Bank Regulation Quotes

Free markets are necessary to promote long-term growth, but they are not self-regulating, particularly when it comes to banks and other large financial institutions.

Starting in 1792 with George Washington, there were financial crises every ten to fifteen years. Panics, bank runs, credit freezes, crashes, depressions. People lost their farms, families were wiped out. This went on for more than a hundred years, until the Great Depression, when Oklahoma turned to dust. "We can do better than this." Americans said. "We don't need to go back to the boom-and-bust cycle." The Great Depression produced three regulations: The FDIC-your bank deposits were safe. Glass-Steagall-banks couldn't go crazy with your money. The SEC-stock markets would be tightly controlled. For fifty years, these rules kept America from having another financial crisis. Not one panic or meltdown or freeze. They gave Americans security and prosperity. Banking was dull. The country produced the greatest middle class the world had ever seen.

God has given to men all that is necessary for them to accomplish their destinies. He has provided a social form as well as a human form. And these social organs of humans are so constituted that they will develop themselves harmoniously in the clean air of liberty. Away, then, with the quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations! And, now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

The crash did not cause the Depression: that was part of a far broader malaise. What it did was expose the weaknesses that underpinned the confidence and optimism of the 1920s - poor distribution of income, a weak banking structure and insufficient regulations, the economy's dependence on new consumer goods, the over-extension of industry and the Government's blind belief that promoting business interests would make America uniformly prosperous.

Roosevelt may have been a Republican, but he was a lot more sensitive to the changing times than his predecessor. He started regulating banks, the food industry, and railway trusts; introduced higher taxes; and for the first time consulted the trade unions, which the government had looked upon with suspicion up to then.

an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.

market leader in interest rate swaps. There was a natural role for a blue-chip corporation with the highest credit rating to stand in the middle of swaps and long-term options and the other risk-spawning innovations. The traits required of this corporation were that it not be a bank—and thus subject to bank regulation, and the need to reserve capital against risky assets—and that it be willing and able to bury exotic risks on its

The assertion that religion is a tool for preserving social order and for organising large-scale cooperation may vex many people for whom it represents first and foremost a spiritual path. However, just as the gap between religion and science is smaller than we commonly think, so the gap between religion and spirituality is much bigger. Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey. Religion gives a complete description of the world, and offers us a well-defined contract with predetermined goals. ‘God exists. He told us to behave in certain ways. If you obey God, you’ll be admitted to heaven. If you disobey Him, you’ll burn in hell.’ The very clarity of this deal allows society to define common norms and values that regulate human behaviour. Spiritual journeys are nothing like that. They usually take people in mysterious ways towards unknown destinations. The quest usually begins with some big question, such as who am I? What is the meaning of life? What is good? Whereas many people just accept the ready-made answers provided by the powers that be, spiritual seekers are not so easily satisfied. They are determined to follow the big question wherever it leads, and not just to places you know well or wish to visit. Thus for most people, academic studies are a deal rather than a spiritual journey, because they take us to a predetermined goal approved by our elders, governments and banks.

BUT WHAT, really, had the People’s Party—the farmers who called themselves “Alliancemen”—asked for? Only that when men found themselves at the mercy of forces too big for them to fight alone, government—their government—help them fight. What were the demands for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for public-works projects, but an expression of a belief that after men have banded together and formed a government, they have a right, when they are being crushed by conditions over which they have no control, to ask that government to extend a helping hand to them—if necessary, to fight for them, to be their champion? They

A civil servant can make rules that are friendly to an industry such as banking—and then go off to J.P. Morgan and recoup a multiple of the difference between his or her current salary and the market rate. (Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.)

The statement of Mr. Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Oklahoma Bank case, is significant: “We cannot say that the public interests to which we have adverted, and others, are not sufficient to warrant the State in taking the whole business of banking under its control. On the contrary we are of opinion that it may go on from regulation to prohibition except upon such conditions as it may prescribe.

Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!

They need only to give up the idea of forcing us to acquiesce to their groups and series, their socialized projects, their free- credit banks, their Graeco-Roman concept of morality, and their commercial regulations. I ask only that we be permitted to decide upon these plans for ourselves; that we not be forced to accept them, directly or indirectly, if we find them to be contrary to our best interests or repugnant to our consciences.

Corporate elites said they needed free-trade agreements, so they got them. Manufacturers said they needed tax breaks and public-money incentives in order to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them. Banks and financiers needed looser regulations, so they got them. Employers said they needed weaker unions—or no unions at all—so they got them. Private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them. Everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them. What did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? Job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs. Having helped wreck small towns, some conservatives were now telling the people in them to pack up and leave. The reality of “Real America” had become a “negative asset.” The “vicious, selfish culture” didn’t come from small towns, or even from Hollywood or “the media.” It came from a thirty-five-year program of exploitation and value destruction in the service of “returns.” America had fetishized cash until it became synonymous with virtue.

