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Post by vulcanized crawler on Oct 23, 2015 10:16:51 GMT -5
perhaps that explains why so many of my penny stock certificates are blank....disappearing ink
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Post by 3bid on Oct 23, 2015 10:41:13 GMT -5
US shale producers have $150bn in debt – Rosneft CEO
22 Oct, 2015
The breakeven price for difficult to extract shale oil is $85-$98 a barrel, according to Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, which is putting US producers deep in debt.
"The total debt of only 25 companies engaged in the extraction of shale oil is about $150 billion," said Sechin speaking at the Eurasian Forum in Verona, Italy, TASS reports.
According Sechin it’s the United States not to OPEC that controls the global oil market. "OPEC is no longer the regulator, its meeting on October 21 [with non-OPEC members] did not bring any decisions," according to Sechin.
Last week, the head of Russia's biggest oil company said Riyadh has been actively dumping and cutting prices to secure its share of the market and gain new ones. Some European countries are now buying Saudi oil for the first time.
Speaking about trends in the global energy market, Sechin said that Europe's share of world energy consumption will decrease from 19 percent in 2015 to 16 percent in 2030.
Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak said shale oil is losing its influence on the world market, and there has been a steady decline in its production in the recent months. According to the minister, dropping prices cause investment outflow.
Subsequently, the number of drilling rigs in the United States is also reducing: a year before there were 1600 rigs with about 600 now.
www.rt.com/business/319401-rosneft-crude-shale-sechin/
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Post by 3bid on Oct 24, 2015 1:13:27 GMT -5
Time to co-operate? Putin tries to build bridges with the West at Valdai
23 Oct, 2015
Vladimir Putin wants to be friends with the West. NATO leaders can either accept his olive branch or continue their disastrous policies. The choice is theirs.
The Moscow-Washington impasse is starting to resemble the plot of a screwball romantic comedy. One side wants to cooperate and mend fences, sincerely trying to kiss and make up. The problem is that the other is too stubborn to change its ways, but knows it will probably eventually have to. There are no prizes for guessing which is which.
Barack Obama has a problem. When he took office, almost seven years ago, the US was just about clinging onto the unipolar world it had created after the Cold War. However, a combination of China’s rapid growth, Russia’s re-birth from the ashes of the USSR and the fallout from costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has changed that reality. Vladimir Putin knows this. So does Obama. The latter cannot countenance being remembered as the President who “threw away” US supremacy.
Of course, this also explains why Obama limits his contacts with Russian officials. Last week, he refused to accept a delegation from Moscow, led by Dmitry Medvedev, whom he was formerly close to. Whenever Obama meets Russian government officials these days, American domestic media perceives it as a sign of weakness.
Instead of direct engagement, both sides have launched an information war. During the past two and a half years, at a time of chaos in Ukraine and the Middle East, they’ve had one short, late-night bilateral meeting. Instead they speak to each other through the media. Obama likes to spin that Russia is weak. Only two weeks ago CBS host, Steve Kroft, insisted that Putin was challenging his leadership. Obama answered: “If you think that running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in (to Syria), in order to prop up your only ally is leadership, then we've got a different definition of leadership.”
In January, the US President alleged that Russia was isolated and its economy was "in tatters.” Last year, he equated Russia to Ebola and ISIS. The problem for Obama is that especially in Europe, and increasingly in America itself, fewer and fewer people are buying his message.
Battle for hearts and minds
Naturally, there are options here. Instead of the media conflict, Putin and Obama could have a televised debate. Say, two hours long with no notes or Teleprompters. Why not let the public decide? Alas, that’s a tad Simon Cowell. Instead, it’d be better if Obama swallowed his pride and engaged with Putin to hammer out a solution to their differences. This appears to be what Russia’s leader wants.
Every time Vladimir Putin speaks to a foreign audience these days, he speaks of America. Often indirectly. His main concerns are the perceived unipolar world and US hegemony. He’s also very upset about US meddling in sovereign states.
On Thursday, at the Valdai forum, near Sochi, Putin continued a theme he’d espoused at the United Nations General Assembly last month. Whereas in New York, he’d spoken broadly, this time he was far more direct. The President was asking Obama to climb down off his high horse and offering to work together to restore stability to the world.
While Russia has been clear on its Syrian objectives, to secure the Syrian state and fight terrorism, the US has conflicting desires. Putin insisted that Moscow isn’t convinced that America’s primary goal in the Middle East is to crush ISIS. Putin believes that Washington is playing both sides. He invoked the specter of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Cold War-era strategy to condemn US policy.
“It’s always hard to play a double game - declare a fight against terrorists but at the same time try to use some of them to move the pieces on the Middle Eastern chessboard in your own favor. There’s no need to play with words and split terrorists into moderate and not moderate. I would like to know what the difference is,” the President said. "They behead gently?”
What next for the Middle East
The matter of America’s lack of a strategy in the event of the collapse of the Syrian (or Iraqi) state also vexes Putin. “A terrorist organization, the so-called Islamic State, took huge territory under control. Just think about it: if they occupied Damascus or Baghdad, the terrorist gangs could achieve the status of a practically official power; they would create a stronghold for global expansion. Is anyone considering this?” He urged Washington to consider dealing with the problem now. He added: “Fifty years ago, the streets of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) taught me that if a fight is inevitable, you have to hit first.”
The President also touched on an issue which greatly upsets Russians, especially state officials. That is American interference in their domestic affairs. This reached its height back in 2012, when the former US ambassador received fringe opposition figures, just days after his appointment. “The US has a law that concerns Ukraine, but it directly mentions Russia, and this law states that the goal is democratization of Russia. Just imagine if we were to write into Russian law that our goal is to democratize the US…” Putin said.
On the topic of American interference in Russia’s borderlands, the President mused: “we are not worried about democracy coming to our borders, we are worried about military infrastructure (NATO) coming to our borders.” Again, it’s fair to say Putin has been consistent on this subject for a long time.
Back in 2008, he described the alliance’s wooing of Georgia and Ukraine as a “direct threat.” Other key Russian figures, like Mikhail Gorbachev, who is loved in the West, are fully behind Putin’s position. Indeed, Gorbachev has alleged that NATO broke promises made to him in the 1990’s when expanding to former Warsaw Pact states and the Baltic countries.
