Presently in Buffalo, on my way East.

There is one good news item:

They've been having record breaking rain and weather in places like Minn., Wis., Michigan, and Ohio for over a year.

Nobody expects the Spanish Climate Change

and that's not how Nature works.

So when it's dry, it will ALWAYS be dry.
When it's hot, it will ALWAYS be hot.

Etc.

Which is why I think Climate Change is blown up beyond all possible recognition into some kind of disaster movie scenario.

And unless we invade and subjugate China, there isn't a whole lot we can do about our climate here. Our weather comes from Asia, and our pollution goes to the Arctic and/or Europe to affect climate there.

Been in the mid 90s for weeks.

You could almost boil an egg in the pool.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_JAPAN_ECONOMY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-06-30-04-15-58

TOKYO (AP) -- Mixed economic data for May suggests Japan's economy is continuing to slow after a sales tax increase at the beginning of the second quarter.

Government figures released Monday and last Friday showed that housing starts and household spending fell in May while industrial output grew less than expected.

Japan's economy was the one of the best performing in the industrial world in the first three months of the year, growing 6.7 percent from the year before. But the April 1 increase in Japan's sales tax to 8 percent from 5 percent is expected to cause a contraction in the economy for the April-June quarter because demand has fallen off following a rush of purchasing to beat the tax hike.

Factory output in the world's third-largest economy climbed 0.8 percent in May from a year earlier, and was up 0.5 percent from the month before, the economy ministry reported. That was lower than most forecasts, but an improvement from a 2.8 percent drop in April.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/W/WORLD_MARKETS_?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-06-30-05-25-41

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Global stock markets mostly inched higher Monday as investors prepared for a busy week of economic news that will give new clues about the strength of the global recovery.

European markets were steady in early trading. Britain's FTSE and France's CAC 40 were nearly flat at 6,761.24 and 4,438.43 respectively while Germany's DAX added 0.3 percent to 9,845.17.

Wall Street was set for a tepid session. Dow Jones futures were down 0.1 percent and S&P 500 futures were little changed.

Trading this week is likely to turn on data from China and the U.S. and a European Central Bank meeting. Last week, Asian stock markets were buffeted by weak U.S. consumer spending and sluggish growth in Chinese industrial profits.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_EUROPE_ECONOMY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-06-30-05-01-31

BRUSSELS (AP) -- The European Union's statistics office says the inflation rate for the 18-nation eurozone in June remained flat at a low 0.5 percent.

Eurostat said Monday its initial June estimate shows the core inflation rate, which excludes volatile food and fuel costs, has edged up to 0.8 percent from 0.7 percent in May.

The European Central Bank seeks an inflation rate of about 2 percent and has embarked on a raft of aggressive measures to spur inflation and boost Europe's economy.

Some economists are warning the persistently low inflation rate could lead to deflation, in which prices fall persistently and choke growth. The ECB says it's worried about the low inflation rate but doesn't expect the currency zone to slide into deflation.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_VETERANS_AFFAIRS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-06-30-03-31-38

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Seeking to turn around a troubled agency, President Barack Obama will nominate former Procter & Gamble executive Robert McDonald to lead a Veterans Affairs department gripped by reports of treatment delays and cover-ups.

An administration official said Obama planned to nominate McDonald to the Cabinet post on Monday. If confirmed by the Senate, the 61-year-old McDonald would succeed Eric Shinseki, the retired four-star general who resigned last month as the scope of the issues at veterans' hospitals became apparent.

McDonald's nomination signals that the president put a premium on management experience as he sought a new VA secretary. McDonald also has a military background, graduating near the top of his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and serving as a captain in the Army, primarily in the 82nd Airborne Division.

The administration official insisted on anonymity in order to confirm McDonald's appointment before the president's announcement.

Is there no one with a medical/hospital background available? What would a man who made and sold over-priced soaps for his living know about the issues? Or the solutions?

easy to get him through.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-30/bnp-dollar-clearing-ban-said-delayed-as-guilty-plea-looms.html

June 30 (Bloomberg) -- BNP Paribas SA won a reprieve during final talks to settle a criminal probe into U.S. sanctions violations, giving the bank six months to prepare for a ban on handling certain dollar transactions, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Authorities in the U.S. rebuffed a last-ditch push by the bank to slash an $8.9 billion penalty, two other people said, asking not to be identified because talks are private. The yearlong ban on dollar clearing could affect specific business lines, such as oil and gas transactions, and certain offices, such as Geneva, where the alleged illegal transactions took place, a person familiar with the terms said last week.

BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, is poised to plead guilty today in Manhattan federal court, ending years of investigation by accepting a record penalty for violating U.S. sanctions against rogue nations, people familiar with the case have said. The talks with state and federal authorities in the U.S. had drawn warnings from French officials against levying disproportionate fines that could harm their nation’s economy and Europe’s banking system.

BNP Paribas, suspected of hiding about $30 billion in transactions, will probably plead guilty to conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a person familiar with the discussions said last week. The Paris-based bank’s board met over the weekend to approve the deal, according to the Financial Times, which reported the delay on the dollar-clearing ban yesterday.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-29/decoding-draghi-banks-still-puzzle-over-ecb-grand-plan.html

Mario Draghi’s latest stimulus tool contains a hidden message: If you think interest rates will rise before 2018, take the money now.

The European Central Bank president has offered lenders a fresh round of cash for as long as four years to keep them afloat and make them support an economic recovery by encouraging lending. He’s also inviting bets on when the ECB will scale back its ultra-loose monetary policy -- the more a bank expects borrowing costs will rise over the term, the more attractive the loan looks.

Four weeks after the ECB unveiled an unprecedented plan for boosting the euro area’s floundering revival, economists and investors are still grappling with its intricacy. While Draghi is trying to reassure investors that the ECB will keep policy loose for longer than the U.S. Federal Reserve and Bank of England, the link between the size of stimulus now and the prospect of higher rates later is a reminder that cheap money won’t be around forever.

“Draghi’s latest move has stepped up the complexity of monetary policy, though simpler options exist,” said Andrew Bosomworth, managing director at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Munich. “I’d reserve judgment until we see results from the economy, but if I were trying to make a guess, it would be a 50-50 call whether it’s going to work or not.”

shakes head sadly

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-29/emerging-market-companies-vulnerable-on-2-trillion-debt-binge.html

Emerging-market companies that took on more than $2 trillion of foreign borrowing since 2008 are vulnerable to an evaporation of funding at the first sign of trouble, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

Bond investors willing to lend generously when conditions are good can pull out in a crisis or when central banks tighten monetary policy, analysts led by Claudio Borio, head of the monetary and economic department, wrote in the BIS annual report. Emerging-market companies that lose access to external debt markets may then be forced to withdraw bank deposits, depriving domestic lenders of funding as well, they said.

Low interest rates and central bank stimulus in developed nations, combined with a retreat in global bank lending, have encouraged emerging-market borrowers to raise debt abroad, according to the Basel, Switzerland-based BIS, which hosts the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision that sets global capital standards. Demand for higher-yielding securities also helped suppress borrowing costs for riskier issuers.

“Like an elephant in a paddling pool, the huge size disparity between global investor portfolios and recipient markets can amplify distortions,” the analysts wrote. “It is far from reassuring that these flows have swelled on the back of an aggressive search for yield: strongly pro-cyclical, they surge and reverse as conditions and sentiment change.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-30/china-debt-set-for-biggest-quarterly-gain-in-two-years-on-easing.html

Chinese sovereign bonds posted the biggest quarterly increase in two years after the central bank eased monetary policy to spur economic growth.

The government notes have risen 3.9 percent since March, the most since the last three months of 2011, a Bloomberg index shows. The yield on benchmark 10-year securities fell 45 basis points to 4.05 percent this quarter through June 27, according to ChinaBond data. The yield on 4.42 percent debt due March 2024 was steady today at 4.07 percent as of 4:54 p.m. in Shanghai, National Interbank Funding Center figures show.

Premier Li Keqiang said this month that the authorities would ensure growth of at least 7.5 percent in 2014 after year-on-year expansion dipped to 7.4 percent in the first quarter from 7.7 percent in the preceding three months. The People’s Bank of China has cut some lenders’ reserve requirements twice this quarter and the State Council has announced a ‘mini-stimulus’ program including tax relief for small companies and increased spending on railways.

“The PBOC’s policy direction is to guide interest rates lower to ensure growth,” said Zhang Guoyu, a Shanghai-based analyst at Orient Futures Co. “If it continues to want lower financing costs to benefit the real economy, the 10-year yield may have further downside.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-30/rivals-already-outgun-u-s-on-trade-subsidies-as-ex-im-imperiled.html

South Korea topped the U.S. on government-backed export credit last year with an economy one-fourteenth as large. Germany helps Airbus Group NV compete against Boeing Co. with loan guarantees. China supports exporters of petrochemicals and electronics.

The Obama administration is highlighting competition from abroad in its bid to keep alive the 80-year-old Export-Import Bank, which provides loans, loan guarantees and credit insurance to foreign buyers of U.S. goods. Republican lawmakers including Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, say Ex-Im is rife with cronyism and are threatening to let the bank’s charter lapse at the end of September.

In the arms race for world markets, export credits are “nuclear missiles,” said Stephen Myrow, a former chief of staff at the Ex-Im Bank.

“You have them because other countries have them, and the thought of unilateral disarmament is not realistic,” said Myrow, who is now managing partner of Beacon Policy Advisors LLC, an independent research firm in Washington.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-30/dark-pools-here-to-stay-says-broker-conflict-researcher.html

While money managers don’t always like what happens in the $23 trillion U.S. stock market, they’re too fond of dark pools to let them go extinct, according to a professor whose research was presented to the Senate.

“Dark pools have existed forever,” Robert Battalio of the University of Notre Dame said in a phone interview last week. “You can shut down these dark pools and just new forms will arise somewhere else.”

Brokers and mutual funds disconnected last week from one of the private trading platforms, owned by Barclays Plc (BARC), after New York’s attorney general said the London-based bank lied to customers and masked high-frequency traders in its LX dark pool. The migration doesn’t mean dozens of others aren’t providing a useful service to investors reluctant to use public exchanges, Battalio said.

“There are bad dentists out there, there are bad store clerks, so you’ve got to separate the structure from the bad apple,” Battalio said. “Order flow will always have multiple venues to execute on -- upstairs markets -- because one size doesn’t fit all.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-30/scotland-has-billions-of-barrels-of-shale-deposits-report-says.html

Scotland may have billions of barrels of shale oil and gas buried under the country’s most densely populated areas, geologists said today.

Scotland’s central belt, running between Glasgow and Edinburgh, may have 80.3 trillion cubic feet of gas in place and 6 billion barrels of oil, a report by the British Geological Survey said. While it’s not an estimate of how much can be extracted, if only a fraction of that amount was drilled it could transform prospects for Scottish oil and gas output.

The oil and gas industry is central to the debate on Scotland’s independence before a referendum in September. The yes campaign says existing fields in the North Sea will underpin the economy of an independent Scotland, while supporters of a no vote say declining production from offshore reserves leaves the country vulnerable.

The U.K. government is offering tax breaks to shale drillers to spur development of the resource as North Sea reserves dwindle The Bowland basin in northern England may supply local natural gas demand for half a century at extraction rates of 10 percent similar to U.S. fields, according to a report last year.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-29/japan-output-rebounds-in-sign-manufacturers-enduring-tax-rise.html

Japan’s production rebounded in May, indicating that manufacturers are riding out a sales-tax increase as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seeks to steer the economy through its aftermath.

Industrial output rose 0.5 percent after dropping 2.8 percent in April, the trade ministry said today. The median forecast of 28 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for a 0.9 percent increase. The government projects production will decrease 0.7 percent in June and increase 1.5 percent in July.

With the economy forecast to contract this quarter, the focus is on whether growth will be strong enough over the next three months for Abe to proceed with a further increase in the consumption levy. A weak expansion may raise the odds of fiscal or monetary support in the coming months.

“The economy is expected to be strong overall in the July-September quarter,” said Yoshimasa Maruyama, chief economist at Itochu Corp. in Tokyo.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-30/explorers-see-promise-in-egypt-oil-and-gas-when-subsidies-eased.html

Explorers in Egypt expect constraints on domestic energy prices to loosen, prompting new investment in oil and natural gas fields.

Companies including Citadel Capital SAE, Circle Oil Plc (COP) and Petroceltic International Plc (PCI) expect President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to make good on promises to reduce subsidies of more than $20 billion a year and ease demands that producers sell fuel on the domestic market well below international prices, they said at a conference in London on June 27.

