
Union officials said on average 80 percent of the country's teachers took part. All but three of Spain's 17 regions participated in the stoppage, the biggest in a series of strikes so far this year that had until now been scattered around the country.
The Education Ministry, however, claimed participation was much lower, at 19 percent, and praised teachers that did show up for work.
Spain's government is pushing through painful austerity measures to heal public finances, which risk being overwhelmed by the costs of helping a troubled banking sector. Investors fear Spain might eventually need a bailout like Greece, Ireland and Portugal.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)And now comes some news about the Facebook IPO that buyers deserve to be outraged about.
Reuters Alistair Barr is reporting that Facebook's lead underwriters Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, all cut their earnings forecasts for the company in the middle of the IPO roadshow.
This by itself is highly unusual (I've never seen it during 20 years in and around the tech IPO business).
But, just as important, news of the estimate cut was passed on only to a handful of big investor clients, not everyone else who was considering an investment in Facebook.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-bankers-earnings-forecasts-2012-5#ixzz1vbcIL47v
Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts)xchrom
(108,903 posts) Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts)Aren't we ail......
:sigh: it's getting rather tedious, isn't it? weeding through all the bullshit.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)because the FBI and the Justice Dept aren't gonna do squat.
Roland99
(53,342 posts)* April existing home sales up 3%; prices leap 10%
* Forecast: April sales of 4.6 million
* April existing home sales up 3.4% to 4.62 million
* Largest price gain since January 2006
Demeter
(85,373 posts)as long as nobody looks to the East... the Old Country.
AnneD
(15,774 posts)
and lurkers. I arrived in Houston late last night (11:30) and was up and on my way to work at 6:30 am.
The graduation went well. We have a newly minted grad in the family with a Major in Sound Technology and a minor in Math and Science. She had an amazing performance prior to graduation. Several of her professors came in to watch it and when they found out we were family, they told us she was one of the best students they ever had and her work was amazing (she actually invented a technique to transform movement into sound. The dancer was wired up and her dance movements generated sound. It really was amazing. They are wanting her to go to grad school, but it is a bit too early for her to think about that.
And of course, we ate too much, drank way too much and had a great time. I forget sometimes how beautiful California is. The flowers were in bloom; the wisteria, the lavender, and the lilacs. Of course I am home sneezing my head off, but it was worth it. I only had time to go to the Griffith Park Observatory (closed of course) and the Grauman's Chinese Theatre, but it was fun. I also saw The Dictator. My daughter's boyfriend just finished the 3D work for the Men in Black-so I can't wait to see that.
Between the lack of sleep and the other activities...I am flying low today, but I should be recovered by tomorrow.
Oh, a I actually watched some tv...CNBC and they were caring on and on about the FaceBook IPO flap. It was so funny watching them foam at the mouth-esp. Cramer. Those folks are so removed from reality as to be a joke. I also got to watch RT and get the real news about the goings on in Chicago. I didn't see much US news to know their spin on the numbers, but it seems the authorities in Chicago were surprised by the numbers and some of the arrested protesters said they were set up, and frankly I have a tendency to believe them.
Happy hunting and watch out for the bears.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)AnneD
(15,774 posts)she worked a lot with the dancers in the school and had quite a few friends among the dancers. She took two years of dance before she took music (I wanted her to understand rhythms before she took band). She was great in tap and was advanced in ballet. She had good anatomical awareness.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)(Reuters) - Germany dismissed a French-led call for euro zone governments to issue common bonds, a day before a European Union summit which investors are looking to for new measures to counter the bloc's debt crisis.
After a torrid week, stock markets rallied on optimism that the Wednesday summit would produce measures to foster growth and ward off the threat of contagion should Greece exit the euro.
The FTSEurofirst 300 .FTEU3 index of top European shares closed up 1.9 percent and Spanish and Italian borrowing costs fell, leaving scope for disappointment if the EU leaders underwhelm. <MKTS/GLOB>
New French President Francois Hollande will push a proposal for mutualising European debt at the informal summit, a scheme which many economists and policymakers say could be one of the most effective ways of restoring market confidence. Hollande has also called for a focus on growth rather than austerity.
But there is no sign that Germany, the EU's paymaster, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, is ready to soften its opposition. Berlin says more progress is needed first on coordinating fiscal policies, a stance in which it has the backing of the Netherlands, Finland and Austria among others.
"Tomorrow's meeting will not deliver any landmark solution. The market is likely to be more prone to disappointment," said Matteo Regesta, a strategist at BNP Paribas.