Amid all this acrimony, Putin then suggested that Moscow and Washington bury the hatchet. “We missed a chance to cooperate at the end of the Cold War, during terrorist attacks of the early 2000s (during George W Bush's first term), let's not miss it again.” With that, Putin opened the door for detente in US-Russian relations. Does Obama have the courage to acquiesce?
www.rt.com/op-edge/319514-putin-obama-valdai-syria/
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Post by vulcanized crawler on Oct 24, 2015 4:48:39 GMT -5
this too shall pass...probably around january 20th, 2017....make america great again
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Post by 3bid on Oct 24, 2015 16:51:36 GMT -5
Iceland, Where Bankers Actually Go To Jail For Committing White-Collar Crimes by Alan Pyke Oct 23, 2015 Nearly all the financiers who headed powerful American firms in the run-up to the 2008 economic crisis remain wealthy, powerful, and free. Not so in Iceland, where jail sentences handed out last week bring the number of bankers imprisoned over the meltdown to 26. Combined, the bankers will spend 74 years behind bars. While critics of such stringent treatment of the business community often warn that cracking down on finance hurts the economy, Iceland’s experience has shown it’s possible to pursue corporate accountability and broad growth at the same time. The American form of justice for banking titans has been rather less robust. Prosecutions for all white-collar crime are at a 20-year low. Criminal prosecutions of corporations dropped 29 percent from 2004 to 2014. Instead of trying to make cases in court, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has sought settlements in a long list of cases tied back to the crisis and its fallout. Most did not require the company that bought its way out of prosecution to admit wrongdoing or even acknowledge the validity of the facts alleged by government investigators. Headline figures about the dollar value of these settlements routinely exaggerated both their punitive effect on corporate bottom lines and their restorative impact for wronged consumers. And in the handful of cases where corporate felons were forced to plead guilty, the federal government has repeatedly acted to minimize the impact of the plea on the firm’s ability to make money. The upshot is that “deterrence has been eliminated,” corporate criminologist and financial expert William Black told ThinkProgress. An industry that created a super-sized housing bubble then mishandled trillions of dollars’ worth of mortgage paperwork in order to facilitate a foreclosure epidemic that’s ruinous for the national economy has, in effect, gotten away with it. That makes another crisis more likely, according to Black. “I’m a big believer in looking forward rather than backwards,” President Obama said months after his inauguration in response to a question about how he would address the still-unfurling financial crisis. With veteran white-collar defense attorneys running the DOJ for him at the time, Obama’s administration pursued a course that’s effectively opposite to Reykjavik’s response to the collapse. When Iceland first opted to let its banks fail and seek an International Monetary Fund bailout, it seemed like a disaster. But Iceland returned to economic growth much faster than skeptics expected after breaking from the conciliatory approach toward financial industry actors that most countries took in the wake of the global collapse. The tiny economy’s growth rate outpaced the average for European countries in 2012. It’s halved its unemployment rate since the peak of the crisis. Like other countries with a large financial industry presence, Iceland spent a lot of money on bailouts after the crisis. But it bailed out workaday citizens instead of bankers, forgiving mortgage debts that exceeded 110 percent of the actual value of the home linked to the loan. The banks, which had swarmed to the north Atlantic island after aggressive deregulation of Icelandic finance law around the turn of the century, were allowed to fail and go bankrupt. Comparing Iceland and the U.S. isn’t entirely fair, since the latter is over one thousand times larger in both population and total economic output. It’s far easier for a country of 320,000 people to nationalize its banks, devalue its currency, and bounce back rapidly after a couple years of deep economic pain. A new paper from economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi illustrates that the policy course chosen by Presidents Bush and Obama in the aftermath of the crash has at least delivered dramatically better outcomes than doing nothing at all. But there are a variety of adapted versions of the core idea behind Iceland’s actions that might well have delivered a far better outcome for the average American than what bank bailouts, out-of-court settlements, and lax pursuit of criminal cases against the industry’s worst actors. With those failures already in the rear-view, both Obama’s administration and several of those vying to replace him in the 2016 election have tried to make course corrections on white-collar crime. Months after Attorney General Loretta Lynch came on-board, the DOJ replaced decades-old guidance on seeking corporate cooperation in investigations with a new set of policies for such cases. They set a higher standard that corporations must meet in order to qualify as cooperating with an investigation, which dramatically reduces the penalties they face for wrongdoing. The Yates Memo, as the new rules are known, is a moderate course correction rather than a drastic reversal. At best, it could mean that more corporate crime cases go to trial because fewer companies clear the higher cooperation standard. At worst, it could mean companies just tick the check-boxes on the new rules by throwing out junior executives as scapegoats – an outcome that would not meaningfully increase accountability and deterrence. thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/10/23/3715775/iceland-jails-bankers-and-survives/
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Post by imSINGLEruRICH on Oct 25, 2015 6:11:35 GMT -5
What an anomaly. Some lessons to be learned. Iceland, Where Bankers Actually Go To Jail For Committing White-Collar Crimes
The "LAISSEZ-FAIRE" attitude geared towards "White Collar" crime needs some face smacking adjustments. What justice can you really expect, when you have "The Fox Guarding the Henhouse" ??
Crooks, they are all Crooks !
SINGLE
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Post by 3bid on Oct 25, 2015 10:07:59 GMT -5
12 Oct, 2015
US Congressman: Washington aims to impose disastrous trade policies everywhere in the world
A historic deal between the US and 11 Pacific Rim nations has just been brokered; American elites are praising it as the most beneficial deal for businesses – and yet, many predict that thousands in the US will lose their jobs because of it. The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is veiled in mystery, as the powers that be are doing their best to keep some of its provisions secret from the general public – and nobody knows why. Who really benefits from the TPP? Why was the president so eager about it – and does he even have a say in these matters, or is it the corporations that call the shots? We ask an American Congressman and senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Brad Sherman is on Sophie&Co.
