In a nearly $13 billion settlement with the US Justice Department in November 2013, JPMorganChase admitted that it, along with every other large US bank, had engaged in mortgage fraud as a routine business practice, sowing the seeds of the mortgage meltdown. JPMorgan and other megabanks have now been caught in over a dozen major frauds, including LIBOR-rigging and bid-rigging; yet no prominent banker has gone to jail.
Mt. Gox, the oldest Bitcoin exchange recently shut down, leaving customers high and dry. This Tokyo based company that once dominated the crypto-currency trading scene is reported to be filing for bankruptcy protection.
To the uninitiated, nothing may be more boring than economics, and especially international trade talks. I know that because 15 years ago I was one of the uninitiated.
My neighbor Warren doesn’t understand high finance. He’s a physician, and they’re usually pretty savvy market-wise, but he’s an exception. Yesterday over the back fence he was expressing alarm over what he thought was a dangerous development in the banking sector.
“It seems that the next big thing on Wall Street,” said Warren, “is banks and other players bundling rental housing into a new product, that is a rent-backed security, similar to the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that were at the root of the big crisis in ’09.”
The credit card business is now the banking industry’s biggest cash cow, and it’s largely due to lucrative hidden fees.
“Epic in scale, unprecedented in world history.” That is how William K. Black, professor of law and economics and former bank fraud investigator, describes the frauds in which JPMorgan Chase (JPM) has now been implicated.
“Are Adjunct Professors the Fast-Food Workers of the Academic World?” Is this provocative, evocative, adversarial, or emblematic of an age of casino capitalism, corrupted Admin Class, and a see/ hear/speak no evil compliant groups of people who are in the 20 percent?
Governor Jerry Brown and his staff are exchanging high-fives over balancing California’s budget, but the people on whose backs it was balanced are not rejoicing. The state’s high-wire act has been called “the ultimate in austerity budgets.”
As gold broke below the psychologically important level of $1,200 an ounce late in December of 2014, the mainstream financial media burst with headlines like this one from Marketwatch: “Gold’s Safe-Haven Role is Over.” The Nobel prize winning economist from the New York Times, Paul Krugman, penned a wicked missive on the ‘barbarous relic’ by invoking Key
