Free Republic

Where’s the outrage? No, not at President Obama’s performance, foreign and domestic, or his airbrushing the past three years of his failed economic policies out of the history books. That particular outrage Mitt Romney is taking good care to express as part of his strategy of concentrating on Obama’s failures rather than risk proposing policies to return morning to America. But where is the Republican candidate’s outrage at some of those who might be considered his own friends and allies? Just because Obama attacks “fat cat” bankers in one of his egalitarian rants doesn’t mean that Romney should refuse to...

Europe plunged deeper into crisis last night as Spain lurched closer to needing a full-blown bailout to save it from collapse. The government in Madrid was forced to pay prohibitively high interest rates to borrow money on another bruising day for the single currency bloc. It raised fears that Spain is on the verge of becoming the biggest victim of the euro crisis so far – following the bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Please read the rest at the source

Pharmacies in Greece were on strike earlier this week in protest at the government not paying them for medicines that should be free to customers. Many pharmacies now have huge debts to pharmaceutical companies for drugs they have handed out free of charge. Sky News spoke to one pharmacist who has not been paid by the state for over a year. Evaggelina Rousi, who runs a chemist in Athens, said: "The government owes us 30,000 euros but we have not been paid by them for a year and a half. Many people who rely on regular medication are at risk....

How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn't pay a medical bill -- one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn't owe. "She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn't have to pay it," The Associated Press reports. "But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs." Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who...

Yesterday, an open letter posted in the public comments section at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) by a self described JP Morgan insider and whistle-blower was removed in short order (no cache of the page exists, but it was briefly indexed by search engines). It was dead on arrival. A direct link to the letter now leads to an empty page in the hopes that it will never be seen by the 99% of Americans who tune in only to mainstream news sources for their daily dose of truth. Don’t worry, though, because if there’s one thing alternative news...

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....