The changes would allow the government to cut the budget deficit and pay suppliers money owed for fuel, said Mohamed Shoeib, a managing director at Cairo-based Citadel. It’s a necessary first step if Egypt wants to lure back investors driven from the country by recent turmoil as it tries to both increase exports and meet surging domestic energy demand.

The government “should tackle the problem and not escape it,” Shoeib, whose company has about $10 billion invested, mostly in Egyptian energy projects, said in an interview. “It should happen very soon.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-28/li-ka-shing-says-wealth-gap-is-making-him-sleepless-in-hong-hong.html



Li Ka-shing, Asia’s richest man, says he has trouble sleeping at night because of a widening wealth gap and waning trust that could become “the new normal” if left unaddressed.

The chairman of Cheung Kong Holdings Ltd. (1) called on the government to introduce fresh impetus to enable dynamic and flexible redistribution policies, in his address to students at China’s Shantou University, according to a speech posted on the website of the Li Ka Shing Foundation on June 27. The growing scarcity of resources is also keeping him awake, he said.

Li’s comments come as the debate over how to elect Hong Kong’s next leader in 2017 divides the city, with more than 787,000 people voting in an unofficial referendum against demands by China to control a leadership election. Popular discontent has risen with a record wealth gap and a doubling in housing prices since 2009, spurring calls for more government action.

“Part of the reason for the activism in the city is the sense that many of the young people feel that the system is unfair, that it is skewed to helping the rich,” said David Zweig, professor of political science at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. Li “is recognizing that part of the problem in Hong Kong is an economic problem,” he said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-29/hedge-funds-boost-gasoline-bets-as-july-4-holiday-nears.html

Speculators boosted bets that gasoline prices will rise on prospects for the most Independence Day traffic in seven years and fighting in the Middle East.

Money managers increased net-long positions by 7.6 percent in the week ended June 24, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data show. Long positions advanced 5.5 percent and shorts fell 0.3 percent.

Americans traveling by car over the July 4th weekend will pay the most for fuel since 2008, AAA said last week. Pump prices are at the highest level for the period in six years, data from the motoring organization show. Gasoline advanced with crude this month after insurgents captured the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and advanced toward Baghdad.

“The gasoline market is relatively strong,” Tim Evans, an energy analyst at Citi Futures Perspective in New York, said by phone on June 27. “There’s anticipation of strong demand over the July 4 weekend and during July and August as a whole.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-29/merkel-hollande-step-up-pressure-in-ukraine-dispute.html

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, in a telephone call lasting more than two hours, stepped up pressure on Russia and Ukraine to resolve their territorial dispute.

Ukraine accused pro-Russian rebels of breaking a cease-fire that is due to end today, the same day Russian President Vladimir Putin faces the threat of deeper European Union sanctions.

Merkel and Hollande, in yesterday’s call with Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, stressed the importance of “the extension of the cease-fire and the implementation of the peace plan presented by the Ukraine authorities,” according a statement from the French president’s office.

The increased pressure came just two days after EU leaders threatened Putin with “further significant restrictive measures” if he fails to rein in separatist rebels by today. Poroshenko last week signed a free-trade pact with the 28-member EU, as he seeks greater solidarity from richer nations to Ukraine’s west against what the government in Kiev calls Russian aggression.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-29/slowing-china-economy-dims-profit-outlook-to-2012-low.html

The most-actively traded Chinese companies in the U.S. are on pace to report the smallest profits in two years as growth in the world’s second-largest economy decelerates to the slowest since 1990.

Analysts covering stocks listed on the Bloomberg China-US Equity Index (HSCEI) estimate that on average they will post earnings of $5.64 per share this year, which would be the lowest profits reported since 2012, data compiled by Bloomberg show. They’ve cut revenue forecasts by 7.9 percent in the past 11 weeks.

Earnings and sales projections are falling as economists surveyed by Bloomberg estimate China’s gross domestic product expansion will slow to 7.4 percent this year, the weakest pace in 24 years, after back-to-back annual increases of 7.7 percent. While the government has implemented tax breaks, accelerated spending and cut some banks’ reserve requirements, investors are concerned that officials aren’t doing enough to stem a decline in real estate prices and boost private consumption.

