Posts Tagged ‘New York Stock Exchange’

Signs of the Times News for Sat, 15 May 2010

Saturday, May 15th, 2010

 

SOTT Focus: Satire: Leaked Reports Declare Obama’s Unwritten Novel Wins the Lost Man Booker Prize

Book

Ignatious O’Reilly
Sott.net
Fri, 14 May 2010 08:18 EDT

Obama book

© unknown
Obama shares ideas for his new book with critics

London – Leaked reports reveal that on Wednesday, début Hawaiian novelist Barack Hussein Obama II, 49, will win the Lost Man Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, with "No Peace for the wicked!". It will be the first time in it’s 41-year history that an unwritten book will claim the award.
He will receive a designer bound copy of his novel (once it is published) at a gala dinner in London and can expect not only overnight literary fame but also a sharp rise in much needed popularity he has lost in the run-up to House of Representatives and Senate elections.
The Lost Man Booker Prize is a one-off prize to honour the books which missed out on the opportunity to win the Booker Prize in 1970.
To pre-empt any potential controversy, Booker organizers have announced that they have a written certificate dated 1970 that clearly shows Obama had an intention to write a book about peace one day. The organizers have stated however, that this certificate will never be released to the public and they should just take their word for it.

Read More…

Best of the Web: The Financial Oligarchy Reigns: Democracy’s Death Spiral From Greece to the United States

Vader

David DeGraw
AmpedStatus Report
Mon, 10 May 2010 04:45 EDT

New York Stock Exchange

As the Economic Elite continue their plunder, the people in Greece riot and the big banks score yet another big blow against the people of the United States.
Democracy throughout the world is under attack. Many people can make the argument that our democracy here in America is only an illusion, but even the illusion of democracy is crashing down. Tragedies are currently playing out across the world on an epic scale. Unprecedented economic and environmental catastrophes have become the norm. Billions of people, the overwhelming majority of humanity, have been sentenced to a slow death due to a concentration of wealth and resources within humanity’s economic top 0.5%. Ultimately, short-sighted greed has proven to be humanity’s most severe disease.
I: Democracy Vs. Oligarchy: Lessons from History
The experiment known as democracy is devolving into fascism before our eyes; the "iron law of oligarchy" is once again asserting itself. From the Founding Fathers on, we have known that you cannot have a concentration of vast wealth and Democracy at the same time – and we currently have the greatest concentration of wealth in the history of the United States. As former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both."

(Comments) Read More…

Best of the Web: Are the bombers Al-Qaeda, the CIA or Israel?

Blackbox

Christopher King
Redress.cc
Fri, 14 May 2010 05:40 EDT

© Sott.net

Christopher King argues that it is likely that the American CIA – or Israel acting on its behalf – is responsible for recent atrocities in Iraq, in order to extend and consolidate the occupation, just as it is probable that the Times Square bomber was, wittingly or otherwise, acting for the CIA or Israel, to justify the US military intervention in South Asia.
On 10 May there were more than two dozen bombings and shootings in Iraq that killed at least 85 people and injured at least 300.These were coordinated attacks, clearly by the same organization.
The American response to this and other recent attacks is to delay plans for withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Obama’s election promise was to withdraw troops from Iraq by May this year. Not only is that obviously not going to happen but we learned after his election that "withdrawal" meant leaving 50,000 troops as ‘trainers’ as well as 4,500 special forces and tens of thousands of para-military contractors.
Now, the US is reviewing even the slipped drawdown schedule out of concern for the security of the Iraqi people. Considering the million killed by the US and the four to five million refugees created by them I would not have thought that they would be bothered by fewer than one hundred dead in a little internal trouble. It might be said to be an improvement on US outcomes.
As these attacks are providing the US with an excuse for delaying even its token withdrawal however, we need to think about who is behind them.

