Masters of the Universe category archive

Ably represented by Mitt the Flip, as Robin Wells comments at the Guardian. A nugget (emphasis added):

Researchers found a consistent correlation between higher income, management responsibility and disagreeableness. One researcher interpreted her findings to imply that money makes people disinterested in the welfare of others. “It’s not a bad analogy to think of them as a little autistic” says Kathleen Vos, a professor at the University of Minnesota.

If this research is accurate (as it seems to be, replicated in various ways by several researches), the synergies between it, the increasing concentration of wealth and the Citizens United ruling, have striking implications for the future of the Republican party. As Newt Gingrich, the uber-southern politician, plaintively explained how he lost the Republican primary: “Romney had 16 billionaires. I had only one.” The domination by the super-wealthy means that Republicans not only have no interest in the welfare of the rest of the 99.9%, they have no understanding of why this is a problem. The noblesse oblige days of the old money, such as the Bushes, the Kennedys and the Roosevelts are long gone, replaced by the new mega-money of hedge funds, corporate raiders and global industrialists.

Radio Times tries to explain the LIBOR scam. If you want to know what it is, why it’s important, and what it tells us about the integrity of the responsible fiscals who would rule your world, this is a good primer.

From the website:

This week, Barclays Plc chief executive Robert Diamond resigned over an interest-rate fixing scandal. Other big banks including Bank of America, Citibank, and JPMorgan are being investigated by regulators in the U.S., Europe and Asia for colluding to set interest rates. In May, JPMorgan Chase announced that a failed hedging strategy cost the bank $2 billion but new estimates but losses closer to $9 billion. The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law was supposed to ensure that banks stopped high risk investments but regulators are still trying to put many of those provision into practice including the centerpiece Volcker Rule, named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. It bans banks from proprietary trading if they receive Federal Reserve funds or have federally insured deposits. Today, the banking business and regulatory reform – what’s changed since the financial crisis? We’ll also take a close look at the Volcker Rule and find out what it is and how it could change Wall Street. We’ll talk with JESSE EISINGER, a Pultizer Prize winning reporter who covers Wall Street and finance for ProPublica. Then former credit derivatives trader and “Occupy the SEC” activist CAITLIN KLINE, explains why she left Wall Street and why thinks the Volcker Rule doesn’t go far enough.

Follow the link to listen or click here (MP3).

As Field discovers, you just have to ask one of them and she will explain to you that the common people don’t get it.

In the Guardian, Robert Reich explains what should be obvious. In the world of international banks and banking, the odds are that American banks are vault-deep in the LIBOR interest-rate-fixing scam.

Banks that have been willing to promote dodgy mortgages, sell (in)securitized debt, and foreclose on houses without cause (to mention a just a few practices of the responsible fiscals on Wall Street) certainly wouldn’t have any qualms about fixing an interest-rate roulette wheel.

The typical saver or borrower on both sides of the Atlantic trusts that the banking system is setting today’s rate based on its best guess about the future worth of the money. And we assume that the banks’ guess is based, in turn, on the cumulative market predictions of countless lenders and borrowers all over the world about the future supply and demand for money.

But if that assumption is wrong – if the bankers are manipulating the interest rate so they can place bets with the money we lend or repay them, bets that will pay off big for them because they have inside information on what the market is really predicting which they’re not sharing with the rest of us – it’s a different story altogether.

It would* amount to a rip-off of almost cosmic proportions – trillions of dollars that average people would otherwise have received or saved on their lending and borrowing that have been going to the bankers instead.

It would make the other abuses of trust Americans have witnessed in recent years – predatory lending, fraud, excessively risky derivative trading with commercial deposits, and cozy relationships with credit-rating agencies – look like child’s play by comparison.

_____________________

*Conditional voice. Yeah. Right.

Translation:

“I came to the United States on an H-2B guestworker visa from my home in Tamaulipas, Mexico. I work in a small town in Louisiana with other guestworkers, peeling crawfish for a company called C.J.’s Seafood, which sells 85% of its products to Walmart. Our boss forces us to work up to 24 hours at a time with no overtime pay. No matter how fast we work, they scream and curse at us to make us work faster. Our supervisor threatens to beat us with a shovel to stop us from taking breaks. We live in trailers across from the boss’s house, and we’re under surveillance all the time. The supervisors come into our trailers without warning, and they threaten to fire us if we leave after 9 p.m. The supervisor also locked us in the plant so we couldn’t take breaks. We want to work. We need to support our families. But we also want to be treated like human beings”

Sign the petition.

Via Contradict Me.

Thom explains LIBOR:

Bonus babies at work.

Another bank bit the dust last night and Georgia widens its lead in responsible fiscals deemed fiscally unfit.

Montgomery Bank & Trust, Ailey, Georgia

There’s just something about them Georgia banksters.

They are used to getting away with stuff. Bloomberg comments on LIBOR:

We don’t countenance bank bashing. Nor have we ever called on regulators to bust up big banks. But it’s difficult to defend an industry that defrauds the market with fake interest-rate figures, thereby stealing from other banks and customers.

Sadly, the Libor case reveals something rotten in today’s banking culture. We hope the investigations expose the bad actors, lead to jail terms for those who knowingly manipulated the market, and force out the senior managers and board directors who participated in, or overlooked, such conduct.

