Convicted of Felonies, Banks Are Allowed to Stay in Business

Two large international banks — Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas — are expected to plead guilty to criminal charges within the next few weeks. If that happens, they will pay large fines and officially be felons.

Should anyone care?

Is there really a difference between criminal convictions of banks and civil settlements that yield equally large fines?

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. certainly thinks so. He proudly proclaimed a couple of weeks ago that there was no bank “too big to jail.”

The obvious problem with that statement is that it is a non sequitur. Big or small, banks and other corporations are too inanimate to jail. Executives conceivably could be sent to prison, but that is not what we are talking about here.

But if companies cannot be sent to Leavenworth, they can face the death penalty
more http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/business/banks-that-are-criminals-remain-in-business.html?_r=0

The Brutal, Beneath-the-Surface, Slo-Mo Crash of Stocks

Leon Black, epitome of the smart money and CEO of private equity giant Apollo Global Management, explained the phenomenon this way during Thursday’s earnings call:

At a conference in the spring of last year, I was somewhat infamously quoted as saying that we were selling everything that was not nailed down. Here, at Apollo, since then, it’s no secret we’ve been very active in monetizing the existing investments of the funds we manage, but even I didn’t foresee the remarkable pace of the activity to come.... For now, in terms of harvesting, we intend to remain active in capitalizing on market conditions as appropriate.

This “harvesting” takes place when the smart money sells its investments at peak valuations and at the peak of the market to the dumb money, often mutual funds that get stuffed into the retirement nest eggs of the unwitting.
So this had to happen. With stock markets soaring for five years straight, with home prices jumping in the double digits two years in a row, and with other assets defying gravity each in its own manner, regular folks started doing the math and extending straight lines from these data points decades into the future, and they discovered that they’ll be able to retire once again comfortably. Or more precisely, 50% of them made that discovery, according to Gallup. The highest percentage since 2007, just before all heck broke lose.
This optimism of regular folks is required for the smart money to be able to “harvest” its gains. The mainstream media has been playing along by breathlessly covering the Dow, which set another all-time high on Friday, and the S&P 500 which is just a smidgen off its all-time high. But beneath the surface, stock after stock has been getting slaughtered. It just doesn’t show up in these two indices.
The stocks of the largest corporations have been doing pretty well. Due to their enormous market capitalization, they dominate mathematically the capitalization-weighted indices. And in that capacity, they paper over the systematic, wholesale destruction of smaller stocks, and particularly of the darlings of the last few years.
Some of this destruction has gnawed through the layers of large-cap stocks in other indices: the NASDAQ is down 6.9% from its 52-week high in March; the small-cap Russell 2000 is down 8.8%; the IBB Biotech Index 17.8%; the FDN Internet Index 18.9%; the SOCL social media index 27.0%.... It’s brutal out there.
And extensive. FBN Securities looked at individual stocks to determine how far the average stock in each of the major indices had plunged off their 52-week highs – and “plunge” is beginning to be the right word:

Note that the average stock in the Russell 2000 and in the NASDAQ has dropped into bear-market purgatory. There are about 5,000 stocks in the NASDAQ composite, and the average stock is down 24.3% from its 52-week high. This isn’t a handful of stocks, but thousands that are down in a big way. Only the index’s mastodons with megaton capitalizations cover up the bloodletting beneath them.
Drilling down a little, we get to the fabled momentum stocks, the darlings of the last few years, stocks that were driven to insane heights by Wall-Street hype, industrial-strength smoke and mirrors, blindly adoring buyers, momentum players, and finally retirees in search of the illusory wealth effect (after their life savings had been decimated by the Fed’s ZIRP). And among those stocks, there has been an extraordinary bloodbath.
Twitter’s plight – it’s down 57% from its 52-week high – has been ascribed in the media to its unique circumstances, the expiration of the lockup period, lack of profits, and whatnot. It certainly wouldn’t be indicative of anything else. Alas, these kinds of landmines have been blowing up all over the stock market.
One place to find some of them grouped together is the Cloud Index maintained by VC firm Bessemer Venture Partners. There are 37 publicly traded “cloud” companies in the index. The list below shows the top 23 by market cap, ranging from Salesforce with $31 billion in market cap to LogMeIn with just under $1 billion.

