bankers – Page 2 – The Burning Platform

The Shift to a Cashless Society is Snowballing

Love it or hate it, cash is playing an increasingly less important role in society.

In some ways this is great news for consumers. The rise of mobile and electronic payments means faster, convenient, and more efficient purchases in most instances. New technologies are being built and improved to facilitate these transactions, and improving security is also a priority for many payment providers.

However, there is also a darker side in the shift to a cashless society. Governments and central banks have a different rationale behind the elimination of cash transactions, and as a result, the so-called “war on cash” is on.

On the Path to a Cashless Society

The Federal Reserve estimates that there will be $616.9 billion in cashless transactions in 2016. That’s up from around $60 billion in 2010.

Continue reading “The Shift to a Cashless Society is Snowballing”

Case Closed: Iceland’s Criminal Bankers Released From Jail Years Early

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/07/2016 10:26 -0400

How very ironic.

Over the weekend, just hours before the Panama Papers were released, we wrote a post that took “A Look Inside Iceland’s Kviabryggja Prison: The One Place Where Criminal Bankers Face Consequences.”

And then, minutes later, the Panama Papers were disclosed by the ICIJ, which had a clear target: to “expose” the “circle of friends close to Putin”, and of course, to reveal the dirty laundry of the Iceland Prime Minister, who resigned just two days after his shady offshore tax dealing were revealed to the world.

There was some “conspiratorial” speculation whether the explicit hit on ex-PM Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson was precisely due to Iceland’s crackdown on the country’s criminal bankers. As a reminder, Iceland is the only nation that sent bankers found guilty of crimes resulting from the financial crisis, to prison.

It turns out there may have been something valid in said speculation, because moments ago, Iceland Monitor reported that three bankers from the defunct Iceland bank Kaupthing are to be released from jail today – after serving just one year of their 5-year sentences.

Magnús Guðmundsson, Ólafur Ólafsson and Sigurður Einarsson were one of four men jailed in 2015 in the so-called ‘Al-Thani case’ on charges of breach of trust and market abuse.Sigurður Einarsson, former chairman at Kaupþing, received a sentence of four years, while Magnús Guðmundsson, former CEO of Kaupthing Luxembourg, and Ólafur Ólafsson, who was the bank’s second largest shareholder at the time, both received a sentence of four and a half years.

They will be taken to a halfway house today, where they will be fitted with ankle tags and released under electronic supervision.

Hreiðar Már Sigurðsson , Sigurður Einarsson and Magnús Guðmundsson.

* * *

Case closed, but the question lingers: is the Panama Papers merely a warning to anyone in government who dares to put bankers in prison to make sure that their own financial documents are in pristine condition, or else?

DEFINITION OF A TOTAL PRICK

The asshole is probably a financial services executive. They will get their recompense.

Via Knuckledraggin

Will Donald Trump End Up Like JFK?

Authored by Bill Bonner of Bonner & Partners (annotated by Acting-Man.com’s Pater Tenebrarum),

Bumpy, Lumpy and Slumpy

The inability of democratic assemblies to carry out what seems to be a clear mandate of the people will inevitably cause dissatisfaction with democratic institutions. Parliaments come to be regarded as ineffective “talking shops,” unable or incompetent to carry out the tasks for which they have been chosen. The conviction grows that if efficient planning is to be done, the direction must be “taken out of politics” and placed in the hands of experts – permanent officials or independent autonomous bodies.

— Friedrich Hayek

hayek

F. A. Hayek among his students at the London School of Economics in 1948

The world is bumpy, lumpy, and slumpy. No matter. We’re going to look on the bright side. The cup is half full! The news is full of commentary on the U.S. presidential primaries.

We watch like a prairie dog staring at a train crash: We have no idea of what is going on, but we can’t take our eyes off it. The smoke. The twisted metal. The luggage and bodies flying through the air.

The Great Hope of the Republican Establishment was junior Florida senator Marco Rubio. But now, poor Rubio is trailing frontrunner Donald Trump by 20 points in his home state.

