IBM is firing yet another 5,000 workers, offshore outsources their jobs and forcing highly skilled Americans to educate and train their cheap offshore replacements. In just the past 2 months IBM has victimized 10,000 workers in this manner. Meanwhile IBM is running an expensive ad campaign to get U.S. government contracts, particularly Stimulus money. That's right, your tax dollars.
Do we really want to award U.S. taxpayer money to a company who routinely forces it's employees to train their replacements only to be fired?
The problems in Europe keep getting worse. In eastern europe the problem has reached the Czech Republic.
The economic crisis sweeping Central and Eastern Europe has claimed a third victim in a month after the Czech government lost a vote of no confidence on Tuesday night in a drama that risks setting off a fresh round of investor flight from the region.
Latvia's government fell last month following violent street protests. Hungary's premier Ferenc Gyurcsany resigned last week after struggling to impose austerity measures required under the terms of a $25bn (£17bn) bail-out from the International Monetary Fund.
(Reuters) – The FBI is bracing for a wave of fraud and corruption cases stemming from the government's multitrillion-dollar effort to get the economy moving again, the agency's chief told Congress on Wednesday.
The expected surge in economic crimes will place further strain on an agency already stretched thin as it investigates mortgage fraud, terrorism and corrupt politicians, FBI Director Robert Mueller said.
"Our expectation is that economic crimes will continue to skyrocket," Mueller said.
After the September 11, 2001 hijacking attacks, the FBI moved more than 2,000 investigators out of its criminal division to place greater emphasis on national security.
But that reduced the agency's ability to cope with a subsequent explosion in corruption, fraud and gang-related cases, Mueller said.
I am so used to the New York Times refusing to acknowledge the reality of bad trade deals, this article clam as a shock.
“A new phenomenon has grown up under Nafta — high-productivity poverty,” said Harley Shaiken, chairman of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Low wages means low purchasing power. “It is not a successful strategy for globalization,” Mr. Shaiken said.
Even Nafta’s greatest success — exports — has become a liability, as Mexico feels the full brunt of declining consumption in the United States. The auto industry, for example, which has flourished under Nafta, has ground to a virtual standstill. Over all, Mexican auto exports fell more than 50 percent in the first two months of this year compared with 2008, and production dropped almost 45 percent.
Bloomberg has a story which is supposed to tear at our heart strings but I have a different reaction. In profiling out of work derivatives technology workers, Fired Doctor of Derivatives Waits to Cry as Finance Jobs Vanish Bloomberg tries to show the pain of the greater than 250,000 jobs lost.
Firstly, it is precisely these derivatives, mathematical models which are part of the problem, so these people losing their jobs does at least imply banks are no longer just cranking out black box mathematical models (ahem) to generate more products and massive fees.
Also buried within this story is the L-1 Guest worker visa.
The Obama administration is considering asking Congress to give the Treasury secretary unprecedented powers to initiate the seizure of non-bank financial companies, such as large insurers, investment firms and hedge funds, whose collapse would damage the broader economy, according to an administration document.
The government at present has the authority to seize only banks.
Giving the Treasury secretary authority over a broader range of companies would mark a significant shift from the existing model of financial regulation, which relies on independent agencies that are shielded from the political process. The Treasury secretary, a member of the president's Cabinet, would exercise the new powers in consultation with the White House, the Federal Reserve and other regulators, according to the document.
Securitization was based on the premise that a “fool was born every minute.” - Joseph Stiglitz in congressional testimony, Financial Regulation, October 21, 2008.
Even Adam Smith recognized that unregulated markets will try to restrict competition, and
without strong competition markets will not be efficient. More recent research has shown that
markets often fail to produce efficient outcomes (let alone fair or socially just outcomes) when
information is imperfect or asymmetric—but information imperfections and asymmetries are at
the center of financial markets. That is what they are about. Our financial markets have even
worked hard to exacerbate these problems; as we have noted, they created non-transparent
products that were so complex that not even those who created them fully understood the risks to
which they gave rise.
Most people think the Red Scare began on February 9, 1950, when Joseph McCarthy produced a piece of paper before the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, and proclaimed...
"I have here in my hand a list of 205 people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party, and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department."
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