G-20 Nations Decide Not to Help Europe and Their Sovereign Debt Woes
“European leaders shift their focus this week to bolstering the euro region’s debt-crisis firewall after the Group of 20 nations rebuffed their call for help.
The decision by G-20 finance ministers to fend off pleas for assistance pending an increase in the euro-area backstop puts the onus onGermany, the biggest national contributor to bailouts, to overcome its resistance to doing more.
With a parliamentary vote on a second Greek aid package looming in Berlin today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government must now decide whether to back plans at a March 1-2 European Union summit to combine rescue funds and produce a potential firewall of 750 billion euros ($1 trillion).
Europe “doesn’t really need any outside money,” Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, said in an e-mail. “It needs their own policy makers, especially Germany, to show leadership.”
Finland votes on the same package on Feb. 29 while the European Central Bank is preparing to issue a second round of unlimited three-year loans to help shore up the region’s banks….”
Comments »The Price of Your Calamari
Photographer’s Video From Homs Shows Urban Warfare in Vivid Detail
Updated | 4:49 p.m. Using footage recorded by a French photographer who was in Homs this month, Britain’s Channel 4 News has produced a remarkable portrait of urban warfare in the Syrian city, between government forces and the lightly armed fighters of the Free Syrian Army.
The 11-minute video report broadcast on Wednesday night features scenes of everyday life in the city divided along sectarian lines, and shows a battle between the rebels and government snipers for control of a local headquarters of the mukhabarat, or secret police.
Comments »The U.N. Accuses Syria of Crimes Against Humanity
Wife of Assassinated Iranian Nuclear Scientist: ‘Annihilation of Israel His Ultimate Goal’
TEHRAN (FNA)- The wife of Martyr Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan Behdast, who was assassinated by Mossad agents in Tehran in January, reiterated on Tuesday that her husband sought the annihilation of the Zionist regime wholeheartedly.
“Mostafa’s ultimate goal was the annihilation of Israel,” Fatemeh Bolouri Kashani told FNA on Tuesday.
Bolouri Kashani also underlined that her spouse loved any resistance figure in his life who was willing to fight the Zionist regime and supported the rights of the oppressed Palestinian nation.
Iran’s 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan Behdast, a chemistry professor and a deputy director of commerce at Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was assassinated during the morning rush-hour in the capital early January. His driver was also killed in the terrorist attack.
Roshan was killed on the second anniversary of the martyrdom of Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, who was also assassinated in a terrorist bomb attack in Tehran in January 2010.
The method used for Roshan’s assassination was similar to the 2010 terrorist bomb attacks against the then university professor, Fereidoun Abbassi Davani – who is now the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization – and his colleague Majid Shahriari. Abbasi Davani survived the attack, while Shahriari was martyred.
Another Iranian scientist, Dariush Rezaeinejad, was also assassinated through the same method on 23 July 2011.
Iran has condemned the CIA, MI6 and Mossad for the five assassinations.
A series of CIA reports revealed that Israeli Mossad agents, posing as American spies, have recruited members of the terrorist organization Jundollah to stage terrorist operations against Iran.
Foreign Policy magazine cites CIA memos from 2007-2008 that Mossad recruited members of Jundollah terror group to fight a covert war against Tehran.
Buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush’s administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundollah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two US intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting US passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundollah operatives – what is commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation.
The sources – one of whom has read the memos and another who is intimately familiar with the case – said the memos investigated and debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundollah – a Pakistan-based extremist organization responsible for numerous terrorist attacks against Iranian civilians and military officials. Even according to the US government and published reports, Jundollah is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children.
Comments »Rise Of The HFT Machine – Visual Confirmation How SkyNet Broke The Stock Market On US Downgrade Day
The following animated GIF chronicles the rise of the HFT Algo Machines from January 2007 through January 2012.
August 5th, 2011, was U.S. debt downgrade day.
Hidden Objectives Within Social Media
[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNMDfHPTayM 450 300]
Comments »In Addition to Apple Google Also Got Around The Privacy Policies of Microsoft
Coffee Break: Fun With Uncle Sam
Quality Assurance VP: Citigroup ‘Defrauded’ Fannie and Freddie
“Citigroup Inc. (C), which last week admitted breaking Federal Housing Administration rules and paid a fine, also violated regulations for home loans sold to Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), according to a whistle-blower’s complaint.
