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Stormfront Nazi Forum Shutting Down Server Amid ‘Financial Crisis’

April 8, 2018 By Ready News Staff

Nazi/White Supremacist Website Stormfront Is Shuttering Its Main Server Amid A Post-Charlottesville Crisis

The world’s oldest Nazi/white supremacist internet forum (hailing back to 1996) may soon be no more. Stormfront, which reported increased traffic in the initial weeks after the deadly summer 2017 Charlottesville Nazi rallies, ran into trouble when its domain name was revoked. The group recovered, sort of, but backlash against the movement has led to dwindling donations, for it seems that many enthusiasts are no longer keen to financially support the cause.

The Southern Poverty Law Center now reveals that Stormfront (like the Daily Stormer, which retreated to the dark web) is now truly struggling to stay afloat. On Friday, the website’s main server will shutter amid a “financial crisis,” and the rest of the site will only be available for those members who fork over a minimum donation per month. Stormfront founder and former KKK Grand Wizard Don Black is begging for help:

“I appreciate everybody’s support. But it’s that time of month again, when the big, scary bills hit. Our contributions have once again totaled less than $2000, which is not enough to cover our basic server and radio bills, and this month we no longer have enough personal money to make up the difference.”

And it’s no wonder. Christopher Cantwell, the “crying Nazi” who was featured in Vice’s Charlottesville mini-doc, went into hiding. Likewise, Peter Cvjetanovic, the raging student shown in the above viral tiki-torch image, quit his campus job and is seeking a more “peaceful” existence. With these high-profile examples of shamed Nazis on the table, Stormfront is now blaming the “Intolerance Crowd,” who they say hates free speech. The site hopes that the server shuttering will only be a temporary tactic, but it’s not looking good for high-tech Nazis.

Source

Nazi/White Supremacist Website Stormfront Is Shuttering Its Main Server Amid A Post-Charlottesville Crisis

Filed Under: Current Events, Financial

Starbucks Chairman: “We Took A Walk On Madison Avenue. It Reminded Me Of The Financial Crisis In 2008”

March 25, 2018 By Ready News Staff

Back in June 2009, in one of our earliest posts in the aftermath of the financial crisis, we took a “random walk down Madison Avenue” and found empty storefront after empty storefront after empty storefront.

In retrospect, the ghost town that was New York’s “Golden Mile” was not surprising: after all the US economy had just been hit with the worst recession since the Great Depression, and only an emergency liquidity injection of trillions of dollars prevented a global financial collapse.

What is more surprising is why nearly 9 years later, at a time of what is supposed to be a coordinated global recovery, a walk along Madison Avenue reveals the exact same picture.

But don’t take our word for it: here is Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz speaking during the company’s annual general meeting on Wednesday, and making some stunning observations.

… let me shift just quickly into the business a bit and what’s going on in terms of the seismic change that we’re all witnessing in terms of consumer behavior in Retail.

No, I wasn’t clairvoyant three years or four years ago, but I did notice something and you didn’t have to be a genius to figure it out that the e-commerce effect of things was going to have a dramatic effect on people physically shopping for goods and services. And that has resulted in a tremendous level of compression in terms of the amount of retailers that are serving customers today because less customers are coming into their stores and that has resulted in unfortunately many, many stores national, regional, and local going out of business.

Now this is a photo as you can see of a mall that is very, very busy with people shopping for goods and services. Unfortunately, that was then, this is now. And it’s a dramatic change. And what it means and you saw this today and what we’ve tried to present to you is that we’ve got a push for reinvention and innovation and we have to do – everything we can to become a primary destination.

Now, as a result of what we’re witnessing, we’re also seeing something else and that is, there is a proliferation around the country right now of empty storefronts. We took a walk in New York two weeks ago from 59th street to 79th on Madison Avenue, and we lost count of how many empty storefronts there were in Manhattan. It reminded me of the cataclysmic financial crisis in 2008. But what’s happening is very simple, the rent structures for the last 5 to 10 years, have been rising at historic rates and retailers do not have the amount of  customers they had during these last 5 to 10 years and could no longer economically survive.

So they’re closing stores and as a result of this, I can promise you just like I predicted in 2014 that rents are coming down and landlords are going to have to get religion, or else their stores are going to stay empty. And we’re already beginning to see a different level of reception in terms of what we believe the cost of occupancy should be. And this is going to bode extremely well, specifically for us. We’re adding almost 700 new Starbucks stores a year. And so we are going to take full advantage of the economic reality of this situation. And as we go forward two, three, four, five years out even though labor is going up in terms of cost of labor, we believe rents are going down and the economic model of Starbucks is going to be enhanced as a result of this macro situation. And we’re just at the beginning of this trend.

