“Depart from me, you accursed. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not comfort me.' They answer, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not care for you?' He answered, 'Truly I tell you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it for me.’”
Matthew 25:40-46
"Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made their living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston...was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary.
Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being nonexistent persons.”
George Orwell, 1984
“The whole purpose of propaganda is to make the obvious seem obscure, or offensive.”
Stefan Molyneux
Financial Times
Barclays hit with £26m fine over gold fix
By Andy Sharman
May 23, 2014
Barclays has been hit with a £26m fine after one of its traders manipulated the setting of the price of gold in order to avoid paying out on a client order.
The UK Financial Conduct Authority on Friday said it was imposing the penalty on the British lender after the trader, Daniel James Plunkett, sent out a burst of orders aimed at moving the price of the yellow metal. The behaviour occurred just a day after the bank paid £290m in penalties and became the first institution to be fined in the sweeping Libor and Euribor rate-rigging probes...
The FCA said Mr Plunkett had manipulated the market by placing, withdrawing and re-placing a large sell order for between 40,000 oz and 60,000 oz of gold bars.
He did this in an attempt to pull off a “mini puke”, which the FCA took to mean a sharp fall in the price of gold. As a result, the bank was not obliged to make a $3.9m payment to the customer under an option contract...
Read the entire article here.
"The contempt for the lives of the soldiers and for France herself has come to the point of calling people raw material and cannon fodder."
François-René de Chateaubriand, De Bonaparte et des Bourbons
“The whole purpose of propaganda is to make the obvious seem obscure, or offensive.”
Stefan Molyneux
Harvard Law Review
Incentives and Ideology
By James Kwak
May 20, 2014
“'If only the King knew!', we cried a thousand times from the depths of our abyss.” Cahiers de doléances de Cahors, 1789
In pre-Revolutionary France, common people would often say of their problems, “If only the King knew . . . .” Whatever evils they suffered at the hand of their government must be due to the king’s ministers and officials, for the king himself could not be at fault.
But the king knew exactly what was going on. As Levitin shows, our financial regulators were and remain deeply enmeshed in a complex political environment. At the margin, they have the discretion to do favors for the industry or for specific institutions (such as the OTS backdating a capital infusion by IndyMac to make it seem well capitalized when it actually wasn’t). But major regulatory decisions, such as turning a blind eye to derivatives or bailing out banks, are made by the political system as a whole...
More generally, we can’t blame everything on the bureaucrats. The financial non-regulation that made the 2008 crash possible was the explicit policy of multiple presidential administrations, and some of its most important elements sailed through Congress with bipartisan support. The choice to bail out large banks rather than homeowners was made by the Bush and Obama Administrations.
And Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act, which largely left in place the regulatory system that had failed so spectacularly, with the Administration lobbying heavily to weaken the most far-reaching reforms. In other words, President Obama knew exactly what was going on — just as President Clinton knew what was going on when he signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, allowing the consolidation of commercial and investment banking."
Read the entire article in the Harvard Law Review here.
