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Rash of Deaths and a Missing Reporter – With Ties to Wall Street Investigations
- (www.wallstreetonparade.com) In a span of four days last week, two current
executives and one recently retired top ranking executive of major financial
firms were found dead. Both media and police have been quick to label the
deaths as likely suicides. Missing from the reports is the salient fact that
all three of the financial firms the executives worked for are under
investigation for potentially serious financial fraud. The deaths began on
Sunday, January 26. London police reported that William Broeksmit, a top
executive at Deutsche Bank who had retired in 2013, had been found hanged in
his home in the South Kensington section of London. The day after Broeksmit was
pronounced dead, Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst turned whistleblower at
Deutsche Bank, was scheduled to speak at Auburn University in Alabama on his
allegations that Deutsche had hid $12 billion in losses during the financial
crisis with the knowledge of senior executives. Two other whistleblowers have
brought similar charges against Deutsche Bank.
Detroit turns bankruptcy into
Wall St. vs. Main St. NYT - (www.cnbc.com)
Detroit's bankruptcy is
rapidly shaping up as a battle of Wall Street vs.
Main Street, at least as far as the city's creditors are concerned. Amy Laskey,
a managing director at Fitch Ratings, said in a recent report that
she sensed an "us versus them" orientation toward debt repayment. And
in the view of bondholders, bond insurers and other financial institutions, it
only grew worse last week after the city circulated its plan to emerge from
bankruptcy and filed a lawsuit on Friday. The suit, brought by the city's emergency
manager, Kevyn D. Orr, seeks to invalidate complex transactions that helped
finance Detroit's pension system in 2005. In a not-so-veiled criticism, the
city said the deal was done "at the prompting of investment banks that
would profit handsomely from the transaction." The banks that led the deal
were Bank of America and UBS.
They helped Detroit borrow $1.4 billion for its shaky pension system and also
signed long-term financial contracts with the city, known as interest-rate swaps,
to hedge the debt.
Venezuela
Siphoning U.S. Oil Exports to China Sinks Bonds - (www.bloomberg.com) Venezuela’s plummeting oil sales to the
U.S., its biggest export market, are exacerbating a collapse in the nation’s
debt securities. Bonds issued by Venezuela sank 3 percent on Jan. 31, a day
after data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed that
2013 energy sales to the country are headed for a 28-year low. The selloff
pushed losses this year to 12.4 percent, more than three times the average 3.93
percent drop among notes from the least-creditworthy developing nations,
according to data by Bloomberg. The tumble in oil exports, Venezuela’s biggest
source of dollars, comes as President Nicolas
Maduro faces a shortage of U.S. currency that’s caused consumer
prices to soar 56 percent and foreign reserves to plunge to a decade-low of $21
billion.
As
Citigroup Spun Toward Insolvency in ’07- ’08, Its Regulator Was Dining and
Schmoozing With Citi Execs - (www.wallstreetonparade.com)
Before Timothy Geithner
became the 75th Secretary of the U.S. Treasury in 2009, he served as the
President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for five years. The New York
Fed is one of Wall Street’s primary regulators. But after leaving his post at
the New York Fed, Geithner testified before the U.S. House of Representatives’
Committee on Financial Services on March 26, 2009 that he was notregulating
Wall Street as he earned his $400,000 a year with car, driver and private
dining room. At the 2009 hearing, in response to a question from Congressman
Ron Paul, Geithner said: “That was a very thoughtful set of questions. I just
want to correct one thing. I have never been a regulator, for better or worse.
And I think you are right to say that we have to be very skeptical that
regulation can solve all these problems. We have parts of the system which are
overwhelmed by regulation…It wasn’t the absence of regulation that was a
problem. It was, despite the presence of regulation, you got huge risks built
up.”
Govt nearly triples job hours
lost to Obamacare - (www.cnbc.com) President Barack
Obama's signature health-care law will contribute to this phenomenon,
the CBO said, citing new estimates that the Affordable
Care Act will cause a larger-than-expected reduction in working
hours—eliminating the equivalent of about 2.3 million workers in 2021. In 2011,
the CBO estimated the law would cause a reduction of about 800,000 full-time
equivalent workers. "CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total
number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 to 2 percent during the period
from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less
labor—given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial
benefits some will receive," said the report. "The reduction in CBO's
projections of hours worked represents a decline in the number of
full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5
million in 2024," it added.
Relationship
Managers at the New York Fed and Citibank: The Job Function Ripe for Corruption
- (www.wallstreetonparade.com)
Despite
Eight Ongoing Criminal/Civil Investigations of JPMorgan, the Bank’s a Law
Enforcement Partner With the NYPD - (www.wallstreetonparade.com)
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