Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Financial transactions tax in Europe given go-ahead


EU ministers have given the go ahead for 11 eurozone members, including France and Germany, to prepare a new financial transactions tax.
The approval under "enhanced co-operation" rules allows the smaller group to pioneer the tax.
Governments previously failed to agree to impose the tax across the entire 27-member EU or 17-member eurozone.
The UK and 15 other EU members will not introduce the tax, which is intended to discourage speculative trading.
Some European governments have blamed speculators and excessive trading for exaggerating the swings in financial markets during the 2008 crash and the recent eurozone crisis.
"It is a milestone for EU tax policy, as it paves the way for more ambitious member states to progress on a tax file, even when unanimity could not be achieved," said Algirdas Semeta, the European Commissioner for tax.
"Those who want to move ahead, and who appreciate the merits of working more closely on taxation at EU level, can do so."

BBC News - Financial transactions tax in Europe given go-ahead

Monday, January 21, 2013

EES: Currency Markets Continue To Baffle Traders, Except The Yen

Keynes said markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. This is especially true for currency traders. For the last 3 months, data indicates the majority of traders have been on the wrong side of the market.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1123431-currency-markets-continue-to-baffle-traders-except-the-yen

Yen Gains as BOJ Meets; Most Europe Stock Rise, Oil Falls


The yen rebounded from its lowest level since June 2010 against the dollar as the Bank of Japan (8301) began a two-day policy meeting. Most European stocks rose as finance chiefs gathered for the first time this year.
Japan’s currency strengthened 0.5 percent to 89.65 per dollar at 9:45 a.m. in New York. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index added 0.2 percent, with the volume of shares changing hands 31 percent less than the 30-day average. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures gained 0.1 percent. In Canada, the S&P/TSX increased 0.1 percent. Oil dropped from a four-month high. U.S. natural gas climbed to its highest level since Dec. 7.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Europe fires shot in new currency war


The alert from the country that chairs the Group of 20 came as Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker complained of a “dangerously high” euro and officials in Norway and Sweden expressed exchange-rate concern.
The push for weaker currencies is being driven by a need to find new sources of economic growth as monetary and fiscal policies run out of room. The risk is as each country tries to boost exports, it hurts the competitiveness of other economies and provokes retaliation.
Yesterday “will go down as the first day European policy makers fired a shot in the 2013 currency war,” said Chris Turner, head of foreign-exchange strategy at ING Groep NV in London.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Ben Bernanke: Get rid of the debt ceiling, it has no practical value


Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke criticized the debt ceiling as an unusual device that can be used to prevent the United States from paying it’s bills, as he suggested that the country would be better off if the debt limit did not exist.
“I think it would be a good thing if we didn’t have [the debt ceiling],” Bernanke told students at the University of Michigan today. “I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think it’s going to be around.” Those remarks put Bernanke in agreement with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who has said that Congress should eliminate the debt ceiling.
The conversation began when Bernanke was asked if the debt ceiling had any “practical value” as a matter of fiscal policy. “No, it doesn’t really have — it’s got symbolic value,  I guess, but . . . no other countries in the world have this particular institution,” he said.
“If the Congress is approving spending and it’s approving taxing, and those two things are not equal,” Bernanke continued, “the way to addres it is by having a sensible plan for spending and a sensible plan for revenue and make decisions about how big the government should be or how small it should be.”

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Hitting the debt limit: What bills would be paid?


WASHINGTON (AP) -- In the summer of 2011, when a debt crisis like the current one loomed, President Barack Obama warned Republicans that older Americans might not get their Social Security checks unless there was a deal to raise the nation's borrowing limit.
After weeks of brinkmanship, Republicans consented and Obama agreed to a deficit-reduction plan the GOP wanted. Crisis averted, for a time.
Now that there's a fresh showdown, the possibility of Social Security cuts -and more - is back on the table.