/... http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/05/22/uk-eurozone-idUKBRE84L0QH20120522
Ummmm...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)In a debt deflation, debt liquidation leads to falling asset prices. As the process continues, the repayments of debt (and default) outpace extension of new credits, meaning that the banking system is destroying money through credit contraction. That means deposits fall, and so does money supply. That leads to sharper falls in asset prices, more repayment and default, contracting money supply, deflation, rinse and repeat.
I speculated yesterday that China is slipping into some version of these dynamics based upon what is happening right now in the monetary statistics, as loan demand appears very weak and both deposits and money supply are falling. Today, I have an anecdote that suggests that the it could well be happening.
Last year, I reported on the shadow banking mess in Wenzhou that led to companies chiefs fleeing and/or killing themselves to avoid being killed by their creditors. The government came in and most thought the crisis was over. Now, the First Financial Daily is reporting a scene happening in banks in Wenzhou that suggests otherwise. Even at a normally non-peak hours in the afternoon, it says, banks are full of people queuing up, not for borrowing money, but repaying debts.
This is a curious scene that suggests the debt deflation process has started in Wenzou, if not nation-wide. According to the report, informal lending in Wenzhou has fallen by 30% compared to last August, and Wenzhou banking sector profits have fallen 53.5% in the first quarter compared to a year ago. In fact, some banks are losing money, which is, according to the report, rare in Wenzhou. The report also mentions that non-performing loans, perhaps not surprisingly, have been on the rise...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The JPMorgan Chase fiasco reveals the huge structural flaws that persist on Wall Street. What to do with Jamie Dimon? The CEO and Chair of JPMorgan Chase has tried so hard in the past several years to seem the “good banker.” He is so charming and gracious, yet all the while lobbying, cajoling, pushing, and wheedling to eviscerate any semblance of real reform on Wall Street. He shrugged off the cataclysm of 2008 as just something that happened, like the weather—no need for any structural reform.
Now the chickens have come home to roost—at least 2 billion of them—and it is clear that Chase is like every other big financial institution with distorted incentives. Thanks to a backstop of a federal guarantee, these gigantic institutions get to keep all the upside of crazy bets while the government gives them all the downside protection they need. Earlier this year, Dimon pooh-poohed concerns about the risks his traders were taking. Did Dimon not understand those risks, not care to know about them, or actually mislead the public about them?
But it isn’t so much money, they cry! True, in the context of Chase’s balance sheet, a $2 billion loss can be absorbed. But it shows once again the impossibility of trusting the banks in the absence of structural reform and regulation to control their willingness to take almost unmitigated risk. Of greater significance than the size relative to Chase’s balance sheet is that the loss was in a relatively stable market in which most people are finding it easy to trade. Imagine if the market had been choppy—the losses could have been even more gargantuan—and if several institutions had been in the same position, then the aggregate effect could have become once again cataclysmic.
It was Chase’s own lobbying on Capitol Hill and with the Treasury, the Fed, and other agencies that made these bets arguably permissible within the scope of hedging under the Volcker rule. Had they not lobbied and pushed and delayed and made the rule more complicated, these bets would have been illegal or at a minimum so transparent as to have been smaller and less damaging. The banks love to complain about the complexity of these rules. But the rule as proposed by Paul Volcker was simple. It is only because of the very lobbying by the banks that the complexity and loopholes crept in...
PRESCRIPTIONS FOR A CURE FOLLOW
Demeter
(85,373 posts)NOW, THAT'S THE $7 BILLION QUESTION. WITHOUT NATO OR THE PREDATOR DRONE, I MEAN, PRESIDENT OBAMA BEHIND HIM, YEAH. OTHERWISE.....MEH.
http://triplecrisis.com/standing-up-to-jamie-dimon-is-it-safe/
Jamie Dimon’s bravado railing against financial reform has morphed into contrition and a heavy diet of humble pie. After reportedly referring to Paul Volcker’s support of the “Volcker Rule” ban on risky proprietary trading and Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ President Richard W. Fisher’s support for downsizing the nation’s biggest banks as “infantile” and “nonfactual”, Dimon, President of JP Morgan-Chase is now admitting “egregious mistakes” as his bank reports a minimum of $2 billion in losses on risky trades that just a few weeks ago he defended against press reports which he called a “tempest in a teapot.” But, unless politicians stand up to Dimon and his ilk, Dimon’s mea culpas will prove no more lasting or meaningful than Allan Greenspan’s widely publicized admission of shock that his faith in the invisible hand of banker’s self-interest serving the public good was, after all, somewhat misplaced. (By bankers’ invisible hands, Greenspan presumably didn’t mean the hands that have been sneaking into taxpayers’ pockets.) Without a full assault on too big to fail banks’ use of taxpayer funds to make risky bets rather than create jobs and raise productivity and wages, Jamie Dimon, his Wall Street colleagues and friendly politicians will continue to destroy the remnants of the Dodd-Frank Act and other avenues for financial reform, as recently detailed by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.
