The world watched in admiration last year when over two dozen Icelandic bankers who played a role in causing the 2008 financial crisis were sentenced to prison.
Bankers
The rising number of banker suicides has been written about here before; the New York Times now focuses on the increasing number of deaths, by suicide and otherwise, on Wall Street: In retrospect,…
Last year we ran stories about the unusually high number of suicides among bankers. The trend is continuing in 2015, reports ZeroHedge, with the death of a “cheerful” Dutch playboy financier making…
Abby Martin speaks with Rolling Stone journalist, Matt Taibbi, about a JP Morgan Chase whistleblower that has come forward to expose how the company knowingly sold toxic mortgages to investors and how…
Liz Pleasant writes at Yes! Magazine: Last month PM Press published the Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual —also known as “the DROM.” But don’t let that menacing-sounding acronym fool you: this is a…
Will unregulated, debt-based financial products destroy the world? Bloomberg reports that the funneling of capital into instruments of so-called “shadow banking” continues to balloon to unimaginably large proportions: The shadow banking industry…
Via the Nation, David Graeber on rebellion against indebtedness: The rise of [Occupy Wall Street] allowed us to start seeing the system for what it is: an enormous engine of debt extraction….
A history of false flags, war opportunism, Al-Qaeda and other deceptions.
Via WeAreChange
Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange asks Tom Brokaw what he thinks the state of journalism is in today and who he thinks runs the world.
The erudite James Surowiecki brings his journalistic skills to the problem of a banking system that has subsumed the its own watchdogs, in The New Yorker: In order to work well, markets…
With clinical psychopaths dramatically overrepresented in finance, one can only assume that mentally healthy workers must learn to imitate psychopathic behavior to remain employed. Via the Huffington Post: One out of every…
Strauss-Kahn And The Secret Culture Of Aggressive Sexuality In The High Pressure World Of Bankers And Banksters. My colleague Mike Whitney asks: “So, what are the chances that Strauss-Kahn will get a…
The US Justice Department has sued Deutsche Bank for more than $1bn (£600m) for defrauding the government.
The complaint says Deutsche’s MortgageIT subsidiary lied in order to get Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insurance for its loans.
FHA rules say lenders must make sure the borrower will be able to repay the loan, but the Justice Department claims Deutsche did not do so.
A Deutsche spokesperson described the claims as “unreasonable and unfair”. “We intend to defend against the action vigorously,” she added.
The lawsuit is one of the first targeting mortgage lenders under the federal False Claims Act.
What a shocker. Matthew Lynn writes in Bloomberg: There is something surprising about a private banker warning his colleagues about the rich. It would be like a director of Volkswagen AG casting…
Yet another instance in which the United States could learn something from our Scandinavian brethren: In Iceland, bank executives who helped bring about the nation’s financial meltdown are being rounded up and…
It’s about a minute into the clip on one of the background computers. That’s definitely not a financial spreadsheet : ) Lester Haines writes on the Register:
An employee of Sydney’s Macquarie Bank probably isn’t in line for a fat payrise after he was caught on live TV closely analysing something a bit more scintillating than the Lucky Country’s interest rates:
According to net experts, at least one of the photos in question is Orlando Bloom’s squeeze Miranda Kerr. The Victoria’s Secret Angel is a local lass made good, and is rarely seen dressed in more than her underwear, which makes her the pin-up of choice among Sydney’s hardened bankers.
Whoops, sounds like somebody broke the first two rules. Personally, I wouldn’t mind taking a crack at some of these overpaid adrenaline junkies.Thanks Bloomberg.
“We get a lot of finance guys,” said Max McGarr, the gym’s program director and a professional fighter. “It’s a good release from their job. If you lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s good to come here and get it out.”
“It’s a great stress reliever,” said Richard Byrne, chief executive officer of Deutsche Bank Securities, who practices jiu-jitsu and sparring at Renzo with Cholish and other professional fighters. “Talk about a great way to get aggression out, and it’s an unbelievable workout.”
Cholish and his roommate, Erik Owings, also a professional fighter, converted the top level of their duplex apartment on the Upper East Side into a gym, where Byrne sometimes brings Wall Street colleagues to work out.
“It’s the dungeon of pain,” said Brian Peganoff, an assistant vice president in corporate cash management at Deutsche Bank. Peganoff, 27, learned tae kwon do as a child and started boxing as a workout while attending Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He began jiu-jitsu about two years ago.
“People on Wall Street are pretty competitive and I think that carries over,” Peganoff said. “That’s the ultimate competition, putting two people in a cage and seeing who is the better guy.”