We have the 5th credit union failure of the year, the Defense Logistics Federal Credit Union of Dover, New Jersey, which has been liquidated and taken over by the Pentagon Federal Credit Union (PenFed).
I still don’t know why the bank failures have flipped, with the credit unions outstripping commercial banks over the past few years.
Perhaps someone involved in banking regulation could give me a hint.
In any case, here is the Full NCUA credit union closing list.
Joe Biden has issued a rule banning surprise medical billing.
I’m surprised, particularly its application to emergency services, where private equity has made surprise billing a central part of their profit generation strategies. (Biden has a lot of PE types in the administration)
This is an very good, at least in the context of an executive order: (We really need a law to ban this)
The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled the first in a series of rules aimed at banning surprise billing.
The interim final rule bars surprise billing for emergency services and high out-of-network cost-sharing for emergency and non-emergency services. It also prohibits out-of-network charges for ancillary services like those provided by anesthesiologists or assistant surgeons, as well as other out-of-network charges without advance notice.
………
While public health insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid already prohibit balance billing, people with job-based coverage or individual health plans frequently and unknowingly accept care from an out-of-network provider before they are slapped with a surprise medical bill. The new rule aims to put a stop to that.
………
This first round of regulation applies to providers, air ambulance providers, group health plans, health insurance issuers and Federal Employees Health Benefits Program carriers. The rule takes effect in 60 days, but most provisions don’t apply until January 1. Providers and insurers have until September 1 to submit comments.
Air Ambulance providers have been charging insane rates over the past few years as PE has snapped up more services.
The private equity model of medicine is to drastically overcharge people in situations where they have no choice.
Under the new rule, health plans that cover emergency services cannot use prior authorization for those services and must pay for them regardless of whether the clinician is an in-network provider or emergency facility. Likewise, insurers can’t charge their enrollees higher out-of-pocket costs for emergency services delivered by an out-of-network provider. They also have to count beneficiaries’ cost-sharing for those emergency services toward their in-network deductible and out-of-pocket maximums.
………
The Biden administration is still working out the details about how the dispute resolution process will work. But Congress laid out the broad-brush strokes in December’s No Surprises Act, which passed as part of its end-of-year spending package. Providers and insurers will have 30 days to agree to a price for the medical services delivered. And if they don’t settle, they’re supposed to enter arbitration, during which each side will present a final offer and make their case for why their recommendation is best. The arbitrator must then pick one of the two offers. But they can’t split the difference.
MY guess is that the PE parasites will still find a way to rat-f%$# people, it’s king of their “thing”, but it looks to be significantly harder now.
Personally, I favor a government owned National Health Service as a solution, but this is a positive move.
The banksters are fighting the debt relief plan for Black farmers who have been harmed by government and bank racism because early pay-offs will reduce their profits.
F%$# you.
You benefited from a system which sucked resources from Black farms for more than 100 years, and now you are whining about having their loans paid off early.
Let me repeat, f%$# you:
The Biden administration’s efforts to provide $4 billion in debt relief to minority farmers is encountering stiff resistance from banks, which are complaining that the government initiative to pay off the loans of borrowers who have faced decades of financial discrimination will cut into their profits and hurt investors.
………
Now, three of the biggest banking groups — the American Bankers Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America and National Rural Lenders Association — are waging their own fight and complaining about the cost of being repaid early.
Their argument stems from the way banks make money from loans and how they decide where to extend credit. When a bank lends money to a borrower, like a farmer, it considers several factors, including how much interest it will earn over the lifetime of the loan and whether the bank can sell the loan to other investors.
By allowing borrowers to repay their debts early, the lenders are being denied income they have long expected, they argue. The banks want the federal government to pay money beyond the outstanding loan amount so that banks and investors will not miss out on interest income that they were expecting or money that they would have made reselling the loans to other investors.They also want other investors who bought the loans in the secondary market to get government money that would make up for whatever losses they might incur from the early payoff.
