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Paul Merrell

Wall Street is Taking Over America's Pension Plans - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...-wall-street-story-one-talking

banksters public-pension-funds

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Coverage of the midterm elections has, understandably, focused on the shift in political power from Democrats toward Republicans. But behind the scenes, another major story has been playing out. Wall Street spent upwards of $300M to influence the election results. And a key part of its agenda has been a plan to move more and more of the $3 trillion dollars in unguarded government pension funds into privately managed, high-fee investments — a shift that may well constitute the biggest financial story of our generation that you’ve never heard of.
  • But Wall Street’s agenda goes beyond any one election cycle. It has been fighting to turn public pensions into private profits for quite some time, steering retirement nest eggs into investments that are complex, charge hefty fees, and that generate big profits for management firms. And it has been succeeding. Of the $3 trillion in public assets currently in pension funds throughout the country, almost a quarter of that has already found its way into so-called “alternative investments” like hedge funds, private equity and real estate. That translates to roughly $660 billion of public money now under private management, invested in assets that are often arcane and opaque but that offer high management and placement fees to Wall Street financiers.
  • If all this wasn’t egregious enough, a huge preponderance of evidence suggests that this massive transfer of wealth from public to private management is having a corrupting effect on the political process. Sirota’s reporting seems to have particularly touched a nerve with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has described Sirota as “a hack” and “not a journalist”. It’s not difficult to see why Christie isn’t a fan. Earlier this year, Sirota wrote that… 43 financial firms managing New Jersey pension money have spent a total of $11.6 million on contributions to New Jersey politicians… Many of those donations have gone directly to Gov. Christie’s election campaign … Additionally, many of the contributions came either just before or just after the Christie administration awarded the firms multi-million-dollar pension management contracts. Those 43 firms ended up managing around $14 billion dollars of state pension money, a take that serves as a timeless reminder of the great rewards that can derive from catering to the needs of receptive politicians.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Christie’s tenure as New Jersey governor has been particularly emblematic of the extent of Wall Street’s reach into the public sphere. Among other things, he installed a private equity investor as the state’s pension overseer and publicly lied about the manner in which pension fund investment decisions are made. Ironically enough, he’s defended these practices in his own state while criticizing Democrats for utilizing them through his position as chair of the Republican Governor’s Association.
Paul Merrell

Looting the Pension Funds: How Wall Street Robs Public Workers | Politics News | Rolling Stone - 0 views

www.rollingstone.com/...ing-the-pension-funds-20130926

banksters pension-funds looting

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Sep 13
     
    The Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi strikes again. 
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Sep 13
     
    Awesome article Paul. A must read for anyone trying to understand the 2008 financial collapse. The same Wall Street Banksters who collapsed the world economy are back at it. This time raiding the public workers pension funds, spending millions on politicians and press campaigns to blame cops, firefighters, and teachers for mounting municipal fiscal failures and the coming collapse. Blame anyone but these triple dipping Banksters and their political toadies. Excellent piece of writing too. Check out this opening excerpt introducing the five page story: "In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo - an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist - the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government. Detroit's Debt Crisis: Everything Must Go Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn't even know how to react. "She's Yale, Harvard, Oxford - she worked on Wall Street," says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. "Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn't know what the fuck she was talking about." Soon she was being talked about as a probable candidate for Rhode Island's 2014 gubernatorial race. By 2013, Raimondo had raised more than $2 million, a staggering sum for a still-undeclared candidate in a thimble-size state. Donors from Wall Str
Paul Merrell

Jeb Bush's Administration Steered Florida Pension Money to George W. Bush's Fundraisers - 0 views

www.ibtimes.com/ge-w-bushs-fundraisers-1880592

Auction 2016 Jeb-Bush bribery

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Four years before the financial collapse, Goldman Sachs executive George Herbert Walker IV had much to be thankful for. "I've been fortunate to be a small part of teams leading U.S. restructurings, European privatizations, global pension management and now hedge fund and private equity investing,” he said in the annual report of a banking colossus that would soon be known as the “great vampire squid” of Wall Street. “The world,” said Walker, “just keeps getting more interesting." As the head of Goldman Sachs’ alternative investment unit, Walker’s ebullience was understandable. At the same time he was raising $100,000 for his cousin George W. Bush’s successful presidential re-election effort, the administration of another cousin, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, returned the family favor, delivering $150 million of Florida pension money to an alternative investment fund run by Walker’s firm. Like other executives whose companies received Florida pension money, Walker is now renewing the cycle, reportedly attending in February a high-dollar fundraiser for Jeb Bush’s political committee.
  • Walker is not alone: He is one of 19 top fundraisers for George W. Bush -- known as “Pioneers” and “Rangers” -- whose financial firms received state business from Jeb Bush’s administration in Tallahassee. In all, an International Business Times’ review of government documents shows Jeb Bush oversaw Florida directing at least $1.7 billion of state workers’ retirement money to the financial firms of his elder brother’s major donors. As Jeb Bush oversaw the State Board of Administration (SBA) that runs Florida’s massive public pension system, the state shifted billions of dollars into higher-risk, higher-fee alternative investments, benefiting the same sector of the investment industry he would work in upon leaving office. Many of those state deals delivered returns that fell short of projections. Roughly 20 percent of that system’s 53 private investment deals during Bush’s governorship went to companies that employed his brother’s Pioneers. Those financial firms, in turn, delivered more than $5 million of campaign cash to George W. Bush, the Republican National Committee and Jeb Bush’s Republican Party of Florida. (Click here to see the full list of Bush Pioneers whose firms received Florida pension investments from Jeb Bush’s administration).
  • Ethics experts say the connection between Bush family donors and Florida pension deals raises questions about whether the investments were properly insulated from political influence. “If not an actual conflict of interest, these examples would provide fodder for apparent conflicts of interest,” said Common Cause Florida’s Peter Butzin. “Those folks who give … expect something in return. And if that something in return is not blatantly sending business their way or resulting in a particular vote, it most certainly is at least providing an opportunity for access, to get the foot in the door, so that they can make the case with that official.” Jeb Bush’s aides did not respond to questions from IBTimes, and Walker declined to comment for this story. Dennis MacKee, an SBA spokesperson, said the agency’s “elected Trustees do not now, nor did they during Governor Bush’s term, participate in the selection of individual investments.” MacKee’s statement conflicts with emails reviewed by IBTimes that show that, as governor, Jeb Bush was deeply involved in the state’s investment decisions, periodically brokering conversations between Florida officials and individual financial firms, including one whose top executive was a longtime Bush family donor.
Gary Edwards

California Government Hides Billions From Taxpayers « REALITY BLOG - 0 views

realitybloger.wordpress.com/...-hides-billions-from-taxpayers

Clint-Richardson Bay-Area-Patriots California-Budget California-Debt-Deception

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 May 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 26 May 12
     
    This must read post from Clint Richardson is a Bay Area Patriots catch.  Stunning stuff.  Clint walks us through the CAFR - Comprehensive Annual Rinancial Report - for the State of California.  Governor Moonbeam is claiming that the State has a $16 Trillion dollar debt, and he's threatening to shut down public education unless California citizens agree to massive tax hikes.  Clint rips through the entire annual report discovering that Gov Moonbeam is not only lying, but that there is an official "debt increase" methodology in place to deceive citizens into voting for government seizure of their property and prosperity.  Note also that this local-state-federal "debt bomb" methodology involves conversion of tax dollars into hard assets.  Like property and productive assets.  Awful, reprehensible stuff.  Brace yourselves. excerpt: the Government is lying to you.  It promotes debt and hides assets. This should not be construed as the only hidden wealth in the California State government… just the wealth we have uncovered today. And you must understand that this is only the State government's CAFR. Each County, city, district, and other local governments and pension funds have their own CAFR's with their own funds and hidden wealth - hidden in plain sight. Totals for Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other counties and municipalities in California will, when combined together, dwarf the investment wealth of the State government alone. They will tell you that some of these investments are restricted and not able to be used for taxpayer services. And as a taxpayer, that should really piss you off! They will also tell you that laws are in place that don't allow these funds to be transferred for other purposes other than what they are designated for. And yet Obama and State legislators continuously speak of raiding the pension funds for their own benefit. In their opinion, it's government's money after all, not the employees or the taxpayers. But of
Paul Merrell

The fix is in: how banks allegedly rigged the US$5.3 trillion foreign exchange market | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...illion-foreign-exchange-market

banksters fraud litigation settlements currency-exchange

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Suppose you’re in the supermarket shopping for groceries. While you’re strolling the aisle with your cart, a shadowy figure looms over your shoulder and changes the prices on the items you want to buy before you get a chance to pick them up. As you reach for some vine tomatoes, you notice the price just jumped 20 cents. When you select some brie from among the cheeses, you witness the number on the sticker change right before your eyes. Ditto when you look for your favorite brand of granola.
  • This is the essence of what regulators learned might be happening in the foreign exchange market, where US$5.3 trillion of dollars, euros and yen are traded every day. In June 2013, Bloomberg reported that traders at some of the world’s biggest banks worked to manipulate key currency rates, racking up profits and costing investors – including your retirement fund – hundreds of millions of dollars globally. They are accused of placing their own transactions ahead of trades requested by clients – known as front-running – which was the reason prices kept changing as people tried to make their own trades, like in the shopping analogy above. They bought euros or dollars, driving up the rate, and then profited by selling to other investors at a higher level.
  • This week six of the currency-dealers being investigated – including JP Morgan, Citigroup and HSBC – agreed to pay a total of US$4.3 billion to regulators in the US, UK and Switzerland to resolve the allegations. The deal is likely only the first in a series of settlements and other penalties that will emerge from the ongoing investigations. The investors most concerned with the alleged manipulation are funds that invest internationally, such as hedge funds, the endowments of charitable or cultural institutions and insurance companies. But it also includes the mutual funds in which many of your 401K or IRA assets are likely invested.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • When institutions like these need to buy or sell assets across borders, they call a dealer at one of the big banks, which provides what is basically a wholesale version of the cambio currency kiosks you see at the airport. The dealer quotes a buying price and a selling price, and the fund chooses whether to buy or sell. In addition to trading with customers, the dealers trade among themselves, sometimes to manage their inventory and sometimes hoping to make money by taking speculative positions for a few minutes or even seconds. And that’s how we arrive at the scandal. Every day at 4pm in London, the market sets special “fixing” exchange rates that are used to value the funds’ international investments. The fixing price is set in a simple way: it’s just the average of all prices paid among dealing banks during the 30 seconds before and after the clock strikes 4. Many international fund managers prefer to trade currencies at exactly the fixing price because it’s simpler and smarter to trade at the same price used to value your portfolio. To make these transactions happen, international funds often place large orders with dealers at major banks before the fix.
  • Suppose, for example, a pension fund with major investments in Europe knows it will receive a lot of new IRA money on November 30, when many US employees get paid. And suppose the fund plans to invest €100 million of that in European stocks. At 3:30pm that day the fund might instruct its bank to purchase €100 million at the fixing price. With this kind of advance order, the bank could book its own trades before the fund does, buying the euros it will later sell to the investor.
  • The banks – or more accurately, specific dealers at specific banks – are accused of manipulating the fixing prices based on their knowledge of advance customer orders. In a nutshell, the accusation is that dealers from different banks got together before the fix and compared notes in chat rooms. Most currency trading is handled by 10 or so mega banks, so if just a few of them compared notes, they would have a good sense of whether the exchange rate would rise or fall during the fixing interval that day. The shadowy figure looking over your shoulder at the supermarket to see what you’re going to buy next is like the banks comparing their customer orders before the fix. To finish the supermarket analogy, we need to know how and why the dealing banks could raise the fixing rate to the disadvantage of international pension and mutual funds. Suppose once again that many customers have placed big orders to buy euros at the fix, and the banks figure the euro-dollar exchange rate will rise during the window. This would give them an incentive to buy a lot of euros before it’s set (remember the golden rule of trading: buy low, sell high).
Paul Merrell

