Free Republic

"We warned that the banks have turned the corner when their cycle finished last year. The NY Post has come out stating that being a banker is not so great anymore. When the ECM turns down 2015.75 into 2020, things for the banks are going to get a lot worse. They are hated perhaps even more than politicians. Their proprietary trading has destroyed the industry and been the worst public image than any sector can have."

Future generations of Bitcoin billionaires may someday look back on 2014 with knowing smiles. Here was a year when thefts spread, exchanges collapsed, rates gyrated like a teenager’s moods. And yet the buying of bitcoins showed no signs of abating. The past week was particularly extreme. The apparent suicide of an American business executive in Singapore was investigated for possible ties to her Bitcoin investments. A California man fingered as the currency’s mysterious inventor reacted to his sudden fame by asking that journalists buy him lunch. After finishing his meal at a sushi restaurant, he went on to deny any...

It’s a sad day for the Internet… according to Trend Micro’s security analysts, it’s been discovered that photographs of both sunsets and — even more heartbreaking — cats being shared across the web contain malware capable of getting into your bank accounts.

It’s become a health hazard to be a banker. What evil lurks beneath the pile of bodies?In growing numbers, the bodies of bankers are piling up in the streets — at least eight global financial types in recent weeks (and five others in the past year). And a financial reporter for The Wall Street Journal walked out of his house and mysteriously hasn’t been seen or heard from in weeks.So what gives? Three of the bankers worked for JPMorgan. One worked for Deutsche Bank AG. Others for companies not so prominent, i.e., not “too big to fail,” but possibly...

Wells Fargo cuts 700 employees, including 203 in the Twin Cities, as demand for mortgages declines.Wells Fargo & Co. said Wednesday that it is cutting 700 employees, including 203 in the Twin Cities, as demand for mortgages continues to shrink. The San Francisco-based bank said it notified affected employees Wednesday, and that almost all of them work at the Wells Fargo Home Mortgage campus in south Minneapolis. Some work elsewhere in the Twin Cities. The cuts follow scattered layoffs in the Twin Cities in January in which Wells Fargo laid off fewer than 30 mortgage-related workers. “We currently expect mortgage...

My colleagues Hester Peirce and Robert Greene have put together a series of charts showing the recent concentration of the U.S. banking system — small banks are disappearing and large banks are growing in number. Here is one of their charts that shows the changes: Repeated waves of bank regulation — most recently Dodd-Frank — can be particularly burdensome for small banks. Peirce and Green explain: Regulatory compliance can be a particular challenge for small banks with limited compliance expertise. Regulatory expenses absorb a larger percentage of small banks’ budgets than of their larger counterparts’ budgets. Although correlation is not...

The last time JPMorgan had an investor day, Jamie Dimon explained to Mike Mayo why he is richer than him (and pretty much anyone else). This year, Jamie will be more focused on explaining to 8,000 JPM workers why after firing 16,500 people in consumer and mortgage banking, the bank will now let go another 2K and 6K in those same two groups (which will bring total mortgage and consumer banking headcount reductions between 2013 and 2014 to at least 17K and 7.5K, respectively). This may be tricky especially in the context of, you know, the housing and economic...

What are we to make of this sudden rash of banker suicides? Does this trail of dead bankers lead somewhere? Or could it be just a coincidence that so many bankers have died in such close proximity? I will be perfectly honest and admit that I do not know what is going on. But there are some common themes that seem to link at least some of these deaths together. First of all, most of these men were in good health and in their prime working years. Secondly, most of these "suicides" seem to have come out of nowhere and...

  The dismal trail of dead bankers continues. As The Journal Star reports, a successful Lincoln businessman and member of a prominent local family died last week. Former National Bank of Commerce CEO James Stuart Jr. was found dead in Scottsdale, Ariz., the morning of Feb. 19. A family spokesman did not say what caused the death. This brings the total of banker deaths in recent weeks to 9 as Stuart is sadly survived by three sons and four daughters.  Mr Stuart's background (via The Journal Star), Stuart was a native of Lincoln and graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with...

What else can we do with the $1.25 trillion we'll save by eliminating these obsolete financial middleman parasites? A lot. Technology has leapfrogged the banking sector, rendering it as obsolete as buggy whips. So why are we devoting 9% of our economy to an obsolete parasite? Financial sector profits now total a staggering 4.5% of GDP (gross domestic product), while the expenses generated by financial churning account for another 4.5% of the economy....