I will shed no tears over any money lost by these parasites.
They benefited and actively participated in the racism that destroyed over 90% of Black owned farms in the United States, and now they want more blood money.
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice, who is at the forefront of cutting benefits from the unemployed in his state, is personally liable for nearly $¾ billion in loans from the collapsed dodgy non-bank loan company Greensill Capital.
It could not happen to a nicer guy:
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice is personally on the hook for nearly $700 million in loans his coal companies took out from now-defunct Greensill Capital, according to people familiar with the loans and documents described to The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Justice’s personal guarantee of the loans, which hasn’t been reported, puts financial pressure on the popular Republican governor. He is also dealing with unrelated lawsuits alleging parts of his sprawling network of coal companies breached payment contracts or failed to deliver coal.
Greensill packaged the loans and sold them to investment funds managed by Credit Suisse Group and Greensill ran $10 billion in supply-chain finance funds that extended financing to a range of borrowers.
………
[Governor Justice’s company] Bluestone hadn’t expected to begin repaying the Greensill loans until 2023 at the earliest, it said in a lawsuit brought in March in a New York federal court alleging Greensill committed fraud in its lending practices.………
Greensill was a once-hot private finance firm whose bankers said could have been worth $40 billion in a potential initial public offering. It attracted investment from SoftBank Group Corp. before collapsing into bankruptcy in March when it lost a key type of insurance that backed up its loans.
………
Credit Suisse in a recent notice to investors said Bluestone owes nearly $700 million in loans.
………
The guarantees were provided by Mr. Justice as well as his wife and covered unlimited amounts, some of the people familiar with the loans said. Mr. Justice’s son and Bluestone’s chief executive, James C. Justice III, guaranteed the loans up to a certain limit, one of the people said, though that figure couldn’t be learned. All three are listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Greensill.
………
Forbes this year dropped Mr. Justice from its billionaires list, owing to Greensill’s failure. It now pegs his net worth at $450 million, down from $1.2 billion in April 2020. His wealth stems from dozens of coal companies, farms and other businesses he and his family oversee, including the famed Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.
$450 million – $700 million = -$250 million dollars.
He’s rich, so he is not going to have to pay it all off, rich people never pay their bills, but this is going to take a significant bite out of his wallet.
I would also note that Greensill’s model was to make to make supply chain loans, where suppliers would get the cash while their customers dragged their feet on paying them.
Their special sauce was in using complex financial instruments to mask the risk involved in these transactions, which allowed them to offer lower rates.
If you were into Greensill for 700 Extra Large, it means that you company was already in serious trouble.
Here’s hoping that Justice will need to get an honest job after he leaves the Governor’s mansion.
The Federal Reserve has been forced to warned Deutsche Bank that it is money laundering again.
The fix for this is very simple: Lock them out of the US, because they are not going to fix this.
This is BCCI with a German accent:
The Federal Reserve told Deutsche Bank AG in recent weeks that the lender is failing to address persistent shortcomings in its anti-money-laundering controls, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Fed’s frustration has escalated to a point that the bank could be fined, the people said.
Deutsche Bank has poured massive resources into addressing repeated shortcomings and penalties related to allowing suspect transactions. The Fed told Deutsche Bank that instead of making progress, the German lender with a large Wall Street presence is backsliding. The regulator has said that some of the anti-money-laundering control problems require immediate attention, according to the people.
………
The Fed’s harsh words contrast with the bank’s message that it has worked diligently to improve its systems and has put most of its legal troubles in the past.
The Fed’s latest warning comes four years after it classified Deutsche Bank’s U.S. operations as being in “troubled condition,” a rare rebuke for a major bank. In May 2020, it issued a fresh admonishment over the bank’s money-laundering controls.
………
Deutsche Bank is Germany’s largest lender and as a dollar clearing bank regulated by the Fed, is a major player in global financial transactions.
