We were reading a global banking 1% literary STAR Willa Cather------writing back in the days of Great Depression and last century's ROBBER BARON ROARING 20s. We love Willa's historical fiction----this one called THE PROFESSOR.
Willa being that global banking 1% freemason STAR prefaced the commercialization of our US public universities----the morals and ethics of UNIVERSITIES as PATENT MILLS----but one point we would like to make today is that faithful servant to what was to become a wealthy household loses her life's savings--$500 ---quite a lot to save by household seamstress. She made a bad investment tied to her church group ignoring what her wealthy employer advised. Of course the fiction has these wealthy employers feeling they will throw in their wealth to replace the seamstress' stock market losses.
Our 99% of US WE THE PEOPLE and our 99% global labor pool must remember what deregulation during CLINTON ERA 1990s created in the investment world-----where what we call STOCKBROKERS are now being allowed to be INVESTMENT COUNSELORS OR FIRMS. This was never done because ------people assume investment counselors fall under FIDUCIARY LAW. We have shouted over and again.......many of the laws passed these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ARE ILLEGAL. They break every kind of historical precedent for legal standings----whether covered in US CONSTITUTION, BILL OF RIGHTS, COMMON LAW, COURT RULING PRECEDENCE. The 5% global banking pols and players can PRETEND all they want that simply passing a law makes it legal. Rogue ROBBER BARON pols passing laws to stage massive and systemic frauds do not fit US Rule of Law -----a Congress passing a law stating Congressional pols are not held to INSIDER TRADING laws 99% of US WE THE PEOPLE are------have passed an illegal law. In US all citizens are held equally under law-----
So, people considering themselves stock brokers being allowed to sell themselves as investment advisors staging massive loses to clients----FORGET ABOUT THAT BEING LEGAL.
Is my Financial Advisor a Fiduciary or a Stockbroker?
Written by Ethan S. Braid, CFA - March 2013
Is my Financial Advisor a Fiduciary or a Stockbroker?
What is the fiduciary duty and why is that important?
The fiduciary duty requires an investment adviser, by law, to act in the best interest of her clients, putting her clients’ interests ahead of her own at all times.[i] Under the fiduciary duty, an investment adviser must provide advice and investment recommendations that she views as being the best for the client. In addition to being obligated to put clients’ interests ahead of their own, fiduciaries must also adhere to the duties of loyalty and care.[ii] An investment adviser, subject to the fiduciary duty, is required to provide up-front disclosures to the client, before any contracts are signed to provide investment advice. These disclosures cover important topics such as the investment adviser’s qualifications, services provided, compensation, range of fees, methods of analysis, record of any disciplinary actions and possible conflicts of interest, if any.[iii] An investment adviser that has a material conflict of interest must either eliminate that conflict or fully disclose to its clients all material facts relating to that conflict.[iv]
The world of investment advice is plagued with conflicts of interest, obscure disclosure and an overall lack of transparency. Seeking out an investment adviser who will act as your fiduciary can help to eliminate many of the problems associated with commission-oriented, product focused salespeople. Because a fiduciary is required, by law, to give full disclosure of how they are paid as well as any conflicts of interest they may have, before you do business with them, you as the consumer are in a better position to make an informed decision.
How is a stockbroker different from a fiduciary and why should I be concerned?
A stockbroker is defined as any person engaged in the business of effecting transactions (buying and selling securities - trading) for the account of others.[v] Brokers have many different titles these days with some of the more common being: wealth manager, wealth advisor, investment consultant, financial advisor, financial consultant and registered representative.
Regardless of their title, stockbrokers are generally not considered to have a fiduciary duty to the client.[vi] Stockbrokers are able to avoid the higher legal standard of the fiduciary duty due to an exemption they receive from the definition of Investment Adviser (fiduciary). This exemption, which can be found under section 202 (a) (11) (C) of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 reads: any broker or dealer whose performance of such services is solely incidental to the conduct of his business as a broker or dealer and who receives no special compensation therefor. In other words, in the eyes of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, brokers are generally not considered to be fiduciaries because their advice is merely incidental to the sale of their products. Instead of being obligated to put their customers’ interests ahead of their own, brokers are instead expected to deal fairly with their customers and adhere to the lower standard of legal care, known as the suitability doctrine[vii]. The suitability doctrine requires a broker to know her customer’s financial situation well enough to recommend investments that are considered suitable for that particular client.[viii] Brokers are not required to provide up-front disclosures like the ones required for investment advisers.[ix]
As a consumer, caution should be exercised when dealing with a broker. Because a broker is only required to establish suitability, she is not legally obligated to put your interests ahead of hers. She may in fact sell you the investment that pays her the most commission, so long as the investment is deemed suitable. She is also able to sell you proprietary products if her firm offers them. Finally, she may be subject to conflicts of interest that could influence her investment recommendations while at the same time not being required to disclose those conflicts of interest to her client.
Who is a fiduciary and who is a stockbroker?
Investment Adviser (see Investment Advisers Act of 1940) means any person who, for compensation, engages in the business of advising others, either directly or indirectly or through publications or writings, as to the value of securities or as to the advisability of investing in, purchasing, or selling securities, or who, for compensation and as a part of a regular business, issues or promulgates analyses or reports concerning securities. Investment advisers are subject to the higher legal standard of care known as the fiduciary duty. Investment advisers also use a number of titles in addition to investment adviser, such as: investment manager, portfolio manager, wealth manager, and asset manager. Investment advisers provide ongoing advice and investment management based upon the client’s objectives. Typically the investment adviser is given discretionary authority over the client’s investments. Discretionary authority allows the investment adviser to make investment decisions in the portfolio without having to get prior approval from the client. Investment advisers carry a license called the “series 65 or series 66.” Investment advisers are monitored by either the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or state regulators.
Stockbrokers (also called Financial Advisors, Wealth Managers, etc.) are subject to the lower legal standard, known as the suitability doctrine (stockbroker). Most of the financial advisors working at the largest Wall Street Brokerage firms (wirehouses) fall into this category. Brokers carry a license called the “series 7.” Brokers are monitored by the SEC, state regulators and industry self-regulatory organizations.
Dual Registration can make the legal situation very confusing. Today, a large number of financial advisors serve as both investment advisers and brokers. According to a FINRA study, 88% of investment adviser representatives are also registered as brokers.[x] For example, you open several accounts with a financial advisor employed by one of the major brokerage firms. The advisor may sell you a “fee-based” account where she acts an investment adviser and concurrently sell you bonds or limited partnerships in another account where she gets a commission (which you may not even see) and functions as a broker. Which hat does she want to wear today and how much does she want to get paid? The biggest issue for clients of dual registrants is that ultimately the lower legal standard typically applies to the dual registrant wirehouse broker who can function as both an investment adviser and stockbroker.
Insurance Licensing is also common for many brokers and investment advisers. Insurance products can have massive embedded commissions and present significant conflicts of interest for financial advisors. These conflicts of interest are generally not disclosed and the fiduciary duty is not followed.
How can I tell if my adviser is a fiduciary or a stockbroker?
Look at the disclosures on the advisor’s website, marketing materials and business cards. Brokers who sell products & dual registrants will have disclosures that look something this:
Company XYZ makes available products and services offered by XYZ, a registered broker-dealer and Member Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). Insurance and annuity products are offered by DDT, a licensed insurance agency and wholly owned subsidiary of XYZ.
Banking products are provided by XXY, Members FDIC and wholly owned subsidiaries of XYZ
Ask, “Are you legally obligated to put my best interests ahead of yours?” “Will you be serving as my fiduciary?”
Ask, “Will my account be an advisory account or a brokerage account?” An answer of brokerage account will be your clue that you have found a stockbroker or dual registrant.
Ask to see the advisor’s form ADV. The form ADV will describe, among other things, fees & compensation, types of clients, disciplinary information, conflicts of interest, and education. If the advisor cannot provide you with an ADV, then the advisor is most likely a broker. Bear in mind that just because you get an ADV however, doesn’t mean that the advisor doesn’t also put on the broker hat from time to time if she is dual registrant.
Ask if the advisor is fee-only or “fee-based”. Fee-only advisers will be fiduciaries. Fee-only advisors cannot legally accept commissions and their only source of revenue is the fee they charge for advice and investment management. Since brokers are commission oriented, they cannot legally hold themselves out as fee-only. “Fee-based” however is a very different story. A“fee-based” advisor offers advisory accounts as well as brokerage accounts and is a dual registrant. So while she may put on the advisory hat one day, the next day she might put on the brokerage or insurance agent hat to sell some limited partnerships or annuities.
Ask what licenses the advisor has. A “series 7 license” means the advisor is registered as a stockbroker (the series 7 is the broker examination). The series 65 or 66 means she is registered as an investment advisor. Having both the series 7 and 65/66 equates to dual registration, which brings about the problems we covered previously in this article. Having an insurance license means she can sell you life insurance and annuities and accept commissions.
Why do Conflicts of Interest Matter?
According to Merriam Webster, a conflict of interest is defined as: a conflict between the private interests and the official responsibilities of a person in a position of trust.
If you are a client at a Wall Street Bank/Brokerage firm, you will likely be exposed to significant conflicts of interest. You are a client because you are looking for advice. However, what you receive may be something very different. These firms are in the business of selling products and producing a profit for shareholders. As brokers, exempt from the definition of investment adviser, advice from their salespeople is typically considered incidental to the sale of products they are promoting or helping you buy. In other words, broker dealer firms are there to facilitate a transaction on behalf of the customer, with the focus on the transaction and not the advice. Also, as we learned earlier, many advisors at these firms are able to switch hats on a whim playing broker one minute and advisor the next. The broker’s ability to offer both advisory and brokerage accounts creates serious conflicts of interest. These conflicts are often centered on how the broker gets paid.
To demonstrate just how deep the conflict can be, let’s consider an example. Suppose that a woman named Sue recently sold her company and has decided to retire. Her husband, Bob, a recently retired executive, has a pension that provides for most of the couple’s living expenses and they have no debt.
Hypothetical Clients Sue & Bob
Age: 65 years old
Children: 3
Grandchildren: 4
Total Investable Assets: $5.0 million dollars
Net worth: $6.50 million dollars
Pension & Soc Security: $100k annually
Goal: $150k annually in portfolio income
To keep this example simple let’s just focus on what can happen when Sue and Bob walk into the office of a dual registrant, insurance licensed salesperson at traditional Wall Street Brokerage firm.
Example options A & B (in terms of payment to the stockbroker):
A.The stockbroker shows the clients a $1m variable annuity with a 7% commission and a $4m investment in bonds, limited partnerships & structured notes at an average of 3% commission.
Result is an immediate non-transparent commission of $190,000 to the stockbroker.
B.The stockbroker shows the clients a $5m balanced wrap mutual fund advisory account at a 1% annual fee (paid at .25% quarterly)
Result is an immediate fee of $12,500 to the stockbroker.
You don’t have to be very good at math to see that by changing the product mix, the stockbroker can dial up or dial down how much he or she gets paid. Does the stockbroker want to get paid $190,000 or $12,500 this month? What a dilemma! To add insult to injury, in many cases, especially with annuities and investment bank products, the commissions are not transparent and difficult to gauge.
This payment scheme should certainly cause you to think twice about where you get financial advice. Caution should be exercised with dual registrants, especially those who are also insurance licensed. Do your homework. Ask lots of questions. Be critical of anything with a huge prospectus – these investments generally enrich the stockbroker completely at your expense.
There is a better way to receive investment advice – work with a fee-only advisor who is subject to the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and operates as a fiduciary for clients. There is a great comfort that comes in knowing your advisor is putting your interests ahead of her interests and not merely selling you products for commission.
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What has been allowed to happen during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA staging ROBBER BARON few decades is this BLURRING of stock broker and investment advisor deliberately, willfully, and with malice opening the door to HOODWINKING. Clinton era 1990s deregulation at the same time they staged this platform for fraud-------passed policy pushing our public and private sector labor unions often tied to stock investment to being left on their own in investment of PENSION funds. OPEN DOOR TO HOODWINKING-----HANDING 99% CONTROL OF INVESTING PENSIONS -----at same time making it impossible for those 99% of investors to educate to be wise investors because of all the INSIDER-BACK DOOR corruptions and frauds.
Global banking 5% to the 1% want to declare these laws passed by CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA were simply a legal deregulation of US stock markets. We discussed in detail the process of DERIVATIVES AND CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS-----installed by JP MORGAN and US FED at this same time. Artificially inflating stock and bond values to hide weak stocks and corporate holdings----NO, THAT CAN'T BE ILLEGAL.
What we do is keep reminding our US 99% and our new global 99% immigrant citizens wanting to invest whether forced to through 401K or pensions-----global banking 5% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA have made our US stock market as too Europe and UK too fraudulent and criminal for any 99% to invest and win. Like the lottery----one may win a time or two the ONE-ARMED BANDIT-----but the HOUSE comes away with great PROFITS. Those corporations calling themselves INVESTMENT FIRMS------are indeed acting criminally. Please think about taking all wealth tied to 401ks and pensions out of today's global banking market......BOND MARKET FRAUD HAS KILLED THAT ONE SAFE HARBOR----
The Cold, Hard Truth About Brokers and Financial Advisors
Think you're getting better investment performance by using a broker or financial advisor?
