In most countries, it would be an act of mind-bending chutzpah, or perhaps a display of political insanity, but in Italy it barely made ripples: for a government official, a minister no less, to declare that the country cannot pay its long overdue bills, and not for a month or two, but for the rest of this year! Due to “technical” problems.
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Market Celebrates Egypt’s Coup, But It’s Not Over Yet
by Contributor • • Comments Off on Market Celebrates Egypt’s Coup, But It’s Not Over Yet
Contributed by Jen Alic of Oilprice.com: The situation in Egypt has not been tenable since the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi took over, post-revolution, but now that the military has stepped in, ousted Morsi, and placed him in detention, foreign investors are celebrating – on the logic that things couldn’t get any worse, only better.
David Stockman: The Greenspan Put And The Deformation Of M&A
by David Stockman • • Comments Off on David Stockman: The Greenspan Put And The Deformation Of M&A
“The Wall Street coddling monetary régime” that Greenspan institutionalized “deeply transformed M&A,” writes David Stockman. It turned a corporate business strategy into “an all-encompassing mechanism for speculative finance” that executives used to build “empires with apparent, if unsustainable, earnings growth” that ended in “spectacular crash landings.”
Beware, the Borderless Tax Man Cometh
by Don Quijones • • Comments Off on Beware, the Borderless Tax Man Cometh
Contributed by Don Quijones: The first four items the G-8 dealt with was the need for governments to share information to “fight the scourge of tax evasion.” If only their primary targets were multinationals, banks, and hedge funds that pay a pitiful fraction of the taxes they owe in the countries they operate. But they’re going after the little guy.
Goldman Sachs To The Fed: Taper But Don’t Tighten
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Goldman Sachs To The Fed: Taper But Don’t Tighten
Tapering bond purchases gets real. New York Fed President William Dudley has spoken. He represents Goldman, where he was a managing director. Goldman owns part of the NY Fed and is one of its 21 “primary dealers.” But it doesn’t want the financial system to blow up. On the theory that you can milk a cow many times, but you can bleed it only once.
‘Total Surveillance’ Officially Brushed Off In Germany
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on ‘Total Surveillance’ Officially Brushed Off In Germany
Chancellor Merkel’s coalition is likely to emerge victoriously from the elections in September, unless a major debacle blows up. So no debacle is allowed to occur until after the election. But just then, new revelations about NSA spying blew up: turns out, all citizens anywhere can be under surveillance by any government, including their own, beyond control and oversight.
David Stockman – Deal Mania: The Rise Of ‘Chase and Crash’
by David Stockman • • Comments Off on David Stockman – Deal Mania: The Rise Of ‘Chase and Crash’
“One of the great ironies of the Greenspan bubbles” was that his free market convictions enabled the Fed to drift “irreversibly into its eventual submission to the Cramerite intimidation,” wrote David Stockman. It turned “a blind eye to lunatic speculations in the stock market, dismissing them as the exuberances of capitalist boys and girls playing too hard.
Surveillance Society: If You Drive, You Get Tracked
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Surveillance Society: If You Drive, You Get Tracked
A technology that surreptitiously captures data of people out on the street, combines it with other data, and mines it ad infinitum? Local and federal government agencies love it. It’s increasingly sophisticated and cheap. It’s spreading. And it led a professor at West Point to warn: “We don’t have a police state in this country, but we have the technology.”
Eerie Abandoned Japanese Island Hashima On Google Street View
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Eerie Abandoned Japanese Island Hashima On Google Street View
Ghost island: Hashima, a speck of land, used to be a coal mine where 5,000 people lived and toiled. But in the 1970s, it was abandoned and the concrete structures left to decay, only to resurface in the last James Bond movie. Now Google captured it for Street View – and made an awesome brief video of this eerie industrial wasteland.
The Power Of The Financial Lobby: “For 25 Years, It’s Never Been The Right Moment” To Tighten
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on The Power Of The Financial Lobby: “For 25 Years, It’s Never Been The Right Moment” To Tighten
Things move quickly at the G-20 when markets go south. The turmoil following Chairman Bernanke’s mere suggestion of a vague and slow taper of the Fed’s multi-year money-printing and bond-buying binge has already incited our illustrious finance gurus and central bankers at the G-20 to buckle – under the weight of the financial lobby.