(Comments) Read More…

SOTT Focus: Connecting the Dots: Plane Madness Redux and Looking-Glass Weather

Phoenix

Sott Editors
Sott.net
Sat, 08 May 2010 21:05 EDT

Mother Nature revealed its awesome beauty this month as our Big Blue Marble continues to open up in breathtaking fashion. The sight of Eyjafjallajokull coming to life, while beautiful to behold, may set a terrifying trend as volcanoes wake from their slumber and impact our climate in a sudden and system-changing way. Perhaps it is not without meaning that the first significant volcanic eruption to draw people’s attention to our rapidly cooling climate took place in IceLand… the harbinger of IceWorld?
April witnessed deluge after deluge of torrential rains bringing flooding, landslides and misery to many in the Americas and China where large cities are underwater. Arctic-cold weather in the least expected places, more frequent earthquakes and hailstorms of unusual ferocity have extended winter in the northern hemisphere into May, raised seabeds and pelted homes with ice.
Dramatic and significant though it was, did the volcanic eruption in Iceland really merit the unprecedented shutdown of European airspace for a week, with knock-on effects across the world? Who made the call, and on what basis? These are important questions to ask because Eyjafjallajokull’s wandering ash cloud now apparently holds the near-term fate of international air travel in its plume, so to speak. With cosmic bombardment underway and magma erupting from the oceans’ floor, wrangling over the immediate fiscal losses detract from necessary preparations for the approaching ice age.
As always, the stresses and strains in our environment are mirrored back at us in the political and social events of which we play a more immediate role. We will analyse the mysterious circumstances surrounding the Polish government air crash, the political and corporate back-room manipulation of "Tea Party" activism and the psychopaths on Wall Street’s engorgement upon humanity through economic terrorism. We’ll observe how The Big Brother Surveillance State and naked scanner racketeering expand unchecked, and consider the geopolitical chess moves behind the Kyrgyz and Thai "Red Shirt" revolutions.
And, of course, we couldn’t connect the dots in April without acknowledging the high strangeness of the global UFO wave…

(Comments) Read More…

SOTT Focus: An Odd Rash of Stabbings

Eye 2

Jason Best
Sott.net
Mon, 10 May 2010 16:38 EDT

It had been so long since I checked in with a "mainstream" news site, I decided to visit cnn.com this morning for fun.
An article that caught my eye was (All bold print in this article will be my added emphasis):

Minnesota man charged with stabbing 29 pigs (5-5-2010)

A drunk man stabbed 29 pigs in Minnesota, hurting them so badly they had to be slaughtered, according to charges filed against the man by police.
Curtis Adams, 23, said he did not remember stabbing the pigs, but did not deny having done it, Detective Matt Owens said in court papers. (continues)

It turns out the man was drunk, but something struck me as odd. I decided to search via Google News to see what other stabbing events, if any, had occurred recently.

(Comments) Read More…

Read More SOTT Focus / Read More Best of the Web

Latest World News

U.S. News

More Recent News

UK & Euro-Asian News

More Recent News

Around the World

More Recent News

Big Brother

More Recent News

Axis of Evil

More Recent News

Middle East Madness

More Recent News

Grand Theft Economics

More Recent News

The Living Planet

More Recent News

Health & Wellness

More Recent News

Science & Technology

More Recent News

Our Haunted Planet

More Recent News

Don’t Panic! Lighten Up!

More Recent News

Signs of the Times News for Sat, 15 May 2010

FindLaw | seems there is corroborating financial data from the 28 crash

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

To assert in these times that wall street and the bankers are intent to defraud us of our lively hood.

Verndewd

Footnotes

[ Footnote 1 ] McCann had brought suit in 1933 against the New York Stock Exchange, its officers and members, the Better Business Bureau of New York, and a large number of other persons, seeking thirty million dollars damages for conspiracy in restraint of trade. He represented himself in this extensive litigation, and personally brought appeals to the Circuit Court of Appeals and to this Court. See McCann v. New York Stock Exchange, 2 Cir., 80 F.2d 211; Id., 2 Cir., 107 F.2d 908; Id., 309 U.S. 684 , 60 S.Ct. 807.

[ Footnote 2 ] Felony, it may not be irrelevant to note, is a verbal survival which has been emptied of its historic content. Under the federal Criminal Code all offenses punishable by death or imprisonment for more than a year are felonies. Section 335 of the Criminal Code, 18 U.S.C. 541, 18 U.S.C. A. 541.