We still do not know exactly how Dimon and JP Morgan-Chase lost such massive amounts of money on complex trades, how much the ultimate bill will be, or what other financial institutions might have similar toxic trades going on. If the reform efforts following the financial crisis should have accomplished anything, it should have created more transparency about such matters, but the banks have fought transparency tooth and nail because they make more money in the shadows. Nonetheless, as news reports and the excellent blog by Americans for Financial Reform’s Marcus Stanley explains, the trades were undertaken by the bank’s London based chief investment office, headed by Ina Drew, one of the most highly paid female Wall Street banker, who’s presumed job it was to invest the bank’s “excess cash” and hedge other risky positions that the bank might have in its portfolio. These sound like risk reducing kinds of activities, right? But more than a month ago Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal started reporting about massive, complex bets made by Bruno Iksil, whom they called the London Whale, because his trades made such waves in the markets. Hedge funds and even other banks started making bets against Iksil, and so far at least some of them have won – to the tune of $2 billion or more.
JP Morgan claimed these were hedges – meaning they were designed to (off-set) REDUCE the risk the bank was incurring elsewhere. But this idea does not square with the fact that the London Office was becoming a “profit center,” earning millions of dollars on trades. Suspicion is further raised by the fact that a number of the key traders in the London Office had been former proprietary traders from the New York office of the bank or from elsewhere. The adrenaline rush of prop trading and the money that goes with it is presumably hard to purge from the veins. Indications are that the London Office were taking bets by buying credit default swaps (CDS) on some investments in an index of corporate bonds and the selling CDS on a another index to hedge and to bet. Some news reports suggest that the bets and trade simply got more complicated and convoluted as time went on and they started going bad – a kind of Rube Goldberg set of cover-ups that just get one deeper and deeper into it. JP Morgan argued that these kinds of “hedges” and bets were consistent with the current presumed interpretation of the Volcker Rule intended to ban proprietary trading, new rules that had come to allow so-called “portfolio hedging” – hedges that could be justified by off-setting some other unspecified risk someplace in the banks’ portfolio; such portfolio hedging, which had NOT been intended by Senators Levin and Merkley, who developed the language of the Volcker Rule, had been worked into the rules by relentless lobbying by Dimon and his fellow bankers with millions of dollars of lobbying largesse.
So, how do we stand up to Jamie Dimon and the other tax payer subsidized bankers that use the privileged position of tax payer underwritten banks to engage in risky activity that harms the real economy and generates massive salaries and bonuses for the bankers (Ina Drew is reportedly in line to make $14 million this year.) First, we must unmask the Republican and Democratic politicians that have actively served to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank rules on proprietary trading, derivatives and swaps regulations and other parts of the Dodd-Frank regulations, in the name of job creation and liquidity enhancement. The regulators at the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and others must be badgered to write and enforce rules that implement strict enforcement of the Dodd-Frank rules against proprietary trading, controls over derivatives, and other key Dodd-Frank provisions. But such provisions will not be enough because banks will eventually find ways around them and continue to act like the world is one big casino and ponzi palace. There is increasing recognition by economists and public officials that the too big to fail banks need to be cut down to size. Senator Sherrod Brown has introduced the SAFE banking act which, like his proposal with Senator Ted Kaufman in 2008, is designed to limit the size of banks and put on hard leverage limits and size restrictions. Sherrod Brown’s SAFE banking act should get much more attention and support than it is getting. Other actions which can work to reduce the riskiness of banks and reduce the tax payer’s liabilities are tougher capital requirements on banks as proposed by Stanford business school’s Anat Admati, and enforcement of legal restrictions against bank fraud. Still, there other fixes are needed to help transform this speculative banking into banking that will support the real development of the economy. These include a tough financial transactions tax; and public options in finance and banking so we are not as dependent on the behavior of these private bankers.
