Bij toeval zag ik dat er bij mijn bank een, ooit in 1985, afgesloten lijfrenteverzekering afloopt. Op 13 december 2010.
Bij toeval. Een mooi woord.
Behalve als het om geld incasseren gaat.
Dus loop ik mijn bank binnen en wijs een dame in een gestroomlijnd bankpak op deze feestelijke gebeurtenis.

Dame weet van niets. Uiteraard niet. Banken weten nooit van iets. Daar staan ze om bekend. Behalve als het om grove initimiderende brieven schrijven gaat, naar klanten die een beetje rood staan. Dat kunnen ze dan weer wel heel goed.
Ze doet iets met een computer en haalt mijn gegevens op: “O, ja, u heeft gelijk. Heeft u daar geen bericht van gehad?”

“Nee, ik krijg alleen berichten als ik rood sta.”
“Hmm, heeft u de polis bij u?”
“Nee. Nou ja, het zit zo. Normaal gesproken loop ik al sinds 1985 met die polis in mijn binnenzak maar vorige week was ik met mijn tandarts op de schietbaan. Dat doen wij elke maand. Lekker op de schietbaan staan en luisteren naar inslaande projectielen. Heerlijk hoe je daar van opknapt. Hoe dan ook, mijn polis is daar toen bij ingeschoten.”
Dame kijkt opgelucht. (more…)

It really doesn’t matter what you feed the Fox public, Americans just keep on watching that propaganda network.

Fox Business was overjoyed yesterday by the news that Wall Street had done so well in 2010 and kept going on 2011′s first day of trading. Host Neil Cavuto explains why things are so good in the stockmarket. “As we start off a new year, it’s time to recognize a familiar historic fact,” Cavuto boasted with glee. “When you cut taxes, good things happen.”
So let’s look at the picture that was shown in the background on Fox Business.
The U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate among any of the four countries listed (even though the effective tax rate is much lower), yet the U.S. stock performance increased 11 percent in 2010. In fact the two countries with the lowest corporate tax rate did worse than the two countries with the highest rate.

The debt situation in Europe is deteriorating. Inflation threatens to derail emerging-market economies. And the U.S. faces a potential time bomb with its own sizable debt.
Yet in the face of all these hazards, the stock market is hitting two-year highs and investors are feeling more bullish than they have in years. Even the market’s “fear gauge” is trading near its lowest levels since April, indicating a lack of worry among professional options traders.
“The rally we’ve seen since the end of August has been more or less a straight line,” says Jeffrey Palma, a strategist at UBS. “Given some of the uncertainties in the world, it seems pretty tough to believe that we can hold sustained levels of low volatility through the next year.” (WallStreetJournal)

Oil is back above $90 a barrel. Copper and cotton have hit record highs. Wheat and corn prices are way up. Over all, world commodity prices have risen by a quarter in the past six months.
So what’s the meaning of this surge?
Is it speculation run amok? Is it the result of excessive money creation, a harbinger of runaway inflation just around the corner? No and no.
What the commodity markets are telling us is that we’re living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of emerging economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw materials, pushing up their prices. And America is, for the most part, just a bystander in this story. (Paul Krugman, New York Times)

It’s a measure of how rapidly our economic order has shifted that nearly a quarter of the 400 wealthiest people in America on this year’s Forbes list make their fortunes from financial services, more than three times as many as in the first Forbes 400 in 1982.
Many of America’s best young minds now invent derivatives, not Disneylands, because that’s where the action has been, and still is, two years after the crash.
In 2010, our system incentivizes high-stakes gambling — “this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place,” as Calvin Trillin memorably wrote last year — rather than the rebooting and rebuilding of America.
(Frank Rich, The New York Times)

