California Man Pays Off $6,500 Credit Card Bill In Pennies
UPI reports:
MIRA MESA — California man upset with his bank for disallowing his requested refinance said he decided to pay off his $6,500 credit card bill entirely with pennies.
Thierry Cahez of San Diego County rolled 650,000 pennies in plastic, loaded them into crates and drove the lot to his Mira Mesa bank, KABC-TV, Los Angeles, reported.
Cahez was turned away by the bank several times but eventually was sent to a branch with a vault large enough to handle the coins.
Cahez said he opted to pay his credit card bill with pennies because he was turned down for a refinance and for the amount of charges and fees on his credit card, KABC-TV said Tuesday.
Treasure Islands: The Murky World Of Offshore Tax Shelters
New Left Project sits down with author Nicholas Shaxson to talk tax havens — a mammoth system of quasi-legal money-laundering which has a far wider impact than we realize, with a large role in the global drug trade and financial crisis. As it turns out, the biggest “treasure islands” are not the Caymans or Monaco, but places such as the City of London and the U.S. state of Delaware:
There is no common definition of what a tax haven is. Everybody has a slightly different definition. Ultimately what a tax haven provides is escape from the rules and the laws of jurisdictions. Tax havens are also about ‘elsewhere’ – the laws of the Cayman Islands are not designed for the benefit of the 50,000-odd population of the Cayman Islands.
The traditional view is…palm-fringed tropical islands in the Caribbean, Monaco, Switzerland, Liechtenstein. Small states. But if you do the analysis of what a tax…
Silver Manipulation By JP Morgan And U.S. Fed?
In yesterday’s New York Times, William D. Cohan refines what was once a confusing and fringe theory about JP Morgan and HSBC’s involvement in silver market manipulation into a very plausible scenario, tying in the cloak and dagger elements of the story with the currently unfolding class action lawsuits in several states.
Once again, the Xtranormal.com platform is being put to good use to elucidate exactly what’s happening:
Each segment has information that I found useful, especially the fact that there is actually no physical silver left in circulation — nice touch. Part II is here and part III available here.
Part IV is here, and after the creators accidentally deleting the original voices, the bear in the overalls is now sounding strangely like John Lennon.
Another source of information and a more detailed breakdown on basic market manipulation and arbitrage is available here. The site that appears to be the sponsor/creators of the Xtranormal videos silvergoldsilver.blogspot.com is less clear, but has information as well…
France Wants New System Of Global Currencies
Are the days of each nation having its own currency numbered? France is calling for a global financial system based around “international currencies,” RTE News reports:
France, as current head of the Group of 20 countries, will help the transition to a global financial system based on ’several international currencies’, French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde said today.
Lagarde, speaking ahead of a G20 finance ministers meeting in Paris on Friday and Saturday, said the world had to move on from the ‘non-monetary system’ it now has to one ‘based on several international currencies’.
Accordingly, France wants to see less need for countries, especially the emerging economies, to accumulate huge foreign reserves, she said.
At the same time, international capital flows should be better regulated and the role of the Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund should be reinforced by the inclusion of China’s yuan in the system.
China, whose booming economy now ranks…
Finance Capitalism is Causing Starvation
We all know Soviet-style communism causes starvation. Looks like American-style capitalism does the same thing in a different way. Johann Hari in the Independent, from this past July:
It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people — mostly children — couldn’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made…
2010 Financial and Commodity Markets and Productivity: WTF?
I could go on and on about the way speculative finance is utterly divorced from the real economy, sapping 80 cents out of the economy for each dollar it touches*, etc., etc.. But why bother when the following chart says it all? Compiled from the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics release.
![Financial and Commodity Markets in 2010 - WTF[1]](http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Financial-and-Commodity-Markets-in-2010-WTF1-300x200.jpg)
See underlying analysis, along with links to original source data, within this workbook.
P.S. I would like to offer a ’special’ TBA prize to the first Dystopia Diaries reader who detects the even more disturbing trend vis-a-vis crude oil prices and CPU within the workook data. Hint: Can you say “Peak Oil?”