“What we’re seeing now is the near-term impact of the adjustment in expectations as these policies get implemented,” Alan Gayle, senior investment strategist, who helps oversee about $50 billion for RidgeWorth Investments, said by phone from Atlanta on June 27. “They’re trying to slow down some of the more inflationary real-estate related sectors and improve overall average standards of living.”

[center][/center]
... As products of their social and cultural environments, humans raised in the West have been victims of a massive global brainwash forced into a world of duplicitous dualism to “choose” sides, of course choosing the political side of their own nation, culture, ethnicity and/or religion, conned into automatically accepting that their nation/culture/religion is far more righteous and superior in comparison to others on the opposing side...

... Fortunately over time this oversimplified, black and white rerun version of the world has been challenged and exposed as jingoistic bias and distortion of how our complicated world actually is. Many of us have intuitively known all along that as members of the same human species, the striking similarities of our common human nature that bind us together far outweigh whatever differences in culture, skin color, nationality, political ideology, global region or religion. What many of us are increasingly realizing both here in America as well as in other nations around the globe is that we have been purposely and methodically lied to and manipulated for a very long time. The education system in America is more about socializing, programming and brainwashing young people into becoming obedient, mindless, robotic adults than learning any real truth or learning to cultivate and use their critical faculties to seek the truth amidst the world of illusion.

This “us versus them,” “you’re either with us or against us” dichotomy has been forever used as an artificial manmade device to separate humans into an in-group versus out-group duality. Unfortunately it has been operating nonstop ever since cavemen first emerged from their caves and encountered other human tribes. Through human migration and modern technology of air travel and most recently internet travel, now more than at any time prior in man’s relative short history on earth, Canadian communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the world seen as a “global village” has shrunk the earth into a here and now everyday accepted reality.

As a result, in recent years the world view of nations and continents has become somewhat more homogenized, made more accessible by mass media technology that transcends both geography and culture. Learning and communicating with people from diverse cultures and backgrounds have brought the world closer. That said, conversely the earth today is geopolitically moving rapidly toward more fragmented polarization, driven by a single globalization economy owned, controlled and operated by a global oligarchy. Its perverse vision of a New World Order currently has much of the global population brainwashed to fear, mistrust, hate and kill each other with unparalleled potential. But not all of us are being fooled by such divisively spun projections from a shadowy elite madly pulling their deceptive spin levers cloaked behind their gold curtain. An honest look at what is actually happening now around the world exposes the oligarch agenda to purposely increase worldwide tension, division and conflict...

... By carefully orchestrated design, the US-EU-NATO alliance is obediently carrying out the oligarch high command to destabilize, polarize and militarize every continent on earth, pitting regional adversaries against each other in a global offensive with the West jabbing and baiting the East into military conflict from the Arctic to every corner of the globe...

/... http://www.globalresearch.ca/todays-oligarch-curtain-of-lies-theft-death-and-destruction-are-exposed-as-never-before/5388945

[center][/center]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-29/bulgaria-arrests-two-men-amid-efforts-to-stop-run-on-banks.html

Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev said the eastern European nation has the resources to fight attempts to destabilize its financial system as it grapples with the worst run on banks in 17 years and prepares for early elections.

Plevneliev met with the leaders of the country’s biggest political parties and central bank Governor Ivan Iskrov, who agreed “to secure all necessary means and actions to guarantee banks’ stability,” the president told reporters in the capital Sofia today. He called early elections for Oct. 5 and said he will dissolve parliament on Aug. 6.

Bulgaria’s ruling Socialists are under pressure to resign following a poor showing in European Parliament elections May 25. The government, which took office a year ago, is fighting to keep the banking system stable as opposition politicians say current leaders have brought the country to the brink of ruin and police make arrests on charges of spreading rumors to destabilize the country’s finances.

In the past two days, police have arrested seven men on suspicion of spreading “false, ill-intended information against Bulgarian banks to destabilize the banking system,” the State Agency for National Security said on its website.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-29/fear-thaws-out-for-investors-as-online-brokers-defy-funk.html

With U.S. stocks stuck in the sleepiest funk since the dawn of the Internet, one group is waking up: online and discount brokers.

E*Trade Financial Corp. (ETFC), Charles Schwab Corp. and TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. (AMTD) rallied 5 percent on average in June on speculation rising shares and the lowest volatility since 1986 will entice individuals. While analysts say earnings will fall this year for firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), profits are poised to surge 20 percent or more at their discount brethren.