Shut down their dollar clearing operations. Problem solved, and the Germans can deal with following their own “No Bailouts” advice that they foist on the rest of the Euro Zone.
It appears that the wild swings in heavily shorted stocks, most recently for AMC movie theaters, is causing instabilities in the market that threaten the stability of index funds.
The solution to this is fairly straightforward, first and most importantly, enact a transaction tax for all financial transfers to increase the friction, and hence reduce the speculation.
It might also be a good idea to ban Payment for Flow Order, which is a Bernie Madoff inspired “Innovation” which is little more than an excuse for front running, where a broker executes their trades before those of their customers for their own personal profit.
Speculation is a cost we pay for investment, an evil that we tolerate in order to encourage investment.
A tax of between 10 and 50 basis points (⅒% — ½%) tax per transaction.
Even if it does not generate as much revenue as its supporters predict, it will produce a very real public good:
Index funds are supposed to cut out the human-driven craziness that periodically infects markets, but the recent meme-stock fever proved the $11 trillion industry is far from immune.
The remarkable surge in shares of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and a handful of other stocks is showing up in multiple exchange-traded funds, skewing portfolios, altering risk profiles and exerting outsized influence on prices.
Take the $68 billion iShares Russell 2000 ETF (ticker IWM). In the past week through Thursday, AMC powered 70% of the product’s advance. The stock was responsible for less than a 10th of the fund’s return in the previous week.
It’s a timely reminder that even diversified funds on autopilot remain subject to the whims and eccentricities that frequently lash markets out of nowhere.
………
“For index investing, the appeal is that human decision-making, human emotions are taken out of it,” said Tom Essaye, a former Merrill Lynch trader who founded “the Sevens Report” newsletter. “That works all well and good until a stock that is supposed to be 50 basis points of the fund now becomes 6%.”
This is going to destroy us all.
Case in point, the hacking of the MTA in New York City, which was caused by lapses at a private equity (PE) owned software firm.
PE is not about building a good company, long term success, or security. It’s about pump and dump, and security is a cost that you can cut to juice your numbers before they sell out the company.
It’s all pump and dump:
Oh look, a hack of the New York subway system.
A hacking group believed to have links to the Chinese government penetrated the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s computer systems in April, exposing vulnerabilities in a vast transportation network that carries millions of people every day, according to an M.T.A. document that outlined the breach.
These hacks are becoming commonplace, but it’s not just because everything is connected to the internet. It turns out, hackers got in through commercial software.
To gain access to the M.T.A. and other systems, the hackers took advantage of vulnerabilities in Pulse Connect Secure, a widely used connectivity tool that offers workers remote access to their employers’ networks.
Pulse Connect Secure is owned by Ivanti, a software roll-up owned by private equity firms Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. and TA Associates. I’ve written about the dangers of private equity owning cybersecurity firms – Solar Winds was such a case. (In fact, Thoma Bravo partners – which owns Solar Winds – continues to snap up cybersecurity and compliance firms such as Proofpoint.)
I’ve gone through job reviews on Glassdoor and Indeed, and Ivanti seems to be a typical PE roll-up, ruining the product quality, offshoring jobs and firing people, and just generally destroying enterprise value. Here’s a typical review.
PE takeovers are frequently followed up by the collapse of the firms (usually) after the PE pukes have gotten their vigorish.
We really need to change bankruptcy laws so that these crooks aren’t able to leave someone else holding the bag.
We have another credit union failure, the Empire Financial Federal Credit Union in Jackson , New Jersey was placed into conservatorship.
No commercial bank failures so far this year though.
As to what this all might mean? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It looks like even the gonifs running Silicon Valley unicorns have decided that special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) are too dodgy for them.
I did not think that there was a financial instrument sufficiently duplicitous for the masters of the universe to object.
I was misinformed:
Startup chief executives are turning a cold shoulder to SPACs.
Skeptical CEOs say they are turning down offers from special-purpose acquisition companies, deleting their solicitous emails and tapping the brakes on merger deals amid nosediving shares and disappointed investors.