The government could run out of cash to pay all its bills in full as early as Feb. 15, according to one authoritative estimate, and congressional Republicans want significant spending cuts in exchange for raising the borrowing limit. Obama, forced to negotiate an increase in 2011, has pledged not to negotiate again. Inside Bay Area - Associated Press content

UBS Retreat Plotted at Castle as Credit Suisse Cuts Costs



In September, UBS AG Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti gathered the bank’s top executives at Switzerland's Wolfsberg castle.
Switzerland’s 437-year-old Wolfsberg castle has welcomed the likes of Alexandre Dumas and Franz Liszt. In September, UBS AG (UBSN) Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti gathered the bank’s top executives there for dinner.
UBS had been under pressure since losing more than $57 billion during the financial crisis. So had its main competitor, Credit Suisse Group AG. In 2011, Swiss lawmakers approved some of the strictest capital and liquidity rules in the world, forcing the banks to cut risk taking and boost equity at the expense of profit in their securities units.
The end of banking secrecy, which had helped the firms attract funds from rich clients around the world, was challenging a century-old wealth-management model. A 32-year-old former UBS employee, Kweku Adoboli, would go on trial in London the next week in connection with a $2.3 billion loss, the largest from unauthorized trading in British history.
“For banks domiciled in Switzerland, doing business and making money has become more difficult,” central bank President Thomas Jordan told financiers at a conference in Zurich two days before UBS’s Wolfsberg meeting. “Pressure on the Swiss financial center has been intensifying.”

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

EES: Windows 8 and Microsoft


Microsoft (MSFT) has not changed much since 2000, since Steve Ballmer replaced Bill Gates. But the same could be said for a lot of stocks during the 2000 - 2010 era. The Dow is only slightly higher during the same time, peaking near 12,000 in 2000 and now being at 13,350.
Operating Systems ((OS)) are the core business of Microsoft, although they have now expanded into hundreds of niche industries from making keyboards, video games and business applications.

Monday, January 7, 2013

Banks Win 4-Year Delay as Basel Liquidity Rule Loosened


Global central bank chiefs gave lenders four more years to meet international liquidity requirements and watered down the measures in a bid to stave off another credit crunch.
Banks won the delay to fully meet the so-called liquidity coverage ratio, or LCR, following a deal struck by regulatory chiefs meeting yesterday in Basel, Switzerland. They’ll be able to pick from a longer list of approved assets including equities and securitized mortgage debt as they seek to build up buffers of liquidity for use in a financial crisis.


Banks Win 4-Year Delay as Basel Liquidity Rule Loosened - Bloomberg

10 Banks Agree to Pay $8.5B for Foreclosure Abuse


(WASHINGTON) — Ten major banks and mortgage companies agreed Monday to pay $8.5 billion to settle federal complaints that they wrongfully foreclosed on homeowners who should have been allowed to stay in their homes.
The banks, which include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, will pay billions to homeowners to end a review process of foreclosure files that was required under a 2011 enforcement action. The review was ordered because banks mishandled people’s paperwork and skipped required steps in the foreclosure process.

10 Banks Agree to Pay $8.5B for Foreclosure Abuse | TIME.com

Fannie Deal Resolves a Bank of America Mortgage Headache

Bank of America Corp. BAC -0.50% reached an $11.6 billion settlement with mortgage-finance giant Fannie Mae FNMA +8.37% to settle a long-running standoff over nearly a decade's worth of home loans, the bank's latest bid to resolve its biggest hangover from the acquisition of Countrywide Financial Corp. five years ago.

Fannie Deal Resolves a Bank of America Mortgage Headache - WSJ.com

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Swiss bank Wegelin to close after US tax evasion fine