“They’re primarily focused on household investors, which are getting more confident as their fear thaws out,” Chad Morganlander, a money manager at St. Louis-based Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., which oversees about $160 billion, said in a June 25 phone interview. “It bodes well for broker-dealers. Volatility terrifies retail investors.”

The S&P 500 (SPX) has rallied 4.7 percent since March and is poised for the longest stretch of quarterly gains in 16 years as central bank stimulus and confidence in economic growth sent stocks to all-time highs. Futures on the gauge were little changed at 9:19 a.m. in London today.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-this-week-is-going-to-be-huge-2014-6

Get ready: This week is going to be huge. This holiday-shortened week is going to be jam-packed with economic data, culminating with the grand finale at 8:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, when we get the latest jobs report, and the weekly Initial Jobless Claims report.
Earlier in the week we'll be getting construction data, housing data, auto sales data, and manufacturing numbers, all of which will give us a fresh lens through which to see the economy.

Now the first week of every month is always packed with data, so in a sense it's a normal week. The fact that the data will be compressed into four days as opposed to five marginally adds to what will make this week so exciting.

The real story is that this is truly do-or-die time for the economy.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-this-week-is-going-to-be-huge-2014-6#ixzz367Qv3Aop

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-global-bank-profits-hit-920-billion-as-chinese-lenders-boom-2014-29

LONDON (Reuters) - China's top banks accounted for almost one-third of a record $920 billion of profits made by the world's top 1000 banks last year, showing their rise in power since the financial crisis, a survey showed on Monday.
China's banks made $292 billion in aggregate pretax profit last year, or 32 percent of the industry's global earnings, according to The Banker magazine's annual rankings of the profits and capital strength of the world's biggest 1,000 banks.

Last year's global profits were up 23 percent from the previous year to their highest ever level, led by profits of $55 billion at Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) <601398.SS>. China Construction Bank <601939.SS>, Agriculture Bank of China <601288.SS> and Bank of China <601988.SS> filled the top four positions.

Banks in the United States made aggregate profits of $183 billion, or 20 percent of the global tally, led by Wells Fargo's <WFC.N> earnings of $32 billion.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/r-global-bank-profits-hit-920-billion-as-chinese-lenders-boom-2014-29#ixzz367Rl4pB4

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28085256


The European Commission has approved a request from Bulgaria to provide funding for some of the country's biggest banks.

The Commission extended a credit line of 3.3bn levs ($2.3bn; £1.4bn) to help banks that Bulgarian authorities believe have been victims of a plot to undermine the banking system.

Five people were arrested over the weekend in connection with the plot.

In the past week, there have been runs on two of Bulgaria's big banks.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28081771

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has warned that ultra-low interest rates have lulled governments and markets "into a false sense of security".

The Basel-based organisation - usually dubbed the "central banks' central bank" - urged policy makers to begin to normalise rates.

"The risk of normalising too late and too gradually should not be underestimated," the BIS said.

Markets have rallied since January.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/06/randy-wray-rise-monetary-cranks-fixing-aint-broke.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

... the Fish of Finance is rotting from the head down. It stinks. As Hamlet remarked earlier in the play, Denmark is “an unweeded garden” of “things rank and gross in nature” (Act 1, scene 2). The ghost of the dead king appears to Hamlet, beckoning him to follow. In scene 5, the ghost tells Hamlet just how rotten things really are. Denmark, is of course Wall Street or London. Far more rotten than anyone can imagine. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, we all wax “desperate with imagination”, looking for explanation. For solution. For retribution! The financial system is rotten. Our banking regulators and supervisors failed us in the run-up to the crisis, they failed us in the response to the crisis, and they are failing us in the reform that we expected in the aftermath of the crisis. Heaven will not save us, either. The Invisible Hand is impotent. Just wait for Scene 5!

In times like these, we thrash about, desperate for ideas, for imagination, for leadership. There’s nothing unusual about that. Read the entry, monetary cranks, by David Clark in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, First Edition, 1987, Edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman. http://www.dictionaryofeconomics.com/contributor_articles?id=ClarkDavid You’ll find many of the same proffered reforms bandied about now. Many of them make sense, or at least partial sense. I’ve always used that entry in my money and banking courses as an example of sensible ideas being rejected by the mainstream, labeled “crank” to discredit them. When I use the term monetary cranks, I use it as a term of endearment. We need some cranky ideas because all the respectable ones failed us. There is nothing, and I mean literally nothing, that will come out of the mainstream that will be of use.

