Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Russell Brand begins his financial education



READER: PLEASE CLICK THE REACTION BELOW - THANKS!

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Market support

Denninger:

... a handful of banks, most specifically Goldman Sachs, constitute the majority of NYSE trading volume... This "back and forth trade" between a handful of institutions is nothing more than the old "pump and dump" game that has been played in the OTC market forever - and almost always screws the individual investor.

This is no different than you and I selling a house back and forth between us repeatedly, each time at a higher price. We both appear to be geniuses as we're both making a "profit", right?

Well, no. One of us is destined to take a horrifying loss if we do not find a sucker to make the final transaction with.

I wondered what was keeping it all up. And sooner or later...

P.S. Rob Kirby strongly suspects that similar manipulation is going on in oil and gold - one kept up, the other down. (For an update on the latter, click on the goldcam.)

Sunday, April 05, 2009

The truth will out: it WAS fraud

William K. Black, a former financial regulator who has written a book about the U.S. Savings & Loan disaster of the 1980s, is unequivocal: the banks defrauded us. It was deliberate and with full knowledge of what they were doing. How much longer before mass trials are set up?

Worse, the regulators didn't even start to investigate until the crash, whereas in the S&L crisis they were making preparations even while the lenders were boasting of record profits.

Black says the current mess is at least 100 times worse than the S&L debacle. In his view, Bernard Madoff is a mere "piker", not even in the first rank of the fraudsters responsible for all this.

(htp: Michael Panzner)



Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Filling their boots and fleeing

Karl Denninger accuses the elite of delaying system rectification so they can get their money out of the country. Everybody who is anybody board the Gold Train, eh?

On a bad day, I'm half-inclined to believe it.

Friday, January 09, 2009

Conspiracy, not c*ck-up

Michael Hudson sees the current crisis as deliberately fomented, and intentionally anti-democratic (htp: Anon, on Nourishing Obscurity). The economic is now shading into the political:

What do you mean “failure”? Your perspective is from the bottom looking up. But the financial model has been a great success from the vantage point of the top of the economic pyramid looking down. The economy has polarized to the point where the wealthiest 10% now own 85% of the nation’s wealth. Never before have the bottom 90% been so highly indebted, so dependent on the wealthy. From their point of view, their power has exceeded that of any time in which economic statistics have been kept.

You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards; it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite.

Meanwhile, Karl Denninger makes his case for the perpetrators of the credit crunch to be penalized under the US laws relating to mail fraud.

Friday, December 12, 2008

The US economy in a nutshell

"Wages are sticky downward": American car workers are still trying to fight gravity, i.e. globalization's effect on wage rates. Denninger think that if it's anything more than a bargaining ploy, it will finish most of the US car industry.

And after them? Who else could have their work outsourced? White-collar workers should not look on unconcerned. Save money while you can, while wages are still ahead of minimum spending requirements.

Meanwhile, up in the clouds, a hedge fund manager has (allegedly) admitted his business was a fraud, losing $50 billion; more than three times the car-makers' bailout fund currently under discussion.

Friday, September 12, 2008

LHC update

Two days after the Mighty Marmite Machine was switched on, and no news. Did they run out of shillings?

Or is this proton recycling thing one of those EU subsidy scams? * At 11,000 circuits a second, the turnover would much quicker.

But I still think it's really a bunker and escape tunnel to Switzerland (geographically the sane eye in the mad mask of Europe). The elite have something to flee from, as Tony Sharp points out - this is the 14th consecutive year of accounts rejected by their own Court of Auditors.

So how WAS the £4.4 billion spent, exactly?

I don't care; I'm off to look for the Great Wine Lake. If they'll tell me where it is, I'll sign the bl**dy accounts myself. **

* "In 2003 German authorities combined isotopic evidence with paper-trail analysis to put a stop to a sophisticated scam, known as "carousel fraud". A group of German companies had been illegally claiming subsidies by trading EU-made butter to and from Estonia (then not a member of the EU). Each time a butter lorry crossed the border from Germany to Poland the companies were given EU export subsidies. Once in Estonia the butter was repackaged and labelled to make it look like it had originated in Estonia, heaved back on a lorry and hauled back to Germany. This time, the importers took advantage of a tax break on foreign imports aimed at increasing trade with prospective EU member countries, as Estonia then was. The investigation revealed that 22 out of 25 butter samples taken from Estonian-labelled butter imported into the EU were not Estonian. In at least one case, the isotopic ratios of hydrogen and oxygen in a butter sample indicated it could only have come from Ireland."

** Wasn't a Chinese emperor deposed for excessive taxation, which he used to create an artificial lake and fill it with wine so that ships could sail on it and have mock battles for his entertainment?