Cryptocurrencies are vulnerable to hacking and theft. When you have fiat money in a government regulated bank account, you have some authority to help you solve a problem like that. With crypto, you're all alone and out of luck.

Only that when men found themselves at the mercy of forces too big for them to fight alone, government—their government—help them fight. What were the demands for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for public-works projects, but an expression of a belief that after men have banded together and formed a government, they have a right, when they are being crushed by conditions over which they have no control, to ask that government to extend a helping hand to them—if necessary, to fight for them, to be their champion?

Politicians have often declared that unbridled competition among financial intermediaries promotes failures that will harm the public. Although the evidence that competition does this is extremely weak, it has not stopped the state and federal governments from imposing many restrictive regulations.

Imagine your child has an emotional bank account. The currency in this bank account is connection, and their behavior at any moment reflects the status of their account, how full or depleted it is. I mentioned earlier the idea of this “connection capital”—when we really connect with a child, see their experience, allow for their feelings, and make an effort to understand what’s going on for them, we build our capital. Having a healthy amount of connection capital leads kids to feel confident, capable, safe, and worthy. And these positive feelings on the inside lead to “good” behavior on the outside—behavior like cooperation, flexibility, and regulation. So in order to create positive change, we have to first build connection, which will lead kids to feel better, which will then lead them to behave better. But note, behavior comes last. We cannot start there. We must start with connection.

Surprising as it may seem today, classical ideas of creating a free market were to be achieved by “socialist” reforms. Their common aim was to protect populations from having to pay prices that included a non-labor rent or financial tax to pay landlords and natural resource owners, monopolists and bondholders. The vested interests railed against public regulation and taxation along these lines. They opposed public ownership or even the taxation of land, natural monopolies and banking. They wanted to collect rent and interest, not make land, banking and infrastructure monopolies public in character.

In 1988 bankers from around the world met in Basel, Switzerland, to agree on international banking regulations, and published a 30-page agreement (known as Basel I). Sixteen years later, the Basel II accord was an order of magnitude larger, at 347 pages, and Basel III was twice as long as its predecessor.

While I was researching this book, an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.

The answer was not to go into Iraq. It should have been to look at ourselves, look at our own crumbling policies, and economic mishaps. We should have lowered the debt, regulated the banks, prevented the oncoming mortgage crisis, and reevaluated our foreign policy, but we didn’t. We played on the fear of innocent Americans and spent our resources on a nameless, faceless war that tore apart Iraq, emptied our war chest, and left us with an American infrastructure screaming for help. We didn’t look at ourselves until it was too late. We spent our money on an arms race against ourself, fought an unnecessary war, and neglected the problems we had on this side of the water’s edge.

Traders risk the bank’s capital: they literally bet the bank, at least up to their limits. If they win then they get a share of the winnings. If they lose, then the bank picks up the loss. Traders might lose their jobs but the money at risk is not their own, it’s all OPM – other people’s money. What if the losses threaten the bank’s survival? Most banks are now ‘too big to fail’ and they can count on government support. Regulators are wary about ‘systemic risk’, and no regulator with an eye to their place in history wants the banking system to be flushed down the toilet on their watch. Traders can always play the systemic risk trump card. It is the ultimate in capitalism – the privatization of gains, the socialization of losses.

So what are people actually referring to when they talk about "deregulation"? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean "changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like." In practice this can refer to almost anything. In the case of airlines or telecommunications in the seventies and eighties, it meant changing the system of regulation from one that encouraged a few large firms to one that fostered carefully supervised competition between midsize firms. In the case of banking, "deregulation" has usually meant exactly the opposite: moving away from a situation of managed competition between mid-sized firms to one where a handful of financial conglomerates are allowed to completely dominate the market. This is what makes the term so handy. Simply by labeling a new regulatory measure "deregulation," you can frame it in the public mind as a way to reduce bureaucracy and set individual initiative free, even if the result is a fivefold increase in the actual number of forms to be filled in, reports to be filed, rules and regulations for lawyers to interpret, and officious people in offices whose entire job seems to be to provide convoluted explanations for why you're not allowed to do things. (p. 17)

State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators.

first. In a financial system that was rapidly generating complicated risks, AIG FP became a huge swallower of those risks. In the early days it must have seemed as if it was being paid to insure events extremely unlikely to occur, as it was. Its success bred imitators: Zurich Re FP, Swiss Re FP, Credit Suisse FP, Gen Re FP. (“Re” stands for Reinsurance.) All of these places were central to what happened in the last two decades; without them, the new risks being created would have had no place to hide and would have remained in full view of bank regulators. All of these places, when the crisis came, would be washed away by the general nausea felt in the presence of complicated financial risks, but there was a moment when their existence seemed cartographically necessary to the financial world. AIG FP was the model for them all.