Three former Barclays bank employees have now been charged with “conspiracy to defraud” in the continuing LIBOR scandal, bringing the total to 13 people charged in America and the U.K. It has been reported that three ex-ICAP brokers are next on the list for helping traders manipulate interest rates. Three former Barclays bankers have been charged “in connection with the manipulation of Libor” interest rates, the Serious Fraud Office said. The SFO alleges the three – Peter Charles Johnson, Jonathan James Mathew and Stylianos Contogoulas – "conspired to defraud between 1 June 2005 and 31 August 2007". They will appear...

JPMorgan banker jumps from Hong Kong headquarters A 33-year-old man jumped to his death from the skyscraper roof of U.S. investment bank JPMorgan Chase & Co’s Asia headquarters on Tuesday, police said. JP Morgan has confirmed that the man who jumped was an employee at the firm with the last name Li. He was a junior investment banker.

SEATTLE (AP) — For marijuana dispensaries around the country, the days of doing business in cash — driving around with bill-stuffed envelopes to pay the rent, or showing up at a state revenue office with $20,000 in paper bags for the tax man — can't end soon enough.

Former senior legal counsel at the World Bank turned whistleblower Karen Hudes talks about the corruption inside the World Bank and her personal saga to find out about it. She says a worldwide currency war is certain and NATO in jeopardy, if the wrongdoing isn’t finally addressed. By Lars Schall Karen Hudes studied law at Yale Law School (J.D.) and economics at the University of Amsterdam (M.Phil). She worked as a corporate and securities lawyer at a major New York law firm and for several years at the Export Import Bank of the US, before she became a senior counsel...

<p>If the stock market were already crashing then it would be simple to blame the dismally sad rash of dead bankers in the last week on that - certainly that was reflected in 1929. However, for the third time in the last week, a senior financial executive has died in what appears to be a suicide. As Bloomberg reports, following the deaths of a JPMorgan senior manager (Tuesday) and a Deutsche Bank executive (Sunday), Russell Investments' Chief Economist (and former Fed economist) Mike Dueker was found dead at the side of a highway in Washington State. Police said the death appeared to be a suicide.</p>

People are getting increasingly agitated about being spied on by government. The snoops at the National Security Agency have gotten the most attention, and those bureaucrats are in the challenging position of trying to justify massive invasions of our privacy when they can’t show any evidence that this voyeurism has stopped a single terrorist attack. And let’s not forget that some politicians and bureaucrats want to track our driving habits with GPS devices. Their immediate goal is taxing us (gee, what a surprise), but does anyone doubt that the next step would be a database of our movements? But the...

Two top American bankers commit suicide in London as one jumps 500ft to his death from JP Morgan skyscraper and another hangs himself in luxury home •Gabriel Magee, a 39-year-old JP Morgan bank executive, died this morning after he threw himself off the top of the bank's European headquarters •On Sunday, former Deutsche Bank senior manager, William 'Bill' Broeksmit, 58, was found hanging in his home in South Kensington •Both deaths have been ruled non-suspicious by the Metropolitan Police •Magee had lived in London for seven years after transferring from the Unites States with JP Morgan •Broeksmit had been in...

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have both held investigations into whether Bank of America (BAC) engaged in improper trading by doing its own futures trades ahead of executing large orders for clients, according to a regulatory filing. The June 2013 disclosure, which Reuters recently reviewed on a website run by the securities industry regulator FINRA, sheds light on the basis for a warning by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on January 8. The warning, in the form of an intelligence bulletin to regulators and security officers at financial services firms,...

Bitcoin is here to stay and will continue to grow, according to experts speaking on separate panels at Money2020 in Las Vegas. The recent prosecution of Silk Road, an underground online market for drugs that traded Bitcoins and the FBI’s confiscation of approximately $3.5 million in Bitcoins, looked like a severe blow to the virtual currency. But Carol Van Cleef, partner in Patton Boggs and moderator of a session on maths-based and virtual currencies, said the bust showed growing sophistication on the part of federal law enforcement agencies, reports Tom Groenfeldt. “They decided to go not after the system itself,...

A major peculiarity of Obama's recent promises involving his upcoming "Year of Action" is that the chief enemy he's sworn to overcome is none other than... Barack Obama. Consider "income inequality." As far as this can be said to actually exist, it's a function of certain sectors of the financial industry reaping massive windfalls over the past few years while the rest of the country has stagnated under the burden of the recession. So who is responsible for this state of affairs? Consider the trillion and a half dollars handed over to the banks and other financial institutions shortly after...