derivatives
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Brexit and the Derivatives Time Bomb By Ellen Brown
Brexit could trigger a $500 trillion derivatives meltdown, by forcing the EU to allow insolvent member governments and banks to write down debt. Italy is in financial crisis and is already petitioning for that concession. How to avoid collapse of the massive derivatives house of cards? Alternatives are considered. Continue reading
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Goldman Sachs Sued for Selling Libya Billions in Worthless Options By Richard Smallteacher
Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, is being sued in London for selling Libya “worthless” derivatives trades in 2008 that the country’s financial managers did not understand. Libya says it lost approximately $1.2 billion on the deals, while Goldman made $350 million. Continue reading
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Larry Summers and the Secret “End-Game” Memo By Greg Palast
The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3% unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back… Continue reading
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My Big Fat Greek Minister By Greg Palast
Fat Bastard – or Theodoros Pangalos, leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK), Greece’s equivalent to UK’s Labour Party – thinks the little Greek kiddies should stop belly-aching. Pangalos, as you can see from the photo below, is not bent over with hunger pains. In fact, he looks more likely to be bent over with… Continue reading
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It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors By Ellen Brown
Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the… Continue reading
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Video: LIBOR Scandal More Than Fraud – Whole Game is Rigged
Costas Lapavitsas: From multimillion dollar losses by cities like Baltimore to pension fund losses and much more, the LIBOR interest rate scandal shows that such mechanisms must be taken out of the hands of banks and be run in public interest (inc. transcript) Continue reading
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Ellen Brown: How Greece Could Take Down Wall Street
CDS are a form of derivative taken out by investors as insurance against default. According to the Comptroller of the Currency, nearly 95% of the banking industry’s total exposure to derivatives contracts is held by the nation’s five largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs. The CDS market is unregulated,… Continue reading
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The $600 Trillion Time Bomb That's Set to Explode By Keith Fitz-Gerald
The world’s gross domestic product (GDP) is only about $65 trillion, or roughly 10.83% of the worldwide value of the global derivatives market, according to The Economist. So there is literally not enough money on the planet to backstop the banks trading these things if they run into trouble. Continue reading
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Keiser Report with very special Hollywood guest
Max Keiser and co-host Stacy Herbert look at a handful of the many Goldman Sachs fraud metaphors; the scandals of what the US bankers, regulators and government knew about Repo 105 before it helped take down Lehman Brothers, and of President Clinton’s big mistake on derivatives. In the second half of the show, Stacy interviews… Continue reading
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William Blum: Anti-Empire Report, Number 68, 4 April, 2009 Some thoughts about socialism
Wall Street has not only an army of lawyers and accountants, but a horde of mathematicians with advanced degrees searching for the perfect equations to separate people from their money. Continue reading
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Economics 101 – Interesting times By William Bowles
24 October 2008 ‘May you live in interesting times’, traditional Chinese curse Being raised in a family of Reds has its pluses and its minuses, one of the minuses being a decidedly unworldly approach to economics. It was as if we already lived in a socialist world but of course nobody else did. The upshot Continue reading
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Anti-Empire Report, October 1, 2008 By William Blum
What changes take place in the real world to cause the crisis? Nothing, necessarily. The crisis is usually caused by changes in the make-believe world of financial capitalism. Continue reading
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The media’s moola madness By William Bowles
22 September, 2008 What does it take for the corporate media to speak the truth about the economic meltdown? Take the BBC Website for example: It has a page titled ‘Q&A: Financial crisis and you’ where you would expect to find an explanation of this, the latest crisis of capital. Dream on folks, dream on. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 