Andy Borowitz - Romney Pays Surprise Visit to his Money in the Caymans

In an uncharacteristically emotional scene for the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney today paid a surprise visit to his money in the Cayman Islands.

Speaking in a bank vault surrounded by stacks of cash, Mr. Romney praised his money for "the brave work you have done in the never-ending fight for freedom from Federal income tax."

"Thanks to your hard work, losers around the world are envious of me," he added.  "For that I salute you."

Stressing that his money's mission in the Caymans was "far from over," he refused to set any timetable for withdrawal.

In a reference to his bid for the Presidency, Mr. Romney told his money, "It would be an honor and a privilege to have my face on you someday."

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http://www.borowitzreport.com/2012/05/02/romney-pays-surprise-visit-to-his-money-in-the-caymans/

Stefan Kaiser - Austerity Backlash Unites European Leaders

Be it austerity queen Angela Merkel or Socialist François Hollande, European politicians are suddenly in agreement with ECB President Mario Draghi's proposal to round out the European fiscal pact's austerity measures with a "growth pact." But many seem to have a different idea about what this means.  

It's so nice to see Europe in agreement once again. Whether it's German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso or French presidential candidates François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy -- everyone seems to think a "growth pact" for the continent is a good idea. But it is precisely this agreement that should make one skeptical -- because all the vague phrase really does is verbally lump together Europe's tremendous conflicts of interest.

The suggestion came from European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi. "We have had a fiscal compact," Draghi told the economic and monetary affairs committee of the European Parliament on Wednesday, referring to the treaty European governments signed in March, pledging to toughen their spending rules. "What is most present in my mind now is to have a growth compact."

Since then, the concept has garnered acceptance from all sides. "Growth is the key, growth is the answer," European Commission President Barroso said in a speech. In France, where the presidential campaign continues, both conservative incumbent Sarkozy and his Socialist challenger Hollande saw affirmation of their own positions on the issue. Hollande said it went in the same direction as his earlier policy suggestions, while Sarkozy said that a policy based on austerity alone would be a mistake.

Devil in the Details

But the unanimous approval of Draghi's suggestion conceals just how far apart its proponents are on details. What ECB President Draghi has in mind has little to do with Socialist Hollande's notions. "He doesn't necessarily have the same measures in mind as me to foster growth," Hollande admitted in a radio interview on Thursday. But this disagreement has somehow been overlooked.

Read More:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,830185,00.html

Insight: Falling home prices drag new buyers under water

More than 1 million Americans who have taken out mortgages in the past two years now owe more on their loans than their homes are worth, and Federal Housing Administration loans that require only a tiny down payment are partly to blame.

That figure, provided to Reuters by tracking firm CoreLogic, represents about one out of 10 home loans made during that period.

It is a sobering indication the U.S. housing market remains deeply troubled, with home values still falling in many parts of the country, and raises the question of whether low-down payment loans backed by the FHA are putting another generation of buyers at risk.

As of December 2011, the latest figures available, 31 percent of the U.S. home loans that were in negative equity - in which the outstanding loan balance exceeds the value of the home - were FHA-insured mortgages, according to CoreLogic.

Many borrowers, particularly since late 2010, thought they were buying at the bottom of a housing market that had already suffered steep declines, but have been caught out by a continued fall in prices in wide swaths of America.

Even for loans taken out in December - less than four months ago and the last month for which data is available - nearly 44,000 borrowers, or about 7.5 percent of the total, now find themselves under water.

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/26/us-usa-housing-negative-idUSBRE83P12E20120426

Richard (RJ) Eskow - Burden of Proof: Geithner, Obama, and Wall Street’s Unpunished Crimes

Forgery. Perjury. Investor fraud. Bribery. Money laundering. The body of evidence against individuals at the nation’s biggest banks is overwhelming. Nothing speaks louder about the banks’ guilt than this evidence - nothing, that is, except the billions they’ve paid to settle the charges.

The Administration reacted indignantly this week to suggestions it’s still slow-walking its investigation. And then, despite all this evidence, the Treasury Secretary of the United States proclaimed that no laws had been broken. And the White House wonders why its word is no longer enough?

A source in the office of a key figure in the investigation has denied a new story that they’re ruled out criminal prosecutions. But the burden of proof has shifted. Nothing will convince the public now except action.

Straw Men

Whether it’s JPMorgan Chase settling bribery charges in Alabama, Wells Fargo settling charges of laundering drug-cartel money in Mexico, or the nation’s five largest banks buying their way out of widespread foreclosure fraud and tax evasion, never in history has so much evidence led to so little action. Investigators pinpointed the fraudulent activity of individual accountants in GE Capital’s settlement with the SEC, only to be dumbfounded to discover that no criminal indictments were handed down.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/burden-proof-geithner-obama-and-wall-street-s-unpunished-crimes-1335595803

Phil Rockstroh - The Big Empty: Eating Cheetos With the Hungry Ghosts of the Corporate State

Due to the consolidation of wealth and privilege into fewer and fewer hands, thus requiring escalating amounts of officially mandated surveillance and brutality to maintain social order, the natural trajectory of unregulated capitalism tends towards hyper-authoritarian excess, even towards fascism. Moreover, by the standards of capitalist ideology, and exacerbated by the rigged nature of economic and social arrangements -- large segments of society are deemed losers, and, resultantly, will grow restive, if scapegoats aren't invented to mitigate a sense of humiliation and displace rage. Accordingly, rightist demagogic fictions can seize the psyches of large segments of the general public: immigrant interlopers wreck the economy; minority layouts suck-up public funds; gays and women, possessed of dubious morality, destroy the nation's moral fabric; lefties are driven to challenge the system, but only because of their spite, borne of jealousy.

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http://www.nationofchange.org/big-empty-eating-cheetos-hungry-ghosts-corporate-state-1335456259

Robert Reich - How Europe’s Double Dip Could Become America’s

Europe is in recession.

Britain’s Office for National Statistics confirmed today (Wednesday) that in the first quarter of this year Britain’s economy shrank .2 percent, after having contracted .3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011. (Officially, two quarters of shrinkage make a recession). On Monday Spain officially fell into recession, for the second time in three years. Portugal, Italy, and Greece are already basket cases. It seems highly likely France and Germany are also contracting.

Why should we care? Because a recession in the world’s third-largest economy, combined with the current slowdown in the world’s second-largest (China), spells trouble for the world’s largest.

Remember – it’s a global economy. Money moves across borders at the speed of an electronic impulse. Wall Street banks are enmeshed into a global capital network extending from Frankfurt to Beijing. That means that notwithstanding their efforts to dress up balance sheets, the biggest U.S. banks are more fragile than they’ve been at any time since 2007.

Meanwhile, goods and services slosh across the globe. If there’s not enough demand for them coming from the second and third-largest economies in the world, demand in the U.S. can’t possibly make up the difference. That could mean higher unemployment here as well as elsewhere.

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http://www.nationofchange.org/how-europe-s-double-dip-could-become-america-s-1335446855

Oliver Stuenkel - Does Kim Signal World Bank Changes?

Editor's note: This roundup is a new monthly feature of the Council of Councils initiative, gathering opinions from global experts on major international developments.

The selection of Jim Yong Kim, the U.S. candidate, as the next president of the World Bank has stimulated debate over reform of the institution's governance. Four experts size up the succession process, some judging it a missed opportunity for meaningful change while others seeing a crucial injection of new expertise at the sixty-eight-year-old development body.

CFR's Stewart Patrick notes a flawed process that still marks a turning point for the Bank.Oliver Stuenkel of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in Brazil laments the failure of the emerging powers to rally around Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. Both Stuenkel and Daniel Bradlow of the University of Pretoria in South Africa warn that without reform at the World Bank, some of its largest borrowers could seek alternatives, such as the proposed BRICS bank. But the East Asia Institute's Sook Jong Lee welcomes Kim's selection, saying his public health background bodes well for tackling the complex problems of development work.

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http://www.cfr.org/world-bank/does-kim-signal-world-bank-changes/p27994?cid=emc-WorldBankPressNote-ExpertRoundup-04_20_12

Yves Smith - The Hidden Bank Time Bomb: Interest Rate Risk

At the Atlantic Economy Summit in Washington last month, Sheila Bair fielded a question about the just-released results of the latest bank stress tests. The former FDIC chief took pains to point out that they were an improvement over earlier iterations by virtue of keying off a truly dire economic scenario, but then ticked off a number of ways in which they fell short. One was in that they focused solely on credit risk, when historically, adverse interest rate moves have proven very effective in decimating the banking sector. Witness phase one of the savings and loan crisis, in which hasty deregulation and gimmickry in the early 1980s set up the crisis later in the decade, or the derivatives wipeout of 1994, in which an unexpected 25 basis point Fed funds increase created bigger losses than the 1987 crash, or the losses on US bond portfolios in 1997 and 1998, which among other things nearly wiped out Lehman.

The perils of interest rate risk have largely receded from memory since the US has been in a long-term disinflationary trend since 1983. But with rates at zero, we have nowhere to go but up from here.

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http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/the-hidden-bank-time-bomb-interest-rate-risk.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Groups to World Bank: Stop the Land Grabs!

As the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty takes place in Washington DC this week, farmers and environmental groups have organized to push back against the Bank's pro-corporate, pro-privatization land grab attempts and the rights and environmental violations they bring.

Screen grab from film (see below) from La Via Campesina and Friends of the Earth International on the devasting impacts of the World Bank's land grabs on Uganda. The groups -- including Focus on the Global South, Friends of the Earth International and GRAIN -- say the World Bank is a leading force behind the land grabs, which allow giant global corporations to gobble up land and resources from local communities. 

In a group statement on the Bank's conference, the protesting groups say, "The World Bank is playing a key role in this global land grab by making capital and guarantees available for big multinational investors, providing technical assistance and support to 'improve the agricultural  investment climate' in so-called recipient countries, and promoting policies and laws that are corporate-oriented rather than people-centered."

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/24-3

James Ball - WikiLeaks supporters plan US foundation to restore funding

High-profile US supporters of WikiLeaks are planning to establish a foundation to break the 500-day "banking blockade" that has disrupted donations to the whistleblowing website.

WikiLeaks was forced to suspend many of its publishing operations in October last year after Visa, MasterCard and PayPal refused to process supporters' donations to the website, reducing its donation income by about 95%.

The move, which came after the US senator Joe Lieberman called on US companies to cut off services to WikiLeaks, was called a blockade by the organisation's editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, and came without any legal orders or actions against the site.

Supporters based in the US are now in talks with Assange to establish a US-based foundation aimed at funding organisations cut off by private companies in situations with first amendment implications.

At the forefront of the efforts are Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the US media, and John Perry Barlow, the former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the US online rights organisation Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/20/wikileaks-500-day-banking-blockade