In other words, if 2017 was the year the “retail bubble burst” as Urban Outfitters CEO Richard Hayne said one year ago, 2018 will be the year when not only the retail sector slides into purgatory, but the deflationary shockwave that is being unleashed as rents finally hit a brick wall, will lead to the next, and far more violent crash in commercial real estate, and the hundreds of billions in debt that prop it.

Don’t believe us? Just take a walk on Madison between 59 and 79th…

Source

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-22/starbucks-chairman-we-took-walk-madison-avenue-it-reminded-me-financial-crisis-2008

Filed Under: Current Events, Financial

10 years after the financial crisis, have we learned anything?

March 21, 2018 By Ready News Staff

Remembering one of the darkest days in financial history

When John Taylor starts remembering the years leading up to the financial crisis, his fury wells up all over again.

As president of the nonprofit National Community Reinvestment Coalition, he warned Congress about the predatory and fraudulent lending that was fueling a housing bubble as early as 2000. Lawmakers told the Federal Reserve to write rules that would have put a stop to the worst practices. But the crash came first.

“Thinking about it now, I can feel myself being angry about it,” says Taylor, in a soft accent left over from his upbringing in the housing projects of Boston. “Because we fought when we saw these things happening. We brought it to the attention of both Democrats and Republicans. In the end, it took the nation’s economy having to collapse before they felt the need to do something.”

The crisis unofficially began a decade ago today, with JPMorgan’s shocking deal to rescue Bear Stearns for $2 a share after the investment bank suffered deep losses tied to its mortgage investments. Bear was the first major investment bank to fail, but it would not be the last.

Now, with a buoyant economy finally starting to lift some of the United States’ most depressed pockets, CNNMoney is taking a look back at the 10 years following the financial meltdown that stretched around the globe — and signs that something similar might again be on the horizon, as Congress and regulators begin to loosen some of the rules they put in place to fix and prevent the problems.

“We’re sitting here, 10 years later, with a short-term memory that doesn’t seem to recall how we got into that mess,” Taylor says. “We got into that mess because of the lack of regulation, and now we’re talking about making banks less accountable. It makes no sense whatsoever.”

Of course, America has come a long way since the government had to step in to save the banking system from going under. Corporate profits are at record highs, the unemployment rate is at a 17-year low and the stock market has quadrupled in value since itsRecession-era nadir in 2009.

decade later stock market chart

But this is still a changed country. By many metrics, and for millions ofAmericans,the recovery has yet to arrive.

Take the homeownership rate, for example: Only in 2017 did it stop its long downward slide, after private equity investors bought hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes and rented them back to their former owners, manyof whom saw their credit so badly damaged that they can never buy again.

Male workforce participation is still nearly as low as it’s ever been, since blue-collar professions were particularly hard hit and haven’t totally bounced back.

decade later labor force chart

Median household net worth remains below where it stood in 1998, according to the Federal Reserve, even as households take on more debt than ever before. There’s also a shortage of affordable housing, a legacy of the drought in both mortgage and construction lending that lasted long after the worst days of the recession had passed.

Memories of those difficult days seem to have faded from the public consciousness, as have the lessons we learned on how we got there in the first place.

Congress tried to answer this question when it established the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and its 2011 autopsy of the meltdown remains excellent reading today. Its fundamental conclusion: The financial crisis was not like a freak weather event, as some bankers and regulators hadclaimed. Rather, it was man-made, predictable and entirely avoidable.

If only lawmakers hadn’t knocked out legal guardrails in the 1990s that had kept banks small and relatively uncomplicated. If only bank CEOs had thought more critically about the complex securities they had created and traded with abandon. If only the Federal Reserve had acted to stop the flow of toxic mortgages that would rot through the core of the nation’s largest financial institutions — they could have saved the global economy from disaster, the commissionfound.

decade later foreclosure filings chart

A missed opportunity to change the system

Even as the commission’s report was being drafted, however, the next chapter of the recession was unfolding.

A year later, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 established new oversight bodies to coordinate the alphabet soup of regulators that had avoided responsibility by acting in silos. It also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was explicitly charged with monitoring malfeasance by lenders. Itinstructed financial regulators to draft new rules for derivatives, credit bureaus, mortgage appraisals, executive compensation, corporate governance and other factors that played a role in the economy’s implosion.

While most agree that the financial system is safer now than it was before the crisis, there’s been abundant criticism of the adequacy of the response.

Many argue that bailouts for homeowners should have been much more generous, in order to avoid more foreclosures and better stabilize neighborhoods, and that banks should have been pushed harder to lend to qualified borrowers once new safeguards were put in place.

decade later househols debt

Others faulted Obama for not punishing the executives at fault for reckless lending. Although their firms — and thus shareholders — have paid out hundreds of billions of dollars in fines, none of the people running these investment banks and mortgage lenders went to jail. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission itself made eleven criminal referrals to the Department of Justice, and none were prosecuted. The commission’s chairman Phil Angelides says the lack of action sent a message to Wall Street that consequences for individuals would be minimal.

“I believe it was a seminal failure of the Obama administration not to hold accountable the people responsible for the wrongdoing,” Angelides says. “If someone robbed a 7-Eleven of $1,000, and were able to settle up by having someone else pay $50, would they do it again? Of course they would.”

Banks have spent billions of dollars complying with Dodd-Frank, even while fighting the rules as they were written, contributing to long delays in implementation. As of mid-2016, 20% of the mandated rules hadn’t been proposed at all.

The Treasury’s independent Office of Financial Research, which Dodd-Frank established to serve as an early warning system for impending crises, has been dramatically scaled back.

More broadly, Anat Admati, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, argues that reformers missed their chance to increase transparency in the financial system and decrease the industry’s dependence on debt, which could pose a risk as interest rates start to rise.

“We haven’t had a major crisis and a bailout,” says Admati. “But in terms of being prone to one, I’m disappointed that relatively little or not enough really changed.”

Deregulation begins again

Now, after years of attempts, Republicans are poised to pass the most significant rollback of Dodd-Frank regulations since the bill was enacted, with the help of 16 DemocratIc senators who this week voted to exempt banks with less than $250 billion in assets from enhanced supervision. The bill also frees most banks from having to report lending data used to police fordiscrimination and weakens mortgage underwriting standards, among a host of other provisions.

decade later banks chart

Meanwhile, President Trump’s picks to head federal agencies overseeing the banks have either worked for the industry, like Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Jay Clayton, or have been harsh critics of the agency they’ve been put in charge of, like the CFPB’s acting director Mick Mulvaney. They have slowed or halted enforcement actions and rule making and imposed hiring freezes, limiting their ability to pursue fraud.

Add to all of this an exuberant market and it again brings big risks, from rising corporate debt to cyber threats that can cripple whole companies in an instant. In combination with weaker tools to address financial failures when they occur, Columbia Law professor Kathryn Judge worries that these industry-friendly regulators again won’t take action when they need to.

“There’s been a shift from safety to growth,” Judge says. “But if you want to have a growth-oriented system, then you have to accept that there’s going to be fragility. How are we going to deal with that fragility when it becomes manifest?”

A Decade Later: It’s been 10 years since the financial crisis rocked America’s economy. In a special yearlong series, CNNMoney will examine the causes of the crisis, how the country is still feeling its effects, and the lessons we have — and have not — learned.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Anat Admati, who is a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

CNNMoney (New York) First published March 16, 2018: 8:03 AM ET

Source

http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/16/news/economy/financial-crisis-10-years/index.html

Filed Under: Current Events, Financial

Senate passes rollback of banking rules enacted after financial crisis

March 17, 2018 By Ready News Staff

The Senate on Wednesday passed the biggest loosening of financial regulations since the economic crisis a decade ago, delivering wide bipartisan support for weakening banking rules despite bitter divisions among Democrats.

The bill, which passed 67 votes to 31, would free more than two dozen banks from the toughest regulatory scrutiny put in place after the 2008 global financial crisis. Despite President Trump’s promise to do a “big number” on the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the new measure leaves key aspects of the earlier law in place. Nonetheless, it amounts to a significant rollback of banking rules aimed at protecting taxpayers from another financial crisis and future bailouts.

In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders praised the legislation’s passage. “The bill provides much-needed relief from the Dodd-Frank Act for thousands of community banks and credit unions and will spur lending and economic growth without creating risks to the financial system,” she said.

Given the bipartisan support for the bill, Wednesday’s passage was expected. But for the first time since Trump became president, the divisions lurking within the Senate Democratic Caucus burst into full view, with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio) leading vehement opposition to the bill, even as supporters — including Democrats up for reelection in states Trump won — supported it with equal vigor.

Warren and Brown argued the bill amounts to a gift to Wall Street that increases taxpayer risk while boosting the chances of another financial crisis. Supporters of the legislation — including endangered Democratic Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Joe Donnelly (Ind.) and Jon Tester (Mont.) — disputed that characterization, contending that the bill’s aim is to loosen onerous regulations on local banks and credit unions, freeing them to focus more on community lending, particularly in rural states.

The Senate is preparing to roll back the 2010 banking legislation known as Dodd-Frank. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)

“It is a bill that I am in­cred­ibly proud of,” Heitkamp said in a Senate floor debate this week. “Dodd-Frank was supposed to have stopped too big to fail, but the net result has been too small to succeed. The big banks have gotten bigger since the passage of Dodd-Frank, and the small banks have disappeared.”