Weet u het nog? Pieter Lakeman riep vorig jaar Nederlanders op hun geld van hun rekeningen van de DSB Bank te halen. De bank moest failliet, meende hij. Hij kreeg zijn zin. Arnout Boot, hoogleraar financiële markten, noemde Lakemans actie ‘onverantwoordelijk, stompzinnig en buiten proportie’.
Duizenden mensen verloren hun baan, en vele duizenden mensen verloren hun geld dat op een rekening van de DSB Bank stond. Sterker nog, ook de mensen die Lakeman vertegenwoordigde namens de Stichting Hypotheekleed raakten veel geld kwijt door het faillisement. Bij een failliet bedrijf is altijd minder te halen dan bij een werkend bedrijf.
Nu wil de Nederlandse regering per wet het oproepen tot een bankrun strafbaar maken, met vier jaar gevangenis. Ik ben dus niet de enige die vindt dat Lakeman eigenlijk had moeten worden opgesloten.

Netherlands Plans to Make Call for Bank Run a Criminal Offense‎

Bloomberg - The Dutch government says it studying a law that would make it a crime to call publicly for a run on a bank.
The move stems from the abrupt October 2009 collapse of DSB Bank NV. The regional Dutch bank was facing claims it overcharged mortgage clients, when a well-respected industry commentator called for all retail clients to pull their deposits. [read on] (more…)

Nobelprize winning economist Paul Krugman has a column in the New York Times and he’s great. Though he must be disheartened sometimes because whatever he writes, and how correct he has been in the past, it doesn’t seem to matter much in the U.S. Money matters, not knowledge.
Still he’s trying to beat back the people whose policies helped to almost destroy the world’s biggest economy when George W. Bush was president. The amazing fact is that in the United States the people responsible for the meltdown in the first place haven’t been shunned. Instead they are leading the charge to keep things they way they are or if possible to make them worse.

Krugman - First, there was a widely spread housing bubble, not just in the United States, but in Ireland, Spain, and other countries as well. This bubble was inflated by irresponsible lending, made possible both by bank deregulation and the failure to extend regulation to “shadow banks,” which weren’t covered by traditional regulation but nonetheless engaged in banking activities and created bank-type risks.
Then the bubble burst, with hugely disruptive consequences. It turned out that Wall Street had created a web of interconnection nobody understood, so that the failure of Lehman Brothers, a medium-size investment bank, could threaten to take down the whole world financial system.
It’s a straightforward story, but a story that the Republican members of the commission don’t want told. Literally…read on

Crooks and Liars - In another column called When Zombies Win, he highlights the fact that all the people responsible for the meltdown in the first place haven’t been shunned, but instead are leading the charge to only make things worse. Simply f*&king amazing.
[read on] (more…)

Where is the gratitude? They should be kissing President Obama’s feet in stead of gearing up hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat him in the 2012 presidential election. Stop whining about “regulatory uncertainty” and other such bullshit. The reality:

American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or non-inflation-adjusted terms.
Corporate profits have been going gangbusters for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history.

Does anyone actually have data showing that giving millionaires tax breaks creates jobs? I’ve never seen actual data about that, but being a millionaire myself I can assure you it won’t. Most of the money just goes to Wall Street or any other stockexchange in the world where rich people know they can make money with money.
Warren Buffet is one of many rich people - like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, George Soros - who think that the really really wealthy people should pay their fair share of taxes. Here he is talking to Christiane Amanpour about allowing the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy to expire:

“If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further,” Buffett said. “But I think that people at the high end — people like myself — should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.”
[read on] (more…)

Does anyone actually have data showing that giving millionaires tax breaks creates jobs?
Well, I’ve never seen actually data about that but being a millionaire myself I can assure you it won’t. Most of the money just goes to Wall Street or any other stock-exchange where rich people know they can make money with money.

Does anyone actually have data showing that giving millionaires tax breaks creates jobs? How many jobs would that be? For all those who claim that it is so, please provide the data so we can have an honest discussion about it.
You know, what we in the old days used to call “facts” to back up the argument that we need to bail out the rich because they need to get richer because “everyone knows” that what follows is jobs (aka “trickle-down theory” or Reaganomics).
Really? If it worked so well, where are the jobs now?
(Greg Dworkin - Politico)

inflation - by pavel constantin, romania

Science Daily: At the current pace of research and development, global oil will run out 90 years before replacement technologies are ready, says a new University of California, Davis, study based on stock market expectations. The forecast was published online on Nov. 8 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. It is based on the theory that long-term investors are good predictors of whether and when new energy technologies will become commonplace.
“Our results suggest it will take a long time before renewable replacement fuels can be self-sustaining, at least from a market perspective,” said study author Debbie Niemeier, a UC Davis professor of civil and environmental engineering.

How bad is ’socialist’ President Barack Obama and his Democratic Congress for business in the United States of America? Well this bad:

U.S. corporations are on track for the biggest earnings growth in 22 years and the stock market is headed for its best back-to- back annual gains since 2004.

Bloomberg: Investors are evenly split over their overall impression of the president, though 62 percent of those in the U.S. view him negatively. Worldwide, 63 percent of all respondents say his policies are detrimental to the U.S. investment climate. That number increases to 68 percent among U.S. investors, even though the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has risen more than 43 percent since Obama was inaugurated in January 2009 and corporate profits have rebounded almost to the pre-recession peak reached in 2006.

Nederland is na Luxemburg het rijkste land van Europa wat betreft inkomen per inwoner. Bij elkaar hebben de 500 rijksten van Nederland een vermogen van 135.588.000.000 euro, volgens Quote is dat nog altijd 10 miljoen minder dan in 2008. Willen jullie er ook bijhoren?

Find smart friends (1), be a cheap charlie (2), inherit money (3), ignore the rules (4) and don’t read how to get rich tips (5)!

*Live near smart people and make them your friends. The most valuable resource in the 21st century is brains. The more, the better. Smart money follows smart people.
[read on] (more…)

Forbes 400: The super-rich get richer…

Rank Name Citizenship Age Net Worth ($bil) Residence

1 Carlos Slim Helu & family Mexico 70 53.5 Mexico
2 William Gates III United States 54 53.0 United States
3 Warren Buffett United States 79 47.0 United States
4 Mukesh Ambani India 52 29.0 India
5 Lakshmi Mittal India 59 28.7 United Kingdom
6 Lawrence Ellison United States 65 28.0 United States
7 Bernard Arnault France 61 27.5 France
8 Eike Batista Brazil 53 27.0 Brazil
9 Amancio Ortega Spain 74 25.0 Spain
10 Karl Albrecht Germany 90 23.5 Germany
11 Ingvar Kamprad & family Sweden 83 23.0 Switzerland
12 Christy Walton & family United States 55 22.5 United States
13 Stefan Persson Sweden 62 22.4 Sweden
14 Li Ka-shing Hong Kong 81 21.0 Hong Kong
15 Jim Walton United States 62 20.7 United States
16 Alice Walton United States 60 20.6 United States
17 Liliane Bettencourt France 87 20.0 France
18 S. Robson Walton United States 66 19.8 United States
19 Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud Saudi Arabia 55 19.4 Saudi Arabia
20 David Thomson & family Canada 52 19.0 Canada
21 Michael Otto & family Germany 66 18.7 Germany
22 Lee Shau Kee Hong Kong 82 18.5 Hong Kong
23 Michael Bloomberg United States 68 18.0 United States
24 Sergey Brin United States 36 17.5 United States
24 Charles Koch United States 74 17.5 United States
24 David Koch United States 69 17.5 United States
24 Larry Page United States 37 17.5 United States
28 Michele Ferrero & family Italy 83 17.0 Monaco
28 Kwok family Hong Kong NA 17.0 Hong Kong
28 Azim Premji India 64 17.0 India
31 Theo Albrecht Germany 88 16.7 Germany
32 Vladimir Lisin Russia 53 15.8 Russia
33 Steven Ballmer United States 54 14.5 United States
33 Robert Kuok Malaysia 86 14.5 Hong Kong
35 George Soros United States 79 14.0 United States
36 Anil Ambani India 50 13.7 India
37 Paul Allen United States 57 13.5 United States
37 Michael Dell United States 45 13.5 United States
39 Mikhail Prokhorov Russia 44 13.4 Russia
40 Birgit Rausing & family Sweden 86 13.0 Switzerland
40 Shashi & Ravi Ruia India 66 13.0 India
42 Mikhail Fridman Russia 45 12.7 Russia
43 Jeffrey Bezos United States 46 12.3 United States
44 Savitri Jindal India 60 12.2 India
45 Donald Bren United States 77 12.0 United States
45 Gerald Cavendish G. United Kingdom 58 12.0 United Kingdom
45 John Paulson United States 54 12.0 United States
48 Abigail Johnson United States 48 11.5 United States
48 Jorge Paulo Lemann Brazil 70 11.5 Brazil
50 Roman Abramovich Russia 43 11.2 Russia
51 Warhoofd Goirle, Brabant 64 11,1 Nederland

