On a day witnessing such tremendous financial market volatility, this seems like the perfect story. The Bank of England has announced an “Open Forum” to be held on November 11, with the title: Building Real Markets for the Good of the People. No, I’m not making this up.
Here’s a screenshot from the BOE website:
We have to “build real markets?”
I’ve posted a lot of “dismal’ stuff today, but since it’s better to laugh than to cry, I give you the following.
I don’t know what’s more horrifying, Hillary’s blatant disregard for the law, or the thought of her doing yoga.
Thanks for playin’
*Image courtesy of William Banzai7
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How can you ensure that the interests of TBTF Wall Street mega banks and the military-intelligence-industrial complex remain aligned? Create a revolving door of course.
This is a trend I’ve been following over the past several years. Below are a couple of notable examples:
Video of the Day – General Wesley Clark Suggests Putting “Disloyal Americans” in Internment Camps
Now for the latest. From the Wall Street Journal:
This spring, traders and analysts working deep in the global swaps markets began picking up peculiar readings: Hundreds of billions of dollars of trades by U.S. banks had seemingly vanished.
The vanishing of the trades was little noted outside a circle of specialists. But the implications were big. The missing transactions reflected an effort by some of the largest U.S. banks — including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley — to get around new regulations on derivatives enacted in the wake of the financial crisis, say current and former financial regulators.
The trades hadn’t really disappeared. Instead, the major banks had tweaked a few key words in swaps contracts and shifted some other trades to affiliates in London, where regulations are far more lenient. Those affiliates remain largely outside the jurisdiction of U.S. regulators, thanks to a loophole in swaps rules that banks successfully won from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2013.
Many of the CFTC employees who were lobbied in these meetings went on to work for banks. Between 2010 and 2013, there were 50 CFTC staffers who met with the top five U.S. banks 10 or more times. Of those 50 staffers, at least 25 now work for the big five or other top swaps-dealing banks, or for law firms and lobbyists representing these banks.
The lobbying blitz helped win a ruling from the CFTC that left U.S. banks’ overseas operations largely outside the jurisdiction of U.S. regulators. After that rule passed, U.S. banks simply shipped more trades overseas. By December of 2014, certain U.S. swaps markets had seen 95 percent of their trading volume disappear in less than two years.
– From the excellent Reuters article: U.S. Banks Moved Billions of Dollars in Trades Beyond Washington’s Reach
The following story is guaranteed to make you sick. Once again, we’re shown that following trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts and backstops, TBTF Wall Street banks immediately went ahead and focused all their attention obtaining loopholes in order to transfer risk and make billions upon billions of dollars in the financial matrix, as opposed to adding any benefit whatsoever to society.
From Reuters:
Welcome to Dismaland: A far better representation of life for the world’s masses, frustratingly toiling under an endlessly corrupt, neo-feudal, criminal oligarchy.
But don’t take it from me. Here’s a look at some photos from the latest Banksy exhibit, which opened Thursday in Western-super-Mare, Somerset, England.
The Denver Post reports:
The elusive British graffiti artist Banksy has unveiled his latest project — a parody of a seaside theme park called “Dismaland” complete with a derelict castle, a dead Cinderella and a Grim Reaper in a bumper car. The artist, best known for his subversive, stenciled street art, said it was a “festival of art, amusements and entry-level anarchism.” “I guess you’d say it’s a theme park whose big theme is theme parks should have bigger themes,” he said.
I was more than half serious yesterday when I tweeted:
If 2016 becomes a race between Trump, Clinton and Bush, you can definitely count me in as a “Deez Nuts” supporter. https://t.co/Fx3zj17EmU
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) August 19, 2015
I immediately thought the idea was brilliant. What better way to express your contempt and disdain for the American political system than with a vote for “Deez Nuts.”? Forget Trump, this is the real protest vote.
It turns out the kid who came up with the idea knew exactly what he was doing. If he sort of had my support yesterday, it’s grown considerably today.
From Reason:
I clearly remember the moment several years ago when my closest friend from NYC was at my place pleading with me to download and use Spotify. The pitch was compelling and I was open minded about the concept, until I learned that you had to login through Facebook to use it (no longer the case I believe). I immediately found this creepy and refused to use it.
Fast forward to 2015, and Forbes has come out with a very important article highlighting the incredible creepiness factor in Spotify’s new “privacy policy.” Here’s some of what it found:
Music streaming market leader Spotify has decided that it wants to know a lot more about you. It wants to be able to access the sensor information on your phone so it can determine whether you’re walking, running or standing still. It wants to know your GPS coordinates, grab photos from your phone and look through your contacts too. And it may share that information with its partners, so a whole load of companies could know exactly where you are and what you’re up to.
At this point, it almost feels like kicking someone while he’s down. Jeb Bush can’t even stand up to Donald Trump, let alone his own growing series of scandals.
In the latest revelation from David Sirota and team at International Business Daily, we learn that:
For Florida taxpayers, the move by the administration of then-Gov. Jeb Bush to forge a relationship with Lehman Brothers would ultimately prove disastrous. Transactions in 2005 and 2006 put the Wall Street investment bank in charge of some $250 million worth of pension funds for Florida cops, teachers and firefighters. Lehman would capture more than $5 million in fees on these deals, while gaining additional contracts to manage another $1.2 billion of Florida’s money. Then, in the fall of 2008, Lehman collapsed into bankruptcy, leaving Florida facing up to $1 billion in losses.
But for Jeb Bush personally, his enduring relationship with Lehman would prove lucrative. In 2007, just as he left office, Bush secured a job as a Lehman consultant for $1.3 million a year, Bloomberg reported.
A month ago, I published a post titled, The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves – Spain Officially Becomes a Police State, which covered the implementation of the nation’s incredibly authoritarian “gag laws.” Amongst other things, the laws criminalized protesting, including free speech on the internet and “photographing police.” The elements of the law relevant to today’s post are the following:
Naturally, it didn’t take long for such a law to be used agains the helpless plebs, as an unidentified Spanish woman has been fined $900 for posting a picture of local police parked in a handicapped spot to Facebook.
The Guardian reports:
Who says there’s no affordable housing in NYC or San Francisco?
A couple of weeks ago, I published an article titled, The Rent is Too Damn High – San Fran Residents Pay $1,000 a Month to Live in Shipping Containers. Here’s an excerpt:
Luke Iseman has figured out how to afford the San Francisco Bay area. He lives in a shipping container.
The Wharton School graduate’s 160-square-foot box has a camp stove and a shower made of old boat hulls.
Iseman collects $1,000 a month for each of the 11 structures parked in the 17,000-square-foot warehouse he rents for $9,100. Tenants include a Facebook Inc. engineer, a SolarCity Corp. programmer and a bicycle messenger.
Now we have New York City’s answer. From International Business Times: