WELCOME TO OPINIONS BASED ON FACTS (OBOF)
| Name | Published |
| OVERVIEW | Dec. 28, 2010 |
| SOCIAL SECURITY PART 1 | Dec. 30, 2010 |
| SOCIAL SECURITY PART 2 | Jan. 10, 2011 |
| SOCIAL SECURITY PART 3 | Jan. 17, 2011 |
| SOCIAL SECURITY PART 4 | Jan. 24, 2011 |
| SOCIAL SECURITY PART 5 | Jan. 31, 2011 |
| SOCIAL SECURITY PART 6 | Feb. 07, 2011 |
| SOCIAL SECURITY PART 7 | Feb. 14, 2011 |
| SPECIAL ISSUE | Feb. 18, 2011 |
| SOCIAL SECURITY PART 8 | Feb. 21, 2011 |
| SOCIAL SECURITY PART 9 | Mar. 01, 2011 |
| SOCIAL SECURITY PART 10 | Mar. 07, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 1 | Mar. 14, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 1A | Mar. 21, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 2 | Mar. 25, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 3 | Mar. 29, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 4 | Apr. 04, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 5 | Apr. 11, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 6 | Apr. 18, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 7 | Apr. 25, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 7A | Apr. 29, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 8 | May 02, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 9 | May 09, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 10 | May 16, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 11 | May 24, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 12 | Jun. 06, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 13 | Jun. 20, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 14 | July 05, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 14A | July 18, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 15 | July 19, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 16 | Aug. 03, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 17 | Aug. 15, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 18 | Aug. 29, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 19 | Sept. 12, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 20 | Sept. 26, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 21 | Oct. 10, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 22 | Oct. 24, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 22 EXTRA | Nov. 04, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 23 | Nov. 07, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 24 | Nov. 21, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 25 | Dec. 05, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 26 | Dec. 19, 2011 |
| SS & MORE PART 27 | JAN. 03, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 27A | JAN. 05, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 28 | JAN. 17, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 29 | JAN. 31, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 30 | Feb. 14, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART CL1 | Feb. 21, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 30 EXTRA | Feb. 23, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 31 | Feb. 28, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART CL2 - 59 | Mar. 06, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 31 EXTRA | Mar. 07, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 32 | Mar. 13, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART CL3 - 1 | Mar. 20, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 32 EXTRA | Mar. 24, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 33 | Apr. 10, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART CL 4 - 2 | Apr. 17, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 34 | Apr. 24, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART CL5 - 49 | May 01, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 35 | May 09, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART CL6 - 19 | May 15, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 35 EXTRA | May 18, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 36 | May 22, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 36 EXTRA | May 25, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 36 | |
| EXTRA II | June 01, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 37 | June 05. 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 37 EXTRA | June 07, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 38 | June 12, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 39 | June 19, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 40 | June 26, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 41 | July 03, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 42 | July 10, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 43 | July 17, 2012 |
| SS & MORE PART 44 | July 24,2012 |
1. Opening comments.
2. Hopelessly corrupt Financial System.
3. The Libor scandal.
4. Will the Libor iceberg sink the ship.
5. Corporate tax confusion.
6. Parting thought.
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What is an educated vote? It is one that has been made with as much knowledge, based on facts, not misinformation, that an individual can obtain.
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OPENING COMMENTS
Would you like to read something that is very confusing, but yet tells you what a serious corrupt financial system we have? In my opinion, it has happened because of the past decade of deregulation and the withholding of funds to enforce new regulations, the past two to three years.
I think it is important for us to understand what the financial system has done, and is doing, to us. It can be very complicated, but I have pulled up a couple of articles that helps those of us who are, so called, beginners and victims, that I believe, gives us a thumbnail sketch of the "flim flam" that has been going on.
I have not included information about the latest attempt by the banks to get out of prosecution. They are getting together as a group and trying to negotiate a settlement. At this point, it appears that the Regulators are not interested in those talks.
Talk about tax confusion, in one of the following articles, regarding corporate taxes, there is reference to corporate taxes, Marginal Corporate taxes, Effective Corporate taxes, and Actual Corporate taxes. This one is short, but very interesting.
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HOPELESSLY CORRUPTED
FINANCIAL SYSTEM
by Ezra Klein's Wonkbook
Published, Friday , Juyly, 20, 2012
Very few banks came out of the financial crisis looking good. But JPMorgan and Barclays were in that elite club. Their apparent rectitude raised the possibility — as JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said over and over again — that what we’d had were a few bad banks, not a hopelessly corrupted financial system.
Fast forward a couple of years, and JPMorgan and Barclays are not looking so good anymore. And the particular way in which they’re not looking so good points to the fact that we did, indeed, have a hopelessly corrupted financial system.
If you haven’t been following the Libor scandal, read Dylan Matthews’ great primer. But if you refuse to do even that, here it is in a few sentences: Libor is the rate at which banks lend to each other. It’s considered a measure of how safe the financial system is. As such, many banks use it as a benchmark to set the rate on the consumer debt you and I buy — they start with the Libor rate and then they add on whatever they think our risk is. But there’s something odd about Libor: It’s a rate the banks report themselves. And, in recent weeks, we’ve found out Barclays was lying about it.
