They are starting to have the same sort of chutzpah that the Tea Party has. That’s what the political left sorely needs.
– Kalle Lasn, co-editor of Adbusters, on the growing anti-Wall Street protests in New York. The magazine’s July 2011 issue called for the occupation of Wall Street. (via Quotation of the Day Mailing List)
The super-rich (and their GOP supporters) appear to be running scared, given their shrill name-calling of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Paul Krugman explains the panic:
The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is.
When was the last time you saw a major American corporation issue an official press release like this?
Either Mr. Lynch has a very poor memory or he’s lying.
Update: And now I am informed in the comments that Oracle has posted a follow-up. Terrific and now you can view Autonomy’s PowerPoint slides from the pitch meeting.
I am sure it is accurate. I wonder how many lawyers looked at this and, through an abundance of caution, warned against it? I am in awe of Larry Ellison and his apparent willingness to speak the truth directly.
And I think that this sort of press release is interesting, right now, because of how many major technology, media and retail companies are finding themselves at loggerheads with others, often in complicated ways. The disputes among companies now is not simply driven by the normal competitive environment, but rather by a large chess game on multiple levels, with literally billions at stake. Change is in the air (and in the cash register with the iPad/iPhone juggernaut) and the field is open for those with the guts to make big plays and carry them off. Alliances are ripe for creation and long-standing teams are at risk of destruction. Billions will be made and lost in the next year or two, from Wall Street to Hollywood to Silicon Valley to unnamed locales yet to be identified.
All of this is a result of rapid technological change (primarily driven by mobile device advances, social media and faster, broader Internet media streaming) and by fundamental realignments of profit opportunities brought on by the great recession. When banks don’t make money, but instead lose money in the billions, and when real estate collapses around the world and when China becomes by far the fastest growing economy, big money begins to reevaluate its opportunities. Bets are being placed on a grand scale by investment decisions and even more importantly by the decisions being made by the biggest enterprises of the day. There are multiple land rushes going on at the same time.
Perhaps this is all good news for the long run economy.
(via Daring Fireball)
This bad.
Laurie Anderson explains the (non-)solution to our problems: only an expert can do it. This is one song that addresses Oprah, Iraq, torture, and Wall Street financial crimes, while being kick-ass msuically. The version below is live, but the version on the album, Homeland, is even more terrific.
The studio version is available on iTunes for those who like her work.
It turns out the bankers continue to this day fabricating loan documents and using robo-signers in foreclosures, despite promise to improve their operations and bring foreclosures into legal compliance.
Several dozen documents reviewed by American Banker show that as recently as August some of the largest U.S. banks, including Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., Ally Financial Inc., and OneWest Financial Inc., were essentially backdating paperwork necessary to support their right to foreclose.
Some of documents reviewed by American Banker included signatures by current bank employees claiming to represent lenders that no longer exist.
Many banks are missing the original papers from when they securitized the mortgages, in some cases as long ago as 2005 and 2006, according to plaintiffs’ lawyers. They and some industry members say the related mortgage assignments, showing transfers from one lender to another, should have been completed and filed with document custodians at the time of transfer.
“It’s one thing to not have the documents you’re supposed to have even though you told investors and the SEC you had them,” says Lynn E. Szymoniak, a plaintiff’s lawyer in West Palm Beach, Fla. “But they’re making up new documents.”
Why aren’t bankers going to jail over this, or at least being held in civil contempt for filing falsified documents in court?
(via The Big Picture)
Well I hear the whistle blowin, it plays a happy tune
The conductor is calling “all aboard”, we’ll be leavin soon
With champagne and shrimp cocktails and that’s not all you’ll find
There’s a billion dollar bonus and no banker left behindNo banker, no banker, no banker could I find.
When the train pulled out next mornin’, no banker was left behind
– Ry Cooder, from the song No Banker Was Left Behind, recorded on his 2011 album Pull Up Some Dust & Sit Down. (via Quotation of the Day Mailing List)
.
The fear about the economy’s prospects is so high that huge amounts of cash are pouring into banks.
In a sign of just how much cash had poured into commercial bank accounts, Bank of New York Mellon said on Thursday that it would charge institutional clients with more than $50 million on deposit a fee of 13 basis points. The move is intended to recover some of the cost of managing the money, but is also a bid to slow the so-called hot money that has been ricocheting between Treasuries, money-market funds and pure cash balances at the big banks.
The Bank of New York Mellon said the fee would only be applied “to a small number of institutional clients with extraordinarily high deposit levels where the deposits have increased significantly in recent weeks, well above market trends.” The bank did not disclose just how much cash had poured into its coffers recently.
Over all, banks took in nearly $200 billion between mid-June and mid-July as institutional investors fled money market accounts and sought the safety of accounts protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, according to Joseph Abate, a money market strategist at Barclays Capital.