The processes of corporate power do not work in isolation. The economic and legal mechanisms that allow the privatization of the commonwealth, externalization of costs, predatory economic practices, political influence-buying, manipulation of regulation and deregulation, control of the media, propaganda and advertising in schools, and the use of police and military forces to protect the property of the wealthy-all of these work synergistically to weave a complex web of power. Activists have dedicated lifetimes of necessary work to deal with the results of corporate power, by trying to mitigate the results of power: an ever-increasing disparity in wealth and power and continual economic, political, environmental, and human rights crises. For social justice campaigns to be strategic, it is also necessary to examine how privatization, externalization, monopoly, and other corporate power processes have been institutionalized. This institutionalization is exemplified in the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and in recent "free" trade agreements which have culminated in the creation of the World Trade Organization. An understanding of such institutions provides a necessary tool for achieving the long-term goals of environmental sustainability and social justice.

Adam Smith, with his half-baked idea about a hidden hand that works the cotton looms, decides to use that as his central metaphor for unrestrained Free Market capitalism. You don’t need to regulate the banks or the financiers when there’s an invisible five-fingered regulator who’s a bit like God to make sure that the money-looms don’t snare or tangle. That’s the monetarist mystic idol-shit, the voodoo economics Ronald Regan put his faith in, and that middle-class dunce Margaret Thatcher when they cheerily deregulated most of the financial institutions. And that’s why the Boroughs exists, Adam Smith’s idea. That’s why the last fuck knows how many generations of this family are a toilet queue without a pot to piss in, and that’s why everyone we know is broke. It’s all there in the current underneath that bridge down Tanner Street. That was the first one, the first dark, satanic mill.

De facto segregation, we tell ourselves, has various causes. when African Americans moved into a neighborhood like Ferguson, a few racially prejudiced white families decided to leave, and then as the number of black families grew, the neighborhood deteriorated, and "white flight" followed. Real estate agents steered whites away from black neighborhoods, and blacks away from white ones. Banks discriminated with "redlining," refusing to give mortgages to African Americans or extracting unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. African Americans haven't generally gotten the educations that would enable them to earn sufficient incomes to live in white suburbs, and, as a result, many remain concentrated in urban neighborhoods. Besides, black families prefer to live with one another. All this has some truth, but it remains a small part of the truth, submerged by a far more important one: until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States. The policy was so systematic and forceful that its effects endure to the present time. Without our government's purposeful imposition of racial segregation, the other causes - private prejudice, white flight, real estate steering, bank redlining, income differences, and self-segregation - still would have existed but with far less opportunity for expression. Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy.

But after all the horse trading between Democrats and Republicans—and reformers, bankers, and lobbyists—I fear that its complex, obtuse regulations (some 170 separate rules are still being developed) involved in limiting proprietary trading by banks makes me wish we’d taken the simple step of restoring the separation of deposit taking banks from investment banks. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 worked well until it was gradually eroded and finally repealed in 1999.

It tugged at his soul not to talk to other writers about his work. He loved the bank, keeping it secure and compliant with the laws and regulations. People assumed these things happened by magic. They did not. Hauer never talked about it outside the office. He didn't want to make the other writers uncomfortable. If he developed a reputation as someone who brought his work with him to writers conferences they would all turn away, to sip and swizzle their drinks without him.

To restrain private people, it may be said, from receiving in payment the promissory notes of a banker for any sum, whether great or small, when they themselves are willing to receive them; or, to restrain a banker from issuing such notes, when all his neighbours are willing to accept of them, is a manifest violation of that natural liberty, which it is the proper business of law not to infringe, but to support. Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respect a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as or the most despotical. The obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty, exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed

Schumpeter chose the term "creative destruction" to describe the introduction of new innovations into the economy for a reason—as the case of PayPal shows, it's a strife-filled process. A half-dozen startup competitors were quick to follow PayPal's lea before eBay got in on the act. And that's just representatives of the so-called new economy. The fact that many banks either entered the online payments market directly or lobbied for regulations against it showed that the old guard was not prepared to go silently into the night.

In the mid-1980s, Congress authorized the creation of the US Sentencing Commission to examine prison terms and codify norms to correct the arbitrary punishments meted out by unaccountable judges. First, in 1989 the commission’s guidelines for individuals went into effect, establishing a point system for how many years of prison a convicted criminal might get, based on the seriousness of the misconduct and a person’s criminal history. In 1991, amid public and congressional outrage that sentences for white-collar criminals were too light and fines and sanctions for corporations too lenient, the Sentencing Commission expanded the concept to cover organizations. It formalized the Sporkin-era regime of offering leniency in exchange for cooperation and reform. The new rules delineated factors that could earn a culprit mercy. In levying a fine, the court should consider, the sentencing guidelines said, “any collateral consequences of conviction.” 1 “Collateral consequences” was, and remains, an ill-defined concept. How worried should the government be if a punishment causes a company to go out of business? Should regulators worry about the cashiering of innocent employees? What about customers, suppliers, or competitors? Should they fret about financial crises? From this rather innocuous mention, the little notion of collateral consequences would blossom into the great strangling vine that came to be known after the financial crisis of 2008 by its shorthand: “too big to jail.” Prosecutors and regulators were crippled by the idea that the government could not criminally sanction some companies—particularly giant banks—for fear that they would collapse, causing serious problems for financial markets or the economy.