So-called blank-check companies, which go public with no assets and then merge with private companies, exploded in popularity last year as a mechanism for startups to raise a lot of money with more speed and fewer regulatory hurdles than a traditional initial public offering.
Startup chief executives are turning a cold shoulder to SPACs.
Skeptical CEOs say they are turning down offers from special-purpose acquisition companies, deleting their solicitous emails and tapping the brakes on merger deals amid nosediving shares and disappointed investors.
So-called blank-check companies, which go public with no assets and then merge with private companies, exploded in popularity last year as a mechanism for startups to raise a lot of money with more speed and fewer regulatory hurdles than a traditional initial public offering.
………
Among 44 technology startups that completed a SPAC deal from the start of 2020 through this past April, share prices have on average fallen 12.6%, according to data provided by Minmo Gahng and Jay Ritter, public-stock researchers with the University of Florida. More than half of the tech stocks declined more than 20%. The research is based on the share closing price on May 17.
………
Enthusiasm for SPACs waned after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced new accounting mandates last month and stepped up scrutiny of other SPAC practices. Another deterrent for startups is mounting litigation from stock traders against SPACs, alleging conflicts of board members, breaches of fiduciary responsibilities and misleading statements, among other things. Some fund managers said they have put a moratorium on new SPAC investments, and one San Diego-based family office, Sky and Ray, said since last year it has slashed its SPAC holdings to five from 104.
This is the first time in a long time that I’ve heard of a Wall Street scam falling from favor because the intended pigeons came to their senses before it all collapsed.
It’s not the beginning of the end for Wall Street as casino, but perhaps, it is the end of the beginning.
H/T Naked Capitalism
I am referring to Charles Koch, who has been lobbying for increased evictions relaxed regulations while investing in real estate.
The famously Libertarian Koch, whose family fortune came from selling energy technology to Stalin, is engaging in a classic case of rent seeking behavior, basically being a leech on society by the definition of Ayn Rand (יִמַּח שְׁמו) who Charles Koch is a big fan of.
I guess it’s capitalism for thee and socialism for me from him:
Billionaire Charles Koch’s foundation has bankrolled three conservative legal groups leading the court battle to eliminate prohibitions against tenant evictions during the Covid-19 pandemic in America.
At the same time, Koch’s corporate empire has suddenly stepped up its real estate purchases during the pandemic – including making large investments in real estate companies with a potential financial interest in eliminating eviction restrictions.
………
But since the Covid-19 pandemic began, Koch Industries has been plowing money into real estate.
In March this year, the Wall Street Journal published a report headlined Charles Koch Is Betting Big on Distressed Real Estate. The paper reported that the billionaire’s corporate conglomerate “is emerging as a major real-estate investor during the pandemic, using its robust cash reserves to buy properties at beaten-down prices and betting on a longer-term recovery”.
I might suggest that Mr. Koch arrange for burial at see when he passes on, because the line to piss on his grave would be awfully long otherwise.
The UK, normally the United States’ poodle in all matters, is not offering its support for Biden’s global business tax plan.
This is not a surprise. The British financial sector, known colloquially as the City of London, has two areas where it dominates world markets: Tax evasion and currency speculation.
The US may dominate the UK, but the City of London owns the whole government, lock, stock and barrel.
Of course they are objecting to a plan with makes revenue shifting a less profitable enterprise. It’s their profits that they are protecting.
It should surprise no one that gypsy cab company Uber is less of a ride sharing company than it is an exercise in fraud.
By this, I don’t mean that it has no path to profitability (though it doesn’t), I mean that Uber, and WeWork, DoorDash, and pretty much the entire investment portfolio of Softbank is an attempt to generate buzz through a massive infusion of capital, followed by an IPO that offloads the company to suckers.
It seems to me that in addition to those startups, the management of Softbank should be frog-marched out of their offices in handcuffs when the reckoning comes.
