Daily Archives: September 29, 2013

The JP Morgan apologists of CNBC

By Felix Salmon SEPTEMBER 29, 2013

I don’t know which producer at CNBC had the genius idea of asking Alex Pareene on to discuss Jamie Dimon with Dimon’s biggest cheerleaders, but the result was truly great television. What’s more, as Kevin Roose says, it illustrates “the divide between the finance media bubble and the normals” in an uncommonly stark and compelling manner.

The whole segment is well worth watching, but the tone is perfectly set at the very beginning:

Maria Bartiromo: Alex, to you first. Legal problems aside, JP Morgan remains one of the best, if not the best performing major bank in the world today. You believe the leader of that bank should step down?

Alex Pareene: I think that any time you’re looking at the greatest fine in the history of Wall Street regulation, it’s really worth asking should this guy stay in his job. In any other industry — I can’t think of another industry. If you managed a restaurant, and it got the biggest health department fine in the history of restaurants, no one would say “Yeah, but the restaurant’s making a lot of money. There’s only a little bit of poison in the food.”

This is a very strong point by Pareene — and it’s a point which was well taken by Barclays. When the UK bank was fined $450 million last year for its role in the Libor scandal, its CEO duly resigned. After all, a $450 million fine is prima facie evidence that the CEO really isn’t in control of his bank.

But $450 million is a rounding error with respect to the kind of fines that Dimon is now talking about paying — $4 billion, $11 billion, $20 billion, who knows where this will stop. Tim Fernholz has a good roundup of all the various things that JP Morgan is in trouble for; Libor manipulation is at #5 on his list of seven oustanding investigations — on top of another four settled investigations. If Libor manipulation alone was enough to mean the end of Bob Diamond, it’s hard to see how Jamie Dimon should be able to survive this tsunami of litigation.

Unless, it seems, you work for CNBC. In which case you just ignore Pareene’s question, and get straight onto the important stuff:

Duff McDonald: It’s preposterous. The stock’s touching a ten-year high. It’s a cash-generating machine.

Maria Bartiromo: Should we talk about the financial strength of JP Morgan? The company continues to churn out tens of billions of dollars in earnings and hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. How do you criticize that?

Read the full article at Reuters

Russia Continues To Increase Its Gold Reserves, The East Accumulating More Gold

Published On: Sun, Sep 29th, 2013 World News | By Robert Herriman Russia and Kazakhstan expanded their gold reserves for an 11th straight month in August as they added 12.7 metric tons, according to a recent Bloomberg report. Image/CIA Russia’s holdings of the precious metal has topped 1,000 tons at 1,015.5 tons, according to the report. In addition, Kazakhstan’s reserves rose 2.5 tons to 134.5 tons…

Jim Grant – The Fed Is A Danger To The U.S. & To The World

With central planners continually shocking investors and creating turmoil in global markets with unprecedented monetary experiments, legendary Jim Grant warned King World News that the Fed poses a great danger not only to the U.S. but also to the world.  Grant also warned, “A lot of the concentration of wealth, it seems to me, is…

Mannarino: Debt Bubble is the Biggest Threat to Humanity

Published on Sep 29, 2013

http://usawatchdog.com/the-economy-is… Gregory Mannarinio of TradersChoice.net thinks, “We do not have an economy that is designed to create wealth. We have an economy that is designed to create debtors.” Mannarino warns, “The bubble in debt is, without a doubt, the greatest threat to humankind. . . . When that bubble bursts, resources will become scarce. We are going to have a loss of life on par with a nuclear exchange.” Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with trader/analyst Gregory Mannarino.

Making Sense of the Modern Republican Party

Jesse Walker|Sep. 29, 2013 1:13 pm Timothy Carney’s new column looks at the GOP’s internal dynamics. Here’s his starting point: To understand the Republican leadership vacuum, consider what’s different today compared to five years ago. The 2010 Citizens United ruling has spawned SuperPACs that offset the power of the political parties and K Street. The Republican earmark…

Goldseek PM End of Week Market Commentary – 9/28/2013

Gold finished Friday up +12.80 on light volume, and silver was up +0.07 to 21.80 also on light volume. The gold/silver ratio rose +0.39 to 61.33. Gold had a pair of stop-running raids to the upside today starting a few hours before the NY open, eventually touching 1345, hitting another high. Ever since breaking 1332…

Max Keiser: “Bill Clinton Is A Cracker!” “I am blacker than Bill Clinton!”

Published on Sep 27, 2013

Watch the full Keiser Report Episode 503http://youtu.be/zQX2sk1CyL4
In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, discuss whether banking bonus outrage is equivalent to the lynching of African Americans in the Deep South and the money, money, money, MONEY! of the ex-Presidents of the United States. In the second half, Max interviews George Galloway, a Member of Parliament, about his documentary film, The Killing of Tony Blair. They also discuss crowd funding democracy with Galloway’s run for Mayor of London.

FOLLOW Max Keiser on Twitter: http://twitter.com/maxkeiser

WATCH all Keiser Report shows here:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=… (E1-E200)
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=… (E201-E400)
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=… (E401-current)

The Organized Crime / Banking At Its Finest Show

Published on Sep 28, 2013

http://www.larsschall.com/2013/09/28/…

In a new edition of their Organized Crime / Banking At Its Finest Show, Canadian financial analyst Rob Kirby and German financial journalist Lars Schall talk about this week’s dismissal by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission of complaints about manipulation of the silver market.

Rob Kirby, who is the publisher of the “Kirby Analytics Newsletter” and a consultant to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (http://www.gata.org/), was born 1960 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He studied Economics at York University in Toronto. Upon completion, he went to work in the Bay Street, the financial district in Toronto. He served on an institutional trading desk for most of the 1980s and right up until 1996. For 11 years he worked at Prebon Yamane, an international inter-dealer broker, and one year at Freedom Bond Brokers (now part of Cantor Fitzgerald). Afterwards he spent two years at Garban Inc., another inter dealer bond brokerage in Toronto. In 2002, he went to work for Investor’s Group, the largest Mutual Fund Company in Canada, and stayed there up until 2004, when he resigned to write about the markets. His website is: http://www.kirbyanalytics.com/. Mr. Kirby lives in Toronto, Canada.

Moderation: Lars Schall

Keiser Report: Lynching America (E503) ft. Galloway

Published on Sep 28, 2013

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, discuss whether banking bonus outrage is equivalent to the lynching of African Americans in the Deep South and the money, money, money, MONEY! of the ex-Presidents of the United States. In the second half, Max interviews George Galloway, a Member of Parliament, about his documentary film, The Killing of Tony Blair. They also discuss crowd funding democracy with Galloway’s run for Mayor of London.

FOLLOW Max Keiser on Twitter: http://twitter.com/maxkeiser

WATCH all Keiser Report shows here:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=… (E1-E200)
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=… (E201-E400)
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=… (E401-current)