Following Heitkamp on the floor, Warren condemned the legislation as “the bank lobbyist act” and said it “puts American families in danger of getting punched in the gut.”

“Washington is poised to make the same mistake it has made many times before, deregulating giant banks while the economy is cruising, only to set the stage for another financial crisis,” Warren said.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) opposed the legislation but has played little role in a debate that has allowed liberals and moderates in his caucus to stake out positions tailored to their own political needs. But after Warren called out red-state Democrats and other supporters of the bill by name in a fundraising appeal, Schumer encouraged her to stay focused on the substance in the debate, according to a person familiar with the exchange who requested anonymity to discuss it.

Few of the Democrats named by Warren wanted to comment publicly on dissension within the caucus. Heitkamp downplayed their disagreements, saying of Warren in an interview, “She feels very, very strongly about this. I think it’s a difference between where we’ve always been on these banking issues. And you know obviously as you’re moving the bill forward, these differences were going to come to a head, and we were going to see a conflict because I just don’t see the bill the way she does.”

It’s not clear whether the Democratic divisions laid bare by the banking bill will resurface anytime soon, given the light legislative schedule expected in the Senate for the remainder of this midterm election year. But the debate highlighted how the political imperatives for red-state Democrats can collide with those of liberals such as Warren, who’s seen as a potential presidential candidate in 2020, creating the potential for conflict that could flare anew in future.

Banks with more than $50 billion in assets are now considered “too big to fail” and are subject to the toughest regulations, including a yearly stress test to prove they could survive another period of economic turmoil. The Senate legislation, shepherded by Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), would raise that threshold to $250 billion in assets, potentially allowing several high-profile financial institutions, including American Express, Ally Financial and Barclays, to escape the extra regulatory scrutiny.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called attempts to change Dodd-Frank banking regulations “a cause for alarm” on March 8. (Reuters)

The bill’s supporters say these banks have been unfairly saddled with regulations originally intended for global behemoth banks such as JPMorgan Chase, not regional or midsized firms. Lifting the restrictions would save the industry billions a year in compliance costs, industry analysts say. It would also make it easier for them to reward shareholders with dividends and stock buybacks, they say.

Democrats and advocacy groups warn that the push to loosen the regulations fails to recognize that many of the midsized institutions that would be helped by the Senate legislation fell into dire financial straits less than a decade ago and needed more than $40 billion in taxpayer bailouts. During a financial crisis, they say, banks tend to fail in tandem, suffering from similar ailments. And the failure of several in a short time period could strain the U.S. economy.

The bill has largely been marketed as long-overdue help for small community banks and credit unions. The legislation, for example, would exempt banks with less than $10 billion in assets from the “Volcker rule,” which bars banks from making risky wagers with their own money. The bill would also exempt many small banks from a Dodd-Frank requirement that financial institutions report more detailed data on whom they lend to. The industry has complained that both measures are too cumbersome and time-consuming.

Exempting small banks from the mortgage data requirement would weaken the government’s ability to enforce fair-lending requirements, making it easier for community banks to hide discrimination against minority mortgage applicants and harder for regulators to root out predatory lenders, consumer advocates say.

The bill still needs to be approved in the House, where Republicans have been pushing a more aggressive rollback of financial regulations. That chamber passed a bill last year that stripped the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created under Dodd-Frank, of much of its power, for example. But the future of the CFPB is not addressed in the Senate bill.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has said that House Republicans will want to alter the Senate bill to reflect their priorities. But that could drive away the Senate Democrats needed to pass the legislation, and so the House will face significant pressure to accept the Senate legislation with few, if any, changes.

Although the banking bill marked the first bipartisan legislation of the Trump era aside from must-pass spending deals, it was far from a freewheeling debate on the floor. Because of disagreement between the parties that has become routine, no amendment votes were permitted, frustrating senators in both parties who hoped to advance favored policies.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), a member of the Banking Committee, had been pushing an amendment to strike a section of the bill that could reduce the capital cushions of five of America’s biggest banks. Though supported by liberal Senate Democrats, it never came up for a vote amid the wrangling over the amendment process.

Jeffrey Stein contributed to this report.


Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, was one of the major supporters of the banking bill that passed Wednesday. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

Source

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/senate-passes-rollback-of-post-financial-crisis-banking-rules/2018/03/14/43837aae-27bd-11e8-b79d-f3d931db7f68_story.html

Filed Under: Current Events, Financial

Former treasurer Wayne Swan warns climbing executive pay could trigger new financial crisis

March 17, 2018 By Ready News Staff

Former treasurer Wayne Swan warns climbing executive pay could trigger new financial crisis

Former treasurer Wayne Swan has warned surging chief executive pay risks mirroring the events that led to the global financial crisis almost 10 years ago.

