The children of Sam Walton, founder of the Walmart empire, are among the richest people in the world. Walmart is notorious for paying its workers poorly and treating them badly. As this article from Bloomberg shows, they use every trick in the book to prevent paying taxes so that they keep as much of their money as possible. What seems like generous gifts to charity are in fact tax dodges. [Read more…]
I wrote earlier about how the stock market is rigged against small investors. Matt Taibbi provides another example. As a result of a wrongful termination suit by a former Thomson Reuters employee named Mark Rosenblum who became a whistleblower, a document has been released that shows how key economic data that is influential in predicting how the stock market would move was released early to a few special institutions that were willing to pay for the privilege. [Read more…]
I do not directly invest in the stock market. I do not have the knowledge to do so nor sufficient interest to invest the time to study how it works to make the kinds of informed decisions that are required. Of course, my retirement money is invested by others on my behalf but that goes on automatically without any involvement on my part. I have no idea what is going on. [Read more…]
Greg Palast is an investigative journalist. In an article in Vice, he says that a source has given him a secret memo whose “content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn’t believe it.” The document that he calls the ‘End Game Memo’ reveals how top US treasury officials secretly colluded with the heads of major banks to implement the deregulations that led to the financial collapse. Once again, this was something that was suspected but it makes a difference to have it actually spelled out. [Read more…]
The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation has released a report where they say that the recent NSA revelations are going to cost American companies that provide cloud computing and encryption services quite a lot of money, since many international businesses may be reluctant to give their business to US companies that can be compelled to provide the government with backdoor access to all their information. [Read more…]
I have been railing about the fact that despite the massive damage that the major banks did to ordinary people and the economy leading up to and during the recent financial crisis, not a single major bank executive was even threatened with jail time. Instead the banks were merely fined amounts that seem impressive to ordinary people but are a pittance to the banks who can write it off as the cost of doing business. [Read more…]
Economist Dean Baker points out that speculation by the big banks and investment houses is the cause of much of our financial woes and that a financial speculation tax would be well worth implementing as a means of curbing that practice. He explains why such a tax is needed. [Read more…]
Felix Salmon tells us what happened, comparing two cases, one in which Goldman Sachs sided with the defendant, the other in which they were part of the prosecution, and the big differences in the outcomes. Can you guess which case resulted in the harsher punishment? He concludes: [Read more…]
Workers in the fast food industry are going on strike across the country demanding that their wages be increased so that they can live on them. It is long overdue that the minimum wage be doubled to somewhere around $15 per hour. That would do more to end poverty than many of the anti-poverty programs that currently exist. [Read more…]
As Ben Bernanke ends his term as the chair of the Federal Reserve in January 2014, there has been intense speculation amongst Fed watchers as to whom president Obama will choose to replace him, and the betting is that it will be either Janet Yellen, deputy chair of the Fed, or Obama advisor Lawrence Summers. [Read more…]