From Jerome Corsi, World Net Daily, June 18, 2010:
“Former Clinton and Obama budget adviser Franklin Raines owns a key carbon-emissions patent he developed as CEO of the government-sponsored mortgage giant Fannie Mae, positioning him and his partners to make millions of dollars if it is used in any carbon-capping scheme implemented by the Obama administration. 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
Forbes on where richer than average households are moving within the USA, June 14, 2010:
No. 1: Collier County, Fla.
Arriving average income per capita: $76,161
Departing average income per capita: $26,128
Stationary household average income per capita: $49,959
Total arriving people: 15,150
Total departing people: 16,802
Top origin: Lee County, Fla. (2,987 people) 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
Well, well, well. It looks like Patrick Byrne, Judd Bagley, Mark Mitchell and the rest of the estimable team at Deep Capture are having more than some effect.
Not only have the Germans and Austrians banned naked short- selling, Vanity Fair, our least favorite low-class, high-gloss magazine of the DC twitterati, tells us that Steve Cohen is closing up shop as a trader. Sith Lord Cohen doesn’t like the spotlight, it seems. Maybe he remembers all too well what he was up to in the 1980s……even if Reuters wants to keep it buried.
In the July issue of Vanity Fair, legendary hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen tells special correspondent Bryan Burrough that he might be ready to walk away from active trading. How big would that be? Well, says Burrough, it’s “a little like saying that God is ready to walk away from Earth.” In this video, Burrough takes the measure of Cohen’s controversial careeer—and offers his theory on why the reclusive banker granted the second in-depth interview of his 30-year career to Vanity Fair.
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
Bloomberg reports on the nation-wide bid-rigging fraud in the municipal bond-market that accompanied the credit crisis:
“A telephone call between a financial adviser in Beverly Hills and a trader in New York was all it took to fleece taxpayers on a water-and-sewer financing deal in West Virginia. The secret conversation was part of a conspiracy stretching across the U.S. by Wall Street banks in the $2.8 trillion municipal bond market.
The call came less than two hours before bids were due for contracts to manage $90 million raised with the sale of West Virginia bonds. On one end of the line was Steven Goldberg, a trader with Financial Security Assurance Holdings Ltd. On the other was Zevi Wolmark, of advisory firm CDR Financial Products Inc. Goldberg arranged to pay a kickback to CDR to land the deal, according to government records filed in connection with a U.S. Justice Department indictment of CDR and Wolmark.
West Virginia was just one stop in a nationwide conspiracy in which financial advisers to municipalities colluded with Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Wachovia Corp. and 11 other banks. Continue reading
Update: Here’s Chris Cook’s radio interview of me on University of Victoria Radio, May 10, 2010.
I’m in the last third. As it was, we didn’t talk much about the crisis, except a bit at the end. We talked mostly about how libertarians suddenly became too dangerous to be allowed across the border.
ORIGINAL POST:
I’ll be talking with Chris Cook of The Peace and Earth Justice website and University of Victoria Gorilla radio show about the financial crisis and the call for regulation; also, about Canada’s increasing unfriendliness to free speech on political matters.
A Preview of the Program:
GR 05-50 101.9 FM 104.3 Cable ‘cfuv.uvic.ca
Monday May 10, 2010
5:00:00 3:00 Welcome to GR, etc. Gordon Campbell’s Liberal party has promised it will enact the Harmonized Sales Tax, or HST come hell or high water; and he may get plenty of both. To call the opposition to the tax popular in B.C. merely scratches the surface of the deep dissatisfaction felt in Canada’s westernmost province. After watching nearly a decade of service cuts, and relentless tax relief to corporations and the wealthiest of British Columbia’s citizens, more tax rises for the working class is about as welcome here as as communicable disease. Resistance to the proposed HST has organized, and petitions currently making the rounds in every voting jurisdiction are piling up signatures, hoping to reach a level that will force the government to back down. Brad Slade is a long-time labor activist and he’s the Regional Organizer for the South Island and the Islands with Fight The HST. Brad Slade in the first half.