Bear Stearns chief executive James Cayne sold his stake in the company for US$61 million after its collapse and his inflated salary saw him named in Time magazine as one of the top 25 executives to blame for the financial crisis.

Mr Swan, who served as treasurer in Kevin Rudd’s Labor government from 2007, told the ABC average chief executive pay had recovered to $5.2 million since the crisis, in a sign of complacency about the recovering global economy.

“There’s no question about that.

“We’re also seeing arrogance and I think executives suffer from a blindness of affluence at a time when we’ve got record low wage growth and record low wage share,” Mr Swan said.

“I think there are short memories as CEO salaries shoot up to almost pre-great recession levels.

“Only last year we had the spectacle of seven CEOs coming down to Canberra to lobby for a $65 billion corporate tax cut when their combined salaries amounted to $65 million.

“For example, the National Australia Bank’s chief executive [Andrew Thorburn] is paid 108 times average weekly earnings. You get the feeling that the NAB’s slogan, ‘more than money’ might as well read, ‘more money’.”

Mr Swan has launched a report by The Australia Institute showing that while average weekly earnings have less than doubled since 2000, the salaries of senior executives at the Commonwealth Bank and National Australia Bank have tripled.

The report shows that before the financial crisis, the highest CEO salary was $33.5 million, This fell to $11.8 million in 2011, before bouncing back to $21.6 million last year.

Mr Swan said the study highlighted gross distortions in salaries, despite the pressure from shareholders in the “two-strike rule” where protests can be made at annual general meetings to rein in executive pay.

The study says a key lesson from the global financial crisis is that a surge in executive pay is not only unwarranted, but dangerous given the high-risk culture of some financial institutions.

First posted

Source

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-15/wayne-swan-warns-on-new-financial-crisis/9550324

Filed Under: Current Events, Financial

London house prices slump the most since financial crisis

March 17, 2018 By Ready News Staff

House prices in London have dropped the most since the height of the financial crisis, underscoring the impact from rising inflation and uncertainty over the U.K.’s exit from the European Union.

The average price of a home in the capital dropped to £593,396 ($822,447) in the three months to January, down 2.6% from the same period last year, according to a report by data provider Acadata out on Monday. In comparison, house prices across all of England and Wales rose 0.7% during the period, with the biggest jump seen in the North West.

Acadata

London house prices dropped 2.6% in January, year-on-year

“This is the steepest annual rate of decline in London prices since August 2009, during the last housing slump, which was itself associated with the banking credit crisis of 2008/09,” Acadata said in the report.

“On the basis of housing transactions, it certainly suggests that the concept of a Northern powerhouse to rival London has already begun to emerge, and one that is being built on the back of relatively affordable housing.”

London — once the center of a U.K. property boom — has now seen house prices fall for three straight months, according to the data. The weakness comes as the country grapples with uncertainty over the Brexit negotiations with Brussels, with particular focus on how the divorce will impact the capital’s financial center and investments.

The EU referendum in 2016 also sparked a plunge in the pound  , which pushed up inflation and is now eating into household’s budgets. Rising inflation also prompted the Bank of England to raise interest rates for the first time in a decade in November, driving up the cost of mortgages.

Even with the recent drop in London house prices, the capital remains an expensive place to live. In the most pricey borough — Kensington and Chelsea — a home costs an average £2.2 million ($3.05 million), while potential buyers have to fork out £300,000 ($337,812) in the cheapest area of Barking and Dagenham.

The city’s bloated prices have fueled concerns young families are forced to leave the capital and that the whole generation of so-called millennials will be priced out of the property ladder. London Mayor Sadiq Khan said in an interview with City A.M. on Monday that chief executives refer to the “housing crisis” as a primary barrier to do business in the city.

“That is why we are trying to rapidly increase the number of genuinely affordable homes in London. It is crucial, because otherwise Londoners aged between 30 and 40 are leaving London because they want to buy a property, go from a flat to a home, and what you don’t want is a brain drain,” Khan said.

Source

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/london-house-prices-slump-the-most-since-financial-crisis-2018-03-12

Filed Under: Current Events, Financial

The Stock Market Crash Of 2016: Stocks Have Already Crashed In 6 Of The World’s 8 Largest Economies

March 13, 2018 By Ready News Staff

Over the past 12 months, stock market investors around the planet have lost trillions of dollars.  Since this time last June, stocks have crashed in 6 of the world’s 8 largest economies, and stocks in the other two are down as well.  The charts that you are about to see are absolutely stunning, and they are clear evidence that a new global financial crisis has already begun.  Of course it is true that we are still in the early chapters of this new crisis and that there is much, much more damage to be done, but let us not minimize the carnage that we have already witnessed.