While its rivals have not yet announced similar moves, the Bank of New York’s charges are likely to force cash out of banks and back into money market funds and Treasuries, driving rates even lower where possible, Mr. Abate said in a note to investors Thursday.
All that cash, stashed in a bank account, at a time when lending and other demand is low, is a huge drain on the economy. And some are even claiming that BONY’s imposition of the charge triggered a panic and the resulting huge stock market losses yesterday.
Stimulus is needed.
If so, be very, very afraid.
The check had Njoku’s name and address on it and was issued by JP Morgan Chase. But the Chase Customer Banker who handles large checks at the Auburn branch was immediately suspicious.
“I was embarrassed,” Njoku said. “She asked me what I did for a living. Asked me where I got the check from, looked me up and down—like ‘you just bought a house in Auburn, really?’ She didn’t believe that,” he said.
The Customer Banker said the check looked fake, so she took it, along with Njoku’s driver license and credit card, and called Bank Support.
After waiting for about 15 minutes, Njoku said he got impatient and told Chase he was leaving to do an important errand. By the time he got back, the bank was closed. Njoku said he called customer service and asked them what he should do. He says they told him to go back to the bank the next day to get his money.
But when Njoku arrived, it wasn’t the money that was waiting for him.
“They just threw me in jail; they called the police and said this guy has a fraudulent check,” Njoku said.
Auburn police arrested him for forgery – a felony crime.
“I was like – you’re making a mistake, you’re making a mistake, don’t take me to jail, I got work tomorrow. I can’t afford to miss work,” he said.
Njoku was taken to jail on June 24, 2010, which was a Thursday. The next day, Chase Special Investigations, realized it was a mistake. The check was legitimate. The Investigator called Auburn Police and left a message with the detective handling the case, but it was her day off. So Njoku stayed in jail for the entire weekend. Finally, on Monday, he was released.
Greek coat of arms. Image via Wikipedia
At lunch today with some friends, I expressed the view that if the Greeks were really smart, they would refuse the co-called “bail out,”, depart from the European Union, and flat out default on their debt. The debt is primarily held by banks in Germany, and to a lesser extent in France. Why would this be the best approach? Because it would stiff the lenders who made idiotic (or worse) decisions to lend to an uncreditworthy country. Why should the Greek citizens suffer through a very prolonged painful period of austerity to benifit richer countries who knowingly took obvious risks?
Now, Barry Ritholtz expresses a similar view:
… the Greeks are not so different than you or I. We Americans socialized the losses of our banks, while being so dumb as to leave the profits privatized. (The worst of both worlds!). Or the Irish, for that matter, who like us and the Greeks, were foolish enough to assume the bad debts of their reckless bankers.
Whenever you hear a Bailout being discussed, look to see who it is that is actually being bailed out. It is not the Greek people or even the Greek government — rather, it is the creditors of Greece. These are the banks mostly in Europe, primarily in Germany and France, but also includes Japan, China and the US.
Thus, it is no surprise that Greek people are rioting and the banks are rallying. They are the beneficiaries of the Greek austerity, of the EU’s largesse, of the various rescue.
Greece has all sorts of problems, from their tax base to their economy. But the Greek people can tell when they are being raped and pillaged . The media may not get it, but the ones who seem to know the score are the rioters in the streets of Athens, Thessaloniki and Syntagma Square.
Check this out:
“Chancellor Merkel said today that this was really a very good piece of news [that the Greek parliament had voted for massive new austerity cuts]. And of course the German government continues to focus on trying to avoid a Greek default,” he told RT. “They see that as the main danger here. Chancellor Merkel said that if the Greeks were to default on [their] debt, that would throw the whole eurozone into chaos, and it would unleash a crisis worse than the collapse of Lehman Brothers.”
Of course this is “good news” … for German banks.
President Obama, speaking at the LGBT Gala in New York last week, again refused to endorse same-sex marriage. Such refusal came as New York, lead by Andrew M. Cuomo, was legalizing same sex marriage in the state. Why Obama cannot bring himself to openly support a freedom that the majority of citizens now supports is beyond confusing. His failure to support same-sex marriage is a betrayal of his promises of equal rights for all.
This is yet another in a long string of disappointments for those of us who voted for him, expecting that he would alter the policies of the Bush administration. We are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guantanamo remains open. The DOJ has refused to investigate credible claims that we tortured prisoners in the so-called war on terror using the cover of wrong-headed opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel. Our civil liberties continue to be eroded by the extension of the Patriot Act and new spying tools claimed by the FBI. We are fighting a third war in Libya, without Congressional approval, despite Administration claims that we are not involved in hostilities. The big banks have been bailed out but not homeowners who owe billions to the banks as a result of abusive loan tactics. No officials of the banks have been convicted for wrongdoing.
Change? Hope? Nope. Not from Obama.
This is too, too good.
(via The Big Picture)