TV News LIES

Headquartered in a former Rothschild chateau in an affluent Parisian neighborhood, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is best known for earnest conferences on economic and social policy.

With little outside attention, it also plays a pivotal role enabling global corporations such as Google Inc. (GOOG), Hewlett- Packard Co. and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN). to dodge taxes by shifting profits into offshore subsidiaries, costing the U.S. and Europe more than $100 billion a year.

Puerto Rico occupies a space between foreign and domestic status with U.S. citizenship for residents, its own Olympic team and a tax system that allows individuals and companies the chance to elude the IRS.

The U.S. territory’s leaders are seeking to lure mainland residents such as hedge-fund billionaire John Paulson. Moving to Puerto Rico could allow Paulson and other top-earning taxpayers to shield future income from the Internal Revenue Service without giving up their passports.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged two affiliates of well-known hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors with illegal insider trading Friday, resulting in the largest ever insider-trading financial penalties.

CR Intrinsic Investors and Sigma Capital Management, which are linked with Steven Cohen's SAC Capital Advisors, separately agreed to pay $614 million and give up $14 million in gains to settle the SEC's charges. The settlement with CR and Sigma, in which the firms didn't admit or deny guilt, is the largest paid in an insider trading case and one of the largest financial penalties charged by the SEC.

Jamie Dimon’s email response was direct and to the point. “I approve,” he wrote to an oversight body within his enormous bank, JPMorgan Chase, thereby giving his blessing to an increase in the amount of risk the institution could shoulder. He also approved a change in the way a key trading unit was assessing threats of trouble in its then-burgeoning portfolio.

That email -- released late Thursday as part of a 300-page Senate report probing how and why Dimon’s bank managed to lose $6.2 billion on derivatives trading -- now appears to tie the chief executive directly to the disastrous decision-making at issue.

With news of record corporate profits and increased bonuses for those at the top of the financial heap — and on-going income stagnation, job loss, and rising poverty for those in the middle and bottom of the ladder—it’s maddening for progressives to hear our political elites continuing to promote austerity as a means for growth.

Just a year and half ago, Occupy Wall Street was all anyone could talk about.  President Obama won a historic second term running on these themes and announced a new era of liberal governance in his recent Inaugural address.  Yet, even with strong evidence out of Europe that austerity is failing, and public opinion polls in the U.S. showing clear opposition to rising inequality, the political class in Washington is collectively trying to convince itself that America can cut its way to prosperity and economic opportunity for the middle class.

Florian Wilhelm Jurgen Homm, the German hedge-fund manager who has been a fugitive for more than five years, was arrested today at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence on U.S. fraud charges.

Homm, 53, allegedly caused at least $200 million in losses to investors in hedge funds operated by Absolute Capital Management Holdings Ltd., according to a statement by the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles. Homm was arrested by Italian authorities following a U.S. request, according to the statement.