Outsourcing has run amok, driven by multinational corporations' disregard for everything other than maximizing profits for shareholders, according to Pope Benedict XVI.
In remarks that will fuel the row around excessive pay, Lord Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, said banks should not be ashamed of rewarding their staff.
Speaking to an audience at St Paul’s Cathedral in London about morality in the marketplace last night, Griffiths said the British public should “tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all”
Perhaps the danger that the public will completely lose faith in the financial system is spurring a modest push for reforms. Of course we are still only talking about the SEC, which has proven itself totally incompetent at enforcing existing regulations.
(Dow Jones)--The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission unanimously agreed Wednesday to consider three proposals aimed at shedding more light on non-public electronic trading entities including dark pools, which match big stock orders privately.
The proposals would require dark pools to make information about an investor's interest in buying or selling a stock available to the public instead of only sharing it with a select group operating with a dark pool. They would also require dark pools to publicly identify if their pool executes a trade.
The National Academy of Sciences has issued its own estimates of the number of Americans in poverty, and yes, it’s much worse than the official statistics have been telling us for the past decade. The new NAS formula estimates nearly 1 in 6 Americans, 15.8 percent, are living below the poverty line. That’s 48 million Americans.
By comparison, the latest official Census Bureau statistics are that 13.2 percent of Americans, or 39.8 million, are impoverished. It should be noted that the Census Bureau is reportedly cooperating with the National Academy of Sciences to get this information out as quickly as possible.
John Montgomery Ward was inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in 1964. He debuted with the Providence Grays on July 15, 1878, as a pitcher. He won 164 career games with a 2.15 ERA. He threw the second perfect game in baseball history.
When an injury ended his pitching career in 1884, he learned to throw with his other arm and became a shortstop and second baseman. He went on to collect over 2,100 hits and steal 540 bases, including 111 in just one season.
He played on two pennant winning New York Giants teams, and managed the team for two other seasons. No other player in the history of baseball has won over 100 games as a pitcher and also collected over 2,000 hits.
For all these reasons he deserves to be remembered.
However, these accomplishments were nothing in comparison to the real legacy that defined him as a person and left its mark on baseball.
Hedge funds and financial firms shouldn’t be allowed to sidestep potential new laws governing the $592 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market, Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said today in Chicago.
Any exemptions for so-called end-users should be “very narrowly defined” to include only non-financial institutions, Gensler said. End-users such as utilities, energy producers and agricultural companies have pushed for an exemption to new laws that would require standardized over-the-counter trades to go through exchanges or clearing houses.
Tonight on PBS Frontline is investigates the causes of the financial crisis. Check your local listings for times. And for a sneak peak here is the link to Frontline website.
From the press release:
"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"
The stock market rally coming off March lows has now surpassed 60%, a rally of strength rarely seen before. But it has been seen before, so let's put it into perspective.
* Year over Year Retail Sales: 9.3% average in prior 60% rallies versus -5.3% in the current one
* Consumer Confidence: 95.5 average; 53.1 now
* Capacity Utilization: 79.9% average; 66.6% now
* Year over Year Industrial Production: 4.1% avereage; -10.7% now
* ISM: 53.9 average; 52.6 now
* Payroll employment gains over period: 2.2% average; -2.0% now
* Decline in continued unemployment claims from cycle peak: -26.3 average; -11.6% now
* Year over Year growth in total credit market debt: 9.3% average; 3.0% now
* Year over Year growth in household debt: 8.8% average; -0.1% now
The House was drawing up new banking regulation this week, which included the new agency to protect consumers from abusive and deceptive lenders. So would Congress stand up for the voters or the industry?
Bowing to political pressure from community bankers, the House Financial Services Committee approved an exemption on Thursday for more than 98 percent of the nation’s banks from oversight by a new agency created to protect consumers from abusive or deceptive credit cards, mortgages and other loans.
The carve-out in legislation overhauling the regulatory system would prevent the new consumer financial protection agency from conducting annual examinations of the lending practices at more than 8,000 of the nation’s 8,200 banks, leaving only the largest banks and other lenders subject to the agency’s examiners.
Recent comments