In general, there have been three major waves of financial panic over the past 12 months.  Late last August we saw the biggest financial shaking since the financial crisis of 2008, then in January and February there was an even bigger shaking, and now a third “wave” has begun in June.  Not all areas around the globe have been affected equally by each wave, but without a doubt this new financial crisis is a global phenomenon.

The charts that I am about to show you come from Trading Economics.  It is an absolutely indispensable website that is packed full of useful data, and I encourage everyone to check it out.

Let’s talk about China first.  The Chinese economy is the second largest on the entire planet, and since this time last year Chinese stocks are down an astounding 40 percent…

As things have started to unravel in China, the Chinese have been selling off U.S. debt and U.S. stocks like crazy.  The following comes from Bloomberg…

For the past year, Chinese selling of Treasuries has vexed investors and served as a gauge of the health of the world’s second-largest economy.

TRENDING ON SONS OF LIBERTY MEDIA

The People’s Bank of China, owner of the world’s biggest foreign-exchange reserves, burnt through 20 percent of its war chest since 2014, dumping about $250 billion of U.S. government debt and using the funds to support the yuan and stem capital outflows.

While China’s sales of Treasuries have slowed, its holdings of U.S. equities are now showing steep declines.

Unfortunately for China, their economy just continues to slow down, and George Soros is so alarmed by this and a potential “Brexit” that he has been selling off stocks and buying enormous amounts of gold in anticipation of an even bigger global downturn.

Japan has the third largest economy in the world, and over the past year Japanese stocks are down a total of 26 percent from the peak…

Personally, I have been extremely alarmed by what has been happening in Japan lately.  Japanese stocks were down almost 500 points last night, and overall the Nikkei is down a whopping 1,800 points so far in June.

Of course the Japanese economy as a whole is essentially a basket case at this point.  For a detailed analysis of this, please see my previous article entitled “Watch Japan – For All Is Not Well In The Land Of The Rising Sun.”

Germany has the fourth largest economy in the world, and over the past year their stocks have fallen 19 percent from the peak of the market…

The key thing to watch for in Germany are serious troubles at their biggest bank.  I wrote a long article about the slow-motion implosion of Deutsche Bank last month, and just this week Deutsche Bank stock hit an all-time low.

The fifth largest economy on the planet belongs to the United Kingdom, and since last June their stocks have fallen about 13 percent…

One week from today, the “Brexit” vote will be held in the UK, and if they vote to leave the EU that could have very serious economic and financial implications for them and for the rest of Europe as well.  For an in-depth look at this, please see my previous article entitled “June 23, 2016: The Brexit Vote Could Change EVERYTHING And Plunge Europe Into Financial Chaos.”

France has the sixth largest economy in the world, and over the past year French stocks are down 20 percent from the peak of the market…

The French economy is really struggling these days, and we have not heard much about it in the U.S. media, but there have been tremendous riots in major cities in France in recent weeks.

The seventh largest economy on our planet belongs to India.  Even though India is facing some very serious economic problems, their stocks are doing okay for the moment.  Even though stocks in India are down over the past 12 months, we have not seen a major financial crisis over there just yet.

But there is definitely a major crisis in the eighth largest economy in the world.  Italian stocks are down a staggering 32 percent from the peak of the market.  That means approximately a third of all stock market wealth in Italy is already gone…

Earlier this year, I wrote about the horrifying collapse of the Italian banking system that has greatly accelerated since the start of 2016.  It looks like virtually all of their big banks will ultimately need to be bailed out, and this threatens to become a far bigger crisis than the crisis in Greece ever was.

And let us not leave off the ninth largest economy in the world.  Not too long ago, CNN ran an article entitled “Brazil: Economic collapse worse than feared.”  So not only are they admitting that the ninth largest economy on the globe is collapsing, they are also admitting that it is even worse than what the experts had anticipated.

So did I leave anyone off the list?

Ah yes, I haven’t even addressed what has been going on in the United States yet.

U.S. stocks did crash last August, but then they recovered.

Then they crashed again in January, but then they recovered again.

Now U.S. stocks have been taking another tumble here in June, but we are being assured that there is nothing to worry about.

Meanwhile, the underlying numbers for the U.S. economy just continue to get worse and worse and worse.  If you have any doubt about this, please see the article that I posted yesterday entitled “15 Facts About The Imploding U.S. Economy That The Mainstream Media Doesn’t Want You To See.”

Hopefully this article will clear a lot of things up.  In this piece, I have presented undeniable evidence that a new global financial crisis has begun over the past 12 months.  We have not seen global stock declines of this nature since the great financial crisis of 2008, but much worse is still to come.

I would love to be wrong about that last part.

It would be wonderful if the worst was now behind us and good times for the global financial system were ahead.

Unfortunately, every single indicator that I am watching is telling me just the opposite.

