Category: 9. Corporate Power is Protected

  • Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan Also Have a Perfect Quarter

    Nothing to see here: Their remarkable 61-day streak is one for the record books. Perfect trading quarters on Wall Street are about as rare as perfect games in Major League Baseball. On Sunday, Dallas Braden of the Oakland Athletics pitched what was only the 19th perfect game in baseball history. But Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman […]

  • Goldman Sachs Made Money Every Single Day in Q1

    From Bloomberg: Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s traders made money every single day of the first quarter, a feat the firm has never accomplished before. Daily trading net revenue was $25 million or higher in all of the first quarter’s 63 trading days, New York-based Goldman Sachs reported in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange […]

  • France and Germany Extort Greece for Arms (Alleged)

    This sounds like something the US arms industry would do: France and Germany, while publicly urging Greece to make harsh public spending cuts, bullied its government to confirm billions of euros in arms deals, a leading Euro-MP alleged Friday. Franco-German lawmaker Daniel Cohn-Bendit said that Paris and Berlin are seeking to force Prime Minister George Papandreou […]

  • Here Come the Super-Weeds

    More Monsanto madness: Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds. To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with […]

  • SPIEGEL: Huge National Debts Could Push Euro Zone into Bankruptcy

    The ‘mother of all bubbles’: All of the major industrialized countries have lived beyond their means for decades… The United States, in particular, paid for its prosperity on credit… Things couldn’t possibly go well forever and, indeed, the financial crisis put an end to the days of unfettered spending… In March, the rating agencies Standard & […]

  • Bloomberg: Wind Power is Too Cheap

    It’ll tank utility stocks. But that’s only bad for shareholders: After years of getting government incentives to install windmills, operators in Europe may have become their own worst enemy, reducing the total price paid for electricity in Germany, Europe’s biggest power market, by as much as 5 billion euros some years, according to a study […]

  • Fraudonomics

    From Smirking Chimp: But what I’m saying is, no confidence means end of the confidence game. Thats what Lehman showed. Every single player in finance suddenly had to face the fundamental problem–this whole fucking economy is built on fraud and lies and garbage. So when Lehman collapsed, every single player panicked, going, If Lehman was […]

  • 93% of AAA Sub-Prime Mortgages Are Now Junk

    From Krugman: Of AAA-rated subprime-mortgage-backed securities issued in 2006, 93 percent — 93 percent! — have now been downgraded to junk status. via Berating the Rating Agencies

  • The New Declinism

    From Alternet: It’s not hard to persuade people these days that they’re doing worse than they were 10 years ago. This is the problem with the new declinism. With no compelling vision of the apocalypse that doesn’t involve zombies, cyborgs, or outlaw bikers, we tend to miss something obvious: The problem isn’t that things are collapsing. […]

  • Dichotomies and Clown Cars

    A frequent theme I see in discussions between conservatives and liberal points of view is a lack of empathy. That my circumstances are different so I still get to get mine and screw everybody else. A lack of understanding that we are all a cancer diagnosis away from complete financial ruin. The fantasy that one […]