Free Republic

There is so much chaos going on that I don't even know where to start. For a very long time I have been warning my readers that a major banking collapse was coming to Europe, and now it is finally unfolding. Let's start with Deutsche Bank. The stock of the most important bank in the "strongest economy in Europe" plunged another 8 percent on Monday, and it is now hovering just above the all-time record low that was set during the last financial crisis. Overall, the stock price is now down a staggering 36 percent since 2016 began, and...

So It Begins: Bloomberg Op-Ed Calls For An End Of Cash http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-31/bloomberg-op-ed-calls-end-cash So It Begins: Bloomberg Op-Ed Calls For An End Of Cash Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/31/2016 In a moment of curious serendipity, a little over 90 minutes after we showed what a dystopian, centrally-planned, cashless society unleashed in a negative interest rate world would look like ("by forcing people and companies to convert their paper money into bank deposits, the hope is that they can be persuaded (coerced?) to spend that money rather than save it because those deposits will carry considerable costs"), and briefly after we...

Earlier this week, before first JPM and then Wells Fargo revealed that not all is well when it comes to bank energy loan exposure, a small Tulsa-based lender, BOK Financial, said that its fourth-quarter earnings would miss analysts’ expectations because its loan-loss provisions would be higher than expected as a result of a single unidentified energy-industry borrower. We can now make it official, because moments ago we got confirmation from a second source who reports that according to an energy analyst who had recently met Houston funds to give his 1H16e update, one of his clients indicated that his firm...

When it comes to selling copy, it’s a good bet that sex trumps multilateral finance. That’s an axiom of human nature. It would be asking too much to expect that the media, or its customers, would be as fascinated by the in-house diplomacy of the International Monetary Fund as all concerned have been by the scandal surrounding the recently handcuffed and dethroned IMF managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Most eyes are now on the prosecutor’s cratering case, the curious past of the maid who alleged the sexual assault, and the media now analyzing its own coverage of these sordid events. But...

Still no deal with Apple. Five of Australia's biggest banks have signed up with Google's Android Pay payments service as they continue to butt heads with Apple over Cupertino's own Apple Pay platform. ANZ Bank, Westpac, ING Direct, Macquarie Bank, St George, Bank of Melbourne, Bank of South Australia and Bendigo Bank will all support the Android payment service when it lands in Australia in the first half of next year. At launch, Android Pay will support Mastercard and Visa credit and debit cards, Google said in a blog post today. The company is currently "working with Eftpos" on similar...

It was precisely two months ago, on September 2nd, when we explained that as a result of China's recent currency devaluation, in order to mitigate the inevitable capital outflows that such an FX move would unleash, China was "scrambling to enforce capital controls" in order to prevent the exit of hot (and not so hot) money from China's economy. We then said the following to explain why "this is great news for bitcoin": Which is why we would not be surprised to see another push higher in the value of bitcoin: it was earlier this summer when the digital currency,...

The concept of earning interest on money in the bank is so deeply ingrained into economic life that few people even know that the opposite can happen too: Banks can take a percentage of cash from your account in the form of negative interest rates, under certain conditions. Normally, this doesn't happen. Banks want your cash, and pay you interest on it, because the more deposits they have, the more they can lend it to others who pay them even more on their investments. But interest rates in Europe are so close to zero — and economic activity is so...

In 1913, the U.S. Congress passed a bill called the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. This bill allowed an independent group to privatize, and take control of America’s monetary system. The Federal Reserve Bank’s name was chosen to deceive the American people into believing that it is a branch of the U.S. government. It isn’t. This privately held monopoly gives great power to a handful of international bankers ... The Federal Reserve has no reserves. The name was created prior to the Federal Reserve Act being passed in 1913. This was done to make Americans believe the U.S. banking system...

Global law enforcement agencies have arrested a gang member behind the theft of £20 million ($30.7 million) via a piece of malicious software that records banking details, and are on the hunt for the remaining members. The malware – known as Dridex – is believed to be developed by in eastern Europe and it's able to harvest bank details online in order to steal money from people. Global financial institutions and a variety of different payment systems have been targeted, the U.K.'s National Crime Agency (NCA), one of the authorities involved, said on Tuesday. "Thousands" of Brits have been infected...

While the world breathlessly awaits the outcome of this week’s FOMC meeting—will the Federal Reserve raise interest rates or won’t it?—one thing is clear regardless: the Fed is driving the U.S. into a 2nd depression in order to carry out its one and only remit now that America’s ability to produce real jobs has been reduced to ash, namely, propping up criminal banks with multi-trillion-dollar giveaways. What’s so disturbing about the fatal path that the Fed has been on for 7 years is that it's one the Fed went down before, when—by its own admission—it extended and deepened the Great...