Continue reading “Will Donald Trump End Up Like JFK?”

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.”

Mark Twain

“Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?”

John Maynard Keynes

“Central Bankers are driving us to Hell in a vehicle We are paying the installments on”

Dean Cavanagh

“And the banks – hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created – are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

Richard Joseph Durbin

“3 people get stranded on a remote Island

A Banker, a Daily Mail reader & an Asylum seeker

All they have to eat is a box of 10 Mars bars

The Banker says “Because of my expertise in asset management, I”ll look after our resources”

The other 2 agree

So the Banker opens the box, gobbles down 9 of the Mars bars and hands the last one to the Daily Mail reader

He then says ” I’d keep an eye on that Asylum seeker, he’s after your Mars Bar”

Christopher Brookmyre, When the Devil Drives

This Is The Real Reason For The War On Cash

Originally posted Op-Ed via The Wall Street Journal,

These are strange monetary times, with negative interest rates and central bankers deemed to be masters of the universe. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that politicians and central bankers are now waging a war on cash. That’s right, policy makers in Europe and the U.S. want to make it harder for the hoi polloi to hold actual currency.

Mario Draghi fired the latest salvo on Monday when he said the European Central Bank would like to ban €500 notes. A day later Harvard economist and Democratic Party favorite Larry Summers declared that it’s time to kill the $100 bill, which would mean goodbye to Ben Franklin. Alexander Hamilton may soon—and shamefully—be replaced on the $10 bill, but at least the 10-spots would exist for a while longer. Ol’ Ben would be banished from the currency the way dead white males like him are banned from the history books.

Limits on cash transactions have been spreading in Europe since the 2008 financial panic, ostensibly to crack down on crime and tax avoidance. Italy has made it illegal to pay cash for anything worth more than €1,000 ($1,116), while France cut its limit to €1,000 from €3,000 last year. British merchants accepting more than €15,000 in cash per transaction must first register with the tax authorities. Fines for violators can run into the thousands of euros. Germany’s Deputy Finance Minister Michael Meister recently proposed a €5,000 cap on cash transactions. Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan predicted last month that cash won’t survive another decade.

The enemies of cash claim that only crooks and cranks need large-denomination bills. They want large transactions to be made electronically so government can follow them. Yet these are some of the same European politicians who blew a gasket when they learned that U.S. counterterrorist officials were monitoring money through the Swift global system. Criminals will find a way, large bills or not.

Continue reading “This Is The Real Reason For The War On Cash”

Something Very Disturbing Spotted In A Morgan Stanley Presentation

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/10/2016 15:46 -0500

With central bankers losing credibility left and right, and failing outright to boost the “wealth effect” no matter what they throw at it, the next big question is when will central planners around the world unveil the cashless society which is a necessary and sufficient condition to a regime of global NIRP.

And while in recent days we have seen op-eds by both Bloomberg and FT urging the banning of cash, the most disturbing development we have seen yet in the push for a cashless society has come from the following slide in a Morgan Stanley presentation, one in which the bank’s head of EMEA equity research Huw van Steenis, pointed out the following…

… and added this:

One of the most surprising comments this year came from a closed session on fintech where I sat next to someone in policy circles who argued that we should move quickly to a cashless economy so that we could introduce negative rates well below 1% – as they were concerned that Larry Summers’ secular stagnation was indeed playing out and we would be stuck with negative rates for a decade in Europe. They felt below (1.5)% depositors would start to hoard notes, leading to yet further complexities for monetary policy.

Consider this the latest, and loudest, warning on the road to digital fiat serfdom.

Iceland does what the US won’t: 26 top bankers sent to prison for role in financial crisis

Via Free Thought Project

'Businessman lighting cigar with $100 dollar bill' [Shutterstock]

‘Businessman lighting cigar with $100 dollar bill’ [Shutterstock]

Reykjavík, Iceland – In stark contrast to the record low number of prosecutions of CEO’s and high-level financial executives in the U.S., Iceland has just sentenced 26 bankers to a combined 74 years in prison.

