Free Republic

Financial markets are in a precarious place, with European banks and sovereign balance sheets in the cross-hairs. Bank regulators are becoming increasingly aggressive, and euro-zone borrowing costs are rising as the debts of years past are coming due. In this environment, policy makers are finding their authority, credibility and firepower being tested. In turn, they are finding it tempting to pursue "financial repression"—suppressing market prices that they don't like. But this is bad policy, not least because it signals diminished faith in the market economy itself. Markets are not always efficient, but the market-clearing prices for stocks, bonds, currencies and...

Today, in advance of their sworn testimony, each witness to the Senate Agricultural Committee's MF Global hearing was requested to disclose what their prepared remarks would be. Sure enough, CME executive chairman Terry Duffy did that, and his prepared testimony can be found here. In and of itself there was nothing unexpected about said speech, the relevant section of which has been transcribed below. Where things got very ugly for Corzine, is when Duffy literally veered from the script, and added three unexpected sentences, catching everyone in the committee off guard (including those who had given up on the testimony...

Job-killing bank regulations threaten to wipe out all the gains in private-sector employment since the recovery began, the industry warns. Washington, however, is hiring thousands more bureaucrats to enforce the rules. Signed into law last year, the Dodd-Frank Act is the biggest rewrite of financial regulations since the New Deal. It was intended to rein in Wall Street "excesses." But the banking industry says burdensome red tape is hurting economic growth and jobs in a still-sluggish labor market. "The level of real GDP could be 2.7% less by the year 2015 than would otherwise be the case for the United...

Laurie: R. Ferber has quite a resume. She is currently the general counsel of MF Global Holdings, the New York-based futures and commodities brokerage that filed for bankruptcy on October 31, listing some $40 billion in liabilities. Before joining MF Global in 2009, a year or so before Jon Corzine became its chairman and chief executive officer, Ferber was general counsel and chief regulatory officer at the International Derivatives Clearing Group LLC, which clears interest-rate swaps. Before that, she spent more than 20 years at Goldman Sachs Group, where first she was general counsel for J. Aron & Company, a...

more: http://www.SHTFplan.com/ From what we can gather, according to eye witness testimony, St. Louis PD has barricaded the Bank of America building and is refusing customer access to deposits. Eye witness account: ‘They would not let me get past that barricade, where those three guys are. I talked to the liutenant of the St. Louis Police Department – and he said they [customers?] don’t have a legal right – but he was going to try to work out something, a symbolic gesture where eight people to pull out their money, I being one of them.’ He came back later and...

The lawsuits against Bank of America are piling up. The latest comes from Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp, which wants Bank of America Corp. to repurchase poorly-written mortgages sold by Countrywide Financial in 2005. Bank of America bought Countrywide Financial Corp. in 2008. The lawsuit, which was filed in New York on Monday, claims Countrywide sold U.S. Bancorp a pool of over 4,000 loans originally valued at $1.75 billion. U.S. Bancorp claims Countrywide ignored its own mortgage underwriting guidelines when issuing those loans. According to the complaint, Countrywide agreed to repurchase loans within 90 days if any of the statements made in...

FOR the last three years we have been told repeatedly by government officials that funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to large and teetering banks during the credit crisis was necessary to save the financial system, and beneficial to Main Street... --snip-- Bloomberg reported that the Fed had provided a stunning $1.2 trillion to large global financial institutions at the peak of its crisis lending in December 2008. --snip-- In 2008, the Royal Bank of Scotland received $84.5 billion, and Dexia, a Belgian lender, borrowed $58.5 billion from the Fed at... --snip-- Mr. Todd also questioned the Fed’s decision to...

<p>NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) is joining a growing number of banks that are introducing or testing a monthly fee for debit cards, casting around for revenue lost to debit-card regulatory restrictions.</p> <p>Wells Fargo, the nation's second-largest bank by deposits, will charge a $3 fee for debit and automated-teller-machine cards as of Oct. 14 in several states if such cards are used for purchases (but not for ATM usage). The bank said it is a pilot program, and it will monitor how people respond.</p>

The real reason JP Morgan recently decided to open and operate a Comex gold vault is now in full view. A close friend of mine in the NYC hedge fund community informed me today that hedge funds are now buying gold from JP Morgan, who turns around and "safekeeps" it for them for 15 basis points (that's .15%) on the market value of the gold being stored. My friend referred to this as "allocated" gold. On the surface it looks like the smart money "gold rush" is on. But, in the wisdom of Shakespeare via Macbeth: "nothing is but what...

Ron Paul's recent idea on how to ease the national debt is hardly original but none the less worthy of consideration. He has proposed what leftist critics of the status quo monetary system have been proposing for decades: that money printing should be used to fund the government. To give Ron due credit, he is not proposing exactly that. More precisely, he is proposing that the Fed should tear up a bundle of its Treasury securities, which would lower our overall debt total bringing us below the current debt ceiling. Still, the mechanics are identical, if not in reverse order....

Bank of America and Morgan Stanley have agreed to pay more than $22 million combined to settle federal civil charges on improperly foreclosing on military personnel, The Associated Press reports. The latest home or commercial real estate news Sample Between 2006 and 2009, the mortgage lenders foreclosed on 178 military members in 22 states without getting court approval. The military members affected will each receive $125,562, on average. The banks will also continue to investigate whether improper foreclosures occurred in 2009 through 2010.

Preface: Some defendants are no longer allowed to see the "secret evidence" which the government is using against them. See this and this. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that judges can throw out cases because they don't like or believe the plaintiff ... even before anyone has had the chance to conduct discovery to prove their case. In other words, judges' secret biases can be the basis for denying people their day in court, without even having to examine the facts. Claims of national security are being used to keep the shenanigans of the biggest banks an corporations secret,...

Yesterday, when we posted the full original letter submitted by True Finns leader Timo Soini titled "Why I Won't Support More Bailouts" as presented by the Wall Street Journal in verbatim, we were surprised that the WSJ, traditionally the bastion of various Fed interests (a topic previously dissected in "On The New York Fed's Editorial Influence Over The WSJ"), would allow such a truthy letter to appear on its pages. Today, courtesy of Karl Denninger who pointed out something glaringly disgusting, we were forced to look again at the letter as it now appears on the website of the WSJ....

Authorities say a homeless man robbed a Tampa bank, fled on a city bus and handed out stolen cash to passengers. Hillsborough County Sheriff's deputies say 27-year-old Elmer McGuirt handed a note demanding money to a Wachovia Bank teller about 4:30 p.m. Thursday. Witnesses told deputies he then got on the bus and started handing out money, keeping some of the cash for himself. The sheriff's office contacted the bus driver, who stopped the bus and pretended to have mechanical failure. Deputies arrested McGuirt and were also able to get some of the money back from passengers. McQuirt now faces...

GULAG NIGHT Monday 4/25 10pmET - Stream Live Here - Call 310-807-5060Come let us classify and catalog the most consistently treacherous and dangerous of America's enemies. We will expose and elucidate George Soros' INET, the IMF, World Bank, "Federal Reserve," and the central bank empire they serve... What are they scheming, in their headlong pace of Spring Meetings?...their neo-Marxist-motivating lies of egalitarianism ...and their deeply evil goals of world domination ...control of nearly every phase of our lives ...their profiteering from constant debauching of our currency ...and even their objective of our depopulation -- however that may be done....

The economy is so bad that African television stations are showing 'Sponsor an American Child' commercials! The economy is so bad, a picture is now only worth 200 words. It's so bad, Snoop Dogg had to start eating regular brownies. The economy is so bad, I saw the CEO of Wal-Mart shopping at Wal-Mart. The economy is so bad, I went to my bank the other day and the teller handed me a note saying, "This is a robbery!" The economy is so bad, George W. Bush appeared in a flight suit and declared economic recovery was complete. The economy...

The United States does not have debtors prisons, per se -- they effectively were outlawed in 1833 -- but you can still go to jail for failure to pay your debts. Surprised? You wouldn't be if you thought about it for a bit. Judges occasionally jail a parent who fails to pay court-ordered child support, but only after going to considerable effort to extract the money in other ways, and usually only if the courts believe the parent can afford to pay. And there are still "pay the fine or …" judgments, although community service in lieu of slammer time...

Federal mortgage backer Freddie Mac is taking its foreclosure cases from the Fort Lauderdale-based Marshall C. Watson law firm, one of eight Florida firms facing state scrutiny for its handling of home repossessions. Brad German, a spokesman for Freddie Mac, confirmed the removal of the cases this morning, but did not say why Watson will no longer be used. “Going forward our servicers will be directing business to other counsel,” German said. In a statement, the Marshall C. Watson law firm said the parting was a mutual decision made by both sides. “Freddie Mac and our firm mutually decided to...

Duchess of York admits Duke arranged for convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein to pay off her debts The Duchess of York has admitted that her former husband arranged for a convicted paedophile to pay off her debts.

The representatives of the petition on kjosum.is, where President of Iceland Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson is urged not to sign the new Icesave legislation and send it to a national referendum, delivered almost 37,600 signatures to Bessastadir, the presidential residence, today at 11 am. One of the petition’s organizers, Hallur Hallsson, told ruv.is that the signatures were run against the National Registry database by the company Creditinfo, which resulted in 186 names being crossed off the list. Hallsson said the methodology of the collection and the processing of the data would be explained to the president. The petition was closed to...