US state department names more than 50 corrupt officials in Central America
Associated Press in Guatemala City, 01 July 2021
The US state department has named more than 50 current and former officials, including former presidents and active lawmakers, suspected of corruption or undermining democracy in three Central American countries.
Among the most prominent figures on the list are former Honduras president José Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa and his wife Rosa Elena Bonilla de Lobo. The State Department report alleges Lobo Sosa took bribes from a drug cartel and his wife was involved in fraud and misappropriation of funds. Both deny the allegations. Bonilla’s conviction on related charges was invalidated by the supreme court last year and she is awaiting a new trial. Continue reading “Article: US state department names more than 50 corrupt officials in Central America”
Reddit forum discussions and coordinated trades have been rooted in the community’s disdain for so-called “toxic market participants”. These toxic players tend to be hedge funds and a few others on Wall Street who make sizable bearish bets against certain stocks through naked shorting.
Robinhood Markets Inc. unleashed a revolution, marshaling throngs of new traders to financial markets in an upside-down year. But the free trading app’s breakneck growth hurt the same small-time investors it sought to empower.
Reddit forum discussions and coordinated trades have been rooted in the community’s disdain for so-called “toxic market participants”. These toxic players tend to be hedge funds and a few others on Wall Street who make sizable bearish bets against certain stocks through naked shorting.
A recurring theme of this column is that if you have the power to make the price of a financial asset go up, you should (1) do that but (2) buy a lot of it first. So for instance Tesla Inc. is a big company and its chief executive officer, Elon Musk, is a famous influential guy with a lot of Twitter followers. So when Tesla announced that it would start accepting Bitcoin as payment for its cars, the price of Bitcoin went up. This was very predictable. So what did Tesla do? It bought $1.5 billion of Bitcoin before announcing the news, and then Bitcoin went up and it had an immediate gain. 1
If Britain’s company registry is to be believed, my family and I have been sharing our dwelling with a Russian in his mid-forties. For a time, our place doubled as an office for his start-up, which he set up last year, and in which he is the sole shareholder.
The Texas Freeze was one of those unprecedented events that have the potential to upend the way things are done, in this case, in power utilities. The crisis, which saw natural gas prices rise from two-figure to four-figure numbers, prompted an in-depth look at Texas’s grid and electricity market, and measures to ensure it never happened again. Now, gas prices are on the rise again, and many of the February bills have not been paid yet. Disgruntlement is building up across the swathe of states affected by the freezing cold spell in February. In California, people are being warned their bills are going to rise higher.
As Brussels sold its new five- and thirty-year debt, four banks that had previously suspended EU bond sales were selected to manage Block’s latest trading on Tuesday.
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“No single organization can stop synthetic identity fraud on its own,” reports The Federal Reserve. “Fraudster tactics continually evolve to stay a step ahead of detection—and the most sophisticated fraudsters can operate at scale in organized crime rings, generating significant losses for the payments industry. It is imperative that payments industry stakeholders work together, share information and keep up with the threat.”