Russian hackers attacked JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and at least four other banks this month in a coordinated assault that resulted in the loss of gigabytes of customer data, according to two people familiar with the investigation. At least one of the banks has linked the breach to Russian state-sponsored hackers, said one of […] Continue reading → 
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation said it is investigating media reports that several U.S. financial firms have been victims of recent cyber attacks. “We are working with the United States Secret Service to determine the scope of recently reported cyber attacks against several American financial institutions,” FBI spokesman Joshua Campbell said in a statement […] Continue reading → 
VoxEU, the indispensable economic-policy website of the Center for Economic Policy Research, has outdone itself with a new e-book on secular stagnation. This is the most important conversation in applied macroeconomics — but it’s complicated and confusing, too. Editors Richard Baldwin and Coen Teulings and a team of eminent contributors have produced the first comprehensive […] Continue reading → 
Doug Giles In the last couple of weeks my cigar company has had a hell of a time trying to find a credit card processing company that’ll do recurring revenue charges for my customers who’d like to get an automated, monthly dose of one of the finest cigars on this planet, our Safari Cigar. As […] Continue reading → 
Empires are typically financed by theft and forced tribute The Dow stabilized yesterday. Gold rose $22. In 2006, we wrote a book with Addison Wiggin called Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis. The idea of the book was as follows: Empires are not the result of conscious thought; they happen when a […] Continue reading → 
Washington’s Blog Despite “Mission Accomplished” Announcement, the Giant Banks Are Worse Than Ever Last week, Paul Krugman said too big to fail is over: There was indeed a large-bank funding advantage during and for some time after the crisis, but it has now been diminished or gone away — maybe even slightly reversed. That is, financial markets […] Continue reading → 
Here’s the Government Accountability Office announcement and study on whether there’s a too-big-to-fail subsidy for big banks. The answer is no-ish but it’s complicated. It’s complicated in part by the fact that the GAO ran 42 different regression models, and they all got different answers: All 42 models found that larger bank holding companies had […] Continue reading → 
The European Union has published a law that will curb arms sales to Russia and to cut off financing for five major Russian banks over Moscow’s support for rebels in Ukraine. Russia has denounced the measures, agreed by the 28 EU member states on Tuesday, as “destructive and short-sighted”, while fighting has intensified in eastern […] Continue reading → 
The attack on a U.S. hedge fund’s network, which a cybersecurity contractor said last week disrupted the firm’s high-speed trading and stole its data, is but one among many. That is the assessment of more than a half-dozen computer security experts, who in recent interviews characterized the hedge-fund industry as the target of multiple attacks, […] Continue reading → 
Activist Post – by Ellen Brown “Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you […] Continue reading → 
Liberty’s Beacon Good morning, Gentle Reader. Have you been disturbed by the most recent news? Thinking that things really aren’t as bad as that, because they’re actually worse? Wondering if you’ll ever manage to unravel that knot in your stomach short of hauling stakes and “going Galt?” If the above applies to you, turn off […] Continue reading → 
Obama determined to stop banks from doing business with firearms retailers Senator Rand Paul is attempting to prevent the Obama administration from making an end run around the Constitution. On Thursday Paul introduced legislation to amend the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act for the 2015 budget. The amendment would prohibit the federal […] Continue reading → 
Michael Schaus The nation’s top extortion artist, Eric Holder, is at it again (or still). This time, rather than running guns to Mexican drug cartels or investigating reporters who publish inconvenient facts about the administration’s scandals, Holder is taking aim at America’s small businesses. While Holder and Co have been busy collecting billion dollar fines […] Continue reading → 
“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” If Thomas Jefferson’s benign reflection on Shays’ Rebellion, that uprising of farmers in 1786 and 1787, is not the first thought that comes to mind today for his fellow […] Continue reading → 
Michael Snyder | Economic Collapse The numbers that you are about to see are likely to shock you. They prove that the global financial Ponzi scheme is far more extensive than most people would ever dare to imagine. As you will see below, the total amount of debt in the world is now more than […] Continue reading → 
The European Central Bank (ECB) just went negative — and that’s not going to be good for your money. Last week, the ECB distinguished itself as the first major central bank ever to implement what’s called “negative interest rates,” which means the ECB will actually charge depositors to keep their money at the central bank. […] Continue reading →