http://tinybuddha.com/blog/find-peace-today-stop-worrying-about-what-you-might-lose/


...Over the years, I have struggled with allowing people to get close to me for fear of losing them the way I had lost so many before.

After an adoption, the unexpected death of my adopted mother, my best friend, several family members, and the smattering of broken relationships, I built a solid wall against anyone who looked like they wanted to be near me.

I finally came to terms with the fact that in the end, most people who come into our lives will leave in some way or another—sometimes by choice and sometimes not, but their presence is what matters, not their absence.

What’s important is realizing that each moment we have with those we love is of infinite value, and we must enjoy the time we have with them while we have it instead of being so afraid we’ll lose them that we’re never really with them even when they are here.

If we’re so engulfed in the potential for loss, we’ll not only miss the lessons each experience can bring to our lives, but the joy it has to offer. Our happiness will sit in front of us waiting for us to recognize its face and we’ll look past it like a stranger.

People spend an exorbitant amount of time, energy, and resources on attempting to hold back aging as it is a reminder of our mortality. It reminds us that there is no permanence, so we frantically fight to find ways to extend the length of our lives, but how many focus on deepening the quality?

Why not slow down and realize we are immortal only in the moment we are in—this moment we inhabit contains our entire past and all of our potential and possibility for the future that may or may not arrive...

http://thesaker.is/the-deal-with-iran-a-major-sign-of-the-empires-weakness/

So a deal was apparently reach in Lausanne. It is not quite final, and there might be zig-zags, but it looks likely that a deal will be reached between Iran and the AngloZionist Empire. Except for in this case, the Anglos appear to be distinctly happier than the Zionist. So what is going on here?

First and foremost, and I have sad that innumerable times on this blog, this is not about some putative Iranian nuclear weapons program. I will not repeat all the arguments in detail here (those interested can look into the archives), but here is a short summary of why Iran never intended to have a nuclear weapon:

1) Iranians are very smart, not stupid. They fully understand that a few nuclear weapons would make absolutely no difference in a war against Israel or the US or anybody else. If used aggressively they would trigger a massive response and if used defensively, in response to an attack, they would not be here in the first place because any attack would begin by a counter-force disarming strike, possibly a nuclear one. Any putative Iranian nuclear forces lacks both the survivability and flexibility needed to be used or even to deter.
2) Acquiring a military nuclear capability would instantly turn Iran into a pariah state. We saw the sanctions against Iran against an imaginary nuclear program, you can imagine what they would be against a real one.
3) Iran is uninvadable as a country – it is too big, the terrain too complex, the population too big and, frankly, its armed forces too strong. Compared to Iran, both Afghanistan and Iraq are an easy target (there is a reason why the US has not even attempted to invade Iran since 1979!). Iran can, however, be very heavily bombed by missiles and airstrikes. This is not the kind of threat a nuclear capability can deter. In other words, Iran does not even need nukes.
4) The US intelligence community has agreed that Iran has no military nuclear program. All they could claim is that Iran had one in the past. Considering the pressure the US intelligence community was under at the time, this is as exculpatory a report as can be realistically expected.
5) The Iranian spiritual leaders have gone on the record multiple times and most officially declared that nuclear weapons are immoral, un-Islamic and forbidden. Secularists tend to believe that religious folks are always liars, I tend to believe that they do follow the principles which they believe in.
6) It is most definitely not about anybody wanting to get (or prevent) and “Islamic bomb” as Pakistan already has just that.

So if this not about nukes, what is it?

Simple!

1) It is about not allowing the Islamic Republic of Iran to become a viable, vibrant and prosperous alternative to the Wahabi and Zionist client-states in the region.
2) Is is about showing that even Iran can and will be bullied into submission to the Axis of Kindness.
3) It is about preventing Iran from acquiring its own civilian nuclear research program which is a source of technology and pride.
4) It is a pretext to impose vicious sanctions on Iran
5) It is a pretext to attack Iran militarily
6) It is about subverting the Iranian society

Now that we have listed the real stakes of the apparent agreement in Lausanne, we can also explain why Obama is pushing the deal while Netanyahu is appalled by it. The US deep state apparently came to the realization that a war with Iran would be a disaster for the USA and its Empire and the US might even be considering reaching some kind of modus vivendi with Iran before the entire Middle-East explodes because of the multiple foreign policy mistakes of the USA in the region. We are not talking about a US-Iranian love fest, at least not quite yet, but rather a way from freeing the USA from this exhausting and useless confrontation with the key regional superpower. With now three major potential wars possible (Ukraine, Yemen, Iran), the US wants at least one put back on the back burner to free resources for the other two.

For the Israelis, this is very bad news indeed, not because Iran is about to “commit another Holocaust” (sic), but because they put all their power, prestige, influence and, last but not least, hysterics into whipping up a crazy anti-Iranian panic and they have failed. These feelings of failure and fear will now also be shared by the Saudis...

MORE ANALYSIS AT LINK

http://thesaker.is/in-yemen-the-axis-of-kindness-shows-the-true-face-of-the-empire-and-proves-lenin-right/

The headlines out of Yemen really say it all:

U.S. pulling last of its Special Operations forces out of Yemen (and destroy their equipment in the process)

Russia’s Yemen consulate damaged amid Saudi-led airstrikes – embassy source

Russian evacuation plane denied landing in Yemen, diverts to Cairo

Chinese military disembark in port of Aden, Yemen, to guard evacuation – official

Yemen crisis: Foreigners’ tales of escape

Saudi Arabia, Yemen won’t hamper Russians’ evacuation from Sanaa SEE POST FOR LINKS

All this can be summarized like so: the US made an unholy mess of yet another country, was the first to run, and now everybody runs, except for Russian and Chinese forces who try to evacuate their nationals. Yet another major foreign policy success for Obama who had presented Yemen as the shining example of anti-terrorism done right.

In the meantime, the local al-Qaeda franchise is using the Saudi-lead aggression to liberate its members from prison, the US continues to pretend to bomb al-Qaeda in Iraq while supporting the same al-Qaeda in Syria and Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Israel are jointly bombing the Shia in Yemen and Iran is accused of interfering in Yemeni affairs. How utterly crazy AngloZionist policies have become?!

This would all be outright hilarious if people were not dying. And it is going to get a whole lot worse if the Wahabi crazies in Riyadh go ahead with their plans for a suicidal and fully illegal land invasion of Yemen. My hope is that the Saudis follow the typical American strategy and just bomb from high altitudes a country with only primitive air defenses (the Yemenis still managed to shoot down at least 2, possibly 3, “coalition” aircraft and one drone!).

So now we have yet another “gangster mob” ganging up against one small country: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan, Egypt and, of course, the USA and Israel, supported by al-Qaeda, all together against the Yemeni Shia. And, of course, fighting the Yemeni Shia objectively means supporting al-Qaeda in Yemen. Thus, it would be fair to say that Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan, Egypt, the USA and Israel are all supporting al-Qaeda...


...I will repeat this again and again, here we’re faced with yet another example of how the AngloZionist Empire is finally showing its true face: not the gentle face of human rights, democracy, international law and progress, but the ugly, brutal and stupid face of ignorant violence, support for the scum of the planet (Nazis, Zionists and Wahabis) and imperialism. The period of “capitalism with a human face” is now clearly over and we are now living exactly what Lenin had predicted: imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism (and no, I am neither a Leninist nor a Marxist but, in the words of Malcolm X, “I am for truth, no matter who tells it”).

MORE

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/US-Military-to-Launch-Special-Force-for-Latin-America-20150401-0037.html

The United States military will deploy a new special force for Latin America, revealed the website Defensa.com on Wednesday. The 250-troop force will be deployed to the U.S. military base Soto Cano in Palmerola, Honduras.

The deployment includes 4 armed helicopters and the JHSV Spearhead amphibian vessel. The special force will work in a similar way as the U.S. African task force Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force-Crisis Response, a combat unit designed to intervene in critical situations.

The new unit is expected to become operational between June and November this year.

The announcement comes after Ernesto Samper, UNASUR's Secretary General, requested that the forthcoming Summit of the Americas considers banning U.S. military bases in Latin America.

Earlier this year, it was announced that over 3,000 U.S. marines would be deployed to Peru in September, to participate in joint operations.

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/US-Military-to-Launch-Special-Force-for-Latin-America-20150401-0037.html. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

DEMETER SECONDS THE BAN!

HOW CONVENIENT! ONE-STOP ESPIONAGE!

http://fortruss.blogspot.mx/2015/04/russian-consulate-bombed-and-looted-in.html


The Shiite rebels attacked and looted the Russian Consulate in Aden. They broke down the door of the Consulate building, and looted the consulate property and office equipment. The militants loaded the equipment and documents into cars and fled in an unknown direction. At the time of the attack there were no workers in the Russian Consulate.

Earlier the Russian Consulate in Aden was damaged in the bombing of the largest city in the South of Yemen by Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia. This was reported by the Russian Embassy in Yemen.


The source admitted that there was not a single window left in the building. He added that the Russian Consulate may be closed and Russian citizens evacuated.

MORE

https://www.emptywheel.net/2015/03/30/more-straws-on-us-financial-hegemonic-camels-back/

Over the weekend, Juan Cole laid out how, if nuke negotiations with Iran fail this week, Europe is likely to weaken or end its sanctions anyway: http://www.juancole.com/2015/03/guaranteed-european-sanctions.html



Cole notes — and quotes a British diplomat strongly suggesting — that the US may lack credibility because of the stunts by people like Tom Cotton.

Meanwhile, Dan Drezner assigned blame to both a an obstinate Congress and Obama for losing its allies to China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (the first domino of which I noted here).



These are just two straws on a still very big camel’s back. But slowly, US financial hegemony is getting weighed down by our hubris.

http://www.alternet.org/world/how-gates-foundation-and-western-countries-are-plotting-take-control-africas-agriculture

Small farmers are being marginalized and excluded thanks to corporate-friendly regulations.
A battle is currently being waged over Africa's seed systems. After decades of neglect and weak investment in African agriculture, there is renewed interest in funding African agriculture. These new investments take the form of philanthropic and international development aid as well as private investment funds. They are based on the potentially huge profitability of African agriculture - and seed systems are a key target.

Right now ministers are co-ordinating their next steps at the 34th COMESA (Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa) Intergovernmental Committee meeting that kicked off 22nd March, in preparation for the main Summit that follow on 30th and 31st March 2015. COMESA's key aim is to pave the way for a "Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) in 2017 under the auspices of the African Union" with uniform regulations, including on agricultural products, seeds and GMOs. A recent meeting on biotechnology and biosafety was held to establish a "COMESA biotechnology and biosafety policy implementation plan" (COMBIP) to roll out from 2015-2019, "leading to increased biotechnology applications and agricultural commodity trade in the region."

But read between the lines and its real purpose was to facilitate the planting and commercialization of GMO crops in Africa all at one go, instead of country by country. USAID Regional representatives for East Africa, based in Nairobi, were present to monitor the process and ensure the desired outcome. And on the agenda for the main COMESA Summit next week is the approval of a 'Master Plan' for the implementation of the COMESA Harmonised Seed Trade Regulations agreed last year in Kinshasa. The regulations, according to the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, "will greatly facilitate agricultural transformation in the COMESA member states towards industrialization of farming systems based on the logic of the highly controversial, failed and hopelessly doomed Green Revolution model of agriculture."

They "promote only one type of seed breeding, namely industrial seed breeding involving the use of advanced breeding technologies. The entire orientation of the seed Regulations is towards genetically uniform, commercially bred varieties in terms of seed quality control and variety registration."

No place for small farmers!

"What is very clear is that small farmers in Africa, seeking to develop or maintain varieties, create local seed enterprises or cultivate locally adapted varieties are excluded from the proposed COMESA Seed Certification System and Variety Release System, because these varieties will not fulfill the requirements for distinctness, uniformity and stability (DUS).

"Land races or farmers' varieties usually display a high degree of genetic heterogeneity and are adapted to the local environment under which they were developed. In addition, such varieties are not necessarily distinct from each other."

COMESA's key agricultural objectives are to raise production by 6% per year, "integrate farmers into the market economy", make Africa a "strategic player in agricultural science and technology development". To this end USAID is funding COMESA programmes for 'Coordinated Agricultural Research and Technology Interventions' and 'A Regional Approach Towards Biotechnology' - in other words, to create uniform corporation-friendly regulations for seeds, agro-chemicals and GMOs across the region.

More than 80% of Africa's seed supply currently comes from millions of small-scale farmers recycling and exchanging seed from year to year. This seed meets very diverse needs in very diverse conditions. Farmers know the quality of 'recycled' seed, selected and saved from their own crops. It is cheap and readily available. New varieties can be introduced through informal trade within villages and beyond. This system may not be perfect, but it has been broadly functional for generations. The so-called 'formal' seed sector is a relatively new addition in Africa and has a narrow focus on commercial crops, especially hybrid maize. This commercial seed may offer yield advantages, but only in the right conditions, e.g. when coupled with continuous use of synthetic fertilizer, irrigation, larger pieces of land and mono-cropping - the Green Revolution package.

MUCH MORE

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/31/wealth-creators-klepto-rewards-bosses

There is an inverse relationship between utility and reward. The most lucrative, prestigious jobs tend to cause the greatest harm. The most useful workers tend to be paid least and treated worst.

I was reminded of this while listening last week to a care worker describing her job. Carole’s company gives her a rota of, er, three half-hour visits an hour. It takes no account of the time required to travel between jobs, and doesn’t pay her for it either, which means she makes less than the minimum wage. During the few minutes she spends with a client, she may have to get them out of bed, help them on the toilet, wash them, dress them, make breakfast and give them their medicines. If she ever gets a break, she told the BBC radio programme You and Yours, she spends it with her clients. For some, she is the only person they see all day.

Is there more difficult or worthwhile employment? Yet she is paid in criticism and insults as well as pennies. She is shouted at by family members for being late and not spending enough time with each client, then upbraided by the company because of the complaints it receives. Her profession is assailed in the media as the problems created by the corporate model are blamed on the workers. “I love going to people; I love helping them, but the constant criticism is depressing,” she says. “It’s like always being in the wrong.”

Her experience is unexceptional. A report by the Resolution Foundation reveals that two-thirds of frontline care workers receive less than the living wage. Ten percent, like Carole, are illegally paid less than the minimum wage. This abuse is not confined to the UK: in the US, 27% of care workers who make home visits are paid less than the legal minimum...

EXCELLENT EXPOSITION...MUST READ!

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/01/kraft-manipulation-cftc-idUSL2N0WY2GE20150401

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Wednesday charged Kraft Foods Group Inc and Mondelez Global LLC, respectively, with manipulation and attempted manipulation of cash wheat and wheat futures prices.