Switzerland's oldest bank is to close permanently after pleading guilty in a New York court to helping Americans evade their taxes.
Wegelin, which was established in 1741, has also agreed to pay $57.8m (£36m; 44m euros) in fines to US authorities.
It said that once this was completed, it "will cease to operate as a bank".
The bank had admitted to allowing more than 100 American citizens to hide $1.2bn from the Internal Revenue Service for almost 10 years.
Wegelin, based in the small Swiss town of St Gallen, started in business 35 years before the US declaration of independence.
It becomes the first foreign bank to plead guilty to tax evasion charges in the US.
Other Swiss banks have in recent years moved to prevent US citizens from opening offshore accounts.
US Attorney Preet Bharara said: "The bank wilfully and aggressively jumped in to fill a void that was left when other Swiss banks abandoned the practice due to pressure from US law enforcement."
He added that it was a "watershed moment in our efforts to hold to account both the individuals and the banks - wherever they may be in the world - who are engaging in unlawful conduct that deprives the US Treasury of billions of dollars of tax revenue".
Otto Bruderer, a managing partner at the bank, admitted that Wegelin had sheltered US clients from tax between 2002 and 2010, and said it was aware that its conduct had been "wrong".
Mr Burderer's further admission that assisting tax evasion was common practice in Switzerland has caused huge concern among the Swiss banking community, according to the BBC's Switzerland correspondent, Imogen Foulkes.
"Some Swiss financial analysts are already speculating that Wegelin's $58m fine, which many had expected to be higher, was kept low by the US authorities in return for Wegelin clearly implicating the rest of the Swiss banking community in tax evasion," she said.
Inevitable demise
Wegelin effectively ceased to function as a Swiss bank almost a year ago.
US criminal accusations against three of its executives prompted the bank to sell off its core Swiss and other non-US businesses in January 2011.
The rushed sale protected Wegelin's non-US clients from the fall-out of any legal battle, and reflected fears that few clients would want to continue doing business with a bank being pursued by the US anyway.
The businesses were bought by Raiffeisen Bank, Switzerland's co-operative bank, which has since severed the few business ties that it had with the US.
The sale left Wegelin responsible only for its American clients, including those at the centre of the US authorities' probe.
Wegelin as an institution was then itself indicted by US authorities in February last year, and later declared a fugitive from justice when the bank's executives failed to appear in a US court.
The bank had vowed to fight the charges, claiming that because it only had branches in Switzerland, it was bound only by its home country's relaxed banking laws.
Its decision to cave in, and wind down its one remaining business, has made the bank's demise inevitable.
"Usually when you cave in to the USA, you do it because you just want to get rid of it," said Dr Peter V Kunz, an economic law professor at the University of Bern.
Having sold off all its non-US businesses, Mr Kunz believes the bank's partners would have been keen to end a potentially interminable legal dispute with the US in order to recover as much of the sale proceeds as possible from what had in effect become a shell company.
The desire to end the legal battle would have been given added pique by the fact that Wegelin's partners have personal financial liability for the bank.
'Aggressively pursuing'
Jeffrey Neiman, a former US federal prosecutor who was involved in a previous investigation into Swiss banks, said: "It is unclear whether the bank was required to turn over American client names who held secret Swiss bank accounts.
"What is clear is that the Justice Department is aggressively pursuing foreign banks who have helped Americans commit overseas tax evasion."
It remains to be seen whether US authorities will continue with, or drop, parallel charges against three Wegelin bankers, Michael Berlinka, Urs Frei and Roger Keller.
The decision to throw in the towel also marks a turnaround for Konrad Hummler, Wegelin's managing director since 1991, and one of the partners whose own personal finances were potentially at stake.
Mr Hummler, who is also chairman of the Swiss daily newspaper Neuer Zuercher Zeitung, has previously been unusually outspoken among Swiss bankers in calling for the country's authorities to block any disclosure of banking client details to the US authorities.
The Wegelin case comes four years after a far larger Swiss bank, UBS, agreed to pay a $780m fine to US authorities related to tax evasion charges. UBS also agreed to reveal the details of US account holders.
However, UBS neither pleaded nor was found guilty. Instead it and US prosecutors came to what is called a deferred prosecution agreement, with the fine being paid in exchange for the charges being dropped.
Switzerland's other major bank, Credit Suisse - with over a trillion dollars in total assets and another trillion in clients' money - remains under investigation by the US authorities, as does another high profile bank, Julius Baer, which is about a fifth of the size of Credit Suisse, as well as 11 other mainly local, cantonal banks.

Friday, January 4, 2013

Barter Currency "Tem" used in Greece to beat economic crisis

It's been a busy day at the market in downtown Volos. Angeliki Ioanitou has sold a decent quantity of olive oil and soap, while her friend Maria has done good business with her fresh pies.
But not a single euro has changed hands – none of the customers on this drizzly Saturday morning has bothered carrying money at all. For many, browsing through the racks of second-hand clothes, electrical appliances and homemade jams, the need to survive means money has been usurped.
"It's all about exchange and solidarity, helping one another out in these very hard times," enthused Ioanitou, her hair tucked under a floppy felt cap. "You could say a lot of us have dreams of a utopia without the euro."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/02/euro-greece-barter-poverty-crisis

Where The Jobs Are: "55 And Older"


A good jobs report? Sure, if one is 55 and over. In December the American jobs gerontocracy continued its relentless course, and as the two charts below summarize since Obama's first term, some 2.7 million jobs in the 16-55 year old category have been lost. The "offset": 4 million jobs for Americansbetween 55 and 69. For all those young people graduating from college (with $150,000 in student loans) who are unable to get a job, here is our advice: tell your parents, and grandparents, to retire already. Oh wait, they can't because Bernanke destroyed their savings. Oops - better luck next time.
Job "gains" for all Americans 54 and younger vs those 55 and older:
And the same broken down by segment:
Source: BLS