The bank “defrauded, falsified information or misled federal government entities” by selling or securing insurance for mortgages with defects such as improper appraisals and paperwork errors and not reporting them as required, Sherry Hunt, a Citigroup quality-assurance vice president, said in her complaint, which was unsealed yesterday. It was filed under the False Claims Act in federal court in Manhattan in August.
For Citigroup, the third-largest U.S. bank by assets, the high defect rates could be costly. It might be forced to buy back substandard mortgages sold to government-controlled Fannie and Freddie, who buy or guarantee most U.S. mortgages.
Under the Feb. 15 settlement with the U.S. on FHA loans, Citigroup will pay $158.3 million. TheJustice Department reserved the right to pursue criminal and other charges related to mortgages originated or underwritten by Citigroup and not insured by the FHA.
“Everyone is a little bit guilty for not keeping an eye on the processes and doing what we should have been doing,” Hunt said in a phone interview from her home in Silex, Missouri. “Managers have to take ownership of their area, know what’s going on and make sure they’re doing the right thing.”
Comments »UN nuclear watchdog in Iran for talks
Comments »Tehran, Iran (CNN) — Officials with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency begin a second round of talks Monday with Iranian officials over the country’s nuclear program, a day after Tehran cut off crude exports to British and French companies in retaliation for a new round of sanctions imposed on the regime.
The two days of talks come amid heightened tensions in the region, with Israel making clear it is pondering an attack on Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure, while Iran warned it could cut off the narrow strait through which oil tankers sail in and out of the Persian Gulf.
The scheduled talks between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iranian officials are billed as an opportunity for the watchdog agency to get more clarity about the “possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program,” the group said.
Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency cited the head of the IAEA mission as saying it would take time to resolve Iran’s nuclear issue because it is complicated.
Japan Slowly Wakes up to Doomsday Debt Risk
TOKYO, Feb 17 (Reuters) – Capital flight, soaring borrowing costs, tanking currency and stocks and a central bank forced to pump vast amounts of cash into local banks — that is what Japan may have to contend with if it fails to tackle its snowballing debt.
Not long ago such doomsday scenarios would be dismissed in Tokyo as fantasies of ill-informed foreigners sitting on loss-making bets “shorting Japan”.
Today this is what is on bureaucrats’ minds in Japan’s centre of political and economic power.
“It’s scary when you think what could happen if there’s triple-selling of bonds, stocks and the yen. The chance of this happening is bigger than markets think,” says a senior official.
Leaning back in a leather sofa in his office, the official appears relaxed, but the way he wastes no time answering questions about a debt meltdown, suggests it is an all too familiar topic.
Read the rest here.
Comments »Sheer Indignity: The Shady Business Practices of Citibank
IRS: Identity Theft, Phishing Are Top Tax Scams in US
Identity theft and phishing top the federal U.S. tax service’s list of “dirty dozen” scams, which tend to peak this time of year as millions of Americans gear up to file their tax returns.
“Scam artists will tempt people in person, online and by email with misleading promises about lost refunds and free money. Don’t be fooled by these scams,” Internal Revenue Service(IRS) Commissioner Doug Shulman said in a statement.
While the “dirty dozen” schemes are common year round, many occur most frequently during tax filing season, the IRS said. The filing deadline for 2011 taxes is April 17.
The IRS did not give figures in its annual list for the amount stolen or not paid through scams.
Identity theft occurs when thieves use a taxpayer’s identity and personal information to file a tax return and claim a fraudulent refund.
The IRS blocked more than $1.4 billion from going to the wrong person last year through identity theft, the statement said.
Phishing is usually carried out through an unsolicited email or a fake website to lure potential victims and prompt them to provide personal and financial information.
“Armed with this information, a criminal can commit identity theft or financial theft,” the statement said.
Among other scams, about 30,000 people have voluntarily disclosed foreign financial accounts since 2009 under a program to pay taxes on money returned to the United States.