You better read this.Matt Koppenheffer
(TMFKopp)
Mar 20, 2012 at 12:00AM
The case against stock brokers and financial advisors isn't just all hot air. Today, I have proof that when you use a financial advisor or full-service broker, you may find yourself with lower returns than if you'd handled your investing yourself. Read on and I'll share the details of recent research that shows just how costly professional financial advice can be.
To Germany we go!
I'm referring to a paper titled "Financial Advisors: A Case of Babysitters?" that comes to us from Andreas Hackethal and Michael Haliassos of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and Tullio Jappelli of the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. The trio of researchers got their hands on a couple of very cool datasets -- one is from a German online brokerage and includes 32,751 randomly selected customers, while the other is 4,447 clients of a large German bank.
In both the online brokerage and the bank, customers were offered the option to manage the accounts themselves or employ an advisor. That choice provided the perfect opportunity to do a side-by-side study of advisor-assisted and individually managed accounts.
Let's get right to those results.
Here are the researchers summing up their findings:
Involvement of financial advisors is found to lower portfolio returns net of direct cost, to worsen risk-return profiles, as measured by the Sharpe ratio; and to increase account turnover and investment in mutual funds, consistent with incentives built into the commission structure of both types of financial advisors.That may be a lot to digest all at once, so let me break this down a little further. There are three very crucial points that the researchers highlighted:
Lower performance. Bottom line, the research showed that the accounts that used financial advisors had lower returns (net of fees) than the accounts that did not. How much lower? A whopping five percentage points lower. That smarts. But just how much does that hurt? Starting with a $100,000 portfolio, over the course of 30 years, getting 7% returns instead of 12% means a difference of a cool $2.2 million, or having a $761,226 account value instead of nearly $3 million.
Lower risk-adjusted performance. A potentially reasonable explanation for No. 1 above is that advisors are serving their clients by creating safer portfolios that produce lower returns but also have lower risk. But that doesn't appear to be the case with this dataset. The researchers found that advisor-assisted accounts also had lower Sharpe ratios. The Sharpe ratio is a measure of performance that adjusts for risk, so the findings suggest that investors using advisors were getting less compensated for the risk they were taking as opposed to investors who weren't using advisors.
Padding their bottom line. Finally, the results suggest that, on the whole, advisors in this dataset were focused on padding their own bottom lines. Accounts that used advisors had higher turnover and were more heavily invested in mutual funds -- both outcomes that would (conveniently!) earn higher commissions for the advisors.
What have you done for me... ever?
Take a moment to think about what it means to pay a professional for their services. I've had problems with scorpions in my house, so I hired a pest professional. Evaluating that service has been simple -- I've been happy because I'm not seeing poisonous arthropods running around anymore. Which, mind you, is an outcome I was woefully unsuccessful at achieving on my own.
Likewise, you could hire a plumber to fix a leaky faucet or a doctor to treat an infection with the expectation that either could do a better job at remedying the problem than you could.
With all of that in mind, consider this: What is a financial advisor worth if you end up with lower investment returns?
Say it ain't so!
I'm sure there are holes that could be poked in this research, and I'd be overreaching if I were to suggest that this one study of a couple of financial outlets in Germany is enough to condemn the entire financial advisory industry worldwide.
At the same time, if I'm Bank of America's (NYSE: BAC) Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (a Citigroup (NYSE: C) / Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) joint venture), Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC), Charles Schwab (Nasdaq: SCHW), or any of the many other players in this multitrillion-dollar business, it's got to be a bit uncomfortable that research like this is coming out. For decades, brokers and financial advisors were very much like the great and powerful Oz, hiding out behind a comfortable and profitable shroud of secrecy. In the age of the Internet, it's becoming much easier to find out the value -- or lack thereof -- that brokers and financial advisors actually offer their customers.
WE THINK MOTLEY FOOL IS BEING A 5% PLAYER IN MAKING PEOPLE THINK WE CAN USE INTERNET TO VET FOR GOOD FINANCIAL ADVISORS.
But I'm not writing this to simply crucify the industry. I want to hear what you have to say. Whether you're a financial advisor or broker client or you're a financial advisor or broker yourself, I want to hear why you think this research hits the nail on the head or why it misses the point. Share your thoughts in the comments section below or send us an email at tips@fool.com.
Something big just happened
I don't know about you, but I always pay attention when one of the best growth investors in the world gives me a stock tip. Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner and his brother, Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner, just revealed two brand new stock recommendations. Together, they've tripled the stock market's return over the last 13 years.* And while timing isn't everything, the history of Tom and David's stock picks shows that it pays to get in early on their ideas.
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When Bernie Madoff was exposed as the only Wall Street fraudster to go to jail----he was accused of creating a PONZI SCHEME disguised as an investment firm. Madoff went to jail because he defrauded wealthy people----99% of the rest of Wall Street doing these same frauds allowed to keep their loot.
Are people creating ponzi schemes BUSINESS MEN AND WOMEN? Of course not. We don't call criminal cartels BUSINESS LEADERS.
What makes today's global banking corruptions even more fraudulent is tying our government treasuries to these frauds. Very easy---EASY PEASY to find DELIBERATE, WILLFUL, AND WITH MALICE FRAUDS----in public pension investment and US Treasury and state municipal bond frauds these several years of OBAMA---MOVING FORWARD under TRUMP.
When these schemes crash----and they always do-----the 'dividends' received over several years never cover the extent of losses in what is invested by our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE.
Our 5% to the 1% freemason/Greeks black, white, and brown ----whether labor unions or global banking 1% Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations directing citizens into these criminal investments -----HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE when angry over these wealth losses.
How to Recognize a Ponzi Scheme
The Ponzi scheme is a notorious type of securities fraud, and for good reason. Because it functions by paying off newer investors with money from previous investors while little to no actual investing is going on, everything looks to be on the up and up. Although eventually every Ponzi scheme will run out of new investors to dupe, many of these scams can run for a long time.
So what is a wise investor supposed to do?
If a Ponzi scheme is so undetectable that newer investors are being paid and previous investors are able to say they've received the "promised" returns, how can an average investor sniff out a fishy deal? As securities fraud attorneys, we'd like to say that, luckily, with a little education, any investor can be wise to the biggest red flags.
What Is a Ponzi Scheme?
Before you are able to recognize the warning signs of a Ponzi scheme, it is important that you understand what this type of fraud entails. Charles Ponzi was one of the most notorious people who participated in this type of scam, which is why it was named after him. Basically, he collected money from people who wanted to invest in his business and then paid investors large interest payments from the money he obtained from the new investors. While Ponzi didn’t create this form of investment fraud, his operation was the first to become known in the United States.
Ponzi schemes can be difficult to identify. One of the most recent examples involved a man from Santa Ana, CA, who allegedly used money received from new investors to make payments for principal and interest to previous investors. The earlier investors believed that they were receiving returns on their investments. This scam reportedly cost investors $14.5 million. Unfortunately, this case is not isolated, as there are regularly reports of Ponzi schemes resulting in financial loss.
Red Flags of a Ponzi Scheme
When you are looking into a new investment opportunity, it's important to take the time to check out both the person offering the investment and the investment itself. Verifying that both the promoter and the opportunity are legitimate can save you a lot of time, money, and heartache.
Any person offering an investment should:
Be registered to sell investments in your state
Have a history that is clear of any disciplinary action or a pattern of complaints
Be able to explain his or her investment model to you in terms you understand
Be willing and able to provide all of the documents and information you need
Beyond checking out the person offering the investment, you should also look into the actual opportunity itself. If an opportunity features the following, it could be a Ponzi scheme:
"Guaranteed" High Returns
Any investment with “guaranteed” high returns should be carefully examined.
Hidden Information
Excuses about missing paperwork, errors, or secretive strategies are red flags.
Consistent High Returns
Be cautious of investments that generate high returns unaffected by the market
Unregistered Investments
Most cases of investment fraud involve investments that have not been registered.
Unlicensed Sellers
Many Ponzi schemes involve unregistered firms and/or unlicensed individuals.
Pressure to Reinvest
Ponzi schemes collapse without regular income or when too many investors cash out.
Steps to Avoid a Ponzi Scheme
Check out the credentials and background of the person who has approached you about the investment. You can check the company out with the BBB. If the person is a broker, you can use his or her CRD number to gain more insight into the broker’s record.
Have an attorney review any contracts that you are given. Don’t send any money until you have had the contracts analyzed by a lawyer that you can trust.
Be cautious if a money manager wants to be your custodian. A custodian is a broker-dealer that maintains investment accounts. If a money manager asks you to write a check directly to them, it is a red flag. It would be better to write the check to the custodial firm.
Make sure you understand your investment. If the investment appears complicated or if it cannot be properly explained, you may not want to hand over your money.
Trust your instincts. There are times when your instincts will tell you something is wrong. If you don’t feel comfortable about an investment, walk away.
Take Action to Protect Your Rights
The first step you should take if you suspect a Ponzi scheme is to contact an experienced investment fraud attorney. Failure to do so may result in evidence becoming too obscured to properly establish your case. An attorney will take the time to go through your options and determine the best course of action. Choosing the right legal representative is not easy. However, it is absolutely critical in establishing an effective legal strategy.
The right law firm should possess the following qualities:
Established, recognized experts in investment fraud cases
Track record of successful outcomes in investment claims
If you believe that you may have been the victim of a real estate Ponzi scheme then it is important to contact an experienced investment fraud attorney. Meyer Wilson has successfully represented more than 800 investors in stockbroker mediation, arbitration, and litigation claims.
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The ROBBER BARON frauds with the ROARING 20s ending in the great economic crash and Great Depression was criminal as well-----that is why the rich tied to owning these corporations are called ROBBER BARONS. We don't excuse these frauds simply because these ROBBERS turnaround to DONATE to CHARITIES being patrons to US CITIZENS made impoverished by that global banking fraud.
TRUMP is MOVING FORWARD what was massive and systemic US TREASURY AND STATE MUNICIPAL BOND MARKET FRAUD operating during the entire OBAMA terms. We want to be clear about whom to hold responsible------CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA global banking 5% pols and players staged these frauds----TRUMP is simply all too glad to be the FALL GUY.
Don't get mad at 99% of black citizens---99% of white citizens---99% of brown citizens---don't get mad at 99% of Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Hindi -----our US elections rigged and fraudulent have not allowed for any of our US voters to GET RID OF CRIMINAL GLOBAL WALL STREET POLS.
Absolutely NONE of what this global banking VOX MEDIA OUTLET prints as public policy concerns for all kinds of population groups IS TRUE. Our 99% of WE THE PEOPLE do not have to march to Washington DC to find these 5% pols and players!
PLEASE GLANCE THROUGH TO SEE PUBLIC POLICY ISSUES HAVING NO IMPORTANCE NEXT TO GORILLA-IN-THE-ROOM MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE POLICIES.
Economists said a Trump presidency would be a disaster. So why isn't Wall Street worried?
By Timothy B. Leetim@vox.com Nov 10, 2016, 9:00am EST
Before the election, a lot of people — including me — assumed that a Donald Trump win would send stocks plunging. A group of 20 Nobel Prize–winning economists warned last week that a Trump presidency could “jeopardize the foundations of American prosperity and the global economy.”
But on Wednesday morning, the markets didn’t seem very alarmed. Stocks opened the day up, and then they kept rising, ending the day up by 1.1 percent. Evidently, Wall Street doesn’t view a Trump presidency as all that alarming, at least for shareholders.
So what’s going on here? I think it’s possible for both those Nobel laureates last week and the markets this week to be right. Depending on which campaign promises Trump chooses to pursue, a Trump administration could wind up doing a lot of damage to the US economy. But this damage wouldn’t necessarily take forms that would be reflected by stock market values.
For example, Trump’s plan for bank deregulation could eventually lead to another 2008-style financial crisis. And his deregulation of the greenhouse gas emissions could eventually lead to catastrophic climate change. But those disasters may take a long time — years, even decades — to materialize. And in the meantime, less regulation could mean more economic activity and more profits for US companies.
Some of Trump’s economic policies could also be disastrous for particular groups of people — like poor people and immigrants — without harming the stock market or conventional economic metrics like gross domestic product or the unemployment rate. So the economic stakes of Trump’s economic agenda are high. They just won’t necessarily be reflected in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Donald Trump was not a conventional candidate, and he didn’t have the detailed policy blueprints that presidential candidates normally publish. But the broad outlines of his economic agenda are fairly clear.
First, a massive tax cut. Trump’s plan would reduce government revenue by $7.2 trillion over a decade, making it more than twice as large as the significant tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush. Almost half the benefits would flow to the top 1 percent of income earners.
Trump would pair his tax cut with a package of infrastructure investments that could cost more than $500 billion.
“We have bridges that are falling down,” he said in August. “We’ll get a fund, we’ll make a phenomenal deal with the low interest rates and rebuild our infrastructure.”
Trump has also signaled that he’d like to see about $500 billion in additional military spending over the next decade. “We want to deter, avoid, and prevent conflict through our unquestioned military dominance,” Trump said in September, lamenting recent cuts to defense spending.
He vowed to make these changes “revenue neutral” using “commonsense reforms that eliminate government waste and budget gimmicks.” But that promise may go out the window once it becomes clear that there isn’t anywhere close to $500 billion in “government waste” to cut and Republicans still want to spend more on the Pentagon.
Ironically, the package of tax cuts and spending hikes could amount to the kind of Keynesian fiscal stimulus that liberals advocated during the 2009 recession. If deficit spending boosts the economy, it could force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to keep inflation under control.
And sure enough, the yield on 10-year Treasury bonds soared on Wednesday, rising above 2 percent for the first time since early 2016. That’s a sign that markets are expecting less fiscal discipline from the new regime than it would have gotten under President Hillary Clinton.
Another part of Trump’s agenda is deregulation. In particular, Trump has vowed to repeal Obama’s regulations designed to combat global warming by curtailing greenhouse gas emissions. He also wants to roll back Dodd-Frank, the package of financial regulations Congress passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
In the short term, repealing environmental regulations could cause economic activity to go up, not down, as businesses face lower costs. It will only be after a generation or two that the full consequences — rising temperatures, rising sea levels, more severe weather — will be felt. And these effects will occur globally, not just in the United States, so the costs will be very widely distributed.
The story is similar for financial deregulation. The Dodd-Frank reforms tried to discourage big banks from making the kind of highly risky leveraged bets that brought the banking system to the brink of collapse in 2008. It’s too early to say whether this framework has been effective at preventing financial crises, since it’s only been about six years since it passed. But there’s reason to worry that financial crises could become more likely if the law is repealed.
Those consequences, too, might take many years to materialize. Indeed, as with climate regulations, the initial effect might appear to be positive — as newly deregulated banks lend more and boost economic activity.
So Trump’s regulatory policies will have big impacts, but they may not be obvious until long after he leaves the White House.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly railed against China and Mexico, vowing to slap higher tariffs on Chinese imports and renegotiate the NAFTA trade deal. But Simon Lester, a trade expert at the Cato Institute, argues that it’s far from clear how far Trump would actually go toward cutting the US off from foreign trade.
One of Trump’s big challenges on the trade front is the fact that the world is bound together in a complex patchwork of agreements that limits the ability of any one country to change trade policies unilaterally. For example, the US imposes something called anti-dumping duties on certain Chinese goods, and the president has some discretion to decide how these duties are set. In principle, Trump’s trade team could tweak these formulas to effectively charge China more to sell products to us.
The problem is that China would likely challenge these higher charges at the WTO, and if Trump didn’t have a good justification for them, then US goods would be hit by countervailing duties in China. That would start a trade war that would be in no one’s interest.
Trump’s second problem is Congress. For example, Simon says that Trump does have the authority to unilaterally withdraw the US from the NAFTA agreement. The problem is that Congress made key NAFTA commitments — like zero-tariff treatment for most goods — part of US law. So unilaterally withdrawing from NAFTA wouldn’t actually accomplish very much; Mexican companies could still sell goods in the US without paying tariffs.
To change that, Trump would have to get Congress to repeal the law that implemented NAFTA’s requirements back in the 1990s. The problem is that many members of Congress — especially in Trump’s own party — are enthusiastic free traders. They have close ties to business groups like the US Chamber of Commerce that have long favored free trade. So they won’t necessarily go along with a plan to withdraw from NAFTA — especially if Trump doesn’t have something to replace it.
Simon argues that a more likely scenario is that Trump will go to countries like Mexico and seek more modest changes to their trade relationships. If Mexicans make some concessions, then Trump can declare victory and seek congressional approval — without upending the global trading system.
Still, it’s hard to be sure. While Trump has talked a lot about trade, the statements have tended to be very general: He thinks NAFTA is bad and China is ripping us off. Trade law is a complex subject, so whoever Trump chooses to help him on trade policy could have a lot of influence.
From a humanitarian perspective, the most significant aspect of Trump’s administration may be his treatment of immigrants. Trump has vowed to deport millions of people who are in the United States illegally. That will have untold personal costs for the people targeted. It will also be bad for businesses that employ those workers and their customers.
Also, if Trump adopts the economic agenda of House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), it could lead to dramatic cuts in social programs, including Medicaid and food stamps. Vox’s Dylan Matthews argues that the Ryan budget amounts to “the most vicious cuts to programs for poor and medium-income people of any president since Reagan.”
Finally, Trump and the Republican Congress are widely expected to repeal Obamacare. No one knows what, if anything, they’ll put in its place. But Vox’s Sarah Kliff reports that as many as 22 million people could lose health insurance as a result.
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We have made clear these same ROBBER BARON frauds these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA were the same frauds happening in early 1900s MOVED FORWARD by same global banking 5% freemason/Greek pols and players. Same game----different generation. Here we see European banking fleecing their 99% of European citizens same way. Both European and US 5% players pretending to be investment firms acting as stock brokers thinking they are outside of US or European jurisdiction by fleecing our third world 99% of citizens-----who WORLD BANK/IMF have tied to same 401K/pension schemes thrown out as FODDER to these criminal cartels-----ARE ACTING ILLEGALLY BECAUSE THEY ARE INSIDE US OR EUROPEAN SOVEREIGN BOUNDARIES pedaling these frauds. It is the same as if CHINA or RUSSIAN 5% players were in these nations acting criminally towards 401K/pension investments of US or European citizens.
THE CRIMINAL ACTIONS OF INVESTMENT CHEATS ARE TIED TO THE NATION FROM WHERE THESE ACTIONS TAKE PLACE.
When our 99% of WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens think it OK to fleece that overseas 99% of their hard-earned savings----then we can be sure it has become alright for ourselves to be fleeced in these same ways. Please stand up against these ROBBER BARON FRAUDS AND CORRUPTIONS----and history repeats itself-----WW 1 and WW 2 were a direct result of global banking 1% ROBBER BARON FRAUDS.
We KNOW our 5% freemason/Greeks are hard into being these ROBBER BARON players.
The rankings in this RAND CORPORATION article would have us believe that it is those Eastern block or Greek/Italian socialist nations doing all these frauds-----NO, those listed as being least corrupt are driving these frauds and corruptions in those other nations.
The Cost of Corruption in Europe — Up to €990 Billion (£781.64 Billion) Lost Annually
FOR RELEASE
Tuesday
March 22, 2016
The Cost of Non-Europe in the Area of Corruption Study by RAND Europe, commissioned by the European Parliament, investigated the many forms of corruption, which includes paying bribes or exercising power to give privileged access to public services, goods or contracts.
The new figures from the study are far higher than the initial estimate provided by the European Commission of €120 billion (£94.74 billion), after RAND Europe used an innovative methodology to measure the cost of corruption to the EU as a whole. This takes into account the indirect effects of corruption, such as disincentives of companies to invest, and direct effects, such as money lost on tax revenues and public procurement.
Corruption involving EU public procurement was estimated to cost Europe around €5 billion (£3.95 billion) a year. This form of corruption could be involving only one organisation in a procurement process, or giving organisations just a couple of days to respond to a tender for a new contract.
Based on the study, RAND Europe has recommended three policy measures to address corruption in Europe and retrieve an initial €71.12 billion (£56.16 billion) from the money lost each year. These are:
He continues: “Measuring corruption is challenging, but our study provides one of the most realistic and current estimations of its true cost to Europe as a whole. Our recommendations highlight achievable targets for the EU and member states to help stop corruption from taking place and limit the amount of money lost each year.”
The full report for the Cost of non-Europe Corruption can be viewed at: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2016/579319/EPRS_STU%282016%29579319_EN.pdf.
- ENDS -
Notes to Editors:
The league table of EU corruption — lowest to highest levels in individual member states based on an average of three corruption indices
PositionCountry
1Denmark
2Finland
3Sweden
4Netherlands
5Luxembourg
6UK
7Austria
8Germany
9Republic of Ireland
10Belgium
11France
12Spain
13Portugal
14Cyprus
15Estonia*
16Slovenia*
17Malta*
18Hungary*
19Lithuania*
20Poland*
21Czech Republic*
22Italy*
23Slovakia*
24Greece*
25Latvia*
26Croatia*
27Bulgaria*
28Romania*
The * indicates countries that have higher corruption levels than the EU average for the 28 member states.
About RAND Europe
RAND Europe is a not-for-profit organisation whose mission is to help improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. Our clients include European institutions, governments, charities, foundations, universities and private sector firms with a need for impartial research. We combine deep subject knowledge across diverse policy areas including health, science and innovation; defence, security and infrastructure; and home affairs and social policy. Combined with proven methodological expertise in evaluation, impact measurement and choice modelling, we are able to offer quality-assured research and analysis, unbiased insights and actionable solutions that make a difference to people's lives. www.randeurope.org
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When US national media deliberately creates TENSIONS between RUSSIA---CHINA selling the idea that these nations are hacking and/or attacking our 99% US citizens with these fraudulent schemes------this is what we call OLD WORLD MERCHANTS OF VENICE GLOBAL 1% KINGS AND QUEENS-----these nations---China/ Russia/Eastern/Western Europe/US/Canada----are today controlled by global banking 1% neo-liberals/neo-cons all working for the same OLD WORLD GLOBAL 1% KINGS AND QUEENS.
There is no tension between these global banking 1% of each of these nations----they are glad to help each other fleece our US and global 99% of citizens. The manufactured tensions by national and international media preface this MARCH TO WW 3.
Shadow Banking Threatens China's Economy—but What Is It, Exactly?
Needed government reforms to the country's byzantine financial system may nonetheless upend China's growth.
Zhou Xiaochuan (R), Governor of the People's Bank of China, is tasked with tackling excesses in China's shadow banking system.(Molly Riley/AP)
Last week, the Shanghai interbank offered rate (Shibor), China's once-anonymous version of London's LIBOR, made news around the world when it suddenly spiked at all time high. Expected to lower this rate by injecting cash into struggling Chinese banks, the People's Bank of China (the country's equivalent of the Fed) instead did nothing, leading to speculation that China's leaders were finally prepared to tackle the economy's overheating problem. In the process, the media appears to have finally taken notice of the potential dangers that lurk within the byzantine industry that is Chinese finance. Reviewing the headlines, a series of arcane, sinister terms leap out: Off-balance sheet lending. Inter-corporate finance. And, most prominently, shadow banking.
Such terms, nebulous as they may be, are keeping Chinese policy makers up at night: According to Fitch, China's shadow banking sector may be hiding as much as $2 trillion worth of risky assets in off-balance sheet lending. But what does that really mean? And, more importantly, how did China find itself in this situation? Before we can answer these questions, it's worth going back and having a look at what shadow banking really is, and how it presents a risk to China -- and the world economy as a whole.
Firstly, the concept of shadow banking has an unfortunate reputation and is in dire need of rebranding. Despite the macabre connotations its name conjures, it's not inherently a bad thing. Generally, shadow banking simply refers to the lending and borrowing -- basic financial activities -- that occur outside the traditional deposit and loan model; that is, anything other than putting money in the bank and occasionally borrowing for things like buying a house. In Western nations such as the U.S, hedge funds, venture capital firms and private equity -- all forms of shadow banking -- form a major part of economic life. In China, however, the structure of shadow banking is very different.
Until around 2007-8, conventional banks, in the form of loans, undertook the vast bulk of all lending in China, and because the Communist Party controls the vast majority of banks, this structure allowed the government to retain a handle over the economy at large. However, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, as export-oriented businesses -- the companies that form a major pillar of the Chinese economy -- saw markets shrink, two important things happened.
The Shibor rate hike and the government's refusal to step in with additional funds, then, is a not-so-subtle statement that the party's over and that it's time to solve debt addiction the old fashioned way -- cold turkey.First, in response to the global financial crisis in 2008, the Chinese government enacted a stimulus package worth $586 billion, more than half of which was financed through new bank lending. This package won praise around the world for its speed and decisiveness and kept the country on track in the short term, in noted contrast to a similar plan implemented by the United States. But the stimulus also flooded the economy with cheap credit, thereby fuelling a speculative housing bubble, propping up inefficient state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and undoing years of work spent trying to instill China's banks with financial discipline.
In the two decades leading up to the financial crisis, a lot of hard and sincere work was done to try to teach profligate SOEs, local governments, and banks to live and work within their means, but that doesn't mean these institutions suddenly forgot how to take advantage of a free lunch. In fact, it probably heightened their appetite for it. As a result, much of the money was sunk -- almost literally -- into local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), which are municipal government-owned companies often responsible for infrastructure investment. These companies, for the most part, exist to keep local government debt off the books -- since local governments have a very limited capacity to borrow money directly -- by allowing them to borrow indirectly and finance construction projects through companies they own, built on land often acquired and sold below market price by them.