The regulator said it was seeking a permanent injunction from future violations by the two companies, as well as disgorgement and civil monetary penalties.

AND NOW WE KNOW THE "WHY" OF THE MERGER OF KRAFT & HEINZ!

http://uk.pcmag.com/security-reviews/40868/news/obama-authorizes-sanctions-for-cyber-attacks

...President Obama signed an executive order that authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, to impose sanctions on individuals or entities believed to be involved in "malicious cyber-enabled activities" that could pose "a significant threat to the national security, foreign policy, economic health, or financial stability of the United States."

"Starting today, we're giving notice to those who pose significant threats to our security or economy by damaging our critical infrastructure, disrupting or hijacking our computer networks, or stealing the trade secrets of American companies or the personal information of American citizens for profit," Obama said in a statement.

One of the country's biggest challenges, according to cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel, special assistant to the president, is to develop the right tools to respond to malicious attacks.

"In many cases, diplomatic and law enforcement tools will still be our most effective response," Obama said. "But targeted sanctions, used judiciously, will give us a new and powerful way to go after the worst of the worst."

What type of activity might trigger sanctions? Compromising services by government entities, running a distributed denial-of-service attack, pilfering data for commercial or financial gain, using cyber-stolen trade secrets, and providing material support for any of these actions could land you in hot water....

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-01/petrobras-signs-3-5b-financing-accord-w-china-development-bank

Petroleo Brasileiro SA, the world’s most indebted oil producer, is bolstering ties to China as a corruption scandal has shut the company out of international bond markets.

Petrobras, as Brazil’s state-run producer is known, signed a finance contract with the China Development Bank for $3.5 billion, the first part of an accord to be implemented this year and in 2016, according to a regulatory filing Wednesday. That follows the entrance of two Chinese oil companies in Petrobras’s biggest project in 2013 and a $10 billion cash-for-oil agreement in 2009.

Petrobras is slashing investments, selling assets and seeking financing options as it searches for ways to book corruption losses in financial statements. Delays in reporting earnings have all but shut out the company from bond markets at a time of slumping crude prices.

“The Chinese are seizing on their opportunities worldwide and the fact that Petrobras has another funding option is very positive,” Marcelo Lima, a fixed-income trading manager at INTL FCStone Securities Inc. in Miami, said in an e-mail.

MORE

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-01/franklin-templeton-4-ukraine-creditors-said-to-form-committee

Franklin Templeton and four other leading Ukraine creditors have set up a committee to negotiate debt-restructuring terms with a government struggling to avert a default, according to a person close to the talks.

The group is being advised by Blackstone and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the details are private. A representative of Lazard Ltd., which Ukraine hired for the negotiations, declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg News on Wednesday.

Government bonds rose as the committee’s formation paved the way for talks to start with Ukraine, which needs to reach new terms on 29 bonds and enterprise loans before the next review of a $17.5 billion International Monetary Fund aid agreement at the end of May. Franklin Templeton is the biggest bondholder with about $7 billion, followed by Russia, which bought a $3 billion Eurobond from the country in December 2013.

“Templeton and one or two other big shots should be enough to reach an agreement,” Andreas Rein, a money manager who helps oversee $470 million in assets, including Ukrainian Eurobonds, at Uniqa Capital Markets GmbH in Vienna, said by e-mail. “There is still nothing clear on the $3 billion Russian bond and that still complicates the story.”

MORE

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/04/commodity-prices-move-together.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29


Yves here. As strange as it may seem, most economists loudly disputed the notion that the rise in commodity prices, particularly in the first half of 2008, was in large measure due to financial speculation. More and more analytical work (such as comparisons of price action in commodities trades on futures exchanges with ones that have large markets but are not exchange-traded, like eggplant, a staple in India, and cooking oil) have dented the orthodox view.

By Manisha Pradhananga, Assistant Professor of Economics at Knox College. Originally published at Triple Crisis

Remember the 2008-11 food price spike? It led to food riots in many parts of the world and increased the number of malnourished people by 80 million worldwide (USDA 2009). What many people don’t know about the price spike is that besides the rise in magnitude, it was distinctive for the breadth of commodities affected. Prices of a wide range of commodities including agricultural (wheat, corn, soybeans, cocoa, coffee), energy (crude oil, gasoline), and metals (copper, aluminum), all rose and fell together during this period.


Source: IFS, commodity prices. Normalized by demeaning and dividing by standard deviation of each series

It is not unusual for prices of related commodities to move together; if two commodities are either complements or substitutes in production or consumption, then a demand or supply shock in one commodity market may be transmitted to the other. For example, prices of certain industrial metals may move together if they are jointly used to produce alloys. Similarly, prices of grains such as corn, wheat, rice, and barley may move together if they are substitutes in consumption. However, commodity-specific shocks cannot explain co-movement of unrelated commodities, like the one observed in 2008-11 (Gilbert 2010, Frankel and Rose 2009). Many of the factors that were initially given as explanations for the price spike—such as drought, or the use of corn and oil-seeds to produce biofuels—are thus unable to explain this rise in comovement between commodity prices. Only factors that can affect many commodity markets simultaneously can be considered as explanations. In a recent paper, I focus on one of these factors, financialization of the commodities futures market, and explore the links between financialization and comovement.

The term financialization has been used in the broader literature to loosely describe a range of developments related to the rising dominance of financial markets, institutions, and interests in the U.S. economy since the 1970s. (Epstein and Jayadev 2005, Orhangazi 2008). This concept of financialization has been extended to the commodities futures markets, where financial actors and interests have similarly played an increasingly dominant role in the functioning of the market. Financialization in the commodities futures market refers to the massive inflow of investment in the market, and the rise of commodities as an investment asset. Futures contracts of commodities like oil, wheat, corn, soybeans, etc., are now considered a financial asset like stocks and bonds. The number of open contracts in U.S. exchange-traded commodity derivatives market increased six-fold between 2001 and June 2008, from around 6 million to 37 million in June 2008 (BIS). These new investors are neither producers nor direct consumers of the underlying commodities, and they increasingly control a large share of the market. Between 1995-2001 “bonafide” hedgers, who are producers and consumers of commodities, controlled 70% of the market in crude oil; by 2006-09 they controlled less than 43%.

This financialization of commodity futures markets may cause comovement between unrelated commodities in three ways. First, if commodity futures are bought and sold not based on expectations of future demand and supply of the particular commodity, but based on other portfolio considerations or herd behavior. This is especially true for financial traders who buy and sell commodity derivatives not individually, but as a group of securities based on pre-set weights of commodity indices like the Standard and Poor’s-Goldman Sachs commodity index (S&P GSCI). If a large portion of “investment” in the commodities derivatives market are controlled by such passive index trading (like they were in 2008), then it is likely that prices of commodities will move together. Second, if commodity speculators trade in two or more commodity markets, a fall in the price of one commodity may cause the price of other commodity to also fall. For example, if price of commodity A falls, speculators might have to sell commodity B to cover margin calls in the market for commodity A (in which they have a long position), thus leading B to move with A. Finally, as weight of energy commodities like crude oil is high in commodity indices like the S&P GSCI, so shocks (supply or speculative bubbles) in energy markets might be transmitted to other commodity markets, even if there are no changes in the fundamentals of those specific commodities.

In my recent Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) working paper, Financialization and the Rise in Comovement of Commodity Prices, I examine whether financialization of the commodity futures market can explain the remarkably synchronized rise and fall of commodity prices in 2008. For the empirical analysis, I extract common factors that explain trends in prices of 41 commodities and study the correlation between this common factor and the flow of money into the futures market. Results show that financialization can explain the rise in comovement between commodity prices after accounting for other macroeconomic variables such as demand from emerging markets and depreciation of the U.S. dollar. These results imply that as financialization of the commodities futures market proceeded and more traders entered the futures market, market liquidity increased. Much of the rise in liquidity was due to increasing investment in commodity indices, which meant that futures of unrelated commodities were being bought and sold together as parts of portfolios. This increase in liquidity across different commodity markets led to the synchronized rise (and fall) in commodity prices.

RAMIFICATIONS AT LINK

ANOTHER INTERPRETATION...EQUALLY STUNNING, AND A BETTER QUALITY OF RECORDING

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/11500130/Andorra-on-the-brink-of-Europes-next-banking-crisis.html

Tiny principality has been rocked by allegations of money laundering in its oversized banking sector... The country has for many years enjoyed the benefits of European borders without the restrictions of EU membership, allowing light-touch regulation that has brought in tourism and wealthy expats from its bordering countries. However, in the last three weeks, the state has been gripped by a banking crisis that threatens to take it to the brink. Bankers have been thrown in jail, savers’ deposits have been restricted, and the country’s government is scrambling to convince powerful regulators thousands of miles away that the country is not a haven for tax evasion.

On Tuesday March 10, the US Treasury Department’s financial crime body, FinCEN, accused Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA), the country’s fourth-largest bank, of money-laundering. The authority said “corrupt high–level managers and weak anti–money-laundering controls have made BPA an easy vehicle for third–party money-launderers”. Three senior managers at the bank accepted bribes to help criminals in Russia, Venezuela and China, to funnel money through the Andorran system, according to FinCEN....The next day, the state took charge of BPA, dismissing three directors. On the Friday, the bank’s chief executive, Joan Pau Miquel, was arrested and detained. Mr Miquel remains in a jail cell in La Comella, the country’s only prison, with a capacity of 145. At BPA, the Andorran authorities have installed new management. After international banks cut off links, withdrawals were capped at €2,500 (£1,830) a week, a limit many people are maxing out.

Banco Madrid, the Spanish subsidiary of BPA acquired as part of an expansion spree in recent years, filed for administration on Wednesday. The Andorran government insists that BPA is an isolated case, saying it is committed to transparency and that the rest of the sector is clean. For its sake, it had better be right, but many experts fear this is not the case.

The state’s banks have assets under management 17 times bigger than the economy, and the sector accounts for a fifth of GDP – almost all of the rest is from tourism. Were its banks to get into trouble, Andorra, which is not a member of the eurozone but uses the single currency on an informal basis, would have no way of bailing them out. In short, the country faces a catastrophe if its banks fall apart. The crisis is a classic example of how countries seeking to welcome financial services by promising a hands-off approach to regulation, can become dangerously vulnerable to them.

Andorra’s exposures to its banks provoke echoes of Iceland and Cyprus – both of which suffered painful economic crises when their lenders fell into trouble. But unlike Cyprus, which received a last-minute bail-out, Andorra has no central bank to act as a lender of last resort: if its banks go under, it goes under...The crisis has now led Standard & Poor’s, one of the three major ratings agencies, to downgrade the value of the principality’s sovereign debt.

AND THERE'S STILL MORE

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2015/03/paranoia-reigns-in-congress-over-an-international-financial-cabal/

It’s tough to keep up with the conspiracy theories that run rampant from day to day in the hallowed halls of Congress. But one that is gaining traction is that the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Stability Oversight Council (whose acronym is pronounced F-SOC) is the handmaiden of an international finance cabal and is obediently marching to its beat instead of the mandates of Congress. These suspicions were on display at the Senate Banking Committee hearing last Wednesday and the House Financial Services Committee hearing the week before where U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who Chairs F-SOC, was pummeled with thinly veiled, and not so thinly veiled, accusations.

F-SOC was created under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010. It is charged with the early identification of emerging risks to the financial system. Every major regulator of Wall Street banks has a seat...The conspiracy theory that foreign hot shots are really controlling decisions at F-SOC is not without roots. The international equivalent of F-SOC is the Financial Stability Board, which is run by a Plenary of central bankers and finance ministers from around the globe, along with organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The United States has three members on the Plenary: Nathan Sheets, the Undersecretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Treasury; Daniel Tarullo, a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve; and Mary Jo White, Chair of the SEC. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England is the current Chair of the Financial Stability Board.

The simmering conspiracy took wings on February 5 of this year when Mark Carney issued what appeared to be marching orders from the Financial Stability Board to G20 members, which includes the United States. One portion of the document reads as follows:


This certainly sounds like the FSB is calling the shots. At the Senate Banking hearing on Wednesday, it became clear that the conspiracy theory has spread to at least one trade group, the American Council of Life Insurers. Gary Hughes, the Executive Vice President and General Counsel of the trade group submitted written testimony that included this excerpt:



The conspiracy theory that an international financial cabal is supplanting the legislative will of Congress has an important competing theory. That is, that a Wall Street cabal of lobbyists, deep-pocketed bank CEOs and hedge fund billionaires are pulling the strings in our Congress behind a dark curtain. The fact that Citigroup was able to gut a key portion of Dodd-Frank’s reform of derivatives recently by sneaking the measure into a critical funding bill to keep the government operating, would appear to prove the point.

And there is yet a third theory. This one goes like this: Wall Street is perceived by our foreign allies to so completely control Congress that foreign financial markets simply do not trust U.S. regulators to rein in Wall Street abuses or prevent another systemic financial collapse. The Financial Stability Board feels it must look over Wall Street’s shoulder because it can’t trust Congress or the Federal Reserve to do their job.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/how-chicago-has-used-financial-engineering-to-paper-over-its-massive-budget-gap-144515066.html



This article explains that the City of Chicago has concealed how it has dealt with its budget gap over the past decade. The city failed to cut its recurring expenditures to match its recurring revenues after it blew through its reserve funds. Instead, two administrations have:

• Used long-term debt to finance everyday expenses and maintenance;
  
  
• Used long-term debt to finance judgments and settlements, including police brutality cases, and retroactive wage increases and pension contributions for its unionized employees;
  
  
• Restructured the city’s existing debt to extend the maturities on its bonds far out into the future in order to avoid having to pay the debt as it was coming due;
  
  
• Borrowed more money than it needed in order to make payments on the bonds its was issuing to avoid debt service expenses, essentially using debt to pay debt; and
  
  
• Possibly used the city’s portfolio of interest rate derivatives as an ATM.

State and local governments typically issue bonds to finance the construction of buildings and infrastructure that will benefit residents for generations. This article explains how Chicago residents have billions of dollars of debt and nothing to show for it.

***

Chicago made headlines at the end of February after Moody’s downgraded the city’s general obligation bond rating to Baa2. Moody’s has cut Chicago’s rating five notches in less than two years. This downgrade, however, placed the city’s credit below the termination triggers on some of its outstanding interest rate swaps. The city has been working to renegotiate the terms of those contracts with its counterparties. If Chicago’s general obligation rating falls below investment grade, the city’s credit deterioration will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. The city risks nearly $400 million of swap termination payments and the acceleration of its $294 million of outstanding short-term debt. Unsurprisingly, some of Chicago’s bonds are already trading at junk levels... That said, the rating agencies and most other market participants still appear to be light years away from understanding the true scope of Chicago’s financial problems. The city has a very — well, let’s just call it unconventional — approach to borrowing money and probably should not be considered investment grade.