The majority of those convicted have been sentenced to prison terms of two to five years. The maximum penalty in Iceland for financial crimes is six years, although hearings are currently underway to consider extending the maximum beyond six years.

The prosecutions are the result of Iceland’s banksters manipulating the Icelandic financial markets after Iceland deregulated their finance sector in 2001. Eventually, an accumulation of foreign debt resulted in a meltdown of the entire banking sector in 2008.

According to Iceland Magazine:

In two separate rulings last week, the Supreme Court of Iceland and the Reykjavík District Court sentenced three top managers of Landsbankinn and two top managers of Kaupþing, along with one prominent investor, to prison for crimes committed in the lead-up to the financial collapse of 2008. With these rulings the number of bankers and financiers who have been sentenced to prison for crimes relating to the financial collapse has reached 26, and a combined prison time of 74 years.

Massive debts were incurred in the name of the Icelandic public, to allow the country to continue to function, which are still being repaid to the IMF and other nations eight years later by the citizens of Iceland. In contrast to the U.S., Iceland has chosen to hold the criminals that manipulated their financial system accountable under the law.

Continue reading “Iceland does what the US won’t: 26 top bankers sent to prison for role in financial crisis”

Lawrence Wilkerson: Travails of Empire – Oil, Debt, Gold and the Imperial Dollar

Guest Post by Jesse

“We are imperial, and we are in decline… People are losing confidence in the Empire.”

This is the key theme of Larry Wilkerson’s presentation. He never really questions whether empire is good or bad, sustainable or not, and at what costs. At least he does not so in the same manner as that great analyst of empire Chalmers Johnson.

It is important to understand what people who are in and near positions of power are thinking if you wish to understand what they are doing, and what they are likely to do. What ought to be done is another matter.

Wilkerson is a Republican establishment insider who has served for many years in the military and the State Department. Here he is giving about a 40 minute presentation to the Centre For International Governance in Canada in 2014.

I find his point of view of things interesting and revealing, even on those points where I may not agree with his perspective. There also seem to be some internal inconsistencies in this thinking.

But what makes his perspective important is that it represents a mainstream view of many professional politicians and ‘the Establishment’ in America. Not the hard right of the Republican party, but much of what constitutes the recurring political establishment of the US.

Continue reading “Lawrence Wilkerson: Travails of Empire – Oil, Debt, Gold and the Imperial Dollar”

An Inadvertent Warning From BlackRock – Get Your Money Out Of Mutual Funds ASAP

SITUATION HOPELESS, BUT NOT SERIOUS

Your keepers will not be warning you before the collapse. They will be taking actions behind the scenes to protect their wealth, while throwing you under the bus. Obama and your corrupt congresscritters will demand that you bail out the .1% to preserve your way of life. Will you allow it to happen again? Or will you string up the perpetrators from lampposts? The great reset is coming. Social disorder, chaos and civil strife are just over the horizon. Are you prepared?

Via Investment Research Dynamics,

BlackRock Inc. is seeking government clearance to set up an internal program in which mutual funds that get hit with client redemptions could temporarily borrow money from sister funds that are flush with cash. – Bloomberg News

We may have been early on warning about leaving your savings in the financial system. It’s okay to be too early getting your money out of the system but it’s fatal to be just one second too late. The gates are already in place in money market funds just waiting for the signal to be lowered

BlackRock’s filing with the SEC to enable “have cash” funds to lend to “heavy redemption” funds should send shivers down the spine of anyone with funds invested in any BlackRock fund. In fact, it should horrify anyone invested in any mutual fund.

Larry Fink, BlackRock’s chief executive officer, said in December that U.S. bond funds face increased volatility, adding that he expected a “dysfunctional market” lasting days or even weeks within the next two years. – Bloomberg

I warned last summer when the money market funds received authorization to put redemption gates in place that it was time to remove your money from these instruments. The only reason a gate would be needed is if the people running the funds believed that there were risk events coming that would necessitate the gates.

Continue reading “An Inadvertent Warning From BlackRock – Get Your Money Out Of Mutual Funds ASAP”