For a variety of reasons, there is a lot of enthusiasm and optimism surrounding the death of Palestinian Authority (''PA'') leader, Yasser Arafat, and how his demise might advance an expeditious resolution of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. To be sure, I would love to jump on this bandwagon, and offer another in a litany of cheery op-eds issued internationally since the passing of the former leader of the PLO. However, though I agree that Arafat has been a huge stumbling block to peace in this region that has now been removed, it is unquestionably much more than just him that has...

Financial companies are facing extortion threats from hackers who threaten to knock their websites offline unless firms pay tens of thousands of dollars, an FBI agent told MarketWatch Thursday. More than 100 companies, including targets from big banks to brokerages in the financial sector, have received distributed denial of service threats since about April, says Richard Jacobs, assistant special agency in charge of the cyber branch at the FBI’s New York office. With these types of attacks, known as DDoS, criminals jam websites by flooding them with useless traffic. The ransom requests typically run in the tens of thousands of...

Five years after the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial law, the causes and effects of the failed economic recovery are apparent throughout the banking system. The Federal Reserve’s monetary easing has inflated bank reserves, but lending has barely increased. Today banks maintain an extraordinary $29 of reserves for every dollar they are required to hold. In the first quarter of 2015 banks actually deposited more money in the Fed ($65.1 billion) than they lent ($52.5 billion). According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., 1,341 commercial banks have disappeared since 2010. Remarkably, only two new banks have been chartered. By comparison,...

You're John McCain, a fallen hero who wanted to become president so desperately that you sold yourself to Charlie Keating, the wealthy con man who bears such an incredible resemblance to The Joker. Yes this was written in 1989, but has John McCain changed that much????

**snip** Although she didn’t know it immediately, Ms. Sung had stumbled on a fraudulent scheme involving false borrower income verifications and documentation. The bank began investigating and Mr. Yu was fired the following Monday. The discovery put an end to the scheme at Abacus. But it was only the beginning of a five-and-a-half-year odyssey through the New York State criminal justice system for the Sung family and the community lender the family had built from nothing. Bank officials uncovered the fraud, fired the mastermind, investigated and reported it to regulators and provided New York State prosecutors with over 900,000 pages...

If only Wall Street bankers had listened to St. Hillary during the subprime mortgage frenzy. She now claims she warned about the risky loans. Yep, a Clinton actually went there. Her campaign may regret it. While bashing Wall Street for risky acts and "criminal behavior," Clinton in her first economic stump speech portrayed herself as the voice of financial sanity in a casino of wild greed. "As we all know, in the years before the crash, financial firms piled risk upon risk," she intoned, "and regulators in Washington either wouldn't or couldn't keep up. "I was alarmed by this gathering...

Few in the odd coalition of Left and Right pushing for reauthorization of the 81-year-old Export-Import Bank have been louder than Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “It’s wrong that candidates for president, who really should know better, are jumping on this bandwagon,” she said at a May 22 campaign stop in New Hampshire. “It’s wrong, it’s embarrassing. . . . The idea that we would remove this relatively small but vital source of funding for our businesses to compete is absolutely backwards.” Clinton’s defense of Ex-Im may be motivated by more than mere concern for American businesses. Critics have argued...

(Title edited due to lemgth) Fears the central bank of Greece will collapse following today's referendum are rising as voters flocked to the polls to decide on their country's future. [snip] Officials are set to ask the European Central Bank (ECB) for emergency cash in a bid to stave off financial ruin following tonight's result, it has been reported. [snip] It comes as some sources also suggested ATMs will not open this evening in a bid to save money after EU leaders threatened to withdraw the euro in the event of a 'No' vote.

Recently, the financial services company Signature Bank announced the appointment of a prominent new board member. Perhaps to the surprise of some, the individual receiving the board seat was none other than the co-author and namesake of one of the nation’s largest and arguably most significant pieces of banking regulation since the Great Depression, former Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Barney Frank. How much can Frank expect to earn for his services? Fortune writes that Signature’s non-employee board members earned approximately $375,000 in cash and stock for their services last year. Rep. Frank was reportedly also granted restricted shares vesting in March...

An injunction issued against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by federal judge Leigh Martin May could spell the beginning of the end for Administrative Law Courts and with them, 80 years of unconstitutional abuse of power by the Executive branch. Administrative Law “…allows for the creation of public regulatory agencies and contains all of the statutes, judicial decisions, and regulations that govern them.” These regulatory bodies include the EPA and the SEC. Many came into being during the reign of Franklin Roosevelt, the one president more arrogant and power hungry than Barack Obama. The law itself “…is created by...