Finance

This Radical Plan To Fund The ‘Green New Deal’ Just Might Work

December 19, 2018 Staff, Ellenbrown.com Resist! Banks, Finance

With what Naomi Klein calls “galloping momentum,” the “Green New Deal” promoted by newly-elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) appears to be forging a political pathway for solving all of the ills of society and the planet in one fell swoop. It would give a House Select Committee “a mandate that connects the dots between energy, transportation, housing, as well as healthcare, living wages, a jobs guarantee” and more. But to critics even on the left it is just political theater, since “everyone knows” a program of that scope cannot be funded without a massive redistribution of wealth and slashing of other programs (notably the military), which is not politically feasible.

China Warns Canada Of Consequences For Imprisoning Huawei’s Financial Director

December 11, 2018 Staff, Cubadebate.cu Resist! Canada, China, Finance, Inter-Imperialist Rivalry

The Canadian justice made the arrest last day 1 in the airport of Vancouver, while Meng was preparing to take a flight with connection to Mexico. Huawei denied the accusation and ensured compliance with all the regulations of the territories where it operates. In addition, the Government of China recalled that as a permanent member of the UN Security Council it always implemented the resolutions approved by that body, but at the same time it rejected the imposition of unilateral measures by one State against another.

The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire

December 6, 2018 Michael Oswald, Roarmag.org Educate! Documentary, Film, Finance, United Kingdom (UK)

The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire, is a documentary film that shows how Britain transformed from a colonial power into a global financial power. At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth may be hidden in British offshore jurisdictions, and Britain and its offshore jurisdictions are the largest global players in the world of international finance. But, as the world of offshore finance grew, so too did the inherent corruption that secrecy and unaccountability breed.

Report: 90% Of Pipeline Blasts Draw No Financial Penalties

November 27, 2018 Lorraine Chow, Ecowatch.com Educate! Finance, Fossil Fuels, Pipelines

A striking report has revealed that 90 percent of the 137 interstate pipeline fires or explosions since 2010 have drawn no financial penalties for the companies responsible. The article from E&E News reporter Mike Soraghan underscores the federal Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration's (PHMSA) weak authority over the fossil fuel industry for these disasters. The government levied a mere $5.4 million in fines for the 13 pipeline explosion and fire cases in the last eight years, the analysis found. "That's less than one day of profits for one major pipeline company, TransCanada. It's $2 million less than what [TransCanada CEO Russ Girling] made last year," Soraghan explained in a tweet.

How Neoliberal Economists Wreak Havoc On The Global Poor While Protecting The Financial Elite

November 16, 2018 Vijay Prashad, Independent Institute Educate! Capitalism, Finance, IMF, Inequality, Uneven Development

On December 1, Mexico will have a new president—Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He will take over the presidency from the lackluster Enrique Peña Nieto, whose administration is marinated in corruption. Peña Nieto’s legal office has already asked the Supreme Court to shield his officials from prosecution for corruption. The elite will protect itself. López Obrador will not be able to properly exorcize the corrupt from the Mexican state, let alone from Mexican society. Corrupt weeds grow on the soil of capitalism, the loam of profit and greed as well as of rents from government contracts. López Obrador comes to the presidency as a man of the left, but the space for maneuvering that he has for a left agenda is minimal. Mexico’s economy, through geography and trade agreements, is fused with that of the United States.

Ten Years After The Financial Crisis, The Contagion Has Spread To Democracy Itself

September 18, 2018 Zach Carter, Huffingtonpost.com Resist! Crisis, Finance

By the time Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in American history on Sept. 15, 2008, the country had been navigating stormy global financial waters for more than a year. Bear Stearns had been rescued in a bailout-facilitated merger with JPMorgan Chase, and the government had nationalized housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. For anyone paying attention to the financial system, the situation had been quite dire for a long time. And yet throughout the mess, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury had been permitting the largest banks in the country to funnel as much cash as they wanted to their shareholders ― even as it became clear those same banks could not pay their debts. Lehman itself had increased its dividend and announced a $100 million stock buyback at the beginning of 2008.

Retrospectives Of The Financial Crisis Are Leaving Out The Most Important Part—Its Victims

September 17, 2018 David Dayen, Inthesetimes.com Educate! Capitalism, Crisis, Finance, Revisionism

Because I’m a masochist, I’ve read as many retrospectives as I could about the 10th anniversary of the fateful failure of Lehman Brothers, the emblematic event of the financial crisis. And I can’t help but notice a gaping hole in the narratives. I’ve heard from Lew Ranieri, the Salomon Brothers trader who invented the mortgage bond in the 1980s, and now regrets it. I’ve heard bailout architects Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and Tim Geithner justify their beliefs in doing whatever it took to save the banks. I’ve endured you-are-there narratives about bankers and policymakers racing to rescue the financial system. Wonks, pundits, and reporters have all offered thoughts on the crisis’ origins, the response, and its ultimate meaning. It seems the only people not consulted for their perspective were those most powerfully affected by the crisis’ impact...

Central Banks Have Gone Rogue, Putting Us All At Risk

September 15, 2018 By Ellen Brown, Truthdig.com Educate! Banks, Finance

The U.S. Federal Reserve, which bailed out General Motors in a rescue operation in 2009, was prohibited from lending to individual companies under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, and it is legally barred from owning equities. It parks its reserves instead in bonds and other government-backed securities. But other countries have different rules, and central banks are now buying individual stocks as investments, with a preference for big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. Those are the stocks that dominate the market, and central banks are aggressively driving up their value. Markets, including the U.S. stock market, are thus literally being rigged by foreign central banks.