Surprisingly, this system constituted a huge source of revenue for cash-strapped local governments, which have few real sources of tax revenue. Less surprisingly, it is also an endemic, institutionalized form of corruption. A recent OECD report estimated that total public debt reached 57 percent of GDP by the end of 2010, with LGFVs accounting for about three quarters of this figure. Given that some people familiar with LGFVs see them as little more than holes in the ground into which seemingly endless amounts of perfectly good money are poured, it is likely this borrowing generated a wave of future defaults.
***
How, and why, was the money spent this way? To answer this question, it's important to understand the love affair between the Chinese government and infrastructure projects. Over the past two decades, Beijing has relied on building roads, power grids, and other fixed assets in order to facilitate the rapid expansion of the economy, but this method of growth inevitably leads to declining returns over time. As a result, Chinese policy makers understand that to decrease the economy's dependence on investment and export markets (which depend too much on the whims of the global economy) domestic consumption needs to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, however, this "rebalancing" is tricky.
One problem is this: Contrary to popular belief, China's manipulation of the yuan isn't the golden goose Western critics make it out to be. Even if the currency were allowed to float freely, Chinese labor would still cost a fraction of what it does in the U.S. This discrepancy is mainly achieved through the hukou, a household registration system that prevents workers from becoming fully entitled residents in the regions to which they have migrated to work, as well as restricting the rights of children born in these regions to services like education and health care.
In short, the hukou ensures that workers remain in the shadows -- and wages remain low -- by constantly recycling labor out of factories and back to the place of registration. Factors like this have made it increasingly difficult to rebalance the economy and have contributed to the yawning wealth gap in Chinese society. Though Chinese leaders have hinted at reforming the hukou, they nonetheless face a vexing dilemma: How do they increase domestic demand without significantly upsetting a social order upon which the economy depends for its competitive advantage?
***
Historically, the answer to this question was infrastructure development, and for good reason: Infrastructure is politically neutral, theoretically benefits the whole of society, is generally dominated by massive State and quasi-State owned enterprises, and in the past generated massive returns. However, over the last four years, the GDP growth generated by each yuan of additional loan has fallen from 0.85 to 0.15, an indicator that the limits of debt-fuelled growth are being reached. In effect, the very engine that caused China's growth ---fixed asset investment fuelled by local debt -- wasn't sustainable, and the government began to worry about the negative consequences of an overheating economy: inflation, real estate bubbles, and overcapacity.
So in 2009 they slammed on the breaks. An economy that was addicted to credit needed to go somewhere else to get its fix. This was where shadow banking came in.
Desperate for credit, banks began working closely with trust companies and other entities to refinance bad loans by bundling them up and repackaging them as "wealth management vehicles", or WMVs. These vehicles, which require a tenure ranging from a year to a few days, offered a higher rate of return than conventional bank deposits. They also allowed banks to keep their lending off their balance sheets and were sold through their branches or online, effectively turning banks into middle men between recipients and investors. In theory, this should have solved the problem of obtaining local financing. But the problems have only begun.
***
As more and more of these loans turned bad they were simply recycled into high yield WMVs, a fact that China's policy makers have acknowledged. In an uncharacteristically stark warning aired in a China Daily op-ed, Xiao Gang, the former head of the Bank of China, said that there are more than 20,000 WMVs in circulation -- compared with "a few hundred" five years ago. Worse, many of these WMVs lack transparency or are linked to empty real estate, long term infrastructure projects or collections of assets which have no sure fire way of generating the revenue needed to repay them at the given time, creating the real possibility of a liquidity crisis.
Has this crisis already begun? There's evidence that banks and trusts have colluded to circumvent a shortage of liquidity by issuing ever greater numbers of WMVs -- with still higher rates of return to attract the cash necessary to finance the short fall. But if the music stops and investors pull their money or stop purchasing new issuances, then the rollover for the bank to pick up could potentially be huge. The consulting firm KPMG estimates that shadow banking and WMVs overtook insurance to become China's second largest financial sector in 2012 and represent assets roughly equivalent to 15 percent of total commercial bank deposits.
This situation has arisen in a country whose people, facing restrictions on investing abroad and nervous about China's volatile stock market, have so few other investment options. In addition, most simply don't believe banks will let them lose their money and will support their investments, no matter how risky they are; essentially, the basic ingredients of a Ponzi scheme. The Shibor rate hike and the government's refusal to step in with additional funds, then, is a not-so-subtle statement that the party's over and that it's time to solve debt addiction the old fashioned way -- cold turkey. The question, then, is this: how bad was the addiction, and how big will the comedown be?
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During ROBBER BARON periods as last century and today------Hong Kong bankers come to US to defraud their 99% of citizens as US global Wall Street is over in Hong Kong defrauding the 99% of US citizens-----Russian oligarchs are in NYC defrauding their 99% of RUSSIAN citizens while UK/US are in Russia defrauding US 99% of citizens and of course all the above are in Nigeria using that banking system to launder all that global fraud while Nigerian banking 1% are in US defrauding their 99% of Nigerian citizens------ALL SAME GLOBAL BANKING SYSTEM ----GLOBAL BANKING 1% DEFRAUDING from all nations' citizens-----no tensions between these OLD WORLD GLOBAL 1% KINGS AND QUEENS. Each of these nations have those 5% freemason/Greeks as ROBBER BARON PLAYERS.
The deregulation during CLINTON ERA 1990s let us know ROBBER BARON period was gearing up-----as soon as ROBBER BARON period is over----as with this coming massive US TREASURY and corporate bond fraud------all those criminal investment firms acting as stock brokers pretending to be free of any FIDUCIARY will disappear.
Corruption in Nigeria
The $20-billion hole in Africa’s largest economy
Most Nigerians live in poverty. Millions would be spared if officials stopped pilfering from the public purse
Middle East and Africa
Feb 2nd 2016 | LAGOS
POWER corrupts. So too does a resource-rich economy, like Nigeria’s, where easy access to oil revenues opens the door to palm-greasing. Of 168 countries surveyed by Transparency International, an anti-corruption group Germany, in its annual Corruption Perception Index, Nigeria ranks 32nd from the bottom.
Whistleblowers sometimes try to estimate how much cash has gone missing from Nigeria’s public purse. In 2014 a respected former central-bank governor lost his job after claiming that $20 billion had been stolen. But this captures only a small share of the damage done by corruption. The much bigger question is where Nigeria could be if its politicians and officials were a little more honest.
One answer comes from economists at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). They compared Nigeria to three other resource-producing countries that are somewhat less corrupt than it, though by no means squeaky clean: Ghana, Malaysia and Colombia. PwC concluded that Nigeria’s’s economy, which was worth $513 billion in 2014, might have been 22% bigger if its level of corruption were closer to Ghana’s, a nearby west African country.
By 2030, the size of Africa’s biggest economy should triple in real terms come what may. Yet if Nigeria manages to reduce corruption to levels comparable to Malaysia (itself hardly above suspicion: its prime minister recently had to explain how almost $700 million had made it into his bank account), its economy could be some 37% bigger still. The additional gain would be worth some $534 billion (adjusted for inflation), or about as much as the economy is currently worth. If it does nothing to change then the cost of corruption in Nigeria would amount to almost $2,000 per person a year by 2030, PwC reckons.
Some of this damage is visible. When public cash—most of which comes from oil pumped in the southern Niger delta—is siphoned off, investment in health, education and roads suffers. But corruption also affects the economy in more surreptitious ways. Public institutions often hire the family and friends of the boss rather than the best candidates. In turn those institutions become more inefficient and deliver less of what they are meant to, whether it is education or roads. In addition countries where corruption is high attract less foreign investment. They have higher prices, and lower tax bases. Nigeria’s tax-to-GDP ratio is only about 8%, compared with more than 25% in South Africa. Given rampant theft, many people are reluctant to pay their taxes on the ground that the money will just be squandered.
This may in part explain why, despite its oil wealth, there is a rising share of Nigerians who are classified as below the poverty line. A survey of living standards (using data from 2010, the most recent figures available) suggested that 61.2% of the population lives in absolute poverty, an increase of over six percentage points on the previous figures from 2004. At least 25m people who should have been lifted into low- or middle-income still reside below the breadline thanks to “excess corruption”, says Andrew S. Nevin, PwC’s chief economist in Nigeria.
Last year Muhammadu Buhari, the president, swept to power on the votes of Nigerians who have had enough. Since then, anti-fraud agencies have arrested senior politicians and sidekicks accused of embezzlement, and new corruption bills have been put before parliament. “Ending the impunity is about political will, because those benefiting most are among the ranks of the leaders,” says Samuel Kaninda, the co-ordinator for west Africa at Transparency International. Cleaning up Nigeria will be an Herculean task. But the rewards are equally fabulous.
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Can we imagine how such a protest ---here in that US CITY DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE----LOS ANGELES ----would be effective in getting rid of global banking 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA if we didn't allow these national global banking 5% leaders to name these protests after TRUMP?
MARCH FOR OUR LIVES------ROBBER BARON FRAUDS AND US CITIES AS FAILED STATES----
Peaceful rolling protests for weeks and months filling US city downtown streets just as this video shows ----millions of US 99% of WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens -----demanding those 5% global banking pols and players get out of our people's government---local and state.
The Political Resistance against Donald Trump
March 24 at 1:01pm ·
“MARCH FOR OUR LIVES” Downtown Los Angeles
you tube.com
This CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ROBBER BARON period was timed to BABY BOOMER wealth assets-------maxed wealth in Social Security and Medicare Trusts-----maxed wealth in retirement savings and life insurances -----all reaching the period of baby boomer maximum retirement CURVE. Baby boomers from 1940s are aging out----the peak of baby boomer retirements happening during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA.
This is for what our US 99% OF MILLENNIALs are being staged ----sadly, our young adults are deliberately being kept unable to maintain steady employment and strong wages but Obama and Clinton neo-liberals privatized all public trusts and savings to private global banking to continue these SOCIAL SECURITY/MEDICARE/401k/PENSION schemes for these next few decades of MOVING FORWARD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE construction of massive global corporate campuses and global factories----
SAME MASSIVE AND SYSTEMIC FRAUDS WILL POP UP AGAIN STEALING ALL OF ANY WEALTH OUR US MILLENNIALS will accumulate---especially those thinking they are WINNERS being that 5% earning $200-400,000 annual salaries.
Since MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD SMART CITIES for only the global 1% has a goal of global 99% of citizens having no access to any monetary wealth-----there will be no need for a next round of ROBBER BARON FRAUDS----IF WE KEEP MOVING FORWARD.
When did CLINTON ERA install deregulated criminal banking structures? Here we see baby boomers peaked in 1999
'Baby Boomers have always had an outsize presence compared with other generations. They peaked at 78.8 million in 1999 and have remained the largest living adult generation'.
And our millennials are being led to protest a TRUMP ----
Fact Tank - Our Lives in Numbers
March 1, 2018
Millennials projected to overtake Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation
By Richard Fry PEW RESEARCH
Millennials are on the cusp of surpassing Baby Boomers as the nation’s largest living adult generation, according to population projections from the U.S. Census Bureau. As of July 1, 2016 (the latest date for which population estimates are available), Millennials, whom we define as ages 20 to 35 in 2016, numbered 71 million, and Boomers (ages 52 to 70) numbered 74 million. Millennials are expected to overtake Boomers in population in 2019 as their numbers swell to 73 million and Boomers decline to 72 million. Generation X (ages 36 to 51 in 2016) is projected to pass the Boomers in population by 2028.
The Millennial generation continues to grow as young immigrants expand its ranks. Boomers – whose generation was defined by the boom in U.S. births following World War II – are aging and their numbers shrinking in size as the number of deaths among them exceeds the number of older immigrants arriving in the country.
Because generations are analytical constructs, it takes time for popular and expert consensus to develop as to the precise boundaries that demarcate one generation from another. Pew Research Center has assessed demographic, labor market, attitudinal and behavioral measures and has now established an endpoint – albeit inexact – for the Millennial generation. According to our revised definition, the youngest “Millennial” was born in 1996. This post has been updated accordingly (see note below).
Here’s a look at some generational projections:
Millennials
Generation X
Baby Boomers
Willa being that global banking 1% freemason STAR prefaced the commercialization of our US public universities----the morals and ethics of UNIVERSITIES as PATENT MILLS----but one point we would like to make today is that faithful servant to what was to become a wealthy household loses her life's savings--$500 ---quite a lot to save by household seamstress. She made a bad investment tied to her church group ignoring what her wealthy employer advised. Of course the fiction has these wealthy employers feeling they will throw in their wealth to replace the seamstress' stock market losses.