Some budget history

In order for you to follow my discussion of Chicago’s borrowing shenanigans, it is necessary to understand the fiscal machinery behind its bond issues. Please be patient with me here. This story will blow your mind shortly...Chicago’s budget is divided into seven different fund classifications, but only three funds are relevant to our narrative: the Corporate Fund, Property Tax Fund, and Reserve Funds.

The Corporate Fund is Chicago’s general operating fund. This fund is used to pay for essential government services and activities (e.g. public safety and trash collection). Corporate Fund revenues are derived from a wide variety of sources, including: (1) local tax revenue from utility, transaction, transportation, recreation, and business taxes; (2) intergovernmental tax revenue, which represents the city’s share of the state’s sales and use taxes, income tax, and personal property replacement tax; and (3) non-tax revenue from fees, fines, asset sales, and leases.

Chicago’s property tax revenues do not go into its general operating fund. These revenues go into a Property Tax Fund, which is used to make debt service payments on the city’s general obligation bonds; make required employee pension contributions; and (to a minor extent) fund the library system. The fund also includes tax increment financing revenues that flow to projects in designated TIF districts.

The city used some of the proceeds from long-term leases of city assets to establish Reserve Funds. The Chicago Skyway reserve funds were established in 2005 in the amount of $975 million. The Metered Parking System reserve funds were established in 2009 in the amount of $1.15 billion. Of these funds, $475 million of the Skyway reserves were designated for budgetary uses. What remained was $500 million for the Skyway; $400 million for the Metered Parking System; and $326 million for a budget stabilization fund.

There has been a structural gap in Chicago’s Corporate Fund budget since at least 2003. Although most governments are required to balance their budgets on a cash flow basis each fiscal year, a structural budget gap can arise when recurring expenditures are greater than recurring revenues. Some of the city’s offering documents suggest that this gap is a legacy of the last economic downturn, but in reality the gap pre-dates the economic downturn by several years. The impact of economic downturns on tax collections tends to have a considerable lag anyway...So, Chicago’s structural budget gap is a political, not economic, creature. Rather than cut expenditures to a level that could be supported by recurring revenues, the city mostly used non-recurring resources to fill the gap from one fiscal year to the next. This is not surprising. Most of Chicago’s Corporate Fund budget goes to salaries and benefits for its employees, and 90% of the city’s employees belong to around 40 different unions. Attempts to adjust expenditures tend to have well organized opposition.

Between fund transfers and drawing down its reserves, the city blew through its financial cushioning quickly. The $326 million budget stabilization fund was exhausted by 2010. From 2009 to 2011, the city used $320 million from the Metered Parking Reserves. The city’s budget gap was at its widest in the wake of the last economic downturn, at over $600 million.

Chicago’s dysfunctional debt program

Now things start to get interesting. Transfers from reserves and other funds have not been the only means Chicago officials (across administrations) have devised to subsidize the city’s Corporate Fund. The city has effectively been using its general obligation bond offerings and interest rate derivatives to accomplish the same thing.

AND IT GOES ON AND ON AND ON....LIKE DETROIT, WITHOUT KWAME.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-stanford-students-turning-down-161700336.html

Startups and tech companies will sometimes offer Stanford students as much as $500,000 in compensation right out of school. But all the Stanford students we spoke with insisted that they would never take a job just because it pays more. Hired.com CMO Tyler Willis says that 80% job applicants don’t end up accepting the highest offer. So if it isn’t money, what do Stanford students care about?

Here’s what they told us:

They want to make an impact. Jessica Taylor chose to work at nonprofit MIRI instead of Google. “They only have like three full-time researchers and I feel like I might be able to do more good because it is not really crowded at all,” She says.

They want to do good. Taylor says the “primary goal in my career is to do the most good for the world.”

They want a mission. Myles Keating, a Stanford junior, says companies that are "going after a business opportunity because it'll make a lot of money,” are not that appealing. It’s better for them to say: "We really care about this problem and we want to make the world a better place by solving it."

They want to learn and grow. Stanford graduate student John Yang-Sammataro is running his own company. He says the only way he would join another firm is if it could “prove” to him that "for the next two years, you will learn and grow and be more prepared than if you did this thing on your own."

They want to work with interesting people. "You can talk about the grand vision all the time, but if the day to day is miserable then that's not going to matter,” says Keating. They key is the people you work with. "You have to trust them, you have to hopefully enjoy them and their company."

They want freedom. Ben Zheng, a graduate student who is going full-time at Facebook this summer, says he picked that company because when he interned there, he was "given freedom in terms of what kinds of things to work on."

They want to be nurtured. Vinamrata Singal, who will intern at Google this summer, says she is going there because there is a strong culture of mentorship there — a "nurturing environment."

They don’t want to be coddled. "I want to feel like I'm valued, but never that I'm being coddled," says Myles Keating. He wants to work somewhere that has high expectations of him.

They want to be allowed to take initiative. Keating wants a job where he can get his primary job done well and early, and be able to say: "All right, that was fun. Now I have a little extra time — what am I personally interested in?"

They want to work on interesting problems. Stanford senior Rafael Cosman interned at Palantir but decided he did not want to work there because "most of the people there are not actually working on interesting problems." "You need to fix the UI of something. It's not really what you want to do, but you got to do it." Cosman is going to work at a nonprofit after school instead.

to have those types of choices.

It took me a good couple of years before I got something that resembled the beginnings of a career. Didn't help that I graduated into the Reagan recession.

Oh, it is the Friday before Easter, silly me.

4/2/15
Markets are closed on Good Friday, and the Monday afterwards is historically the S&P 500's worst post-holiday trading session. When the key monthly jobs report comes out on that Friday, stocks perform even more poorly.
more...
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102558165

forgot all about that. But in my part of the world, Easter comes on the 12th this year. Better than last year, though. Last year it was May 4th!

See you in the morning!

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/emerging-market-debt-crisis-by-andres-velasco-2015-03

Consider the following scenario, one that has played out time and again in emerging-market countries. Local banks and firms go on a borrowing binge and pile up dollar-denominated debt – debt that pundits consider perfectly sustainable, as long as the local currency is strong. Suddenly, something (an increase in United States interest rates, a drop in commodity prices, a domestic political conflict) causes the local currency to drop in value against the dollar. The debt burden, measured in domestic currency, is now much higher. Some borrowers miss interest payments; others are unable to roll over principal. Financial mayhem ensues.

This is how the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Mexican Tequila crisis of 1994, the Asian debt crisis of 1997, and the Russian crisis of 1998 unfolded. It was also how the financial crisis of 2008-2009 transmitted itself to emerging markets. Every time, borrowers and lenders claimed to have learned their lesson.

Not only could it happen again today; it could happen on a much larger scale than in the past. Taking advantage of ultra-low interest rates in advanced countries, emerging-market banks and firms have been borrowing like never before. A recent paper by the Bank of International Settlements shows that since the global financial crisis, outstanding dollar credit to non-bank borrowers outside the US has risen by half, from $6 trillion to $9 trillion.

The bulk of that debt is in Asia, with China alone accounting for approximately $1 trillion. Other big dollar borrowers include Brazil (over $300 billion) and India ($125 billion). Countries such as Malaysia, South Africa, and Turkey, plus Latin America’s more financially open economies, also have rising foreign-currency debts.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/emerging-market-debt-crisis-by-andres-velasco-2015-03#pOxbSKFKGXzXCqfB.99

I think I’ve never understood the American – and international – fascination with money, with gathering wealth as the no. 1 priority in one’s life. What looks even stranger to me is the idolization of people who have a lot of money. Like these people are per definition smarter or better than others. It seems obvious that most of them are probably just more ruthless, that they have less scruples, and that their conscience is less likely to get in the way of their money and power goals.

America may idolize no-one more than Warren Buffett, the man who has propelled his fund, Berkshire Hathaway, into riches once deemed unimaginable. For most people, Buffett symbolizes what is great about American society and its economic system. For me, he’s the symbol of everything that’s going wrong.

Last week, Buffett announced a plan to merge a number of ‘food’ companies in a deal he set up with Brazilian 3G Capital. For some reason, they all have German names (I’m not sure why that is or what it means, if anything): Heinz, Kraft, Oscar Mayer. Reuters last week summed up a few of the ‘foods’ involved:

His move on Wednesday to inject Velveeta cheese, Jell-O, Lunchables, Oscar Mayer wieners, and Kool-Aid into his portfolio, stuffs an already amply supplied larder. The additions came from the acquisition of Kraft Foods Group Inc by H.J. Heinz Co, which is controlled by 3G Capital and Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. His larder already included everything from Burger King’s Triple Whopper burgers, Coca-Cola soft drinks and Tim Horton donuts to See’s Candies and Dairy Queen icecream Blizzards, as well as such Heinz brands as Tomato Ketchup, Ore-Ida fries, bagel bites and T.G.I. Friday’s mozzarella sticks.

Isn’t it curious to see that once people have more than enough to eat, they sort of make up for that by drastically lowering the quality of their food, like there’s some sort of balance that needs to be found? Give them more than plenty, and they’ll start using it to poison themselves.

Complete story at - http://www.theautomaticearth.com/2015/04/warren-buffett-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-america/


Oh oh. Attacking the Wizard of Wichita. Or is it the Oracle of Omaha?

I think the changing food market is reflected in this merger.

A new independent grocery just opened up in Yuppieville Ann Arbor.

Half the store is "nutraceuticles" the latest fads in health/nutrition. None of these can be classified as food or medicine...but, whatever.

Then there's the buffet...for those that don't-can't-won't cook for themselves.

Then there's some actual groceries--off brands and prices--and produce.

And an extensive wine selection!

I didn't buy a thing, and I won't be back. Like this town needs another Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Plum Market (and we have several of each already). I give it a year, maybe two.

And the reason all the brands are "German" is that the US is/was dominated by people from Germany, especially in the Midwest, so they developed food processing and put their German names on it... good solid food for farm work....

Jerk from Joisey is a rotating position. And you don't have to be from Joisey to qualify for the position.

I know. I spent many years in Joisey!

http://www.businessinsider.com/worker-fired-for-talking-about-the-minimum-wage-2015-3

A hotel owner in Arkansas fired an employee after she spoke to the Washington Post's Chico Harlan about the state's 25 cent wage hike last month.

Harlan writes this week that Shanna Tippen, who at the time of the original story worked at a Days Inn in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, notified him that she had been fired from her job after she told Harlan that "the minimum wage hike would bring her a bit of financial relief, but it wouldn’t lift her above the poverty line."

The worst part? Tippen's boss, Herry Patel, reportedly spoke to Harlan and asked Tippen to also speak with him. But when the Post story came out, Patel fired Tippen for what she said. From Harlan's article Monday:


Tippen is now living off her tax refund and desperately seeking employment, according to Harlan.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/worker-fired-for-talking-about-the-minimum-wage-2015-3#ixzz3WFBmw3FY

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/new-economy/2015/0330/Consumer-spending-barely-rises-in-February.-Shoppers-are-saving-instead.-video

...US consumers stayed indoors February, and in much of the country, no one would blame them. Still, a disappointing showing for the largest segment of the US economy can’t be all chalked up to weather.

Consumer spending crept up just 0.1 percent in February, slightly more disappointing than the 0.2 percent uptick analysts were expecting, according to data released Monday by the Commerce Department. It was the first positive reading in two months; January and December both recorded a 0.2 percent slide.

When adjusted for inflation, it was the first overall decline in consumer spending in nearly a year, setting up a disappointing first quarter of the year after a very strong end to 2014. The results were “indicative of a very slow rate of gain in consumer spending in the quarter as a whole even if there is a rebound in March due to February (presumably) having been affected by extremely harsh weather in many areas,” MFR Inc. economist Josh Shapiro wrote in an e-mailed analysis...

http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2015/03/foreclosure-crisis-update.html


Is the foreclosure crisis over? Yes and no. Since 2007, about six million homes have been sold at foreclosure sales (Foreclosures Public Data Summary Jan 2015). Today, about one million homes are still somewhere in the foreclosure process. Homeowners behind in their payments have declined from 15% at the 2010 peak of the crisis to less than 8% now (MBAA delinquent plus in foreclosure at 12/31/14). Most of the still-troubled loans were originated before 2007. The best news is that new foreclosure starts are now down to pre-crisis levels, at less than one-half of one percent of all mortgages, if we take 2006 to be the pre-crisis level.

So new home loans, those made since 2008, are doing very well, and what remains is the legacy of those bad loans that triggered the crisis, right? Not exactly.

The first problem is to define what we mean by pre-crisis levels. Subprime mortgages expanded rapidly from 2000 to 2007, accounting for an ever-increasing share of all mortgages, and skewing delinquency rates upwards. So for a real pre-crisis baseline, we need to go back to earlier times, or to look at mortgage default rates for prime and FHA loans only. Today in 2015 there are virtually no subprime mortgages being originated. As the inventory of old subprime loans winds down, we should expect to see default rates well below those for the early 2000s, and we are not there yet.

The second problem is negative equity. At the end of 2014, 16.9% of residential mortgages were underwater, i.e. the debt exceeded the current home value. Home price appreciation is not projected to solve this problem any time soon. This situation is historically unprecedented, and leaves millions of homeowners at continuing risk of default should the economy falter.

The third problem is the fragile inventory of nontraditional and modified loans that remain from the subprime bubble. There are perhaps 3 to 4 million active mortgages that were modified to avoid foreclosure in the past seven years. Some of these have temporarily low rates, as low as 2%, that will adjust upwards soon. Others have large balloon payments or payment terms than extend for 40 years, making repayment or refinancing difficult. And of course there are still plenty of homeowners stuck in non-amortizing mortgages or ARMs that are vulnerable to coming interest rate hikes.

THE COMMENTARY IS NOT SO CONFIDENT...MORE AT LINK

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11507810/Iceland-looks-at-ending-boom-and-bust-with-radical-money-plan.html

Iceland's government is considering a revolutionary monetary proposal - removing the power of commercial banks to create money and handing it to the central bank. The proposal, which would be a turnaround in the history of modern finance, was part of a report written by a lawmaker from the ruling centrist Progress Party, Frosti Sigurjonsson, entitled "A better monetary system for Iceland"....The report, commissioned by the premier, is aimed at putting an end to a monetary system in place through a slew of financial crises, including the latest one in 2008.

