U.S. Corruption: A Summary of Recent Reports

By Eric Zuesse (about the author)
corruption threat to liberty
(image by DonkeyHotey)

www.flickr.com/photos/47422005@N04/11001289643/: corruption threat to liberty" alt="From www.flickr.com/photos/47422005@N04/11001289643/: corruption threat to liberty" width="300">

On 24 April 2014, Jake Bernstein at ProPublica headlined, "Judge Tosses Retaliation Lawsuit by Fired N.Y. Fed Examiner," and reported that when Carmen Segarra, "a lawyer, was hired [on 31 October 2011] along with other examiners for her expertise in compliance," as part of the N.Y. Fed's new initiative to "ramp up its supervision of nine so-called 'Too-Big-To-Fail' financial institutions" and she found that "Goldman Sachs lacked a firm-wide conflict-of-interest policy," her three bosses ordered her to eliminate her finding, she refused to do so, and she was fired on 23 May 2012. She then filed charges against them and the N.Y. Fed; she "argued that numerous laws and regulations underpinned" her findings in the case; and the judge, whose husband was an attorney "representing Goldman Sachs in an advisory capacity" in the case, wrote in her ruling, that "Plaintiff [Segarra] has failed to state a cause of action." This judge "had also previously worked at a law firm with the Fed's lead counsel in the case." In other words: Don't whistle-blow if you're hired as a regulator and you find that a firm you're regulating isn't doing what the laws and regulations say they should. The judge ordered "to terminate the motions ... and to close the case." This was "regulation," in today's United States: Don't do your job -- or else! (Or else you'll be fired for doing it.)

Also on 24 April 2014, the Center for Public Integrity headlined "Meet the Banking Caucus, Wall Street's secret weapon in Washington: Lawmakers help industry donors beat back tougher rules," and a team reported that: "Members of this Banking Caucus receive massive financial support from the industry and collaborate with industry lobbyists to block or roll back efforts to tighten oversight of financial firms. Lobbyists help draft legislation and write questions for lawmakers to ask at hearings. Lawmakers help drum up support for lobbyists' pet issues."

The next day, yet another team at the Center for Public Integrity bannered, "What Happens When a Dark Money Group Blows Off IRS Rules? Nothing. The Government Integrity Fund spent most of its money on election ads, despite IRS rules prohibiting a social welfare nonprofit from doing so." The Government Integrity Fund was an Ohio nonprofit set up by aristocrats to oust the most progressive U.S. Senator, Ohio's Senator Sherrod Brown, and to install in his place a very conservative Republican, Josh Mandel. You can see the top 20 known contributors to each of these two contenders at opensecrets.org where the biggest two for Brown were Ohio State University ($113,980), and JStreet PAC ($110,990), and the biggest two for Mandel were Senate Conservatives Fund (former Republican U.S. Senator Jim DeMint's bundling operation) ($360,319), and Club For Growth (a Wall Street front) ($301,553). However, the Government Integrity Fund reported too late to make that list, and when they finally did report at opensecrets.org, they reported spending $1.3 million for Mandel, who nonetheless ended up with only 45% of the vote. Somehow, the most progressive U.S. Senator, Sherrod Brown, just kept on winning, even in his middle-of-the-road state of Ohio, despite everything that conservative aristocrats have been able to throw at him. Barack Obama's IRS refused to enforce the law against the clear legal violation by Mandel's largest donor-group: Government Integrity Fund.

On 26 April 2014, William K. Black at New Economic Perspectives bannered "Corporate CEOs Demand that They Be Tipped Off When a Whistleblower Reports Their Crimes," and he noted that, "The degree of hostility against regulators and whistleblowers, and intense sympathy for the CEOs leading the control frauds [i.e., heading the frauds against investors and consumers], is palpable among large numbers of Reagan and Bush judicial appointees," as a consequence of which there was now a raging war against whistleblowers. A reader-comment observed: "Enlisting the government to help whack rats is brazen even for the money industry." President Obama stood aside silently, while the "rats" who wanted clean and honest corporate governance, got "whacked" by judges, with his Administration's quiet complicity.

On 28 April 2014, yet a different team at the Center for Public Integrity bannered "Law-Breaking Judges Took Cases That Could Make Them Even Richer: Federal judges aren't supposed to hear cases in which they have a financial stake" but some "do it anyway," because "Judges face no formal punishment for breaking these rules." Consequently, for example: "When Linda Wolicki-Gables and her husband appealed a lawsuit all the way to the second-highest court in the nation against Johnson & Johnson over a malfunctioning medication pump that had been implanted in her body, the couple had no idea that one of the judges who decided their case had a financial stake in the giant multinational company. Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James Hill owned as much as $100,000 in Johnson & Johnson stock when he and two other judges ruled against the Gables' appeal in the precedent-setting case."

