Article: The Global Intelligence Files

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The Global Intelligence Files

Wikileaks, 02 Aug 2021

On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.

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Article: Greedy Wall Street giants won’t fare well in Xi Jinping’s China

Article - Media, Publications

Greedy Wall Street giants won’t fare well in Xi Jinping’s China

Nels Frye, 01 June 2021

Congrats to America’s finance bros for finally getting their reward from the Chinese Communist Party. But surely, after obediently lobbying in favor of opening up to Beijing for decades, Wall Street deserved more than it received.

Two finance giants, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, can now operate wealth-management businesses on the mainland, partnering with China Construction Bank Corp. and Commercial Bank of China — state-run entities at the center of power in the Communist state. The result: Goldman and BlackRock will likely relinquish much in independence, data and intellectual property, while scrounging only scraps of the domestic finance market in China. Continue reading “Article: Greedy Wall Street giants won’t fare well in Xi Jinping’s China”

Article: Lessons from the Texas big freeze

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Lessons from the Texas big freeze

Carl Pope, 24 March 2021

The Texas power market caps wholesale prices at an astonishingly high $9,000 per/mwh. When the crisis hit, the computers managing the market price crashed. Regulators then arbitrarily set prices at the peak rate, and left them there for four days, knowing that generators could not provide more power because their facilities were frozen. During the freeze, household daily utility bills of $2,500 and more were incurred by homeowners who had signed up for variable plans, even when for most of the four days they had no power. The City of Denton incurred $300 million in power bills in a week, $2,000 for each of its 15,000 residents.

The power companies maximised their profit from those units that were up and running. By the third week in February, it appeared all the energy companies serving the Texas market had made as much money in 2021 as they had in the previous three years.

“We were able to get super premium prices, that’s going to pay off handsomely like hitting the jackpot,” said Chief Financial Officer Roland Burns of Comstock Resources, a leading Texan energy producer. He later apologised when his remarks hit the headlines. Continue reading “Article: Lessons from the Texas big freeze”

Official: Mary Schapiro

Official, People

Mary Lovelace Schapiro  (born June 19, 1955) served as the 29th Chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). She was appointed by President Barack Obama, unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and assumed the Chairship on January 27, 2009. She is the first woman to be the permanent Chair of the SEC.

In 2009, Forbes ranked her the 56th most powerful woman in the world.[4] Continue reading “Official: Mary Schapiro”

Lawyer: Gary J. Aguirre

Lawyer

Gary J. Aguirre is an American lawyer, former investigator with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and whistleblower.

After working in a law firm briefly, he became a public defender, then worked as a trial lawyer in California. Having reached his professional and financial goals, he took an extended break in 1995. In 2000, he decided to go into public service and went back to law school, focusing on international and securities law. Continue reading “Lawyer: Gary J. Aguirre”

Article: How to Break the Kneecaps of Wall Street Sociopaths Before It’s too Late: Ferdinand Pecora Revisited

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How to Break the Kneecaps of Wall Street Sociopaths Before It’s too Late: Ferdinand Pecora Revisited

Matt Ehret, SubStack, 18 February 2021

If America and the western order is to somehow find its moral fitness to survive and if a world war is to be avoided in the coming near-term future, then certain fundamental banking reforms will be needed. Among the most important of these reforms will be a breaking up of banking activities into two categories under a renewal of the Glass-Steagall bank reform which was repealed by Bill Clinton in 1999. These two categories would include: 1) speculative trash and illegitimate usury which must be “deleted” under a debt jubilee and 2) legitimate savings and other useful commercial banking activities tied to “real” values without which society couldn’t sustain itself.

Faced with these revelations, The Nation magazine famously reported “If you steal $25, you’re a thief. If you steal $250 000, you’re an embezzler. If you steal $2.5 million, you’re a financier.”

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Comment: The House of Morgan was a British operation. The UK is the main enemy of the USA.  Rothschilds/Israel/Vatican as well. Time everyone got this.

Subject: Kevin M. Warsh

Subject of Interest

Kevin M. Warsh was sworn in as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 24, 2006. He left the Board on March 31, 2011. In 1995, Warsh accepted a position with the mergers and acquisitions department at Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York. In  2002, Warsh left his vice president and executive director post at Morgan Stanley & Co. to join the administration for President George W. Bush. He served as special assistant to the president for economic policy and as executive secretary at the National Economic Council. In addition, he advises several companies including serving on the board of directors of United Parcel Service. He graduated from Stanford University(BA), and went on to Harvard Law School and received a law degree in 1995. He also completed coursework in market economics and debt capital markets at Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.