According to a study by four central bankers, the country has had "over 20 instances of financial crises of different types" since 1875, with "six serious multiple financial crisis episodes occurring every 15 years on average". Mr Sigurjonsson said the problem each time arose from ballooning credit during a strong economic cycle. He argued the central bank was unable to contain the credit boom, allowing inflation to rise and sparking exaggerated risk-taking and speculation, the threat of bank collapse and costly state interventions. In Iceland, as in other modern market economies, the central bank controls the creation of banknotes and coins but not the creation of all money, which occurs as soon as a commercial bank offers a line of credit. The central bank can only try to influence the money supply with its monetary policy tools.

Under the so-called Sovereign Money proposal, the country's central bank would become the only creator of money. Banks would continue to manage accounts and payments, and would serve as intermediaries between savers and lenders.

Mr Sigurjonsson, a businessman and economist, was one of the masterminds behind Iceland's household debt relief programme launched in May 2014 and aimed at helping the many Icelanders whose finances were strangled by inflation-indexed mortgages signed before the 2008 financial crisis.

"Crucially, the power to create money is kept separate from the power to decide how that new money is used," Mr Sigurjonsson wrote in the proposal.

"As with the state budget, the parliament will debate the government's proposal for allocation of new money," he wrote.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/04/greece-plans-miss-imf-payment-issues-drachma-threat.html


Greece has decided to up the ante in its negotiations with the Troika. The open question is whether the latest move, the press leak via Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph that Greece will miss its April 9 payment to the IMF so that it can continue to make pension payments, and has started to make plans to issue the drachma, are game-changers that Greece hopes they will be. The sources that spoke to Evans-Pritchard said that the government would be out of funds on April 9, the IMF due date. Note this is earlier than the most recently leaked drop-dead date of April 20. The Greek government cannot make that payment and also make pension and government salary payments due April 14. Keep this in mind:

Investors have recognized that a Grexit was a possible outcome; indeed, the financial press was treating it as a far more likely outcome than the political press. With Greece running out of money, discussion of that possibility increased last week, with Warren Buffett even saying a Grexit could be good for the eurozone versus serious pundits like Martin Wolf warning that a Grexit would pave the way for other countries to leave. But even Wolf held out the option of a managed Grexit so as to reduce the dislocation. So the idea that Greece might leave is hardly news. And Greece has made veiled threats officially, along the lines of, “We can only be pushed so far.” The question is whether the markets have really priced that in, since an adverse market reaction would give Greece more leverage. Despite the dramatic sound of invoking the “d” words, so far, this is a bluff. Read the first paragraph of the Telegraph account:



If you read the article, Greece has yet to take a single concrete step towards issuing drachma, the most important being to impose capital controls.

Market reactions will be influenced by Eurocrat actions and messaging. Here Greece has given the officialdom a full four days, since Friday and Monday are holidays in non-Christian Orthodox Europe, to plan a response. No developed economy has defaulted on the IMF, but the flip side is IMF payment dates are loose. In fact, the Telegraph reports that it is a full six weeks after a non-payment before Greece would be declared to be in technical default, so the April 9 date is not an event horizon. Moreover, Greece was already up against an end-of-month deadline to conclude its bailout fund negotiations, so missing the payment in and of itself does not change the overall timing parameters. Note some analysts worry that there could be more serious knock-on effects. For instance, we have this dire take in the Ambrose Evans-Pritchard account:



Since it highly unlikely operationally, given the long weekend, for the Troika to approve the reforms and then get Eurogroup approval to release the bailout funds, it seems more likely that the IMF would determine what sort of short-term fudge it needed to engage in so as not to trigger a default under the EFSF. Again, since there were doubts that Greece would be able to make all of its March IMF payments, it may well be that some “extend and pretend” gambit has already been pre-planned...The leak will accelerate the bank run. One correspondent pointed out in February that anyone who was keeping deposits in Greek banks was a fool. Those who relied on the government statements that they were committed to remaining in the Eurozone will be forced to reassess, and if they have an operating brain cell, will drain their accounts.

MORE ANALYSIS, BUT NO CONCLUSIONS, AT LINK

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/04/greece-throws-away-one-eurogroup-memo-wins-submits-reforms-reaching-3-9-fiscal-surplus.html

One of the things we’ve stressed is that the Greek government’s repeated claims that it is submitting an anti-austerity reform package is untrue. The Greek government committed to achieving a fiscal surplus of 1.0% to 1.5% and has separately said it will always run a fiscal surplus. We have stressed that running a fiscal surplus is an economic dampener, and is even more damaging in a severely depressed economy like Greece.

One could argue that Greece still got a win in the Eurogroup memo of February, in which the agreement stated that the fiscal surplus target for 2015 would be reassessed in light of current conditions. Most observers took that to mean that the scheduled increase to 3.0% was officially off the table, and that that was an important success for Greece. Mind you, the 3.0% goal was widely recognized as unrealistic, but Greece was relieved of the need to make concessions to have it reassessed. But is also important to recognize that this was a qualified gain, since the 1.0%-1.5% target is still austerian.

Greece submitted a new version of its structural reform package yesterday. Peter Spiegel of the Financial Times received a copy and reported on it. His article focused on the state of play, that while the working relations between the two sides is improving, the creditor side still sees the draft as needing a lot of work before anyone can make a decision. The International Business Times reports that its sources say Spiegel’s recap of the latest document is accurate.

From my perspective, Spiegel held a real stunner back till close to the close of his article:



So if the Greeks are negotiating in good faith, they are committing themselves to more austerity within 48 hours of Tsipras telling the Greek parliament he would not agree to recessionary measures. I suppose that it technically accurate. He’s volunteered to implement them instead...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-29/ecb-nerves-fray-on-greece-as-supervisors-rile-central-bankers

Inside the five-month-old union between monetary policy and financial oversight at the European Central Bank, nerves are beginning to fray.

As officials under ECB President Mario Draghi seek to replace deposits fleeing Greek banks without blatantly financing the state, the efforts of the institution’s new Single Supervisory Mechanism to do its part are riling the old guard. Central bankers say they are concerned that overly-strict orders to lenders could worsen the Greek turmoil.

After building an institutional pillar that has supervised the euro area’s largest banks since November, the ECB is now facing one of the worst flare-ups in six years of sovereign-debt crisis. Officials must work out how to align their two policy arms in a way that can find a path through the Greek turmoil and set a template for handling banking turbulence to come.



Just as those U.S. policy makers in the 2008 financial crisis had to choose between the moral hazard of bailing out banks and the economic chaos of watching them fail, European officials are trapped between giving in to Greek cash demands and the political debacle of letting the country leave the euro...

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/yet-another-fiscal-fiasco-is-about-to-hit-the-stock-market-2015-04-02?siteid=YAHOOB

Just when it seemed that worries about debt and deficits were fading, the geniuses in Washington, D.C., are chomping at the bit to undo the little progress we’ve made.

President Obama and Congressional Republicans both have proposed budgets that would circumvent spending limits imposed after the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis.

Throw in an October deadline for a fiscal 2016 budget and another proposed increase in that very same debt limit, and Chris Krueger, senior policy analyst for Guggenheim Partners in Washington, warns we could have a full-blown “fiscal fiasco” by fall — just as the 2016 presidential election heats up.

“Any one of these issues is going to be complicated,” Krueger told me in a telephone interview. “You’re going to be adding all these [complications] to a situation that’s going to be very volatile.”

This could mark the end of a brief fiscal hiatus during which deficits have dropped dramatically...

MORE

EVIDENTLY, THE ZOMBIE "SEQUESTER" STILL LIVES...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-02/fannie-mae-to-begin-auctioning-defaulted-home-loans-to-investors



Fannie Mae will begin bulk auctions of mortgages, including some sales targeted for non-profit groups and small investors, as the company moves to cut the number of non-performing loans on its books.

“These transactions are intended to reduce the number of seriously delinquent loans that Fannie Mae owns, to help stabilize neighborhoods and to offer borrowers access to additional foreclosure prevention options,” Fannie Mae Senior Vice President Joy Cianci said in a statement Thursday. “Our goal is to market these loans to a diverse range of buyers.”

The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has overseen U.S. conservatorship of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae since 2008, is requiring the companies to reduce the number of severely delinquent loans on their books this year. In March, the agency released a set of new rules for the sale of troubled mortgages. Freddie Mac has auctioned about $2 billion in defaulted debt in three separate sales since last year. Fannie Mae’s first sale will happen “in the near future,” the company said. FHFA will require prospective investors to prove they’ve retained a loan servicer with a track record of handling delinquent debt, the agency said in a March 2 statement. Servicers also will have to offer aid to avoid foreclosures as a condition of sale.

Demand for soured mortgages has been increasing as Wall Street firms compete to buy loans at a discount after a real-estate market rebound. Investment firms including Lone Star Funds, Bayview Asset Management LLC and Selene Finance LP have been some of the biggest buyers of delinquent home loans.

[url=https://flic.kr/p/9B7MDM][img][/img][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/9B7MDM]
Easter Eggs, Kiev[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/people/76583692@N00/]Matt. Create.[/url], on Flickr

[url=https://flic.kr/p/nekTBM][img][/img][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/nekTBM]
Easter Color Explosion[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/people/76583692@N00/]Matt. Create.[/url], on Flickr

[url=https://flic.kr/p/e5XvHc][img][/img][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/e5XvHc]
Big Eggs (2)[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/people/76583692@N00/]Matt. Create.[/url], on Flickr

The first two were taken, not surprisingly, right around Easter. The third one was taken in September (!).

My Photostream @ Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattsh/

Last edited Fri Apr 3, 2015, 01:41 PM - Edit history (1)

I have the equipment (primitive) but have never had the time...

Is there a significance for the blue dye? I haven't ever seen so much blue before...

is that blue is one of the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

Of course, pysanky predates the current Ukrainian flag by many many years...

I have no patience to create such beautiful art

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”? Sure, I knew you could!

On Hitler's Birthday, US to Begin Openly Training Neo-Nazi Integrated Forces in Ukraine

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Robert Barsocchini

The US has long be openly coordinating with, advocating for, and supporting neo-Nazi and neo-Nazi integrated forces in Ukraine.

.....

In 2012, the EU officially designated Svoboda, the militant group led and co-founded by Tyahnybok, as an anti-democratic, “racist”, “anti-Semitic” group, and the World Jewish Congress designated it a “neo-Nazi” group.

In a leaked phone call, Nuland was caught determining who should assume the post of prime minister after the Ukrainian coup d’etat was completed, or, in Nuland’s term “midwifed”. She picked Yatsenyuk, and, indeed, he took the position after the coup. Nuland suggested that he should meet with Tyahnybok “four times a week”.

For his part, also exhibiting a Nazi-influenced outlook, Yatsenyuk later wrote on a government website:

“They lost their lives because they defended men and women, children and the elderly who found themselves in a situation facing a threat to be killed by invaders and sponsored by them subhumans. First, we will commemorate the heroes by wiping out those who killed them and then by cleaning our land from the evil”

Complete story at - http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/04/hitlers-birthday-us-begin-openly-training-neo-nazi-integrated-forces-ukraine.html

Bad jobs Friday to weigh on Monday

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102559607

U.S. stocks will likely plummet on Monday, especially with the disappointing March jobs report. Markets are closed on Good Friday, and the Monday afterwards is historically the S&P 500's worst post-holiday trading session. When the key monthly jobs report comes out on that Friday, stocks perform even more poorly.

More downward momentum will likely come from the March nonfarm payrolls report that showed an increase of just 126,000 jobs, far below Reuters' expectations of 245,000.



Futures turned sharply negative, with the Dow futures off more than 160 points, after the data release.

Analysis using the quantitative tool Kensho showed the three major indices declined much more on Mondays following the release of jobs numbers on a Good Friday.

MORE HAND-WRINGING AT LINK

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/04/03/56131000-women-arent-in-the-labor-force-a-record-high/

Corresponding with the national increase in Americans not in the workforce the number of women, African Americans, and Asians not in the workforce also experienced an increase in March. According to data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 56,131,000 million women were not in the labor force last month, an increase of more than 100,000 from February when 56,023,000 women were not in the workforce. The level is a record high, and the labor force participation for the month of March at 56.6 percent is a 27-year low, according to CNS News. In February that rate for women was 56.7 percent.

People not in the labor force are defined as those 16 years and older who are not employed and have not “made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week.” The unemployment rate for women did decline, from 5.4 percent to 5.3 percent.

The number of African Americans not in the labor force also experienced a slight increase in March to 12,202,000 from 12,122,000 in February. And the labor force participation rate also took a slight dip from 61.2 percent to 61.0 percent. African American unemployment also remained high at 10.1 percent, but did decline from 10.4 percent in February.

Asians experienced a slight uptick in the population not in the work force as well, with 5,363,000 in March, compared to 5,253,000 in February. And their participation rate also declined from 63.2 percent in February to 62.5 percent in March. Asian unemployment was down to 3.2 percent in March, from 4.0 percent in February.

The Latino population was one group that saw a decline in the number of people not in the workforce, with 13,236,000 in March, compared to 13,282,000 in February. The participation rate increased as well, with 66.3 percent in March compared to 66.2 percent last month. The unemployment rate increased from 6.6 percent to 6.8 percent in March.

And the unemployment rate for teens, ages 16-19, also experienced an increase in March up 17.5 percent, from 17.1 percent in February. Teenage males had a higher unemployment rate than their female counterparts 19.8 percent to 15.2 percent respectively. Indeed while teenage male unemployment jumped in March from 17.8 percent in February, females experienced a dip in employment from 16.4 percent in February.

Nationally number of people not in the labor force also reached a record high of of 93,175,000 and the unemployment rate remained at 5.5 percent.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/out-of-work-boomers-face-tough-job-market-2015-03-31?mod=MW_story_recommended_default&Link=obnetwork

The U.S. job market is on the mend but boomer workers are probably being left behind. Workers aged 45 to 70 who lose a job face steep challenges in finding new work — and even when they do find a job, it’s often at lower pay and with fewer benefits than they enjoyed before, according to a new survey by AARP, published Monday. Fully 50% of the people surveyed — respondents were 45- to 70-years old and had been unemployed at some point in the past five years — were still unemployed or had dropped out of the workforce, according to the survey of 2,492 people.

Twenty percent of those surveyed had two spells of unemployment in the previous five years and 23% had three or more bouts of unemployment in that time. (AARP didn’t release data on income and occupation.) “Long after the Great Recession, too many 50-plus workers who want to work are still unemployed, and once unemployed it takes them longer on average to find jobs than younger job seekers,” said Jo Ann Jenkins, president of AARP, in a news conference in Washington. That’s despite a relatively strong labor market. In 2014, job growth hit its fastest pace since the late 1990s, with the U.S. economy adding an average of about 250,000 jobs each month, according to data cited by Heidi Shierholz, chief economist with the U.S. Labor Department, in a presentation at the AARP conference.