Humphrey Not another czar, please, Prime Minister. In the last three years we’ve appointed an Enterprise Czar, a Youth-Crime Czar, a Welfare Supremo, a Pre-School Supremo, an Unemployment Watchdog, a Banking Regulator, a Science and Technology Supremo and a Community Policing Czar. If you go on like this you won’t need a Cabinet. Jim Perfect! Humphrey Perfect? Prime Minister, we even have a Twitter Czar! Bernard His appointment was announced as a Tweet. Humphrey What’s he supposed to achieve? Jim The same as the others: at least twelve column inches in every paper.

Nearly every aspect of modern civilization has been flattening down except one: money. Minting money is one of the last jobs left for a central government that most political parties agree is legitimate. It takes a central bank to battle the perennial scourges of counterfeit and fraud. Someone has to regulate the amount of money issued, keep track of the serial numbers, ensure that the money is trusted. A robust currency requires accuracy, coordination, security, enforcement—and an institution that takes responsibility for all those. Thus behind every currency stands a watchful central bank.

In my view, there is absolutely no doubt that the increase of inequality in the United States contributed to the nation’s financial instability. The reason is simple: one consequence of increasing inequality was virtual stagnation of the purchasing power of the lower and middle classes in the United States, which inevitably made it more likely that modest households would take on debt, especially since unscrupulous banks and financial intermediaries, freed from regulation and eager to earn good yields on the enormous savings injected into the system by the well-to-do, offered credit on increasingly generous terms.

In short, there is no question that a country can run a stable paper currency without a gold standard, a central bank, a lender of last resort, or much regulation; and not only avoid disaster, but perform well. Bottom–up monetary systems – known as free banking – have a far better track record than top–down ones. Walter Bagehot, the great nineteenth-century theorist of central banking, admitted as much. In his influential book Lombard Street, he effectively conceded that the only reason a central bank needed to be a lender of last resort was because of the instability introduced by the existence of a central bank. The

Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations! And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

So now Israel, what do you think God expects from you?  Just this: Live in His presence in holy reverence, follow the road he sets out for you, love him, serve God, your God, with everything you have in you, obey his commandments and regulations of God that I’m commanding you today–live a good life. Deuteronomy 10:12-13   Lord, I thank you for this opportunity to be obedient to your commands.  I praise you because you’re true to your word.  I’m sorry for the times I’ve doubted you and had to miss out on the blessings you’d planned for me, and worse, required discipline.  I know you want what’s best for me, and because I’m choosing to obey I’m clearing the way for the miraculous to happen in my life.

Sonnet of Cryptocurrency The reason people are nuts about cryptocurrency, Is that they hear the magic phrase regulation-free. But what they forget to take into account, Is that it also means the user alone bears liability. The purpose behind a centralized system, Is not exploitation but to provide trust and stability. Anything that is decentralized on the other hand, Is a breeding ground for fraud and volatility. Not every fancy innovation is gonna benefit society, Innovation without accountability is only delusion. Cryptocurrency can be a great boon to banking, If it merges with the centralized financial institution. Intoxication of tech is yet another fundamentalism. Algorithm without humanity is digital barbarism.

As always, behind the flow of money necessary for such mergers and acquisitions were the banks. Once there were hundreds of banks in America, owned by individuals and local families. But due to government regulations put into place during the Reagan-Bush years, these banks either faded away or consolidated. In 1990, there were thirty-seven major banks in the U.S. By 2009, buy-outs, mergers, and bankruptcies had reduced this number to four. Those left standing were Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, according to the General Accounting Office. Ominously, in June 2012, the giant global rating agency Moody’s downgraded the ratings of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan, citing concerns for the stability of the world’s financial system.

I told the Icelandic prime minister that it appeared that large sums of money had been taken out of the UK from the Kaupthing branches, which was a serious breach of FSA regulations. The FSA had to find out by the end of the afternoon whether or not that breach had taken place. If it had, they would close the bank. He asked whether the money was needed today and how much it was. I said it was about £600 million, small beer for us but a huge amount for him. It was urgent, I said, that he look into it immediately. His response rang alarm bells. He asked if there was any chance that the amount could be negotiated down. I said there was no chance and that the money had to be returned before the end of the weekend. I suspected we would end up having to close the banks the following week.

There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labour of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality: we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something better and better in our surrounding, the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute - or, to satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us, if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things - if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the confused lea age of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those severely regulated minds who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory - that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.

