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"The cashpoint at the Greek parliament is reported to have been topped up three times during an emergency session on Saturday night as ministers and MPs scrambled to get their own money out"

Greece banks to stay closed on Monday, Piraeus Bank chief says, after emergency meeting in Athens This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly

Why Is The EU Forcing European Nations To Adopt 'Bail-In' Legislation by the End of the Summer? Are they expecting something to happen? As you will read about below, the European Union says that any nation within the EU that does not enact "bail-in" legislation within the next two months will face legal action. The countries that are being threatened in this manner include Italy and France. If you fast forward two months from this moment, that puts us in early August. So clearly the European Union wants everything to be squared away by the end of the summer. Is...

HOUSTON (AP) - Larry Gonzales was emerging from his Garda Cash Logistics armored truck to refill an ATM at a Houston-area Chase Bank in October 2013 when a man behind him demanded money. "People joke around with us," said Gonzales. "I didn't think this dude was actually serious. Next thing, I get shot in the back. Then I knew this was for real." The 28-year-old was shot six times and, despite multiple surgeries, still has a "lucky" bullet lodged in his chest. Gonzales' case is not unique. Federal statistics indicate Texas' largest city has become a hub for bank and...

Welcome to the Recovery! Food banks across the US state of New York are running out of food (37% of food pantries say they have had to turn away needy people because they ran out of food), amid falling funds and rising demand from people that have trouble affording food. About 2.6 million people have trouble affording food across New York with about 1.4 million New York City residents relying on food pantries to feed themselves, according to the Food Bank For New York City. But as PressTV reports, contrary to the belief that people visiting food pantries are homeless...

The Export-Import Bank charter will expire in a few days, on June 30, unless Congress acts to reauthorize it. The Export-Import Bank was created more than 80 years ago by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help foreign customers buy goods from the United States. Some companies benefit from the Export-Import Bank and they are the first ones to defend its reauthorization. But let’s be clear: Companies benefit from Export-Import Bank loans at the expense of taxpayers and other businesses. Taxpayers—not the companies themselves—assume the risk of a foreign loan, made through a private bank (like Goldman Sachs), to purchase a...

From the Middle East Media Research Institute comes a recent video of Egyptian presidential candidate Bassem Khafagi on Al-Nas TV promising to “complete the implementation of Islamic law in Egypt” (HT: Zip). From the MEMRI transcript: (VIDEO AT LINK) Bassem Khafaji: Let me tell you, in all honesty, that as a Muslim Egyptian, I am convinced of [the need to] complete the implementation of Islamic law in Egypt. I do not hide this truth in any way, because it is in keeping with the inclination of the Egyptian people. We Egyptians – both Muslims and non-Muslims – refer to the...

Banks want assurances from U.S. regulators that they will not be barred from certain businesses before agreeing to plead guilty to criminal charges over the manipulation of foreign exchange rates, causing a delay in multibillion-dollar settlements, people familiar with the matter said. In an unprecedented move, the parent companies or main banking units of JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), Citigroup Inc (C.N), Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS.L), Barclays Plc (BARC.L) and UBS Group AG (UBSG.VX) are likely to plead guilty to rigging foreign exchange rates to benefit their transactions. The banks are also scrambling to line up exemptions...

For most people, pleading guilty to a felony means they will very likely land in prison, lose their job and forfeit their right to vote. But when five of the world’s biggest banks plead guilty to an array of antitrust and fraud charges as soon as next week, life will go on, probably without much of a hiccup. The Justice Department is preparing to announce that Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and the Royal Bank of Scotland will collectively pay several billion dollars and plead guilty to criminal antitrust violations for rigging the price of foreign currencies, according to people briefed...

Lynn Parramore: How would you describe the problem of Too Big to Fail banks. Whey does it matter to an ordinary person? Anat Admati: Too Big to Fail is a license for recklessness. These institutions defy notions of fairness, accountability, and responsibility. They are the largest, most complex, and most indebted corporations in the entire economy. We all have to be really alarmed by the fact that not only do we still have such institutions, but many of them are ever-larger and more complex and at least as dangerous, if not more so, than they were before the financial crisis....