Our 99% of US WE THE PEOPLE and our 99% global labor pool must remember what deregulation during CLINTON ERA 1990s created in the investment world-----where what we call STOCKBROKERS are now being allowed to be INVESTMENT COUNSELORS OR FIRMS. This was never done because ------people assume investment counselors fall under FIDUCIARY LAW. We have shouted over and again.......many of the laws passed these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ARE ILLEGAL. They break every kind of historical precedent for legal standings----whether covered in US CONSTITUTION, BILL OF RIGHTS, COMMON LAW, COURT RULING PRECEDENCE. The 5% global banking pols and players can PRETEND all they want that simply passing a law makes it legal. Rogue ROBBER BARON pols passing laws to stage massive and systemic frauds do not fit US Rule of Law -----a Congress passing a law stating Congressional pols are not held to INSIDER TRADING laws 99% of US WE THE PEOPLE are------have passed an illegal law. In US all citizens are held equally under law-----
So, people considering themselves stock brokers being allowed to sell themselves as investment advisors staging massive loses to clients----FORGET ABOUT THAT BEING LEGAL.
Is my Financial Advisor a Fiduciary or a Stockbroker?
Written by Ethan S. Braid, CFA - March 2013
Is my Financial Advisor a Fiduciary or a Stockbroker?
What is the fiduciary duty and why is that important?
The fiduciary duty requires an investment adviser, by law, to act in the best interest of her clients, putting her clients’ interests ahead of her own at all times.[i] Under the fiduciary duty, an investment adviser must provide advice and investment recommendations that she views as being the best for the client. In addition to being obligated to put clients’ interests ahead of their own, fiduciaries must also adhere to the duties of loyalty and care.[ii] An investment adviser, subject to the fiduciary duty, is required to provide up-front disclosures to the client, before any contracts are signed to provide investment advice. These disclosures cover important topics such as the investment adviser’s qualifications, services provided, compensation, range of fees, methods of analysis, record of any disciplinary actions and possible conflicts of interest, if any.[iii] An investment adviser that has a material conflict of interest must either eliminate that conflict or fully disclose to its clients all material facts relating to that conflict.[iv]
The world of investment advice is plagued with conflicts of interest, obscure disclosure and an overall lack of transparency. Seeking out an investment adviser who will act as your fiduciary can help to eliminate many of the problems associated with commission-oriented, product focused salespeople. Because a fiduciary is required, by law, to give full disclosure of how they are paid as well as any conflicts of interest they may have, before you do business with them, you as the consumer are in a better position to make an informed decision.
How is a stockbroker different from a fiduciary and why should I be concerned?
A stockbroker is defined as any person engaged in the business of effecting transactions (buying and selling securities - trading) for the account of others.[v] Brokers have many different titles these days with some of the more common being: wealth manager, wealth advisor, investment consultant, financial advisor, financial consultant and registered representative.
Regardless of their title, stockbrokers are generally not considered to have a fiduciary duty to the client.[vi] Stockbrokers are able to avoid the higher legal standard of the fiduciary duty due to an exemption they receive from the definition of Investment Adviser (fiduciary). This exemption, which can be found under section 202 (a) (11) (C) of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 reads: any broker or dealer whose performance of such services is solely incidental to the conduct of his business as a broker or dealer and who receives no special compensation therefor. In other words, in the eyes of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, brokers are generally not considered to be fiduciaries because their advice is merely incidental to the sale of their products. Instead of being obligated to put their customers’ interests ahead of their own, brokers are instead expected to deal fairly with their customers and adhere to the lower standard of legal care, known as the suitability doctrine[vii]. The suitability doctrine requires a broker to know her customer’s financial situation well enough to recommend investments that are considered suitable for that particular client.[viii] Brokers are not required to provide up-front disclosures like the ones required for investment advisers.[ix]
As a consumer, caution should be exercised when dealing with a broker. Because a broker is only required to establish suitability, she is not legally obligated to put your interests ahead of hers. She may in fact sell you the investment that pays her the most commission, so long as the investment is deemed suitable. She is also able to sell you proprietary products if her firm offers them. Finally, she may be subject to conflicts of interest that could influence her investment recommendations while at the same time not being required to disclose those conflicts of interest to her client.
Who is a fiduciary and who is a stockbroker?
Investment Adviser (see Investment Advisers Act of 1940) means any person who, for compensation, engages in the business of advising others, either directly or indirectly or through publications or writings, as to the value of securities or as to the advisability of investing in, purchasing, or selling securities, or who, for compensation and as a part of a regular business, issues or promulgates analyses or reports concerning securities. Investment advisers are subject to the higher legal standard of care known as the fiduciary duty. Investment advisers also use a number of titles in addition to investment adviser, such as: investment manager, portfolio manager, wealth manager, and asset manager. Investment advisers provide ongoing advice and investment management based upon the client’s objectives. Typically the investment adviser is given discretionary authority over the client’s investments. Discretionary authority allows the investment adviser to make investment decisions in the portfolio without having to get prior approval from the client. Investment advisers carry a license called the “series 65 or series 66.” Investment advisers are monitored by either the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or state regulators.
Stockbrokers (also called Financial Advisors, Wealth Managers, etc.) are subject to the lower legal standard, known as the suitability doctrine (stockbroker). Most of the financial advisors working at the largest Wall Street Brokerage firms (wirehouses) fall into this category. Brokers carry a license called the “series 7.” Brokers are monitored by the SEC, state regulators and industry self-regulatory organizations.
Dual Registration can make the legal situation very confusing. Today, a large number of financial advisors serve as both investment advisers and brokers. According to a FINRA study, 88% of investment adviser representatives are also registered as brokers.[x] For example, you open several accounts with a financial advisor employed by one of the major brokerage firms. The advisor may sell you a “fee-based” account where she acts an investment adviser and concurrently sell you bonds or limited partnerships in another account where she gets a commission (which you may not even see) and functions as a broker. Which hat does she want to wear today and how much does she want to get paid? The biggest issue for clients of dual registrants is that ultimately the lower legal standard typically applies to the dual registrant wirehouse broker who can function as both an investment adviser and stockbroker.
Insurance Licensing is also common for many brokers and investment advisers. Insurance products can have massive embedded commissions and present significant conflicts of interest for financial advisors. These conflicts of interest are generally not disclosed and the fiduciary duty is not followed.
How can I tell if my adviser is a fiduciary or a stockbroker?
Look at the disclosures on the advisor’s website, marketing materials and business cards. Brokers who sell products & dual registrants will have disclosures that look something this:
Company XYZ makes available products and services offered by XYZ, a registered broker-dealer and Member Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). Insurance and annuity products are offered by DDT, a licensed insurance agency and wholly owned subsidiary of XYZ.
Banking products are provided by XXY, Members FDIC and wholly owned subsidiaries of XYZ
Ask, “Are you legally obligated to put my best interests ahead of yours?” “Will you be serving as my fiduciary?”
Ask, “Will my account be an advisory account or a brokerage account?” An answer of brokerage account will be your clue that you have found a stockbroker or dual registrant.
Ask to see the advisor’s form ADV. The form ADV will describe, among other things, fees & compensation, types of clients, disciplinary information, conflicts of interest, and education. If the advisor cannot provide you with an ADV, then the advisor is most likely a broker. Bear in mind that just because you get an ADV however, doesn’t mean that the advisor doesn’t also put on the broker hat from time to time if she is dual registrant.
Ask if the advisor is fee-only or “fee-based”. Fee-only advisers will be fiduciaries. Fee-only advisors cannot legally accept commissions and their only source of revenue is the fee they charge for advice and investment management. Since brokers are commission oriented, they cannot legally hold themselves out as fee-only. “Fee-based” however is a very different story. A“fee-based” advisor offers advisory accounts as well as brokerage accounts and is a dual registrant. So while she may put on the advisory hat one day, the next day she might put on the brokerage or insurance agent hat to sell some limited partnerships or annuities.
Ask what licenses the advisor has. A “series 7 license” means the advisor is registered as a stockbroker (the series 7 is the broker examination). The series 65 or 66 means she is registered as an investment advisor. Having both the series 7 and 65/66 equates to dual registration, which brings about the problems we covered previously in this article. Having an insurance license means she can sell you life insurance and annuities and accept commissions.
Why do Conflicts of Interest Matter?
According to Merriam Webster, a conflict of interest is defined as: a conflict between the private interests and the official responsibilities of a person in a position of trust.
If you are a client at a Wall Street Bank/Brokerage firm, you will likely be exposed to significant conflicts of interest. You are a client because you are looking for advice. However, what you receive may be something very different. These firms are in the business of selling products and producing a profit for shareholders. As brokers, exempt from the definition of investment adviser, advice from their salespeople is typically considered incidental to the sale of products they are promoting or helping you buy. In other words, broker dealer firms are there to facilitate a transaction on behalf of the customer, with the focus on the transaction and not the advice. Also, as we learned earlier, many advisors at these firms are able to switch hats on a whim playing broker one minute and advisor the next. The broker’s ability to offer both advisory and brokerage accounts creates serious conflicts of interest. These conflicts are often centered on how the broker gets paid.
To demonstrate just how deep the conflict can be, let’s consider an example. Suppose that a woman named Sue recently sold her company and has decided to retire. Her husband, Bob, a recently retired executive, has a pension that provides for most of the couple’s living expenses and they have no debt.
Hypothetical Clients Sue & Bob
Age: 65 years old
Children: 3
Grandchildren: 4
Total Investable Assets: $5.0 million dollars
Net worth: $6.50 million dollars
Pension & Soc Security: $100k annually
Goal: $150k annually in portfolio income
To keep this example simple let’s just focus on what can happen when Sue and Bob walk into the office of a dual registrant, insurance licensed salesperson at traditional Wall Street Brokerage firm.
Example options A & B (in terms of payment to the stockbroker):
A.The stockbroker shows the clients a $1m variable annuity with a 7% commission and a $4m investment in bonds, limited partnerships & structured notes at an average of 3% commission.
Result is an immediate non-transparent commission of $190,000 to the stockbroker.
B.The stockbroker shows the clients a $5m balanced wrap mutual fund advisory account at a 1% annual fee (paid at .25% quarterly)
Result is an immediate fee of $12,500 to the stockbroker.
You don’t have to be very good at math to see that by changing the product mix, the stockbroker can dial up or dial down how much he or she gets paid. Does the stockbroker want to get paid $190,000 or $12,500 this month? What a dilemma! To add insult to injury, in many cases, especially with annuities and investment bank products, the commissions are not transparent and difficult to gauge.
This payment scheme should certainly cause you to think twice about where you get financial advice. Caution should be exercised with dual registrants, especially those who are also insurance licensed. Do your homework. Ask lots of questions. Be critical of anything with a huge prospectus – these investments generally enrich the stockbroker completely at your expense.
There is a better way to receive investment advice – work with a fee-only advisor who is subject to the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and operates as a fiduciary for clients. There is a great comfort that comes in knowing your advisor is putting your interests ahead of her interests and not merely selling you products for commission.
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What has been allowed to happen during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA staging ROBBER BARON few decades is this BLURRING of stock broker and investment advisor deliberately, willfully, and with malice opening the door to HOODWINKING. Clinton era 1990s deregulation at the same time they staged this platform for fraud-------passed policy pushing our public and private sector labor unions often tied to stock investment to being left on their own in investment of PENSION funds. OPEN DOOR TO HOODWINKING-----HANDING 99% CONTROL OF INVESTING PENSIONS -----at same time making it impossible for those 99% of investors to educate to be wise investors because of all the INSIDER-BACK DOOR corruptions and frauds.
Global banking 5% to the 1% want to declare these laws passed by CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA were simply a legal deregulation of US stock markets. We discussed in detail the process of DERIVATIVES AND CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS-----installed by JP MORGAN and US FED at this same time. Artificially inflating stock and bond values to hide weak stocks and corporate holdings----NO, THAT CAN'T BE ILLEGAL.
What we do is keep reminding our US 99% and our new global 99% immigrant citizens wanting to invest whether forced to through 401K or pensions-----global banking 5% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA have made our US stock market as too Europe and UK too fraudulent and criminal for any 99% to invest and win. Like the lottery----one may win a time or two the ONE-ARMED BANDIT-----but the HOUSE comes away with great PROFITS. Those corporations calling themselves INVESTMENT FIRMS------are indeed acting criminally. Please think about taking all wealth tied to 401ks and pensions out of today's global banking market......BOND MARKET FRAUD HAS KILLED THAT ONE SAFE HARBOR----
The Cold, Hard Truth About Brokers and Financial Advisors
Think you're getting better investment performance by using a broker or financial advisor?
You better read this.Matt Koppenheffer
(TMFKopp)
Mar 20, 2012 at 12:00AM
The case against stock brokers and financial advisors isn't just all hot air. Today, I have proof that when you use a financial advisor or full-service broker, you may find yourself with lower returns than if you'd handled your investing yourself. Read on and I'll share the details of recent research that shows just how costly professional financial advice can be.
To Germany we go!
I'm referring to a paper titled "Financial Advisors: A Case of Babysitters?" that comes to us from Andreas Hackethal and Michael Haliassos of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and Tullio Jappelli of the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. The trio of researchers got their hands on a couple of very cool datasets -- one is from a German online brokerage and includes 32,751 randomly selected customers, while the other is 4,447 clients of a large German bank.
In both the online brokerage and the bank, customers were offered the option to manage the accounts themselves or employ an advisor. That choice provided the perfect opportunity to do a side-by-side study of advisor-assisted and individually managed accounts.
Let's get right to those results.
Here are the researchers summing up their findings:
Involvement of financial advisors is found to lower portfolio returns net of direct cost, to worsen risk-return profiles, as measured by the Sharpe ratio; and to increase account turnover and investment in mutual funds, consistent with incentives built into the commission structure of both types of financial advisors.That may be a lot to digest all at once, so let me break this down a little further. There are three very crucial points that the researchers highlighted:
Lower performance. Bottom line, the research showed that the accounts that used financial advisors had lower returns (net of fees) than the accounts that did not. How much lower? A whopping five percentage points lower. That smarts. But just how much does that hurt? Starting with a $100,000 portfolio, over the course of 30 years, getting 7% returns instead of 12% means a difference of a cool $2.2 million, or having a $761,226 account value instead of nearly $3 million.
Lower risk-adjusted performance. A potentially reasonable explanation for No. 1 above is that advisors are serving their clients by creating safer portfolios that produce lower returns but also have lower risk. But that doesn't appear to be the case with this dataset. The researchers found that advisor-assisted accounts also had lower Sharpe ratios. The Sharpe ratio is a measure of performance that adjusts for risk, so the findings suggest that investors using advisors were getting less compensated for the risk they were taking as opposed to investors who weren't using advisors.
Padding their bottom line. Finally, the results suggest that, on the whole, advisors in this dataset were focused on padding their own bottom lines. Accounts that used advisors had higher turnover and were more heavily invested in mutual funds -- both outcomes that would (conveniently!) earn higher commissions for the advisors.
What have you done for me... ever?
Take a moment to think about what it means to pay a professional for their services. I've had problems with scorpions in my house, so I hired a pest professional. Evaluating that service has been simple -- I've been happy because I'm not seeing poisonous arthropods running around anymore. Which, mind you, is an outcome I was woefully unsuccessful at achieving on my own.
Likewise, you could hire a plumber to fix a leaky faucet or a doctor to treat an infection with the expectation that either could do a better job at remedying the problem than you could.
With all of that in mind, consider this: What is a financial advisor worth if you end up with lower investment returns?
Say it ain't so!
I'm sure there are holes that could be poked in this research, and I'd be overreaching if I were to suggest that this one study of a couple of financial outlets in Germany is enough to condemn the entire financial advisory industry worldwide.
At the same time, if I'm Bank of America's (NYSE: BAC) Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (a Citigroup (NYSE: C) / Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) joint venture), Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC), Charles Schwab (Nasdaq: SCHW), or any of the many other players in this multitrillion-dollar business, it's got to be a bit uncomfortable that research like this is coming out. For decades, brokers and financial advisors were very much like the great and powerful Oz, hiding out behind a comfortable and profitable shroud of secrecy. In the age of the Internet, it's becoming much easier to find out the value -- or lack thereof -- that brokers and financial advisors actually offer their customers.
WE THINK MOTLEY FOOL IS BEING A 5% PLAYER IN MAKING PEOPLE THINK WE CAN USE INTERNET TO VET FOR GOOD FINANCIAL ADVISORS.
But I'm not writing this to simply crucify the industry. I want to hear what you have to say. Whether you're a financial advisor or broker client or you're a financial advisor or broker yourself, I want to hear why you think this research hits the nail on the head or why it misses the point. Share your thoughts in the comments section below or send us an email at tips@fool.com.
Something big just happened
I don't know about you, but I always pay attention when one of the best growth investors in the world gives me a stock tip. Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner and his brother, Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner, just revealed two brand new stock recommendations. Together, they've tripled the stock market's return over the last 13 years.* And while timing isn't everything, the history of Tom and David's stock picks shows that it pays to get in early on their ideas.
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When Bernie Madoff was exposed as the only Wall Street fraudster to go to jail----he was accused of creating a PONZI SCHEME disguised as an investment firm. Madoff went to jail because he defrauded wealthy people----99% of the rest of Wall Street doing these same frauds allowed to keep their loot.
Are people creating ponzi schemes BUSINESS MEN AND WOMEN? Of course not. We don't call criminal cartels BUSINESS LEADERS.
What makes today's global banking corruptions even more fraudulent is tying our government treasuries to these frauds. Very easy---EASY PEASY to find DELIBERATE, WILLFUL, AND WITH MALICE FRAUDS----in public pension investment and US Treasury and state municipal bond frauds these several years of OBAMA---MOVING FORWARD under TRUMP.
When these schemes crash----and they always do-----the 'dividends' received over several years never cover the extent of losses in what is invested by our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE.
Our 5% to the 1% freemason/Greeks black, white, and brown ----whether labor unions or global banking 1% Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations directing citizens into these criminal investments -----HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE when angry over these wealth losses.
How to Recognize a Ponzi Scheme
The Ponzi scheme is a notorious type of securities fraud, and for good reason. Because it functions by paying off newer investors with money from previous investors while little to no actual investing is going on, everything looks to be on the up and up. Although eventually every Ponzi scheme will run out of new investors to dupe, many of these scams can run for a long time.
So what is a wise investor supposed to do?
If a Ponzi scheme is so undetectable that newer investors are being paid and previous investors are able to say they've received the "promised" returns, how can an average investor sniff out a fishy deal? As securities fraud attorneys, we'd like to say that, luckily, with a little education, any investor can be wise to the biggest red flags.
What Is a Ponzi Scheme?
Before you are able to recognize the warning signs of a Ponzi scheme, it is important that you understand what this type of fraud entails. Charles Ponzi was one of the most notorious people who participated in this type of scam, which is why it was named after him. Basically, he collected money from people who wanted to invest in his business and then paid investors large interest payments from the money he obtained from the new investors. While Ponzi didn’t create this form of investment fraud, his operation was the first to become known in the United States.
Ponzi schemes can be difficult to identify. One of the most recent examples involved a man from Santa Ana, CA, who allegedly used money received from new investors to make payments for principal and interest to previous investors. The earlier investors believed that they were receiving returns on their investments. This scam reportedly cost investors $14.5 million. Unfortunately, this case is not isolated, as there are regularly reports of Ponzi schemes resulting in financial loss.
Red Flags of a Ponzi Scheme
When you are looking into a new investment opportunity, it's important to take the time to check out both the person offering the investment and the investment itself. Verifying that both the promoter and the opportunity are legitimate can save you a lot of time, money, and heartache.
Any person offering an investment should:
Be registered to sell investments in your state
Have a history that is clear of any disciplinary action or a pattern of complaints
Be able to explain his or her investment model to you in terms you understand
Be willing and able to provide all of the documents and information you need
Beyond checking out the person offering the investment, you should also look into the actual opportunity itself. If an opportunity features the following, it could be a Ponzi scheme:
"Guaranteed" High Returns
Any investment with “guaranteed” high returns should be carefully examined.
Hidden Information
Excuses about missing paperwork, errors, or secretive strategies are red flags.
Consistent High Returns
Be cautious of investments that generate high returns unaffected by the market
Unregistered Investments
Most cases of investment fraud involve investments that have not been registered.
Unlicensed Sellers
Many Ponzi schemes involve unregistered firms and/or unlicensed individuals.
Pressure to Reinvest
Ponzi schemes collapse without regular income or when too many investors cash out.
Steps to Avoid a Ponzi Scheme
Check out the credentials and background of the person who has approached you about the investment. You can check the company out with the BBB. If the person is a broker, you can use his or her CRD number to gain more insight into the broker’s record.
Have an attorney review any contracts that you are given. Don’t send any money until you have had the contracts analyzed by a lawyer that you can trust.
Be cautious if a money manager wants to be your custodian. A custodian is a broker-dealer that maintains investment accounts. If a money manager asks you to write a check directly to them, it is a red flag. It would be better to write the check to the custodial firm.
Make sure you understand your investment. If the investment appears complicated or if it cannot be properly explained, you may not want to hand over your money.
Trust your instincts. There are times when your instincts will tell you something is wrong. If you don’t feel comfortable about an investment, walk away.
Take Action to Protect Your Rights
The first step you should take if you suspect a Ponzi scheme is to contact an experienced investment fraud attorney. Failure to do so may result in evidence becoming too obscured to properly establish your case. An attorney will take the time to go through your options and determine the best course of action. Choosing the right legal representative is not easy. However, it is absolutely critical in establishing an effective legal strategy.
The right law firm should possess the following qualities:
Established, recognized experts in investment fraud cases
Track record of successful outcomes in investment claims
If you believe that you may have been the victim of a real estate Ponzi scheme then it is important to contact an experienced investment fraud attorney. Meyer Wilson has successfully represented more than 800 investors in stockbroker mediation, arbitration, and litigation claims.
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The ROBBER BARON frauds with the ROARING 20s ending in the great economic crash and Great Depression was criminal as well-----that is why the rich tied to owning these corporations are called ROBBER BARONS. We don't excuse these frauds simply because these ROBBERS turnaround to DONATE to CHARITIES being patrons to US CITIZENS made impoverished by that global banking fraud.
TRUMP is MOVING FORWARD what was massive and systemic US TREASURY AND STATE MUNICIPAL BOND MARKET FRAUD operating during the entire OBAMA terms. We want to be clear about whom to hold responsible------CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA global banking 5% pols and players staged these frauds----TRUMP is simply all too glad to be the FALL GUY.
Don't get mad at 99% of black citizens---99% of white citizens---99% of brown citizens---don't get mad at 99% of Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Hindi -----our US elections rigged and fraudulent have not allowed for any of our US voters to GET RID OF CRIMINAL GLOBAL WALL STREET POLS.
Absolutely NONE of what this global banking VOX MEDIA OUTLET prints as public policy concerns for all kinds of population groups IS TRUE. Our 99% of WE THE PEOPLE do not have to march to Washington DC to find these 5% pols and players!
PLEASE GLANCE THROUGH TO SEE PUBLIC POLICY ISSUES HAVING NO IMPORTANCE NEXT TO GORILLA-IN-THE-ROOM MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE POLICIES.
Economists said a Trump presidency would be a disaster. So why isn't Wall Street worried?
By Timothy B. Leetim@vox.com Nov 10, 2016, 9:00am EST
Before the election, a lot of people — including me — assumed that a Donald Trump win would send stocks plunging. A group of 20 Nobel Prize–winning economists warned last week that a Trump presidency could “jeopardize the foundations of American prosperity and the global economy.”
But on Wednesday morning, the markets didn’t seem very alarmed. Stocks opened the day up, and then they kept rising, ending the day up by 1.1 percent. Evidently, Wall Street doesn’t view a Trump presidency as all that alarming, at least for shareholders.
So what’s going on here? I think it’s possible for both those Nobel laureates last week and the markets this week to be right. Depending on which campaign promises Trump chooses to pursue, a Trump administration could wind up doing a lot of damage to the US economy. But this damage wouldn’t necessarily take forms that would be reflected by stock market values.
For example, Trump’s plan for bank deregulation could eventually lead to another 2008-style financial crisis. And his deregulation of the greenhouse gas emissions could eventually lead to catastrophic climate change. But those disasters may take a long time — years, even decades — to materialize. And in the meantime, less regulation could mean more economic activity and more profits for US companies.
Some of Trump’s economic policies could also be disastrous for particular groups of people — like poor people and immigrants — without harming the stock market or conventional economic metrics like gross domestic product or the unemployment rate. So the economic stakes of Trump’s economic agenda are high. They just won’t necessarily be reflected in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Donald Trump was not a conventional candidate, and he didn’t have the detailed policy blueprints that presidential candidates normally publish. But the broad outlines of his economic agenda are fairly clear.
First, a massive tax cut. Trump’s plan would reduce government revenue by $7.2 trillion over a decade, making it more than twice as large as the significant tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush. Almost half the benefits would flow to the top 1 percent of income earners.
Trump would pair his tax cut with a package of infrastructure investments that could cost more than $500 billion.
“We have bridges that are falling down,” he said in August. “We’ll get a fund, we’ll make a phenomenal deal with the low interest rates and rebuild our infrastructure.”
Trump has also signaled that he’d like to see about $500 billion in additional military spending over the next decade. “We want to deter, avoid, and prevent conflict through our unquestioned military dominance,” Trump said in September, lamenting recent cuts to defense spending.
He vowed to make these changes “revenue neutral” using “commonsense reforms that eliminate government waste and budget gimmicks.” But that promise may go out the window once it becomes clear that there isn’t anywhere close to $500 billion in “government waste” to cut and Republicans still want to spend more on the Pentagon.
Ironically, the package of tax cuts and spending hikes could amount to the kind of Keynesian fiscal stimulus that liberals advocated during the 2009 recession. If deficit spending boosts the economy, it could force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to keep inflation under control.
And sure enough, the yield on 10-year Treasury bonds soared on Wednesday, rising above 2 percent for the first time since early 2016. That’s a sign that markets are expecting less fiscal discipline from the new regime than it would have gotten under President Hillary Clinton.
Another part of Trump’s agenda is deregulation. In particular, Trump has vowed to repeal Obama’s regulations designed to combat global warming by curtailing greenhouse gas emissions. He also wants to roll back Dodd-Frank, the package of financial regulations Congress passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
In the short term, repealing environmental regulations could cause economic activity to go up, not down, as businesses face lower costs. It will only be after a generation or two that the full consequences — rising temperatures, rising sea levels, more severe weather — will be felt. And these effects will occur globally, not just in the United States, so the costs will be very widely distributed.
The story is similar for financial deregulation. The Dodd-Frank reforms tried to discourage big banks from making the kind of highly risky leveraged bets that brought the banking system to the brink of collapse in 2008. It’s too early to say whether this framework has been effective at preventing financial crises, since it’s only been about six years since it passed. But there’s reason to worry that financial crises could become more likely if the law is repealed.
Those consequences, too, might take many years to materialize. Indeed, as with climate regulations, the initial effect might appear to be positive — as newly deregulated banks lend more and boost economic activity.
So Trump’s regulatory policies will have big impacts, but they may not be obvious until long after he leaves the White House.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly railed against China and Mexico, vowing to slap higher tariffs on Chinese imports and renegotiate the NAFTA trade deal. But Simon Lester, a trade expert at the Cato Institute, argues that it’s far from clear how far Trump would actually go toward cutting the US off from foreign trade.
One of Trump’s big challenges on the trade front is the fact that the world is bound together in a complex patchwork of agreements that limits the ability of any one country to change trade policies unilaterally. For example, the US imposes something called anti-dumping duties on certain Chinese goods, and the president has some discretion to decide how these duties are set. In principle, Trump’s trade team could tweak these formulas to effectively charge China more to sell products to us.
The problem is that China would likely challenge these higher charges at the WTO, and if Trump didn’t have a good justification for them, then US goods would be hit by countervailing duties in China. That would start a trade war that would be in no one’s interest.
Trump’s second problem is Congress. For example, Simon says that Trump does have the authority to unilaterally withdraw the US from the NAFTA agreement. The problem is that Congress made key NAFTA commitments — like zero-tariff treatment for most goods — part of US law. So unilaterally withdrawing from NAFTA wouldn’t actually accomplish very much; Mexican companies could still sell goods in the US without paying tariffs.
To change that, Trump would have to get Congress to repeal the law that implemented NAFTA’s requirements back in the 1990s. The problem is that many members of Congress — especially in Trump’s own party — are enthusiastic free traders. They have close ties to business groups like the US Chamber of Commerce that have long favored free trade. So they won’t necessarily go along with a plan to withdraw from NAFTA — especially if Trump doesn’t have something to replace it.
Simon argues that a more likely scenario is that Trump will go to countries like Mexico and seek more modest changes to their trade relationships. If Mexicans make some concessions, then Trump can declare victory and seek congressional approval — without upending the global trading system.
Still, it’s hard to be sure. While Trump has talked a lot about trade, the statements have tended to be very general: He thinks NAFTA is bad and China is ripping us off. Trade law is a complex subject, so whoever Trump chooses to help him on trade policy could have a lot of influence.
From a humanitarian perspective, the most significant aspect of Trump’s administration may be his treatment of immigrants. Trump has vowed to deport millions of people who are in the United States illegally. That will have untold personal costs for the people targeted. It will also be bad for businesses that employ those workers and their customers.
Also, if Trump adopts the economic agenda of House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), it could lead to dramatic cuts in social programs, including Medicaid and food stamps. Vox’s Dylan Matthews argues that the Ryan budget amounts to “the most vicious cuts to programs for poor and medium-income people of any president since Reagan.”
Finally, Trump and the Republican Congress are widely expected to repeal Obamacare. No one knows what, if anything, they’ll put in its place. But Vox’s Sarah Kliff reports that as many as 22 million people could lose health insurance as a result.
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We have made clear these same ROBBER BARON frauds these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA were the same frauds happening in early 1900s MOVED FORWARD by same global banking 5% freemason/Greek pols and players. Same game----different generation. Here we see European banking fleecing their 99% of European citizens same way. Both European and US 5% players pretending to be investment firms acting as stock brokers thinking they are outside of US or European jurisdiction by fleecing our third world 99% of citizens-----who WORLD BANK/IMF have tied to same 401K/pension schemes thrown out as FODDER to these criminal cartels-----ARE ACTING ILLEGALLY BECAUSE THEY ARE INSIDE US OR EUROPEAN SOVEREIGN BOUNDARIES pedaling these frauds. It is the same as if CHINA or RUSSIAN 5% players were in these nations acting criminally towards 401K/pension investments of US or European citizens.
THE CRIMINAL ACTIONS OF INVESTMENT CHEATS ARE TIED TO THE NATION FROM WHERE THESE ACTIONS TAKE PLACE.
When our 99% of WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens think it OK to fleece that overseas 99% of their hard-earned savings----then we can be sure it has become alright for ourselves to be fleeced in these same ways. Please stand up against these ROBBER BARON FRAUDS AND CORRUPTIONS----and history repeats itself-----WW 1 and WW 2 were a direct result of global banking 1% ROBBER BARON FRAUDS.
We KNOW our 5% freemason/Greeks are hard into being these ROBBER BARON players.
The rankings in this RAND CORPORATION article would have us believe that it is those Eastern block or Greek/Italian socialist nations doing all these frauds-----NO, those listed as being least corrupt are driving these frauds and corruptions in those other nations.
The Cost of Corruption in Europe — Up to €990 Billion (£781.64 Billion) Lost Annually
FOR RELEASE
Tuesday
March 22, 2016
- RAND Europe's study shows the true extent of the cost of corruption in the EU, with new figures far higher than the previous estimate of €120 billion (£94.74 billion).
- Study estimates that an initial €71.12 billion (£56.16 billion) could be saved through the EU adopting three policy measures regarding corruption.
- Corruption risks during public procurement could cost Europe around €5 billion (£3.95 billion) a year.
The Cost of Non-Europe in the Area of Corruption Study by RAND Europe, commissioned by the European Parliament, investigated the many forms of corruption, which includes paying bribes or exercising power to give privileged access to public services, goods or contracts.
The new figures from the study are far higher than the initial estimate provided by the European Commission of €120 billion (£94.74 billion), after RAND Europe used an innovative methodology to measure the cost of corruption to the EU as a whole. This takes into account the indirect effects of corruption, such as disincentives of companies to invest, and direct effects, such as money lost on tax revenues and public procurement.
Corruption involving EU public procurement was estimated to cost Europe around €5 billion (£3.95 billion) a year. This form of corruption could be involving only one organisation in a procurement process, or giving organisations just a couple of days to respond to a tender for a new contract.
Based on the study, RAND Europe has recommended three policy measures to address corruption in Europe and retrieve an initial €71.12 billion (£56.16 billion) from the money lost each year. These are:
- Applying the updated Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM), which was used in Bulgaria and Romania before each joined the EU, to other member states could reduce corruption costs by €70 billion (£55.27 billion) annually.
- Establishing a European Public Prosecutors' Office (EPPO), which would assist OLAF (the European Commission Anti-Fraud Office) in investigating corruption across the EU, could reduce corruption costs by €0.2 billion (£0.16 billion) annually.
- Implementing a full EU-wide procurement system could reduce corruption costs by €920 million (£726.37 million) annually.
He continues: “Measuring corruption is challenging, but our study provides one of the most realistic and current estimations of its true cost to Europe as a whole. Our recommendations highlight achievable targets for the EU and member states to help stop corruption from taking place and limit the amount of money lost each year.”
The full report for the Cost of non-Europe Corruption can be viewed at: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2016/579319/EPRS_STU%282016%29579319_EN.pdf.
- ENDS -
Notes to Editors:
The league table of EU corruption — lowest to highest levels in individual member states based on an average of three corruption indices
PositionCountry
1Denmark
2Finland
3Sweden
4Netherlands
5Luxembourg
6UK
7Austria
8Germany
9Republic of Ireland
10Belgium
11France
12Spain
13Portugal
14Cyprus
15Estonia*
16Slovenia*
17Malta*
18Hungary*
19Lithuania*
20Poland*
21Czech Republic*
22Italy*
23Slovakia*
24Greece*
25Latvia*
26Croatia*
27Bulgaria*
28Romania*
The * indicates countries that have higher corruption levels than the EU average for the 28 member states.
About RAND Europe
RAND Europe is a not-for-profit organisation whose mission is to help improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. Our clients include European institutions, governments, charities, foundations, universities and private sector firms with a need for impartial research. We combine deep subject knowledge across diverse policy areas including health, science and innovation; defence, security and infrastructure; and home affairs and social policy. Combined with proven methodological expertise in evaluation, impact measurement and choice modelling, we are able to offer quality-assured research and analysis, unbiased insights and actionable solutions that make a difference to people's lives. www.randeurope.org
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When US national media deliberately creates TENSIONS between RUSSIA---CHINA selling the idea that these nations are hacking and/or attacking our 99% US citizens with these fraudulent schemes------this is what we call OLD WORLD MERCHANTS OF VENICE GLOBAL 1% KINGS AND QUEENS-----these nations---China/ Russia/Eastern/Western Europe/US/Canada----are today controlled by global banking 1% neo-liberals/neo-cons all working for the same OLD WORLD GLOBAL 1% KINGS AND QUEENS.
There is no tension between these global banking 1% of each of these nations----they are glad to help each other fleece our US and global 99% of citizens. The manufactured tensions by national and international media preface this MARCH TO WW 3.
Shadow Banking Threatens China's Economy—but What Is It, Exactly?
Needed government reforms to the country's byzantine financial system may nonetheless upend China's growth.
- Ryan Perkins
- Jun 28, 2013 THE ATLANTIC
Zhou Xiaochuan (R), Governor of the People's Bank of China, is tasked with tackling excesses in China's shadow banking system.(Molly Riley/AP)
Last week, the Shanghai interbank offered rate (Shibor), China's once-anonymous version of London's LIBOR, made news around the world when it suddenly spiked at all time high. Expected to lower this rate by injecting cash into struggling Chinese banks, the People's Bank of China (the country's equivalent of the Fed) instead did nothing, leading to speculation that China's leaders were finally prepared to tackle the economy's overheating problem. In the process, the media appears to have finally taken notice of the potential dangers that lurk within the byzantine industry that is Chinese finance. Reviewing the headlines, a series of arcane, sinister terms leap out: Off-balance sheet lending. Inter-corporate finance. And, most prominently, shadow banking.
Such terms, nebulous as they may be, are keeping Chinese policy makers up at night: According to Fitch, China's shadow banking sector may be hiding as much as $2 trillion worth of risky assets in off-balance sheet lending. But what does that really mean? And, more importantly, how did China find itself in this situation? Before we can answer these questions, it's worth going back and having a look at what shadow banking really is, and how it presents a risk to China -- and the world economy as a whole.
Firstly, the concept of shadow banking has an unfortunate reputation and is in dire need of rebranding. Despite the macabre connotations its name conjures, it's not inherently a bad thing. Generally, shadow banking simply refers to the lending and borrowing -- basic financial activities -- that occur outside the traditional deposit and loan model; that is, anything other than putting money in the bank and occasionally borrowing for things like buying a house. In Western nations such as the U.S, hedge funds, venture capital firms and private equity -- all forms of shadow banking -- form a major part of economic life. In China, however, the structure of shadow banking is very different.
Until around 2007-8, conventional banks, in the form of loans, undertook the vast bulk of all lending in China, and because the Communist Party controls the vast majority of banks, this structure allowed the government to retain a handle over the economy at large. However, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, as export-oriented businesses -- the companies that form a major pillar of the Chinese economy -- saw markets shrink, two important things happened.
The Shibor rate hike and the government's refusal to step in with additional funds, then, is a not-so-subtle statement that the party's over and that it's time to solve debt addiction the old fashioned way -- cold turkey.First, in response to the global financial crisis in 2008, the Chinese government enacted a stimulus package worth $586 billion, more than half of which was financed through new bank lending. This package won praise around the world for its speed and decisiveness and kept the country on track in the short term, in noted contrast to a similar plan implemented by the United States. But the stimulus also flooded the economy with cheap credit, thereby fuelling a speculative housing bubble, propping up inefficient state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and undoing years of work spent trying to instill China's banks with financial discipline.
In the two decades leading up to the financial crisis, a lot of hard and sincere work was done to try to teach profligate SOEs, local governments, and banks to live and work within their means, but that doesn't mean these institutions suddenly forgot how to take advantage of a free lunch. In fact, it probably heightened their appetite for it. As a result, much of the money was sunk -- almost literally -- into local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), which are municipal government-owned companies often responsible for infrastructure investment. These companies, for the most part, exist to keep local government debt off the books -- since local governments have a very limited capacity to borrow money directly -- by allowing them to borrow indirectly and finance construction projects through companies they own, built on land often acquired and sold below market price by them.
Surprisingly, this system constituted a huge source of revenue for cash-strapped local governments, which have few real sources of tax revenue. Less surprisingly, it is also an endemic, institutionalized form of corruption. A recent OECD report estimated that total public debt reached 57 percent of GDP by the end of 2010, with LGFVs accounting for about three quarters of this figure. Given that some people familiar with LGFVs see them as little more than holes in the ground into which seemingly endless amounts of perfectly good money are poured, it is likely this borrowing generated a wave of future defaults.
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How, and why, was the money spent this way? To answer this question, it's important to understand the love affair between the Chinese government and infrastructure projects. Over the past two decades, Beijing has relied on building roads, power grids, and other fixed assets in order to facilitate the rapid expansion of the economy, but this method of growth inevitably leads to declining returns over time. As a result, Chinese policy makers understand that to decrease the economy's dependence on investment and export markets (which depend too much on the whims of the global economy) domestic consumption needs to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, however, this "rebalancing" is tricky.
One problem is this: Contrary to popular belief, China's manipulation of the yuan isn't the golden goose Western critics make it out to be. Even if the currency were allowed to float freely, Chinese labor would still cost a fraction of what it does in the U.S. This discrepancy is mainly achieved through the hukou, a household registration system that prevents workers from becoming fully entitled residents in the regions to which they have migrated to work, as well as restricting the rights of children born in these regions to services like education and health care.
In short, the hukou ensures that workers remain in the shadows -- and wages remain low -- by constantly recycling labor out of factories and back to the place of registration. Factors like this have made it increasingly difficult to rebalance the economy and have contributed to the yawning wealth gap in Chinese society. Though Chinese leaders have hinted at reforming the hukou, they nonetheless face a vexing dilemma: How do they increase domestic demand without significantly upsetting a social order upon which the economy depends for its competitive advantage?
***
Historically, the answer to this question was infrastructure development, and for good reason: Infrastructure is politically neutral, theoretically benefits the whole of society, is generally dominated by massive State and quasi-State owned enterprises, and in the past generated massive returns. However, over the last four years, the GDP growth generated by each yuan of additional loan has fallen from 0.85 to 0.15, an indicator that the limits of debt-fuelled growth are being reached. In effect, the very engine that caused China's growth ---fixed asset investment fuelled by local debt -- wasn't sustainable, and the government began to worry about the negative consequences of an overheating economy: inflation, real estate bubbles, and overcapacity.
So in 2009 they slammed on the breaks. An economy that was addicted to credit needed to go somewhere else to get its fix. This was where shadow banking came in.
Desperate for credit, banks began working closely with trust companies and other entities to refinance bad loans by bundling them up and repackaging them as "wealth management vehicles", or WMVs. These vehicles, which require a tenure ranging from a year to a few days, offered a higher rate of return than conventional bank deposits. They also allowed banks to keep their lending off their balance sheets and were sold through their branches or online, effectively turning banks into middle men between recipients and investors. In theory, this should have solved the problem of obtaining local financing. But the problems have only begun.
***
As more and more of these loans turned bad they were simply recycled into high yield WMVs, a fact that China's policy makers have acknowledged. In an uncharacteristically stark warning aired in a China Daily op-ed, Xiao Gang, the former head of the Bank of China, said that there are more than 20,000 WMVs in circulation -- compared with "a few hundred" five years ago. Worse, many of these WMVs lack transparency or are linked to empty real estate, long term infrastructure projects or collections of assets which have no sure fire way of generating the revenue needed to repay them at the given time, creating the real possibility of a liquidity crisis.
Has this crisis already begun? There's evidence that banks and trusts have colluded to circumvent a shortage of liquidity by issuing ever greater numbers of WMVs -- with still higher rates of return to attract the cash necessary to finance the short fall. But if the music stops and investors pull their money or stop purchasing new issuances, then the rollover for the bank to pick up could potentially be huge. The consulting firm KPMG estimates that shadow banking and WMVs overtook insurance to become China's second largest financial sector in 2012 and represent assets roughly equivalent to 15 percent of total commercial bank deposits.
This situation has arisen in a country whose people, facing restrictions on investing abroad and nervous about China's volatile stock market, have so few other investment options. In addition, most simply don't believe banks will let them lose their money and will support their investments, no matter how risky they are; essentially, the basic ingredients of a Ponzi scheme. The Shibor rate hike and the government's refusal to step in with additional funds, then, is a not-so-subtle statement that the party's over and that it's time to solve debt addiction the old fashioned way -- cold turkey. The question, then, is this: how bad was the addiction, and how big will the comedown be?
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During ROBBER BARON periods as last century and today------Hong Kong bankers come to US to defraud their 99% of citizens as US global Wall Street is over in Hong Kong defrauding the 99% of US citizens-----Russian oligarchs are in NYC defrauding their 99% of RUSSIAN citizens while UK/US are in Russia defrauding US 99% of citizens and of course all the above are in Nigeria using that banking system to launder all that global fraud while Nigerian banking 1% are in US defrauding their 99% of Nigerian citizens------ALL SAME GLOBAL BANKING SYSTEM ----GLOBAL BANKING 1% DEFRAUDING from all nations' citizens-----no tensions between these OLD WORLD GLOBAL 1% KINGS AND QUEENS. Each of these nations have those 5% freemason/Greeks as ROBBER BARON PLAYERS.
The deregulation during CLINTON ERA 1990s let us know ROBBER BARON period was gearing up-----as soon as ROBBER BARON period is over----as with this coming massive US TREASURY and corporate bond fraud------all those criminal investment firms acting as stock brokers pretending to be free of any FIDUCIARY will disappear.
Corruption in Nigeria
The $20-billion hole in Africa’s largest economy
Most Nigerians live in poverty. Millions would be spared if officials stopped pilfering from the public purse
Middle East and Africa
Feb 2nd 2016 | LAGOS
POWER corrupts. So too does a resource-rich economy, like Nigeria’s, where easy access to oil revenues opens the door to palm-greasing. Of 168 countries surveyed by Transparency International, an anti-corruption group Germany, in its annual Corruption Perception Index, Nigeria ranks 32nd from the bottom.
Whistleblowers sometimes try to estimate how much cash has gone missing from Nigeria’s public purse. In 2014 a respected former central-bank governor lost his job after claiming that $20 billion had been stolen. But this captures only a small share of the damage done by corruption. The much bigger question is where Nigeria could be if its politicians and officials were a little more honest.
One answer comes from economists at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). They compared Nigeria to three other resource-producing countries that are somewhat less corrupt than it, though by no means squeaky clean: Ghana, Malaysia and Colombia. PwC concluded that Nigeria’s’s economy, which was worth $513 billion in 2014, might have been 22% bigger if its level of corruption were closer to Ghana’s, a nearby west African country.
By 2030, the size of Africa’s biggest economy should triple in real terms come what may. Yet if Nigeria manages to reduce corruption to levels comparable to Malaysia (itself hardly above suspicion: its prime minister recently had to explain how almost $700 million had made it into his bank account), its economy could be some 37% bigger still. The additional gain would be worth some $534 billion (adjusted for inflation), or about as much as the economy is currently worth. If it does nothing to change then the cost of corruption in Nigeria would amount to almost $2,000 per person a year by 2030, PwC reckons.
Some of this damage is visible. When public cash—most of which comes from oil pumped in the southern Niger delta—is siphoned off, investment in health, education and roads suffers. But corruption also affects the economy in more surreptitious ways. Public institutions often hire the family and friends of the boss rather than the best candidates. In turn those institutions become more inefficient and deliver less of what they are meant to, whether it is education or roads. In addition countries where corruption is high attract less foreign investment. They have higher prices, and lower tax bases. Nigeria’s tax-to-GDP ratio is only about 8%, compared with more than 25% in South Africa. Given rampant theft, many people are reluctant to pay their taxes on the ground that the money will just be squandered.
This may in part explain why, despite its oil wealth, there is a rising share of Nigerians who are classified as below the poverty line. A survey of living standards (using data from 2010, the most recent figures available) suggested that 61.2% of the population lives in absolute poverty, an increase of over six percentage points on the previous figures from 2004. At least 25m people who should have been lifted into low- or middle-income still reside below the breadline thanks to “excess corruption”, says Andrew S. Nevin, PwC’s chief economist in Nigeria.
Last year Muhammadu Buhari, the president, swept to power on the votes of Nigerians who have had enough. Since then, anti-fraud agencies have arrested senior politicians and sidekicks accused of embezzlement, and new corruption bills have been put before parliament. “Ending the impunity is about political will, because those benefiting most are among the ranks of the leaders,” says Samuel Kaninda, the co-ordinator for west Africa at Transparency International. Cleaning up Nigeria will be an Herculean task. But the rewards are equally fabulous.
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Can we imagine how such a protest ---here in that US CITY DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE----LOS ANGELES ----would be effective in getting rid of global banking 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA if we didn't allow these national global banking 5% leaders to name these protests after TRUMP?
MARCH FOR OUR LIVES------ROBBER BARON FRAUDS AND US CITIES AS FAILED STATES----
Peaceful rolling protests for weeks and months filling US city downtown streets just as this video shows ----millions of US 99% of WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens -----demanding those 5% global banking pols and players get out of our people's government---local and state.
The Political Resistance against Donald Trump
March 24 at 1:01pm ·
“MARCH FOR OUR LIVES” Downtown Los Angeles
you tube.com
This CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ROBBER BARON period was timed to BABY BOOMER wealth assets-------maxed wealth in Social Security and Medicare Trusts-----maxed wealth in retirement savings and life insurances -----all reaching the period of baby boomer maximum retirement CURVE. Baby boomers from 1940s are aging out----the peak of baby boomer retirements happening during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA.
This is for what our US 99% OF MILLENNIALs are being staged ----sadly, our young adults are deliberately being kept unable to maintain steady employment and strong wages but Obama and Clinton neo-liberals privatized all public trusts and savings to private global banking to continue these SOCIAL SECURITY/MEDICARE/401k/PENSION schemes for these next few decades of MOVING FORWARD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE construction of massive global corporate campuses and global factories----
SAME MASSIVE AND SYSTEMIC FRAUDS WILL POP UP AGAIN STEALING ALL OF ANY WEALTH OUR US MILLENNIALS will accumulate---especially those thinking they are WINNERS being that 5% earning $200-400,000 annual salaries.
Since MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD SMART CITIES for only the global 1% has a goal of global 99% of citizens having no access to any monetary wealth-----there will be no need for a next round of ROBBER BARON FRAUDS----IF WE KEEP MOVING FORWARD.
When did CLINTON ERA install deregulated criminal banking structures? Here we see baby boomers peaked in 1999
'Baby Boomers have always had an outsize presence compared with other generations. They peaked at 78.8 million in 1999 and have remained the largest living adult generation'.
And our millennials are being led to protest a TRUMP ----
Fact Tank - Our Lives in Numbers
March 1, 2018
Millennials projected to overtake Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation
By Richard Fry PEW RESEARCH
Millennials are on the cusp of surpassing Baby Boomers as the nation’s largest living adult generation, according to population projections from the U.S. Census Bureau. As of July 1, 2016 (the latest date for which population estimates are available), Millennials, whom we define as ages 20 to 35 in 2016, numbered 71 million, and Boomers (ages 52 to 70) numbered 74 million. Millennials are expected to overtake Boomers in population in 2019 as their numbers swell to 73 million and Boomers decline to 72 million. Generation X (ages 36 to 51 in 2016) is projected to pass the Boomers in population by 2028.
The Millennial generation continues to grow as young immigrants expand its ranks. Boomers – whose generation was defined by the boom in U.S. births following World War II – are aging and their numbers shrinking in size as the number of deaths among them exceeds the number of older immigrants arriving in the country.
Because generations are analytical constructs, it takes time for popular and expert consensus to develop as to the precise boundaries that demarcate one generation from another. Pew Research Center has assessed demographic, labor market, attitudinal and behavioral measures and has now established an endpoint – albeit inexact – for the Millennial generation. According to our revised definition, the youngest “Millennial” was born in 1996. This post has been updated accordingly (see note below).
Here’s a look at some generational projections:
Millennials
- With immigration adding more numbers to this group than any other, the Millennial population is projected to peak in 2036 at 76.2 million. Thereafter, the oldest Millennial will be at least 56 years of age and mortality is projected to outweigh net immigration. By 2050 there will be a projected 74.3 million Millennials.
Generation X
- For a few more years, Gen Xers are projected to remain the “middle child” of generations – caught between two larger generations, the Millennials and the Boomers. Gen Xers were born during a period when Americans were having fewer children than in later decades. When Gen Xers were born, births averaged around 3.4 million per year, compared with the 3.9 million annual rate from 1981 to 1996 when the Millennials were born.
- Though the oldest Gen Xer was 51 in 2016, the Gen X population is projected to grow for a couple more years. Gen Xers are projected to outnumber Boomers in 2028, when there will be 64.6 million Gen Xers and 63.7 million Boomers. The Census Bureau projects that the Gen X population will peak at 65.8 million in 2018.
Baby Boomers
- Baby Boomers have always had an outsize presence compared with other generations. They peaked at 78.8 million in 1999 and have remained the largest living adult generation.
- There were an estimated 74.1 million Boomers in 2016. By midcentury, the Boomer population is projected to dwindle to 16.6 million.
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