The average decline from their individual 52-week highs is 41.1%. A serious crash.
“After 30+ years in this biz, I’ve never watched an equity market rollover in slow mo,” a deeply worried portfolio manager with one of the world’s major banks told me. “That is, I’ve always been caught up in the excitement, as in 2000 and 2007. But today, there’s little excitement. Just calm confidence, as reflected in the VIX.”
That panic indicator, which measures volatility among S&P 500 stocks, sits tranquilly near its 52-week low, in a state of complete serenity. According to the VIX, stock market investors still think that nothing untoward is going to happen to stocks any time soon.
Only, it is already happening to thousands of stocks! The process is expanding and deepening, drawing evermore stocks into its vortex. But even while the googly-eyed mainstream media celebrate the Dow’s record high and speculate when the S&P 500 might itself set another record, stocks are being gutted one by one beneath these illustrious indices. The carnage is spreading. And nothing in history indicates that this might be a temporary blip, or that these stocks – after a dizzying, rationality-defying five-year bull market – will somehow not drag behind them those stocks that are still managing, by hook or crook, to keep their nose above water.
It fits the pattern of gratuitous bank enrichment perfectly. But this time, the big beneficiaries of the Fed are foreign banks. Read.... When $1.2 Trillion In Foreign Bank Funds In The US Dissipate
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What Are They Thinking?

Health Insurance is Not Healthcare

By JP Sottile | January 18, 2013

Insurance companies make a simple wager with you each time you sign a policy. They are betting that, over the life of the policy, they will pay out less to you and your beneficiaries than you will pay them.
Insurance companies of all kinds make tidy profits on this simple wager. If they don’t, sometimes the government will bail them out.
Either way, insurance is still just a bet. And in America, we do not have a healthcare system. We have a health insurance industry.
That industry has been one of the most profitable sectors of the economy for well over a decade. But costs skyrocketed and care suffered. We heard horror stories about rationed care, denied procedures and corporate bureaucracies run amok. Ironically, these were the horror stories we were supposed to hear if the government took the reigns of the “best healthcare system in the world.”
So, instead of a single-payer healthcare system, we got The Affordable Care Act—aka Obamacare. Instead of retiring the health insurance industry and its actuarial tables and profit margins and wagers, Obama “saved” the health insurance industry and enshrined it in perpetuity as the “Health Insurance-Industrial Complex.”
As the Affordable Care Act’s provisions begin to take effect, the folks in the Complex are wasting no time doing what they can to keep their profits tidy. Leading insurers in California are seeking increases in premiums ranging from 20% to 26%. Regulators in Florida and Ohio have already approved increasing premiums as much as 20%, and, since the ACA doesn’t set federal standards, insurance companies are moving in a number of states to force these spikes in premiums.
Remember, if you can “afford” health insurance, you have to buy it. If you refuse, you’ll pay a penalty to the government at tax time. Some are exempt from this mandate. But, in effect, the ACA has guaranteed the health insurance industry a captive market.
Meanwhile, they continue to change the terms of all those bets they’ve placed against millions of Americans and the cost of the “best healthcare in the world” continues to rise. When compared to other nations with some form of single-payer system, the difference is so stark that it’s almost obscene. It’s not just the $800 difference between an MRI in France versus the U.S., it’s almost every part of a system that has at its heart the relentless desire to turn a profit.
Even worse, a much-ballyhooed part of the promised “21^st Century transformation” into greater “affordability” has turned out be little more than a profiteering scheme.
Remember the “streamlining” and “cost savings” guaranteed from the conversion to electronic medical records? Well, it hasn’t quite panned out. In fact, the only real beneficiaries of the conversion are companies like General Electric that sell electronic medical records systems. Not coincidentally, GE and other interested parties funded the key RAND study in 2005 that both predicted $81 billion in savings for America’s health care system and also became the driving rationale for the profitable conversion.
This type of closed system is par for the course in Washington, D.C.
Every door revolves in the nation’s only recession-proof city. Is it any surprise that the woman who wrote the Affordable Care Act is now leaving the White House for a job with health care giant Johnson & Johnson? Liz Fowler worked for Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) during the drafting of the ACA and had the primary responsibility for authoring the legislation. After its passage, she migrated to the White House to help with implementation. Seems reasonable enough. However, it is important to note where she was before joining the staff of Senator Baucus. Yup, you guessed it…she was a bigwig at WellPoint, the nation’s second leading health insurance company with nearly 54 million policyholders.
All of this makes you wonder who knew whom in the breast milk-pump industry, which is seeing a huge spike in its profits thanks to a new coverage requirement written into the ACA.
It may be too early to render judgment on a law that hasn’t yet been fully implemented, but it is not too early to determine that the profit motive might simply be incompatible with the equitable delivery of healthcare. As matter of course, businesses try to lower costs and increase revenue. That may be okay when they sell scissors or candlesticks, but it seems ill-suited to deliver labor-intensive care for those who are most vulnerable.
And as far as the health of the insurance industry, it’s a safe bet that they’ll keep coming out on top as the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented.
JP Sottile is a freelance journalist, published historian, radio co-host and documentary filmmaker (The Warning, 2008). His credits include a stint on the Newshour news desk, C-SPAN, and as newsmagazine producer for ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington. His weekly show, Inside the Headlines w/ The Newsvandal, co-hosted by James Moore, airs every Friday on KRUU-FM in Fairfield, Iowa. He blogs under the pseudonym “the Newsvandal.”
Source

Economic Policies Have Led Us To The Great Divide And Will Lead Us To The Great Collapse

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When slow and steady change happens in your life, slowly but surely, you don’t really notice the aggregate of the change so much while you adapt to it over the span of time.

This is why when we reflect back on how it used to be (“back in the day”), it often seems so radically different than it is today. When we look back, we see some of the huge changes that have taken place – and we wonder how and why it has changed so much. The thing is, much of the change is disguised in increments, be it good or bad.

One such change has been taking place right under our noses, and I call it,

“The Great Divide”

There is a great divide that has been developing in this country, and although it has always existed to an extent throughout time – it has magnified dramatically since the FED bailouts and new economic policies since 2008.

That is, the divide between the very rich, and the rest of us.

No, not the divide between the rich and the poor, but the divide between the very upper middle class (on up to the very wealthy) – and the rest – including the rapidly disappearing middle class.

No, this has nothing to do with fanning the flames of “class warfare” between the have’s and the have-not’s. There will always be a gap – it’s just the way the spread works… and is logical when you really think about it – along with the typical reasons for it.

HOWEVER,

The reason for this EXAGGERATION of disparity are the present economic policies of the central bankers who have been (and still are) printing (digitally) an unbelievable amount of money every day, every month…

You all know this – it has been well known for years – the expanding money supply, the ballooning debt of our nation and the world’s nations.

When this amount of money is printed, it has to go somewhere.
It doesn’t just sit there! – with no effects.
A-lot of it goes into the financial markets – stocks, bonds, commodities, etc.

It also goes to extravagant luxuries of the rich – multimillion dollar estates, yachts, and any and all other opulence of the wealthy, etc.

The result of all this (money printing) is the ‘price’ of the things where the money flows — (e.g. the stock market) goes up (despite the underlying realities of the ‘real’ economy), and asset classes go up, all while our food, energy, and retail prices creep higher and higher as our government tells us inflation is tame and prices really aren’t getting any higher (due to their cloaking and manipulation of the numbers and how they are reported)…

A steady creep. Do you notice it?

The results of higher prices do not affect the wealthy who spend a very small percentage of their income on living expenses.

But for the rest (and the majority of people) who spend a very high percentage of their income on living expenses (rent-mortgage-food-energy-autos-health-insurance-bills-loans-taxes-etc.,) a creeping increase of those costs are consuming the remaining few percent of surplus income (if any) just to stay afloat.

Look at it this way — how much disposable income is left for you at the end of each week or month? 10%? Less?

If you earn, say, $50K a year and your weekly take-home pay is say, $800/wk. ($3500/mo.), how much do you have left over after your rent (mortgage), groceries, utilities, insurances, property taxes, fuel, loans, etc.? Do you have more than $300 or $400 left in your pocket? For most of the middle class, probably not so much…

For most, if their margin is say, 10%, (it’s costing 90% of their income to ‘live’), then ANY increases in these living expenses will have a very big impact on their lives!