Piraeus Bank will write off credit cards and retail loans up to 20,000 euros ($21,484) for Greeks who qualify for help under a law the leftist government passed to provide relief to poverty-stricken borrowers, it said on Thursday.

Wall Street's six biggest banks have cut nearly 80,000 jobs over the past 5 years, according to Bloomberg. The majority of the cuts have come from Bank of America. That's over both the past 5 years and the past 12 months, as well as in the first quarter of 2015. Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley added jobs in the first quarter of 2015, but 4,000 jobs were still cut across Wall Street last quarter. Bloomberg looked at data from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Bank of America. Over the past 5 years, JPMorgan has...

WASHINGTON - When two Russian immigrants and their American financial backer needed marketing help for their innovative electric motor, they turned to a merchant banker at one of the nation's largest investment houses - retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark. The meeting at the Washington office of Stephens Inc. in late 2001 proved fortuitous for both Clark, the former supreme commander of NATO, and the principals in WaveCrest Laboratories, at the time a small research and development company in Dulles, Va. "They hit it off pretty much right away," said WaveCrest spokesman Tom McMahon. Clark signed on as a consultant...

To understand what feeds former president Jimmy Carter's anti-Israeli frenzy, look at his early links to Arab business. Between 1976-1977, the Carter family peanut business received a bailout in the form of a $4.6 million, "poorly managed" and highly irregular loan from the National Bank of Georgia (NBG). According to a July 29, 1980 Jack Anderson expose in The Washington Post, the bank's biggest borrower was Mr. Carter, and its chairman at that time was Mr. Carter's confidant, and later his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bert Lance.

The central banks don’t like that cash makes it hard to cut rates to below zero. 0% is pretty much as far as they can go (though there are exceptions such as in Denmark.) Bloomberg reports;

The world's central banks have a problem. When economic conditions worsen, they react by reducing interest rates in order to stimulate the economy. But, as has happened across the world in recent years, there comes a point where those central banks run out of room to cut — they can bring interest rates to zero, but reducing them further below that is fraught with problems, the biggest of which is cash in the economy. In a new piece, Citi's Willem Buiter looks at this problem, which is known as the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. Fundamentally, the...

Some of the world's biggest banks, including JP Morgan, Bank of America and US Bancorp, are withdrawing from the student loan market. That's according to a series of reports over the past couple years.It couldn't come at a worse time.That is because it coincides with a rise in students who want student loans.And, the amount of money those students want to borrow is also going up because the price of of a college education keeps rising.This chart tells the story: Federal Reserve Bank of New York -- Staff Reports April 2014 NY Federal Reserve report shows borrowers, and their average...

Hell yeah to the chief. Rapper Azealia Banks, in an interview with Billboard magazine, confessed to a major crush on President Obama. “He’s so fine,” declared the 23-year-old Banks. “Those big-ass white teeth and ears hanging off his head? I’m like, ‘Oh my God... ”

They're doing it again! When the last housing bubble burst, politicians blamed "greedy banks." They said mortgage companies lent money recklessly, making loans to people with dubious credit, for down payments as low as 3 percent. "It will work out," said the optimistic bankers. Regulators didn't disagree. Everyone said, "Home prices will keep going up." And home prices did -- until they didn't. The bubble popped in 2007. Lots of people were hurt, and politicians took more of your tax money to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac along with reckless banks. They also gave the Federal Housing Administration...

The idea of a bank deposit tax was raised by Labor in 2013 and was criticised by Tony Abbott at the time. Assistant Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has indicated an announcement on the new tax could be made before the budget. The Government is heading for a fight with the banking industry, which has warned it will have to pass the cost back onto customers. Mr Frydenberg is a member of the Government's Expenditure Review Committee but has refused to provide any details