Why so exercised? In the Barclays settlement documents, regulators released smoking-gun e-mails that reveal the extent of the dirty dealing between bank traders (looking to protect profits and bonuses) and senior officials in bank treasury units (hoping to convince markets that their banks weren’t in financial difficulty). The two aren’t supposed to collude, but it’s obvious that the Chinese walls between them come with ladders.

Via Bartcop.

Job prospects for process servers are looking up:

Despite reports of a thawing housing market, yet another wave of foreclosures appears to be looming, real estate records filed in multiple metro-Denver counties indicate.

The recording of deed-of-trust assignments in Colorado–the ownership rights of mortgages and the ability to foreclose on them–has more than doubled in the first five months of the year compared with the same period last year, The Denver Post has found.

Via Contradict Me.

The corrupt moneychangers feared the wilds of Sherwood Forest and the men in tights of Lincoln Green.

As JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon showed up to Congress on Tuesday to try to explain how his “too big to fail” bank could mysteriously lose $2bn in risky trades, he was suddenly diverted to a back entrance. Why?

Because Robin Hood was waiting.

Nurses, healthcare and community activists were in the hallways ready to send him and the rest of his Wall Street gang a message: it’s time to pay up for the damage you have done to our communities and our nation.

This week, the Robin Hood campaign, which has exploded across the world, took a major step forward in the US with a stepped-up campaign that included visits by Robin Hood and his merry men and women to JP Morgan branches across the country, and scores of other actions.

Free-market capitalism, indeed. The editors of Bloomberg explain how the banksters parlay bad judgment and reckless bets into places at the public trough.

To be precise, JPMorgan receives a government subsidy worth about $14 billion a year, according to research published by the International Monetary Fund and our own analysis of bank balance sheets. The money helps the bank pay big salaries and bonuses. More important, it distorts markets, fueling crises such as the recent subprime-lending disaster and the sovereign-debt debacle that is now threatening to destroy the euro and sink the global economy.

Remember, when you hear talk of “bail-outs” of Greece and Spain and wherever, who’s actually being bailed-out: banks who placed bets in made loans to Greece and Spain and wherever. Greece and Spain and wherever get to wave at the money as it goes by.

A charter member of the “Milking it for all it’s worth” club in Florida:

Life Force Arts and Technology’s closure this month, after two years of classes and spending more than $1.6 million in public education funds, signaled the end of a charter school that was roundly despised.

It also proved a dramatic point about the state’s $1 billion charter-school industry: that the freedom granted to charters can open the door to for-profit companies with little interest in following the rules or achieving student success.

As the charter school movement refocuses on profit over education, expect more like this.

While I was enjoying the nice June weather last night and looking for signs of the times, the FDIC was busy spreading vanishing cream on more financial geniuses. These dodos are extinct.

The Farmers Bank of Lynchburg, Lynchburg, Tennessee

Security Exchange Bank, Marietta, Georgia

Putnam State Bank, Palatka, Florida

Shrewd investment strategies my anatomy.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon told Congress the bank let traders take risks they didn’t understand while he didn’t answer key questions about more than $2 billion in trading losses.

In testimony prepared for a hearing today, Dimon expressed regret over losses in the bank’s chief investment office, saying that its trading strategy was “poorly conceived and vetted” by senior managers who were “in transition” and not paying adequate attention.

They put it all on double-zero and let it ride, then, when they spun the wheel, they discovered they had forgotten to fix vet the wheel.

This is failed strategy on Wall Street.

The FDIC has awaken from its slumbers and is hungry. This evening, it has snacked on these:

Carolina Federal Savings Bank, Charleston, South Carolina

First Capital Bank, Kingfisher, Oklahoma

Farmers and Traders State Bank, Shabbona, Illinois

Waccamaw Bank, Whiteville, North Carolina

Responsible fiscals at work.

A Phoenix, Arizona woman is taking on two mortgage giants, Bank of America and Fannie Mae, and the case is making its way through federal court. Lilly Washington is representing herself, and seeking ownership of her home and compensation for belongings that were thrown out when her home was wrongfully foreclosed.

Washington was in the middle of a loan modification with Bank of America when her son who is in the military was wounded and sent to a hospital in Germany. She informed the bank that she needed to go be with her son, and BoA assured her in a letter that they were aware of her trip and: “will await your return so that we can finish the loan modification process.” She thought everything would be fine until her return.

But just days after leaving, the bank foreclosed, and Fannie Mae took ownership of her home.

Via C&L.

Bill Maher:

“This Facebook fiasco is one of the biggest clusterf**ks ever on Wall Street. Regular people got screwed and the banks and the insiders did okay. Or as Mitt Romney calls it, ‘The American Dream.’

In the Guardian, Ha-Joon Chang muses on why it is so strong (emphasis added):

Unemployment rates in the major capitalist economies were between 0% (some years in Switzerland) and 4% from 1945-80, despite increasing labour market regulation. There were more jobless people during the 19th century, when there was effectively no regulation on hiring and firing.

So, if the whole history of capitalism, and not just the experiences of the last few years, shows that the supposed remedies for today’s economic crisis are not going to work, what are our political and economic leaders doing? Perhaps they are insane – if we follow Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. But the more likely explanation is that, by pushing these policies against all evidence, our leaders are really telling us that they want to preserve – or even intensify, in areas like welfare policy – the economic system that has served them so well in the past three decades.

It is notable that the one thing the “haves” by and large are not suggesting is that they make a bigger contribution to the “have nots.”

Austerity clearly is good for others, not for themselves.

Read the rest.