Nomi Prins: The Empire Expands (Not The American One; Trump’s)

Tomgram: Nomi Prins, All in the Family Trump:

President Trump, his children and their spouses, aren’t just using the Oval Office to augment their political legacy or secure future riches. Okay, they certainly are doing that, but that’s not the most useful way to think about what’s happening at the moment. Everything will make more sense if you reimagine the White House as simply the newest branch of the Trump family business empire, its latest outpost.

It turns out that the voters who cast their ballots for Donald Trump, the patriarch, got a package deal for his whole clan.  That would include, of course, first daughter Ivanka who, along with her husband, Jared Kushner, is now a key political adviser to the president of the United States.  Both now have offices in the White House close to him.  They have multiple security clearances, access to high-level leaders whenever they visit the Oval Office or Mar-a-Lago, and the perfect formula for the sort of brand-enhancement that now seems to come with such eminence. President Trump may have an exceedingly “flexible” attitude toward policymaking generally, but in one area count on him to be stalwart and immobile: his urge to run the White House like a business, a family business.

The ways that Jared, “senior adviser to the president,” and Ivanka, “assistant to the president,” have already benefited from their links to “Dad” in the first 100 days of his presidency stagger the imagination. Ivanka’s company, for instance, won three new trademarks for its products from China on the very day she dined with President Xi Jinping at her father’s Palm Beach club.

Read moreNomi Prins: The Empire Expands (Not The American One; Trump’s)

Nomi Prins Warns Financial Crash From Epic Debt, Asset Bubbles “Possible In Last Quarter 2017”

Nomi Prins Warns Financial Crash From Epic Debt, Asset Bubbles “Possible In Last Quarter 2017”:

Could there be a crash coming in 2017? Will increasing interest rates at the Federal Reserve trigger the beginning of the end?

It is possible, but not certain.

It will fall, perhaps, after a new sense of normal sets in, and some become comfortable with the change in leadership, and accustomed to drowning out the opposition yelling noisily from the other side. Expectations have been set for a growing economy, fresh infrastructure and new hopes for the average worker.

But getting too comfortable would be a huge mistake. All that could prove to be a mirage. And things could come crashing down.

Read moreNomi Prins Warns Financial Crash From Epic Debt, Asset Bubbles “Possible In Last Quarter 2017”

Nomi Prins: Crony Capitalism & Corruption – An Entirely Rigged Political-Financial System

nomi-prins

Nomi Prins: Crony Capitalism & Corruption – An Entirely Rigged Political-Financial System:

I think you would do well to watch this video below.

Too big to fail is a seven-year phenomenon created by the most powerful central banks to bolster the largest, most politically connected US and European banks. More than that, it’s a global concern predicated on that handful of private banks controlling too much market share and elite central banks infusing them with boatloads of cheap capital and other aid.

Synthetic bank and market subsidization disguised as ‘monetary policy’ has spawned artificial asset and debt bubbles – everywhere. The most rapacious speculative capital and associated risk flows from these power-players to the least protected, or least regulated, locales.

Read moreNomi Prins: Crony Capitalism & Corruption – An Entirely Rigged Political-Financial System

Nomi Prins: The Sinister Evolution Of Our Modern Banking System

nomi_prins

Nomi Prins: The Sinister Evolution Of Our Modern Banking System (PeakProsperity, Jan 31, 2015):

Because we’re all about those banks, ’bout those banks…

I quit Wall Street and decided that it was time to talk more about what was going on inside it, as it had changed. It had become far more sinister and far more dangerous.

~ Nomi Prins

Today, the ‘revolving door’ connecting our political and financial systems is evident to anyone with eyes. But this entwined relationship between Washington DC and Wall Street is nothing new, predating even the formation of the Federal Reserve.

To chronicle the evolution to where we find ourselves today, we welcome Nomi Prins, Wall Street veteran turned financial industry reformist, and author of the excellent expose All The Presidents Bankers.

Read moreNomi Prins: The Sinister Evolution Of Our Modern Banking System

Former Goldman Banker Reveals The Path To The Next Depression And Stock Market Collapse

From the article:

“Yet, our political-financial system has gone from the dysfunctional to the failed to the surreal. Speculation, once left to individuals and investors, is now federally sponsored, subsidized and institutionalized.  When this sham finally buckles and the next shoe falls and rates do eventually rise, the stock market will tank, liquidity will die, and the broader economy will plunge into a worse Depression than before. We are not there yet because of these coordinated moves and the political force behind them. But we are on a precarious path to that inevitability. “


QE isn’t dying, it’s morphing (Nomi Prins, Nov 10, 2014):

A funny thing happened on the way to the ‘end’ of the multi-trillion dollar bond buying program known as QE – the Fed chronicles. Aside from the shift to a globalization of QE via the European Central Bank (ECB) and Bank of Japan (BOJ) as I wrote about earlier, what lingers in the air of “post-taper” time is an absence of absence. For QE is not over. Instead, in the United States, the process has simply morphed from being predominantly executed by the Federal Reserve (Fed) to being executed by its major private bank members. Fed Chair, Janet Yellen, has failed to point this out in any of her speeches about the labor force, inflation, or inequality.

Read moreFormer Goldman Banker Reveals The Path To The Next Depression And Stock Market Collapse

Matt Taibbi: Secrets And Lies Of The Bailout (Rolling Stone)

Secrets and Lies of the Bailout (Rolling Stone, Jan 4, 2013):

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

Read moreMatt Taibbi: Secrets And Lies Of The Bailout (Rolling Stone)

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts And Nomi Prins: The Real Libor Scandal

The Real Libor Scandal ~ Paul Craig Roberts and Nomi Prins (Paul Craig Roberts, July 14, 2012):

According to news reports, UK banks fixed the London interbank borrowing rate (Libor) with the complicity of the Bank of England (UK central bank) at a low rate in order to obtain a cheap borrowing cost. The way this scandal is playing out is that the banks benefitted from borrowing at these low rates. Whereas this is true, it also strikes us as simplistic and as a diversion from the deeper, darker scandal.

Banks are not the only beneficiaries of lower Libor rates. Debtors (and investors) whose floating or variable rate loans are pegged in some way to Libor also benefit. One could argue that by fixing the rate low, the banks were cheating themselves out of interest income, because the effect of the low Libor rate is to lower the interest rate on customer loans, such as variable rate mortgages that banks possess in their portfolios. But the banks did not fix the Libor rate with their customers in mind. Instead, the fixed Libor rate enabled them to improve their balance sheets, as well as help to perpetuate the regime of low interest rates. The last thing the banks want is a rise in interest rates that would drive down the values of their holdings and reveal large losses masked by rigged interest rates.

Read moreDr. Paul Craig Roberts And Nomi Prins: The Real Libor Scandal

Author Nomi Prins: The Corporate Mugging of America

1 of 2:

Added: 3. February 2011

2 of 2:

Added: 3. February 2011