These crises are really a form of domestic default that governments employ in countries where financial repression is a major form of taxation. Under financial repression, banks are vehicles that allow governments to squeeze more indirect tax revenue from citizens by monopolizing the entire savings and payments system, not simply currency. Governments force local residents to save in banks by giving them few, if any, other options. They then stuff debt into the banks via reserve requirements and other devices. This allows the government to finance a part of its debt at a very low interest rate; financial repression thus constitutes a form of taxation. Citizens put money into banks because there are few other safe places for their savings. Governments, in turn, pass regulations and restrictions to force the banks to relend the money to fund public debt. Of course, in cases in which the banks are run by the government, the central government simply directs the banks to make loans to it.

Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey. Religion gives a complete description of the world, and offers us a well-defined contract with predetermined goals. ‘God exists. He told us to behave in certain ways. If you obey God, you’ll be admitted to heaven. If you disobey Him, you’ll burn in hell.’ The very clarity of this deal allows society to define common norms and values that regulate human behaviour. Spiritual journeys are nothing like that. They usually take people in mysterious ways towards unknown destinations. The quest usually begins with some big question, such as who am I? What is the meaning of life? What is good? Whereas most people just accept the ready-made answers provided by the powers that be, spiritual seekers are not so easily satisfied. They are determined to follow the big question wherever it leads, and not just to places they know well or wish to visit. Thus for most people, academic studies are a deal rather than a spiritual journey, because they take us to a predetermined goal approved by our elders, governments and banks.

The growth of international bureaucracies with power to determine many aspects of people’s lives is a dominant feature of our age. Even the European Union is increasingly powerless, as it merely transmits to its member states rules set at higher levels. Food standards, for example, are decided by a United Nations body called the Codex Alimentarius. The rules of the banking industry are set by a committee based in Basel in Switzerland. Financial regulation is set by the Financial Stability Board in Paris. I bet you have not heard of the World Forum for the Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations, a subsidiary of the UN. Even the weather is to be controlled by Leviathan in the future. In an interview in 2012, Christiana Figueres, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said she and her colleagues were inspiring government, private sector and civil society to make the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken: ‘The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation.’ Yet

The Proofs Human society has devised a system of proofs or tests that people must pass before they can participate in many aspects of commercial exchange and social interaction. Until they can prove that they are who they say they are, and until that identity is tied to a record of on-time payments, property ownership, and other forms of trustworthy behavior, they are often excluded—from getting bank accounts, from accessing credit, from being able to vote, from anything other than prepaid telephone or electricity. It’s why one of the biggest opportunities for this technology to address the problem of global financial inclusion is that it might help people come up with these proofs. In a nutshell, the goal can be defined as proving who I am, what I do, and what I own. Companies and institutions habitually ask questions—about identity, about reputation, and about assets—before engaging with someone as an employee or business partner. A business that’s unable to develop a reliable picture of a person’s identity, reputation, and assets faces uncertainty. Would you hire or loan money to a person about whom you knew nothing? It is riskier to deal with such people, which in turn means they must pay marked-up prices to access all sorts of financial services. They pay higher rates on a loan or are forced by a pawnshop to accept a steep discount on their pawned belongings in return for credit. Unable to get bank accounts or credit cards, they cash checks at a steep discount from the face value, pay high fees on money orders, and pay cash for everything while the rest of us enjoy twenty-five days interest free on our credit cards. It’s expensive to be poor, which means it’s a self-perpetuating state of being. Sometimes the service providers’ caution is dictated by regulation or compliance rules more than the unwillingness of the banker or trader to enter a deal—in the United States and other developed countries, banks are required to hold more capital against loans deemed to be of poor quality, for example. But many other times the driving factor is just fear of the unknown. Either way, anything that adds transparency to the multi-faceted picture of people’s lives should help institutions lower the cost of financing and insuring them.

SINCE the financial crisis, it has become commonplace to argue that banks should be run as utilities, not casinos. At least in terms of their financial performance, that seems to be happening. In 2006, the eight American banks that regulators have since labelled “globally systemically important” generated casino-like profits, with returns on equity of 30% on average, according to Oliver Wyman, a consultancy. They are currently managing less than 11%, and there is worse to come: the Federal Reserve recently announced plans to oblige them to raise extra capital. By one calculation that would reduce their return on equity to little over 8%, other things being equal—a lower return than America’s water companies make. And other things are unlikely to be equal. American regulators continue to biff big banks with blistering fines. Then there is the requirement that banks produce “living wills”, explaining how they could be wound down if disaster strikes: the regulators have rejected every single “will” they have received so far as too flimsy. Making banks easier to close down will probably leave them even less profitable.

