Finance

Founder Of Largest Black-Owned Bank: Racism Rampant

August 2, 2016 Rob Wile, www.fusion.net Educate! Banks, Finance, Racism

By Rob Wile for Fusion - The day before he was assassinated in Memphis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech urging black Americans to change where they kept their money. “I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank,” King said, referring to a black-owned bank in Memphis. Urging a “bank-in” movement, King continued: “These are some practical things that we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base. And at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts.”

After Murder Of Berta Cáceres European Financiers Stop Funding Dam Project

May 10, 2016 Brian Salamanca, www.foe.org Resist! Finance, Latin America, Murder

By Brian Salamanca for Friends Of The Earth - WASHINGTON D.C.- In an announcement today, FMO stated that it took the decision after a court in Honduras decided on May 8th to press charges against four individuals in connection with the murder of Berta Cáceres. One of the suspects is the acting Manager for social and environmental matters of the Honduran company DESA, the developer of the Agua Zarca project. FMO and FinnFund will organise a mission to Honduras, to take place as soon as possible, comprised of independent experts, to develop a strategy for exiting the project.

Corporations Killed Medicine. Here’s How To Take It Back.

February 17, 2016 Fran Quigley, www.fpif.org Create! Drugs, Finance, health, Labor, Trade

By Fran Quigley for Foreign Policy In Focus and The Nation - Along the path toward the creation of a global capitalist system, some of the most significant steps were taken by the English enclosure movement. Between the 15th to 19th centuries, the rich and the powerful fenced off commonly held land and transformed it into private property. Land switched from a source of subsistence to a source of profit, and small farmers were relegated to wage laborers. In Das Kapital, Marx described the process by coining the term land-grabbing.

17 Of The Worst Corporate Crimes In 2015

December 27, 2015 Phil Mattera, www.DirtDiggersDigest.org Educate! Big Banks, Big Pharma, Bribery, Climate Change, Corporate crime, Finance, Food and Agriculture, Oceans, Oil and Gas, pollution, Wage Theft, Workplace hazards

By Phil Mattera for Dirt Diggers Digest. The ongoing corporate crime wave showed no signs of abating in 2015. BP paid a record $20 billion to settle the remaining civil charges relating to the Deepwater Horizon disaster (on top of the $4 billion in previous criminal penalties), and Volkswagen is facing perhaps even greater liability in connection with its scheme to evade emission standards. Other automakers and suppliers were hit with large penalties for safety violations, including a $900 million fine (and deferred criminal prosecution) for General Motors, a record civil penalty of $200 million for Japanese airbag maker Takata, penalties of $105 million and $70 million for Fiat Chrysler, and $70 million for Honda. Major banks continued to pay large penalties to resolve a variety of legal entanglements. Five banks (Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS) had to pay a total of $2.5 billion to the Justice Department and $1.8 billion to the Federal Reserve in connection with charges that they conspired to manipulate foreign exchange markets.

Bank-Free, DIY Lending System Helps People Finance Themselves

November 4, 2015 Liz Pleasant, www.yesmagazine.org Create! Economic Justice, Finance, Money

By Liz Pleasant for YES! Magazine - A few years ago, Maral Kharadjian decided to join the women in her family—including her mother, sister, sister-in-law, aunts, and cousins—at their monthly get-togethers at her aunt's Los Angeles home. She was looking for a way to stay connected with the women in her extended family, despite her busy schedule. Each month the 10 women get together, cook food, and exchange stories. And one ends up with $1,000. Each woman puts $100 into a pot every month, and at the end of the night the host keeps the money. Most recently they met at Kharadjian's house, so she got to keep the $1,000. She plans to use that money to pay a credit card bill. Next month someone else will host the party and keep the cash.

The $9 Billion Witness: JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare

November 9, 2014 Matt Taibbi, www.rollingstone.com Educate! Corruption, Finance, Finance and the Economy, JP Morgan, Whistleblowers

In today's America, someone like Fleischmann – an honest person caught for a little while in the wrong place at the wrong time – has to be willing to live through an epic ordeal just to get to the point of being able to open her mouth and tell a truth or two. And when she finally gets there, she still has to risk everything to take that last step. "The assumption they make is that I won't blow up my life to do it," Fleischmann says. "But they're wrong about that." Good for her, and great for her that it's finally out. But the big-picture ending still stings. She hopes otherwise, but the likely final verdict is a Pyrrhic victory. Because after all this activity, all these court actions, all these penalties (both real and abortive), even after a fair amount of noise in the press, the target companies remain more ascendant than ever. The people who stole all those billions are still in place. And the bank is more untouchable than ever.

The American Bankers Association’s Quiet War On Students

September 13, 2014 Devon Douglas-Bowers, www.hamptoninstitution.org Educate! Education, Finance, Student Loans

In the present-day, the ABA is waging a quiet war on students by actively combating virtually any legislation that would ease their debt burden. With regards to being able to get rid of student loans in bankruptcy, the ABA stated in 2012 that, if allowed to go into effect, it "would tempt students to rack up big debt that they won't repay [and that] 'The bankruptcy system would be opened to abuse." This is rather ironic, accusing that students will engage in irresponsible lending and borrowing habits, when considering the banks themselves engaged in massive amounts of the exact same activity by giving mortgage loans to people they knew couldn't repay the amount.