The program was reopened this year. The IRS has collected about $3.4 billion under the 2009 program, and another $1 billion in upfront payments under a 2011 program.
The “dirty dozen” list is rounded out by:
• fraud by return preparers;
• scams promising “free money” from the IRS or tax schemes involving Social Security;
• false or inflated income and expenses;
• false claims for refunds from Form 1099, which reports income other than wages, salaries and tips;
• frivolous arguments;
• falsely claiming zero wages;
• abuse of charitable organizations and deductions;
• disguised corporate ownership;
• misuse of trusts.
Comments »WAKE UP: Courtesy of the National Lawyers Guild
“I hesitate to label this piece as “opinion,” because it is fact — rather than one’s editorial opinion — that the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) contains indefinite detention without trial provisions which violate a shocking number of Constitutional and international civil rights protections.
These imprisonment without trial provisions were drafted by a bipartisan group in Congress, and then quietly signed into law by President Obama on New Year’s Eve — after his administration withdrew an earlier veto threat on NDAA.
The lack of media coverage of this historic event has been stunning, and as awareness of the NDAA grows online, some individuals are seeking clarity as to what laws, specifically, are violated by the NDAA’s indefinite detention provisions.
The video segment below gives you a brief, two-minute rundown on the legal specifics, and the rights violated by the NDAA. Special thanks to the National Lawyers Guild; I’ve relied heavily on their analysis for this piece. Also, other leading legal and civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have come to similar conclusions about the NDAA’s unconstitutionality and threat to our democratic values.
At time of publication, multiple bills have been proposed in the House which would seek to “de-claw” or repeal the most egregious portions of the NDAA. The public’s support of such bills is, in my view, crucial at this time.
Legal breakdown of the NDAA:
[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufOE3Bd002o 450 300] “ Comments »Citigroup Whistle-Blower Says Bank’s ‘Brute Force’ Hid Bad Loans From U.S.
“Four years after rotten mortgages helped trigger a global financial crisis, Sherry Hunt said her Citigroup Inc. quality-control team was still finding flaws in new loans that included altered tax forms, straw buyers and borrowers who listed fictitious employers.
Instead of reporting the defects to the Federal Housing Administration, the bank saddled the agency with losses by falsely declaring the loans fit for its federal insurance program, according to a complaint filed yesterday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. Citigroup agreed to pay $158.3 million to settle the claims, and admitted that it certified loans for FHA backing that didn’t qualify.
Hunt, who filed a sealed lawsuit against New York-based Citigroup in August that the government joined, will collect $31 million of that sum — before taxes and attorney’s fees — as a whistle-blower, she said in an interview yesterday. The settlement, which encompassed misconduct spanning 2004 to the present, indicates Citigroup has lingering problems in its O’Fallon, Missouri-based CitiMortgage unit.
“Citigroup in particular received government funding, taxpayer dollars, because of its risky operations,” said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. “It shows that they hadn’t really learned much of a lesson from the financial crisis.”
Inspector General
The inspector general for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development faulted Citigroup’s quality-control program during a 2008 audit, according to the complaint. Taxpayers rescued the bank with a $45 billion bailout that same year and guaranteed more than $300 billion of its risky assets after the lender’s stability was threatened by mounting costs on soured loans. The bank lost a total of $29.3 billion in 2008 and 2009.
Hunt’s co-workers, instead of checking for fraud or making reports about underwriting defects to the FHA as required, argued with her over the soundness of the loans, she said. Employees who acted as “gatekeepers” applied “what they describe as ‘brute force’ to pressure Citi’s quality control managers” into downplaying defects, according to the government’s complaint.
Some colleagues had pay incentives tied to reducing the number of reported problems, and they spent hours trying to get her to relax her warnings, including those about the most basic deficiencies, Hunt said.
‘Beating Us Up’
“They started beating us up over the quality-control reports,” she said.
Last year, she said, she became convinced she was being asked to look the other way on serious flaws. That’s when she decided to become a whistleblower.
“All a dishonest person had to do was change the reports to make things look better than they were,” Hunt said in an interview. “I wouldn’t play along.”
Citigroup has approved about 30,000 loans with a value of $4.8 billion for FHA insurance since 2004; more than 30 percent of those borrowers have quit paying, the Justice Department said in its complaint. Almost half the bank’s FHA loans originated in 2006 and 2007 have defaulted, the government said, with HUD paying out almost $200 million in insurance claims on mortgages Citigroup originated or underwrote since 2004.
Mark C. Rodgers, a Citigroup spokesman, said bank executives were pleased to resolve the matter.
Improvements Undertaken
“We take our quality-assurance processes seriously and have proactively undertaken process improvements to ensure that they are as robust as possible,” Rodgers said in an e-mailed statement. “We are committed to continuing to work with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to make mortgage loans available to low- and moderate-income borrowers through the FHA program.” He declined to comment further.”
Comments »Tensions Run High During Failed Greek Conference Call
“Greek President Karolos Papoulias slammed Germany’s finance minister for recent comments about his country as stalled bailout talksstoked tensions between Greece and the northern European countries funding its rescue.
“I don’t accept insults to my country by Mr. Schaeuble,” Papoulias, who fought in the resistance against the Nazis during World War II, said in a speech today. “I don’t accept it as a Greek. Who is Mr. Schaeuble to ridicule Greece? Who are the Dutch? Who are the Finns? We always had the pride to defend not just our own freedom, not just our own country, but the freedom of all of Europe.”
Papoulias’s comments came as Wolfgang Schaeuble and other European officials pushedGreece to gouge more cuts out of its budget to qualify for a new bailout that would stave off an economic collapse. Schaeuble today blamed Greece’s New Democracy party, the second largest, for holding up agreement on a new rescue package and his deputy, Steffen Kampeter, compared Greece to a “bottomless pit.”
Greek politicians are expressing their frustration after European finance ministers last week rejected a Greek austerity package worth 7 percent of gross domestic product. That prompted New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras to complain that a gun was being held to the country’s head. George Karatzaferis, head of Laos, the third party in the governing coalition, said the country “could do without the German boot.”
Playing With Fire
“We are continually faced with new terms,” Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos told reporters in Athens today. “In the euro area, there are plenty who don’t want us anymore. There are some playing with fire, domestically and abroad. Some are playing with torches and some are playing with matches. But the risk is equally great.”
Comments »Obama Will Raise Money Through Super PAC Options Despite it Being a Threat to Fair Elections & Democracy
Is Cheap ECB $ Making EU Leaders Reckless ?
“It appeared that the brinkmanship tactics had pushed Greece over the edge on Feb 12 as Athens was set ablaze in protest. Now it appears that the European finance ministers are slipping over the edge. Strong doubts remain, and are being expressed, about whether a second aid package is throwing good money after bad.
Papademos has failed to deliver. As former ECB vice president, he was expected to deliver two things: new austerity and implementation. He has, after much fanfare, agreed to the new austerity demands. The rub, according to the creditor nations, is the commitment.
Domestic considerations are blunting the international priorities. When this seemed to be the case in Italy late last year, Germany’s Merkel reportedly helped push Berlusconi out. However, it seems more difficult to repeat. It seems European officials would prefer to extend Papademos’s term. Samaras has no incentive to agree to postpone elections that he would likely win. Nor can European officials bar Samaras, yet his apparent reservations and desire to modify/renegotiate the agreements cannot but undermine confidence in a government he would lead.
In this environment, creditor nations seem to be making a bet on the LTRO that will provide banks with another large liquidity cushion. It will increase their ability to deal with a shock emanating from Greece, if necessary. Ironically, that may mean that the larger than take down at the Feb 29th LTRO, the more likely European officials will be emboldened vis a vis Greece.
There is plenty of room for policy error. The reasons to fear a Lehman-like event still seem compelling. European officials suggest the problem is the lack of implementation of reform and growth measures in
Greece. No doubt there is an element of truth with that assessment.
The problem is that it is incomplete. Part of the problem is that the program is working. Greek unit labor costs are falling. Demand is evaporating. The contraction is deeper than expected and despite optimistic forecasts of growth as soon as 2013, the risks are all on the downside.
The Troika are in Portugal to review their progress. They will likely praise Portugal’s efforts. However, it may still miss its debt/GDP targets because of the denominator…”
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