Sophie Shevardnadze:American Congressman, senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Brad Sherman, welcome to the show, it's great to have you with us. Now, President Obama says the Trans Pacific Partnership reflects American values and will greatly benefit U.S. workers. If it is really so, and if it is so beneficial, why keep the details of the agreement secret, when it's been finalized? What does he have to hide?
Brad Sherman: Well, that's just one of the many questions we in the U.S. have had - a phenomenally bad trade policy for the last 30 years. We have gone with this "free trade model" which is really not free trade. We have tried to impose that model everywhere else in the world, and we have run up the largest trade deficit in America's history, in history of the world, in fact. If we could just reduce by half, maybe even just reduce by a third the trade deficit America faces, we would have a labor shortage, or a job surplus, if you will, and we’d have rapidly rising wages. This policy on trade is a real disconnect between the elites in America and the average american.
SS:So, like you've said, you've had this bad trade policy all along, there was NAFTA, the North-American Free Trade Agreement, and the CAFTA, the Central-American Free Trade Agreement - and both agreements cost American workers hundreds of thousands of jobs. Why is America repeating the same mistake here?
BS: There are couple of reasons: first, these trade agreements are very much in the interest of Wall St., and the powers of the society. Seconds, a lot of students want the professors to think they're smart, and a lot of professors live in a professorial world, where they can design theoretical models, and, you know, frankly, if we lived in one of these "theoretical model" universes, I'd support these trade deals, The fact is, they don't work in practice, and the reason they don't is that while the U.S. is very much a rule of law, capitalist competition society, most other societies in the world are considerably less so. Perhaps, if we had a free trade agreement with Canada, as we did and still do, or Britain - it would work out to our advantage, but the idea that we're going to get free access to Vietnamese market is absurd. They don't have freedom and they don't have markets!
SS:So, Congressman, I want to play devil's advocate here a bit. The Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement will help American exports, it will, apparently, remove thousands of tariffs on U.S. goods. Isn't that beneficial for small businesses and citizens ultimately?
BS: It will help our exports a little bit, and increase imports by a lot more - and the reason for that is, the only barrier to exporting to the U.S. is our tariffs. And so, we eliminate those, whereas other countries have tariff barriers and non-tariff barriers, so they reduce or eliminate their tariffs and they keep their non-tariff barriers. That's why the U.S., with its trade policies, has been able to go from the largest net exporter in the world to the largest net importer in the history of the world.
SS:Now, you've called the TPP not only a bad economic policy but a bad geopolitical policy as well. Why is that? I mean, surely, the U.S. needs to be on good terms with such a rapidly developing region like Asia...
BS: It's being sold as kind of a China-containment policy, because, frankly, the economics are so bad, that they can always shift and tell people "well, it may be bad for your family, but it's good for American security". The fact is, China benefits from this deal in two very important ways: first, it establishes the principle that currency manipulation is allowed - that is a device America doesn't use. It's the number one device China does use, and while China's not a party to this agreement, it entwines approach to trade. Second, there's a thing called "rules of origin”. You would think "okay, we're going to have imports from Japan or imports from Vietnam" - what about goods that are 60, 70, 80 percent made in China? Well, they can go to Vietnam, they can get a "made in Vietnam" sticker put on them and be shipped into the U.S. tariff-free. So, China gets tremendous additional access to the U.S. market, and of course, since China isn't a party, they do nothing to reduce their barriers to American exports. So, they won't show us the rules of origin provisions, which define whether the good has to be 60% or 70% or only 50% made in one of the twelve countries. But, whatever those rules are, they won't tell us. But the stated rule is going to be different from the de-facto rule. So, you may have a rule that says: "You've got to certify that this good is at least 60% made in Vietnam" - but who will enforce that? How do you tell the difference between goods that are 60% made in Vietnam and those that are 28% made in Vietnam? The companies involved are not going to tell you, and so, whatever the rules of origin are, de-jure they are going to be very different from what they are de-facto.
SS:Now, China is not a member of TPP, and when promoting a deal, Obama stated: "We can't let China write the rules, we should write the rules". China is competing with the U.S. as the world's leading economy. Can America really hope to go into Asia-Pacific and ignore China?
BS: Oh, I wouldn't ignore China for a second; but the idea that we're going to sacrifice American jobs on the altar of "we're writing the rules"...No! The representatives of working men and women are not writing the rules, most of the rules are written on Wall St. and then, the single rule that is most important to China, is written in Beijing. So, there's a lot in it for Wall St., there's a lot in it for China - and there's nothing in it on a net basis for workers in the U.S.
SS:Now, you go as far as to say that this agreement can undermine U.S. sovereignty - how so, and why would American leaders push for something like that and call it "historic"?
BS: Well, corporations have awful lot of power here in the U.S., and they don't like when the government of any country tries to control their behaviour. And, so, they are looking for multi-national commitments that would give them a way around national governments, and the investor state provisions are designed to allow companies to say: "We don't have to comply with this law or that law" because international tribunal says "It's bad for investment" or "bad for trade". The once exception that they did get in this is that a tobacco company trying to avoid health and safety regulations will not be able to use this, which, of course, exposes the fact that every other company trying to use this system to avoid health and safety regulations is certainly allowed to do so.
SS:But, from what I understand, corporations have the right or the ability to sue governments under the TPP - so, let's say, government bans Exxon from drilling, right? Then Exxon can then take the government to court, and if they win, then they get exactly what they want - isn't it right? Will this power start affecting public policy, basically?
BS: Well, it's not clear that they get what they wanted, which was to drill in this particular location or to engage in this particular activity that hurts the environment. Most of these deals provide that if they don't get what they want, they get a big check from a national government. But, of course, once you write one or two of those checks, the message gets down to local environmental regulators to make sure not to do anything that a multinational corporation can recover funds from the U.S. government - so, whether it's a check or whether it is an unchecked power, the multinationals get an awful lot of what they want under this deal.
SS:Now, here's another thing. This provisions for the legal protection of corporations against countries have been a common part in trade agreement for over 50 years - why are they making so much controversy now?
BS: I think it's because the provisions are getting stronger, and the ability of corporations to make use of them is getting more clever and more nuanced. So, we see more lawsuits by corporations using these provisions - and of course, this deal creates more investor state lawsuit protection then all the other trade agreements that the U.S. is part of.
SS:Now, the deal faces months of scrutiny in Congress, and you're obviously planning to vote against - but, is there a realistic chance of it passing?
BS: In all likelihood, it will pass. I think it will have very solid Republican support - not complete. We did lose quite...you know, almost 40 votes, roughly 40 votes in the vote a few months ago. So, this is an uphill battle just as the last bill was an uphill battle, and, frankly, we need some additional allies. You know, maybe...
SS:Do you feel pressure from your colleagues for the bill to pass?
BS: Not from my colleagues. Most Democrats will be voting against the bill, against TPP. Nancy Pelosi was not from the beginning against trade promotion authority, but she eventually voted against it - and, I would suspect that there will be very little pressure... the President will do everything he can, and around the edges, we’ll see. His target list are the 40 Democrats who voted for TPA, which gave him the authority to sign this agreement and gave him the authority to submit it to Congress for an up or down vote. It's very rare that you get to submit a bill under those favorable rules.
SS:Is there a lobby for the TPP? When I said "colleagues" I really meant - are you pressured by the lobbyists?
BS: This will be lobbied on both sides, and my hope is that there will be one or two business interests who feel that they weren't treated fairly in the agreement - that may give us a few allies that we haven't had before. But the lobbying will be from labor organisations on one side, and almost all of Wall St., almost the entire business community on the other side; not to mention a President, who regards this as a legacy. Keep in mind that all of the...the weight of authority in the elites of the society colored in part because elites benefit, colored in part because elites like to take their cue from professors with academic models - all of that is pushing the President to thinking that this is a good deal for American workers.
SS:Which side do you think is stronger? The one that's pro- or the one that's con?
BS: Well, in the White House, the pro- forces will prevail. In the Senate, the pro- forces will prevail. The House of Representatives, the last part of the decision-making process - I would say, they're ahead of us, but we might catch up. So, and, as I'm sure you're aware, the House of Representatives is in some turmoil today, making it even more difficult to predict. But it's going to be difficult to stop this deal.
SS:Congressman, you've introduced a bill that would break up too-big-to-fail banks as they pose a threat to U.S. economic security. Do you really believe you can push something like that through Congress?
BS: No. Bernie Sanders introduced it to Senate, I introduced it in the House, I’ve got two or three co-sponsors in the House, Bernie does not have any at the Senate. It is a statement of where we stand, not an attempt to immediately adopt a statute. Perhaps, longer term, we would have some success, but the chances of that bill passing in the foreseeable future is very small, beyond small.
SS:Talking about Bernie, why is becoming President so expensive in the U.S.? I mean, why does Hillary Clinton need a billion dollars for a campaign?
BS: Every campaign can figure out a way to spend every dollar they can get their hands on. I've been involved in a lot of campaigns, where people say: "Well, if you raise...you only need this amount", and we raise more and we found effective ways to spend it. What we need is a system in which small donors play an important role and we ought to have a system where every American is given $25 or $50 a cycle that they can donate to the elected officials of their choice. We also need to prevent this "secret" money, this unlimited money that has been allowed into our politics as a result of Supreme Court decision in Citizens United. That's why I've joined with others in introducing a Constitutional amendment. We believe in free speech, but the Supreme Court has gone kind of nuts and said that that means billionaires can control our elections.
SS:Well, that's the idea everyone gets overseas...about big corporations as well - I mean, Presidential campaign sponsors include Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citigroup. If they are bank-rolling this show, does it mean they are running it as well?
BS: As a technical matter the main campaign for anybody running for federal office can take funds only from individuals or organisation where they get voluntary contributions, under strict limits from individuals. Problem is, the Supreme Court has opened things up for these "second campaigns" - it's absolutely absurd, but in many of the Presidential races, the candidate controls way less that half of his or her campaign, and a group of people that the candidate isn't allowed to talk to are running their TV commercials, running the main part of their campaign on collecting money from often undisclosed sources to run those campaigns. I can't think of a system that is worse than what we have now, where not only they have huge quantities of money - and often it's kept secret - but the candidate can play this game of not taking responsibility for what their main campaign is actually saying.
SS:So, are you saying, for instance, Hillary Clinton is not controlling half of her campaign?
BS: More than half of the money that will be spent - and I haven't charted exactly when the expenditures are made - but when those big expensive TV campaigns start, most of the commercials favoring Hillary Clinton or favoring Jeb Bush, or opposing their opponents, will be paid for by these “independent expenditure committees”, which are allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money. Often, they are structured so that they don't have to disclose where that money comes from. They are allowed to take money directly from corporations. The one rule is: they are not supposed to talk to the candidate about how they're going to spend it...which sometimes stretches credulity but creates these bizarre circumstances where you could have the most watched Hillary Clinton commercial be one that contains material that she doesn't like.
SS: In the last Romney-Obama Presidential contest, Wall St. was giving money to both candidates. Is this tactic for insurance, to make sure they'll influence the winner, whomever that may be? So does it matter which candidate even wins?
BS: Not every contribution from somebody who works for Goldman Sachs is part of the will to find efficient campaign for Goldman Sachs to have political power. In fact, you have a lot of rich individuals there, they have strong views on foreign policy, they have strong views on women's right to choose or gun control or this or that; they happen to be wealthy and with Goldman Sachs and usually support Goldman Sachs's position on banking and taxation issues, but they are involved in the campaign for other reasons. Obviously it gives those with money, whether their first goal of spending enough money is to protect Goldman Sachs’s financial interests or their first goal is to promote gun control - people who write really large checks have some influence not only on their first goal, but also on their second goal.
SS:So, basically, does that mean that both candidates will end up doing what their sponsors want, no matter who wins - Democrat or Republican?
BS: It's not just money. The purpose of money is to get votes, and the more sophisticated are the voters, the more effort they put in the making of their decisions, the more the voters control what the politicians do and the money controls less. But it's clear that if you have two American citizens and one spends $5 billion dollars giving money to politicians and one doesn't - the first one has way more influence on their policy, and that's not the way Democracy is supposed to work.
SS:So, if a man like Bernie Sanders, for instance, proposes reigning in the rich corporations, obviously they won't give him the money. I like the man, I worry about the man; does that mean that he doesn't stand a chance of being elected?
BS: I think he stands some chance. Bernie and I have known each other for a long time, since our days together in the House of Representatives, but I think he faces a number of issues. He describes himself as a Democratic-Socialist. This country doesn't naturally... the average voters doesn't identify themselves as Democratic socialists; in fact, "socialism" is a dirty word among big chunk of electorate. So, I think Bernie faces a number of issues. You wouldn't expect him getting a lot of Goldman Sachs' money. That being said, the fact that he's taken a strong position that he has, and that I have, too, to break up banks that are too-big-to-fail, have motivated an awful lot of small contributions. And, the technology is in the direction of democracy. Technology has meant small contributions can be raised back... You know, I’m pretty old, I’ve been doing this for a while. Decade and half ago, small contributions were raised with postal mail, and it would cost $20 of postal costs and printing in order to raise $22 in small contributions. Now, so much of that is online, you're raising the same $22, but it's costing you 22 cents. So, small contributions are playing the big role, and then, secondly, it used to be that if you didn't own a newspaper, if you didn't control a TV station or buy an awful lot of time, then you couldn't influence voters. Now, anybody with a blog can get their message through to some folks, so technology is pulling in one way, the Supreme Court decision, unfortunately, pulls very hard in the other direction.
SS:I wonder, if technology is making American Presidential campaign this time around, showing that people are backing some very unusual candidates - like, Donald Trump is an obvious example - but then, against, there’s Bernie Sanders, who as you say doesn't shy away from being called a "socialist", and he still attracts voters. What's changing in the U.S. political scene? Is the traditional two-party contest showing signs of decline?
BS: Well, the parties as structures have remained. We probably won't face a major third-party candidate the way we did in 1992 with Ross Perot, but instead of those structures being owned by the insiders, we see people way outside the mainstream of those parties, way outside of social mainstream of those parties, vying effectively, and they are because Americans are angry. When I was growing up, we were told: "every generation is going to live better than the generation before them". That's stopped in the 1980s, and we've noticed. We see economic growth higher in many places in the U.S., and we'd like to see economic growth here not in terms of a top-line GDP number, but in terms of median family incomes. Americans haven't had a raise for 20 or 30 years, that's about time we got one. By "we" I mean the average working people, Congressmen are doing fine.
SS:It was a pleasure talking to you, Congressman, thanks a lot for this interview. We were talking to American Congressman, senior member of House Foreign Affairs Committee, Brad Sherman, discussing what the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is, how big business benefits from the deal and who rules the show in U.S. politics. That's it for this edition of Sophie&Co, I will see you next time.
www.rt.com/shows/sophieco/318340-tpp-us-congress-jobs/
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scot
Diamond Finder
US President wants to form an international committee to set a world wide Business tax RATE.
Posts: 92
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Post by scot on Oct 25, 2015 13:13:34 GMT -5
Trying to get this straight in my twisted mind. What I think I see. So the people who _ucked us, were held to the fire. Mr. BM's work. Shares were sold to them to cover the gross NAKED. Money they paided, was put? Mr. M passed away. Powers that be obscounder with said money. Task at hand to again hold people who are _ucking us accountable. In the mean time back at the (Bush) ranch, Now we are going into OIL? WTF. Just a thought from me to you. In the words of Americas LAST President, WHAT DOES IT MATTER!!! Well I hope this post made you think it did me.....
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Post by 3bid on Oct 28, 2015 18:09:25 GMT -5
Impeachment of the Federal Reserve SARTRE – October 27, 2015
Throughout history, holding public officials accountable for wrongdoing has been elusive even under the most moral regimes. As an ordinary practice, crime pays, especially in public office. Personal gain is an obvious offense. However, misdemeanors against specific persons, entire classes of people or even crimes against humanity are routinely committed in the normal course of administrating governments. Woefully, a universal remedy to prevent such a chronicle of depravity has never been applied to the body politik.
When such violations of the public trust are perpetrated by non elected authoritarians, especially from a protected segment of the financial elite, the abuse of the people is supreme. How ludicrous that the endless struggle against establishing a central bank could have been so causally accepted just over a hundred years ago.
As any and every student of American Revolution knows, allowing the coinage and administration of currency to a private bank was an important factor in freeing the New World from the strangle hold of old empires. With the creation and treachery of a Christmas vote, the Federal Reserve took full control of the financial sector and placed the country on the inevitable path of totalitarian rule.
If a refresher course is needed, the Jackals of Jekyll Island - Federal Reserve Audit article illustrates the dire nature and consequences of the debt created money system that has impoverished our society. In the essay, Federal Reserve 100 Years of Failure the history of the banksters financial system is examined.
So what can be done to stop this monster of liberty destruction and monetary theft? First off the immediate remedy provided for the removal of reprehensible outlaws is impeachment. But before one assumes that impeachment is basically a legal procedure, it must be acknowledged the function of removal from entrusted and limited authority, means that impeachment is fundamentally a political act.
The Constitutional Rights Foundation describes that High Crimes and Misdemeanors can lead to impeachment.
The U.S. Constitution provides impeachment as the method for removing the president, vice president, federal judges, and other federal officials from office. The impeachment process begins in the House of Representatives and follows these steps:
· The House Judiciary Committee holds hearings and, if necessary, prepares articles of impeachment. These are the charges against the official.
· If a majority of the committee votes to approve the articles, the whole House debates and votes on them.
· If a majority of the House votes to impeach the official on any article, then the official must then stand trial in the Senate.
· For the official to be removed from office, two-thirds of the Senate must vote to convict the official. Upon conviction, the official is automatically removed from office and, if the Senate so decides, may be forbidden from holding governmental office again.
Historically there are three examples of attempts to use the impeachment method to put forth a purging of governors of the Federal Reserve. The first was by Congressman Lindbergh: Articles of Impeachment Against Federal Reserve.