See here the fifty richest Americans…
[read on] (more…)

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, “The Great Recession” is finally over. It lasted a year-and-a-half and ended some 15 months ago. The offical end of the recession only marks the bottom. How long it will take to completely climb out is anyone’s guess, with some forecasters putting it as far away as 2014.
The National Bureau of Economic Research has declared that the 2007 recession ended in June 2009. The NBER always delays its announcements of the beginnings and ends of recessions until data in this regard are clear.

President Obama on the Rage of the Rich: “Now, you know, I have been amused over the last couple years, this sense of somehow me beating up on Wall Street. I think most folks on Main Street feel like they got beat up on. … There’s — there’s a big chunk of the country that thinks that I have been too soft on Wall Street. That’s probably the majority, not the minority.”

Obama To Hedge Fund Manager Who Complains Of Being ‘Whacked’

Today, President Obama participated in a live CNBC townhall event. Recently, Obama has been feeling the “rage of the rich,” as Paul Krugman describes it today. One top Wall Street executive recently compared Obama’s tax proposals to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. During today’s discussion, Anthony Scaramucci, a CNBC contributor who is also a hedge fund manager, stood up to represent the aggrieved “Wall Street community.”
[read on] (more…)

Het financieel-economische systeem, dat tegenwoordig wereldwijd heilig is, is bedacht in Nederland. Het leverde ons de Gouden Eeuw op, plus de eerste en allergrootste multinationale onderneming die er ooit in de wereld heeft bestaan, de VOC.
Er is weer een aandeel in de VOC te koop. Dat is groot nieuws, tot in China aan toe.

World’s oldest stock certificate found in Netherlands

The Hague, (Xinhua) — An old note Dutch history student Ruben Schalk found in the West Fries Archive in Hoorn of the Netherlands is identified as hitherto the oldest share in the world, the archive said on Thursday. This share in the Dutch East India Company is dated Sept. 9, 1606, which was issued three weeks before what had been the oldest known share in the corporation. The Archive said that the holder of this share was Pieter Harmenz and the share is worth 150 guilders.
[read on] (more…)

by arend van dam

Zie ook dit verhaal, mei 21st - Ze krijgen een keer gelijk maar je hebt er geen zak aan!

Eén zo’n goeroe is de Amerikaanse tv-presentator Glenn Beck in wiens geraaskal dankzij Fox News zo’n 30 procent van rechts Amerika gelooft. Hij wordt betaald door het frauduleuze goudbedrijf Goldline. Hij promoot het bedrijf schaamteloos in zijn show waar Goldline ook nog eens adverteert. Zijn truc is van alle tijden. Hij maakt domme Amerikanen bang (Barack Obama has ‘a deep seated hatred for white people’) en lokt vervolgens de arme schapen zijn kerk binnen: Goldline.