Banks were once an extremely valuable part of the economy and did a lot of good in advancing civilization. Banks played a pivotal role in financing big projects like roads, bridges, factories, stadiums, etc. Banks were to the economy what the heart is to the human body. But that has ended. Traditional banks have become extra toxic entities in the economy. It’s partially the fault of excessive government regulations that have made everything dysfunctional and it’s partially the fault of greedy bankers putting profits above customers and shareholders above society... But nonetheless, banks today offer very little benefit to their clients. They pay barely anything in interest. They offer barely anything in growth. They move money too slowly. They’re too restrictive. They’re selling the same boring products and services they did a hundred years ago. And they have too much power over peoples accounts. Soon, the many new companies and applications that emerge on the Ethereum infrastructure will eliminate the need for traditional banks and eliminate their value proposition by providing people with superior value. Everything from growth to asset management to lending can be done even better on the Ethereum infrastructure by anyone.

THREE BIG MISTAKES. But, of course, it’s never that simple. Before we even got to the third one, we were down and done. As much as our willingness to believe in the constant rise felled us, as much as our eagerness to conquer risk opened us up to more risk, as much as Greenspan stood by as Wall Street turned itself into Las Vegas, there was also Greece, and Iceland, and Nick Leeson, who took down Barings, and Brian Hunter, who tanked Amaranth, and Jérôme Kerviel and every other rogue trader who thought he—and it was always a he—could reverse his gut-churning, self-induced free fall with one swift, lucky strike; it was rising oil prices, global inflation, easy credit, the cowardice of Moody’s, the growing chasm of income inequality, the dot com boom and bust, the Fed’s rejection of regulation, the acceptance of “too big to fail,” the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the feast of subprime debt; it was Clinton and Bush the second and senators vacationing with banking industry lobbyists, the Kobe earthquake, an infatuation with financial innovation, the forgettable Hank Paulson, the delicious hubris of ten, twenty, thirty times leverage, and, at the bottom of it, our own vicious, lingering self-doubt. Or was it our own willful, unbridled self-delusion? Doubt vs. delusion. The flip sides of our last lucky coin. We toss it in the fountain and pray.

When 9/11 happened, I was an observer. I mourned for the victims and felt for the people as individuals, but this wasn’t my fight. It wasn’t the victims’ fight, either, though. They were caught in the middle as always. The little people suffer for the crimes of few. This fight wasn’t between the people that flew the planes and the people in the towers. We all got played by politics we had nothing to do with. In the aftermath of 9/11, if you tuned in to television stations and watched the debates over the war in Iraq, no one had the backbone to point out the obvious. America, Inc. was running out of gas. We’d squeezed everything we could out of the rest of the world with our foreign policy. The answer was not to go into Iraq. It should have been to look at ourselves, look at our own crumbling policies, and economic mishaps. We should have lowered the debt, regulated the banks, prevented the oncoming mortgage crisis, and reevaluated our foreign policy, but we didn’t. We played on the fear of innocent Americans and spent our resources on a nameless, faceless war that tore apart Iraq, emptied our war chest, and left us with an American infrastructure screaming for help. We didn’t look at ourselves until it was too late. We spent our money on an arms race against ourself, fought an unnecessary war, and neglected the problems we had on this side of the water’s edge.

When General Genius built the first mentar [Artificial Intelligence] mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul. Or so the General genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus there didn't seem to be a need for a mentar body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mentar mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer. And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals. As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls. This was intelligence the mentars never inherited from us. ... The genius of the irrational... ... We gave them only rational functions -- the ability to think and feel, but no irrational functions... Have you ever been in a tight situation where you relied on your 'gut instinct'? This is the body's intelligence, not the mind's. Every living cell possesses it. The mentar substrate has no indomitable will to survive, but ours does. Likewise, mentars have no 'fire in the belly,' but we do. They don't experience pure avarice or greed or pride. They're not very curious, or playful, or proud. They lack a sense of wonder and spirit of adventure. They have little initiative. Granted, their cognition is miraculous, but their personalities are rather pedantic. But probably their chief shortcoming is the lack of intuition. Of all the irrational faculties, intuition in the most powerful. Some say intuition transcends space-time. Have you ever heard of a mentar having a lucky hunch? They can bring incredible amounts of cognitive and computational power to bear on a seemingly intractable problem, only to see a dumb human with a lucky hunch walk away with the prize every time. Then there's luck itself. Some people have it, most don't, and no mentar does. So this makes them want our bodies... Our bodies, ape bodies, dog bodies, jellyfish bodies. They've tried them all. Every cell knows some neat tricks or survival, but the problem with cellular knowledge is that it's not at all fungible; nor are our memories. We're pretty much trapped in our containers.

As an analogy, we used to think of books, music, and movies as distinct. Then they all became represented by packets sent over the internet. Yes, we listened to music in audio players and viewed books in ebook readers, but their fundamental structure became digital. Similarly, today we think of stocks, bonds, gold, loans, and art as different. But all of them are represented as debits and credits on blockchains. Again, the fundamental structure became digital. Now, we are starting to think of different kinds of collections of people –— whether communities, cities, companies, or countries —– all fundamentally as networks, where the digital profiles and how they interact become more and more fundamental. This is obvious for communities and companies, which can already be fully remote and digital, but even already existing cities and countries are starting to be modeled this way, because (a) their citizens48 are often geographically remote, (b) the concept of citizenship itself is becoming similar to digital single sign-on, (c) many 20th century functions of government have already been de-facto transferred to private networks like (electronic) mail delivery, hotel, and taxi regulation, (d) cities and countries increasingly recruit citizens online, (e) so-called smart cities are increasingly administrated through a computer interface, and (f) as countries issue central bank digital currencies and cities likely follow suit, every polity will be publicly traded on the internet just like companies and coins.

The power of the big fish in general to regroup is hardly restricted to banking. When Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, the immediate effect was to replace a national monopoly with a number of regional monopolies controlled by many of the same Wall Street interests. Ultimately, the regional monopolies regrouped: In 1999 Exxon (formerly Standard Oil Company of New Jersey) and Mobil (formerly Standard Oil Company of New York) reconvened in one of the largest mergers in US history. In 1961 Kyso (formerly Standard Oil of Kentucky) was purchased by Chevron (formerly Standard Oil of California); and in the 1960s and 1970s Sohio (formerly Standard Oil of Ohio) was bought by British Petroleum (BP), which then, in 1998, merged with Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana). The tale of AT&T is similar. As the result of an antitrust settlement with the government, on January 1, 1984, AT&T spun off its local operations so as to create seven so-called Baby Bells. But the Baby Bells quickly began to merge and regroup. By 2006 four of the Baby Bells were reunited with their parent company AT&T, and two others (Bell Atlantic and NYNEX) merged to form Verizon. So the hope that you can make a banking breakup stick (even if it were to be achieved) flies in the face of some pretty daunting experience. Also, note carefully a major political fact: The time when traditional reformers had enough power to make tough banking regulation really work was the time when progressive politics still had the powerful institutional backing of strong labor unions. But as we have seen, that time is long ago and far away.

There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something better and better in our surroundings the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute, or, to satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us, if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things; if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those regulated minds who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory; that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and color, but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.

It's not that we're dumb. On the contrary, many millions of people have exerted great intelligence and creativity in building the modern world. It's more that we're being swept into unknown and dangerous waters by accelerating economic growth. On just one single day of the days I have spent writing this book, as much world trade was carried out as in the whole of 1949; as much scientific research was published as in the whole of 1960; as many telephone calls were made as in all of 1983; as many e-mails were sent as in 1990.11 Our natural, human, and industrial systems, which evolve slowly, are struggling to adapt. Laws and institutions that we might expect to regulate these flows have not been able to keep up. A good example is what is inaccurately described as mindless sprawl in our physical environment. We deplore the relentless spread of low-density suburbs over millions of acres of formerly virgin land. We worry about its environmental impact, about the obesity in people that it fosters, and about the other social problems that come in its wake. But nobody seems to have designed urban sprawl, it just happens-or so it appears. On closer inspection, however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car designers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand-but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. "Out of control" is an ideology, not a fact.

Oh, it’s perfectly safe to handle if somebody else has triggered the curse and you took it from their still-smoking body.” Eve paused. “Or if they sold it to you.” “You bought it, didn’t you?” Imp walked towards her. “Didn’t you?” “I think so. I may have screwed up that side of things,” Eve admitted. “It’s unclear.” “What’s unclear?” “It was up for auction: obvs, right? But it’s not clear that the person auctioning the location of the manuscript actually owned what they were selling, that’s the thing. Also, ancient death spells and intellectual property law don’t always play nice together. I, uh, my boss has a standard procedure he has me follow in cases of handling blackmail and extortion. We pay the ransom, then once we’ve destroyed the threat I repossess the payment from the blackmailer’s bank account. Via a Transnistrian mafiya underwriter—” This time it was Wendy who interrupted: “The Russian mafiya has underwriters?” “Transnistrian, please, and yes, criminal business models are inherently expensive because they have to pay for their own guard labor—there are no tax overheads, but no police protection for carrying out business, either—so of course they evolved parallel structures for risk management, mostly by embedding the risk in a concrete slab and dumping it in the harbor—anyway. At what stage does the book consider itself to have been legitimately acquired? And by whom? Is it safe for you to handle it, as my employee? What about as an independent freelance contractor not subject to the HMRC IR35 regulations? Am I an acceptable proxy for Bigge Enterprises, a Scottish Limited Liability Partnership domiciled in the Channel Islands, in the view of a particularly dim-witted nineteenth-century death spell attached to a codex bound in human skin by a mad inquisitor? It’s like digital rights management magic, only worse.

