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Latest Articles: Business/Finance
China Eclipses U.S. as Biggest Trading Nation Measured in Goods
Post Date: 2013-02-11 06:20:22 by Tatarewicz
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China surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s biggest trading nation last year as measured by the sum of exports and imports of goods, official figures from both countries show. U.S. exports and imports of goods last year totaled $3.82 trillion, the U.S. Commerce Department said last week. China’s customs administration reported last month that the country’s trade in goods in 2012 amounted to $3.87 trillion. Enlarge image China Jan. CPI Rises 2%, Matching Economists’ Estimates A man takes a photograph of commercial buildings at dusk in the Pudong area of Shanghai. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/BloombergPhotographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg Sachs Says Obama Must ...
Sign of a financial Armageddon?
Post Date: 2013-02-07 19:01:24 by Southern Style
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Ominous stock trade suggests insider knowledge and warning Sign of a financial Armageddon? If you’re like me, you’re just a “regular” person whose lack of understanding of the stock market is enough to keep you away from it. For me, it’s a spectator sport that’s rigged at the highest levels in favor of the “initiated ones,” or as Gerald Celente calls them, the “white shoe boys.” If you’re like me, you probably don’t have any insider channels of information that would permit you to make $100,000 in the short span of ten months from a single $1,000 investment in cattle futures, the way Hillary Rodham Clinton did in 1994. Okay, ...
Mikulski’s ‘Paycheck Fairness Act’ Would Allow Employees to Discuss Salaries
Post Date: 2013-02-04 16:16:16 by Dakmar
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LANHAM, Md. (CBSDC)- A ‘Paycheck Fairness Act’ introduced in Congress last week would require employers to show pay disparity is related to job-performance and prohibit employer retaliation for sharing salary information with coworkers. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, both Democrats, said their legislation is aimed at closing the pay gap between men and women and would also address loopholes in the 1963 Equal Pay Act. Currently, the law allows employers to sue or otherwise punish employees for sharing their salary information and women still make just 77 cents on their male counterpart’s dollar, according to Sen. Mikulski’s office. ...
Exposing Fraud in New JerseyÂ’s Broken Pension System
Post Date: 2013-02-02 19:33:24 by farmfriend
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Exposing Fraud in New Jersey’s Broken Pension System Former cops collect hefty lifetime pensions thanks to bogus disability claims. Mark Lagerkvist | February 2, 2013 Timothy Carroll retired at age 33. He claimed he was “totally and permanently” disabled by the trauma of seeing dead bodies while working as a sheriff’s officer in Morris County, New Jersey. “I suffer from crime scene flashbacks and hallucinations due to all the years I served as a crime scene detective,” stated Carroll in his disability application. The real shock is Carroll then started a business that cleans up gory crime scenes, a New Jersey Watchdog investigation found. Yet the state ...
Bank card scam: Skimming devices target consumers at the ATM, gas pumps
Post Date: 2013-02-02 19:30:44 by scrapper2
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Swipe. Tap. Pray. Criminals might have their eyes on your bank card. In 2011, roughly 11.6 million adults -- 1 out of every 20 -- in the U.S. were victims of identity theft, including more than a million Californians, according to the Pleasanton-based financial industry consulting firm Javelin Strategy and Research. And in the last few years, skimmers -- criminals who use fake card swipe machines to steal card information -- have stolen millions from unsuspecting consumers at gas pumps and ATMs alike. It's part of an identity theft industry that cost consumers, businesses and banks $18 billion in 2011. According to Javelin, 66 percent of identity thefts involved existing credit or ...
US Economy: Troubled or All's Well?
Post Date: 2013-02-01 02:33:38 by Stephen Lendman
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US Economy: Troubled or All's Well? by Stephen Lendman Headlines flashed warning signs. Commentaries downplayed them. A Wall Street Journal editorial headlined "As Contractions Go…." US Q IV GDP shrank, "but not to worry. The report is better than it sounds, the stock market is rocking, and (the Fed will) keep both feet pressed firmly on the monetary accelerator." The Financial Times headlined "US outlook still clear despite shower," saying: Predicting recession "based on (-0.1% GDP decline) "is a bit like expecting rain because somebody threw a bucket of water out the window." The wildcard is "if Congress decides to dump ...