Footnote
*Yeah, it’s true. By giving yet another extraordinary tax cut to the finance-addled trust fund brats, Obama and the Republican’ts are throwing away 80% of those dollars’ productivity. See the analytical graph and supporting details here.
Contributed from Dystopia Diaries
Still Think Financial Markets = Financial Investment?
For those STILL too gullible to believe that we will never recover until we stop the irresponsible hoarding and gambling behaviours of Wall Street through a property tax on large securities holdings, I present the following:
Our economy doesn’t need to print more money. The economy must have had about $1.5 TRILLION more money at the end of 2010 than it started with. What we need to do is make the banksters and uber-rich pay their fair share and stop glomming off old age pensioners.
Details available upon request. Or check it out for yourself here.
If you liked this, or better yet, if you hated this, check out my ‘Policy Directions‘ page at Dystopia Diaries.
There’s No Such Thing As “The Market”
Dan Roberts, writing earlier this year for the Guardian:
Margaret Thatcher famously outraged the left by asserting there was no such thing as society. Perhaps today would be a good moment for David Cameron to flummox rightwing orthodoxy by declaring there is no such thing as “the market”. This mythical creature has been credited with playing a key role in events of the last few days. The market was unhappy with uncertainty. The market doesn’t like coalition government. The market didn’t want to hang around and wait.
Television news crews were even dispatched down to the City of London to try to doorstep this grumpy beast, standing outside empty office blocks hoping to catch a glimpse.
The reality, as ever, is more complicated. There are markets, but many of them, all with buyers and sellers expressing necessarily contradictory opinions on where things are going.
Some of these markets have indeed shown clear reactions to…
Wall Street To Break Record Again With $144 Billion In Pay This Year
Having déjà vu? Top Wall Street firms will once again break their own salary record this year. If that’s not a sign we’re in economic boom times, I don’t know what is! MSNBC reports:
Wall Street pay is on pace to break a record high for a second consecutive year, according to a report in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.
Some three dozen top banks and securities firms will pay $144 billion in salary and benefits this year, the paper said. That’s a 4 percent increase from the $139 billion paid out in 2009, according to a survey conducted by the Journal. Compensation is expected to rise at 26 of the 35 firms surveyed, including banks, investment banks, hedge funds, money-management firms and securities exchanges.
Large Wall Street banks are unlikely to accelerate bonus payouts, however, to help their employees avoid the higher tax rates that may be coming when tax cuts enacted by the…
Hedge Funds Accused of Gambling with Lives of the Poorest as Food Prices Soar
Image: World Development Movement (WDM)
Katie Allen writes in the Guardian:
Financial speculators have come under renewed fire from anti-poverty campaigners for their bets on food prices, blamed for raising the costs of goods such as coffee and chocolate and threatening the livelihoods of farmers in developing countries.
The World Development Movement (WDM) will issue a damning report on the growing role of hedge funds and banks in the commodities markets in recent years, during which time cocoa prices have more than doubled, energy prices have soared and coffee has fluctuated dramatically.
The charity’s demands for the British financial watchdog to follow the US in cracking down on such speculation comes against a backdrop of cocoa prices jumping to a 33-year high as it emerged that a London hedge fund had snapped up a large part of the world’s stock of beans. On Friday, traders say, Armajaro took delivery of 240,100 tonnes of cocoa —…
American Banks Laundering Hundreds Of Billions Dollars For Mexican Drug Cartels
Who are the Mexican drug cartels’ biggest allies north of the border? Major banks such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America, who blatantly break U.S. anti-money-laundering laws by laundering hundreds of billions of dollars for the cartels, Bloomberg reports. That’s a pretty huge “stimulus package” our banks are getting from Mexican drug traffickers:
Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history — a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.
“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” says Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case.
“It’s the banks laundering money for the cartels that finances the tragedy,” says Martin Woods, director of Wachovia’s anti-money-laundering unit in London from…
Top Bank Executives In Iceland Jailed, Sued For Billions
Yet another instance in which the United States could learn something from our Scandinavian brethren: In Iceland, bank executives who helped bring about the nation’s financial meltdown are being rounded up and jailed, issued international arrest warrants, and sued for billions of dollars. AFP reports:
More than a year and a half after Iceland’s major banks failed, all but sinking the country’s economy, police have begun rounding up a number of top bankers while other former executives and owners face a two-billion-dollar lawsuit.
