Free Republic

<p>Silicon Valley may have plenty of millionaires, but the road to U.S. billionairedom is increasingly paved through finance.</p> <p>Nearly 27% of all U.S. billionaires in 2014 worked in finance (read: hedge-fund managers and a few others), according to a study by Caroline Freund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Sarah Oliver, a research analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank.</p>

Bernie Sanders, everyone's favorite socialist running for the American Presidency, has been exciting his urchins by telling them how the big, bad wolves of Wall Street are stealing their breakfast, lunch and dinner. The other night he stated "The business model of Wall Street is a fraud." Many people think Sanders is just a cute old Grandpa type. But since he just slandered everyone in the financial and banking business in America, I thought it might be a fine time to defend them and dispute the spurious statements he is making. I don't doubt that Sanders believes what he says....

Trump is Owned by EVERY Bank on Wall St. (Except Citi, Who He Stiffed for $300M)...

During the last Republican debate the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Stassel challenged Donald Trump on the projected revenue from his proposed tax plan. In essence Stassel claimed some economists doubted the growth factor Mr. Trump projects in his tax proposal. In a sixty second response time, it is factually impossible to explain something we have discussed here before. Specifically, one of the larger hurdles Trump faces is a need to re-educate an entire generation on a fundamentally new vision of the U.S. economy. A return to a goods- based manufacturing and industry driven economic model. Interestingly, many people have referenced...

Anyone have strong enough stomach and information junkie brain to dare watch with me?

For many Goldman Sachs employees, commuting to work does not mean riding the subway down to the firm's waterfront headquarters at 200 West Street in New York City. That's because a quarter of Goldman Sachs' staff work in lower-cost "strategic locations" around the world. About 25% of the global investment bank's headcount is based in cheaper locations in the US and abroad, according to a presentation from CEO Lloyd Blankfein at the Credit Suisse Financial Services Forum on Tuesday. Goldman Sachs had 36,800 staff at the end of 2015, which means 9,200 staff are based in these low-cost locations. By...

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, I asked this question: "We know she was reckless in her handling of national security secrets, but she's assiduously protective of whatever she said in those speeches. Why?" The assumption is that rather than corroborating her implausibly revisionist characterizations of what she said to those elite bankers who paid her six-figures per speech (her typical fee), the hidden transcripts would reveal a very chummy posture toward her supposed mortal enemies, or whatever. Such a revelation would further undermine her credibility among the Democratic base's rabidly anti-Wall Street base, buttress one of Bernie Sanders' central lines of...

Under a constant barrage of criticism from Democratic presidential rival Sen. Bernie Sanders for her cozy relationship with Wall Street, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton contended that she was just being polite in accepting $200,000 per hour for speeches she gave at Wall Street's request. "Look, this is what they offered me," she explained. "Was I supposed to have bargained for lower rates? If I had, would Senator Sanders now be accusing me of favoritism toward those firms? Let's not forget, in some instances I got even bigger speaking fees from universities. How could I, in good conscience, take...

Vintage Hillary. As she fashions herself as a hardcore anti-Wall Street progressive in the midst of a surprisingly competitive Democratic primary, she's trying to explain away her six-figure speeches to major financial institutions, who also happen to be her generous campaign benefactors. At Thursday's (very low-rated) debate against Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton claimed that when she delivered these lucrative addresses, she spoke truth to power -- bravely warning about the subprime mortgage collapse prior to the 2008 financial crisis: Hillary Clinton discusses her speeches on Wall Street Given this alleged, evidence-free prescience, one might think that Mrs. Clinton would be eager to release...

Chart comparing 2008 market behavior with 2016. But it is still too early in the year and 2016 may not repeat the stock market of 2008.

In the last Democratic debate before the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton came up with her fourth explanation for the gluttonous speaking fees and campaign contributions that the financial sector and investment firms -- "Wall Street," in liberal shorthand -- have been showering on her for so long. Explanation No. 1, you'll recall, was the one about her family being "dead broke" when they left the White House and needing "the resources for mortgages for houses." Explanation No. 2, uncorked during a debate last November, was that all that money came her way because "I represented New York on 9/11,...

Former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli refused to answer any questions during a congressional hearing on Thursday, drawing the ire of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee lawmakers.Shkreli was arrested in December 2015 on securities fraud charges.Shkreli, 32, is the founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals AG. He has been widely criticized for raising the price of the lifesaving drug Daraprim more than 5,000 percent."Shkreli essentially ran his company like a Ponzi scheme where he used each subsequent company to pay off defrauded investors from the prior company," Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said at a press conference in December.According...

UBS has a plan to move about 2,500 jobs to low-cost locations such as Poland, India, China, and Nashville, Tennessee, over the next year. Yes, Nashville. The bank announced fourth-quarter results on Tuesday, and in an accompanying presentation it set out examples of cost cuts in the corporate center, which houses things like human resources and IT. As the chart below shows, the bank has created 500 jobs in Nashville since the end of 2014, and plans to add another 100. Admittedly, that isn't a huge number. The Americas business at UBS made 2.8 billion Swiss francs in the fourth-quarter...

(Reuters) - Morgan Stanley (MS.N) will be straying ever further from its Wall Street roots in the coming months as it shifts more operations to lower cost cities like Mumbai and Budapest as it aims to slash costs. The investment bank on Tuesday announced an initiative to cut up to $1 billion by 2017 by using technology and outsourcing jobs now in its New York headquarters and other higher cost cities. However, it declined to give specific details about the number of jobs it would move to lower cost centers. While shifting so-called back office operations to cities where salaries...

Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton said in an interview aired Wednesday night that special interest groups cannot buy her to gain access and influence as she continues to face scrutiny for taking large sums of money in speaking fees from the financial industry in recent years. Speaking over the phone with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Clinton was asked how she will respond to impending attack ads from her main primary challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I, Vt.), who is expected to target her ties to Wall Street. "As anybody who knows me knows, you can't buy me," Clinton said in response, defending...

Bernie Sanders is right about one thing: Hillary Clinton is Wall Street's candidate of choice. It's where she has been leading the real "War on Women" with the good old boys for years. Today, American women earn more bachelor's, associate's, graduate, and doctoral degrees than men. They also open small businesses and create jobs at record rates. Small businesses, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking have long been the engines that have driven the American economy. So why did liberals start waging an all out assault on these foundational values the very moment women rose to parity with men in these measurements? Do...

Reporters were routinely prohibited from covering former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speeches before some of the nation's most exclusive Wall Street financial investment firms, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation. The list of Wall Street firms that barred reporters from covering her speeches reads like Who’s Who of the country's largest and most prestigious wealth management companies. Those confirmed by TheDCNF to have excluded reporters include: the Goldman Sachs Group, UBS Wealth Management, Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts and Company, the Carlyle Group, Apollo Management Holdings, Fidelity Investments, Morgan Stanley and Golden Tree Asset Management.

**SNIP** Together, Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have earned in excess of $125 million in speech income since leaving the White House in 2001, one-fifth of it in the last two years. Mrs. Clinton's own speechmaking was a veritable tour through high finance. She gave paid speeches at GTCR, the Chicago private equity firm that the Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, helped found; Deutsche Bank, the German financial services conglomerate; and the investment bank Morgan Stanley, among other companies. Goldman Sachs alone paid Mrs. Clinton $675,000 for three speeches in three different states, a fact...

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) on Friday said Hillary Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs are "in the past" and not worth delving into. "The fact is that's in the past," she said on MSNBC when asked about Clinton's past speeches to the banking firm. "They're done, so it doesn't matter whether or not you support that or not," Shaheen said. "[It is] just as Bernie's socialism - he claims - is in the past," she added of Clinton's chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders. "The question is what do voters want to...

Goldman Sachs once gave Ted Cruz's campaign a $1.43 million loan. His campaign also got a loan of less than $500,000 from Citibank. According to Donald Trump, in a claim that has been repeated roughly a billion times, that means THEY OWN HIM. Even though, as far as I can tell, all or part of these loans have been repaid. As I reported yesterday, at various times Donald Trump has had hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from Citibank and Goldman, some of which have been repaid, some of which were discharged in bankruptcy when Trump's Altantic City casino...