It also turns out that Uber is an example of particularly extreme financial engineering:
Uber is not a business in the traditional sense. It’s a “bezzle” (“the magic interval when a confidence
trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it”).
The only reason Uber was able to attain growth was because investors gave it billions to lose. First, it was the Saudi Royals, hoping to spend their way to a transportation monopoly.
When that didn’t work, the company’s investors suckered the public into taking their shares off their hands in an IPO premised on two things:
- Self-driving cars
- All buses and subways in the world being scrapped and replaced with Ubers.
Neither of those things have happened, of course. Uber actually had to pay someone else $400m to “buy” the self-driving car division it sank $2.5b into (the resulting cars could not travel for one mile without a serious accident).
………
Uber’s “innovation” wasn’t self-driving cars. It was cheating. Uber is really f%$#ing good at cheating.
How good? Well, last year, Uber managed to dodge tax on $6b in global revenues by laundering its income through fifty Dutch shell companies.
………
It’s quite a whirlwind of socially useless financial engineering, composed of obvious frauds like “selling” its IP to a Dutch subsidiary financed with a $16b “loan” from a Singaporean subsidiary, garnering 20 years‘ worth of $1b annual tax credits.
The Netherlands may be a bastion of progressive politics, but it’s also one of the world’s leading onshore-offshore tax havens, joining Cyprus, Luxembourg, Delaware, Wyoming and the City of London as a key player in the global money-laundry.
Our multinational financial system is one big case of, “If fraud can happen, it will already have happened.”
If we actually enforced the tax and fraud laws, there would be millions of people nationwide who would be in the dock right now.
Will “Goldman Penis Envy” Crash the Economy Again?
The point of his article is that there are a lot of actors in Wall Street like Lehman, who are small enough that they feel that they have to massively over-leverage to compete with the Vampire Squid, but large enough to crash the system.
“We called it ‘Goldman Penis Envy,’” says Lawrence McDonald, former Lehman trader and author of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense. In telling the Gelband story, he explains that Fuld and Gregory were so desperate to beat out Goldman and become the richest men on Wall Street, they chased every bad deal at the peak of the speculative bubble.
“These tertiary financial institutions, in order to win business away from the big players, they have to continually juice their offerings, offer more leverage, more goodies,” says McDonald. “Dick and Joe, they wanted to do these banking deals, to steal Goldman’s business by offering more.”
He’s suggesting that the collapse of Archegos Capital Management is a taste of things to come.
He’s probably right.
In a (sort of) obituary for Bernie Madoff, we learn that in interviews following his conviction for runing a Ponzi scheme, Madoff believed that everyone on Wall Street knew what he was doing.
Certainly, the pattern of financial players of cashing out early before the game of musical chairs stopped is suspicions:
Bernie Madoff died today, and he leaves behind a legacy of financial wreckage that stretched around the globe. His Ponzi scheme was the largest in history, wiping out some $65 billion in gains, albeit paper gains. The longevity of his scheme — decades — was breathtaking. He was without a doubt one of the most accomplished liars in history. Yet perhaps it takes a con man to know how the system cons us all. And Madoff understood the financial system as only a financial crook can. One thing he was certain of: They all knew.
………
I spent hours talking to Madoff during his years behind bars, and more hours listening to tape of his depositions from prison, exclusive material which offered insight into his crimes for my podcast. To the extent one can get into the mind of the greatest con artist of the age, I felt I knew him, or at least certain things about him. And I came to believe that Bernie Madoff was, in his way, a truth-teller. Madoff understood the workings of the financial system as few others did. Clearly he used that knowledge to sustain his con. The financial system’s attitude toward him was “willful blindness,” he said in one deposition.
When he was caught in 2008, as the financial crisis gripped America ever tighter, Madoff became a poster child for the misdeeds of that entire universe. The banks had pushed us to the brink of national ruin. But theirs was a complicated fraud, including such arcana as securitized bonds and overleverage. Their crimes weren’t easy to understand. Madoff, on the other hand, looked you in the eye, shook your hand, and then cut the shirt off your back. That was straightforward.