Also on April 28th, the American Constitution Society headlined, "Federal Judge Says Big Donors' Money Drowning Out 'We the People'," and Jeremy Leaming reported an April 24th decision by U.S. District Court Judge Paul A. Crotty: "'In effect' Crotty wrote, 'it is only direct bribery -- not influence -- that the [U.S. Supreme] Court views as crossing the line into quid pro quo corruption'"; and, so, Crotty was compelled to rule in a case that there was no corruption, even though he thought that there actually was.

These are 6 news reports during 24-28 April 2014, about federal corruption, that did not appear at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox "News," NBC, etc., but that seem to indicate the U.S. is a very corrupt country, perhaps including in its corruption major news-media themselves (if, that is, you and others find this to be a type of news-reporting that's more interesting than much of what those major news-media actually are reporting on -- because they virtually ignore it). If you would want to see more coverage of this type of news, you may indicate that in a reader-comment here, and I shall be happy to pass it along to major news-media, as a suggestion to them, that they should be covering this.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

How Fracking Is Exposing People to Radioactive Waste

Radiation can accumulate in the water we drink, the fish we eat, and the soil in which our food grows.

May 2, 2014  |  

 

 

 

 

There isn’t a lot of good news about fracking lately. Another train with volatile fracked crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale exploded in Lynchburg, Virginia igniting a ball of fire on the surface of the James River. Accidents involving these “bomb trains” are becoming commonplace. So are recent studies indicating serious health risks  from fracking and reports linking fracking to earthquakes.

With all that press you may have missed another cause for alarm: radiation risks. The oil and gas-drilling boom, aided by the practice of fracking, has unleashed some potentially scary radioactive stuff into our environment. 

Fracking involves injecting large quantities (sometimes millions of gallons) of water, sand, and chemicals at high pressure deep underground to break apart shale and release trapped hydrocarbons like oil and gas. But the process can also bring to the surface water that is laced with naturally-occurring radioactive materials that were underground. In small, dispersed quantities low-level radiation is not life threatening, but what happens when those quantities start increasing in the environment, and getting into the water we drink, the fish we eat, and the soil in which our food grows?

Scientists are trying to figure that out. But it’s a difficult process to track since fracking isn’t regulated under most federal environmental laws like the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act. That means industry is charge of policing itself a lot of the time.

Another problem is that it’s really hard to keep track of all the stuff that may become tainted by radioactive materials in the drilling process. Millions of gallons of soupy wastewater that flow back from wells after drilling and fracking can end up in a number of places. Sometimes the wastewater is simply left in lined or unlined pits to either evaporate or sink back into the ground. Other times it is sent to water treatment plants and eventually released back into rivers and streams. At times it is simply spilled or illegally dumped. It also ends up contaminating drilling mud (a more solid waste from the process), storage tanks, and equipment.

“Radionuclides in these wastes are primarily radium-226, radium-228, and radon gas,” reports the Environmental Protection Agency. “The radon is released to the atmosphere, while the produced water and mud containing radium are placed in ponds or pits for evaporation, reuse, or recovery.”

The fact that drilling for oil or gas increases radiation is not news. Avner Vengosh, a professor of geochemistry at Duke University told Bloomberg News that we’ve know that since the 1970s, but the pace and intensity of drilling now, combined with the huge amount of wastewater, is taking the issue to a new level of concern. “We are actually building up a legacy of radioactivity in hundreds of points where people have had leaks or spills around the country,” he said.

Vengosh was part of team of researchers that turned up some troubling findings in Pennsylvania, ground zero for hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale. Their study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology, took samples over a two-year period from Blacklick Creek just below the discharge from the Josephine Brine Treatment Facility, which accepted water from drilling operations. They found that radium levels of wastewater from fracking operations had been reduced in treatment by about 90 percent, but what was coming out of the plant still exceeded upstream levels by 200 times.

“Such elevated levels of radioactivity are above regulated levels and would normally be seen at licensed radioactive disposal facilities, according to the scientists at Duke University's Nicholas school of the environment in North Carolina,” reported Felicity Carus for the Guardian.