Bank of England Gold – the Doubts Remain
Post Date: 2013-01-29 08:55:54 by Ada
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Last week I wrote about the mess the Bundesbank has found itself in over its gold bullion. But they are not alone: the Dutch, Austrian, Mexican and now even the Swedish central banks are also coming under public pressure to explain themselves and to repatriate their gold. The question that is central to the blind trust placed by central banks in the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Board is whether or not this trust has been abused. There appear to be no audits; lessees have sold unrecorded gold into the markets; and there is evidence of outright sales using gold swaps and sight accounts (a sight account does not require physical gold to back it). With this in mind we can make a ...
Cartman Shrugged: The Invisible Gnomes and the Invisible Hand in South Park
Post Date: 2013-01-28 08:04:42 by Ada
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Excerpted from The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV Comedy makes fun of people – that is its nature. As Aristotle stated in his Poetics, comedy portrays people as worse than they are and makes them look ridiculous. To laugh at people is to feel superior to them. Comedy can thus be downright vicious. The contemporaries of a given comedy may well be offended by it, especially when they are the objects of its ridicule and feel threatened by it. Only the passage of time can soften the initially savage blows of satiric comedy and allow later generations to put up on a pedestal authors who were originally viewed by their angry contemporaries ...
At Fed, Nascent Debate on When to Slow Asset Buying
Post Date: 2013-01-28 07:35:42 by noone222
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WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve has left little doubt about its plans for the next few months, and thus little mystery about the statement it will release Wednesday after the latest meeting of its policy-making committee. The economy remains weak. The Fed will keep buying bonds to hold down borrowing costs. Enlarge This Image Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman. The Fed’s threshold of 6.5 percent unemployment to stop easing is disputed internally. Inside the central bank, however, debate is once again shifting from whether the Fed should do more to stimulate the economy to when it should start doing less. Proponents of strong action to reduce ...
Gold Reserve Mysteries
Post Date: 2013-01-21 06:00:40 by Ada
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Last Wednesday the Bundesbank released a statement to the effect that 300 tonnes of Germany's gold will be moved from New York and 374 tonnes from Paris. This should be a simple operation: rail or trucks from Paris, and a few military planeloads (or ships) from America – as soon as they have somewhere to store it. Instead they plan to do it over the next seven years, which is a postponement. This tends to confirm suspicions that the gold does not actually exist. As a side issue, along with the Bundesbank statement is a PDF download with slide number 14 entitled "Storage at the Federal Reserve Bank New York". It looks like a photomontage rather than real gold, and the ...
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? Why They Are Not a Good Investment
Post Date: 2013-01-16 14:21:33 by James Deffenbach
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This is a long article (seven pages) so I am not inclined to post all of it here but here is the first page. If you want to read it all, and it is fascinating, the link will take you to the article. (J D) The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, ...
Google invests $200 million in Texas wind farm
Post Date: 2013-01-10 15:21:02 by noone222
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NEW YORK (CNNMoney) More than 90% of Google's revenue comes from search, but some of the company's biggest bets are being made in seemingly unrelated fields. You've heard about Google's driverless cars, virtual-reality glasses and plans for a space elevator. What's less well-known is that the company is also a huge investor in green energy. Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) announced another big renewable energy deal on Wednesday, purchasing a $200 million stake in a wind farm in west Texas. The 161 megawatt Spinning Spur Wind Project in Oldham County, Texas, generates enough energy to power more than 60,000 homes, the search giant said. Its 70 turbines are located in a ...
California Counties Want Millions
Post Date: 2013-01-10 12:41:26 by noone222
5 Comments
Bank of America and other heavy hitters defrauded cities and counties by conspiring to fix, and lie about, the LIBOR rates, four California counties and cities and a Bay Area utilities district claim in separate federal antitrust complaints. The London Interbank Offered Rate is the rate banks charge one another for short-term loans necessary to carry on their business. More than $300 trillion in financial derivatives are tied to LIBOR rates. Barclays Bank last year settled criminal allegations of fixing LIBOR rates, leading to multiple lawsuits and investigations of major banks on at least two continents. Barclays' plea agreement is attached as an exhibit to Riverside's 156-page ...