And so a narrative evolved. The systems, financial and to some extent judicial, cast Madoff as a rogue operator, a lone bad apple in an otherwise forthright arrangement. We were all hoodwinked, was the going line. He was that good.
Nonsense. The financial system enabled, weaponized, and profited handsomely from Madoff. Some hedge funds he did business with were nothing more than sales operations. They lured in clients with promises of due diligence and exclusive access. “I made them hundreds of millions,” Madoff said. It was true. And for doing what? Some simply took money from investors and handed it to him. For their trouble, they took a percentage off the top. They promised that they examined the details, but that simply wasn’t true.
………
Did the small investors know? Most of them didn’t. They trusted their financial advisors, those connected with institutions such as Banco Santander, who promised to keep an eye on Madoff’s operations.
………
Of course, he bears a large share of the responsibility for defrauding investors, although he liked to shrug that off. No doubt the notion of Madoff as another victim of the system is repulsive. But without the cold-blooded support of large financial players, Madoff would have been a local phenomenon, a tragedy limited in time and scope.
We need to make it easier to prosecute Wall Street malefactors, and we need to make it easier to claw back their ill gotten gains from them when it all goes pear shaped.
Did you know that investors are pissed off because Biden’s infrastructure plans do not include any public-private partnerships? (PPPs)
They want to see public private partnerships, where the private participants are guaranteed a profit, and then borrow money at inflated rates from Private Equity, and ding the taxpayers for decades for user fees for doing basically nothing at all.
I feel pretty good about this:
Finance executives are lamenting being frozen out of plans to bolster America’s dilapidated infrastructure, as the Biden administration pushes a tax-and-spend approach to building projects.
President Joe Biden’s “American jobs plan”, unveiled last month, calls for $2tn of investment in highways, electrical grids and other basic infrastructure.
At the same time, the White House put forward corporate tax reforms that it said would generate enough money to pay for the investment spree within 15 years.
That has disappointed some investors and asset managers who once expected public-private partnerships would be a lucrative financing opportunity.
“I would love to put money into infrastructure projects,” said Christopher Ailman, chief investment officer of Calstrs, the retirement system that pays the pensions of California teachers.
The $290bn fund has held sporadic talks with the US Treasury about investing in infrastructure projects since the Obama administration, Ailman said. “A lot of long-term investors . . . look at infrastructure as being a source of stable long-term returns,” he said.
They are upset that they won’t have the opportunity to loot the taxpayers to buy another yacht. F%$# them with Cheney’s Dick.
………
While Biden’s infrastructure proposal revives some of the unfulfilled ambitions of his predecessor, it does not envisage a role for the private investors who had once expected to be in the driving seat.
“This is a very traditional ‘the government is spending on infrastructure’ plan,” said a lobbyist who regularly represents private equity firms in Congress.
Just kill yourself, you bloody parasite, it will be the best thing you ever do for society.
Some of the executives say that PPPs can, “Impose commercial discipline and generate savings elsewhere,” only they never have, and they have to pay much higher interest rates on what they borrow than the government does, which means that they can’t.
Instead they are efforts to get money today at the cost of tomorrow, as Richie Daley’s incredibly corrupt parking meter deal in Chicago shows.
There never are any savings, just guaranteed profits with some of the vigorish skimmed off the top and returned to the politicians as bribes and campaign donations.
https://twitter.com/DanielaGabor/status/1381665203524415488
see full thwitter thread
You know, when I read the headline, “Wall Street Finds New Way To Finance Unprofitable Tech Firms, I have a feeling of impending doom.
I know that there are cartoons to explain the process, so it does not invoke Saroff’s Rule, “If a financial transaction is complex enough to require that a news organization use a cartoon to explain it, its purpose is to deceive,” but this sounds like it’s another crack-up waiting to happen.