[ Footnote 3 ] The ruling of the Patton case, namely, that the provisions of the Constitution dealing with trial by jury in the federal courts were ‘meant to confer a right upon the accused which he may forego at his election’, 281 U.S. at page 298, 50 S.Ct. at page 258, 70 A.L.R. 263, was expressly recognized and acted upon by Congress in the Act of March 8, 1934, c. 49, 48 Stat. 399, 18 U.S.C.A. 688, which empowered the Supreme Court to prescribe rules of practice and procedure with respect to ‘proceedings after verdict, or finding of guilt by the court if a jury has been waived, or plea of guilty, in criminal cases in district courts of the United States ….’ (Italics added.) Compare H. Rep. No. 858, Sen. Rep. No. 257, 73d Cong., 2d Sess.

[ Footnote 1 ] United States v. Young, 232 U.S. 155 , 34 S.Ct. 303.

[ Footnote 2 ] Cowl v. United States, 8 Cir., 35 F.2d 794; United States v. Rowe, 2 Cir., 56 F.2d 747.

[ Footnote 3 ] Kellogg v. United States, 2 Cir., 126 F. 323.

[ Footnote 4 ] Calnay v. United States, 9 Cir., 1 F.2d 926; Chew v. United States, 8 Cir., 9 F.2d 348.

[ Footnote 5 ] Pandolfo v. United States, 7 Cir., 286 F. 8; Foshay v. United States, 8 Cir., 68 F.2d 205.

[ Footnote 6 ] See Durland v. United States, 161 U.S. 306, 315 , 16 S.Ct. 508, 511.

[ Footnote 7 ] Tincher v. United States, 4 Cir., 11 F.2d 18; Bradford v. United States, 5 Cir., 129 F.2d 274.

But see Dyhre v. Hudspeth, 10 Cir., 106 F.2d 286; Stapp v. United States, 5 Cir., 120 F.2d 898.

[ Footnote 1 ] Compare Glasser v. United States, 315 U.S. 60, 84 , 85 S., 62 S.Ct. 457, and Jacob v. New York, 315 U.S. 752 , 62 S.Ct. 854.

[ Footnote 2 ] This is admirably stated by Judge Learned Hand below, 126 F.2d at pages 775, 776.

FindLaw | Cases and Codes

Wealthy CEOs Conspire to Influence Elections for GOP

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Wall Street CEOs have formed a group to take advantage of new fundraising possibilities opened up by the Supreme Court decision to end the ban on corporate election spending.

February 8, 2010  |  

Just three weeks ago, the United States Supreme Court ended a ban on corporate spending in political elections, drawing intense criticism for the ruling’s potential to erode the democratic process.

This week, a group that includes some of the wealthiest Republican CEOs on Wall Street have formed a group to take advantage of new fundraising possibilities for the GOP.

The Supreme Court ruling could potentially allow the group, called the American Action Network, to take unlimited contributions from corporations for use in political campaigns.

“This administration as well as Citizens United [the Supreme Court ruling] — when you combine the two the prospects for funding these types of efforts are greatly enhanced,” said Norm Coleman, one of the group’s organizers.

Coleman called the group an "action tank" or a "think-and-do tank."

Members of the groups include:

Kenneth Langone, a former director of the New York Stock Exchange who defended a $139.5 million bonus in 2004 and has been sued for “extortion, defamation, fraudulent misrepresentation."

Robert K. Steele, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, helped Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson make his former bank one of the biggest beneficiaries of the $700 billion bailout.

Norm Coleman, who supported President Bush’s 2005 bankruptcy bill.

Ed Gillespie, whose lobbying firm represents Enron, Citibank, Bank of America, Zurich Financial, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

According to the New York Times, the group also includes:

"Republicans who are donors, board members or both include Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi; Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida; Mr. Barbour a former chairman of the Republican Party; Fred Malek, an investor and official in the Nixon and first Bush administrations."

During his State of the Union address, President Obama looked at the Supreme Court justices sitting before him and said, "With all due deference to the separation of powers, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections."

 

http://www.alternet.org/economy/145578/wealthy_ceos_conspire_to_influence_elections_for_gop

America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Telegraph UK
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:36 EST

image

© Associated Press
People gather across the street from the New York Stock Exchange in New York Oct. 24, 1929. Thousands of investors lost their savings in the worst stock market crash in Wall Street history five days later.