Pension-Fund Looters Get Tax Breaks, Too | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone - 0 views

www.rollingstone.com/...rs-get-tax-breaks-too-20131004

banksters pensions looting

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • A few weeks ago, I wrote a feature on pension reform in states like Rhode Island for Rolling Stone. Since the piece was sharply critical of alternative investments like hedge funds, I expected a heated response, and got one right away. In fact, a series of raving/chest-thumping emails from one Manhattan Institute hedge fund billionaire appeared in my email inbox about four and a half seconds after the piece went live on the Rolling Stone website. This colorful personage calmed down eventually, though, and I figured a more sophisticated, for-public-consumption response would come from those quarters later on. It finally showed up this week in GoLocalProv, when Aaron Henn, an "opinion-leading urban affairs analyst" who appears in striking tie-and-folded-arms pose in his column photo, wrote a piece in defense of the Rhode Island Treasurer profiled in the piece called "Matt Taibbi's Deceptive Hatchet Job on Gina Raimondo."
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Oct 13
     
    Matt Taibbi responds to his critics. 
Gary Edwards

Do You Live In A Death Spiral State? - Forbes - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...u-live-in-a-death-spiral-state

William-Baldwin Forbes Death-Spiral-States

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Nov 12
     
    Takers vs. Makers.  It all comes down to that ratio.  Incredibly, California is not at the top of high risk States!  New Mexico holds that honor. excerpt: Don't buy a house in a state where private sector workers are outnumbered by folks dependent on government. Thinking about buying a house? Or a municipal bond? Be careful where you put your capital. Don't put it in a state at high risk of a fiscal tailspin. Eleven states make our list of danger spots for investors. They can look forward to a rising tax burden, deteriorating state finances and an exodus of employers. The list includes California, New York, Illinois and Ohio, along with some smaller states like New Mexico and Hawaii. "Ranked on the taker/maker ratio, our 11 death spiral states range from New Mexico, with 1.53 takers for every maker, down to Ohio, with a 1-to-1 ratio. The taker count is the number of state and local government workers plus the number of people on Medicaid plus 1 for each $100,000 of unfunded pension liabilities. Sources: the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and a study of state worker pensions done in 2009 by two academics, Joshua Rauh and Rovert Novy-Marx. Professor Rauh estimates that the shortage in pension funding is on average a third higher today. The second element in the death spiral list is a scorecard of state credit-worthiness done by Conning & Co., a money manager known for its measures of risk in insurance company portfolios. Conning's analysis focuses more on dollars than body counts. Its formula downgrades states for large debts, an uncompetitive business climate, weak home prices and bad trends in employment."
Gary Edwards

The Three Biggest Lies the Government Is Telling You by Charles Goyette - 1 views

lewrockwell.com/...goyette24.1.html

Government-debt Unfunded-liabilities lies

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Jan 12
     
    Unfunded liabilities are the difference between a program's projected costs and its projected revenues, both valued in today's dollars. Medicare and Social Security both have promised benefits that outrace revenue streams. They are the largest components of the government's unfunded liabilities, the hidden debt of the nation. But there are other federal retirement programs with not merely inadequate funding like Medicare and Social Security, but with no revenue streams of their own at all. Among them are retirement programs for military and federal workers. In September 2011, USA Today analyzed dozens of overlapping programs for retired federal workers. It reported that despite the existing debt crisis, Congress continues to add to the promised benefits, so that retirement programs now have a $5.7 trillion unfunded liability. The newspaper sums up its report on the retirement programs this way: Private employers are legally required to put money into pension funds to match retirement promises. Private pensions have $2.3 trillion in stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets. State and local governments have $3 trillion in retirement funds. The federal government has nothing set aside. The total unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government have been calculated with a number of present value and discount models. Results of the shortfall from these methods range from about $70 trillion to $120 trillion dollars. For a family of four this represents a liability between $900,000 and $1.5 million. (You can follow the debt as it adds up at www.USdebt.org.)
Joseph Skues

http://www.cafrman.com/Articles/Art-MI-S1.htm - 0 views

www.cafrman.com/...Art-MI-S1.htm

cafrman MICH 2003

shared by Joseph Skues on 30 Jul 10 - Cached
  • $1,009 for every man, woman and child
  • This does not include all the additional surpluses that exist in the school districts, cities, or counties in Michigan.
  • funds that are not required or needed
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • But what we have found is that most governments have huge amounts of cash and investments on hand at the end of the fiscal yea
  • not being recycled back through the budget process the next year,
  • The budget only covers a small portion of the State's financial condition
  • The CAFR usually has four categories. Governmental FundsProprietary FundsFiduciary FundsComponent Units
  • Enterprise Funds, a component of proprietary funds,
  • charges for services or goods, assessments, fines, licenses, etc
  • are legally separated organizations for which the government is financially accountable.
  • The remainder of the Funds shown above are not part of the budget and are commonly called "off-budget" items
  • but should be
  • Although taxation is legitimate, running a government surplus isn't.
  • it exceeds the government's contract with the community
  • Excess taxation isn't what the people bargained for.
  • This system is covered in the CAFR Budget System. This system needs to be implemented in all governments. If the State holds the excesses/surplus, it will earn 4% to 5% on that money. If the State returns the money to the people it will receive 20% in revenue because of the increased economic activity. This is elementary economics.
  • Total Benefits...   2,282 9,129  
  • In FY 2002 there were 310,000 unemployed in Michigan, If the $10.13 billion is returned to the people 203,395 jobs are created. This is why it is disastrous for governments to hold excesses/reserves of the taxpayers money.
  • The business community suffers the most.
  • That is 5 times the amount the Federal government used to stimulate the U.S. economy
  • That represents 4 years of reserves.
  • Bottle Deposits Fund, another Special Revenue Fund had net expenditures of $3.3 million. But it also had cash and investment reserves of $125 million. The reserves represent almost 37 years of expenditures.
  • Michigan Unemployment Compensation Fund, an Enterprise Fund, had net expenses of $665 million. It also had reserves of $1.7 billion. That represents 3 years of reserves.
  • These only represent four of the 81 funds shown below that had cash and investment reserves not being used.
  • The following items are not included in the amount of surplus shown:
  • -Retirement/Pension Funds - only included are 1/2 of the actuarially determined excesses, the taxpayers portion. The other 1/2 is the government employees portion.
Paul Merrell