This Act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this Act the invisible government by the Money Power, proven to exist by the Money Trust Investigation, will be legalized. The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation. From now on depressions will be scientifically created.” – Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., 1913, on the Federal Reserve Act Charles Lindbergh Sr. – Congressional record – Feb 12, 1917
3126 Congressional Record Mr. LINDBERGH. Mr. Speaker and the House of Representatives, I, Charles A. Lindbergh, the undersigned, upon my responsibility as a Member of the House of Representatives, do hereby impeach
W. P. G. Harding, governor
Paul M. Warburg, vice governor;
Frederick Delano
Adolf C. Miller
and Charles S. Hamlin
Probably the most famous effort was that of Congressman McFadden on the Federal Reserve Corporation Remarks in Congress, 1934 AN ASTOUNDING EXPOSURE.
"Resolve, That the Committee on the Judiciary is authorized and directed as a whole or by subcommittee, to investigate the official conduct of the Fed agents to determine whether, in the opinion of the said committee, they have been guilty of any high crime or misdemeanor which in the contemplation the Constitution requires the interposition of the Constitutional powers of the House. Such Committee shall report its finding to the House, together with such resolution or resolutions of impeachment or other recommendations as it deems proper."
By this time the actual cause behind the Great Depression was disclosed at a heavy personal risk as described by Robert Edward Edmondson (Publicist-Economist).
Commenting on Former Congressman Louis T. McFaddens's "heart-failure sudden-death" on Oct. 3, 1936, after a "dose" of "intestinal flu," "Pelley's Weekly" of Oct. 14 said:
Now that this sterling American patriot has made the Passing, it can be revealed that not long after his public utterance against the encroaching powers of Judah, it became known among his intimates that he had suffered two attacks against his life. The first attack came in the form of two revolver shots fired at him from ambush as he was alighting from a cab in front of one of the Capital hotels. Fortunately both shots missed him, the bullets burying themselves in the structure of the cab.
"He became violently ill after partaking of food at a political banquet at Washington. His life was only saved from what was subsequently announced as a poisoning by the presence of a physician friend at the banquet, who at once procured a stomach pump and subjected the Congressman to emergency treatment."
The most recent attempt was made by Rep. Gonzalez, Henry B. [D-TX-20] (Introduced 03/07/1985).
H.Res.101 - A resolution providing for the impeachment of Paul A. Volcker, Edward G. Boehne, Robert H. Boykin, E. Gerald Corrigan, Lyle E. Gramley, Karen N. Horn, Preston Martin, J. Charles Partee, Emmett J. Rice, Martha R. Seger, and Henry C. Wallich, as members of the Federal Open Market Committee.
By the time that this last impeachment resolution was introduced, most Americans were born well after the memory of the striking controversy that existed during the first half of this country’s history towards the threat of allowing a central bank to lend debt money into existence.
Author George F. Smith, who co-wrote the Varying Verity series, quoted the following in The Birth of Legal Counterfeiting, illustrates a point that most forget.
"Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly." -- Fifth plank of the Communist Manifesto, 1848
It should be stipulated that for decades the Congress has not demonstrated the stomach to fulfill their Constitutional duties on the same level and scale as our Founding Father’s generation. A legislature that will not even authorize a full forensic audit of the Fed, much less pass an abolishment statute law, is not one brave enough to follow the lead of Iceland after the recapture of their financial institutions as seen in 26 bankers already sentenced to a combined 74 years in prison.
Make no mistake about it, the dubious circumstances and untimely demise of Congressman Louis T. McFadden is not lost on a political class of beggars who are dependent upon the financial contributions of the banking elite to be re-elected.
Nonetheless, the value of using the impeachment vehicle is not necessarily the removal of a Greenspan, a Bernanke or a Yellen. It is about developing the critical mass necessary to instill public awareness that the financial system of central banking is the quintessence and inevitable reason, for the cause of the coming economic collapse, which is unavoidable.
Impeachment is a small step towards the replacement of the malefic hell that the central bankers inflict as they squeeze America to the “consequences of defaulting on a desperate bargain”. "A pound of flesh" is just as germane today as when penned by Shakespeare.
Face the facts that the courts and the legal barrister class are essentially gatekeepers to protect the establishment. Relief from a rare judicial hearing is reliably overturned by a higher court. And there is no greater superpower center of corruption and control than the crony capitalism perversion that hijacked a free enterprise economy.
Much of this depraved derivative financial racket depends upon the domination of the Federal Reserve fraud of the national economy. This is a reality that most historians are unwilling to accept because the punitive penalties from crossing the “PC” Wall Street guardians of the Fed temple are too high to pay.
Unless a modern day Lindbergh emerges to carry on the fight, the next generation will be even more ignorant of the forbidden history that put into motion the demise of our country. Today impeachment is a threat that was fine to use against Richard Nixon but was wrong to try William Clinton. For once a true bi-partisan agreement can be forged to use impeachment against the true and real enemy, the Federal Reserve.