Highest Ever One-Day Sales for American Silver Eagles?
Post Date: 2013-01-08 15:13:21 by noone222
3 Comments
Today, January 7, 2013, the United States Mint began accepting orders from authorized purchasers for 2013-dated American Silver Eagle bullion coins. The opening day sales tally of 3,937,000 coins seems to represent the highest one-day sales total in the history of the program. In recent years it has been typical for the Mint to experience the strongest sales for Silver Eagle bullion coins on the first day of availability for newly dated coins. Last year, orders had been placed for 3,197,000 Silver Eagles on the first day of availability for the 2012-dated coins. In 2011, opening day sales had measured 2,085,000 coins, and in 2010 opening day sales had measured 2,440,000 coins. For the ...
America's Lackluster December Jobs Report
Post Date: 2013-01-07 02:31:46 by Stephen Lendman
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America's Lackluster December Jobs Report by Stephen Lendman Headlines belied its weakness. Economist John Williams reengineers economic data based on reliable decades earlier modeling. U-3 unemployment rose 0.1% to 7.8%. U-6 is broader. It's 14.4%. It includes: (1) Marginally attached workers wanting jobs but not actively looking in the past 30 days. They looked unsuccessfully in the last year. They include "discouraged workers." They gave up in frustration within, but not exceeding, the past 12 months. (2) People looking for full-time work but forced to take part-time or temp jobs to be employed. Based on how unemployment was calculated in the 1980s, Williams ...
Trillion Dollar Coins: The Ultimate Debt Ceiling End-Around?
Post Date: 2013-01-04 12:35:40 by noone222
10 Comments
The Saint-Gaudens double eagle, a twenty-dollar gold coin, or double eagle, produced by the United States Mint from 1907 to 1933. (United States Mint/Wikimedia Commons) With President Obama having kicked off debt ceiling negotiations by vowing not to negotiate over the debt ceiling, a new option for paying off the nation’s considerable tab is gaining momentum with cheeky fiscal and monetary wonks. It goes like this: Should Congress fail to extend the U.S. debt limit — reached again on Dec. 31 — the president could ask the Treasury to begin printing trillion dollar coins (in a process explained mostly seriously by Jim Pethokoukis on his American Enterprise Institute blog), ...
Cliff deal hollow victory for American people
Post Date: 2013-01-02 12:50:18 by farmfriend
12 Comments
Cliff deal hollow victory for American people By David Rothkopf, Special to CNN January 2, 2013 -- Updated 1516 GMT (2316 HKT) Editor's note: David Rothkopf is CEO and editor-at-large of the FP Group, publishers of Foreign Policy magazine and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (CNN) -- The last political drama of 2012 and the first one of 2013 suggest that if you love America, you might want to consider making your New Year's resolution quitting whatever political party you belong to. The "fiscal cliff" debate and the last-minute deal it produced have so far resolved nothing except to show that our system is profoundly broken and ...
Billionaires Dumping Stocks, Economist Knows Why
Post Date: 2012-12-31 19:31:18 by Jethro Tull
8 Comments
Despite the 6.5% stock market rally over the last three months, a handful of billionaires are quietly dumping their American stocks . . . and fast. Warren Buffett, who has been a cheerleader for U.S. stocks for quite some time, is dumping shares at an alarming rate. He recently complained of “disappointing performance” in dyed-in-the-wool American companies like Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and Kraft Foods. In the latest filing for Buffett’s holding company Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett has been drastically reducing his exposure to stocks that depend on consumer purchasing habits. Berkshire sold roughly 19 million shares of Johnson & Johnson, and reduced ...
