Juggling Dynamite

Human costs compound as finance-engineered asset bubbles burst. Liquidity is evaporating worldwide as the cash crunch spreads from under-saved, under-employed households to over-levered governments and businesses.

First they had no pay, and then no work. For a time, there wasn’t even food in the squalid, concrete camps where they had been abandoned to live in the searing heat of the Saudi Arabian desert. Medical supplies dried up two months ago.

Owed weeks and weeks of back pay from construction companies squeezed by the kingdom’s economic slowdown, thousands of foreign laborers from South Asia face the grim uncertainty of how long their plight will continue.
Here is a direct video link.

Security exchanges should be providing a utility highway that is stable, transparent, neutral and fair for all traffic. Success must be earned not purchased as preferential treatment from the police. The current system is corrupt and has deservedly lost the respect and support of all thinking people (who are not participating in the rigging that is).

This IEX commercial explains why their new service is considered ‘revolutionary’.  Keep in mind that the largest high frequency trading firms and exchanges who have been grossly enriched by the purchased advantage system, fought the IEX application for years before it could be approved. It was only public awareness and outsiders pressing for reform that ultimately forced the SEC approval. We need a lot more of this on many issues.

Here is a direct video link.

We cannot afford ‘advice’ from those paid to promote corporate interests. These duplicitous activities are the cancer that has been undermining sustainable policies, fairness and healthy evolution in the free world. Those who wish to offer counsel as learned experts must recuse themselves from conflicting allegiance and compensation schemes. Full stop. We have known this for centuries. Time to double back and redefine professional standards that clearly separate advisory roles from sales and paid promotion. See: Think Tank scholar or corporate consultant? It depends on the day.

An examination of 75 think tanks found an array of researchers who had simultaneously worked as registered lobbyists, members of corporate boards or outside consultants in litigation and regulatory disputes, with only intermittent disclosure of their dual roles.

With their expertise and authority, think tank scholars offer themselves as independent arbiters, playing a vital role in Washington’s political economy. Their imprimatur helps shape government decisions that can be lucrative to corporations.

But the examination identified dozens of examples of scholars conducting research at think tanks while corporations were paying them to help shape government policy. Many think tanks also readily confer “nonresident scholar” status on lobbyists, former government officials and others who earn their primary living working for private clients, with few restrictions on such outside work.

This problem is epidemic and bi-partisan.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, explains how some think tanks engage in “thinly disguised lobbying” to influence lawmakers. Here is a direct video link.