Older workers do enjoy a lower unemployment rate: 4.4% for workers age 65 and over, compared with 5.5% for the U.S. market overall, according to February data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The problems start if and when they lose their jobs.

“Older workers are less likely to become unemployed, but if they are unemployed they are more likely to get stuck in unemployment for long periods,” Shierholz said. “We are potentially seeing the fingerprints of age discrimination here.”

When asked about barriers to finding work, 57% of the job seekers surveyed by AARP said “employers think I am too old.” But 71% pointed to a lack of available jobs and 60% said that being tied to a specific geographic area hampered their job search. Other factors also are in play, Shierholz said. “Older workers spend a long time developing specific skills and experience” — that means it can take them longer to find a match. Even if they find work, often it’s not as good a job as they left behind, according to the AARP survey. Fully 48% of the job seekers who had found work said they were earning less money than before. And older job seekers who found work were twice as likely to be working part time than older workers who had not been hit by recent unemployment. Among the re-employed older workers, 34% were working part time, compared with 16% among all workers age 45 to 70.

“A lot of these folks, although they are working which is certainly better than not working, they are doing so at jobs that are not as good as the jobs they had before they became unemployed,” said Gary Koenig, a co-author of the report and vice president of the AARP Public Policy Institute.

“The national statistics on unemployment are masking some serious challenges that older workers face,” Koenig said.

It’s likely that some older workers who move to part-time jobs are choosing to scale back and work less hard (the survey didn’t ask this). But some are not: 47% of the part-time workers surveyed said they would prefer a full-time job. The survey also found that 53% of the re-employed workers had switched occupations. Some of that might have been a job seeker’s decision to find more rewarding work, but, the report said, “In most cases, the change was probably necessary to find a job.”

There is some good news: 29% of the re-employed workers said they were earning more than they had before, and about 20% said their new job had better retirement and health benefits than their old job.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/03/opinion/paul-krugman-power-and-paychecks.html?_r=0

On Wednesday, McDonald’s — which has been facing demonstrations denouncing its low wages — announced that it would give workers a raise. The pay increase won’t, in itself, be a very big deal: the new wage floor is just $1 above the local minimum wage, and even that policy only applies to outlets McDonald’s owns directly, not the many outlets owned by people who bought franchises. But it’s at least possible that this latest announcement, like Walmart’s much bigger pay-raise announcement a couple of months ago, is a harbinger of an important change in U.S. labor relations.

Maybe it’s not that hard to give American workers a raise, after all.

Most people would surely agree that stagnant wages, and more broadly the shrinking number of jobs that can support middle-class status, are big problems for this country. But the general attitude to the decline in good jobs is fatalistic. Isn’t it just supply and demand? Haven’t labor-saving technology and global competition made it impossible to pay decent wages to workers unless they have a lot of education? Strange to say, however, the more you know about labor economics the less likely you are to share this fatalism. For one thing, global competition is overrated as a factor in labor markets; yes, manufacturing faces a lot more competition than it did in the past, but the great majority of American workers are employed in service industries that aren’t exposed to international trade. And the evidence that technology is pushing down wages is a lot less clear than all the harrumphing about a “skills gap” might suggest.

Even more important is the fact that the market for labor isn’t like the markets for soybeans or pork bellies. Workers are people; relations between employers and employees are more complicated than simple supply and demand. And this complexity means that there’s a lot more wiggle room in wage determination than conventional wisdom would have you believe. We can, in fact, raise wages significantly if we want to. How do we know that labor markets are different? Start with the effects of minimum wages. There’s a lot of evidence on those effects: Every time a state raises its minimum wage while neighboring states don’t, it, in effect, performs a controlled experiment. And the overwhelming conclusion from all that evidence is that the effect you might expect to see — higher minimum wages leading to fewer jobs — is weak to nonexistent. Raising the minimum wage makes jobs better; it doesn’t seem to make them scarcer. How is that possible? At least part of the answer is that workers are not, in fact, commodities. A bushel of soybeans doesn’t care how much you paid for it; but decently paid workers tend to do a better job, not to mention being less likely to quit and require replacement, than workers paid the absolute minimum an employer can get away with. As a result, raising the minimum wage, while it makes labor more expensive, has offsetting benefits that tend to lower costs, limiting any adverse effect on jobs. Similar factors explain another puzzle about labor markets: the way different firms in what looks like the same business can pay very different wages. The classic comparison is between Walmart (with its low wages, low morale, and very high turnover) and Costco (which offers higher wages and better benefits, and makes up the difference with better productivity and worker loyalty). True, the two retailers serve different markets; Costco’s merchandise is higher-end and its customers more affluent. But the comparison nonetheless suggests that paying higher wages costs employers a lot less than you might think. And this, in turn, suggests that it shouldn’t be all that hard to raise wages across the board.

Suppose that we were to give workers some bargaining power by raising minimum wages, making it easier for them to organize, and, crucially, aiming for full employment rather than finding reasons to choke off recovery despite low inflation. Given what we now know about labor markets, the results might be surprisingly big — because a moderate push might be all it takes to persuade much of American business to turn away from the low-wage strategy that has dominated our society for so many years...There’s historical precedent for this kind of wage push. The middle-class society now dwindling in our rearview mirrors didn’t emerge spontaneously; it was largely created by the “great compression” of wages that took place during World War II, with effects that lasted for more than a generation. So can we repeat this achievement? The pay raises at Walmart and McDonald’s — brought on by a tightening job market plus activist pressure — offer a small taste of what could happen on a vastly larger scale. There’s no excuse for wage fatalism. We can give American workers a raise if we want to.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-biggest-financial-market-events-this-week-2015-04-03?siteid=YAHOOB

MarketWatch rounded up the 10 most important news events of the past week. We focused on market-related issues, but we’ve included other subjects of interest to readers.

1. A framework with Iran

The United States, Iran and four other companies said in a joint announcement on Thursday that they had taken “decisive steps” toward a settlement that would end Western sanctions against Iran, in return for constraints on that country’s nuclear program, meant to keep it from developing nuclear weapons...

2. Indiana’s ‘freedom’

After Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed a “religious freedom restoration” bill into law, which requires the state to prove that there’s a “compelling interest” in forcing a person to do something, or not do something, that the person claims would violate their religious beliefs. The passing of the law caused a tremendous outcry by people concerned that it would enable people to discriminate against any group of people they like...

3. Warren Buffett and oil prices

After falling 50% from its peak in June through the end of 2014, crude oil for May delivery CLK5, -1.12% on the New York Mercantile Exchange was down 10% year-to-date through Thursday’s close at $49.53. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. CEO Warren Buffett BRK.B, +0.03% reduced his holdings of oil stocks during the fourth quarter, and there was a tremendous reaction by MarketWatch readers to Barbara Kollmeyer’s discussion on why Buffett may have made the wrong move.

4. Buffett wants you to buy Coke

Berkshire Hathaway has a 9.2% interest in Coca-Cola Co.’s KO, +0.20% common stock. The shares are down 3% this year, as soda sales have softened. But Michael Brush suggested that “recent insider purchases of Coke shares are a cue to add this stock to your portfolio.”

5. It’s earnings season. Again.

Investors can expect plenty of disappointment this earnings season, as S&P Capital IQ said on Thursday that the S&P 500’s first-quarter earnings are expected to decline 3% from a year earlier, with five out of 10 broad sectors showing declines. What may surprise many people is that the biggest silver lining this earnings season could be in the Financial sector, which is expected by analysts to show an 11% increase in earnings...

6. A market ‘enigma’

You’ve probably seen the endless warnings of a “bubble” for U.S. stocks, six years into a bull market. But Yale economics professor Robert Shiller calls the current market “a great enigma,” and discussed his views in detail with Anora Mahmudova.

7. How workers’ pay gets stolen

There are differences in opinion over how bad the problem of the widening pay gap. One cause of stagnant wage growth has been the overall weakness of the job market, despite the continual improvement in the U.S. unemployment rate...

8. Employment growth slows

The Department of Labor said on Friday that the U.S. economy added 126,000 jobs during March, which was the slowest growth of the workforce in 15 months. The national unemployment rate remained 5.5%. One bright spot in the report was a 0.3% increase in average hourly wages, with a year-over-year increase of 2.1%.

9. Four health-care takeout deals

Health care has had, by far, the strongest performance among the 10 S&P 500 SPX, +0.35% sectors over the past 10 years. The sector is this year’s strongest, with a 5.1% gain, compared with a gain of just 0.4% for the entire S&P 500 Index. There were four health-care merger deals announced on Monday, including three cash deals and one tender offer. The cash deals included an agreement by Horizon Pharma PLC HZNP, -0.15% to buy Hyperion Therapeutics Inc. HPTX, -0.04% Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.’s TEVA, +0.02% deal to purchase buy Auspex Pharmaceuticals Inc. ASPX, -0.03% and UnitedHealth Group Inc.’s UNH, -0.30% deal to acquire Catarmaran Corp. CTRX, +0.03%...

10. Retirement

In case you’re wondering if the United States is really headed toward a retirement crisis, or if you need help convincing friends or family members to save for retirement, read Elizabeth O’Brien’s discussion on why half of Americans will see their standard of living fall in retirement...

SUPPLEMENTAL LINKS AT ORIGINAL POST

From "Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris"

EASY GLOBAL WARMING FIX, I SUPPOSE...

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/What-If-An-Oil-Rebound-Never-Comes.html

Oil prices will remain subdued for the next 20 years.

That comes from a new policy brief from Stanford economist Frank Wolak, who says that a series of phenomena – surging U.S. shale production, a weakening OPEC, the shale revolution spreading globally, efficiencies in drilling, and more natural gas substitution for oil – will combine to prevent oil prices from rising above $100 per barrel anytime soon.

Wolak correctly identifies several trends that are already underway, several of which contributed to the 2014-2015 oil bust.

But there are very good reasons as to why the notion that oil prices will not rebound and instead stay in a moderate band of $50 to $60 per barrel over the next 20 years, as Wolak suggests, is a bit optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on your point of view). Wolak does offer some caveats for why his scenario for tepid oil prices may not play out, but they are treated more as outside risks rather than real possibilities....

http://247wallst.com/energy-business/2015/04/04/oil-rig-losses-slow-hedge-funds-add-to-long-positions/

In the week ended April 2, the number of rigs drilling for oil in the United States totaled 802, compared with 813 in the prior week and 1,498 a year ago. Including 226 other rigs mostly drilling for natural gas, there are a total of 1,028 working rigs in the country, down 20 week-over-week and down 739 year-over-year. The data come from the latest Baker Hughes Inc. North American Rotary Rig Count...The number of rigs drilling for oil fell by 696 year-over-year and by 11 week-over-week. The natural gas rig count declined by 11 week-over-week to a total of 222, and it is down by 94 year-over-year. The week-over-week decline in oil rigs has dipped in each of the past two weeks. Since October 10, when the number of oil rigs working in the United States totaled 1,609, the number of oil rigs has dropped by 807, or about 50.2%.

Crude prices rose about 2% last week, after bouncing off a low of just over $47 a barrel, to close out the week at around $48.50 on Thursday. The West Texas Intermediate (WTI) price for May delivery peaked at around $50.50 on Wednesday after the inventory report noted a sharp decline in gasoline supplies. Then, the agreement between Iran and a group of six countries including the United States over Iran’s nuclear program is viewed as potential adding to the current global glut of crude.

Hedge funds — under the Managed Money heading in the Commitments of Traders report from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — added about 10,000 long contracts on NYMEX crude and cut short positions by 24,000 contracts. As of March 31, there were about 325,000 long positions among the Managed Money players, compared with 149,000 short positions. Among the producers themselves, short positions outnumber longs, 336,000 to 210,000, and positions among swaps dealers are about the same. Both groups added about 17,000 short positions and about 10,000 long positions.

The states losing the most rigs last week were Texas (six), Louisiana (five) and Oklahoma (four). Alaska and Kansas each added one rig last week, and California added two.

Such a wonderful gift for the eyes and the soul! I will be planting them this weekend, if it stops raining....Siberian pansies can withstand most everything, and the violas are a hardy native.

They are the color of purple-blue, with yellow accent...like moonlit clouds at midnight, or the thunderstorms of August...it goes with my present mood, too.

Demeter needs Spring, more than most people. This year especially.

Watermelon in Easter Hay - Frank Zappa

This is the central scrutinizer... and some of the best guitar work around.

There are some naughty words in this one, so NSFW (first 1:25 only)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/03/atlanta-educator-cheating-scandal_n_7001214.html?utm_hp_ref=business&ir=Business

It isn't every day that people who abuse their positions of authority are held accountable for wrongdoing. Actually, to be statistically precise about it, it isn't any day that happens, really. But there is some good news on that front, for a change: This week, in an Atlanta courtroom, some malefactors finally got nailed...Yes, that's right, in the most recent scandal of its kind, a group of educators, including one principal and a number of school administrators, were caught altering the results of one of those daffy standardized tests that now subsume the lion's share of all pedagogical opportunities in America's public schools. Only this time, some are saying that this is a huge story and the biggest development in American education law since forever...And sweet fancy Moses, did they ever lay the wood to those folks they convicted! Per the AP: "Over objections from the defendants' attorneys, Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter ordered all but one of those convicted immediately jailed while they await sentencing. They were led out of court in handcuffs."

They took them out in chains! That's hardcore. That's humiliating. That's a sight that will make other people think twice before committing similar crimes -- it's what real accountability looks like. Or at least that's what a horrifyingly unequal justice system looks like when it plays out right before our eyes. Last year The New Yorker took a close look at the teachers and administrators involved in this scandal and, well, read the story for yourself and decide whether these are people who should be shackled; or if, rather, society should apologize for creating the terrible circumstances into which they and their students were thrown: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/21/wrong-answer

So while an Atlanta judge somehow found the courage to lock these educators up even before they've been sentenced -- again, not a thing that happens to white-collar criminals (with an emphasis there on "white&quot -- the justice system typically has little appetite for such accountability. These educators stumbled into one of the few areas of American life where a willingness to lower the proverbial boom on a corrupt actor actually exists. Let me give you a blueprint for how this sort of thing would have gone down if the scofflaws were high-flying bankers. What if you had a situation where, say -- I don't know -- a big bank laundered money for drug cartels and aided and abetted the transfer of funds between rogue nations and terrorist organizations...This is an actual thing that an actual bank -- HSBC -- actually did. They broke the sort of laws that, had someone like you or I done the same, we would be lucky to avoid being flayed alive in the town square for it.