New G20 Rules: Cyprus-style Bail-ins to Hit Depositors AND Pensioners | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...-ins-hit-depositors-pensioners

banksters G20-summit deposits Cyprus bail-ins

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • On the weekend of November 16th, the G20 leaders whisked into Brisbane, posed for their photo ops, approved some proposals, made a show of roundly disapproving of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and whisked out again.
  • It was all so fast, they may not have known what they were endorsing when they rubber-stamped the Financial Stability Board’s “Adequacy of Loss-Absorbing Capacity of Global Systemically Important Banks in Resolution,” which completely changes the rules of banking. Russell Napier, writing in ZeroHedge, called it “the day money died.” In any case, it may have been the day deposits died as money. Unlike coins and paper bills, which cannot be written down or given a “haircut,” says Napier, deposits are now “just part of commercial banks’ capital structure.” That means they can be “bailed in” or confiscated to save the megabanks from derivative bets gone wrong.
  • Rather than reining in the massive and risky derivatives casino, the new rules prioritize the payment of banks’ derivatives obligations to each other, ahead of everyone else. That includes not only depositors, public and private, but the pension funds that are the target market for the latest bail-in play, called “bail-inable” bonds. “Bail in” has been sold as avoiding future government bailouts and eliminating too big to fail (TBTF). But it actually institutionalizes TBTF, since the big banks are kept in business by expropriating the funds of their creditors. It is a neat solution for bankers and politicians, who don’t want to have to deal with another messy banking crisis and are happy to see it disposed of by statute. But a bail-in could have worse consequences than a bailout for the public. If your taxes go up, you will probably still be able to pay the bills. If your bank account or pension gets wiped out, you could wind up in the street or sharing food with your pets.
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  • In theory, US deposits under $250,000 are protected by federal deposit insurance; but deposit insurance funds in both the US and Europe are woefully underfunded, particularly when derivative claims are factored in. The problem is graphically illustrated in a chart from a March 2013 ZeroHedge post. OCC Chart (Image, upper left).
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Dec 14
     
    With commercial banks overloaded by investment bank derivative debt, a bank is the very last place one should park their money. See http://tinyurl.com/3oj7vbs and http://tinyurl.com/3ovf6ze FDIC insurance is now of value only to senior debtors, not to deposit account holders.
Paul Merrell

Losing public opinion on BDS, activists turn to 'lawfare' - 0 views

mondoweiss.net/...lawfare-against-divestment

war & peace Palestine BDS Ilinois legislation 1st Amendment

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 May 15 - No Cached
  •      Champions of proposed Senate Bill SB1761, which passed both houses of the Illinois General Assembly May 18th, say it’s designed to fight anti-Semitic activism and protects Israel from the existential threat posed by the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions movement (BDS). Opponents of the bill say it places the economic welfare of Israel before U.S. interests, tacitly endorses the full annexation of the West Bank into Israel, and violates our country’s First Amendment rights. The bill’s opponents are right. But a potential threat of this legislation, edging closer to the criminalization of advocating for Palestinian rights and against occupation, threatens our core First Amendment rights and has been relatively absent from the discourse surrounding this bill.
  • And that’s not just here in the United States. Israeli lawmakers sought to criminalize public support of boycotts against Israel back in 2010 through their “Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott.” When I spoke with a staffer for Illinois State Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, one of the bill’s primary sponsors, inquiring if SB1761 was modeled after the 1977 amendments to the Export Administration Act (regarding the Arab League boycott of Israel), I was informed “These ‘antiboycott’ laws are the 1977 amendments to the Export Administration Act (EAA) and the Ribicoff Amendment to the 1976 Tax Reform Act (TRA). I hope this helps.…SB1761 falls in line with these federal laws”
  • Referencing EAA is another indication of the move toward weakening our First Amendment rights, as that amendment was meant to criminalize people who adhered to the Arab League’s boycott of Israel. Melissa Redmiles writes of the 70’s legislation in International Boycott Reports, 2003 and 2004 (pdf), from the IRS.gov website: “Those U.S persons who agree to participate in such boycotts are subject to criminal and civil penalties.” SB1761 seems to be the latest manifestation of a trend toward enacting a kind of trickle-down suppression. From the Center For Constitutional Rights website for Palestine Solidarity Legal Support: “These bills must be opposed in order to protect the right to engage in boycotts that reflect collective action to address a human rights issue, which the US Supreme Court has declared is protected speech… These bills would make it state policy to discourage support of human rights boycotts against Israel… and have the potential to stifle expressions of political beliefs…”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • SB1761 requires all five public retirement benefits systems of the Illinois Pension Code to divest “all direct holdings” from any company which engages in boycotting Israel. This is designed to financially punish companies which participate in BDS; presumably European companies. But it will also burden an already severely crippled,“worst in nation”, Illinois pension system. Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner was quoted by Jewish United Fund News (JUF) earlier this month as saying, “I made a pledge that Illinois would become the first state in America to divest its public pension funds from any company in the world that boycotts Israel.” Rauner includes U.S. companies in his threat of divestment when he says “any company in the world.”
  • Relatedly from SB1761 itself: “It is not the intent [of this bill]… to cause divestiture from any company based in the United States of America.” Not intended? This soft language clearly leaves the door open to require Illinois public retirement systems’ divestiture from U.S. companies that participate in BDS. So, while politicians endorsing this bill can point to this statement of “intent” as some kind of safeguard for American companies, this same sentence simultaneously functions as a veiled threat to those companies.
  • SB1761 characterizes the motivations of the BDS movement as “intending to penalize… Israel.” Similarly, JUF News this month quoted JUF President Steven B. Nasatir saying, “At the core of the BDS movement is a quest to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish state.” That’s like stating that the intent of the Civil Rights Montgomery bus boycott was to “penalize white people.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 May 15
     
