Bankers & Wall St.
Iceland’s supreme court has upheld convictions of market manipulation for four former executives of the failed Kaupthing bank in a landmark case that the country’s special prosecutor said showed it was possible to crack down on fraudulent bankers.
Federal regulators created a new ‘rule’ giving banks extraordinary latitude to underreport the risk levels of their investments.
Robert Reich gives one of the best descriptions of the nature & dangers of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a less than 3 minute video. The effort to have this secretive, nontransparent proposal put on a “fast track”, smacks of Tammany Hall-style politics that benefits no one but fat cats. And, after years of the public hoping for bipartisanship in Congress, isn’t it ironic that this is the issue where Republicans are supporting the president in large & growing numbers?
The senators highlight three parts of the TPP that could undermine current and future efforts to regulate Wall Street and prevent another financial crisis: (1) Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), which allows foreign companies or investors to sue governments for losses in expected profits; (2) “Market access” provisions that could prohibit restrictions on predatory financial products, like risky forms of derivatives; and (3) Limitations on governments’ ability to impose capital controls, which could stymie efforts to prevent future financial crises as well as efforts to pass a financial transaction tax.
Is a family of Asian elders about to spell the end of the Banking Cabal through a worldwide monetary reset? Or is the global economy about to be consolidated even further? Foster Gamble discusses these possibilities in this video from their ThriveTogether think tank event that was held last weekend.
Breaking the Set host Abby Martin speaks with Rolling Stone journalist, Matt Taibbi, about a JP Morgan Chase whistleblower that has come forward to expose how the company knowingly sold toxic mortgages to investors and how the Justice Department used her as a pawn in its settlement negotiations with the financial giant.
Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She’s had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.
Those involved in politics – the politicians, reporters and corporate lobbyists – are constantly lying. We all know it, we just don’t all appreciate the scope of it. Of course, there is outright lying which might be done in any number of ways, including complete conjuration and outright elimination of important information. However corporate heads, politicians and their faithful media normally prefer more nuanced presentations to their lies — so it pays to understand just how they go about it.
The World Bank’s Doing Business rankings force countries to compete with each other to do away with things like environmental protections, workers rights and corporation taxes. Sign on to demand the abolition of the rankings.
The Rand Corporation would have us believe that the world is a massive game of Jenga, and the supporting pieces just remove themselves from the teetering structure by magical and coincidental causality.
An investor filed a lawsuit claiming HSBC and other banks unlawfully manipulated the price of silver and its derivatives to “reap large illegitimate profits”.
President Woodrow Wilson saw a horrible danger to his country, looked it in the eye, and decided that instead of trying to decentralize and dismantle that overarching power, he would hope against hope that greater cooperation among leaders of nations would bring sanity and peace and freedom of the individual. Of course, he was wrong. Wilson knew he was entangled with those very powers that were destroying the best of what American stood for. Nevertheless, no modern President has made more revealing comments on the existence and nature of the shadow government, the real rulers of America.
WikiLeaks published a previously tightly-held and secretive draft of a trade document that, if enacted, would give the world’s financial powers an even more dominant position to control the global economy by avoiding regulations and public accountability. Known as a Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), the draft represents the negotiating positions of the U.S. and E.U. and lays out the deregulatory strategies championed by some of the world’s largest banks and investment firms.
Growing food demand for billions in the developing world combined with bankrupt developed nations and insolvent central banks spells doom for the status quo.