On Wednesday, the administrators of Glitnir’s liquidation announced they had filed a two-billion-dollar (1.6-billion-euro) lawsuit in a New York court against former large shareholders and executives for alleged fraud.
Four former Kaupthing executives, who all live in Luxembourg, have meanwhile been arrested in Iceland in the past week and Interpol has issued an international arrest warrant for that bank’s ex-chairman, Sigurdur Einarsson.
Former head of the bank’s domestic operations, Ingolfur Helgason, and…
Oz Banker Caught Porn-Surfing on Live TV
It’s about a minute into the clip on one of the background computers. That’s definitely not a financial spreadsheet : ) Lester Haines writes on the Register:
An employee of Sydney’s Macquarie Bank probably isn’t in line for a fat payrise after he was caught on live TV closely analysing something a bit more scintillating than the Lucky Country’s interest rates:
According to net experts, at least one of the photos in question is Orlando Bloom’s squeeze Miranda Kerr. The Victoria’s Secret Angel is a local lass made good, and is rarely seen dressed in more than her underwear, which makes her the pin-up of choice among Sydney’s hardened bankers.
Credit Reform and My New 703.8% Card
Kathy Kristof writes on CBS Moneywatch:
Consumer reporters were all crowing about a 79.99% rate credit card that was launched in response to credit reform a few months ago–collectively horrified that a law designed to cut rates and eliminate sneaky fees was inspiring increasingly abusive bank behavior.
I thought that was about as bad as it gets until I took a close look at the statement for my new Macy’s card, which I had opened with “instant credit” while Christmas shopping. It made that 79% card look like a bargain.
Department Stores National Bank, which issues the card, charges a “minimum interest charge.” On my average daily balance of $3.41, that minimum charge worked out to “an actual annual percentage rate” of 703.80%. (Part of the impact of last year’s credit reform is that the issuer had to disclose that shocker on the statement, while also noting that the card’s normal APR is 24.5%.)
Such…
The Credit Card’s Newest Trick: 79.9 Percent Interest
Candice Choi writes on the AP via Yahoo News:
It’s no mistake. This credit card’s interest rate is 79.9 percent.
The bloated APR is how First Premier Bank, a subprime credit card issuer, is skirting new regulations intended to curb abusive practices in the industry. It’s a strategy other subprime card issuers could start adopting to get around the new rules.
Typically, the First Premier card comes with a minimum of $256 in fees in the first year for a credit line of $250. Starting in February, however, a new law will cap such fees at 25 percent of a card’s credit line.
In a recent mailing for a preapproved card, First Premier lowers fees to just that limit — $75 in the first year for a credit line of $300. But the new law doesn’t set a cap on interest rates. Hence the 79.9 APR, up from the previous 9.9 percent.
“It’s the highest…
Goldman Sachs Official Says Jesus Embraced Greed
Matt Taibbi writes:
I didn’t believe this story was true at first — thought it had to be a spoof. But it turns out to be true. The great banks of the world have gone on a p.r. counteroffensive in Europe, and are sending spokescrooks in shiny suits into churches to persuade the masses that Christ would have approved of the latest round of obscene bonuses.
Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths explains it this way: that Christ’s famous injunction to love others as one would love oneself actually means that one should love oneself as one would love oneself. This seemingly baffling outburst by a Goldman executive in what appears to have been a prepared speech — someone actually wrote this, and thought about it, before saying it out loud — gets even weirder when one tries to figure out what could possibly have motivated this person, and by extension his employer…
Pay Your Bills on Time? There’s a Fee for That.
In an attempt to squeeze more revenue out of consumers who don’t rack up much debt, Citigroup, Bank of America, and other credit card companies are adding new fees. According to USA Today credit card users are being hit with new “inactivity fees” and fees for not putting enough debt on your credit cards. Consumers thinking about canceling their cards face taking a hit to their credit scores for closing an account.
Other consumers may have no choice – Citibank has been closing some credit card accounts without reason or warning, damaging their customers credit ratings.
I cut-up my credit cards last night.