But when an organization like HSBC gets caught engaged in these sorts of crimes, what happens next is that the authorities tasked with meting out accountability invoke something called "collateral consequences." Collateral consequences is an idea that Attorney General Eric Holder laid out near the end of a famous memo that everyone initially thought was going to be a new, punitive guideline to disciplining bad banks. But "collateral consequences" encapsulates this notion that the state has much more important things to consider than "holding people accountable for their actions." From that memo:



As a theoretical construct, this is fairly reasonable -- don't wreck the innocent on your way to punishing the guilty. But the way this precept has been applied has been much different. As Dealbook's Ben Protess and Jessica Silver-Greenberg reported, it's the principle that got HSBC largely off the hook: "State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world's largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system." As punishment for directly aiding some of the world's most noteworthy sociopaths, HSBC was forced to pay $1.9 billion in restitution. That sounds like a big number! But bear in mind that this penalty amounted to "little more than half of the $3.5 billion in pre-tax profits the bank earned in the third quarter of 2012," and just a sliver of the $16.8 billion the bank netted in 2011. HSBC also earned a deferred prosecution deal (where you don't get prosecuted as long as you super-duper promise to stop laundering money for drug cartels and terrorists), and was made to apologize. "Our bad," said the bank's spokesperson, probably. As Reuters reported, former U.S. Treasury official and University of Notre Dame Law professor Jimmy Gurule said that this settlement made "a mockery of the criminal justice system," and recommended that HSBC be subject to the same sort of treatment as these Atlanta educators...

THERE THEY GO AGAIN! CODDLING BANKSTERS!

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-judge-approves-settlement-commerzbank-151820812.html

A federal judge on Friday formally approved a settlement between the U.S. government and German bank Commerzbank AG (CBKG.DE) to resolve sanctions and anti-money laundering violations. Commerzbank struck a deferred prosecution deal with the Justice Department in March to settle charges that it illegally moved funds through the United States for countries like Iran and Sudan. The bank was also accused of failing to comply with anti-money laundering laws that require banks to detect and report suspicious activities in connection with a probe into accounting scandal at the Japanese company Olympus.

To resolve the case, the bank is required to collectively pay $1.45 billion (1 billion pounds) in penalties to the Manhattan District Attorney, the New York state Department of Financial Services, the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and the U.S. Department of Justice, with U.S. Attorneys' offices in New York and Washington, D.C. Both U.S. and New York prosecutors agreed to defer the criminal charges against the bank for three years as long as the lender abides by the terms of the deal. New York's state banking regulator also required the bank to terminate several employees and hire an independent monitor. Friday's approval of the Justice Department's deal with the bank by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell for the District of Columbia was the last step needed to clear the deal.

At the hearing, the judge said the violations were "very serious," but that a deferred prosecution deal was warranted due to the bank's cooperation with the government, its thorough internal investigation and its agreement to bolster its compliance programs.

Commerzbank is one of several large European banks who has been targeted by U.S. authorities in recent years for sanctions-related violations. Others have included BNP Paribas, Amsterdam-based ING, British banks Standard Chartered Plc, Lloyds TSB Bank Plc, HSBC, Barclays, and Switzerland's Credit Suisse AG. In this case, U.S. authorities say that Commerzbank concealed more than $250 million it moved through the U.S. financial system, primarily on behalf of Iranian and Sudanese customers.

WHICH RAISES THE QUESTION...WHAT KIND OF ILLICIT, IMMORAL, OR OTHERWISE PROSECUTABLE EVIL IS THE BANK DOING AT THE GOVERNMENT'S BEHEST?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/04/bill-black-hsbc-violates-sweetheart-deal-loretta-lynch-praises.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly published with New Economic Perspectives

HSBC got a sweetheart deal from the Obama administration. It laundered vast amounts of money for Mexico’s murderous Sinaloa cartel, helped bust sanctions for terrorists and mass murderers, and did not cooperate with the investigation. The U.S. Attorney in charge of the case, Loretta Lynch, refused to prosecute any of the HSBC bankers or even sue them individually. Instead, there was a pathetic non-prosecution agreement limited to HSBC. Lynch is accused of not contacting either of the primary whistleblowers in the case. The failure to contact one of the whistleblowers has already blown up in Lynch’s face as it became public a few months ago that the governments of the U.S. and Europe were provided many years ago with data on HSBC’s Swiss affiliate that show it was helping terrorists, genocidal leaders, the most violent drug gangs, and tens of thousands of wealthy people evade taxes. Lynch failed to bring that case or use any of the invaluable data provided by the whistleblower who copied the files from the Swiss bank. ...HSBC is failing to abide even by the pathetic sweetheart deal Lynch gifted HSBC’s criminal managers with... She failed even to do the most obvious move of extending the agreement with HSBC. The New York Times tells the tale in DealBook’s trademark incoherent fashion.



DealBook, of course, is not so impolite as to mention that the two clauses of the second sentence are contradictory and that HSBC is acting in bad faith and violating even the sweetheart agreement. HSBC’s violations were a heaven sent opportunity for Lynch to undo the massive embarrassment of the shameful deal she gave HSBC – one of the world’s largest and most destructive criminal enterprises. She could use the “watchdog” report damning HSBC to state the reality – HSBC’s managers have acted in bad faith and violated the deal that would have got them off with no real prosecution. Lynch could now prosecute HSBC and its senior managers for all the frauds – including the vast frauds she missed last time because of her failure to talk with the whistleblowers. And the chances of that happening closely approach zero because Obama chose Lynch to continue Holder’s shameful policies of refusing to prosecute bankers rather than change those policies.

... Holder’s refusal to prosecute the bankers has led to “repeat offenses on Wall Street.” Ponder that which DealBook religiously refuses to ponder – if fraudulent bankers find they grow wealthy from the “sure thing” of fraud with no risk of prosecution or even being sued, why wouldn’t they respond with “repeat offenses” that would create a “pattern of corporate recidivism?” DealBook is very sympathetic to Holder and Lynch. They are portrayed as “grappling” with the thorny problem that because senior bankers realize that under Holder and Lynch they can grow wealthy and powerful by leading “repeat offenses” they will do so even though they promise “dad” (Holder) or “mom” (Lynch) that they’ll never do it again. (DealBook hates to use the “f” word to describe elite bankers’ frauds.)

********************************************************

Here’s a hint to dad and mom if we presume for the sake of analysis that Holder and Lynch actually wished to “stem the pattern of corporate recidivism.” Put the senior officers in prison for at least a decade. Have the OCC and the NY State authorities yank HSBC’s (and Standard Chartered’s licenses to do business in the U.S.). If they cannot operate profitability without the license have the UK put them in receivership on a Friday, replace the managers with honest, skilled managers, and open the bank (complete with renewed U.S. licenses) on Monday. Then sue and bring enforcement actions against any culpable officers to “clawback” their compensation. We had no problem with recidivism when we got the Department of Justice (DOJ) to bring the S&L prosecutions. To my knowledge, of the over 1000 felony convictions in S&L cases designated as “major” by the DOJ, no senior S&L crook that we convicted played any material role in leading the three fraud epidemics that drove the 2008 financial crisis. The truth is that Holder and Lynch are taking no meaningful efforts against what even DealBook now admits is “the pattern of corporate recidivism” by our most elite bankers. The only thing they “grapple” with is the bad publicity arising from the stench of that “pattern” of the most despicable and harmful elite financial frauds in history.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/apr/02/hsbc-cast-iron-certain-breach-rules-executive

A senior HSBC executive has privately admitted that the bank is “cast-iron certain” to have another major regulatory breach in the future, and is struggling on multiple fronts to clean up its worldwide operations.

Global head of sanctions Lee Hale – whose recorded comments appear to contrast with public statements from HSBC’s chief executive that the bank has fundamentally transformed itself after recent scandals – said gaps remained in the bank’s compliance with sanctions policies and the screening of certain financial transactions.

Stuart Gulliver, HSBC’s chief executive since 2011, and Rona Fairhead, chair of HSBC North America as well as the BBC Trust, have repeatedly assured the UK parliament that the bank today is markedly different from when its Swiss branch facilitated large-scale tax evasion, or when its Mexican branch was found by US authorities to be complicit in multimillion-dollar money-laundering for drug cartels....

http://www.nationalmortgagenews.com/news/servicing/servicers-in-dojs-crosshairs-following-jpm-robo-signing-settlement-1047274-1.html

Mortgage servicers were supposed to have stopped robo-signing foreclosure documents when state and federal authorities cracked down on the practice years ago, but it seems some have not learned their lesson. While only JPMorgan Chase has been cited for recent robo-signing infractions, Clifford J. White 3rd, the head of a Justice program that oversees consumer bankruptcies, says he is seeing evidence of other servicers not following proper protocols when it comes to dealing with homeowners who have filed for bankruptcy. That could include not just robo-signing documents, but also failing to inform homeowners of mortgage payment increases or charging excessive loan-default fees. Such abuses violate a 2012 settlement between law enforcement officials and the nation's largest servicers and White is putting other servicers on notice that they too will be punished if they flout bankruptcy rules.

"Compared to where we were a few years ago, the banks are doing a better job," said White, the director the Justice Department's Office for U.S. Trustees. But, he added, "it is disappointing that, after all the years, the problems…are not completely rectified.

"

The $25 billion national mortgage settlement was supposed to put an end to the widespread practice of low-level employees at mortgage servicers rubber-stamping foreclosure documents without reviewing their accuracy. But earlier this month, JPMorgan Chase agreed to a $50.4 million settlement with the U.S. Trustee Program for robo-signing notices of payment changes in 2013 to borrowers in bankruptcy. Almost all of the restitution will be in refunds and credits to borrowers...For its part, JPMorgan Chase has maintained that it is not guilty of robo-signing documents because its own employees reviewed the accuracy of borrower information. Nonetheless, a third-party vendor electronically signed and filed the payment statements with the bankruptcy court and that, White said, is a violation of bankruptcy court rules.



MORE

https://livinglies.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/fdic-employee-quits-and-goes-public-with-complaint-against-chase-wamu-citi-and-two-law-firms/

... Eric Mains resigned from his employment with the FDIC. He had just filed a lawsuit against Chase, Citi, WAMU-HE2 Trust, Cynthia Riley, LPS, WAMU, and two law firms. Since he felt he had a conflict of interest, he believed the best course of action was to resign effective immediately.

His lawsuit, told from the prospective of a true insider, reveals in astonishing detail the worst of the practices that have resulted in millions of illegal foreclosures. Some of his allegations cast a dark shadow over claims of Chase Bank on its balance sheet, as reported to the public and the SEC and the reporting of both Chase and Citi as to their potential liability for wrongful foreclosures. If he is right, and he proves these allegations, much of what Chase has reported as its financial condition will vanish from its financial statements and the liability side of the balance sheets of both Citi (as Trustee) and Chase (as servicer and “owner’) will increase exponentially. This may well have the effect of bringing both giants into the position of insufficient reserve capital and force the government to take action against both entities. Elizabeth Warren might have been right when she said that Citi should have been broken into pieces. And the same logic might apply to Chase.

He has also penned the phrase “wild goose Chase” referring to discovery of the true creditors and processing of applications for modification of loans. And he has opened the door for RICO actions against the banks and individuals who did the bidding of the banks as well as the individuals who directed those actions.

His Indiana lawsuit is filed in federal court. He alleges that

1. WAMU was not the actual lender in his own loan

2. That the loan was part of an illegal scheme from the start

3. That his loan was subject to claims of securitization but that those claims were false

4. That the REMIC Trust was never funded and therefore never had the capacity to originate or buy loans

5. That the intermediaries never followed the law or the documents for securitization of his loan

6. That the REMIC Trust never did purchase his loan

7. That Citi was therefore “trustee” for an unfunded trust

8. That Chase never purchased the loans from WAMU

9. That Chase could not have been the legal servicer over the loan because the loan was not in the trust

10. That Chase has filed conflicting claims as to ownership of the loans

11. That the affidavit of Robert Schoppe, whom Mains worked for, as to ownership of the loans was false when it states that Chase owned the loans

12. That the use of WAMU’s name on the loan documents was a false representation

13. That his loan may have been pledged several times by various parties

14. That multiple payments from multiple parties were likely received by Chase and others on account of the Mains “loan” but were never accounted for to the investors whose money was being used as though it was the Banks themselves who were funding originations and a acquisitions of loans

15. That the industry practice was to reap multiple payments on the same loan — and the foreclose as though there was balance due when in fact the balance claimed was entirely incorrect

16. That the investors were defrauded and that foreclosure was part of the fraudulent scheme

17. That Mains name and identity was used without his consent to justify numerous illegal transactions in which the banks repeated huge profits

18. That neither WAMU nor Chase had any rights to collect money from Mains

19. That Citi had no right to enforce a loan it did not own and had no authority to represent the owner(s) of the loan

20. That the modification procedures adopted by the Banks were used intentionally to force the borrower into the illusions a default

21. That Sheila Bair, Chairman of the FDIC, said that Chase and other banks used HAMP modifications as “a kind of predatory lending program.”

22. That Mains stopped making payments when he discovered that there was no known or identified creditor.

23. The despite stopping payments, his loan balance went down, according to statements sent to him.

24. That Chase has routinely violated the terms of consent judgments and settlements with respect to the processing of payments and the filing of foreclosures.

25. That the affidavits filed by persons purportedly representing Chase were neither true nor based upon personal knowledge

26. That the note and mortgage are void from the start.

27. That Mains has found “incontrovertible evidence of fraud, forgery and possibly backdating as well.” (referring to Chase)

28. That the law firms suborned perjury and intentionally made misrepresentations to the Court

29. That Cynthia Riley “is one overwhelmingly productive and multi-talented bank officer. Apparently she was even capable of endorsing hundreds of loan documents a day, and in Mains’ case, even after she was no longer employed by Washington Mutual Bank. Mains cites to deposition of Riley in JPM Morgan Chase v Orazco Case no 29997 CA, 11th Judicial Circuit, Florida.

30 That Cynthia Riley was laid off in November 2006 and never again employed as a note review examiner by WAMU nor at JP Morgan Chase.

30. That LPS (now Black Knight) owns and operates LPS Desktop Software, which was used to create false documents to be executed by LPS employees for recording in the Offices of the Indiana County recorder.

31. That the false documents in the mains case were created by LPS employee Jodi Sobotta and signed by her with no authority to do so.

32. Neither the notary nor the LPS employee had any real documents nor knowledge when they signed and notarized the documents used against Mains.

33. Chase and its lawyer pursued the foreclosure with full knowledge that the assignment was fraudulent and forged.

34. That LPS was established as an intermediary to provide “plausible deniability” to Chase and others who used LPS.

35. That the law firms also represented LPS in a blatant conflict of interest and with knowledge of LPS fraud and forgery.


MORE...