Article reposted with permission from The Economic Collapse Blog

Take a look at the future of America: The Beginning of the End and then prepare

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The Stock Market Crash Of 2016: Stocks Have Already Crashed In 6 Of The World’s 8 Largest Economies

Filed Under: Current Events, Financial

This is one of history’s most accurate indicators of a looming financial crisis

March 11, 2018 By Ready News Staff

On April 15, 1185, over eight centuries ago, a powerful earthquake struck the East Midlands region of England near the town of Lincoln.

Modern scientists estimate the magnitude of the earthquake at 5.0 on today’s Richter scale… which was a pretty big deal back then.

Medieval England didn’t have any earthquake-proof construction methods, and much of the region was leveled to the ground.

One of the structures that was destroyed was the Lincoln Cathedral. And the new bishop, Hugh de Burgundy, launched a bold reconstruction project to rebuild an even better cathedral using the latest advances in architectural design and technology.

De Burgundy’s successors kept making improvements to the cathedral, until, in the mid-1300s, the cathedral’s spire was raised to 160 meters (525 feet), making it the tallest structure in the world.

Curiously, a severe economic crisis broke out across Europe soon after as the King of England defaulted on his debts due to military setbacks in the 100 Years’ War.

Fast forward several centuries to the late 1700s, when, in the town of Ditherington, England, the local flax mill took the title as the world’s tallest building in 1797.

That same year, a major economic crisis began raging in Great Britain and the United States after a huge real estate bubble burst. Banks and businesses in both countries suffered major losses.

The completion of the Equitable Life Building in New York City in the early 1870s, which became the tallest building in the world, coincided with the Panic of 1873, and the Long Depression that lasted for more than a decade.

The New York World tower broke the record for tallest building in the world when it was completed in 1890… which also happened to be the same year that the economic panic of 1890 broke out.

Philadelphia’s city hall briefly held the record for world’s tallest building when it was completed just in time for the Panic of 1893– a crisis so severe that the US Treasury Department had to be bailed out.

The Met Life Insurance Tower in New York City shattered the record for the world’s tallest building when it was completed in 1907, just as the Panic of 1907 broke out.

(The Panic of 1907 was so extreme that it led to the creation of the Federal Reserve a few years later.)

Another financial crisis erupted in 1914, just on the heels of New York’s Woolworth Building becoming the tallest in the world.

And on the eve of the Great Depression, multiple projects were all simultaneously competing to become the world’s tallest building, including the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Manhattan Bank Trust Building (now known as the Trump Building).

The construction of the World Trade Center and Chicago’s Sears Tower in the early 1970s, both of which became the tallest buildings in the world, immediately preceded the OPEC oil price shock in 1973 and the subsequent banking crisis and economic recession.

The Petronas Towers were completed in 1998 in Malaysia, taking the title as tallest in the world, right before the Asian Financial Crisis broke out.

Construction of the Taipei 101 tower, which became the tallest building in the world, began just months before the Dot-Com bubble burst and the Recession of the early 2000s began

And of course the Burj Khalifa in Dubai became the world’s tallest building when its height reached 688 meters (2,257 feet) on 1 September 2008… literally days before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and the Global Financial Crisis kicked off.

Is all of this just a crazy coincidence?

Or is there perhaps a link to the world’s tallest buildings and economic crises?

It certainly stands to reason that enormous buildings are extremely expensive and require vast amounts of funding– something that is relatively easy to come by when the economy is near its cyclical peak.

Ego and hubris are also abundant when an economy is near the top, as booms and peaks are often accompanied by ostentatious displays of wealth– including ambitious construction projects.

During the 12th and 13th centuries, for example, when Italian city-states were the dominant powers of Europe, there was practically a competition among the richest citizens of Bologna, who built as many as 180 towers to show off their wealth.

By the mid 1300s, of course, Bologna’s power faded, and the city fell into economic obscurity.

It’s interesting to consider given the flurry of new projects, mostly in Asia, that are feverishly being constructed to rival the tallest building in the world.

From the Goldin Finance tower in Tianjin (to be completed this year), to the Wuhan Greenland Center (also 2018), to the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia (as early as 2019), there is no shortage of hubris, or debt-based funding, to drive these projects to record heights.

All of these new towers, of course, are being built at a time when financial markets are near all-time highs and global debt is at an astonishing, record level of $233 trillion– several times the size of the global economy.

Certainly it’s possible that these historical examples are just wild coincidences.

But even if that were the case, a prudent, rational person still ought to recognize that economic booms never last forever.

There are always periods of expansion, followed by periods of recession. And the more excessive the boom, the more painful the correction.

We’ve been living through one of the longest periods of economic expansion in modern history– one that has been funded by massive quantities of debt, cheap interest rates, and trillions of dollars of new money conjured out of thin air.

It would be utterly foolish to presume that this expansion will persist forever… and to willfully choose to NOT prepare for the inevitable downturn.

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This is one of history’s most accurate indicators of a looming financial crisis

Filed Under: Current Events, Financial

Reversal of Wall Street regulations risks another financial crisis

March 11, 2018 By Ready News Staff

  • US lawmakers are about to reverse post-crisis rules meant to shield taxpayers from having to bail out large banks in case of another meltdown.
  • On the tenth anniversary of the 2008 crisis, Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets tells us the move is “grossly irresponsible at this late very stage of the business cycle.”
  • Senator Elizabeth Warren has come out vocally against the new law: “People in this building may forget the devastating impact of the financial crisis 10 years ago.”

US lawmakers are on the verge of substantially weakening post-crisis regulations on Wall Street banks — and they have decided the tenth anniversary of the worst financial meltdown in modern history is just the right time to do it.

In particular, the new law, which appears to have ample political support from majority Republicans and several Democrats, would sharply narrow the number of banks considered “too big to fail” and thus open to greater scrutiny from regulators like the Fed as well as tougher capital requirements.

Dennis Kelleher, president of advocacy group Better Markets, told Business Insider he is deeply concerned by the new legislation’s reversal of many key rules in the so-called Dodd-Frank law passed in 2010.

“It is grossly irresponsible at this late very stage of the business cycle, to add legislative deregulation of the biggest banks in the country to widespread regulatory agency deregulation and non-enforcement,” Kelleher said. “Unleashing the biggest banks is just asking for another horrific crash.”

The bills proponents, which include 13 Democrats, argue that the Dodd-Frank rules went too far and became overly cumbersome for all but the biggest Wall Street banks. Their strong financial performance, Kelleher says, suggests otherwise.

“Every single argument for deregulation has been objectively rebutted by rising if not historic bank revenues, profits, bonuses and lending,” he said.

Losing battle

Despite its likely passage, several senior Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, have come out against the bill.

“The importance of fighting now is to stop this bill, but it’s also to make clear we’re not just going to lay down for the big financial institutions.”

Warren opposes the legislation’s mandate to raise the threshold at which banks are considered systemically important — and thus potentially needing government bailouts and subject to stricter oversight — to $250 billion from $50 billion. Banks of smaller but still substantial size needed plenty of government help during the 2008 financial crisis, Warren says.

The new rules would also exempts banks with less than $10 billion in assets from rules banning proprietary trading.

Kelleher says a fairly strong economic backdrop and record bank profits should be an indication that financial institutions should be strengthening their balance sheets, not facing looser oversight.

“In a rational world, this is exactly when counter-cyclical measures would require increasing bank capital, liquidity and other buffers for the inevitable downturn, thereby ensuring that the financial sector is strong enough to lend through the cycle rather than contract to repair fragile, broken and over-leveraged balance sheets,” he said.

Source

http://www.businessinsider.com/reversal-of-wall-street-regulations-risks-another-financial-crisis-2018-3

Filed Under: Current Events, Financial

Bill Gates says we will have another financial crisis like in 2008

March 9, 2018 By Ready News Staff

Afolabi Sotunde / Reuters

  • Bill Gates said in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” thread on Tuesday that Americans should expect another financial crisis of the magnitude of the 2008 downturn.
  • Still, Gates was optimistic overall.
  • The billionaire philanthropist believes the world is improving and often cites the falling number of people living in extreme poverty as evidence.

Many economists consider the financial crisis of 2008 to be the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

According to Bill Gates, the US is heading toward another one just like it.

On Tuesday, the Microsoft founder held an “Ask Me Anything” event on Reddit. When a user asked, “Do you think in the near future, we will have another financial crisis similar to the one in 2008?” Gates replied with a stern — but still optimistic — warning.

“Yes. It is hard to say when but this is a certainty,” Gates said. “Fortunately we got through that one reasonably well.”

Gates then deferred to his good friend and fellow billionaire philanthropist Warren Buffett, saying, “Warren has talked about this and he understands this area far better than I do.”

Gates ended his reply by saying, “Despite this prediction of bumps ahead I am quite optimistic about how innovation and capitalism will improve the situation for humans everywhere.”

“It’s because people care,” he said. “It’s because of scientific inventions.”

He often cites his and his wife’s efforts to reduce worldwide rates of poverty through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The proportion of the world population that lives in extreme poverty — defined by the World Bank as those living on less than $1.90 a day — has fallen to about one-tenth of the population from more than one-third in 1990, according to a column Gates wrote for Time last month.

Source

http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-says-another-financial-crisis-is-coming-2018-2

Filed Under: Current Events, Financial

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