    As though ACLU didn't already have enough lawsuits going. But this takes the cake. Although anti-BDS legislation has been introduced several times in Congress but never got off the ground because of the First Amendment barrier. Similar measures pending in Europe too.  The good news here is that Israel's right-wing government is getting desperate. The BDS movement is mushrooming globally and routinely is achieving success in convincing companies (and recording artists, etc.) to pull out of Israel. More so in Europe, but BDS is off to a great start in the U.S. Kerry warned Netanyahu before the latter blew up the last round of negotations with the Palestinians that BDS would soon make it politically impossible for the U.S. to continue providing cover for Israel on the U.N. Security Council. There's a big shift of public opinion in the U.S. about Israel's abuse of Palestinians well under way. It won't be long before introducing Israel Lobby measures in Congress will stop happening. 
Paul Merrell

How 'Free Markets' Defame 'Democracy' | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...-free-markets-defame-democracy

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy U.S.-front-groups NED Freedom-House CIA BIden

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Venezuela seems to be following Ukraine on the neocon hit list for “regime change” as Washington punishes Caracas for acting against a perceived coup threat. But a broader problem is how the U.S. conflates “free markets” with “democracy,” giving “democracy” a bad name, writes Robert Parry.
  • The one common thread in modern U.S. foreign policy is an insistence on “free market” solutions to the world’s problems. That is, unless you’re lucky enough to live in a First World ally of the United States or your country is too big to bully.So, if you’re in France or Canada or – for that matter – China, you can have generous health and educational services and build a modern infrastructure. But if you’re a Third World country or otherwise vulnerable – like, say, Ukraine or Venezuela – Official Washington insists that you shred your social safety net and give free reign to private investors.
  • If you’re good and accept this “free market” domination, you become, by the U.S. definition, a “democracy” – even if doing so goes against the wishes of most of your citizens. In other words, it doesn’t matter what most voters want; they must accept the “magic of the market” to be deemed a “democracy.”Thus, in today’s U.S. parlance, “democracy” has come to mean almost the opposite of what it classically meant. Rather than rule by a majority of the people, you have rule by “the market,” which usually translates into rule by local oligarchs, rich foreigners and global banks.Governments that don’t follow these rules – by instead shaping their societies to address the needs of average citizens – are deemed “not free,” thus making them targets of U.S.-funded “non-governmental organizations,” which train activists, pay journalists and coordinate business groups to organize an opposition to get rid of these “un-democratic” governments.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • If a leader seeks to defend his or her nation’s sovereignty by such means as requiring these NGOs to register as “foreign agents,” the offending government is accused of violating “human rights” and becomes a candidate for more aggressive “regime change.”Currently, one of the big U.S. complaints against Russia is that it requires foreign-funded NGOs that seek to influence policy decisions to register as “foreign agents.” The New York Times and other Western publications have cited this 2012 law as proof that Russia has become a dictatorship, while ignoring the fact that the Russians modeled their legislation after a U.S. law known as the “Foreign Agent Registration Act.”So, it’s okay for the U.S. to label people who are paid by foreign entities to influence U.S. policies as “foreign agents” – and to imprison people who fail to register – but not for Russia to do the same. A number of these NGOs in Russia and elsewhere also are not “independent” entities but instead are financed by the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
  • There is even a circular element to this U.S. complaint. Leading the denunciation of Russia and other governments that restrain these U.S.-financed NGOs is Freedom House, which marks down countries on its “freedom index” when they balk at letting in this back-door U.S. influence. However, over the past three decades, Freedom House has become essentially a subsidiary of NED, a bought-and-paid-for NGO itself.
  • That takeover began in earnest in 1983 when CIA Director William Casey was focused on creating a funding mechanism to support Freedom House and other outside groups that would engage in propaganda and political action that the CIA had historically organized and financed covertly. Casey helped shape the plan for a congressionally funded entity that would serve as a conduit for this U.S. government money.But Casey recognized the need to hide the CIA’s strings. “Obviously we here [at CIA] should not get out front in the development of such an organization, nor should we appear to be a sponsor or advocate,” Casey said in one undated letter to then-White House counselor Edwin Meese III – as Casey urged creation of a “National Endowment.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “CIA’s Hidden Hand in ‘Democracy’ Groups.”]Casey’s planning led to the 1983 creation of NED, which was put under the control of neoconservative Carl Gershman, who remains in charge to this day. Gershman’s NED now distributes more than $100 million a year, which included financing scores of activists, journalists and other groups inside Ukraine before last year’s coup and now pays for dozens of projects in Venezuela, the new emerging target for “regime change.”
  • But NED’s cash is only a part of how the U.S. government manipulates events in vulnerable countries. In Ukraine, prior to the February 2014 coup, neocon Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations.”Nuland then handpicked who would be the new leadership, telling U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt that “Yats is the guy,” referring to “free market” politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who not surprisingly emerged as the new prime minister after a violent coup ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014.The coup also started a civil war that has claimed more than 6,000 lives, mostly ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine who had supported Yanukovych and were targeted for a ruthless “anti-terrorist operation” spearheaded by neo-Nazi and other far-right militias dispatched by the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev. But Nuland blames everything on Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Nuland’s Mastery of Ukraine Propaganda.”]On top of Ukraine’s horrific death toll, the country’s economy has largely collapsed, but Nuland, Yatsenyuk and other free-marketeers have devised a solution, in line with the wishes of the Washington-based International Monetary Fund: Austerity for the average Ukrainian.
  • Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Nuland hailed “reforms” to turn Ukraine into a “free-market state,” including decisions “to reduce and cap pension benefits, increase work requirements and phase in a higher retirement age; … [and] cutting wasteful gas subsidies.”In other words, these “reforms” are designed to make the hard lives of average Ukrainians even harder – by slashing pensions, removing work protections, forcing people to work into their old age and making them pay more for heat during the winter.‘Sharing’ the Wealth In exchange for those “reforms,” the IMF approved $17.5 billion in aid that will be handled by Ukraine’s Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who until last December was a former U.S. diplomat responsible for a U.S. taxpayer-financed $150 million investment fund for Ukraine that was drained of money as she engaged in lucrative insider deals – deals that she has fought to keep secret. Now, Ms. Jaresko and her cronies will get a chance to be the caretakers of more than 100 times more money. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s Finance Minister’s American ‘Values.’”]
  • Other prominent Americans have been circling around Ukraine’s “democratic” opportunities. For instance, Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was named to the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, a shadowy Cyprus-based company linked to Privat Bank.Privat Bank is controlled by the thuggish billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, who was appointed by the Kiev regime to be governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a south-central province of Ukraine. In this tribute to “democracy,” the U.S.-backed Ukrainian authorities gave an oligarch his own province to rule. Kolomoysky also has helped finance paramilitary forces killing ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.Burisma has been lining up well-connected American lobbyists, too, some with ties to Secretary of State John Kerry, including Kerry’s former Senate chief of staff David Leiter, according to lobbying disclosures.As Time magazine reported, “Leiter’s involvement in the firm rounds out a power-packed team of politically-connected Americans that also includes a second new board member, Devon Archer, a Democratic bundler and former adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Both Archer and Hunter Biden have worked as business partners with Kerry’s son-in-law, Christopher Heinz, the founding partner of Rosemont Capital, a private-equity company.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Whys Behind the Ukraine Crisis.”]
Gary Edwards