NOT SURE HOW THIS WOULD WORK, EXACTLY...WHAT WOULD BANKERS HAVE LEFT TO DO? YOU ARE TAKING AWAY THEIR TOYS AND THEIR PLAYING FIELD!

http://www.bruegel.org/nc/blog/detail/article/1601-european-banking-supervisor-should-limit-banks-exposure-to-all-eurozone-governments-not-just-greece/



On March 25 Europe’s new watchdog for banks, The Single Supervisory Mechanism, imposed limits on Greek banks’ holdings of government debt. The measure has been criticised for putting undue pressure on the Greek government to come to terms with its official creditors. But it is an important step to increase Greek financial stability and the likelihood of Greece staying in the euro. The conditions are now perfect for the common supervisor to introduce exposure rules across the euro area, which would greatly increase the stability of monetary union.

In January, Greek banks held €15.5 billion of Greek government debt, of which €8.5 billion was short term T-bills. On top of this came €9.3 billion of loans given to the Greek state. These numbers compare with €30 billion of equity after accounting for €39 billion of provisions made against existing bad loans. Greek banks therefore remain highly exposed to the Greek state. Any banker should reduce exposure to clients talking openly about defaulting. Greek government debt is not risk-free, and the Supervisor rightly reminded banks to treat it accordingly.

Should the Greek government decide to default, Greek banks would make significant losses and be subject to a bank-run. Since Bagehot, the approach to such a situation has been to provide abundant liquidity to solvent banks and to close the insolvent ones. The ECB so far has been providing abundant funding, despite doubts about monetary financing. In the case of a default, the greater the risk of insolvency of Greek banks due to their exposure to the state , the more difficult it will be to make the case for funding.

If the euro area were a country, the watchdog would have closed the banks that became insolvent and put them in recovery and resolution. Other banks would quickly take over the business and the region would not suffer a shutdown of its financial system. Closing down large parts of Greece’s banking system would, however, be difficult as new banks are unlikely to enter the market due to the high legal and political uncertainties. The alternative option would be internal and external capital controls. Yet this is risky and undermines the cohesion of the euro area; such controls de-facto degrade the euro in Greece to a different currency. An exit from the euro area would then be almost inevitable...

ALL ROADS LEAD TO GREXIT

The Greek prime minister will travel to Russia to meet with his Russian counterpart to discuss bilateral relations between the two countries. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras plan to discuss economic ties next week as Greek seeks to pay off it’s International Monetary Fund creditors in order to free up frozen bailout aid.

"The agenda for the Russian-Greek summit talks includes a wide range of bilateral cooperation issues, including trade, economic and investment cooperation, cultural and humanitarian ties, as well as topical international issues," the Kremlin conveyed in a statement on Friday.

Russia, which is the largest importer of Greek goods, seeks to strengthen ties with its neighbor.

Greece's new left-wing government has said it will not seek aid from Moscow assuring its creditors that it will pay a loan tranche due on April 9 in order to unlock fresh funds, Greece’s deputy finance minister said on Friday.

“We strive to be able to pay our obligations on time,” Dimitris Mardas told Greece’s Skai TV. “We are ready to pay on 9 April.”

It will be Tsipras' first visit to the Russian capital after his leftist Syriza party swept to victory in a snap election in January. Reuters reported Friday that both leaders also discuss the European Union's sanctions against Moscow due to the crisis in Ukraine. The Russian government is seeking support from EU members to lift the sanctions, namely from Hungary and Greece. They will also talk about the Greece debt, although the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was too early to talk about any financial aid from Moscow to Athens. However, Greece's new left-wing government has in previous occasions said it will not seek aid from Moscow.

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Alexis-Tsipras-to-Meet-Vladimir-Putin-in-Moscow-Next-Week-20150403-0006.html. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

DEAR ZEUS, THESE GREEKS ARE QUICK TO THROW AWAY EVERY POINT OF LEVERAGE THEY HAVE!

MAKE ALL YOUR DEALS WITH PUTIN, TSIPRAS, AND GIVE UP ON THE EU!

4/4/15 Greek finance minister Varoufakis to meet IMF head, US Treasury officials in Washington

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis will travel to Washington to meet with International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde and unspecified US Treasury officials, the Greek government has announced.

Varoufakis will meet Lagarde Sunday evening and the Treasury officials Monday.

Greece is locked into difficult negotiations with its creditors over its bailout program and this has delayed the disbursement of a 7.2 billion euro ($7.9 billion euros) aid tranche and led to a cash crunch, forcing the government to tap into reserves to meet its obligations.

Earlier Saturday, deputy finance minister Dimitris Mardas told TV station Mega that Greece has the funds to repay a 450 million euro ($493.8 million) loan instalment to the IMF on April 9, but it is up to the government to decide whether to pay.

http://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2015/04/04/greek-finance-minister-visits-us-to-meet-imf-head



edit to add

4/4/15 Greek finance minister to discuss reforms with IMF chief
Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis will meet International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde in Washington on Sunday to discuss a set of planned reforms that Athens hopes will unlock much-needed bailout funds.

The unexpected meeting would be "an informal discussion" on Greece's reform plan, the finance ministry and the IMF said. Varoufakis is also expected to meet U.S. Treasury officials on Monday.

Greece is fast running out of cash and its euro zone and International Monetary Fund lenders have frozen bailout aid until the leftist-led government reaches agreement on a package of reforms.

more...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/04/us-eurozone-greece-imf-idUSKBN0MV0EE20150404

http://www.thestreet.com/story/13099555/1/chinas-new-infrastructure-bank-could-be-boon-for-private-equity-firms.html?puc=yahoo&cm_ven=YAHOO

A new $50 billion infrastructure bank being set up by the Chinese government will likely be a boon for private equity firms as well as major Chinese state-owned infrastructure builders and operators. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, expected to be operational by year's end and headquartered in Beijing, will pool funds from 31 prospective founding member countries. In total, these members have pledged around $50 billion to the bank.

Projects aided by Beijing's development bank would cover energy, transportation, telecommunications and water supplies, to name just some of the categories, in a 4.3 billion-person region anchored by China. Much of Asia is developing rapidly: An estimated $8 trillion will be spent on infrastructure projects between 2010 and 2020, the Asian Development Bank Institute estimates. Chinese officials have not specified exactly how projects led by the infrastructure bank, which was first proposed in 2013, will be funded. The United States regards China's creation as a rival to the similarly funded World Bank and International Monetary Fund, but with laxer standards. BY WHOSE DEFINITION LAXER?

But studies of other development banks with projects in Asia indicate that private equity has been a key funding source, and analysts in China indicate the new one would be no different as a way to spread risk and stoke interest in projects that might be slow to pay returns. The 67-member, Manila-based Asian Development Bank, for example, approved a health care private equity deal in May, committing $60 million to a fund run by New York-based OrbiMed Asia Partners for medical businesses in China and India. China's bank will work the same way, financial analysts predict. It might tap private equity partners to invest in toll roads in return for some of the tolls, or in power plants for a piece of the revenues earned from ratepayers, for example. Gains might accumulate slowly or modestly for the private equity partner, but the involvement of the development bank would cut their risk to near zero by guaranteeing a minimum return, co-investing or financing any debt.

"It seems like everyone's eager to be taking part, but we expect Chinese, Indian and Singaporean PE firms will be taking particular interest, China and Singapore benefiting greatly from stronger trading partners nearby and having reserves to spare, India interested in strengthening its own faltering infrastructure," said Matthieu David-Experton, founder of market research firm Daxue Consulting in Beijing and Shanghai.

I THINK THE IMF, WORLD BANK, ETC...ALL THOSE INSTRUMENTS OF US HEGEMONY, HAVE JUST BEEN PWNED...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-job-growth-cheap-gas-130906584.html

Why US job growth isn't boosting the economy and cheap gas isn't powering spending

Steady hiring is supposed to fire up economic growth.

Cheap gasoline is supposed to power consumer spending.

Falling unemployment is supposed to boost wages.

Low mortgage rates are supposed to spur home buying.

America's economic might is supposed to benefit its workers.

Yet all those common assumptions about how an economy thrives appear to have broken down during the first three months of 2015. The economic benefits that normally would flow after a full year of solid hiring have yet to emerge. Just 126,000 jobs were added in March, the government said Friday. Average weekly paychecks fell. Restaurants cut back on hiring because savings at the gas pump didn't lead to more dinner reservations. Builders and manufacturers each cut 1,000 workers from payrolls, thanks to tepid construction activity and so-so factory orders. Had Friday's report been released a few days earlier, "it would have been laughed at as a great April Fools' joke," said Gregory Daco, head of U.S. macroeconomics at Oxford Economics. THAT'S FUNNY, NOBODY'S LAUGHING....

The middling gains confirm evidence elsewhere of a broad economic slowdown. During the first three months of the year, the Atlanta Federal Reserve forecasts that the economy actually came to a standstill — failing to grow at all. Some of the first quarter's slowdown is no doubt due to an especially harsh winter. Yet nearly six years into the recovery from the Great Recession, the economy's muddled progress seems inescapable. A long-awaited breakout remains elusive, suggesting that the economy's direction has never been quite as simple as some analysts, politicians and bar stool philosophers would have it...Now, some analysts are pointing to factors that might have been downplayed or overlooked this year. Others are holding to their projections about the economy as it theoretically should be. After all, they reason, March may prove to be a hiccup akin to what happened in 2014, when a first-quarter slump was followed by a burst of growth in the ensuing months. Here are five factors that help explain why the U.S. economy isn't accelerating as you might expect.

— NASTY WEATHER

For parts of the United States, it felt like endless winter. The snowfall and frigid temperatures that lingered until the closing days of March can freeze economic growth. Construction crews built fewer homes: On a seasonally adjusted basis, builders broke ground on 17 percent fewer homes between January and February. Shoppers skipped visits to the mall and auto dealers, choosing instead to crank up the thermostat. Retail sales fell in January and February...If weather was a culprit, it might actually be an encouraging fact. It would mean that the economy remains fundamentally healthy — something that would become evident once the clouds lift and the sun emerges in spring. And that would be exactly what occurred last year.

Still, Swonk cautions that weather explains "some but not all" of the disappointing growth.

— STRONG DOLLAR

Many U.S. factories ship their wares around the world. But because the U.S. economy has fared better than its trade partners, U.S. factories are now at a disadvantage: America's relative health has helped drive up the dollar's international value. Goods from U.S. factories are about 20 percent costlier in Europe than a year ago, an increase that has dampened sales. So the U.S. economy's very strength has helped create a weakness. Which is why Maryland-based Marlin Steel has held off on plans to hire more metal workers. "It's not just me selling into Europe — it's all of my clients selling into Europe," said Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel. "They're all dealing with the pain."

— OIL'S SLICK MOVES

A barrel of crude oil costs under $50, having more than halved in price since June. This means wells are pumping out smaller profits, if not losses. When oil prices plunge and billions of dollars are at stake, oil companies tend to respond quickly to curb production. The number of active rigs has fallen 50 percent since October, according to Baker Hughes, the oilfield services company. This has led to layoffs, tighter budgets and fewer orders for equipment, all which hurt growth. Consumers, by contrast, have yet to respond to their savings from cheaper gasoline by spending much more. The lag means that the oil companies' cutbacks have yet to be offset by greater retail spending. So the economy has suffered all the downside, while the upside has yet to appear, said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust.

Tannenbaum predicts that consumers will eventually respond to gas prices, which are on average 33 percent lower than a year ago. When they finally do, the economy should perk up. RIIGHT...ALL THOSE UNEMPLOYED OIL WRANGLERS AND THEIR FAMILIES, AND THE BUSINESSES THAT THEY SPENT THEIR MONEY AT...WILL MAGICALLY HAVE MORE MONEY TO SPEND!

— MEAGER PAY RAISES

It's hard for consumers to spend more if their paychecks barely move. Average annual wage growth is stuck at a meager 2.1 percent even as the U.S. unemployment rate has tumbled over the past year to a near-normal 5.5 percent from 6.6 percent. And average hours worked declined last month, causing workers to earn even less than they did in February.

In theory, the hiring surge that occurred over the past year should lead to higher wages. After all, when the unemployment rate falls, it usually becomes harder for companies to hire capable workers, forcing them to offer better pay. But despite recent raises at McDonald's, Wal-Mart and other companies with lower-paid workers, there's little evidence that pay growth is accelerating.

It might be that the unemployment rate needs to fall even further. The Federal Reserve now says a normal economy should have a rate as low as 5 percent. But another possibility is that a sizable pool of workers remains available around the world, providing cheap labor that suppresses wage growth in the United States. In recent years, the global labor pool has added more than 3.5 billion working-age people from emerging economies. This increase can suppress U.S. pay growth, said Megan Greene, chief economist at John Hancock Asset Management.

"If you have that many jobs globally, it's hard to see why wages would be pushed up in a sustainable way," she said.

Consider the housing market. Since home prices bottomed in 2012, they've surged at a 13-1 ratio compared with raises, according to an analysis by RealtyTrac, a real estate information company. Without rising incomes to save for a down payment and cover monthly mortgage payments, most people who hope to own a home can't take advantage of historically low mortgage rates. This has led to sales running below last year's pace, according to the National Association of Realtors.

— GOING AUTOMATIC

The U.S. economy is undergoing seismic technological shifts. And many employers are finding automation preferable to hiring. A survey of Harvard Business School alumni released in September found that nearly half would rather invest in technology than hire or retain workers. This displacement can undermine the usual connection between falling unemployment and rising wages. Even smaller employers are turning to tech. Recent job ads failed to produce enough qualified applicants at Massachusetts-based retailer Dave's Soda and Pet City, which sells soda and pet food at seven locations. Founder Dave Ratner said his 150 employees earn on average $15 an hour. Raising pay would make him less competitive with national chains. So Ratner chose instead to automate his stores' ordering system.

"We're spending a ton of money trying to automate everything we do," he said. "Anywhere we can cut down on the amount of labor without sacrificing customer service. ...We've just never done that before. But it's really a necessity."

WHEN PROFITS ARE CAPPED, WORKERS WILL GET PAID...

Since officially, we haven't any...I have yet to see deflation in anything, however.

Candy bars, toilet paper, cans and bottles all getting smaller. Prices growing: a penny here, a nickel there...wages falling esp. in right-to-work-for-less states....

Upton Sinclair — 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/rules-global-banks-interest-rate-125126298.html

Efforts to protect the world's banks from interest-rate risks are bogged down, with an agreement on new rules likely to be delayed by at least several months, people involved in the discussions said. Basel Committee negotiators have reached an impasse on the rate-risk requirements, two people involved in the process told Reuters, with Britain and Germany seeking requirements for banks to increase their capital, whereas the United States and Japan argue that the issue should continue to be left to local regulators.

