Juggling Dynamite

Few people grasp the scope and scale of control fraud as a key business model today. Without understanding and admitting, there is no hope for meaningful reform and recovery. Bill Black is an expert on connecting the dots.

Bill Black, expert on Wall Street control fraud, returns to discuss the gross abuses of power rampant in our financial, political and judicial systems. In his estimation, regulation and enforcement of financial crimes have been completely gutted and de-fanged — intentionally by corrupt politicians, and unintentionally by inept ones. All while the Justice Department turns a blind eye.  Here is a direct video link.

Hedge funds [and mainstream asset management services] extract huge fees in exchange for the promise of sophisticated investment strategies to capture above market returns that are uncorrelated with broad market declines.  In practice nearly all of them fail to deliver on both. You might think people would stop believing the sales puff and stop handing them funds to mangle.  You might think that pension trustees, at least, would sober up.  You would be wrong.  Read  A Hedge Fund Sales Pitch casts a spell on public pensions:

One reason pensions turn to hedge fund managers is to try to close the expansive gap between what the pensions owe their beneficiaries and the amount of funds that they have to meet those obligations.  According to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, that gap was around $1 trillion in 2013, the most recent year available.

To stop believing in the highly improbable promises of financial magicians, demands that one acknowledge capital shortfalls and funding deficits head on in order to formulate practical plans.  Apparently it is easier to believe in fairies.

Unfortunately the costs of these misguided beliefs are frequently devastating for individuals.  And in the case of pensions, for we the taxpayers, who are then pledged to make up funding deficits through increased capital contributions to both public pensions and social programs.

President Barack Obama rejected TransCanada Corp.’s bid to build the Keystone XL pipeline, ending seven years of debate over an infrastructure project that swelled into one of the most contentious environmental issues of his presidency.

A lengthy review by the State Department concluded that the pipeline “would not serve the national interest of the United States,” Obama said Friday at the White House. “I agree with that decision.”

Obama said the project wouldn’t make a meaningful contribution to the U.S. economy, lower gasoline prices or enhance the nation’s energy security. It also would have undercut U.S. global leadership on climate change, he said. Here is a direct video link.

Rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline solidifies what the market has been saying for months — there’s less appetite for expensive Canadian oil sands in an era of $45 crude.See: What rejection of Keystone XL means for Canada