Taxpayers strike it rich? - Foster Gamble - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Thrive-Movement Foster-Gamble CAFR

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Jul 12
     
    Excellent video blog/discussion with Foster Gamble of the Thrive Movement.  Foster explains CAFR: The Comprehensive Annual Financial Report that local and State governments must file annually.  The CAFR includes the investments funds that governments control.  For local cities lfiling bankruptcy, ike Stockton, CA, the CAFR's are in the hundreds of millions of dollars.  Foster explains that Stockton is foot dragging on their CAFR, perhaps hoping to break the union pension and healthcare funds through a quick chapter 9 bankruptcy where the CAFR isn't put on the table? This is good stuff, demonstrating fully that governments are in the business of seizing wealth and control of property by hook or by crook.  Nice finish with the Iceland story.  The Icelanders refused to play the Bankster game, and jailed Rothschild-Rockefeller banksters and politicians while refusing to pay both the interest and debt those clowns had racked up. Excerpt: As cities and states struggle to balance their budgets, folks everywhere are losing their jobs, parks are closing and people most in need are getting left in the dust. As Foster describes in this video blog, it doesn't have to be this way. Trillions of dollars of taxpayer money is currently sitting in unpublicized government investment funds and people are organizing to get it back.
Gary Edwards

Is Standard and Poor's Manipulating US Debt Rating to Escape Liability for the Mortgage Crisis? | Firedoglake - 0 views

firedoglake.com/...bility-for-the-mortgage-crisis

S&P Phony-Credit-Ratings national-debt-Ceiling Banksters banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Jul 11
     
    Half way decent expose of those criminals at the S&P credit rating and risk analysis sham.  These clowns should be in jail for what they did with mortgage securities!  One thing the article doesn't mention is that without the S&P triple A credit ratings on the fraudulent mortgage security instruments, main street America 401K, city, state and county investment funds, and the bulk of pension funds could not have been invested in those phony securities.  Forget the Bankster losses and the taxpayers $23 Trillion bailout of the Banksters.  Real Americans got wiped out because of those phony triple A ratings! Another point missed in this article is that Dodd-Frank is designed for massive extortion instead of massive imprisonment, fines and retribution for criminal actions.  The way it works is that the Bankster pony up a billion plus in campaign funds, and the elected criminals pass on the prosecution of criminal violations and reporting failures.  Easy money for the ruling class.  And who pays the S&P's of the world anyway?  Right, the Banksters! Conclusion: It's becoming more and more obvious that Standard and Poor's has a political agenda riding on the notion that the US is at risk of default on its debt based on some arbitrary limit to the debt-to-GDP ratio. There is no sound basis for that limit, or for S&P's insistence on at least a $4 trillion down payment on debt reduction, any more than there is for the crackpot notion that a non-crazy US can be forced to default on its debt. Whatever S&P's agenda, it has nothing to do with avoiding default risks or putting the US on sound fiscal footing. It appears to be intertwined with their attempts to absolve themselves from responsibility for their role in the 2008 financial crisis, and they are willing to manipulate not only the 2012 election but the world economy to escape the SEC's attempts to regulate them. It's time the media and Congress started asking Standard and Poors what their political a
Paul Merrell

Lawsuit accuses IBM of hiding China risks amid NSA spy scandal | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...-lawsuit-idUSBRE9BB1BP20131212

surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback IBM shareholder-lawsuit litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - IBM Corp has been sued by a shareholder who accused it of concealing how its ties to what became a major U.S. spying scandal reduced business in China and ultimately caused its market value to plunge more than $12 billion. IBM lobbied Congress hard to pass a law letting it share personal data of customers in China and elsewhere with the U.S. National Security Agency, in a bid to protect its intellectual property rights, according to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan.The plaintiff in the complaint, Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension & Relief Fund, said this threatened IBM hardware sales in China, particularly given a program known as Prism that let the NSA spy on that country through technology companies such as IBM.
  • The Baton Rouge pension fund said the revelation of Prism and related disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden caused Chinese businesses and China's government to abruptly cut ties with the world's largest technology services provider.It said this led IBM on October 16 to post disappointing third-quarter results, including drops in China of 22 percent in sales and 40 percent in hardware sales.While quarterly profit rose 6 percent, revenue dropped 4 percent and fell well below analyst forecasts.IBM shares fell 6.4 percent on October 17, wiping out $12.9 billion of the Armonk, New York-based company's market value.The lawsuit names IBM, Chief Executive Virginia Rometty and Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge as defendants, and says they should be held liable for the company's failure to reveal the risks of its lobbying and its NSA ties sooner.
  • The case is Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension & Relief Fund v. International Business Machines Corp et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 13-08818.
Paul Merrell

Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Goldman Sachs Wants JPMorgan in 4 Pieces | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...chs-wants-jpmorgan-in-4-pieces

banksters litigation JPMorgan breakup

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM) is paying out a $100 million settlement to keep details about an antitrust lawsuit filed 2 years ago out of the court system and public record.
  • JPM is one of 12 mega-banks named in the suit while they were particularly named for the price manipulation on foreign exchanges markets using digital communications and social media. Several investors including hedge funds, public pension funds, the Philadelphia city and other market investors filed a complaint accusing 12 banks of manipulating WM/Reuters rates through chat rooms, e-mail and instant messaging since Jan 2003. • JPMorgan  • Bank of America  • Goldman Sachs  • Morgan Stanley  • Citigroup  • UBS  • Credit Suisse  • HSBC • Barclays  • The Royal Bank of Scotland  • BNP  • Deutsche Bank.
  • According to court documents, “the banks’ manipulation of WM/Reuters rates impacted the value of financial transactions in the U.S., including foreign exchange trade. Further, the plaintiffs claimed that these also negatively affected the pension and savings accounts that are dependent on global foreign exchange rates.”
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  • Goldman Sachs released a report citing that JPM should be broken up into 4 parts, each culminating in an increase of 25% worth over the total corporate assets. The report stated: “The biggest of the pieces would include the bank’s branch network, which could be worth over $100 billion on its own. JPMorgan’s investment bank would be nearly as large, followed by its commercial bank and an asset management company.” Richard Ramsden, analyst for Goldman Sachs and author of the report explained: “even splitting JPMorgan in two—dividing the investment bank from the traditional bank, returning the company roughly to what was allowed before the Glass Steagall Act was repealed in the early 2000s—would boost the overall value of the current bank by 16%. Our analysis indicates that even accounting for lost synergies, a JPM breakup would be accretive to shareholders in most scenarios.” Sandy Weill, former CEO of Citigroup commented: “[JPM] became the first of the nation’s modern mega-banks. Breaking up the large banks makes sense.” Ramsden asserts “the new capital requirements for big banks proposed by the Federal Reserve in early December make now a good time to consider such a split.”
  • The Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) opened the door for banks to securitize risky derivatives with the announcement to “extend the deadline for banks to sell off stakes in hedge funds and private- equity funds” until 2017. Journalist David Weidner explained: “Now, the ‘push-out’ rule is gone, so we’re in the same position again. And the Fed has delayed a potential roadblock to a taxpayer bailout. In essence, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Fed are implicitly suggesting that losses from hedge funds and private equity won’t hold up government support.” Weidner continued: “Ultimately, let’s be honest, the delay isn’t just a delay, it’s to buy time so the bank lobby can eliminate the Volcker Rule altogether. These investments produced risky, but potentially big, returns. Why is it that the bankers are the only ones with good memories?” This was part of the official delay of the Volker Rule, which would ban risky betting with derivatives by banks, approved in 2010. Because of this announcement, Ramsden said: “A break up makes more sense for JPMorgan because, unlike some of its rivals, its individual businesses are strong enough to stand on their own. The bank is partly a victim of its own success.”
Paul Merrell

West's antiquated unipolar world collides with the East's vision of a mulipolar future. | New Eastern Outlook - 0 views