And; what lies behind the recent economic meltdown in the United States?
Years of deregulation on high-flying financiers and the introduction of increasingly exotic investment vehicles created a bubble economy whose collapse now threatens the entire global economy, but who is to blame? Lila Rajiva is a journalist and author, whose book titles include: ‘The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media,‘ and ‘Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets’, co-written with Bill Bonner. Her articles are available on the internet at CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, and Lew Rockwell.com, and in mainstream sources such as The Washington Post and The Hindu.
Lila Rajiva and the politics behind financial calamity in the second half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed on the view from Victoria’s burgeoning street society. But first, Brad Slade and B.C.’s tax revolt in the making.
5:03:00 21:00 Discussion w/ Brad Slade
“Welcome back to the show, Brad; it’s been a few months since your last visit here; what’s the latest on the Fight the HST front?”
5:24:00 1:00 Cart(s)
5:25:00 10:00 Janine Bandcroft
5:35:00 3:00 Music
5:38:00 21:00 Discussion w/ Lila Rajiva
Welcome back to GR, etc.
Just what lies behind the recent economic meltdown in the United States? Years of deregulation on high-flying financiers and the introduction of increasingly exotic investment vehicles created a bubble economy whose collapse now threatens the entire global economy, but who is to blame?
Lila Rajiva is a journalist and author, whose book titles include: ‘The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media,‘ and ‘Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets’, co-written with Bill Bonner. Her articles are available on the internet at CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, and Lew Rockwell.com, and in mainstream sources such as The Washington Post and The Hindu.
“Welcome back to the program, Lila; we initially planned to discuss an economics forum that took place in Vancouver over the weekend. What is that forum about, and why were you not in attendance?”
Well, I know I promised to stay away from my blog. But a 1000 point drop in the Dow is reason enough to renege on a promise.
I’m going to state my considered judgment that that was no accident. It looked deliberate (like September, 2008) and seems to follow on other deliberate attempts to induce panic….(not that anyone needs to try very hard to do that, since the way governments are behaving nowadays is panic-inducing enough)
Why do I monger conspiracy thus?
Let’s review.
Rewind to the early part of April, a period that has occult significance, as it includes Hitler’s birthday (April 20). It also carries dark overtones from recent history in the US – the Columbine shootings (April 20, 1999), the Federal assault on Waco on April 19, 1993, and the WTC Oklahoma City bombing (April 17, 1995) and from WW II history (the NKVD’s massacre at Katyn in April 1940 , and several other important incidents related to the Nazi prison camps).
1. On April 10 we witnessed the “decapitation” of a large part of the leadership of Poland under the strangest of circumstances. Poland is a country that has been resisting the economic demands of the EU one-worlders and rearing its reactionary nationalistic head on several occasions, to wit., the devaluation of the zloty. The plane crash erased the bulk of the nationalists in government at one shot.
2. This mysterious crash was followed by another smaller but equally strange incident when Eurocontrol (correction: I read that the ultimate decision was not made by Eurocontrol but by EU members acting with coordination from Eurocontrol) over-reacted to the eruption of the Icelandic volcano and grounded the entire airline industry in many northern and western European countries, shutting down 70% of European flights and hitting the economy severely again. Hit two to the markets.
3. Around the same time we had whistle-blower Andrew Maguire outing JP Morgan market manipulation (March 23) and nearly becoming the victim of a hit and run driver (March 27).
This was followed immediately by widespread panic (around April 7) about the lack of physical gold in a number of vaults and behind the majority of contracts. That was hit three.
4. At the same time (April 16), there was the SEC filing of charges against Goldman Sachs. I’m all for flaying Goldman alive, but there’s no denying the “staged” elements of the case, its tardiness, and its potential to set off more litigation that could maul the banking industry badly. Hit four.