To Stop The Next Financial Crisis, We Need Public Ownership Of Banks—Now

September 10, 2018 Thomas M. Hanna, Inthesetimes.com Create! Banks, Crisis, Finance

In mid-September, a secret party is scheduled to take place in London. The participants will be hundreds of alumni from the defunct global investment bank Lehman Brothers. The occasion? The 10-year anniversary of the bank’s collapse in the midst of the Great Financial Crisis. For many Americans, the sight of those very same bankers walking out into the streets of New York City in 2008, with cardboard boxes containing their belongings and shocked looks on their faces, was the first sign that something was truly wrong. But the subsequent publicly funded rescue of America’s giant financial corporations and the “1 percent” demonstrated how unable and unwilling the nation’s political leadership was to address that wrong by fundamentally reshaping the industry responsible for the crisis in the first place. A decade later, we are still experiencing the political, economic and social ramifications of that failure.

Crashing Currency Chaos Spreads Across The Global South

September 3, 2018 By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times Educate! Currency, Finance, US Regime Change

There is a serious currency crisis affecting key emerging markets. Three of these – Brazil, Argentina and Turkey – are G20 members, and Iran, absent external pressure, would have everything to qualify as a member. Two – Iran and Turkey – are under US sanctions while the other two, at least for the moment, are firmly within Washington’s orbit. Now, compare it with currencies that are gaining against the US dollar: the Ukrainian hryvnia, the Georgian lari and the Colombian peso. Not exactly G20 heavyweights – and all of them also inside Washington’s influence.

Europe Working On Payment System Alternative To SWIFT & IMF To Attain Financial Independence From US

August 28, 2018 Staff, Rt.com Educate! Europe, Finance, US Imperialism

Last week, Maas called for European autonomy to be strengthened by creating payment channels that are independent of the United States, establishing a ‘European Monetary Fund’. The intention to create its own system is reportedly connected to Washington’s recent withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, and the re-imposition economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic. As Brussels stays committed to the pact signed in 2015 between Tehran and the world powers, the EU had to enforce the ‘Blocking Statute’ in order to safeguard European businesses operating in Iran from US sanctions against the country. However, the measure failed to keep European majors like Total, Maersk, Mercedes in Iran, as they cannot function independently of the US-dominated international banking system and international financial markets.

Banks Are Becoming Obsolete In China—Could The U.S. Be Next?

August 24, 2018 By Ellen Brown, Truthdig.com Create! Banks, China, Finance

The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a major technology company—whether one from China or a U.S. giant such as Amazon or Facebook—might replicate the success of the Chinese mobile payment systems, cutting banks out. According to John Engen, writing in American Banker in May 2018, “China processed a whopping $12.8 trillion in mobile payments” in the first ten months of 2017. Today even China’s street merchants don’t want cash. Payment for everything is handled with a phone and a QR code (a type of barcode). More than 90 percent of Chinese mobile payments are run through Alipay and WeChat Pay, rival platforms backed by the country’s two largest internet conglomerates, Alibaba and Tencent Holdings. Alibaba is the Amazon of China, while Tencent Holdings is the owner of WeChat, a messaging and social media app with more than a billion users.

Stock Buybacks Will Hit $1 Trillion In 2018

August 10, 2018 Barry Grey, Wsws.org Educate! Capital, Finance, New Economy, Stock Market

US corporations will buy back their own stock at a record clip of $1 trillion this year, according to an analysis issued by Goldman Sachs on Monday. The Wall Street giant attributed the surge in share repurchases to booming corporate profits and Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, which was passed by Congress and signed into law last December. In a note to investors, David Kostin, chief equity strategist at Goldman, gushed that investors were likely to see the impact of the buybacks in higher share prices and fatter stock portfolios very quickly. The scale of the buyback spree is massive. Second-quarter 2018 stock repurchases are up 57 percent from the same period a year earlier. In the tech sector, the year-over-year increase is 130 percent.

Public Ownership, Democratizing Money, And Preparing For The Inevitable Next Financial Crisis

July 16, 2018 Staff, Publicbankinginstitute.org Strategize! Democracy, Finance, Public ownership

Thomas M. Hanna of The Democracy Collaborative has released a compelling new detailed report arguing that we need to start now discussing a viable plan for public ownership — to demand a next financial system — so we are ready to fight for it in the face of the next crisis. “The next financial crisis is all but inevitable. While its exact timing and severity cannot be predicted, both the accelerating frequency of crises in recent decades and the continued consolidation of the banking sector in an increasingly financialized economy suggest that we should be prepared for a crisis sooner rather than later…“Viewed in historical perspective, the ability of the financial sector to use its concentrated wealth to escape or subvert regulations by influencing the political process should come as no surprise…

The Crisis Next Time: Planning For Public Ownership As An Alternative To Corporate Bank Bailouts

July 3, 2018 By Thomas Hanna, Thenextsystem.org Create! Banking, Crisis, Finance, Public ownership

The next financial crisis is all but inevitable. While its exact timing and severity cannot be predicted, both the accelerating frequency of crises in recent decades and the continued consolidation of the banking sector in an increasingly financialized economy suggest that we should be prepared for a crisis sooner rather than later. In the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, the US federal government intervened at an unprecedented scale to bailout our largest commercial banks after they became entangled in the mess of risky financial products built on top of an unsustainable housing bubble. The effect of these massive bailouts was, in the end, to preserve the status quo: the modest attempts made to regulate the financial sector to protect consumers and avert further devastating financial crises have largely been rolled back, and the banks that were then “too big to fail” are today even bigger.

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