But less well understood is the role of austerity in making all of these solutions more difficult. With few attractive options to lend to businesses, which have little incentive to invest in plant and equipment in a stagnating economy, excess liquidity piles up on the balance sheets of banks and corporations. With lax regulation bankers have more and more incentive to undertake the dangerous gambles like those at JP Morgan. People must demand and politicians must enact an end to the policies of the austerity buzzards who are squashing jobs and economic growth, and preventing investments in people and in the transition to a green economy. As Keynes understood, unless the government takes a lead in job creation, a stagnating economy with massive liquidity will only encourage more speculation and more financial instability.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)about the Leader of the "Free World"
Please read this, and only distribute selectively.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/barack-obama-the-great-deceiver.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29
IT WOULD MAKE A DAMN FINE INDICTMENT.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.
The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.” Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.
The latest documents, reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”
The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”
A better description for a fascist police state network could not be written.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)President Barack Obama has $500,001 to $1 million in a JPMorgan Chase private client asset management checking account, according to financial disclosures released by the White House on Tuesday. Obama said this week that JPMorgan was "one of the best managed banks there is"
... despite its $2 billion trading loss being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
THAT'S SURE TO BUILD PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN BANKSTERS!
"This is a checking account used by the president and the first lady," said White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage. "It is the equivalent of an interest-bearing checking account available at many other financial institutions," she said, noting that it generated less than $201 in interest income in 2011. The president's 2011 disclosures also included a regular JPMorgan Chase checking account in the $1,001 to $15,000 range. His other principal assets included $500,001 to $1 million in U.S. Treasury bills and between $1 million and $5 million in U.S. Treasury notes. In a note about the annual financial statements that were posted online, the White House said "neither the president nor the vice president have any conflicts of interest."
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...Allan Danforth bought a house in a short sale in fall 2010. JPMorgan Chase held the previous owner's mortgage. Danforth said two months later, without notice, the bank changed the locks and hauled away $25,000 worth of furniture, appliances and family heirlooms.
"I had to bust in through the basement window here," Danforth said, pointing to the house that he was forced to break into more than 18 months ago. He said JPMorgan Chase's contractor, Safeguard Properties, ignored "No Trespassing" signs on the garage, changed the locks on his home and cleaned it out two months after he paid cash for the property.
"It was basically stuff that was 150 years of family history," Danforth said. "I feel violated and I felt like the house wasn't even safe to go into for a while."
Danforth said Safeguard Properties could find his family heirlooms. He said JPMorgan Chase just gave him a runaround. "They're the big bank and they don't care," he said.
"It's a wrong built upon wrongs," said attorney Tony Stein. He said it's a wrongful foreclosure. "We fully intend to go into court and have a Jackson County jury try to decide the eventual outcome of this case in the only language JPMorgan Chase understands," Stein said. "The language of money."
ANOTHER GOOD REASON TO BE WARY OF SHORT SALES!
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- Food maker General Mills Inc. said Tuesday it will cut about 850 jobs as part of a plan to lower costs and boost efficiency.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/general-mills-eliminate-850-jobs-134637990.html
Eugene
(61,937 posts)Source: Reuters
Facebook drops again as SEC calls for review
By Edward Krudy and Ryan Vlastelica
Tue May 22, 2012 1:57pm EDT
(Reuters) - Facebook's shares fell again on Tuesday as questions mounted over the company's long-term prospects and the top U.S. securities regulator called for a review of the problems surrounding its initial public offering last week.
The comments urging a review, by Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro, added pressure on the company, its underwriters and the Nasdaq, all of which have taken blame for the stock's troubled opening and subsequent sharp decline.
[font size=1]-snip-[/font]
The SEC's Schapiro said investors should be confident in investing, but she conceded there were questions to answer.
"I think there is a lot of reason to have confidence in our markets and in the integrity of how they operate, but there are issues that we need to look at specifically with respect to Facebook," she told reporters as she exited a Senate Banking Committee hearing.
[font size=1]-snip-[/font]
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/22/us-usa-markets-facebook-idUSBRE84L0PE20120522
Tansy_Gold
(17,867 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Not sure my heart could take the strain.
Roland99
(53,342 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Now I feel more like the earth is beneath my feet, and not moving. This airy fairy stuff was really grumping me out.
Roland99
(53,342 posts)Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)I just got home. Dow jumped 35 pts in the time it took to make a sandwich.
Sit on my Facebook down another 8.9% today.
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)Now if u wanna mess up your dermatologist...Splain that that your whole/hole self is pre-cancerous
Roland99
(53,342 posts)* Dell Q1 revenue $14.42 bln vs $15.02 bln
* Dell Q1 profit 36c a share vs 49c a share
Demeter
(85,373 posts)