In recent days, however, we’ve found out that it wasn’t just Barclays lying about it. Everybody was lying about it. Citigroup was lying about it. German banks were lying about it. We know a number of banks — though we don’t know exactly who — are talking to the feds about a settlement. We know HSBC, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase are being investigated.
On Wednesday, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, was asked about Libor. “The biggest impact is once more undermining the integrity of a system that has already been undermined substantially. There was this huge hole to dig out of in terms of getting trust back and now it’s that much deeper.”
Remember when Ronald Reagan said “trust, but verify”? Well, we’ve spent the last few years verifying. And when it comes to the financial system, the lesson is not to have too much trust.
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The Libor scandal shows the flaws in
rate-setting.
Peter Eavis and Nathaniel Popper
“It is an open secret in the banking world: the interest rates for many mortgages and loans are based on a benchmark that is largely guesswork.
The flaws in the rate-setting process, which is used to determine the pricing for trillions of dollars of financial products, have been exposed by the latest banking scandal. Regulators around the world are investigating whether big banks gamed the rates for their own benefit before and after the financial crisis. But even if banks do not deliberately manipulate the rates, the benchmark remains vulnerable.
Banks derive the rates from estimates rather than real market data. So the benchmark, a measure of how much banks charge each other for loans, does not necessarily represent actual borrowing costs. This weakness has only been exacerbated in recent years, as banks have mostly stopped lending to each other.”
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TITANIC BANKS HIT LIBOR ICEBERG: WILL LAWSUITS SINK THE SHIP?
by Ellen Brown
Nationofchamge
Published Sunday 22, July, 2012
At one time, calling the large multinational banks a “cartel” branded you as a conspiracy theorist. Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts. Charges include racketeering (organized crime under the U.S.
.
In an article in the July 3rd Guardian titled “Private Banks Have Failed – We Need a Public Solution”, Seumas Milne writes of the LIBOR rate-rigging scandal admitted to by Barclays Bank:
It's already clear that the rate rigging, which depends on collusion, goes far beyond Barclays, and indeed the City of London
. . . It could of course have happened only in a private-dominated financial sector, and makes a nonsense of the bankrupt free-market ideology that still holds sway in public life.
. . . A crucial part of the explanation is the unmuzzled political and economic power of the City. . . . Finance has usurped democracy.
Bid-rigging and Rate-rigging
Bid-rigging was the subject of U.S. v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, a ten-year suit in which the U.S. America America , JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo
Hot on the heels of the Carollo decision came the LIBOR scandal, involving collusion to rig the inter-bank interest rate that affects $500 trillion worth of contracts, financial instruments, mortgages and loans. Barclays Bank admitted to regulators in June that it tried to manipulate LIBOR before and during the financial crisis in 2008. It said that other banks were doing the same. Barclays paid $450 million to settle the charges.
The U. S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission said, in a press release, that Barclays Bank “pervasively” reported fictitious rates rather than actual rates; that it asked other big banks to assist, and helped them to assist; and that Barclays did so “to benefit the Bank’s derivatives trading positions” and “to protect Barclays’ reputation from negative market and media perceptions concerning Barclays’ financial condition.”
After resigning, top executives at Barclays promptly implicated both the Bank of England
CFTC did not charge Barclays with a crime or require restitution to victims. But Barclays’ activities with the other banks appear to be criminal racketeering under federal RICO statutes, which authorize victims to recover treble damages; and class action RICO suits by victims are expected.
The blow to the banking defendants could be crippling. RICO laws, which carry treble damages, have taken down the Gambino crime family, the Genovese crime family, Hell’s Angels, and the Latin Kings.
The Payoff: Not in Interest But on Interest Rate Swaps
Bank defenders say no one was hurt. Banks make their money from interest on loans, and the rigged rates were actually LOWER than the real rates, REDUCING bank profits.
That may be true for smaller local banks, which do make most of their money from local lending; but these local banks were not among the 16 mega-banks setting LIBOR rates. Only three of the rate-setting banks were U.S.banks—JPMorgan, Citibank and Bank of America U.S. banks—BOA, Citi, JPM and Wells Fargo
Their profits now come largely from derivatives. Today, 96% of derivatives are held by just four banks—JPM, Citi, BOA and Goldman Sachs—and the LIBOR scam significantly boosted their profits on these bets. Interest-rate swaps compose fully 82 percent of the derivatives trade. The Bank for International Settlements reports a notional amount outstanding as of June 2009 of $342 trillion. JPM—the king of the derivatives game—revealed in February 2012 that it had cleared $1.4 billion in revenue trading interest-rate swaps in 2011, making them one of the bank's biggest sources of profit.
The losers have been local governments, hospitals, universities and other nonprofits. For more than a decade, banks and insurance companies convinced them that interest-rate swaps would lower interest rates on bonds sold for public projects such as roads, bridges and schools.
The swaps are complicated and come in various forms; but in the most common form, counter party A (a city, hospital, etc.) pays a fixed interest rate to counter party B (the bank), while receiving a floating rate indexed to LIBOR or another reference rate. The swaps were entered into to insure against a rise in interest rates; but instead, interest rates fell to historically low levels.
Defenders say “a deal is a deal;” the victims are just suffering from buyer’s remorse. But while that might be a good defense if interest rates had risen or fallen naturally in response to demand, this was a deliberate, manipulated move by the Fed acting to save the banks from their own folly; and the rate-setting banks colluded in that move. The victims bet against the house, and the house rigged the game.
Lawsuits Brewing
State and local officials across the country are now meeting to determine their damages from interest rate swaps, which are held by about three-fourths of America
One victim that is fighting back is the city of Oakland , California Oakland Oakland Oakland
What about suing Goldman directly for damages? One problem is that Goldman was not one of the 16 banks setting LIBOR rates. But victims could have a claim for unjust enrichment and restitution, even without proving specific intent:
Unjust enrichmentis a legal term denoting a particular type of causative event in which one party is unjustly enriched at the expense of another, and an obligation to make restitution arises, regardless of liability for wrongdoing. . . . [It is a] general equitable principle that a person should not profit at another's expense and therefore should make restitution for the reasonable value of any property, services, or other benefits that have been unfairly received and retained.
Goldman was clearly unjustly enriched by the collusion of its banking colleagues and the Fed, and restitution is equitable and proper.
RICO Claims on Behalf of Local Banks
Not just local governments but local banks are seeking to recover damages for the LIBOR scam. In May 2012, the Community Bank & Trust of Sheboygan , Wisconsin , filed a RICO lawsuit involving mega-bank manipulation of interest rates, naming Bank of America
The Sheboygan bank claims that the LIBOR rigging cost the bank $64,000 in interest income on $8 million in floating-rate loans in 2008. Multiplied by 7,000 U.S.
RICO Suits Against Banking Partners of MERS
Then there are the MERS lawsuits. In the State of Louisiana, 30 judges representing 30 parishes are suing 17 colluding banks under RICO, stating that the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) is a scheme set up to illegally defraud the government of transfer fees, and that mortgages transferred through MERS are illegal. A number of courts have held that separating the promissory note from the mortgage—which the MERS scheme does—breaks the chain of title and voids the transfer.
Several states have already sued MERS and their bank partners, claiming millions of dollars in unpaid recording fees and other damages. These claims have been supported by numerous studies, including one asserting that MERS has irreparably damaged title records nationwide and is at the core of the housing crisis. What distinguishes Louisiana
Readying the Lifeboats: The Public Bank Solution
Trebling the damages in all these suits could sink the banking Titanic. As Seumas Milne notes in The Guardian:
Tougher regulation or even a full separation of retail from investment banking will not be enough to shift the City into productive investment, or even prevent the kind of corrupt collusion that has now been exposed between Barclays and other banks. . . .
Only if the largest banks are broken up, the part-nationalised outfits turned into genuine public investment banks, and new socially owned and regional banks encouraged can finance be made to work for society, rather than the other way round. Private sector banking has spectacularly failed – and we need a democratic public solution.
If the last quarter century of U.S.
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CORPORATE TAX CONFUSION
Corp. tax, Marginal Corp. tax, Effective Corp. tax, & Actual Corp. tax, plus no Corp. tax even with large profit.
When I transferred this article, I failed to pull up who and when it was published. Now I am unable to find it again. To whoever wrote this, I apologize. I do believe it to be accurate or I would not include it.
Floyd
Over a four years period from 2008 to 2011, Corning Inc. was one of 26 companies that managed to avoid paying any American income taxes, even though it earned nearly $3 billion during that time. In fact, according to Citizens For Tax Justice, the company received a $4 million refund from 2008 to 2010. That didn’t stop Susan Ford, a senior executive at the company, from telling the House Ways America
American manufacturers are at a distinct disadvantage to competitors headquartered in other countries. Specifically, foreign manufacturers uniformly face a lower corporate tax rate than U.S.
Ford told the committee that Corning paid an effective tax rate of 36 percent in 2011, but as CTJ notes, she is counting taxes on profits earned overseas that haven’t yet been paid and won’t be unless the company decides to bring the money back to the United States. Corning’s actual tax rate in 2011, according to CTJ’s analysis, was actually negative 0.2 percent.
The territorial system Ford testified in favor of would actually encourage the offshoring of profits earned by American companies, thereby reducing the amount they pay in taxes even more. And rather than helping remove a disadvantage that prevents companies from creating jobs, an economic analysis of such a tax system found that it could actually cost the United States as many as 800,000 jobs.
The United States
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PARTING THOUGHT
I may have posted this one before, I don't remember. If I did, it is very appropriate to see it again.
There is a lot of talk about self-esteem these days. It seems pretty basic to me. If you want to feel proud of yourself, you've got to do things you can be proud of. Feelings follow actions.
Oseola McCartyl
Washerwoman who, late in life,
gave all her saving to a scholarship fund.
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If the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise, I'll talk with you again on Tuesday, July, 31, 2012, if not before.
"God Bless You All
&
God Bless the United States of America
Floyd
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