Biography

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Subject: Jay Powell

Subject of Interest

Jerome H. Powell took office as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 5, 2018, for a four-year term. Mr. Powell also serves as Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee. Prior to his appointment to the Board, Powell was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. From 1997 through 2005, Powell was a partner at The Carlyle Group. Powell served as an Assistant Secretary and as Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury under President George H.W. Bush. Prior to joining the Bush administration, Mr. Powell worked as a lawyer and investment banker in New York City. He received an AB in politics from Princeton University in 1975 and earned a law degree from Georgetown University in 1979. While at Georgetown, he was editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Law Journal. 

Biography

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Article: Naked Gold Shorts: The Hows and Whys of Gold Price Manipulation

Article - Media

Naked Gold Shorts: The Hows and Whys of Gold Price Manipulation

Commodity Trade Mantra, 20 January 2014

The deregulation of the financial system during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes had the predictable result: financial concentration and reckless behavior. A handful of banks grew so large that financial authorities declared them “too big to fail.” Removed from market discipline, the banks became wards of the government requiring massive creation of new money by the Federal Reserve in order to support through the policy of Quantitative Easing the prices of financial instruments on the banks’ balance sheets and in order to finance at low interest rates trillion dollar federal budget deficits associated with the long recession caused by the financial crisis.

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Article: Secrets and Lies of the Bailout

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Secrets and Lies of the Bailout

Matt Taibbi

Rolling Stone, 4 January 2013

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

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Article: Calling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis

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Calling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis

Eric D. Hovde

Washington Post via Wayback, 21 September 2008

Looking for someone to blame for the shambles in U.S. financial markets? As someone who owns both an investment bank and commercial banks, and also runs a hedge fund, I have sat front and center and watched as this mess unfolded. And in my view, there’s no need to look beyond Wall Street — and the halls of power in Washington. The former has created the nightmare by chasing obscene profits, and the latter have allowed it to spread by not practicing the oversight that is the federal government’s responsibility.

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Article: Sell-out: Why hedge funds will destroy the world

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Sell-out: Why hedge funds will destroy the world

Janet Bush

NewStatesman, 31 July 2006

Something ominous is going on in world finance – again. On 11 May, the US Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, raised rates and hinted that it might do so again. Wall Street wobbled but stock markets in the emerging economies fell through the floor. Since that day, Colombia’s stock market has slumped by 42 per cent; Turkey’s by 38 per cent; Pakistan and Egypt by 28 per cent; India by 25 per cent; the Czech Republic by 22 per cent.

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Article: Investigator claims he was Fired for Hedge Fund Inquiry

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Investigator claims he was Fired for Hedge Fund Inquiry

Andrew Clark

The Guardian cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 24 June 2006

The low-profile, high-earning world of hedge funds suffered a jolt yesterday as allegations surfaced of political influence and insider dealing at one of America’s most prominent players, Pequot Capital Management.

A former investigator at the Securities and Exchange Commission has disclosed that the authority has been examining suspicious trades at Pequot – a Connecticut-based fund which has $7bn (£3.8bn) under management and operates from offices in both the US and Britain.

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Article: SEC: Gone Fishin’

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SEC: Gone Fishin’

Chris Byron

New York  Times cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 6 March 2006

It’s good to see that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has come to its senses and that – at least for the time being – it won’t be enforcing the media subpoenas that have gotten the press so riled up.

But before anyone breaks out the pom-poms for SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, let’s remember that these wrong-headed subpoenas were 100 percent the responsibility of Cox’s own agency in the first place – and until the SEC develops better, more focused leadership, problems like those caused by these subpoenas are going to keep occurring.

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Article: Who’s Looking Out For You? SEC Critics Seeking Investigation

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Who’s Looking Out For You?: SEC Critics Seeking Investigation

Mark Faulk

FaulkingTruth cited by RGM Communications via Wayback,  27 June 2004

The mission statement of the SEC is clearly worded and easy to understand: “The primary mission of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is to protect investors and maintain the integrity of the securities market.”

Last Wednesday, they adopted new rules concerning short-selling that accomplished neither goal. Instead, they passed a watered-down version of their earlier proposed regulation SHO, a version that did absolutely nothing to “protect investors and maintain the integrity of the securities market”. And unlike their mission statement, the new rules are neither clearly worded nor easy to understand. In fact, the only clear message was the “subliminal” one that the SEC sent to investors, which was, simply stated: “We don’t care”.

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THE DOLLAR HAS NO INTRINSIC VALUE : DO YOUR ASSETS?