5. Now, against the background of street riots in Greece, with the EU tottering on its gouty feet, comes hit five – a market plunge of historic proportions apparently from a bizarre trading “mistake.”
Update: 6. April 20, blow up of BP oil rig/
Add in a few other suspicious developments, and malice aforethought rather than chance seems the more plausible explanation….
Now was it Goldman’s High Frequency Trading programs sending a warning to investigators? Or was it the infamous Plunge Protection Team? Perhaps this was a message from the Federal Reserve to those who want to audit it…..that bill has now been “gutted.”
Was it a “fat finger” at Citigroup (denied by the firm) or a “black swan” out of Nassim Taleb’s Universa hedge-fund, as the latest reports suggest?
I have my own ideas, of course. But they’re no more than theory at this point.
Whoever did it, I suspect money was made both on the way down and the way up.
Jim Rogers on Goldseek radio had the best word for the whole frightening mishap. He said someone should suffer for it. This is New York, the HQ of the world capital markets. If the NYSE can’t get it right, time to get rid of them.
But of course, no one is going to go anywhere. No one is going to suffer for their mistakes. The only people who will suffer, as usual, is you, me, and the rest of the investing public.
The report I’ve posted below illustrates why most regulatory efforts are completely counterproductive.
By the time enough bureaucrats are convinced there’s a problem, by the time enough of the public has been educated…or miseducated about it..so there’s enough public pressure to call for hearings, by the time the SEC and the DOJ have been able to gather enough evidence to cobble together charges, the swindles move onto some other part of the system, the crooks cover over their tracks, reinvent themselves, put old wine in new bottles and new wine in old, and, in general, outpace the local flatfoots about 100-1, so that they’re nearly always playing catch-up and dissecting history, rather than actually safeguarding the public from the current perils of the market.
Goldman Sachs is the outrage du jour. But much of the really bad stuff Goldman’s been involved in over several decades has nothing to do with the technicality on which it’s being grilled now, a deal that’s no different from hundreds done on Wall Street by every other bank. Meanwhile, what about the dirty laundry of the hedge-funds, of private equity, of sovereign wealth funds – to take just the private sector? And what of the government’s own culpability in financial wrong-doing? And worse yet, its blunders in financial “right-doing”? Don’t count on the SEC to look at all that.
That’s the intrinsic problem of a statist solution…it’s always a day late and a dollar short.
Thus the LA Times reports on where the action is in the financial world, as evidenced in the glee of some participants at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference [that’s Michael Milken, former convicted junk bond financier turned philanthropist and alleged master mind of global market manipulation}:
“Unemployment is high and the housing market remains weak. But in Beverly Hills on Tuesday, private equity players could hardly be more upbeat.
A panel of private equity fund managers at the Milken Institute’s annual Global Conference celebrated the comeback of highly leveraged deals — which had ground almost to a halt during the financial crisis.
“What a difference a year makes,” enthused Leon Black, head of Apollo Management in New York.
Black and the other buyout honchos attributed the return of debt-financed acquisitions to the recovery in the credit markets and the overall economy.
“The high-yield market is probably better today than it ever has been,” said Scott Sperling, co-president of Thomas H. Lee Partners in Boston, referring to the junk bonds that finance many private equity transactions.
A new problem faces private equity investors now: The prices of target companies have shot up faster than fund managers have been able to scoop up bargains.
“A lot of the low-hanging fruit, frankly, is gone,” Black said. “The snapback has been unbelievably dramatic.”
Not surprisingly, the managers bemoaned what Black termed the “populist wave” helping to fuel the Obama administration’s effort to boost oversight of the financial industry.
“You’re seeing some wacky regulation, which makes running our business a lot more difficult,” said Ted Virtue, chief executive of MidOcean Partners, which buys midsize companies.
Still, the private equity business has largely escaped the scrutiny aimed at other areas of Wall Street. “I’m glad I’m not Goldman Sachs today,” Black said with a wide smile.”