batr.org/forbidden/102715.html
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Post by vulcanized crawler on Oct 28, 2015 18:50:57 GMT -5
impeachment should have started a long time ago. lottery style
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Post by John Winston Lennon O'Boogie on Oct 29, 2015 6:41:28 GMT -5
Bond Basics and the Fed Casey Dowd By Casey Dowd ·Published October 28, 2015 ·FOXBusiness (Reuters) Baby boomers nearing retirement should invest in bonds to safeguard their assets and reduce their risks in the stock market. However, many fear with interest rates at a low level, bonds will decline in value with the Federal Reserve projecting a rate hike in the near future. Freddie Offenberg, partner and portfolio manager with Andres Capital Management discussed with me for FOXBusiness.com the basics of bonds and why they should be included in your retirement portfolio. Boomer: What is a bond and what types of bonds are available? Offenberg: Simply put, a bond is a financial instrument, or debt investment in which an investor loans money to an entity (usually government, municipal or corporate). The funds are generally borrowed for a defined period of time at a fixed rate of interest. They can be purchased by individuals and institutional investors, and the proceeds are used to finance a variety of projects and activities of the issuing entity. All bonds are considered to be fixed-income securities. Boomer: What is a bonds credit risk and are they insured? Offenberg: Regardless of their entity, all bonds have two major risk components. Interest rate risk, which impacts the current value of a given bond issue based on any upward movement in prevailing benchmark interest rate levels (e.g. the federal funds rate, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note etc.). This in turn can reduce the comparative price and principal value. The second kind of risk is credit risk, which is usually identified by credit ratings assigned by large credit rating companies such as Moody’s (MCO) or Standard and Poor’s. The ratings serve as a way of categorizing and quantifying varying degrees of creditworthiness when comparing the current financial condition of any bond issuer. Credit risk is generally reflected by the amount of yield differential perceived as adequate enough to compensate the investor for the increased risk of owning a lower rated bond. Some bonds pay bond insurance companies for insurance, which offers the investor increased assurance as to payment of principal and interest. This is not an ironclad guarantee, as only a handful of insurance companies play in this space. While this results in a higher credit rating, the underlying credit of the insurer comes into play. Boomer: What determines the price of a bond? Offenberg: Many factors determine a bond’s current price. The primary considerations are coupon (the fixed rate of interest at time of issue), maturity date and credit rating. These factors combine to establish a general yield range that a bond trader is willing to pay to buy/position the bonds. Another factor that comes into play is principal amount. Odd-lots—usually anything under one million dollars face value—are generally subject to greater mark-up or mark-down (in the case of selling), than round or institutional lots. Additionally, supply and demand for a particular bond and the size of the client can affect the bid or offer price. Most bond levels are expressed in yield (e.g. 3.65 yield to maturity), and in the spread in interest rates over a U.S. Treasury bond having a similar maturity. The resulting yield or rate is then calculated and expressed as a dollar price. Boomer: What are the tax advantages in purchasing bonds? Offenberg: Interest on all but municipal bonds is federally taxable at an individual’s income tax rate. Municipal bonds, or “tax-exempts,” are exempt from federal tax and usually exempt from state and local taxes if issued in one’s state of residence. Certain U.S. Agency bonds such as the Federal Farm Credit Bank (FFCB) or the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) are tax advantaged and exempt from state income tax. Of course, for any bond held in a 401(k) or an IRA, interest is not taxed. Boomer: How is my financial advisor compensated on my purchase of bonds? Offenberg: Financial advisors are generally compensated in one of two ways. A fee-based schedule, where the advisor or RIA (Registered Investment Advisor) charges the client a percentage of value of assets under management on an annual basis. The other method is a commission-based model where the broker is paid a commission based on the mark-up or amount of spread built into the trade. For stocks, the commission is added to the transaction price. Boomer: How can baby boomers utilize bonds to further ensure their financial security entering retirement? Offenberg: As masses of baby boomers enter their retirement years and begin living on a strict fixed income, they can’t neglect the role of bonds in their portfolios. Bonds can offer steady income streams, less volatility and less principal risk, when compared to the stock market, while also addressing the need for balance and low correlation to the higher risk components of a portfolio. Even in an environment of lower interest rates, bonds can provide significant total returns and in the current period of negligible inflation, real inflation adjusted returns are historically favorable versus nominal rate levels. In my recent article in the Andres Review co-authored with Bob Andres titled “Asset Allocation for Baby Boomers,” we offer additional financial and lifestyle motivation for baby boomers to use bonds as a way of building wealth. www.foxbusiness.com/investing/2015/10/28/bond-basics-and-fed/?cmpid=prn_dailyfinance
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Post by vulcanized crawler on Oct 29, 2015 7:16:07 GMT -5
babyboomers....invest in lottery tickets
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Post by 3bid on Oct 29, 2015 23:54:21 GMT -5
Has It Become Impossible to Prosecute White-Collar Crime? Financial crimes might be too complicated to take to trial. by Sheelah Kolhatkar October 21, 2015 For close watchers of the interactions between the Justice Department and the financial industry, the mistrial in the Dewey & LeBoeuf case was about more than just the fact that a handful of jurors were too overwhelmed by the evidence presented to reach a verdict. The mistrial, after a four months in court and 22 days of deliberations, hints at a much deeper problem: Perhaps most financial crime has reached a level of such complexity that it's beyond the reach of the law. Since the financial crisis sent the economy into a spiral, leading to millions of lost jobs and foreclosed homes, there have been public cries to see bankers responsible for the frauds underpinning the crisis put in jail. This would have fit with the pattern of how things have gone since the beginning of time: Booms and bubbles led to market collapses and crises, followed by the tightening of regulations and criminal prosecutions. In the case of 2008, however, the crackdown never really came. Only one high-level banker went to prison, and the Justice Department pursued enormous multi-billion-dollar civil penalties against big banks, rather than charges against individuals. The U.S. attorney general, the Security and Exchange Commission, Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and others have taken enormous amounts of criticism for this. Still, several years later, many high profile attempts to charge financial criminals have failed, raising the question of whether the crimes themselves have evolved to a point where the resources designed to combat them are hopelessly out of sync. Putting aside the question as to whether the Dewey & LeBoef fraud case was a wise one to bring, reports suggest that jurors were overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of the evidence they were asked to consider, which led to the deadlock. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has also suffered losses in a handful of other financial cases, one involving mortgage fraud at tiny Abacus Bank in Chinatown and another involving a former Goldman Sachs programmer. In 2009, two Bear Stearns hedge fund managers were acquitted after being charged with lying to investors about their holdings in dicey mortgage securities; jurors seemed to have little grasp of what the defendants had done. More recently, the Supreme Court declined to revisit an appeals court decision in an insider trading case, which effectively means that trading on material nonpublic information is legal in New York, so long as the person trading on it doesn't know too much about circumstances surrounding the source of the information. The Justice Department acknowledged that things haven't been going too well in this area when it released new guidelines in September for prosecuting corporate crime. One of the key changes, it said, would be that the department would focus more on individual financial criminals. There's nothing wrong with bringing an ambitious case to trial and losing. But the pattern suggests that law enforcement may have lost the ability to choose the right cases, or that it lacks the expertise to try them in a courtroom in a way that makes sense to jurors, many drawn from the ranks of working people who must struggle to understand the vast, mind-boggling modern financial system. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/has-it-become-impossible-to-prosecute-white-collar-crime-
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Post by 3bid on Oct 31, 2015 3:43:17 GMT -5
First They Jailed Bankers, Now Every Icelander to Get Paid in Bank Sale
October 30, 2015
First, Iceland jailed its crooked bankers for their direct involvement in the financial crisis of 2008. Now, every Icelander will receive a payout for the sale of one of its three largest banks, Íslandsbanki.
