Former Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis arrested at OWS
City governments and police that are arresting Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters are making a big mistake.
Authorities who refuse to work on the problem are breaching democratic rights to free speech and free assembly. Continue reading
The 99% protest at Occupy Toronto (photo CBC)
The Canadian and US tax systems reinforce the concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1%.
It will take a major shift in how the government structures the tax system to see any transfer in wealth from the 1% to the 99%. Continue reading
Prime Minister Harper, RDSP benefits few Canadians except ultra rich
The Registered Disability Savings Plan, a gem in the crown of the Harper government’s social policies, has been a failure in helping Canadians with Disabilities.
If Prime Minister Harper wanted to help Canadians with disabilities he could implement many of the well researched proposals to end poverty and provide disability supports. Complicated schemes like the RDSP that target the ultra rich are of little value.
Recent survey sponsored by the Bank of Montreal shows only 5% of Canadians with disabilities have a tax sheltered savings plan for people with disabilities.
RDSP’s are focused on the upper income parents of children with disabilities who have disposable income available for savings after their own RRSP savings.
Most Canadians with a disabled dependent are spending their money on disability supports and medical costs. 95% of them don’t have any additional money for RDSP savings.
A recent Caledon study found a high percentage of Canadians with disabilities are living in poverty. Anyone living on the $9,000 annual income from CP Disability is not a potential saver. Continue reading
photo - chattahbox.com
by Paul Kiel ProPublica
When the Obama administration launched its flagship foreclosure prevention program in early 2009, it pledged to spend up to $50 billion helping struggling homeowners. But the government has so far only spent a tiny fraction of that.
A recent Treasury Department report summarizing TARP spending put the total at $600 million through October.
Although the Treasury Department posts the maximum amount that could go to each mortgage servicer on its website , it doesn’t report the details of the spending. So we filed a Freedom of Information request for the data, and can now show for the first time exactly how much money has gone to each servicer. (A Treasury Department spokeswoman said they’re considering regularly releasing the information going forward.)
The program, which uses TARP money, tries to prevent foreclosures by paying mortgages servicers incentives to make loan modifications. The largest payout, $79 million, has gone to JPMorgan Chase. Next on the list is Bank of America with $45.1 million. That’s a drop in the bucket for BofA, which reported net servicing income of $780 million in the third quarter. (You can use our bailout tracker to see how much money has gone to each mortgage servicer. The figures, which come from our FOIA request, only go through August.) Continue reading
Long Island Judge Jeffrey Spinner
A year ago, Judge Jeffery Spinner called the foreclosure of Diane Yano-Horoski “repugnant”. He forgave her family’s total debt of $525,000 including interest.
While the judgment is being appealed by the California bank, “Spinner and some of colleagues in the New York City area estimate they are dismissing 20 to 50 percent of foreclosure cases on the basis of sloppy or fraudulent paperwork filed by lenders.” (Washington Post)
“Their decisions illustrate the central role lower court judges will have in resolving the country’s foreclosure debacle. The mess came to light after lawsuits and media reports showed lenders were routinely filing shoddy or fraudulent papers to seize the homes of borrowers who had missed payments.”
“In millions of cases across the United States, local judges have wide latitude to impose sanctions on banks, free homeowners from their mortgage debts or allow the companies to proceed with flawed foreclosures. Ultimately, the industry is likely to face a messy scenario – different resolutions by courts in all 50 states.” Washington Post
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Pump and Dump stock schemes are as old as time itself. More recently pump and dump came into the public view again in the “Jaffer Affair“. Rahim Jaffir’s business partner was said to be a “pump and dump” artist.
The scam works by taking a penny stock that has lots of stock in the market float but little demand. Or it might be an initial public offering where the promoters and investment bankers have received free shares they want to unload on the unsuspecting public.
Lunch at the strip club
The sleep deprived, drug and adrenalin fueled stock market is about to turn from greed to fear over the Greek and EU debt crisis. Things could get ugly very quickly. Yesterday the Dow Jones dropped 900 points before recovering.
When I was living in Toronto in the 1990s, the Financial Post profiled stock brokers and traders during the dot.com boom. The report said many of them used drugs like cocaine to keep up their energy level.
Stock market types from Bay Street would descend on the Zanzibar strip club just up the street from the stock exchange. Lunch with naked dancers got their adrenalin pumped up to make it through the afternoon.
Stock traders also worked long exhausting hours, many drinking their evenings away in bars searching for market rumors and relief from the stress.
Having met traders in Toronto, it made sense. They were a sleep deprived, nervous bunch constantly switching from greed to fear. The story in the paper made sense and several brokers confirmed it was true.
The attention span of a stock broker or trader is today, this afternoon, now. Stocks are up stocks are down. Buy! Sell!
John Hempton, a noted commentator on financial affairs, has pointed out that Bank of America may have been up to the same trick. As per usual, he forgives the fraud artists in the end.
I agree with Felix Salmon that the former Lehman staffers who defend Repo 105 are psychopaths – certifiably insane. They state (as if this justifies it) that …
The only people who would worry about using an old trick to reduce leverage from 13.9 to 12.1, are “yappers who don’t know anything.”
For those that don’t know Repo 105 was a sale and repurchase agreement by which Lehman parked about 50 billion in assets (presumably assets they did not want to discuss) overnight via a repo transaction so they would not appear on the balance sheet. Continue reading
Noomi Rapace in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Music Box Films
A new movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, takes us headlong into the world of 20-something hackers with a grudge. The heroine Salander is 90 pounds of she-devil rage at man and the machine. Sex, anger, Goth and tattoos with one ring in her nose make Salander a new movie heroine on the genre of La Femme Nikita without the guns.
Her boy-friend is a journalist being sued for slander when he exposed right wing industrialists. The movie comes from the popular Stieg Larsson novel of the same title. The journalist is scathing in his denunciation of a lazy mainstream press who write up press releases from corporations as though they were Oracles from Delphi.
Frank Rich, in the NY Times, uses the book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Everybody has different circumstances. You might want to work past 65 and you might want to retire early. The secret is to stop consuming beyond your means and save 20% of gross earnings.
When I was in my 30s, I read those financial planning formulas about saving to create an income of 70% of your pre-retirement income. I worried about that and saved in RRSPs only to have them wiped our periodically by market crashes.
Then 11 years ago at age 50 I retired. It was unscientific. No adviser would have given me the go ahead but I had learned a great secret: you are never too young to retire. The trick is to adjust spending to a much lower rate of consumption.
Continue reading
Repo 105 shady accounting by Lehman and Ernest and Young
By ProPublica – If you haven’t already watched it, Marketplace has a great video explaining Repo 105, a shady accounting maneuver through which Lehman Brothers hid its financial troubles for so long before finally filing in 2008 for the largest bankruptcy in U.S history.
As business reporters sniff through Anton Valukas’ 2,200-page “coroner’s report” on Lehman, here’s a look at all the people who’ve denied they knew anything about the “Repo 105” scam.
“Mr. Fuld, for example, denied knowledge of the effect of the Repo 105 transactions or that the firm removed assets from its balance sheet. A footnote in the report states that Mr. Fuld’s lawyer informed the examiner that he did not use a computer and only accessed e-mails on his BlackBerry but could not open up attachments, including one that went into the Repo 105 deals in March 2008.” (from The New York Times )