Category: corporate corruption

The Fed had to choose between capitulation on inflation or letting the banking crisis mushroom. The twin crashes in the US’s commercial real estate and bond market have collided with $9 trillion uninsured deposits in its banking system, which can vanish in an afternoon in the cyber age.

The second and third biggest bank failures in US history have followed in quick succession. The Treasury and Federal Reserve would like us to believe that they are “idiosyncratic”. That is a dangerous evasion. Almost half of America’s 4,800 banks are already burning through their capital buffers. They may not have to mark all losses to market under US accounting rules but that does not make them solvent. Somebody will take those losses.

“It’s spooky. Thousands of banks are under water,” said Prof Amit Seru, a banking expert at Stanford University. “Let’s not pretend that this is just about Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic. A lot of the US banking system is potentially insolvent.” The full shock of monetary tightening by the Fed has yet to hit. A great edifice of debt faces a refinancing cliff edge over the next six quarters.

Only then will we learn whether the US financial system can safely deflate the excess leverage induced by extreme monetary stimulus during the pandemic. A Hoover Institution report by Prof Seru and a group of experts calculates that more than 2,315 US banks are sitting on assets worth less than their liabilities. The market value of their loan portfolios is $2 trillion (£1.6 trillion) lower than book value.

These lenders include big beasts.

A report in the Wall Street Journal, published on the newspaper’s front page Monday morning, links important figures in the US business and political elite to financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died in a federal prison in Manhattan in 2019 under circumstances that strongly suggest he was murdered to keep him quiet.

The Journal reporters wrote that they had gained access to Epstein’s private diary and other documents, “which include thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017, [that] haven’t been previously reported.” The diary listed meetings with dozens of individuals, though it supplied little information about the content or subject of the meetings. The bulk of these engagements were at Epstein’s palatial townhouse in Manhattan.

Among those prominently mentioned in the Journal report were two high-level officials of Democratic administrations: William Burns, currently CIA director, formerly deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration; and Kathryn Ruemmler, currently general counsel for Goldman Sachs investment bank, who was White House counsel in the Obama administration.

The Chinese government has significantly increased the use of exit bans to stop people – Chinese and foreign nationals alike – from leaving the country since top leader Xi Jinping took power in 2012, according to a new report describing how a web of vague laws are being expanded for political reasons.

The report comes amid growing concern about the environment for foreign businesses in China, after the wide-ranging overhaul last week of the country’s espionage law and raids on corporate consultancies Mintz Group and Bain & Co.

House Republicans have used the power of their new majority to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s business dealings, including examining foreign payments and other aspects of the family’s finances. Comer has obtained thousands of pages of the Biden family’s financial records through subpoenas to the Treasury Department and various financial institutions since January.

Most recently, Comer claimed one deal involving the Biden family resulted in a profit of over $1 million in more than 15 incremental payments from a Chinese company through a third party.

Both Comer and Grassley have accused both the FBI and Justice Department of stonewalling their investigations and politicizing the agency’s yearslong investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes.

Last month, an IRS special agent sought whistleblower protections from Congress to disclose a “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition” of a criminal investigation related to the younger Biden’s taxes and whether he made a false statement in connection with a gun purchase.

The Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Valencia denounced several months ago the CEO of Gedesco, Antonio Aynat, for a possible environmental crime in the Albufera of Valencia, which has led to the opening of legal proceedings for which the main executive of the financial services company for companies and the self-employed is under investigation.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office decided to denounce Aynat after an intervention by the Environmental Unit of the Local Police of Valencia, which acted after being warned by the management of the natural park in May 2021 of the existence of irregular works in a place of the protected area known as Tancat de L’Alcatí. There is the headquarters of the Valencian Association of Lateen Sailing, which is chaired by the businessman.

The CEO of one of the largest non-banking financial institutions in Spain leased the land in 2014 to a community of irrigators in order to install there a sports and business club dedicated to lateen sailing. It is, according to the complaint, a plot located on undeveloped land, within the Albufera natural park, the Natura 2000 Network and in a cataloged wetland area. Its legal use is exclusively agricultural.

Rioters smashed shop fronts and tried to set fire to police officers in Paris as up to a million people marched across France in May Day protests against President Macron’s reform to the pension age. Young men dressed in black from the anarchist “black block” movement were joined by hardline yellow vest protesters on a rampage at the front of the peaceful union-organised march, which moved through central Paris from the Place de la République to the Place de la Nation. The anarchists broke shop windows and bank frontages and set fire to bins as riot police on motorcycles moved in.

Officers using teargas and batons arrested several dozen violent protesters in the capital and at similar outbreaks on the edges of marches in Lyons, Toulouse and Nantes, which were staged by unions and left-wing parties as a “show of contempt” for Macron’s reform. About 12,000 police had been deployed for the marches after the interior ministry said it expected trouble from two or three thousand black block “wreckers” and violent followers of the yellow vest movement, whose protests inflicted heavy damage in Paris and other cities in 2018 and 2019.

Protesters from the radical climate movements were also active, spraying paint on shop fronts in the Place Vendôme, the central Paris home to jewellery shops, and also on the façade of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the contemporary art museum financed by LVMH, the luxury brand giant.

The U.S. is sending Ukraine about $300 million in additional military aid, including an enormous amount of artillery rounds, howitzers, air-to-ground rockets and ammunition as the launch of a spring offensive against Russian forces approaches, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

The new package includes Hydra-70 rockets, which are unguided rockets that are fired from aircraft. It also includes an undisclosed number of rockets for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, mortars, howitzer rounds, missiles and Carl Gustaf anti—tank rifles. The weapons will all be pulled from Pentagon stocks, so they can go quickly to the front lines. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the aid has not yet been formally announced.

The latest shipment comes as Ukrainian officials say they are readying a counteroffensive — with Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov declaring they are in the “home stretch, when we can say: ‘Yes everything is ready.’” Ukrainian officials have said they are stockpiling ammunition to stow it along potentially long supply lines.

Reznikov said Monday that the key things for the assault’s success would be “the availability of weapons; prepared, trained people; our defenders and defenders who know their plan at their level, as well as providing this offensive with all the necessary things — shells, ammunition, fuel, protection, etc.”

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned lawmakers Monday that the federal government could run short of money to pay its bills as early as June 1 unless the debt ceiling is raised soon.

Yellen acknowledged the date is subject to change and could be weeks later than projected, given that forecasting government cash flows is difficult. But based on April tax receipts and current spending levels, she predicted the government could run short of cash by early June.

“Given the current projections, it is imperative that Congress act as soon as possible to increase or suspend the debt limit in a way that provides longer-term certainty that the government will continue to make its payments,” Yellen wrote in a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

The warning provides a more urgent timetable for what has been a slow-motion political showdown in Washington.

WASHINGTON – US President Joe Biden on Monday urged House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy to take the potential for an unprecedented US debt default off the table, warning that it would result in skyrocketing credit card and mortgage rates.

“America is not a deadbeat nation. We have never, ever failed to meet the debt,” Mr Biden told a small business event at the White House.

He said the threat of default by some Republicans in Congress was “totally irresponsible” and that it was essential to take that threat “off the table.”

“It would lead to higher interest rates, higher credit card rates, mortgage rates would skyrocket,” Mr Biden said.

Former Goldman Sachs Group banker Roger Ng won postponement of the start of his 10-year prison term for about three months until Aug 7, a federal judge ruled.

US District Judge Margo Brodie, who sentenced Ng in March for his role in the global 1MDB fraud, granted his request for a delay Monday without explanation.

Ng had been set to begin his prison term May 4. 

Defence lawyer Marc Agnifilo on Friday asked for the delay so Ng could spend more time with his wife and 10-year-old daughter, who had travelled to New York from Malaysia.

JPMorgan Chase, one of the biggest banks in the U.S., is buying the troubled First Republic Bank’s deposits, a “substantial amount of their assets and certain liabilities,” JPMorgan Chase said in a press release Monday.

The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation announced early Monday that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp had taken possession of First Republic.

This marks the third time the U.S. government has taken control of a U.S. lender this year.

First Republic is the third — and biggest — U.S. bank to fail this year. In March, federal regulators swept in to protect customers of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Citing potential risk to the broader financial system, they took unprecedented action to insure all deposits at the two banks — even deposits that exceeded the FDIC’s $250,000 threshold for insurance.

All Britons will be called on to swear allegiance to King Charles III at his coronation, an oath hitherto reserved for British nobility.

It is a move that has upset anti-royalists.

Taipei, April 29 (CNA) The United States should engage with other democracies around the world to help Taiwan fend off threats from China, former U.S. national security adviser and outspoken China hawk John Bolton told a pro-Taiwan independence event in Taipei on Saturday.

“The U.S. response to help Taiwan against the Chinese threat has to be fully global,” Bolton said at the Global Taiwan National Affairs Symposium hosted by the World Taiwanese Congress, suggesting the establishment of “new structures of deterrence” against China.

Taiwan is “the center of gravity of the Chinese threat” to the world, said Bolton, who served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019 and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006.

The US central bank has said it failed to act with “sufficient force and urgency” in its oversight of Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed last month in the country’s biggest bank failure since 2008.

The conclusion is one of the main findings from the Federal Reserve’s investigation of the episode.

It sparked global fears about the state of the banking industry.

The review comes as another US lender, First Republic, remains in trouble.

US regulators are reported to be working on a potential rescue for the struggling firm, which was the 14th largest bank in the US at the end of last year.

The U.S. government has sounded the alarm about a critical software vulnerability found in genomics giant Illumina’s DNA sequencing devices, which hackers can exploit to modify or steal patients’ sensitive medical data.

In separate advisories released on Thursday, U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned that the security flaw — tracked as CVE-2023-1968 with the maximum vulnerability severity rating of 10 out of 10 — allows hackers to remotely access an affected device over the internet without needing a password. If exploited, the bug could allow hackers to compromise devices to produce incorrect or altered results, or none at all.

The FBI carried out a search on Thursday morning at the Potomac, Md., home of former FTX executive Ryan Salame, the New York Times reported, citing two people with knowledge of the matter said.

The FBI, Salame and his attorney did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Days before FTX filed for bankruptcy and Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO, Salame informed the Securities Commission of the Bahamas that client assets held at FTX Digital Markets may have been transferred to Alameda, according to a court filing Wednesday by the agency.

He was one of the top political donors in the 2022 election cycle donating more than $23 million to Republican campaigns, according to OpenSecrets.