December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began.
The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters.
Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism.
The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy – - just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens.
Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody’s Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
Judges are finding ways to block evictions. One magistrate in Minnesota halted a case calling the creditor "harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive". We are not far from a de facto moratorium in some areas.
This is how it ended between 1932 and 1934, when half the US states declared moratoria or "Farm Holidays". Such flexibility innoculated America’s democracy against the appeal of Red Unions and Coughlin Fascists. The home siezures are occurring despite frantic efforts by the Obama administration to delay the process.
This policy is entirely justified given the scale of the social crisis. But it also masks the continued rot in the housing market, allows lenders to hide losses, and stores up an ever larger overhang of unsold properties. It takes heroic naivety to think the US housing market has turned the corner (apologies to Goldman Sachs, as always). The fuse has yet to detonate on the next mortgage bomb, $134bn (£83bn) of "option ARM" contracts due to reset violently upwards this year and next.
US house prices have eked out five months of gains on the Case-Shiller index, but momentum stalled in October in half the cities even before the latest surge of 40 basis points in mortgage rates. Karl Case (of the index) says prices may sink another 15pc. "If the 2008 and 2009 loans go bad, then we’re back where we were before – in a nightmare."
David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said it is remarkable how little traction has been achieved by zero rates and the greatest fiscal blitz of all time. The US economy grew at a 2.2pc rate in the third quarter (entirely due to Obama stimulus). This compares to an average of 7.3pc in the first quarter of every recovery since the Second World War.
Fed hawks are playing with fire by talking up about exit strategies, not for the first time. This is what they did in June 2008. We know what happened three months later. For the record, manufacturing capacity use at 67.2pc, and "auto-buying intentions" are the lowest ever.
The Fed’s own Monetary Multiplier crashed to an all-time low of 0.809 in mid-December. Commercial paper has shrunk by $280bn ($175bn) in since October. Bank credit has been racing down a hair-raising black run since June. It has dropped from $10.844 trillion to $9.013 trillion since November 25. The MZM money supply is contracting at a 3pc annual rate. Broad M3 money is contracting at over 5pc.
Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said the Fed is baking deflation into the pie later this year, and perhaps a double-dip recession. Europe is even worse.
This has not stopped an army of commentators is trying to bounce the Fed into early rate rises. They accuse Ben Bernanke of repeating the error of 2004 when the Fed waited too long. Sometimes you just want to scream. In 2004 there was no housing collapse, unemployment was 5.5pc, banks were in rude good health, and the Fed Multiplier was 1.73.
How anybody can see imminent inflation in the dying embers of core PCE, just 0.1pc in November, is beyond me.
Mr Rosenberg is asked by clients why Wall Street does not seem to agree with his grim analysis.
His answer is that this is the same Mr Market that bought stocks in October 1987 when they were 25pc overvalued on Shiller "10-year normalized earnings basis" – exactly as they are today – and bought them at even more overvalued prices in 2007, long after the property crash had begun, Bear Stearns funds had imploded, and credit had its August heart attack. The stock market has become a lagging indicator. Tear up the textbooks.

 

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/200849-America-slides-deeper-into-depression-as-Wall-Street-revels

A Media Failure Compounds The Financial Failure:

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

The Press Is Still Missing The Story Of Fraud and Economic Decline Ahead

by Danny Schechter

Global Research, October 8, 2009

 

We know that Wall Street has not learned much from the crash it helped instigate. We know that our government, whatever its stated desire to clean up the markets and reform the financial behemoths, lacks the willingness and perhaps the clout to rein in the real power centers. We are not sure if they have been “captured” by them, or just lack the guts to take on institutions and individuals that helped fund their rise to power.

But do we know that, even now, much of our media, despite the sheer volume of coverage may be missing the real story? Do we know that if we want to find missing facts and the real context we have to turn away from the failed media system that never really investigated the failed financial system

The Project on Excellence on Journalism that examines media trends released a study charging “that the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression has been covered in the media largely from the top down, told primarily from the perspective of the Obama administration and big business, with coverage reflecting the concerns of institutions more than the lives of everyday Americans.”