The biggest threat is the bioaccumulation of radium. Small quantities can build up in the environment, eventually posing a health hazard (especially if it ends up in food we eat).

It also means that even if you don’t have a drilling rig in your backyard or even your neighborhood, you may still face some risks. As Carus wrote:

From January to June 2013, the 4,197 unconventional gas wells in Pennsylvania reported 3.5m barrels of fluid waste and 10.7m barrels of "produced" fluid. Most of that waste is disposed of within Pennsylvania, but some of it is also went to other states, such as Ohio and New York despite its moratorium on shale gas exploration. In July, a treatment company in New York state pleaded guilty to falsifying more than 3,000 water tests.

The Duke study came just two years after the New York Times did an exhaustive search of thousands of government and industry documents to try and assess how risky radioactive wastewater from fracking may be.

“The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle,” Ian Urbina wrote for the Times.

“The Times also found never-reported studies by the EPA and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.” They found that 116 wells produced wastewater with levels more than 100 times higher than safe drinking water standards, and 15 wells were more than 1,000 times above the limit.

“The radioactivity in the wastewater is not necessarily dangerous to people who are near it. It can be blocked by thin barriers, including skin, so exposure is generally harmless,” wrote Urbina. “Rather, E.P.A. and industry researchers say, the bigger danger of radioactive wastewater is its potential to contaminate drinking water or enter the food chain through fish or farming. Once radium enters a person’s body, by eating, drinking or breathing, it can cause cancer and other health problems, many federal studies show.”

The Duke study and the Times’ research both focused on Pennsylvania, but the Marcellus region is not the only experiencing problems with radioactive waste. In February, an abandoned building in Noonan, North Dakota was found to contain bags of illegally dumped “filter socks” which are used by the industry to filter liquids during oil production. The radiation level from the material wasn’t high enough to be a health hazard unless people ventured into the building but it signals a growing problem for boomtowns, the likes of which have emerged across North Dakota’s Bakken shale. It’s not the first time this kind of waste has been dumped -- and the booming Bakken is producing around 27 tons of filter socks a day, by one estimate.

And the problem persists across the country.

“While it’s unclear how much drilling waste is produced nationally, state totals are rising. West Virginia landfills accepted 721,000 tons of drilling debris in 2013, a figure that doesn’t include loads rejected because they topped radiation limits,” wrote Alex Nussbaum for Bloomberg. “The per-month tonnage more than tripled from July 2012, when records were first kept, through last December. In Pennsylvania, epicenter of the Marcellus boom, the oil and gas industry sent 1.3 million tons to landfills last year.” Are those facilities equipped to monitor and handle radioactive waste?

North Dakota is attempting to cope with the problem by creating new regulations requiring industry to store these contaminated filter socks on site in special containers until they can be moved to a “certified dump.” But, Rebecca Leber writes for Think Progress, “North Dakota has no facilities to process this level of radioactive waste. According to the Wall Street Journal, the closest facilities are hundreds of miles away in states like Idaho, Colorado, Utah, and Montana.”

So the problem is not solved, it’s simply passed from one state to the next -- increasing the area that may be affected and the number of people. Meanwhile the grand experiment of fracking’s effects on human health continues.

Tara Lohan is a freelance writer and former senior editor at AlterNet. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis, including Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource. Follow her on Twitter @TaraLohan or visit her website, taralohan.com.

Revealed: How parts of Britain are now poorer than POLAND with families in Wales and Cornwall among Europe's worst off

• Seven areas of Britain poorer than ANYWHERE in France or Germany
• Welsh Valleys is one of the Continent's poverty blackspots
• Poles, Lithuanians and Hungarians wealthier than the Cornish
• Outside London, only Home Counties and Aberdeen keep up with Germany

EXCLUSIVE By Tom Mctague, Mail Online Deputy Political Editor

Parts of Britain are now poorer than Poland, Lithuania and Hungary, official figures reveal.
People in the Welsh Valleys and Cornwall - Britain’s two poorest areas - scrape by on less than £14,300 a year on average.
Because Britain is so expensive, this leaves families in these areas worse off than those vast swathes of Eastern Europe, according to an EU study.

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In much of the UK, people's incomes are well below the EU average - in some areas by as much as a third. In the map (above) Britain's poorest regions are highlighted, showing how far below the European average incomes have fallen. The Cornish, for example, are 36 per cent less well-off than the EU norm. Families in Slovenia meanwhile are just 16 per cent poorer - and in Portugal 23 per cent.

In Lincolnshire and Durham, the next two poorest areas in Britain, people live on less than £16,500 a year.
This puts them in the same bracket as Estonians and rural Poles, once prices are taken into account.
Britain as a whole fares a little better, with average earnings of £23,300 - just over the EU average of £20,750. But this still leaves us out of the top 10 wealthiest countries in the EU.

 

And this figure is propped up by Europe’s runaway richest region – inner London. In the heart of the capital the average GDP per person is £71,000 a year.
This is 321 per cent of the average across the EU, according to Brussels’s official statistics arm Eurostat.

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While Britain is home to Europe's richest city, most of the country is poorer than the Continent

EUROPE'S 10 RICHEST AREAS

London is far and away Europe's capital of cash - with incomes 300% the EU average
Here are the top 10 richest cities:

1. Central London (321% of EU average)
2. Luxembourg (266%)
3. Brussels, Belgium (222%)
4. Hamburg, Germany (202%)
5. Oslo, Norway (189%)
6. Bratislava, Slovakia (186%)
7. Île de France, France (182%)
8. Groningen, Holland (182%)
9. Stockholm, Sweden (173%)
10. Prague, Czech Republic (171%)

But central London’s soaring wealth has failed to trickle down to much of the rest of the country, the figures suggest.
Britain’s seven most hard-up areas - including Lancashire, Leicestershire, South Yorkshire and Staffordshire - are poorer than ANY region in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Finland, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria.
The region of “West Wales and the Valleys” is now in the top five poorest areas in Western Europe - with families HALF as wealthy as their German counterparts on average.
The only parts of Britain matching Germany for wealth – outside central London – are “Berkshire, Buckinghamshire & Oxfordshire” and oil-rich “North East Scotland” around Aberdeen.
But even England’s second wealthiest area – with average incomes of £32,000 – fails to make it into Europe’s top 20 rich league.
Only North East Scotland, with an average GDP per person of £33,000, sneaks into Europe’s Premier League of wealth.
Eurostat, which is Brussels’ equivalent of the Office for National Statistics, measures wealth across the EU using a measure known as 'purchasing power standards'.
This aims to measure GDP per person but also 'takes into account differences in national price levels', to give a more realistic idea of how much the cash in people’s pockets is actually worth.
On this basis, four of the UK’s 37 regions struggle by on less than 75 per cent of the average EU earnings, alongside 15 in Poland, nine in Greece, seven in the Czech Republic and Romania, six in Hungary and five in Bulgaria and Italy.

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Towns in Britain are not only being left behind by wealthy parts of the South East - but also by much of the Continent, including former Communist countries in Eastern Europe like Krakow (above, right)

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Former mining villages, like Easington Colliery in County Durham (pictured left) are now poorer than booming cities in Eastern Europe like Vilnius (right) in Lithuania

Alongside Britain Portugal also has four poverty regions. Slovakia has three, Spain two and Croatia and Slovenia one each.
Families in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – which are so small that they each only count as a single region – also live on less than 75 per cent of the EU average, according to the figures.
Overall, there are just eight regions of the UK wealthier than the EU average. The remaining 29 areas are poorer.

'No other European country would tolerate such a gap between its rich and poor regions'
Chris Leslie,
Shadow Treasury Minister

The Valleys and Cornwall are in the top 50 poorest regions of the whole of Europe – and in the top 10 deprived areas of Western Europe, according to the purchasing power league table.
Eleven regions have incomes at least 20 per cent below the European average.
Shadow Treasury minister Chris Leslie told MailOnline the figures were a wake up call for Britain.
He said: 'No other European country would tolerate such a gap between its rich and poor regions.
'To allow so many parts of the country to fall behind not only London, but most of Europe, is shocking. We've got to take more action to have balanced prosperity.
'The challenge of the next few years is to help these parts of the country that have been left neglected.'
The Labour MP added: 'It is shocking to think parts of Britain are now poorer than Poland and other areas of Eastern Europe.
'When you start to take into account the prices people are having to pay in these areas - especially after seeing their incomes squeezed for years now - the contrast with Europe is even more stark.'

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Whole streets in some of Britain's great towns and cities, like this one in Salford, have been abandoned.

Tory MP Douglas Carswell said successive British governments had ran the economy for the benefit of the City - neglecting the rest of the country.
He said: 'Many of the poorest places in Britain are places that have europe-style big government. In Wales and the North East of England, the public sector is a huge chunk of the economy.
'If you are going to manage the economy like Europe, don't be surprised if you get European levels of wealth.'
Mr Carswell claimed there was a 'liberal metropolitan bias' in Westminster against areas outside London.

He said: 'For about 40 years we have been running our currency and our economy for the benefit of finance. This causes a huge distortion. We are basically subsidising Porsches and property in West London.'

Department of Defense to study bitcoin as possible terrorist threat

FILE - This April 3, 2013 file photo shows bitcoin tokens in Sandy, Utah. The Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange in Tokyo is headed for liquidation after a court rejected its bankruptcy protection application. Mt. Gox said Wednesday, April 16, 2014, the Tokyo District Court decided the company, which was a trading platform and storehouse for the bitcoin virtual currency, would not be able to resurrect itself under a business rehabilitation process filed for in February. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)


A division within the Department of Defense is investigating whether the digital currency bitcoin is a possible terrorist threat.
The Combatting Terrorism Technical Support Office is spearheading a program that will help the military understand how modern technologies could pose threats to national security, including bitcoin and other virtual currencies, the International Business Times reported.
A memo detailing some of the CTTSO projects states, “The introduction of virtual currency will likely shape threat finance by increasing the opaqueness, transactional velocity, and overall efficiencies of terrorist attacks,” as reported by Bitcoin Magazine, according to IBTimes.
One of the greatest concerns reportedly rests with the anonymity afforded bitcoin transactions. The transactions are public, but the people involved in the operations are unnamed.
Bitcoins, according to the business site, can allow illegal operations with the speed of the Internet, but with the secrecy of a cash deal.
Some high-profile cases have highlighted bitcoin’s vulnerability, including Silk Road, the digital black market shut down in October by the FBI. Silk Road accepted only bitcoin for payments. The site’s founder was charged with drug trafficking and money laundering.
A Treasury Department probe found no evidence of bitcoin being used to finance terrorism, but the anonymous nature of the transactions still has many law enforcement officials worried.
CTTSO is concerned that anonymous networks are a way to successfully traffic drugs, weapons, people and nuclear tech under the radar.
Android, Motorola, social media and virtual reality were also included on the CTTSO’s list of topics worth researching regarding terrorism.
Click for the story from the International Business Times.

Shocking US jobs data impugns recovery, Fed tapering

Friday's figures are a warning that the US recovery may be losing momentum

The headline unemployment rate fell to 6.3pc but that was only because the labour 'participation rate' plummeted back to a modern-era low of 62.8pc Photo: Getty Images

 

The US economy has delivered two minor shocks in a week, prompting concerns that bond tapering by the Federal Reserve may be doing more damage than expected.

Non-Farm Payrolls data released on Friday shows that the workforce shed 806,000 jobs in April, a stunning drop that cannot plausibly be blamed on the weather. Wage growth and hours worked were both flat and the manufacturing hours per week fell.

This follows news earlier in the week that the economy to a halt in the first quarter. Growth plummeted to 0.1pc and is now well below the Fed’s “stall speed” indicator. Analysts blamed this on the freezing polar vortex over the winter.

Yet the jobs data confirm a disturbingly weak picture. The headline unemployment rate fell to 6.3pc but that was only because the labour “participation rate” plummeted back to a modern-era low of 62.8pc, last seen in 1978 when there were far fewer women in the workforce. The rate for males is the lowest ever recorded at 69.1pc.

The jobs market is highly volatile – and is often revised later – but the data are a warning that the US recovery may be losing momentum. Lakshman Achuthan, from the Economic Cycle Research Institute, said the trend was already weakening long before the cold weather. “We see a failure to launch. We’re decelerating, not accelerating, and that is a big concern,” he said.

The Fed has gradually been turning down the spigot of dollar liquidity, reducing its bond purchases by $10bn a month at each meeting, even though the bank’s measure of core PCE inflation has dropped to 1.1pc. The net stimulus has dropped from $85bn a month to $45bn.
This is a form of monetary tightening. Interest rates have not risen – though they are rising in real terms – but the quantity of money mechanism may nevertheless be having a powerful effect. The broadest measure of the money supply – Divisia M4 – has dropped from a growth rate above 6pc a year ago to just 2.6pc in March.
The Fed is unlikely to blink yet. Even the once dovish San Francisco Fed has warned that quantitative easing no longer serves a useful purpose and may be doing more harm that good at this stage, fuelling asset bubbles without much benefit for the real economy. Analysts say it would take several months of bad data to force the Fed to halt tapering and change course again.
US policy-makers no longer pay much attention to the monetary data. Robert Hetzel, from the Richmond Fed, said this led to a grave error in mid-2008 when the Fed’s voting board began to talk up rate rises even though the money supply was already buckling. He argues that this played a key part in the Lehman crash several months later.
Erica Groschen, from the Bureau of Labour Statistics, said the sudden drop in jobs last month was caused by fewer people joining the workforce, rather than people leaving. That is hardly reassuring, and conflicts with theories that the participation rate is falling because people are choosing to retire early.
The weakness may be nothing worse than a pause for breath – or a mid-cycle correction – as the US gears up for a second leg of the post-Lehman expansion. The risk is that this instead proves to be the end of growth cycle that is already long in the teeth by historic standards.
The possibility of a fresh downturn with the interest rates already at zero, the Fed’s balance sheet already at $4 trillion, and gross public debt above 100pc of GDP for the first time since the end of the Second World War is what keeps US economists awake night. There is little margin for policy error.

 

Fed won't consider rate raise until October: Fisher

The Federal Reserve will likely bring its massive bond-buying program to an end in October, and only after that will it consider when to raise U.S. interest rates, a top Fed official said on Sunday.
"I personally expect us to end that program in October," Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said in an interview on Fox News. "Then we have to see how the economy is doing, including these broader measures of unemployment and where we stand before we can talk about how we might move the short-term rate."
U.S. unemployment registered 6.3 percent in April, a government report showed on Friday. But broader measures of the strength of the labor market, including the labor participation rate and hourly wages, indicated the jobs market is still far from strong.

Why we're still stuck in the 'new normal': Pimco

More workers are dropping out of the labor force, data showed, suggesting that many saw job prospects too poor to merit a job hunt. Average hourly wages last month did not grow at all.
"It's too early to tell," Fisher said of when the economy will be ready for higher rates. "I'll make this prediction: some time in the next 100 years, interest rates will go up."
The Fed has kept short-term U.S. interest rates near zero since December 2008 and has bought trillions of dollars in long-term securities to help boost the economy and bring down unemployment.

Yellen: Small bank loan growth a good sign

Five months ago, with unemployment down sharply from its recession-era high around 10 percent, the Fed began cutting back on its monthly bond-buying stimulus.
Last week it continued that process, trimming its monthly purchases to $45 billion.
At the same time, the Fed has said it will keep rates near zero for a "considerable time" after it ends its bond-buying program so that it can assess the strength of the economy.
Fisher, who votes on Fed policy this year, has long wanted to end the bond-buying program and has warned that keeping rates too low for too long could feed unseen financial market bubbles.

Target chairman and CEO ousted

Target's chairman and CEO Gregg Steinhafel abruptly departed from both roles on Monday, effective immediately, after 35 years with the retailer.
Following the move, Target shares fell in premarket trading on Monday. (Click here to track its shares.)

The company has appointed its chief financial officer, John Mulligan, as interim president and chief executive. Board member Roxanne S. Austin has been appointed as interim non-executive chair of the board.

 

Retail sector is a moving target: Buffett

Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman, and Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway chairman & CEO, share their thoughts on the announcement Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel is stepping down, and the difficulty in working in the retail space.

During the transition, Steinhafel will serve as an advisor.
The decision comes in the wake of a massive data breach that impacted millions of Target customers late last year. The discount retailer has also faced challenges related to its expansion into Canada.
Brian Sozzi, Belus Capital Advisors' CEO & Chief Equities Strategist, said he expected Steinhafel's departure to have occurred a few months ago ahead of the spring selling season.
Watch: Target's new chip credit cards

"The fact that they're doing this now indicates that the first quarter may not have improved from the holiday quarter," he said, adding that he views Steinhafel's exit as a "long-term positive for the stock" and that the company should look for an outsider.
Janney Montgomery analysts echoed this need.
"There is a lot that has gone wrong at TGT over the past few years, and it is critical that the company looks for an outsider to come in, and revisit several strategic mistakes. This is a company that continues to have a great, if tarnished brand, tremendous supply chain, albeit an e-commerce business that is far behind where it needs to be at this point in its online growth strategy," they wrote in a note to clients.

This is the second C-suite departure at Target in as many months. In early March, Target CIO also resigned.

"Clearly, there is no longer the same level of bench strength that historically characterized the organization," Credit Suisse analyst Michael Exstein wrote in a research note. "In time we expect other members of the management team will retire as the management transition unfolds."

To hear Steinhafel's account of the Target breach, click here.
—By CNBC