On the other hand, for those who are spending a small percentage of their income on living expenses, they hardly are impacted at all by increases in their cost of living.

The thing is, the economic policies of the FED, the federal government, and the central bankers have been steadily widening the gap between the wealthy and the rest (the middle class).

And the disparity has become so great, that it is going to lead to social upheaval.

The reality is that proportionally there are very few of ‘them’ and there are LOTS of the rest. When ‘the rest’ reach their limit, there will be ‘unrest’. Count on it.

The great divide.

The current policies have so twisted economic reality, that it seems absurd that it continues. But it does. Debts at all-time (staggering) highs. Price-to-Earnings ratios (PE) and stock markets at all-time highs. The exuberance of blind faith in a never ending stream of dollars and profits flowing from the spigots. The uber-rich are the recipients of the stream of funny-money while the middle class are the recipients of a steady tightening of their budgets – unable to print their own funny money…

One day historians may look back on the years of ‘today’ and wonder why the vast majority of the people did not see it coming (the collapse). The signs were everywhere. How could they not have seen it or changed their ways? [SOURCE]

America’s homeless: The rise of Tent City, USA

Homeless encampments known as “tent cities” are popping up across the country.

Formed as an alternative to shelters and street-living, these makeshift communities are often set up off of highways, under bridges and in the woods. Some have “mayors” who determine the rules of the camp and who can and can’t join, others are a free-for-all. Someare overflowing with trash, old food, human waste and drug paraphernalia, others are relatively clean and drug-free.

The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty documented media accounts of tent cities between 2008 and 2013, and estimated that there are more than 100 tent communities in the United States — and it says the encampments are on the rise.

“[T]here have been increasing reports of homeless encampments emerging in communities across the country, primarily in urban and suburban areas and spanning states as diverse as Hawaii, Alaska, California, and Connecticut,” the organization’s study states.

Tent cities are most common in areas where shelter space is scarce or housing unaffordable. Yet, many people say they choose to live in a tent even when shelter is an option. And they do so for one big reason: freedom.

Shelters typically have strict rules: many require guests to check in and out at certain times that can conflict with work schedules and they often don’t allow couples to stay together. Drug and alcohol use is also prohibited,and some people don’t qualify for the subsidies they need to stay in a shelter because of a prior jail time (for certain crimes), or other reasons.

“Shelter is one step away from jail,” said Dave, who lived in a tent city in Camden, N.J.

Another resident of the same camp, Mike, said the only work he has been able to find is part-time road maintenance, which takes place at night. Because the shelters in the area would have required him to be inside by a certain time, like 10 p.m., staying there wasn’t an option. Setting up his own tent in the woods gave him the freedom to come and go as he pleased.   Some residents also view tent cities as safer than shelters because they say there’s more of a sense of community.

As these encampments continue to spread, public officials are responding in different ways.

The NLCHP found that of the more than 100 camps, only eight were actually considered legal. Ten tent cities weren’t officially recognized, but the city or county wasn’t doing anything to get rid of them. The vast majority of encampments, however, have been shut down and occupants have been evicted.


One of the most recent evictions took place in Camden, N.J., this week, when the state, county and city joined forces to shut down multiple tent cities and kick out the residents. While the county worked with the occupants to find them somewhere to go, Camden’s shelters were already full and many people ended up on the streets.

Instead of evicting people from tent cities, the NLCHP says the root of the issue — unaffordable housing — needs to be addressed.

“Encampments and tent cities have emerged as a means of self-help for homeless individuals to survive and find shelter, safety and a sense of community,” the report states. “Ultimately, the solution to the proliferation of encampments across the United States is the provision of affordable housing.”
 

Plane Crash in Laos Kills Top Government Officials: Vietnam

BREAKING: Plane Crash in Laos Kills Top Government Officials 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05…

http://rt.com/news/159576-laos-plane-…

Read more at http://investmentwatchblog.com/plane-crash-in-laos-kills-top-government-officials-vietnam/#5O02TMZ5KeVu2BVf.99