Reuters reports (June 23, 3010) that Soros is wringing his hands over Germany’s savings policy:
“Germany’s budget savings policy risks destroying the European project and a collapse of the euro cannot be ruled out, billionaire investor George Soros said in a newspaper interview released on Wednesday. Continue reading
Eric Janszen at iTulip on how the masses never connect an excess of past circuses with a deficit of current bread:
“Ten years from now, when the full impact of the U.S. asset bubbles of 1998 to 2008 are fully felt, the dot com era, when money flowed like oil from a geyser, before the wars and financial crisis, will be remembered as the good old days, the high water mark for American power and influence. Not one in a million Americans will connect the antecedents to financial crisis and excessive government borrowing to the inflation that we will experience in the future. Not our readers, of course. Continue reading
London’s BullionVault, an Agora friend and possible partner/affiliate, and, so far as I know, a very reputable firm has recently announced that the World Gold Council and Augmentum Capital (backed by Jacob Rothschild’s RIT Capital) has bought stakes in it, in return for a 12.5 million P. investment. I must say I’m not too happy about the news and may suggest looking into James Turk’s Gold Money as an alternative. The World Gold Council has been an integral part of the gold-suppression scheme that is at the heart of the financialization of the economy from 1970 onward. Continue reading
Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of the influential Economic Cycle Research Institute, has said he’s sure the economy is “rolling over” but can’t definitively call it a recession yet. Today he adds that the elevated price of gold signals anxiety more than inflation concerns. ECRI has a good track record as a trend predictor, from all accounts. On the other hand, it’s also true that gold is hitting new highs and the financial media has to put a good spin on that. Wall Street doesn’t like physical gold, because whenever it dominates the news stories, it undermines the stock and fund selling on which the Street mainly depends. Continue reading
Mark Mitchell at Deep Capture on well-known hedge-fund “activist,” David Einhorn:
“In addition, Allied was not, as Einhorn claimed, a massive Ponzi scheme. Einhorn had made the smarmy suggestion that Allied was a Ponzi because it supposedly raised money from the markets to pay its dividends. An SEC official told the inspector general that this claim was patently false – it was perfectly obvious that Allied legitimately paid dividends out of earnings. Continue reading
Organizations and Markets has a brief bibliography of the evolution of accounting by the distinguished libertarian economic historian, Sudha Shenoy. Accounting emerged without state intervention as a type of Hayekian spontaneous order:
“Someone asked whether accounting conventions can be interpreted as a kind of “spontaneous order,” in Hayek’s sense, or if the standard rules are the result mainly of state intervention. Sudha replied with these reading suggestions (lightly edited by me): Continue reading
Update:
The case gets stranger. Lorenzana was on a 2003 TV serial, giggling about breast implant surgery she’d had. Knowing that, would any lawyer have framed her case the way it was? Of course, this doesn’t mean she wasn’t the target of harassment. The surgery itself says nothing. It’s commonplace. Do men who take viagra or steroids lose their civil rights? No. And a competent corporate lawyer would, of course, make it the first order of business to establish that the plaintiff in a harassment suit was a slut and “asking for it.” That’s quite usual. But I remain suspicious why this story, like the Helen Thomas story, has suddenly become so prominent….Maybe to create a little sympathy for the banks? Take the focus off the Gaza flotilla? Continue reading
Video 1: An interesting interview by Maria Bartiromo of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild on the financial crisis (December 2008). Here’s a quick break down of his main points: Continue reading
Update:
Ms. Lorenzana apparently had some pictures of herself on facebook…Doesn’t sound so professional…
And Citi seems to be claiming that her allegations are false. The ostensible reason for her firing is that she was incompetent – behind on sales.
So let’s wait for more information… Continue reading
“Two U.S. Securities and Exchange enforcement officers released nonpublic SEC information to a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and a short seller who were convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy in 2005, an SEC watchdog’s report said Tuesday. One SEC officer on several occasions talked with the FBI special agent about the progress of agency probes of companies, Inspector General David Kotz said in his semi Continue reading