Why is this? I asked several journalists in making a film and writing a book about the financial crisis as a crime story. A number agreed that the media itself is “embedded” in the culture and narratives of Wall Street, like reporters embedded in Iraq. They lack the ability to be critical of the sources they rely on. They bring little perspective and context to their work.

Max Wolff who works in the financial industry, and also teaches about it, shared his view as we stood outside the New York Stock Exchange:

“I think the media mostly did unpaid press releases for various businesses looking to sale financial products and while that made sense given the advertising driven the media, they became cheerleaders instead of critics and that took of the table out of the discussion a critical voice that would have help people realize what was going on, stop it before it got too big and deal with the crisis in a way that was relatively transparent, democratic and broadly beneficial as opposed to quite and partial and very muddy and unclear.

I pressed him to reflect on why, “It seems like there is still a tendency to amplify rumors on one hand, and then trry to reassure that everything is ok while at the same time tell us that the world is about to end…”

“Well we get a wild volatility, with a blind set of stories, everything is fine, nothing to see here, remain calm or if you don’t do x,y and z or tomorrow life as we know will come to a stretching hold, water won’t come out of your fosse, electricity won’t come on, and you will live the rest of your life regretting that you just didn’t listen to me when I told you what I wanted. And that is a bad way conduct a social discussion. And it makes the public more scared and quite reasonably less confident in leadership whether that is corporative leadership, politicians or the media itself.”

The tendency on the left is to bash the frenzy of free market hype on Fox but not look to carefully at other channels and mainstream media outlets.

Often, even when they run good stories, they don’t probe deeply enough. The Naked Capitalism blog offered up one recent example in the New York Times:

“The New York Times features a generally very good piece, “Buyout Firms Profited as a Company’s Debt Soared,” by Julie Creswell that falls short in one important respect: it fails to call a prevalent and destructive practice of private equity firms by its proper name….

George Akerlof and Paul Romer called that activity looting in a famous 1993 paper and depicted it as criminal: ”Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations…. ”

Conservatives like Peter Schiff who was literally laughed off Fox News when he warned of the coming meltdown in 2006—the year I did the film IN DEBT WE TRUST—says media institutions have centrist biases that genuflect to the status quo. Alot of the media I appeared on were kind of captured by the industries,” he told me. “You know everybody that comes on television is working for government or working for Wall Street. They all have invested interest. They are all trapped inside the bubble and so from their advantage point they don’t know they are in a bubble…”

Right now, many media outlets are reinforcing the idea that a recovery is underway pointing to a rise in the stock market and some signs of improvement, even as joblessness continues to climb along with bankruptcies and foreclosures.

The dissents of informed analysts like Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini and George Soros are heard but marginalized. The signs of another collapse tired to an insolvent banking sector are discussed in the financial blogs but not yet on TV.

And the crime angle that I investigate is still seen as minor, except in all the stories about Bernie Madoff or the corporate lawyer Marc Dreier just profiled by 60 Minutes which wanted to get him to be more “emotional” (ie cry for the camera).

These “poster boys” for corporate crime get the visibility while reports on pervasive “epic” fraud in our financial institutions are buried in trade outlets like Information Week which notes "Seventy percent of financial institutions in the past 12 months have had cases of insider fraud, new survey says."

“Kelly Jackson Higgins reported, "A former Wachovia Bank executive who had handled insider fraud incidents says banks are in denial about just how massive the insider threat problem is within their institutions. Meanwhile, the economic crisis appears to be exacerbating the risk, with 70 percent of financial institutions saying they have experienced a case of data theft by one of their employees in the past 12 months, according to new survey data.

“Shirley Inscoe, who spent 21 years at Wachovia handling insider fraud investigations and fraud prevention, says banks don’t want to talk about the insider fraud, and many aren’t aware that it’s an "epic problem."

Epic problems are often buried problems. No wonder most of us don’t know about them and are not as outraged as we deserve to be.

Danny Schechter has made a film and written a book on the “Crime Of Our Time.” (News Dissector.com/plunder.) Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

Danny Schechter is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Danny Schechter

The Ruthless Truth blog is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache