Archive for the ‘Wall Street’ Category
Tuesday, March 24th, 2020
This is a fascinating and informative video interview by Bill Moyers of a long time congressional staffer, Mike Lofgren, who is the author of two books,’The Party is Over’ and ‘Anatomy of the Deep State’. The interview was done in 2014 discussing the Deep State which was alive and well even long before Donald Trump appeared on the scene in 2016. Some of the subjects that are discussed are Eisenhower’s warning against the military industrial complex, the influence of Wall Street and Silicon Valley in Washington, The FISA court, and how NASA is also deeply involved. So fascinating to learn how they all nefariously work together in The Deep State. Nancy
The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight
511,202 views Apr 15, 2014
Posted in 2014, Administrative State, American History, Big Government, Congress, Corporate Cronyism, Deep State, Defense Budget, Democrats, Dept of Defense, Election 2020, Elitism, FBI, Financial Meltdown, FISA Court, Globalists, GOP, Government Waste and Fraud, Industry, Intelligence, Liberalism, Libertarians, Lobbyists, National Defense, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Political Corruption, Politics, Progressive Movement, Resistance, State Department, Technology, Transparency, Tyranny, Videos, Wall Street | No Comments »
Monday, March 16th, 2020
This is an incredibly shocking video of a talk that Adam Andrzejewski, founder and CEO of openthebooks.com gave regarding waste, fraud, corruption and abuse in all levels of our government at a Hillsdale College event . He names all those that are involved in the abuse of our taxpayer money. This is not a Republican or a Democrat issue as the corruption is widely spread throughout our government. If this level of corruption is allowed to continue, our country will be greatly damaged. Please share with all your contacts. Nancy
VIDEO – CULTURE OF CORRUPTION IN THE DEPTH OF THE SWAMP
Adam Andrzejewski | The Depth of the Swamp
Posted in Administrative State, Bernie Sanders, Big Business, Big Government, California, Congress, Conservatism, Constitution, Corporate Cronyism, Corruption/Crime, Culture Rot, Deep State, Defense Budget, Democrats, Dept of Defense, Donald Trump, Economy, Election 2020, Elitism, Entitlements, GOP, Government Regulation, Government Waste and Fraud, Healthcare, IRS, Joe Biden, Liberalism, Lobbyists, Medical/Drugs, Military, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Pensions, Political Corruption, Politics, Social Security, Spending, State Department, State Governments / Deficits, Taxation, Taxes, Transparency, Videos, Wall Street | No Comments »
Thursday, February 20th, 2020
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Bloomberg’s Business Nanny
The Sustainability Accounting board is a stalking horse for progressive politics.
The Editorial Board February 18, 2020
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink recently made a splash by threatening to vote against corporate managers who don’t disclose an array of non-financial information as directed by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board. But what is SASB, and where is this all going?
Michael Bloomberg founded SASB in 2011 as a shadow regulator for his policy agenda. SASB claims to be modelled on the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), a nonprofit with the imprimatur of the Securities and Exchange Commission that regulates how corporations account for and disclose financial information.
SASB’s nine-member standards board issues guidelines for what kinds of sustainability information corporations should report to investors. Yet while financial accounting is more or less uniform for all businesses, SASB standards vary across 77 industries. Tracking the minutia will provide a lifetime job guarantee for corporate auditors.
Consumer banks have to disclose how many “no-cost retail checking accounts” they provide “to previously unbanked or underbanked customers.” Investment houses must document loans that incorporate “environmental, social and governance” factors. Casinos have to report the share of employees who work where smoking is allowed.
SASB requires businesses in most high-paying industries to disclose workforce diversity. “Hiring foreign nationals to compensate for shortages in local talent can create risks related to perceived social implications,” SASB says. That’s interesting because Mr. Bloomberg’s private media company, Bloomberg LP, reports 17% of its U.S. workers are foreign nationals while 10% are black or Latino. Under SASB this means Bloomberg needs to “improve employee engagement and work-life balance” to recruit more minorities and women.
Some standards would require a wild goose chase, literally. Restaurants must report their share of cage-free eggs and pork produced without gestation crates. Why not grass-fed beef and hormone-free chicken—or vegan meals, as the outfit Vegan Finance suggested in a public comment posted on SASB’s website?
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Posted in Big Business, Big Government, Bloomberg, Election 2020, Elitism, Globalists, Government Regulation, Liberalism, Political Correctness, Progressive Movement, Social Justice, Wall Street | No Comments »
Saturday, January 4th, 2020
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Will the ’20s Roar Again?
We are overdue today for another wave of creative thinking about everything—politics, the culture, education and morality. But this time, hold the roaring.
By Daniel Henninger January 2, 2020
If time travel were real, nearly half the U.S. population—and all the Democrats—would ship Donald Trump back to the Roaring ’20s, an era presumably more in sync with his instinct for creative outrage. But voters then would have been as startled by Mr. Trump’s political personality as voters now. Despite the dawn of the Flapper Age, their taste in presidents ran more toward Warren G. Harding, elected in 1920, whom no one would mistake for Donald J. Trump.
Harding’s campaign slogan was “a return to normalcy.” When he died in office 2½ years later, his successor was the uber-normal Calvin Coolidge, who won election on his own in 1924.
Other than the American presidency, though, the 1920s were in no way normal. In the U.S. and much of the world, the decade witnessed a remarkable economic and industrial boom. If we’re going to compare the ’20s then to the ’20s being born this week, an economic footnote is in order about a main cause of the first “roaring.”
When the 16th Amendment created the personal income tax in 1913, the original top marginal rate was 7%. By 1920 it was 77%, in part because of the Great War.
At the urging of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, Congress enacted tax cuts in 1921, 1924 and 1926, with the top rate falling in middle-decade to 25% on incomes above $100,000. Prosperity followed, just as it did after the Kennedy tax cuts in the 1960s, Reagan’s reductions in the 1980s, and today—undeniably—after the Trump corporate rate cut of 2017. As in the 1920s, the consumer is again king, with disposable income available to buy an innovative economy’s extraordinary array of new products.
Pessimists say the Great Depression silenced the 1920s’ roar. It did, and some of its lessons deserve mention.
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Posted in American History, Congress, Donald Trump, Election 2020, Federal Reserve, History, Legal Issues, Liberalism, President Ronald Reagan, U.S. Presidents, Wall Street | No Comments »
Friday, November 15th, 2019
This is an article you have to read as there is so much new information in it regarding China and how our financial markets are being used to finance China’s expansion of their technological and military advances. Nancy
IMPRIMIS – HILLSDALE COLLEGE
Why and How the U.S. Should Stop Financing China’s Bad Actors
October 2019 • Volume 48, Number 10 • Roger W. Robinson, Jr.
Roger W. Robinson, Jr.
Chairman, Prague Security Studies Institute
Roger W. Robinson, Jr. is president and CEO of RWR Advisory Group and co-founder and chairman of the Prague Security Studies Institute. He earned a B.A. from Duke University and an M.A. from George Washington University. He served as senior director of international economic affairs on President Reagan’s National Security Council, where he was the principal architect of the secret economic and financial strategy that proved decisive to the defeat of the Soviet Union. He later served as chairman of the Congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Prior to his government service, he was a vice president in the international department of the Chase Manhattan Bank.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on September 9, 2019, during a conference on the topic, “Understanding China.”
In the early 1980s, I served on President Reagan’s National Security Council. Prior to my time at the White House, I was a vice president at Chase Manhattan Bank, in charge of its USSR and Eastern Europe division. It was my job to assess the creditworthiness of the countries in that part of the world, and I had come to realize that the Soviet Union had relatively modest hard currency income—and that what little it had came largely from the West.
In 1982, the Soviets had an empire stretching from Havana to Hanoi, but their hard currency revenue totaled only about $32 billion a year—roughly one-third the annual revenue of General Motors at the time. They were spending about $16 billion more annually than they were making, with the funding gap—the USSR’s life support—being financed by Western governments and banks.
President Reagan had long believed that the Soviet Union was economically vulnerable, because he knew it lacked the entrepreneurship, technological dynamism, and freedoms that are the prerequisites of a strong modern economy. And when he learned that we in the West were financing its brutal regime, he committed to slowing, and ultimately terminating, that flow of discretionary cash.
Our European allies had a completely different approach. Their belief in Ostpolitik, as the Germans called it, presupposed that commercial bridge-building would lead to geopolitical cooperation. If the West would offer financing and trade with the Soviets, peace and prosperity would result. Meanwhile, the Soviets were using the proceeds of Western loans, hard currency revenue streams, and technological support to build up their military, expand their empire, and engage in anti-Western activities.
The Reagan administration drew the line on a project called the Siberian Gas Pipeline, a 3,600-mile twin-strand pipeline that stretched from Siberia into the Western European gas grid. If completed, not only would it become the centerpiece of the Soviets’ hard currency earnings structure, but Western Europe would become dependent on the USSR for over 70 percent of its natural gas, weakening Western Europe’s ties to the U.S. and leaving the continent open to Kremlin extortion. Moreover, the pipeline was being financed on taxpayer-subsidized terms, since France and Germany viewed the USSR as a less developed country worthy of below-market interest rates.
The U.S. at the time had a monopoly on oil and gas technology that could drill through permafrost—which we had developed for Alaska’s North Slope—and we imposed oil and gas equipment sanctions on the USSR and European companies that were helping to build the Siberian pipeline. At one point, despite the strain it placed on relations with our NATO allies, we closed the U.S. market entirely to companies that continued to supply the pipeline project over our objections. Four of the six affected companies went under within six months, and Europeans woke up to the fact that they could do business with us or the Soviets, but not both.
As a result of these efforts we capped Soviet gas deliveries to Western Europe at 30 percent of total supplies, delayed the first strand of the pipeline by years and killed the second strand, and eventually helped dry up the bulk of Western credits to the USSR. In a secret deal, we also persuaded the Saudis to pump an additional two million barrels of oil per day and decontrolled prices at the wellhead in this country, knocking oil prices down to about $10 a barrel—significant because for every dollar decrease in the price of a barrel, the Soviets lost some 500 million to one billion dollars. In short, the Soviet Union never recovered from these economic and financial blows. It defaulted on some $96 billion in Western hard currency debt shortly before the total collapse of the Soviet empire.
The story with China today has certain similarities, but with one big difference: the U.S. has been playing the role of the naïve Europeans. Since adopting the Kissinger policy of engaging with China in the 1970s, our government has operated on the assumption that economic and financial relations with China would lead Beijing to liberalize politically. And since 2001, when we backed China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, the pace at which we have given China access to our best technology and capital and trade markets has accelerated. Yet China has shown no signs of embracing individual freedoms or the rule of law.
Instead, with our support, the Chinese have launched a massive campaign to become the world’s leading superpower. We know about the “Belt and Road Initiative,” a strategic undertaking to place huge segments of the world under China’s influence or outright control. We know about “Made in China 2025,” a strategy designed to dominate key technology sectors—from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to hypersonic missiles and 5G. We know about China’s practice of forced technology transfers: requiring American companies to share their trade secrets and R&D in order to do business in China. We know about China’s predatory trade practices. We know many of these things only because President Trump has brought them to the forefront of national attention, for which he deserves credit. And the ongoing tariff war is a good thing in the sense that we’ve finally begun to take a stand.
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Posted in American History, Banking, Big Business, Big Government, China, Congress, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, France, Germany, Globalists, Globalization, Legal Issues, Liberalism, Military, Missle Defense, President Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Russia, Transparency, U.S. Presidents, Wall Street | No Comments »
Sunday, July 28th, 2019
One of the most hopeful and inspiring speeches I’ve ever heard. I guarantee you won’t regret the 20 minutes it takes.
Senator Hawley’s keynote at the National Conservatism Conference
Posted in A Force for Good in the World, American History, Big Government, Congress, Conservatism, Constitution, Cultural Marxism, Culture Rot, Deep State, Democracy, Democrats, Donald Trump, Economy, Education, Election 2020, EU ( European Union), Europe, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, France, Free Enterprise, Globalists, Globalization, GOP, History, Illegal Immigration, Indoctrination of students, Legal Immigration, Liberalism, Multiculturalism, Nationalism, One World Government, Open Borders, Patriotic, Political Correctness, Political Corruption, Progressive Movement, Radical Left, Religion, Religious Freedom, Same Sex Marriage, Social Issues, Social Justice, U.N., Videos, Wall Street, Words of Wisdom | No Comments »
Saturday, July 13th, 2019
The Secure Act which is before the U.S. Senate for a vote can impact the taxes of many of us and our children and grandchildren. Take the time to look at this information and contact your senators if you would like to comment on how you want them to vote on this bill. Nancy
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Congress Is Coming for Your IRA
The Secure Act would upend 20 years of retirement planning and stick it to the middle class.
By
Like grave robbers opening King Tut’s tomb, Congress can’t wait to get its hands on America’s retirement-account assets. The House passed the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act, known by the acronym Secure, in May. The vote was 417-3. The Secure Act is widely expected to pass the Senate by unanimous consent. While ostensibly helping Americans save for retirement, the bill would actually reduce the value of all retirement savings plans: individual retirement accounts, 401(k)s, Roth IRAs, the works.
The main problem with the Secure Act is that it eliminates the stretch IRA,the fixed star in the financial-planning firmament since 1999. The stretch IRA lets savers leave their retirement accounts to children, grandchildren or other beneficiaries. Under current rules, the recipients can parcel out the required minimum distributions from the accounts over the course of their actuarial lifetimes. Payouts tend to be relatively small for children but grow in size over the decades until the inherited IRA might comfortably provide for the child’s retirement through the power of tax-deferred compounding. A parent could die with the knowledge that, whatever vicissitudes their children might experience in life, they won’t have to worry about retirement.
Congress wants to kill this. The Secure Act gives nonspouse beneficiaries 10 years to pull out all the money in an IRA. The effect would be to make more of an IRA subject to higher taxes sooner, as distributions are made in supersize chunks. As much as one-third more of an inherited IRA would get gobbled up by taxes than under current rules. When the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expires in 2025, taxes will rise across the board. If President Trump signs the Secure Act into law, the stage will be set for a taxpocalypse sometime in the next decade.
In exchange for its windfall under the Secure Act, Congress will push back the age at which retirees must take their first required minimum IRA distributions from 70½ to 72. This isn’t the deal American savers were promised when they made contributions to their IRAs the last 20 years. Before, the optimal approach was for savers to leave their IRAs to their children or grandchildren and stretch the payouts over decades.
Posted in Big Government, Congress, Legal Issues, Pensions, Senator, Seniors, Taxation, Taxes, Ted Cruz, Transparency, Wall Street | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 12th, 2018
Maxine, the fox guarding the hen house. Stephen Moore gives us a sweet bit of history regarding the financial crisis. Don’t you just love those Dems and their pious self righteousness ! Nancy
www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/nov/11/why-wall-street-must-get-ready-for-maxine-waters/
WASHINGTON TIMES
Why Wall Street Must Get Ready for Maxine Waters
By Stephen Moore • Stephen Moore, a columnist for The Washington Times, is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book with Arthur Laffer is “Trumponomics.”
November 11, 2018
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California appears a lock to become the next chairman of the powerful Financial Services Committee. Ms. Waters is pledging to be a diligent watchdog for mom and pop investors, and recently told a crowd that when it comes to the big banks, investment houses and insurance companies, “we are going to do to them, what they did to us.” I’m not going to cry too many tears for Wall Street since they poured money behind the Democrats in these midterm elections. You get what you pay for.
But here we go again asking the fox to guard the hen house.
Back during he the financial crisis of 2008-09, which wiped out trillions of dollars of the wealth and retirement savings of middle-class families, we put the two major arsonists in charge of putting out the fire. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Chris Dodd of Connecticut were the cosponsors of the infamous Dodd-Frank regulations. Readers will recall that good old Barney resisted every attempt to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and said he wanted to “roll the dice” on the housing market. That worked out well.
Meanwhile, Mr. Dodd took graft payments in the form of low-interest loans from Countrywide, while greasing the skids for the housing lenders in these years. Instead of going to jail or at least being discharged dishonorably from Congress, he wrote the Dodd-Frank bill to regulate the banks.
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Posted in American History, Banking, Big Government, Congress, Democrats, Dodd/Frank Financial Regulations, Election 2018, Fannie and Freddie, Financial Meltdown, Government Regulation, Liberalism, Lobbyists, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Political Corruption, Politics, Regulations, Transparency, Wall Street | No Comments »
Monday, August 6th, 2018
I, for one, object ! How about you ? Nancy
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Facebook to Banks: Give Us Your Data, We’ll Give You Our Users
Facebook has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about customers as it seeks to boost user engagement
August 6, 2018
The social media giant has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking account balances, as part of an effort to offer new services to users.
Facebook increasingly wants to be a platform where people buy and sell goods and services, besides connecting with friends. The company over the past year asked JPMorgan Chase JPM -0.31% & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup Inc. C -0.14% and U.S. Bancorp USB +0.08% to discuss potential offerings it could host for bank customers on Facebook Messenger, said people familiar with the matter.
Facebook has talked about a feature that would show its users their checking-account balances, the people said. It has also pitched fraud alerts, some of the people said.
Data privacy is a sticking point in the banks’ conversations with Facebook, according to people familiar with the matter. The talks are taking place as Facebook faces several investigations over its ties to political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which accessed data on as many 87 million Facebook users without their consent.
One large U.S. bank pulled away from talks due to privacy concerns, some of the people said.
Facebook has told banks that the additional customer information could be used to offer services that might entice users to spend more time on Messenger, a person familiar with the discussions said. The company is trying to deepen user engagement: Investors shaved more than $120 billion from its market value in one day last month after it said its growth is starting to slow.
Facebook said it wouldn’t use the bank data for ad-targeting purposes or share it with third parties.
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Posted in Banking, Cyber Security, Economy, Free Enterprise, Industry, Legal Issues, Politics, Privacy Rights, Small Business, Social Media, Technology, Transparency, Wall Street | No Comments »
Thursday, June 7th, 2018
THE WEEKLY STANDARD
Regulatory Release
May 24, 2018
The partial repeal of Dodd Frank could have gone farther, but it’s a good start.
In 2010, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and President Obama signed it into law. The legislation, more than 2,000 pages long, imposed cumbersome regulations on financial institutions, which the bill’s authors took to be responsible for the 2008 financial crisis and the consequent recession. The law also established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, an advocacy agency for consumers that, to no one’s surprise, quickly turned into a Naderite anti-corporation attack dog.
Complicated laws passed in the middle of a crisis are guaranteed to make things worse in the long run, and so Dodd-Frank proved. The Democrats, who controlled both House and Senate in 2010, took the blinkered view that the financial crisis had come about exclusively thanks to the unregulated excesses of the private-sector financial industry; regulating that industry was, for them, the only rational response. The law thus deprived the market of liquidity in the middle of a recession—with predictable results.
The Democrats ignored two important points. First, the role of the federal government itself: Government-backed mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae—then as now boasting powerful allies in Congress—encouraged precisely the sort of risky and foolish loans that led directly to the housing-market collapse and attendant financial meltdown. Second, what many of the investment banks did was already illegal: “cooking the books,” to use the popular term. To that extent, it was an enforcement problem, not a regulatory one. Greater regulation of investment banks largely missed the point—though it allowed powerful Democrats in Congress to blame someone other than themselves for the crisis. (The bill’s authors, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Barney Frank of Massachusetts, both had a long history of encouraging Fannie and Freddie’s worst practices.) One of the law’s further follies is that it shackled small and mid-sized banks with the same provisions despite the fact that they had nothing to do with the financial crisis.
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Posted in Banking, Big Government, Congress, Democrats, Dodd/Frank Financial Regulations, Elizabeth Warren, Fannie and Freddie, GOP, Government Regulation, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Progressive Movement, Regulations, Wall Street | No Comments »