Chicago Plan

The “Great Crash” (as JK Galbraith called it, AKA the “Great Depression”) generated a similar outpouring of “cranky” proposals. Even quite mainstream and respectable economists got involved. A group of them published “the Chicago Plan”—supported by Irving Fisher, Milton Friedman, and Henry Simons. The idea was to prevent another run-up in speculative fever by restricting banks. They could issue deposits but could not make loans. To ensure safety of the deposits, they’d hold only the safest assets—such as US Treasuries. (For more on the history of the Chicago Plan, see the great book by my good friend and Levy colleague, Ronnie Phillips, (1995) The Chicago Plan & New Deal Banking Reform, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.) Hyman Minsky wrote an endorsement for the book, but he also wrote that the Narrow Banking plan was aiming to “fix what is not broke”. Yes, the plan would carve out a section of the financial system that would remain safe—the payments system. However, with a central bank that acts as a lender of last resort and with the treasury providing deposit insurance, our payments system is perfectly safe. You want proof? We just went through the worst (global) financial crisis since the 1930s with not even a hiccup in our insured deposit system.

True, our uninsured money market mutual fund system faced disaster, and required expansion of the government safety net to save it. And virtually every other part of our financial system also had to be rescued. As my Ford project team has documented, it took $29 TRILLION of subsidized loan originations by the Fed to prop up Wall Street, London, and Brussels. But the protected deposit-based payments system went through unscathed. (The UK did have a hiccup, precisely because it did not offer 100% insurance; it had to expand insurance to 100% to stop bank runs that never occurred in the USA.) So what do our monetary cranks want to do? Well, a lot of them want to go back to the Chicago Plan. They want to solve a problem that does not exist. Like Minsky, I don’t object. Maybe there is a better way to do the payments system. Personally, I’ve always liked the idea of a nationwide, universally accessible, government-funded, postal savings system. Let’s go for it. It’s a crazy idea only in the USA. It is easy to find PSSs around the world. Last time I looked, the Japanese PSS was the biggest “bank” in the world (but maybe one of the bankster banks has surpassed it now—propped up, fed, clothed and diaper-changed by Uncle Sam). We do not have to reinvent the wheel. We don’t need a Chicago Plan. Let’s just restore the US Postal Saving System (which, as I recall, lasted into the 1960s).

MUCH CRANKINESS FOLLLOWS....


We need to remember two things, however, as we assess the proposals of our cranks.

First, there is no final solution. There is no magic reform that will prevent another crisis. As Minsky said, “stability is destabilizing”. Any successful reform will lead to the recreation of instability that will lead to another crisis.

Second, it is essential that the reform proposal is based on a coherent and valid theoretical framework.

One way to judge the monetary cranks that are proposing reforms is to ask: “Where were you a decade ago?” Did you see “it” (the crisis) coming? Did you have a coherent theory which explained why a financial crisis would occur? Is your proposal consistent with that theoretical framework? What the heck is your monetary framework?

6/30/14

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby that employers with religious objections can opt out of providing contraception coverage under Obamacare.

The ruling deals directly with only a small provision of Obamacare and will not take down the entire law but it amounts to a huge black eye for Obamacare and its backers. The justices have given Obamacare opponents their most significant political victory against the health care law, reinforcing their argument that the law and President Barack Obama are encroaching on Americans’ freedoms.

“Under the standard that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] prescribes, the HHS contraceptive mandate is unlawful,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy.

The court’s four liberal justices called it a decision of “startling breadth” and said that it allows companies to “opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

more...
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/supreme-court-hobby-lobby-decision-contraception-mandate-108429.html



edit to add...

6/30/14 Supreme Court: Private Companies Can't Be Required to Pay for Birth Control
In a highly anticipated decision on Monday, the Supreme Court has ruled that companies cannot be required to pay for contraception coverage for their employees if it violates their religious beliefs. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the justices found that "closely held" private businesses have the same rights under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act as non-profit organizations.

more...
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/supreme-court-hobby-lobby-decision-contraception-mandate-108429.html