journal-neo.org/...s-vision-of-a-mulipolar-future

war & peace Ukraine banksters

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • For years the West has been cultivating a proxy political machine inside of Ukraine for the purpose of peeling the nation away from its historical and socioeconomic ties to Russia. The deep relationship between Western corporate-financier interests on Wall Street and in London and the opposition in Ukraine are best summarized in PR Weeks “Analysis: PR gets trodden underfoot as sands shift in Ukraine.” In the article, the involvement of some of the most notorious corporate lobbying firms on Earth, including Bell Pottinger and the Podesta Group, are revealed to have been involved in Ukraine’s internal affairs since the so-called “Orange Revolution” in 2004 – a coup admittedly orchestrated by the West and in particular the US government.  The article chronicles (and defends) the continuing, unabated meddling of the West up to and including the most recent turmoil consuming Ukraine.    PR Week’s article revealed that heavily funded networks propping up the proxy regime in Kiev are sponsored by “individuals and private companies who support stronger EU-Ukraine relations.” It is these Western corporate-financier interests, not Ukrainian aspirations for “democracy” and “freedom,” that kicked off the “Euromaidan” mobs in the first place – and will be the driving force that misshapes and deforms the regions of western Ukraine now overrun by the West’s proxies.  To the east in Ukraine, people are prominently pro-Russian, sharing closer cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic ties to Russia as well as long historical parallels. They have welcomed moves by Russia to counter the coup in Kiev and protect eastern Ukraine from the corrosive influence that will grow as the West further entrenches itself.
  • With the vacant chair of deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych still warm, the tentacles of Western corporate-financier interests have already wound themselves around Kiev and have begun to squeeze.  Chevron, which had signed a multi-billion dollar deal with Ukraine in November, 2013, was operating in the west of Ukraine, and alongside other Western energy giants such as ExxonMobil and Shell. The deals were part of President Yanukovych’s apparent gravitation toward the West and impending integration with the EU which was then suddenly overturned in favor with re-cementing ties with Russia. Western oil giants clearly saw the benefit of backing a putsch that would leave the western half firmly in the orbit of the US, UK, and EU. They can not only continue their business on the western edge of Ukraine, but expand their interests unabated across the country now that a capitulating, puppet regime sits in Kiev.   While Western big-oil plans to move in and siphon billions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is already planning deep cuts in social benefits as part of a staggering austerity regime to restructure financially the seized western region of Ukraine, and if possible, all of Ukraine proper.
  • RT reported in its article, “Pensions in Ukraine to be halved – sequestration draft,” that: The self-proclaimed government in Kiev is reportedly planning to cut pensions by 50 percent as part of unprecedented austerity measures to save Ukraine from default. With an “empty treasury”, reduction of payments might take place in March.  According to the draft document obtained by Kommersant-Ukraine, social payments will be the first to be reduced. The proxy regime set up in Kiev has already indicated its eager acceptance to all IMF conditions. The fate of western Ukraine will be no different than other members of the European Union preyed upon by the corporate-financier interests that created the supranational consolidation in the first place. The reduction of a multipolar Europe into a unipolar, supranational consolidation which can be easily and collectively looted is a microcosm of what the West’s Fortune 500 plan as part of their global unipolar order.  
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  • The natural resources, human capital, and geopolitical advantages found within the borders of Ukraine, will now become the natural resources, human capital, and geopolitical advantages of Chevron, BP, Monsanto, a myriad of defense contractors, telecom corporations, and other familiar brands seen marauding across the planet leaving in its wake destitution, socioeconomic disparity, and perpetual division they intentionally sow in order to protect their holdings from any form of unified or organized opposition.    No matter how obvious the West’s game may be to some, had Ukraine fallen entirely under the control of Western interests, a multitude of excuses could and would have been peddled to explain the unraveling of Ukrainian society in terms that would exonerate the corporate-financier interests truly driving the crisis. But Ukraine has not entirely fallen to the West, and because of that, the planned decimation of western Ukraine, its economy, and its sovereignty will stand out in stark contrast to the eastern region that has remained beyond the West’s reach and within the orbit of Russia’s multipolar vision of the future.  
Gary Edwards

US debt problem visualized: Debt stacked in 100 dollar bills - 1 views

usdebt.kleptocracy.us

Banksters Federal-Reserve-Bank-Cartel national-debt-Ceiling Trillion Debt-Visual banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Jul 11
     
    From USDebt.Kleptocracy.us.  These visual depictions of our national debt are based on Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel numbers and the USdebtclock.org.  Warning; this will wreck your day.  Our government is spending us into a hole future generations will never dig out of.  And they refuse to stop spending. $114,500,000,000,000. - US unfunded liabilities To the right you can see the pillar of cold hard $100 bills that dwarfs the WTC & Empire State Building - both at one point world's tallest buildings. If you look carefully you can see the Statue of Liberty. The 114.5 Trillion dollar super-skyscraper is the amount of money the U.S. Government knows it does not have to fully fund the Medicare, Medicare Prescription Drug Program, Social Security, Military and civil servant pensions. It is the money USA knows it will not have to pay all its bills. If you live in USA this is also your personal credit card bill; you are responsible along with everyone else to pay this back. The citizens of USA created the U.S. Government to serve them, this is what the U.S. Government has done while serving The People. The unfunded liability is calculated on current tax and funding inputs, and future demographic shifts in US Population. Note: On the above 114.5T image the size of the base of the money pile is half a trillion, not 1T as on 15T image. The height is double. This was done to reflect the base of Empire State and WTC more closely.
Paul Merrell

Putin Puts Pensions at Risk in $43 Billion Bid to Jolt Economy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-infrastructure-projects.html

financial-collapse Russia pensions amnesty

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Faced with meager growth worldwide and a worrisome ebbing of Russia’s own oil and gas revenues, President Vladimir V. Putin announced an ambitious and risky economic stimulus program on Friday along with a novel amnesty plan for imprisoned white-collar criminals that was intended to improve investor confidence.
  • Mr. Putin’s proposal to dip into the country’s pension reserves for loans of up to $43.5 billion for three big infrastructure projects and other investments provoked an immediate debate among some of Russia’s top financial minds. It also brought warnings from financial experts who said that it might produce a burst of inflation, and that what the Russian economy needed most was deep structural change, to diversify from oil and gas and to build investor confidence.
  • While not the headline measure in Mr. Putin’s plan, the amnesty proposal was by far the most surprising item. It was the brainchild of Mr. Putin’s business ombudsman, Boris Titov, who has championed it as a means to improve the business climate.
Paul Merrell

Japan readies package for Trump to help create 700,000 U.S. jobs | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...-usa-trump-japan-idUSKBN15I0RS

Japan foreign-aid U.S.-infrastructure

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Japan is putting together a package it says could generate 700,000 U.S. jobs and help create a $450-billion market, to present to U.S. President Donald Trump next week, government sources familiar with the plans said. The five-part package, to be unveiled when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visits Trump on Feb. 10 in Washington, envisage investments in infrastructure projects such as high-speed trains and cybersecurity, said the sources, who declined to be identified as they were not authorized to speak to the media. Investing in overseas infrastructure projects dovetails with a key plank in Abe’s growth strategy, which is to export "high-quality" infrastructure technology. Japan will invest 17 trillion yen ($150 billion) in public and private funds over 10 years, the sources said. That would include helping develop high-speed railways in the northeastern United States, and the states of Texas and California, and renovating subway and train cars.
  • The package also includes cooperation in global infrastructure investment, joint development of robots and artificial intelligence, and cooperation in cybersecurity and space exploration, among others. The government may tap its foreign exchange reserves account to fund part of the package, the sources said. It may also get funding from megabanks and government-affiliated financial institutions, as well as the Government Pension Investment Fund, the Asahi and other newspapers reported.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Feb 17
     
    Of course the world's largest economy is incapable of funding its own infrastructure maintenance and development.
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