How the Koch Brothers Became Billionaires
Post Date: 2012-12-31 08:51:20 by Ada
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Forbes has a cover story puff piece out on the Koch brothers, but it is informative in a number of ways. We learn for example how the Koch brothers became billionaires. Using their father's asset base, they bought more assets, sometimes using great debt, that then soared in value as a result of Federal Reserve money printing: Over time, Charles says, he learned he could take on profitable risk by investing in long-lived assets that his customers didn’t want to buy themselves. Koch’s father died on a hunting trip in 1967 at age 67, shortly after handing full management control over to Charles, setting in motion the two most momentous turning points in the company’s ...
People Who Live Outside of Washington DC Have No Idea : The Completely Corrupt Mentality of the Federal Worker Class
Post Date: 2012-12-29 00:56:43 by farmfriend
2 Comments
People Who Live Outside of Washington DC Have No Idea : The Completely Corrupt Mentality of the Federal Worker Class Posted on December 28, 2012 by Nick Sorrentino People who live in Denver or Kansas City of Minneapolis, or some other city where people actually do something other than take federally approved improvement classes to raise their federal pay grade might have some inkling of how entitled our Washington DC federal workers behave, but I’m telling you – you still have no idea. I live just outside of DC, and for all the dysfunction we see exhibited by the famous people in the District on the news, the corruption and abuse of the taxpayer at the hands of the immense ...
WHAT IN THE NAME OF SENSE IS GOING ON AT DEUTSCHEBANK?
Post Date: 2012-12-26 13:24:02 by farmfriend
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WHAT IN THE NAME OF SENSE IS GOING ON AT DEUTSCHEBANK? December 26, 2012 By Joseph P. Farrell This is by now a bit dated news, but I don’t think it’s a story we’ve heard the last of, nor do I think it is being viewed in most places in a wide enough context. RT reported on the 12th of this month that German police raided the headquarters of Deutschebank in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany: German police raids Deutsche Bank offices in tax fraud probe Now, before we go any further, it is worthwhile to recall at this juncture a few things I have written about this bank in my various books. First, Deutschebank is a crucial component of that post-World War Two nexus of Western ...
12 Gold Bugs Bring Christmas Cheer
Post Date: 2012-12-25 09:16:04 by Buzzard
1 Comments
While the price of gold has languished in a trading range much of the year, leaving some investors scratching their heads, many have been buying – and in some cases, really loading up. It's a tad puzzling that gold hasn't broken into new highs, despite enough catalysts to move a herd of stubborn mules. But that's the hand we're dealt right now. We can't get up from the table until the game reaches its conclusion. Besides, I think the stall in prices is giving us one last window to buy before prices break permanently into higher levels for this cycle. At least that's how a number of prominent investors and institutions are viewing the price action right now. ...
When Will Death Spiral States Impose Taxes On Fleeing Citizens?
Post Date: 2012-12-23 21:50:18 by X-15
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One of the most fascinating characteristics of government borrowing - whether at the local, state, or federal level - is that debts contracted over time are obligations tied to specific geographical boundaries but not to the citizens living there when those debts were incurred. For example, while it's customary to say that each of the 210,000 residents of Stockton, California, are on the hook for their share of the bankrupt municipality's estimated $700 million in unpaid bills, the day one of them picks up and moves, personal responsibility for that debt drops to zero. Imagine if that type of tax "evasion" were eliminated. How would it change America? Government debts ...
PJTV: A Debt that Will Live In Infamy: America's Ticking Debt Bomb
Post Date: 2012-12-23 00:04:10 by farmfriend
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PJTV: A Debt that Will Live In Infamy: America's Ticking Debt Bomb
Investors turn against gun makers after massacre
Post Date: 2012-12-18 20:00:49 by Buzzard
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Investors shunned some of the nation's largest gun makers Tuesday in the aftermath of the Connecticut school shooting, including making plans to sell the company that manufactures the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle used in the bloody attack. Stocks of other gun companies fell, and one sporting-goods chain said it would temporarily stop sales of military-style firearms. In Washington, some former opponents of gun control signaled that they may change their position, potentially giving stricter gun laws their best chance of passage in years. The most notable rejection of the gun industry came when the private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management announced it would sell the maker of ...
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