California Trial Places Mortgage Blame On Bankers

September 10, 2014 Alexander Reed Kelly, www.truthdig.com Educate! California, Finance, Law, Real Estate

In an “unprecedented” trial that challenges the Obama administration’s official position on who was responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown, a Sacramento jury in late August thwarted a federal prosecutor’s effort to charge borrowers with mortgage fraud after the defense successfully argued that executives who signed off on the loans didn’t care whether answers given on mortgage applications were accurate. The Sacramento Bee reported last month: [F]our people charged with mortgage fraud were acquitted Friday [Aug. 22] by a jury in Sacramento federal court after defense attorneys argued the real culprits are the so-called “victim lenders.” According to experts, it is the first time in such a trial that a court has allowed the defense to present evidence that lenders ignored gaping holes and blatant lies in loan applications during the years leading up to the economic meltdown. In his column at Salon.com on Sunday, political economy writer and cultural satirist Thomas Frank explained that President Obama’s Justice Department has shown “virtually no interest in holding leading bankers accountable for what went on in the last decade,” letting their response to the fallout of the crisis be guided by the logic that banking executives “could not have committed fraud” because “you would expect fraud to result in riches” when “so many banks went out of business instead.” This is what the federal prosecutor argued in the Sacramento trial.

These 9 Charts Show America’s Coming Student Loan Apocalypse

August 21, 2014 Shahien Nasiripour, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Finance, Finance and the Economy, Student Debt

Borrowers with federal student loans, long promoted as the safest way to borrow for college, appear to be buckling under the weight of their debt, new data show. More than half of Direct Loans, the most common type of federal student loan, aren't being repaid on time or as expected, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Education. Nearly half of the loans in repayment are in plans scheduled to take longer than 10 years. The number of loans in distress is rising. The increase in troubled loans comes as the average amount of student debt has significantly outpaced wage growth. After adjusting for inflation, the average recipient of federal student loan funds owed 28 percent more in 2013 than in 2007, according to Education Department data. But the typical holder of a bachelor's degree working full time experienced a 0.08 percent decrease in weekly earnings during that same period. For those with advanced degrees, median wages increased just 0.02 percent, according to figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Obama administration, mindful of borrowers' difficulty in repaying their federal student loans, has been promoting repayment plans that cap monthly payments relative to income. An unemployed borrower with no income, for example, could pay nothing every month, yet still be considered current on the debt.

Rolling Jubilee Student Debt Abolishment

August 6, 2014 Strike Debt, www.strikedebt.org Resist! Education, Finance, Strike Debt, Student Debt

This time, it’s different. Since the beginning of the Rolling Jubilee campaign, we’ve wanted to buy and abolish student debt. But most student loans are guaranteed by the federal government, and so they are not available for purchase. As part of our effort to buy private, unsecured student loans, we talked to Doug St. Peters, the Vice President of Portfolio Management at Sallie Mae, who packages that company’s debt into securities and sells your loans on the secondary market. He confirmed that Sallie Mae does sell its private loans to two large debt buying companies. He would not name names, and he refused to sell us any of these portfolios when he learned that we intended to abolish the debt. According to St. Peters, private Sallie Mae loans are sold for as little as 15 cents on the dollar. We repeat: a Vice President at Sallie Mae confirmed that they sell private loans for 15 cents on the dollar. One goal of the Rolling Jubilee campaign has been to educate ourselves and others about how little our debts are actually worth to the creditors who control our lives. If you have a private Sallie Mae loan, you should know that it may be sold at pennies on the dollar, even as the lender and debt collectors demand full payment, plus interest, from you.

Soros Drops Shares In SodaStream

August 4, 2014 Mahmoud Kassem, thenational.ae Organize! Finance, Israel, Palestine

Soros Fund Management, the family office of the billionaire investor George Soros, has sold its stake in SodaStream, the soda making appliance producer that profits from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and was made popular by actress Scarlett Johansson’s endorsement. The decision comes as a number of big international investors, including the fund linked to the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, join in a burgeoning financial boycott of Israel amid a push by the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement and other groups seeking more rights for Palestinians. SodaStream, headquartered in the Israeli city of Lod, has its main factory in the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. “Soros Fund Management does not own shares of SodaStream,” Michael Vachon, a spokesman for the fund, told The National, declining to comment further on when and why it sold the shares. In a May filing with the US markets regulator, the fund said it had bought 550,000 shares of SodaStream during the first quarter. Bloomberg reported that the fund acquired the shares for $24.3 million, with the new holding making up 0.3 per cent of the fund’s $9.3 billion stock portfolio. “After pressure from Soros partners in the region and the world, they dropped SodaStream and promised, in private letters so far, to issue guidelines similar to those adopted by the EU to prevent any investment into companies that sustain the Israeli occupation and settlements in particular,” said Omar Barghouti, the Palestinian activist and co-founder of the BDS movement.

