Saturday, May 04th
Last update08:13:23 PM GMT
Economic Glance
An Anatomy of a Financial Collapse” (PDF). The 650-page indictment reveals the myriad of ways Wall Street lies, cheats, steals and defrauds on a routine basis. Arguably the report is as revealing as the Nixon tapes or the Pentagon Papers. Unfortunately, it’s too technical to get widely read. So here are the Cliff Notes.
The president of the World Bank has warned that the world is "one shock away from a full-blown crisis". Robert Zoellick cited rising food prices as the main threat to poor nations who risk "losing a generation".
He was speaking in Washington at the end of the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Meanwhile, G20 finance chiefs, who also met in Washington, pledged financial support to help new governments in the Middle East and North Africa.
Analysts who reviewed complex mortgage bonds that ultimately collapsed and ruined the U.S. housing market were threatened with firing if they lost lucrative business, prompting faulty ratings on trillions of dollars worth of junk mortgage bonds, a Senate report said Wednesday.
The 639-page report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations confirms much of what McClatchy first reported about mismanagement by credit ratings agencies in 2009.
The Federal government is trying to establish bartering private currency of any type as an illegal enterprise in a false interpretation of the court's recent conviction of Liberty Dollar's owner Bernard Von NotHaus.
In a case where the government used conspiracy and counterfeit charges against NotHaus to establish that he intended to mint and illegally replace US currency with a private one using silver coins, the US Attorney is now parlaying the conviction to say that this ruling sets a precedent against any private barter transactions which use any form of currency besides established Federal Reserve Notes.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has for months been leading the charge to expose the sweetheart deals the Federal Reserve has worked out for multinational banks and corporations at the same time that working Americans, small businesses, local governments and schools boards struggle to stay afloat financially.
Sanders has tried to make the point that it is simply absurd for the Fed to bail out foreign firms and bad banks and to provide them with low-interest loans at the same time that they are reaping massive profits – and at the same time that federal, state and local governments are supposedly broke.
The heads of the nation’s top companies got the biggest raises in recent memory last year after taking a hiatus during the recession.
At a time most employees can barely remember their last substantial raise, median CEO pay jumped 27% in 2010 as the executives’ compensation started working its way back to prerecession levels, a USA TODAY analysis of data from GovernanceMetrics International found. Workers in private industry, meanwhile, saw their compensation grow just 2.1% in the 12 months ended December 2010, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
US aircraft manufacturer Boeing received at least $5.3bn (£3.3bn) in unfair aid from Washington, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has concluded.
The subsidies included money for research and development from the Nasa space agency, a panel of international trade judges has ruled. Last year the WTO said that Boeing's arch rival Airbus had received illegal aid from European governments.
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