"As the discussions are going now, reaching an agreement looks difficult," one source said of the talks in the Swiss financial centre.

As part of the response to the 2007-2009 financial crisis, the Basel Committee of banking supervisors has been toughening rules such as requirements for stronger capital buffers to prevent or combat future crises. They are also planning rules to ensure banks can withstand sharp moves in interest rates, which are at historic lows around the world. The issue takes on particular significance as the Federal Reserve is expected to raise U.S. interest rates in coming months, with potential ripple effects for banks and markets worldwide.

But as the banking crisis fades in memory, only to be replaced by a lingering economic slowdown, governments are losing interest in financial reform and focusing on economic growth, despite warnings that dangers still lurk...

I JUST DON'T SEE THE US BEING STUPID ENOUGH TO RAISE INTEREST RATES IN THE FACE OF SO MUCH RISK

BUT I'VE BEEN WRONG BEFORE ON THE STUPIDITY OF US GOVT.



SINCE THIS IS A GOVERNMENT OF, BY AND FOR THE PEOPLE, THAT GOES TRIPLE FOR US GOVERNMENT.

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2015/04/04/man-accused-of-using-religion-to-pull-off-scam-gets-30-99-years-behind-bars/

A 53-year-old Detroit man accused of using religion to gain the confidence of people with mortgage problems and steal hundreds of thousands of dollars could very well spend the rest of his life in prison. Anthony Carta on Thursday was sentenced to 30 to 99 years in prison after earlier pleading guilty to seven felony charges. The case stemmed from an investigation by Attorney General Bill Schuette’s Corporate Oversight Division. Schuette’s office says Carta’s company Freedom By Faith Ministries has been ordered to pay more than $674,000 in restitution while Carta has been ordered to pay $400,000 in restitution himself.

“Anthony Carta scammed his friends and neighbors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars under the guise of faith,” Schuette said in a statement. “While we can never undo the damage done to these victims, we have secured them justice and can make sure they’re never victimized by Anthony Carta again.”

Carta was accused of taking money from more than 100 people who were led to believe he would help them with their mortages through his company. Authorities say Carta pocketed the cash, but did nothing to assist the customers. Charges in the case included false pretenses and conducting a criminal enterprise.

Citizens who believe they may have been victims of Carta’s Freedom By Faith Ministries mortgage assistance fraud are encouraged to file complaints with the Attorney General’s Office at www.michigan.gov/ag.

PRESIDENT OBAMA SHOULD BE SHAKING IN HIS SHOES ABOUT NOW....

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/04/01/45-Billion-Tax-Dollars-Goes-Missing-Afghanistan

...A new report from the office of John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), revealed that there’s virtually no way to know what happened to a large chunk of money the Defense Department spent in Afghanistan before 2010...

NOT EXACTLY NEWS, IS IT?

Last edited Sat Apr 4, 2015, 12:32 PM - Edit history (1)

This deserves its own thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/111666308

an extended hymn to the Island Nation, its adventurous sailors, and at the last, a metaphorical twist to the Great Creator of it all.
Got me through some tough years.

Unemployment Report Shows Labor Force Drop Outs At Record High

http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/unemployment-report-shows-labor-force-drop-outs-record-high-5728

The March unemployment rate remained the same, yet once again the BLS survey showed another huge increase in those not considered part of the labor force anymore and as a result the figure hit a record 93.175 million high. The official unemployment rate is 5.5%. The labor participation rate is also 62.7% and remains at 37 year record lows. From a year ago, the number of people considered not in the labor force has increased by over two million.

This article overviews and graphs the statistics from the Employment report Household Survey also known as CPS, or current population survey. The CPS survey tells us about people employed, not employed, looking for work and not counted at all. The household survey has large swings on a monthly basis as well as a large margin of sampling error. The CPS has severe limitations, yet, it is our only real insight into what the overall population are doing for work.

Those employed grew by only 34,000 this month. This is within the margin of error of the survey. From a year ago, the employed has increased by 2.535 million. This is beyond what is needed to keep up with increased population growth.

Those unemployed decreased by -130,000 to stand at 8,575,000. From a year ago the unemployed has decreased by -1.81 million. Below is the month change in unemployed and as we can see, this number normally swings wildly on a month to month basis.

Those not in the labor force increased by 277,000 persons and to bet 93,175,000. The below graph is the monthly change of the not in the labor force ranks. Those not in the labor force has increased by 2,098,000 in the past year.

The labor participation rate is at 62.7%, a -0.1 change from last month. Those aged 16 and over either working or looking for work is still at record lows, as shown in the below graph.

The low labor participation rate is not all baby boomers and people entering into retirement. Below is a graph of the labor participation rate for those between the ages of 25 to 54. These are the prime working years, so one cannot blame retirement and college on the declining participation rate. The 25 to 54 age bracket labor participation rates have not been this low since the 1980's recession and the rate stands at 80.9%.


MORE AND CONCLUSION: (THE GRAPHS WON'T REPRODUCE FOR ME--SEE LINK)

There is much more to the household survey yet the real news is the record breaking numbers of those not in the labor force. There is no way these figures could swell so much on just the baby boomers retiring.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-03/the-u-s-economy-is-still-missing-3-million-jobs

The U.S. Federal Reserve must answer a tough question in deciding when and how quickly to remove stimulus from the U.S. economy: How much more can employment grow before it becomes an inflationary force?

Judging from today's labor market data for March, we're still a few million jobs away from that point. The Fed can do plenty more to get people back to work.

Monthly U.S. Jobs Report

Today's employment report ended what had been the longest streak of outsized monthly job gains in a decade. Nonfarm employers added just 126,000 jobs in March, the Labor Department estimates, bringing the three-month average down to 197,000. The unemployment rate held steady at 5.5 percent, a few tenths of a percentage point above the level economists define as "full employment" -- the point beyond which the demand for goods and workers tends to stoke inflation.

The headline numbers, though, don’t fully reflect the damage still left over from the financial crisis and recession of 2008. Millions have left the workforce for lack of opportunities, or are stuck in part-time jobs. If the unemployment rate counted those people, it would be at least a couple percentage points higher, according to a recent analysis by the economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Levin.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/03/a-dip-or-a-blip-the-jobs-boom-went-bust-in-march/

It's been a tale of two recoveries the past few months. The jobs numbers said the economy was still strong, but all the other data said it wasn't. So you'd either think we were in the middle of one of the best years since the late 1990s if you only looked at the booming jobs reports, or in the middle of the same, slow slog we've been stuck in since the recession ended if you looked at consumer spending or durable goods orders. Well, after the economy added a disappointing 126,000 jobs in March, it's only looking like one recovery now. A weaker one.

It was pretty bad news all around. It wasn't just that the economy added 126,000 jobs in March when we'd been expecting 245,000. It was also that we lost 69,000 jobs in revisions to previous months. These tend to mark turning points in the economy. So the depressing message is that things weren't as good as we thought they were. Now, despite all this, the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.5 percent, but, again, this wasn't cheery news. It was because the labor force shrank by 96,000. The total number of hours people worked also fell. About the only silver lining—and it might not be much of one—is that wages increased 0.3 percent. But you have to squint really hard to see any kind of pattern in the two-steps-forward, two-steps-back wage growth that we've had the past year or so. Over the last 12 months, wages have still only risen 2.1 percent...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/what-went-wrong-in-the-march-jobs-report/389601/


The economy created just 126,000 new positions in March—barely half the predicted total—and the sinking price of oil may be to blame.

DON'T BREAK YOUR GUT STRAINING LIKE THAT FOR A REASON THAT DOESN'T REFLECT RIGHT BACK ON GOVERNMENT....

http://www.businessinsider.com/more-weak-jobs-reports-to-come-2015-4

Nobody saw Friday's jobs report coming....

(THERE'S AN UNDERSTATEMENT, RIGHT THERE!)

Deutsche Bank's Joseph LaVorgna says there's more weakness to come. LaVorgna also linked to a research report from last week. Here's an excerpt:



He also recalled two years of strong payrolls growth — 1999 and 1978 — when the gains were unusually weak in at least three months. But what tends to happen after these weak months, LaVorgna wrote, is that everyone suddenly becomes too pessimistic.

On Friday, the market reaction was swift and clear: Stock futures cratered, the dollar tanked and bonds surged. Even the Fed, which is now hinging its rate-hiking decisions on economic data, may get cold feet, LaVorgna wrote, though he still expects the Fed will raise rates in September.

And in the wake of any weak reports, here's what the Fed, and markets, should be focusing on, according to LaVorgna:


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/more-weak-jobs-reports-to-come-2015-4#ixzz3WRkmsbUT

SO, IT'S JUST OUR IMAGINATION, IS IT? PESSIMISM? GONNA JAWBONE THE ECONOMY OUT OF ITS DOLDRUMS?

I HAVEN'T HAD ANY EASTER GOODIES YET--IF I START, I MAY OVERDOSE IN FRUSTRATION AT THESE IDIOTS!

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-new-job-figures-and-secular-stagnation

...This news shouldn’t have come as surprise. In much of the country, it was an extremely cold winter—colder even than last year, when, for three months in a row, the payroll figure fell below two hundred thousand. A series of other economic indicators, such as retail sales and orders for durable goods, have also come in weak recently, indicating that the economy is stuttering. On Wall Street, some forecasters have reduced their estimates for first-quarter G.D.P. growth to 1.5 per cent, or even less.

That’s not very encouraging, but nor is it something we haven’t seen before. Weak first quarters have become a pattern. Since 2010, economists at Goldman Sachs point out, G.D.P. growth has averaged 0.6 per cent in Q1 and 2.9 per cent the rest of the year. If a similar pattern holds this year, and there isn’t any obvious reason why it shouldn’t, we will see a rise in job creation and G.D.P. growth in the coming months.

But can we expect healthy growth in jobs and incomes to become the norm? In a series of blog posts earlier this week, Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, presented the optimistic view, arguing that many of the “headwinds” that have been holding the economy back in the past five years, such as the housing bust, problems in the banking sector, and restrictive fiscal policy, are now receding. That has been the view of Bernanke’s successor, Janet Yellen, too, and it explains why the Fed has been talking about starting to raise interest rates.

However, there is also an alternative and less optimistic view of the future, popularized by Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary. According to Summers’s “secular stagnation” hypothesis, the U.S. economy may be forced to hobble along with modest growth, at best. Harking back to Keynes and Alvin Hansen, one of the early American Keynesians, Summers warns that modern economies face a chronic problem of deficient demand, or excessive saving (to economists, saving and demand are two sides of the same coin), which, absent some vigorous policy actions, will hold them back permanently. Replying to Bernanke, Summers wrote, “I continue to urge that it is worth taking seriously the possibility that we face a chronic problem of an excess of desired saving relative to investment.”

*******************************
In theory, the (LABOR) participation rate should pick up as the economy starts growing again and people become more optimistic. But this time it hasn’t happened. Almost six years after the recession officially ended, the participation rate sits at 62.7 per cent, which ties the lowest rate since the late nineteen-seventies, when far fewer women went out to work. Although some of the decline is probably due to secular factors, particularly the aging of baby boomers, there is no doubt that slow economic growth and a perceived lack of job opportunities have also played a big part in the process. And at this stage, it seems, many of the discouraged workers have dropped out of the labor force for good.

MORE---BETTER THAN THE REST FOR CONTENT AND ANALYSIS

http://economistsview.typepad.com/timduy/2015/04/air-pocket.html

The employment data hit an air pocket in March, in line with a variety of softer economic news in the first quarter. That said, it likely will have little near term impact on Fed policy; I anticipate they will tend to dismiss the number as expected volatility in the overall upward path of job growth.

Job growth was paltry 126k in March and, in what might be a greater indication that US labor markets are hitting an inflection point, the January and February numbers were revised downward. The three-month moving average dipped sharply, while the 12-month moving average is leveling out:

I CAN'T COPY THESE GRAPHS, EITHER...THEY HAVE DEFEATED MY EASY FIX!

OPINIONS OF VARIOUS FED RESERVE OFFICIALS FOLLOW:

Bottom Line: One jobs report is just that - one report. It needs to be placed in context of subsequent reports to confirm or deny the underlying trend, at least as far as policymakers are concerned. At the moment they seem content to believe the first quarter will be an aberration overall. If it looks like less of an aberration come June, they will be forced to push normalization plans back into the fourth quarter. This would make them less than happy.

Tuesday, Mar 31, 2015 06:11 PM EST
Barney Frank drops a bombshell: How a shocking anecdote explains the financial crisis
Ever wonder why we waited six years to get a decent economic recovery? This new revelation will disgust you


David Dayen

http://www.salon.com/2015/03/31/barney_frank_drops_a_bombshell_how_a_shocking_anecdote_explains_the_financial_crisis/


(snip)
The anecdote comes on page 295 of “Frank,” a title that the former chair of the House Financial Services Committee holds true to throughout the book. The TARP legislation included specific instructions to use a section of the funds to prevent foreclosures. Without that language, TARP would not have passed; Democratic lawmakers who helped defeat TARP on its first vote cited the foreclosure mitigation piece as key to their eventual reconsideration.

TARP was doled out in two tranches of $350 billion each. The Bush administration, still in charge during TARP’s passage in October 2008, used none of the first tranche on mortgage relief, nor did Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson use any leverage over firms receiving the money to persuade them to lower mortgage balances and prevent foreclosures. Frank made his anger clear over this ignoring of Congress’ intentions at a hearing with Paulson that November. Paulson argued in his defense, “the imminent threat of financial collapse required him to focus single-mindedly on the immediate survival of financial institutions, no matter how worthy other goals were.”

Whether or not you believe that sky-is-falling narrative, Frank kept pushing for action on foreclosures, which by the end of 2008 threatened one in 10 homes in America. With the first tranche of TARP funds running out by the end of the year, Frank writes, “Paulson agreed to include homeowner relief in his upcoming request for a second tranche of TARP funding. But there was one condition: He would only do it if the President-elect asked him to.”

Frank goes on to explain that Obama rejected the request, saying “we have only one president at a time.” Frank writes, “my frustrated response was that he had overstated the number of presidents currently on duty,” which equally angered both the outgoing and incoming officeholders.

Obama’s unwillingness to take responsibility before holding full authority doesn’t match other decisions made at that time. We know from David Axelrod’s book that the Obama transition did urge the Bush administration to provide TARP loans to GM and Chrysler to keep them in business. So it was OK to help auto companies prior to Inauguration Day, just not homeowners.

(snip)

Power and money to the wealthy.

I'm done...carry on!

Finally, a few blooms around the yard!

May you feel renewed this spring too, Demeter.