If Finance Minister Bjarni Benediktsson has his way — and he likely will — Icelanders will be paid kr 30,000 after the government takes over ownership of the bank. Íslandsbanki would be second of the three largest banks under State proprietorship.
“I am saying that the government take some decided portion, 5%, and simply hand it over to the people of this country,” he stated.
Because Icelanders took control of their government, they effectively own the banks. Benediktsson believes this will bring foreign capital into the country and ultimately fuel the economy — which, incidentally, remains the only European nation to recover fully from the 2008 crisis. Iceland even managed to pay its outstanding debt to the IMF in full — in advance of the due date.
Guðlaugur Þór Þórðarson, Budget Committee vice chairperson, explained the move would facilitate the lifting of capital controls, though he wasn’t convinced State ownership would be the ideal solution. Former Finance Minister Steingrímur J. Sigfússon sided with Þórðarson, telling a radio show, “we shouldn’t lose the banks to the hands of fools” and that Iceland would benefit from a shift in focus to separate “commercial banking from investment banking.”
Plans haven’t yet been firmly set for when the takeover and subsequent payments to every person in the country will occur, but Iceland’s revolutionary approach to dealing with the international financial meltdown of 2008 certainly deserves every bit of the attention it’s garnered.
Iceland recently jailed its 26th banker — with 74 years of prison time amongst them — for causing the financial chaos. Meanwhile, U.S. banking criminals were rewarded for their fraud and market manipulation with an enormous bailout at the taxpayer’s expense.
www.activistpost.com/2015/10/first-they-jailed-the-bankers-now-every-icelander-to-get-paid-in-bank-sale.html
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Post by imSINGLEruRICH on Nov 2, 2015 15:50:27 GMT -5
I sincerely hope this has everything to do with a certain investment of which this author has probably never heard of. MH www.markethingych.com/story/this-very-day-will-decide-whether-youll-be-rich-or-poor-in-the-future-2015-11-02?dist=lcountdownOpinion: This very day will decide whether you’ll be rich or poor in the future
It has everything to do with the first trading day in NovemberGood morning. Welcome to Monday. Today is actually a very big day for you, and this week is a very big week. But I’ll bet nobody else told you. So brush your teeth, wake the kids, walk the dog and drink your coffee. And get ready for a heads-up. If history is any guide, a couple of financial decisions you make this week are going to have an outsized influence on whether you die rich or broke. Hardly anybody talks about this. And so hardly any members of the public realize it. Yes, April 15 is an important day in the financial calendar. And yes, so is the end of the tax year on Dec. 31. But the first working day of November is also huge. Possibly the biggest of all. And yet is passes silently without any discussion at all. Why is it so important? For two simple, and related, reasons. First, because pretty much any investment gains you’re going to make on your retirement savings over the course of your life are going to come from the stock market. And, second, because pretty much all of those gains are going to come from the stock market between Nov. 1 and April 30. As a result, how you position your portfolio at the start of November each year has almost always ended up making a gigantic difference to your future fortune. Those who made sure each year around this time that they had enough money in stocks ended up making big gains over time. Those who didn’t ... didn’t. Caviar or cat food? Today’s the day. There is some dispute about the numbers, but none about the overall direction of the result. The best estimates argue that over the long term, stocks have beaten bonds, cash and deposits by an average of about 4 to 5 percentage points a year. Compounded over time, that has amounted to an enormous difference. After 30 years, someone who invested in stocks has often ended up with three times as much money as someone who kept it all in cash and bonds. Meanwhile, those gains have typically all come during the winter months. Peculiar, but apparently true. The most recent academic study, which has looked at stock markets around the world and went back in some cases more than 100 years, has found that winter has beaten summer pretty consistently in almost every country and almost every period. On average, the winter months have beaten the summer by a factor of about three. Or, to put it another way: During the winter half of the year, global stocks have typically beaten bonds by about 5 percentage points a year … but during the summer months, stocks have done worse than bonds by about 1 percentage point. There are two caveats. The first is that all this assumes that history is a guide to the future. It may not be. The future may look completely different from the past. However, the research cited above does not make the usual mistake of relying on 30 or 40 years of data from one country only, namely the U.S. It is all based on a century or more’s data, from countries around the world. That’s a pretty big sample. The second caveat is that although stocks have traditionally beaten bonds, the amount of outperformance has varied enormously based on how expensive stocks (and bonds) were at the time. Those who bought stocks when they were cheap — such as in the 1950s and 1980s — made a fortune. Those who bought them when they were expensive — such as in the 1960s, and arguably now — did less well. I remain cautious on the outlook for U.S. stocks at this point. The question of how much any of us should have in the stock market is more complex. For those near or in retirement, or those who have imminent financial needs, the allocation rules are different than they are for those trying to accumulate savings over the long term. But for the long-term investor, probably the most useful single piece of financial research I’ve ever encountered is from British financial consultant Andrew Smithers, who conducted a study a decade ago on behalf of a Cambridge University endowment. Smithers, who is extremely cautious by temperament and the opposite of a stock market cheerleader, concluded after a study of financial history that a long-term investor who wants an easy life should keep 80% of their money in stocks and 20% in short-term bonds or cash. That simple ratio, he argued, produced the best trade-off between return and risk over time. Yes, those who were financially sophisticated could add some value to that, he said. When stocks were cheap on certain key measures, investors should allocate more than 80%, and when they were expensive, investors should allocate somewhat less. But at no point should the long-term investor hold less than 60% of the portfolio in equities, he said. It should be added that based on his metrics, U.S. equities are very expensive right now. But many overseas markets aren’t. The investor who wants a simple life should hold a truly global equity portfolio, including European, Japanese and emerging market stocks as well as U.S. stocks. Putting all this together: If history is any guide, you should log on to your online brokerage account today, or at least this week. And if you are trying to save for a retirement that is more than five years away, you should make sure that your portfolio is at least 60% allocated to global stocks, even if you’re nervous about the market, and more if you aren’t.
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