-
How Unelected Regulators Unleashed the Derivatives Monster and How It Might Be Tamed
It was not the highly visible acts of Congress but the seemingly mundane and often nontransparent actions of regulatory agencies that empowered the great transformation of the U.S. commercial banks from traditionally conservative deposit-taking and lending businesses into providers of wholesale financial risk management and intermediation services. — Professor Saule Omarova, “The Quiet Metamorphosis, How […]
-
Hell in a Very Small Place
Hell: the creditor of last resort Note: While I was writing this I thought about many things I experienced and read. Then as I was posting this the title of a book I read many years ago came to mind. Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. Fall was and remained a sympathizer with […]
-
Unbecoming American: Risky Business
Risk and fraudulent mutuality Thirty years ago, having just successfully completed a international congress on environmental consciousness and mass media which I had organized on behalf of the Deutsche Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, a legacy of an early German pharmaceutical magnate, the inventor of the mouthwash Odol; I was asked to prepare the framework for a subsequent […]
-
Defusing the Derivatives Time Bomb: Some Proposed Solutions
The “protected class” is granted “safe harbor” only because their bets are so risky that to let them fail could crash the economy. But why let them bet at all? This is a sequel to a January 15 article titled “Casino Capitalism and the Derivatives Market: Time for Another ‘Lehman Moment’?”, discussing the threat of […]
-
Casino Capitalism and the Derivatives Market: Time for Another “Lehman Moment”?
Reading the tea leaves for the 2024 economy is challenging. On January 5th, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said we have achieved a “soft landing,” with wages rising faster than prices in 2023. But critics are questioning the official figures, and prices are still high. Surveys show that consumers remain apprehensive. There are other concerns. On December 24, 2023, Catherine […]
-
“The Great Taking”: How They Can Own It All
“’You’ll own nothing and be happy’? David Webb has gone through the 50-year history of all the legal constructs that have been put in place to technically enable that to happen.” [Oct 2 interview titled “The Great Taking: Who Really Owns Your Assets?”] The derivatives bubble has been estimated to exceed one quadrillion dollars (a […]
-
More Banks to Fail? Not in North Dakota
U.S. banks are again in the crosshairs. Standard and Poor’s has downgraded five new middle-tier banks and put three others on negative outlook. This follows sweeping downgrades earlier in August by Moody’s, which cut credit ratings on 10 banks and placed four of the 15 largest U.S. banks on review for possible downgrade. As with the banks going into […]
-
Another Look at the Financial Transactions Tax
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash A small financial transactions tax could correct a number of maladies in our economic system, from the federal debt crisis to the widening wealth divide to the rampant financialization of the economy, while eliminating taxes on income and sales. The debt ceiling crisis has again brought into focus the […]
-
A Certain Form of Thieving
It looks like 2008 all over again. Economic and financial mismanagement feature in scorching, consuming brilliance. The culpable, bungling banksters, have returned with their customary, venal incompetence. In the customary script, they habitually seek the role of the public purse to socialise their losses. Along the way, they will avoid richly deserved prison sentences, lie […]
-
The Looming Quadrillion Dollar Derivatives Tsunami
On Friday, March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed and was taken over by federal regulators. SVB was the 16th largest bank in the country and its bankruptcy was the second largest in U.S. history, following Washington Mutual in 2008. Despite its size, SVB was not a “systemically important financial institution” (SIFI) as defined in […]
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish