Tag: Financial Trickery

Closing Thought–03Aug22

There is a financial trend that seems to be gathering more and more popularity……cryptocurrency.

My daughter has ventured into this and her investment is not paying off as well as she had hoped…..and with any financial thing there is always the chance of fraud……and crypto is no different…..

Cryptocurrency firm Forsage used technology undreamt of when Charles Ponzi was ripping off investors in the 1920s but regulators say the basic idea was the same: A scam in which investors promised big returns were paid off with money from later investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged 11 people in connection with the scheme, which the regulator says raised more than $300 million from investors in the US and elsewhere, CBS reports. The SEC says Forsage was a pyramid scheme as well as a Ponzi scheme, with investors making profits by recruiting others. Investors were promised a “powerful long-term source of passive income.”

When it was launched in early 2020, Forsage claimed to be a decentralized smart contract platform operating on the Ethereum, Tron and Binance blockchains, but regulators say its real function was scamming investors, reports CNBC. “As the complaint alleges, Forsage is a fraudulent pyramid scheme launched on a massive scale and aggressively marketed to investors,” Carolyn Welshhans, acting chief of the SEC’s Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit, said in a statement. “Fraudsters cannot circumvent the federal securities laws by focusing their schemes on smart contracts and blockchains.”

The SEC says it charged Forsage’s four founders—Vladimir Okhotnikov, Jane Doe aka Lola Ferrari, Mikhail Sergeev, and Sergey Maslakov—who are believed to be living in Russia, the Republic of Georgia, and Indonesia. The SEC charged another seven people with violating federal securities laws, including members of the “Crypto Crusaders,” a group that promoted the scheme in the US, TechCrunch reports. The regulator says two of the defendants have agreed to settle the charges.

Settle on charges?

They were defrauding investors…..no settling should be involved….doing time and make them  pay through the nose and ban them from ever working in financial markets again.

If you are considering this investment remember one thing…..Buyer Beware…..If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is…..

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Closing Thought–04Feb21

Closing Thought–04Feb21

Appears the impeachment the the Senate trial are not only things that our ex president has to worry about.

Since Trump has departed the building, the White House, his financial benefactor for years has been Deutsche Bank has decided they have had enough of Donald Trump and his antics….they are closing all his accounts….

Deutsche Bank will no longer do business with President Donald Trump, a move that will cut off his business from a major source of loans that once helped fund his golf courses and hotels.

Germany’s biggest bank has decided to refrain from future business with the president and his company, a person familiar with the bank’s thinking told CNN Business. The news, first reported by the New York Times, follows last week’s deadly riot at the US Capitol.
 
A spokesperson for Deutsche Bank (DB) declined to comment to CNN Business, citing a prohibition on discussing potential client relationships.
The move is the latest example of corporate backlash against the president after his supporters vandalized the Capitol in a brazen assault that left five people dead.
 
Signature Bank said it had started closing Trump’s personal accounts and called for the president to resign. The US bank also said it “will not do business in the future with any members of Congress who voted to disregard the Electoral College.”
Trump has a checking account at Signature Bank, according to a 2019 financial disclosure filed with the US Office of Government Ethics. A revocable trust in the president’s name also has a money market account at Signature Bank, according to the filing.
Trump also has ties to other major banks. The president held between $5 million and $25 million in checking-and-savings accounts at Capital One (COF) and between $500,000 and $1 million in accounts at JPMorgan Chase (JPM), according to the disclosure form.
 
Trump also listed up to $250,000 in a money market account at Bank United.
JPMorgan declined to comment. A Capital One spokesperson said the bank does not discuss current or former customer relationships. Bank United did not respond to a request for comment.
 
Is the Deutshe Bank doing this until after the investigation by the NY prosecutors office
Is retribution in the air for the former president?
 
Will they call in all the debt that Trump has on their books?
 
I Read, I Write, You Know
 
“lego ergo scribo”

Bested By Amateurs

Have you heard the news?

The news where the hedge funds lost their collective butts.

A bunch of non-professional day traders pulled the veil over the big hedge funds…..all around the stock for Game Stop……

Two major players have admitted defeat in the “David and Goliath” battle over GameStop’s share price—but other Goliaths have made a fortune. The stock surged to a new high of $347.51 at the close of trading Wednesday, up almost 135% for the day, making a profit of around $2 billion for the firm’s largest three shareholders, and smaller profits for a horde of others, the Guardian reports. On Tuesday, two of the short-sellers targeted by an army of Reddit users closed their positions after taking major losses, reports CNBC. Andrew Left of Citron Research said the loss had been “100%.” Melvin Capital is believed to have lost billions on its bet that the retailer’s share price would drop, but fund manager Gabe Plotkin said rumors of a bankruptcy filing were untrue. More:

  • What happened? NBC explains how the struggling video game retailer became Wall Street’s hottest stock, rising more than 8,000% in six months. The frenzy began when amateur investors on the Reddit r/wallstreetbets community and other forums began buying stock and pushing the price up. Hedge funds that had shorted the stock—borrowing shares with the aim of profiting by selling them and rebuying them at a lower price later—were left in a squeeze when they had to rebuy the stock at a higher price, which sent the price even higher.
  • Professionals are “reeling.” The Wall Street Journal says professional investors are “reeling from their losses” as power shifts from them to day traders and newbie investors who use sites like Discord and Reddit to discuss which stock to pile into next—and to mock short sellers for their massive losses. On Wednesday alone, investors who took short positions in GameStop lost an estimated $14.3 billion.
  • White House is monitoring the situation. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday that the White House and Federal Reserve are monitoring the situation with GameStop and other companies that have seen meteoric share price rises, reports Reuters. Fed chief Jerome Powell rejected suggestions that policies including ultra-low interest rates were the cause of asset bubbles.
  • Forum goes private. The r/wallstreetbets forum on Reddit was taken private late Wednesday and reappeared with a note from moderators saying that with a flood of new users, it was becoming impossible to enforce content policies, the Verge reports. “We have grown to the kind of size we only dreamed of in the time it takes to get a bad nights sleep,” they wrote.
  • AMC is also heating up. The nightmare for short-sellers is continuing with steep rises in the shares of struggling companies including AMC Entertainment and BlackBerry. The Wall Street Journal reports that the flurry of activity was so intense Wednesday that AMC Networks, which has no connection to the other AMC, also spiked more than 20%
  • AOC speaks out. “Gotta admit it’s really something to see Wall Streeters with a long history of treating our economy as a casino complain about a message board of posters also treating the market as a casino,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Wednesday. Sen. Elizabeth Warren also weighed in, tweeting: “With stocks soaring while millions are out of work and struggling to pay bills, it’s not news that the stock market doesn’t reflect our actual economy.”
  • Where will it end? The New York Times notes that despite the hype, GameStop the company “isn’t noticeably different from a month ago,” which makes its share price appear “wildly inflated” and a risky bet indeed. The “weird little bubble” could cause the price of more solid stocks to drop if big investors have to offload them to cover their losses, according to the Times.

I love it!

The elites were beaten at their own game.

Well done!

After years of the 1% sticking it to the country they have been bested at their own game.

I think the Biden admin will either find the move illegal or they will put in massive restrictions and regulations.

Until then…let the ‘little guy’ hit back at the slugs on Wall Street.

Watch This Blog!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

China–Time To Collect

Closing Thought–04May20

May the Fourth be with you!

Since Trump has been in the White House he has seemed to hold some sort of warm place in his heart for China (that is until the virus and he blames it all on China for now)……and I have thought it was unusual as he seems to try and protect China from all sorts of bad press and criticism…..why is that?

I think maybe I found the answer and it as simple as an IOU…..

But Trump himself has taken on debt from China. In 2012, his real estate partner refinanced one of Trump’s most prized New York buildings for almost $1 billion. The debt included $211 million from the state-owned Bank of China — its first loan of this kind in the U.S. — which matures in the middle of what could be Trump’s second term.

Steps from Trump Tower in Manhattan, the 43-story 1290 Avenue of the Americas skyscraper spans an entire city block. Trump owns a30 percent stake in the property valued atmore than $1 billion, making it one of the priciest addresses in his portfolio, according to his financial disclosures.

Trump’s ownership of the building received a smattering of attention before and after his 2016 campaign. But the arrangement with the Bank of China in 2012 has gone largely unnoticed. The questions surrounding Trump’s ties to the Bank of China come as his campaign is claiming that Biden would be a gift to the Communist country and America’s chief economic rival

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/24/trump-biden-china-debt-205475

That could explain a lot…..

Somehow it always comes down to Donald the Orange’s financial shenanigans….even as president.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Money Laundering

I read where there might be some form of money laundering in the “Report”……so in keeping with my efforts I present an FYI post……

With all the horrible legal news that the president has been getting lately the one that may be the most damaging if proven to be true is “money laundering”…

This is not some accident where you cash goes through the wash cycle…..nope…this is a crime punishable by lots of prison time.

Bloomberg has shown how this crime is done……

You’re a Russian criminal with millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains but one big problem: Transferring slugs of money or carrying suitcases of cash will raise eyebrows. You need to “launder” the dough — make the dirty money appear to be the proceeds of legitimate enterprise. Then it can be spent anywhere in the world — say, on real estate or luxury yachts — no questions asked. Most countries and all the world’s major banks have controls in place to flag suspicious funds coming into the financial system. But as shown by the so-called Troika Laundromat scandal and the probes roiling European banks, bad actors come up with innovative ways to skirt the rules.

Hiding under shell companies

Deliberately opaque “shell” companies, which exist only on paper and have no active business operations, are easy and cheap to set up and effective at obscuring ownership. They’re key to what experts call the “layering phase” of money laundering, in which funds are shoveled around multiple times to make them harder to track. Shell companies are commonly found in traditional tax havens such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, but the U.S. states of Delaware and Nevada also permit corporations to be set up in anonymity. The international consortium of journalists that uncovered the Troika Laundromat scheme says it involved at least 75 shell companies that generated a total of $8.8 billion in transactions through made-up deals. There’s been a global push for more transparency, even in the U.K., whose crown dependencies include Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-09/money-to-launder-here-s-how-hint-find-a-bank-quicktake

And that is how it is done!  One does not be a rocket scientist to be able to achieve success.

Learn Stuff!

Why Not Paraguay?

The big news on the world stage is the mash up the US is having with Venezuela……there are many reasons but oil is probably the only reason.

First, let me ask…..are we still fighting a War on Terror? Is the money trail of the terror groups still one of the prongs of that war?

If so then why are we not paying closer attention to Paraguay?

Paraguay?

The U.S. Department of Justice last year designated Hezbollah, a Lebanese political party and militant group, as a transnational criminal organization, thanks to its long-standing and well-documented partnership with Latin American drug cartels. A focal point of Hezbollah operations in the Western Hemisphere is the Tri-Border Area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, a sanctuary for all sorts of organized crime. Numerous terrorism financing, money laundering, and drug trafficking cases in U.S. courts involve Hezbollah-aligned Lebanese nationals who operate there. Argentina and Brazil have shown an increased readiness to take action against Hezbollah, but Paraguay, the country where Hezbollah is most vulnerable to action, is the most reluctant to recognize the challenge.

Paraguay’s president, Mario Abdo Benítez, in power since last August, is under pressure to change that. Despite a promising start, his administration remains plagued by the same problems his predecessors could not overcome, and a reckoning is coming. This year, the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental organization, will evaluate Paraguay to assess the effectiveness of Asunción’s anti-money laundering and counterterrorism finance systems, for which the task force sets global standards. Countries that do not measure up, such as Iran and North Korea, have to contend with cumbersome restrictions that inhibit trade and investment.

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2019/02/14/paraguay-is-a-fiscal-paradise-for-terrorists/

This is a good thing…..the country is trying to break its association with terror groups……why is the US not more involved in this situation? (well not known to the public)

The president of Paraguay is doing what DC wants so he is in good standings…..as opposed to Venezuela.

Reaganomics To The Rescue

Since the 1980’s Reaganomics has been the saving grace of the GOP…..they use clever propaganda to get the American people to believe the stupidity of trickle down economics or Reaganomics…tax cuts labeled tax reform that benefits few and those are the wealthy.

There is a good chance that all the hard work done by Repubs in 2017 may be for naught…..Reaganomics may not save the GOP this time…..

Republican hopes for holding control of Congress in the midterm elections hinge on the success of Reagan-style tax cuts and deregulation. However, without significant progress early this year on entitlements and infrastructure — with substantial focus on the chronic problems of rural communities and smaller cities — those policies may not prove to be enough.

During the Bush-Obama years, annual economic growth was only 1.8%, but the prosperity instigated by the expansion of financial services, biotechnology and digital industries was adequate to satisfy voters in the citadels of progressive thinking on the two coasts and among communities supported by major universities.

President Donald Trump won an unlikely victory in 2016 by energizing voters in the nation’s interior — places that fell victim to globalization and were left behind by the recent recovery.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/reaganomics-may-not-save-the-republicans-2018-01-08

2018 will be the tell of the tape…..will the economic double talk win the day?

Will Reagaomics save the GOP?

Nothing Learned In A Decade

A decade ago one of the worse financial crisis hit the world…..a crisis that could have been avoided….a sadly nothing has been learned from this collapse…

Ten years ago this month, the French bank BNP Paribas decided to limit investors’ access to the money they had deposited in three funds. It was the first loud signal of the financial stress that would, a year later, send the global economy into a tailspin. Yet the massive economic and financial dislocations that would come to a boil in late 2008 and continue through early 2009 – which brought the world to the brink of a devastating multi-year depression – took policymakers in advanced economies completely by surprise. They had clearly not paid enough attention to the lessons of crises in the emerging world.

Anyone who has experienced or studied developing-country financial crises will be painfully aware of their defining features. For starters, as the late Rüdiger Dornbusch argued, financial crises can take a long time to develop, but once they erupt, they tend to spread rapidly, widely, violently, and (seemingly) indiscriminately.

Source: The Lost Lesson of the Financial Crisis by Mohamed A. El-Erian – Project Syndicate

With no lesson learned then this will repeat itself…..only a matter of time.

How Long Will We Use Cash?

I recently wrote a post talking about our use of money….a sort of historic perspective…..

Source: Why Use Money? – In Saner Thought

Then I went on to talk about how it seems that there is a movement to replace cash with a plastic card of sorts…..the first I heard of it awhile back when Great Britain was replacing some of the their paper money…..

The prospect of living in a cashless society has grown steadily for decades but it might have now reached tipping point, after cards became Britain’s number one payment method for the first time.

According to data released by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) on Wednesday (12 July), cards now account for over 50% of payments processed in the UK for the first time. The landmark achievement was largely driven by a boom in contactless payments, which now account for approximately a third of all payments, compared with 10% in October 2015.

The so-called “tap and go” cards were introduced a decade ago in the UK and after a somewhat unimpressive start they appear to have finally won over British shoppers. An increase in the number of stores accepting “tap and go” payments has also contributed to the sharp rise in popularity of contactless cards.

Source: Beginning of the end for cash? Cards now UK’s preferred payment method

When I first read about this I thought that it was an interesting experiment…but how far would it really go?

I had to ask, huh?

Looks like the IMF (I never thought the IMF was all that important) has a program in place……

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington has published a Working Paper on “de-cashing”. It gives advice to governments who want to abolish cash against the will of their citizenry. Move slowly, starting with seemingly harmless measures, is part of that advice.

In “The Macroeconomics of De-Cashing”, IMF-Analyst Alexei Kireyev recommends in his conclusions:

Source: IMF Tells Governments How to Subvert Public Resistance Against Elimination of Cash – Rigged Game

If this attempt is successful then you will be at the mercy of the government…..I do not like that feeling…..I like the feel of CASH!

Any thoughts?

It Is Financial Colonialism

The big deal for the last 25 years, probably longer, is that phenom called globalization.  Most think it is some sort of financial benefit for those with all the cash…..and there are those that think it is a bane on mankind.

But really….what is it?

Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world.

But policy and technological developments of the past few decades have spurred increases in cross-border trade, investment, and migration so large that many observers believe the world has entered a qualitatively new phase in its economic development. Since 1950, for example, the volume of world trade has increased by 20 times, and from just 1997 to 1999 flows of foreign investment nearly doubled, from $468 billion to $827 billion. Distinguishing this current wave of globalization from earlier ones, author Thomas Friedman has said that today globalization is “farther, faster, cheaper, and deeper.”

This current wave of globalization has been driven by policies that have opened economies domestically and internationally. In the years since the Second World War, and especially during the past two decades, many governments have adopted free-market economic systems, vastly increasing their own productive potential and creating myriad new opportunities for international trade and investment. Governments also have negotiated dramatic reductions in barriers to commerce and have established international agreements to promote trade in goods, services, and investment. Taking advantage of new opportunities in foreign markets, corporations have built foreign factories and established production and marketing arrangements with foreign partners. A defining feature of globalization, therefore, is an international industrial and financial business structure.

Okay that hurt!

All that definition is just so much BS……in reality it is a financial colonialism.

About here it is perfectly fine to scratch your head and utter a ….HUH?

This is an interview with the author of a new book…….

The “have” nations increase profits for their corporations at the expense of grievously underpaid workers in developed nations. The developed nations call this globalization, John Smith argues in his book Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis. In this interview with Truthout, Smith discusses his contention that globalization is just neocolonialism by another name.

Source: Globalization Is Just a Contemporary Word for Financial Colonialism

An interesting concept and makes sense if one takes the time to actually read the interview…