Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
April 27th, 2013Via: Rolling Stone:
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.
Research Credit: conceptualdecay
You know another con… uhh… organized… highly organized attack on the country.
April 27th, 2013Let me know if there’s a dubstep remix of this.
Via: Youtube:
Research Credit: RP
Man Dies in Police Raid on Wrong House
April 27th, 2013Via: ABC:
A 61-year-old man was shot to death by police while his wife was handcuffed in another room during a drug raid on the wrong house.
Police admitted their mistake, saying faulty information from a drug informant contributed to the death of John Adams Wednesday night. They intended to raid the home next door.
Research Credit: RP
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Defense Team May Claim He Was Brainwashed
April 27th, 2013Via: Bloomberg:
The best chance for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to avoid execution for the deadly Boston Marathon bombing may be to cooperate fully with investigators, or convince a jury he was “brainwashed” by his older brother.
…
His lawyers will probably blame his involvement on the “overpowering influence” of his 26-year-old brother, said Harvey Silverglate, a civil liberties and defense attorney. Tamerlan Tsarnaev “appears to have been an embittered and dangerous character, and it is well known that older siblings can often have tremendous power over younger siblings.”
Research Credit: almaverdad2
Body of Sunil Tripathi Found in River; Falsely Accused of Being Boston Marathon Bomber
April 27th, 2013Via: ABC:
The Rhode Island medical examiner’s office has identified the body pulled from a river on Tuesday as missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi.
A forensic dental examination helped confirm the identity of the 22-year-old’s body this morning, according to Dara Chadwick, spokesperson for the Rhode Island Department of Health.
“At this time, the cause of death is pending further study, and his family has been notified,” Chadwick said. Chadwick could not confirm whether the body would remain at the medical examiner’s office.
Lindsay Lague, a spokesperson for the Providence Police Department, told ABCNews.com, “There is no foul play suspected.”
Research Credit: DF
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Talked for 16 Hours Before He Was Read His Rights
April 27th, 2013Via: Salon:
According to the AP, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev answered questions for 16 hours before he was read the Miranda warning that he could remain silent and could ask for a lawyer. Once Tsarnaev was told that, he stopped talking. (So much for the idea that everyone has heard Miranda warnings so many times on TV that they have become an empty ritual.) The AP also reports that the investigators questioning him were “surprised when a magistrate judge and a representative from the U.S. Attorney’s office entered the hospital room.” The investigators “had planned to keep questioning him.”
Wow. That’s bad no matter your point of view. If you think Tsarnaev doesn’t deserve the normal protections American law affords criminal suspects, then you’d want the FBI to keep at him as long as they chose. Or if, like me, you’re worried about how far the Obama administration’s Justice Department has stretched the limited “public safety” exception the Supreme Court has allowed for questioning suspects about ongoing danger without Miranda warnings, 16 hours sounds expansive.
Gold Futures Log Biggest One-Day Gain of the Year
April 26th, 2013Via: MarketWatch:
Gold futures jumped by nearly $40 an ounce on Thursday to log the biggest one-day gain of the year, supported by physical demand for the precious metal, prospects for easier global monetary policies and a weaker U.S. dollar.
Thursday’s rally has brought gold back to roughly 50% of the massive recent sell off, said Phil Storer, director of trading at Dillion Gage Inc., a precious-metals dealer and refiner.
Corexit: Countless Gulf Residents with Symptoms Resembling Something from a Sci-Fi Horror Film, Bleeding from Nose, Ears, Breasts, Anus; Others Complain of Cognitive Damage
April 26th, 2013Via: Huffington Post:
Three years ago, when BP’s Deepwater Horizon began leaking some 210 million gallons of Louisiana Crude into the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. government allowed the company to apply chemical “dispersants” to the blossoming oil slick to prevent toxic gunk from reaching the fragile bays, beaches, and mangroves of the coast, where so much marine life originates. But a number of recent studies show that BP and the feds may have made a huge mistake, for which everything from microscopic organisms to bottlenose dolphins are now paying the highest price.
DHS Used 1,000 More Rounds Per Person than Army in 2012
April 26th, 2013Via: Fox:
Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz said Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security is using roughly 1,000 rounds of ammunition more per person than the U.S. Army, as he and other lawmakers sharply questioned DHS officials on their “massive” bullet buys.
“It is entirely … inexplicable why the Department of Homeland Security needs so much ammunition,” Chaffetz, R-Utah, said at a hearing.
…
Chaffetz, who chairs one of the House oversight subcommittees holding the hearing Thursday, revealed that the department currently has more than 260 million rounds in stock. He said the department bought more than 103 million rounds in 2012 and used 116 million that same year — among roughly 70,000 agents.
Comparing that with the small-arms purchases procured by the U.S. Army, he said the DHS is churning through between 1,300 and 1,600 rounds per officer, while the U.S. Army goes through roughly 350 rounds per soldier.
He noted that is “roughly 1,000 rounds more per person.”
“Their officers use what seems to be an exorbitant amount of ammunition,” he said.
Nick Nayak, chief procurement officer for the Department of Homeland Security, did not challenge Chaffetz’s numbers.
U.S. Believes Syria Used Chemical Weapons
April 25th, 2013Here we go again.
Via: USA Today:
The United States now believes the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against its people, according to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and a White House letter to Congress.
The White House informed Congress about the chemical weapons use in letters to Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz., on Thursday. These announcements are the first U.S. indication of confidence in claims of Syria’s chemical weapons use.
“The intelligence community has been assessing information for some time on this issue,” Hagel said. “The decision to make this conclusion was reached in the last 24 hours.”
The Defense secretary, speaking to reporters in Abu Dhabi, also said the U.S. government believes “any use of chemical weapons in Syria very likely originated” with the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
President Obama has said the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” that could trigger U.S. reaction.
But the assessment of likely chemical weapon use in Syria will not automatically trigger action, including military intervention, said a senior Defense department official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue.
More: Syrian Blood Tests Positive for Sarin Gas, U.S. Spies Say