They are called Asset Backed Secularizations, and every sentence seems of the article implies greater and greater leverage and greater uncertainty:
No earnings? No problem. Investors are funneling money to unprofitable software companies through a new type of debt deal.
Nonbank lenders like Golub Capital, AllianceBernstein Holdings LP and Owl Rock Capital Partners LP have issued asset-backed bonds to help finance about $2 billion of loans to such companies since November, according to data from Kroll Bond Rating Agency Inc. and S&P Global Market Intelligence. Many of the loans are to fast-growing, but still unprofitable, software enterprises.
………
The loans backing the complex bonds—known as asset-backed securitizations, or ABSs—can be small, like the $25 million Golub provided to software delivery specialist CloudBees Inc. Other deals run in the hundreds of millions of dollars, like the $300 million Owl Rock lent to back the leveraged buyout of software security company Checkmarx by private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman LLC. Golub has been making the loans since 2013 and has had no defaults, even during the pandemic-induced economic downturn last year, according to a credit-rating report.
………
Still, some fund managers say the new deals pile debt on debt, disregarding the risk of default in the relatively immature companies.
Demand for ABS backed by conventional corporate loans called collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs, surged late last year as markets recovered from the pandemic selloff. But, the new transactions are so unorthodox that large credit-rating firms Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s Global Ratings don’t rate most of them, the people involved said.
Instead, the bulk of the deals have gotten ratings from Kroll Bond Rating Agency, one of three smaller firms competing with Moody’s and S&P for credit-ratings business.
………
A single investment bank, MUFG Securities Americas Inc., has arranged all of the deals for the lenders, selling them primarily to U.S. investors specializing in ABS, the people said. A spokeswoman for MUFG, a subsidiary of Japan’s largest bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. declined to comment.
………
The average credit quality of the loans is the equivalent of debt with a single-B or triple-C rating, two of the lowest rungs on the credit-rating ladder, according to research by Kroll. If the borrowers default, it is unclear how much lenders will recover. “It is a relatively new asset class with limited recovery data,” Kroll said in a report.
Let’s see:
Bingo!
This is going to blow up.
It appears that white supremacist terrorists are getting extensive support from elements of the Christian right.
I probably should not say that this is because they are one and the same, but it’s because they are one and the same:
A data breach from Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo has revealed that millions of dollars have been raised on the site for far-right causes and groups, many of whom are banned from raising funds on other platforms.
It also identifies previously anonymous high-dollar donors to far-right actors, some of whom enjoy positions of wealth, power or public responsibility.
Some of the biggest beneficiaries have been members of groups such as the Proud Boys, designated as a terrorist group in Canada, many of whose fundraising efforts were directly related to the 6 January attack on the United States Capitol.
The breach, shared with journalists by transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets, shows the site was used for a wide range of legitimate charitable purposes, such as crowdfunding medical bills, aid projects and religious missions.
………
A large proportion of that money came from a number of high-dollar donors who elected to be anonymous on the website, but whose identifying details were nevertheless preserved by GiveSendGo.
………
Of Tarrio’s donors, none immediately responded to requests for comment except for Gerardo G Gonzalez, who anonymously donated $1,000 to Tarrio on 7 January.
………
In a telephone conversation, Gonzalez said that his support of the Proud Boys was motivated by his belief that “there is no systemic racism in this country”, and his opposition to “BLM and Antifa” who he said represented “the real extremism” in the United States. He also used derogatory terms for Latinos and Democrats.
Other Proud Boy fundraisers raised large amounts, and attracted a similar range of high-value anonymous donations.
………
Candyce Kelshall, the president of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies-Vancouver, who at at Simon Fraser University researches violent transnational social movements, said that far-right crowdfunding on GiveSendGo was just “the tip of the iceberg”, and similar efforts were happening across up to 54 other crowdfunding sites that her research had revealed.
She said, however, that GiveSendGo was “particularly insidious” due to its presentation of such crowdfunding in the guise of religion-based charity.
This is not “religion-based charity”, the religion is real: White Christian Fundamentalism in the United States is a part of white nationalism and white supremacism, they simply sell themselves slightly differently.
I call them, “Talibabtists,” thought the term,. “Christo-Fascist,” might also work.
They need to be shown for what they actually are, and it is my belief that a majority of the American public will shun them and their projects.
We really need to do something to stop people from scoring highly remunerative jobs with the companies that they regulated as soon as they leave their position.
The revolving door is not just unseemly, it is a form of bribery:
Citadel Securities, the US market maker owned by billionaire Ken Griffin, has snapped up Heath Tarbert, the former head of the main US derivatives regulator, to be its new chief legal officer.
Tarbert left the Commodity Futures Trading Commission just 27 days ago, having resigned as its chair after an 18-month tenure.
Citadel Securities’ announcement on Thursday marked the latest in a long list of hires from US regulators by Griffin. Tarbert replaces Steve Luparello, Citadel Securities’ general counsel, who is a former director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s division of trading and markets.
Griffin also hired Gregg Berman, the SEC’s former head of research who examined the role of high-frequency trading on the world’s largest equity market, as well as Ryan VanGrack, who was an adviser to former SEC chair Mary Jo White, among others.
The move has reawakened accusations of a so-called revolving door from public service to private work.
I’m not sure how to make this illegal, but it needs to be made illegal.
(As Atrios would say)
It turns out that a reporter at Bloomberg news was feeding insider information to a speculator. Hoocoodanode?
Basically, there was a pattern of suspicious trades in the hours before a story from Bloomberg hit the web, and one reporter had a byline on all of the stories:
For more than six months, federal prosecutors say, a New York man used inside information to make illegal profits in the stock market—and a core element of his alleged scheme was his interaction with Bloomberg News, which published several stories shortly after the trader arranged to make significant purchases of the companies’ shares.
Last month, a federal grand jury indicted Jason Peltz on multiple counts of securities fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and lying to the FBI. Peltz, 38, is accused of working with over a half-dozen unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators to learn about impending takeovers and other market-moving news, and to move money between accounts as a way to hide his role and profits.
The indictment notes that Peltz’s moves were timed closely to stories that ran at “a financial news organization.” While the newsroom isn’t named, federal officials cite five stories and their timestamps— all of which match precisely to pieces that ran on Bloomberg News’ website. Each of those stories had shared bylines, but only one reporter is identified as an author for all of the articles: Ed Hammond, who worked at the Financial Times before coming to Bloomberg more than six years ago to cover mergers and acquisitions. In 2017, Hammond was named Bloomberg’s senior deals reporter in New York — a highly prestigious post in that newsroom.
Hmm, I wonder just who could be the source of the insider information?
The feds allege that Peltz used disposable “burner” phones and encrypted apps to communicate with a journalist, and that the reporter provided “material nonpublic information about forthcoming articles” which Peltz used to trade in the market “just prior to publication of an article about each company written by the reporter.” The indictment describes “numerous contacts” between Peltz and a reporter, including at least one in-person meeting.
I might be inclined to dismiss this as an a unfortunate social interaction, except for the fact that Mr. Peltz was using a burner phone.
Assuming that the Bloomberg source was not actively profiting from the transactions, it means that either Peltz was using him to manipulate the timing of the public release M&A information, or using the Bloomberg source to get information regarding future M&A information, or both.
In either case, the reporter still got something of value, a scoop, and while this should not be actionable from a criminal perspective, one would hope that his editor is crawling so far up his ass about this that he can see his tonsils.
We have the have a development on the second credit union failure of the year, the Indianapolis’ Newspaper Federal Credit Union of Indianapolis, Indiana was liquidated. It was placed under conservator ship the second week of this year.
Still commercial bank failures this year yet.
Not sure what it all means, I’m just counting.