Argentina Is Right To Defy The Taliban Of Global Finance

August 4, 2014 Jerome Roos, www.roarmag.org Resist! Argentina, Capitalism, Finance, Vulture Funds

On Wednesday, Argentina defaulted on its sovereign debt for the second time in 13 years, defying a US court ruling and a small cabal of financial fundamentalists led by the right-wing multi-billionnaire hedge fund mogul Paul Singer. Needless to say, most mainstream analysts are already bandying the usual platitudes, having us believe that Argentina’s populist government and its economic mismanagement are to blame for this outcome. While there is little point in defending Argentina’s corrupt political elite here, it is important to provide a much-needed corrective to this tired mainstream narrative. The first thing to note is that, despite repeated accusations by the vultures that Argentina is in contempt of US court rulings, Argentina’s willingness to pay its debts is not in question. The country has credibly committed itself to repaying its foreign creditors ever since it restructured its unsustainable debt load in the wake of its historic 2001 default, with over 93% of bondholders accepting crisp new bonds in 2005 and 2010. In fact, the government last month deposited $539 million with the Bank of New York Mellon to honor its commitments — in full and on time. Willingness to pay is simply not an issue.

The Empire Economy Does Not Work

July 9, 2014 Paul Craig Roberts, Dave Kranzler, and John Williams, www.paulcraigroberts.org Educate! Debt, Finance, Finance and the Economy, Foreign Policy, Wall Street

The third and final estimate (until the annual GDP revisions) of first quarter 2014 real GDP growth released June 25 by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis was a 2.9% contraction in GDP growth, a 5.5 percentage point difference from the January forecast of 2.6% growth. Apparently, the first quarter contraction was dismissed by those speculating in equities as weather related, as stock averages rose with the bad news. Stock market participants might be in for a second quarter surprise. The result of many years of changes made to the official inflation measures is a substantially understated inflation rate. John Williams (www.shadowstats.com) provides inflation estimates based on previous official methodology when the Consumer Price Index still represented the cost of a constant standard of living. The 1.26% inflation measure used to deflate first quarter nominal GDP is unrealistic, as Americans who make purchases are aware. A reasonable correction to the understated deflator gives a much higher first quarter contraction. The two main causes of inflation’s understatement are the substitution principle introduced during the Clinton regime and the hedonic adjustments ongoing since the 1980s that redefine price rises as quality improvements. Correcting for excessive hedonic adjustments gives a first quarter real GDP contraction of 5%. Correcting for hedonic and substitution adjustments gives a first quarter real GDP contraction of 8.5%.

Seeds Of A New Financial Structure

July 8, 2014 Ariel Noyola Rodríguez, www.voltairenet.org Create! Brazil, BRICS, China, Finance, India, Russia

On the day following the end of the World Cup in Brazil, the Sixth Summit of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will be held in Fortaleza and Brasilia, on the 14th, 15th and 16th of July, to establish a financial architecture under the slogan: “Inclusive growth and sustainable solutions”. In contrast to the initiatives of financial regionalization in Asia and South America, the BRICS countries, since they do not have a common geographical space, at a time when they are less exposed to simultaneous financial turbulence, can increase the effectiveness of their defensive instruments. A monetary stabilization fund called Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) and a development bank called BRICS Bank will operate as a multilateral mechanism in support of balance of payments and investment financing. De facto, the BRICS will distance themselves from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, institutions created some seven decades ago under the orbit of the US Treasury Department. In the midst of the crisis, both of these initiatives open space for financial cooperation in the face of the volatility of the dollar, and financial alternatives for countries in critical situations without subjecting themselves to structural adjustment programmes or economic reconversion. As a consequence of the growing economic slowdown on a world level, it has become more complicated for BRICS countries to reach growth rates above five per cent.

Oil Divestment Must Focus On Private Investors

July 8, 2014 Matthew Cunningham-Cook, www.america.aljazeera.com Strategize! Divestment, Finance, Fossil Fuels

Fossil fuel divestment would target only major corporations that are listed on the stock market. But pension funds and endowments, the entities largely targeted by the 350.org campaign, invest hundreds of billions of dollars in privately traded securities, such as hedge funds and private equity — vehicles that are invested at all levels of the fossil fuel economy. (In particular, hedge funds and private equity have been found to be the key financial backers of the fracking boom.) Were the Massachusetts divestment bill to pass, state pension funds would invariably still be invested in the fossil fuel economy. The divestment campaign argues that 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies dominate the fossil fuel exploration market. But they ignore that such companies frequently depend on private equity and hedge funds for financing new investments when large banks are uninterested in taking on further risk. The public can rarely (if ever) verify that these types of arrangements take place, even if it is a teacher attempting to verify what her pension fund is doing with her money. Pension funds and endowments have not always invested in the private market. In the 1980s and before, in fact, they were almost exclusively invested in publicly traded securities. Laws such as the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Investment Company Act of 1940 allowed the public to verify how the companies in which pension funds and endowments were investing used their funds and provided transparency to investors in order to prevent fraudulent activity.

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