Crooks and Liars - California officials have opened an investigation into Goldline, the stalwart Glenn Beck Show advertiser, favorite of Mick Huckabee and other apocalyptic types. ABC’s Nightline picked right up on it and did a report tonight.
This idea of buying gold in tough financial times isn’t new. What is new is the high-profile pimping of it on cable news. Not only in ads, but as part of the message like Glenn Beck’s “God, Gold and Guns”. Using typical scare tactics, Beck recommends buying gold as a hedge against the government’s ultimate financial armageddon.
Goldline’s business is simple: They buy and sell precious metals, specializing in numismatic gold coins. Investigators are looking specifically at whether Goldline International misrepresents pricing policies on its collectible coins, inflating them when they’re purchased and deflating them when they’re sold. [read on] (more…)

Vlak voor de Grote Depressie was in de Verenigde Staten het deel van het nationale inkomen dat naar de rijkste 1 procent ging met 23,9 procent heel groot. Vervolgens daalde dat door regeringsbeleid. In de jaren tachtig begon met name onder president Reagan de kloof tussen arm en rijk weer groter te worden. En onder de Republikeinse president Bush kwam deze weer uit op het niveau van 1928. De rijkste 1 procent kreeg in 2007 23,5 procent van het Amerikaanse nationale inkomen.

Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation’s total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America’s total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.
- Robert Reich in Unjust Spoils, The Nation, July 19, 2010

DailyKos - Despite sweetheart settlements with the likes of Goldman-Sachs, the United States is plagued by corporadoes whose premises should be surrounded, Michael Moore-style, with yellow police tape for class war-crimes. [read on] (more…)

C&L - After 18 months, Wall Street reform is on its way to the President’s desk. The Senate invoked cloture by a vote of 60-38 and the final conference committee report passed by the same margin. A good summary of the key provisions can be found here.
Even before the final passage, Minority Leader John Boehner (R) called for its repeal. “I think it ought to be repealed. I think it is going to make credit harder for the American people to get.”
Here is a list of Boehner’s 1,299,120 reasons why repeal appeals to him. Draw your own conclusions. Reactions from around the blogs: Continue»

Thom Hartmann talked to author Frederick Kaufman about his cover story in this month’s edition of Harper’s Magazine The food bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it. It’s subscription only but you can read more about Kaufman and his work at his blog AmericanStomach.com.

Hartmann: “The history of food took an ominous turn in 1991, at a time when no one was paying much attention. That was the year Goldman Sachs decided our daily bread might make an excellent investment.”
And then towards the end of the story, just a couple of sentences here. “Bankers had taken control of the world’s food, money chased money and a billion people went hungry.” Remember the food riots of a couple of years ago around the world?
“The world wide price of food had risen by 80% between 2005 and 2008 and unlike other food catastrophes in the last half century or so, the United States was not insulated from this one.” Could it be because it was our banksters that were doing it?
“As 49 million Americans found themselves unable to put a full meal on the table, one in five kids came to be dependent on food kitchens. In Los Angeles nearly a million people went hungry. In Detroit, armed guards had to watch over grocery stores.” And then the question, “Could this happen again?”

Too bad our “mainstream media” isn’t touching this one. As they noted during the interview, it looks like there’s nothing that these bankers won’t exploit to make a buck. Really disgusting. And all we’ve got going on in the United States is some half-baked sorry excuse for “reform”.

LONDON - A full-fledged disintegration of the eurozone would trigger the worst economic crisis in modern history, devastate every country in Europe including Germany, and inflict a deflationary shock on the United States. There would be no winners, warns the Dutch bank ING in a new report, Quantifying the Unthinkable.
[read on] (more…)

DailyKos - Nouriel Roubini, the economist and founder of Roubini Global Economics, has yet to join the growing but far from unanimous chorus saying a double-dip recession may be in the offing. On the other hand, he isn’t exactly optimistic. The guy known as “Doctor Doom” - who in 2006 prophesied the massive hit the U.S. economy would eventually take (to a barrage of ridicule from experts who didn’t predict the recession until well after it was under way) - told CNBC today:
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