“If the U.S. Armed forces can’t find Osama bin Laden in 10 years, let Goldman Sachs try to find me.”
Tag: They are all a bunch of bastards
The Testimony of Simon Johnson | Congressional Oversight Committee
“…Powerful people at the heart of our financial system still have the incentive and ability to take on large amounts of reckless risk – through borrowing large amounts relative to their equity.
There is an insularity and arrogance to policymakers around capital requirements that is distinctly reminiscent of the Treasury-Fed-Wall Street consensus regarding derivatives in the late 1990s – i.e., officials are so convinced by the arguments of big banks that they dismiss out of hand any attempt to even open a serious debate.
Next time, when our largest banks get into trouble, they may be beyond “too big to fail”. As seen recently in Ireland, banks that are very big relative to an economy can become “too big to save” …
…what the Bank of England refers to as a doom loop“.
Required Reading: How To Fake An Economic Recovery | Niethercorp Press
‘You can take the blue pill and wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want. Or you can take the red pill and see how far down the rabbit hole goes…’ That line from ‘The Matrix’ applies to this piece by Giordano Bruno. If you’re having a tough time wondering how the stock market can go up while people are losing jobs and homes, this will give you something to hang your hat on.
WARNING: You can’t unlearn this information.
This may be a highly distasteful proposition, but just for a moment, I want you to sit back, and imagine that you are a member of the corporate banking elite. You are a walking talking disease ridden power mad pustule who naively believes himself intellectually superior to the vast majority of humanity and above the inherent laws of conscience, honor, and general good taste. You are a villain in the purest sense, in that you not only do great harm to the world, you actually SEEK to do great harm to the world, if only to benefit yourself and your exclusive circle of “friends”; a clan of degenerate blood thirsty sociopaths with delusions of omnipotence that stalk the night like Armani wearing Chupacabra exsanguinating the joy from poor unsuspecting cultures. You are capable of anything, and sadly, you take “pride” in this fact…
.
Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? | Rolling Stone Politics
…the justice system not only sucks at punishing financial criminals, it has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals. This institutional reality has absolutely nothing to do with politics or ideology — it takes place no matter who’s in office or which party’s in power. To understand how the machinery functions, you have to start back at least a decade ago, as case after case of financial malfeasance was pursued too slowly or not at all, fumbled by a government bureaucracy that too often is on a first-name basis with its targets. Indeed, the shocking pattern of nonenforcement with regard to Wall Street is so deeply ingrained in Washington that it raises a profound and difficult question about the very nature of our society: whether we have created a class of people whose misdeeds are no longer perceived as crimes, almost no matter what those misdeeds are.
Tricare Investigation: Pentagon Plan Won’t Cover Brain-Damage Therapy | NPR
I have been privileged to be a panelist a number of times for grant panels at the CSUSB’s Office of Technology Transfer. Many of the grant applications focused on limiting or treating traumatic brain injury. It has been the armed forces top priority since the start of the Iraq war. How now is it that an ‘insurance style’ bureaucracy is denying care? Cost?
…reviewers called the Tricare study “deeply flawed,” “unacceptable” and “dismaying.” One top scientist called the assessment a “misuse” of science designed to deny treatment for service members.
Supporting the troops is more than saying thank you. WRITE YOUR LEGISLATORS ABOUT THIS OUTRAGE.
Capital One $286MM Demand on 4K Debt | Legal Blog Watch
Not only did Capital One ignore the demand, under Pennsylvania’s version of the FDCPA, that all future communications be with Perry’s lawyer, continuing to make phone calls to her home, her office, and even some of her friends and relatives, but it kept arbitrarily changing the alleged amount due. Finally, Perry received a letter demanding payment of $286,651,237.00.
Video: Quantitative Easing Explained | Credit Writedowns
To those of you who don’t understand what the Federal Reserve Bank is doing to, er, for the economy, this HILARIOUS video is for you. It features two little fluffy characters who speak of the ‘Bernanc’ and explain why the Fed is printing $600BN dollars.
Why? ‘The Goldman Sachs’
Ralph Nader and EPIC Take On Full-Body Airport Scanners | Fast Company
For the love of God, they’re running the full body scanners on Windows XP: “The machines run an embedded version of Microsoft Windows XP Xpe that is prone to security vulnerabilities.”
Pa. accuses debt company of deceiving consumers – BusinessWeek
A debt collection agency used phony hearings in a room decorated to look like a courtroom to collect money from unsuspecting consumers, according to a lawsuit filed Friday against the company by Pennsylvania.
Special Report: The haves, the have-nots and the dreamless dead | Reuters
Wealth concentration. Pay attention. This will become the new metric.
Kapur told clients in 2005 that the United States and a handful of other economies were developing into “plutonomies” where the wealthy few powered economic growth and consumed much of its bounty, while the “multitudinous many” shared the leftovers.
Plutonomies come around only once or twice a century, he argued — 16th century Spain, 17th century Holland, the Gilded Age. The last time it happened in the United States was during the “Roaring 1920s”.
There was money to be made by buying shares of luxury companies that made toys for the rich, he told clients, suggesting a basket of stocks that included upscale retailer Burberry and luxury home builder Toll Brothers.
“When I presented this to clients, they said, ‘Okay, this is interesting because you’re telling me what happened in the 1920s is happening right now, and you obviously know what happened after 1929, right?’,” Kapur said in an interview.
His response? That can’t happen again because we know better now.
“To be perfectly honest…. I certainly didn’t think it would all melt down in 2007. I’d be lying if I said that.”
Dispatches From The Front 