The fragility of the US economy had nearly destroyed him. It wasn't enough that Citadel's walls were as strong and impenetrable as the name implied; the economy itself needed to be just as solid. Over the next decade, he endeavored to place Citadel at the center of the equity markets, using his company's superiority in math and technology to tie trading to information flow. Citadel Securities, the trading and market-making division of his company, which he'd founded back in 2003, grew by leaps and bounds as he took advantage of his 'algorithmic'-driven abilities to read 'ahead of the market.' Because he could predict where trades were heading faster and better than anyone else, he could outcompete larger banks for trading volume, offering better rates while still capturing immense profits on the spreads between buys and sells. In 2005, the SEC had passed regulations that forced brokers to seek out middlemen like Citadel who could provide the most savings to their customers; in part because of this move by the SEC, Ken's outfit was able to grow into the most effective, and thus dominant, middleman for trading — and especially for retail traders, who were proliferating in tune to the numerous online brokerages sprouting up in the decade after 2008. Citadel Securities reached scale before the bigger banks even knew what had hit them; and once Citadel was at scale, it became impossible for anyone else to compete. Citadel's efficiency, and its ability to make billions off the minute spreads between bids and asks — multiplied by millions upon millions of trades — made companies like Robinhood, with its zero fees, possible. Citadel could profit by being the most efficient and cheapest market maker on the Street. Robinhood could profit by offering zero fees to its users. And the retail traders, on their couches and in their kitchens and in their dorm rooms, profited because they could now trade stocks with the same tools as their Wall Street counterparts.

If Jim was back at the imaginary dinner party, trying to explain what he did for a living, he'd have tried to keep it simple: clearing involved everything that took place between the moment someone started at trade — buying or selling a stock, for instance — and the moment that trade was settled — meaning the stock had officially and legally changed hands. Most people who used online brokerages thought of that transaction as happening instantly; you wanted 10 shares of GME, you hit a button and bought 10 shares of GME, and suddenly 10 shares of GME were in your account. But that's not actually what happened. You hit the Buy button, and Robinhood might find you your shares immediately and put them into your account; but the actual trade took two days to complete, known, for that reason, in financial parlance as 'T+2 clearing.' By this point in the dinner conversation, Jim would have fully expected the other diners' eyes to glaze over; but he would only be just beginning. Once the trade was initiated — once you hit that Buy button on your phone — it was Jim's job to handle everything that happened in that in-between world. First, he had to facilitate finding the opposite partner for the trade — which was where payment for order flow came in, as Robinhood bundled its trades and 'sold' them to a market maker like Citadel. And next, it was the clearing brokerage's job to make sure that transaction was safe and secure. In practice, the way this worked was by 10:00 a.m. each market day, Robinhood had to insure its trade, by making a cash deposit to a federally regulated clearinghouse — something called the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, or DTCC. That deposit was based on the volume, type, risk profile, and value of the equities being traded. The riskier the equities — the more likely something might go wrong between the buy and the sell — the higher that deposit might be. Of course, most all of this took place via computers — in 2021, and especially at a place like Robinhood, it was an almost entirely automated system; when customers bought and sold stocks, Jim's computers gave him a recommendation of the sort of deposits he could expect to need to make based on the requirements set down by the SEC and the banking regulators — all simple and tidy, and at the push of a button.

regulate interest rates charged on bank loans.98

The risk models developed by private firms, whether hedge funds, rating agencies, or banks, are not reliable guides to the future. Even when these models are applied by government regulators, their application is flawed, because they look to past market history as received truth. But markets, we must emphasize, are imperfect; they are the agglomeration of myriad investors, most of whom usually act rationally - usually, as history has shown, but not always. Even perfectly logical investors will panic, as will theatergoers at the mere possibility of fire, so as not to be last to the exit; this threat of contagion renders financial markets inherently unstable.

HDFC Bank was the first of the private lenders to go public— even before it completed a full year. 'It was a mistake,' Deepak told me. The RBI required the new banks to go public within a year but all other lenders went back to the regulator and got extensions. 'We didn't ask for it. We were too naive,' Deepak said. 'Everybody took time as they wanted to get a premium. We sold at par, ₹10. But I have no regrets.' Deepak pushed for a par issue as the bank had nothing to show. And the disaster of parent HDFC's listing was still haunting him, though that had happened a decade and a half ago. In 1978, India's capital market was in a different shape and mortgage was a new product, not understood by many. HDFC put the photograph of its first borrower on the cover of its balance sheet, a D. B. Remedios from Thane, who took a loan of ₹35,000 to build his house. The public issue of HDFC bombed. In an initial public offering (IPO) of ₹10 crore, the face value of one share was ₹100. ICICI, IFC (Washington) and the Aga Khan Fund took 5% stakes each in the mortgage lender and the balance 85% equity was offered to the public, but there were few takers. The stock quoted at a steep discount on listing. For the bank, Deepak did not want to take any chance. So portions of the issue were reserved for the shareholders and employees of HDFC as well as the bank's employees. HDFC decided to own close to a 26% stake in the bank and NatWest 20%. Satpal was offered about 5% and the public 25%. The size of the public issue was ₹50 crore. 'We didn't know whether it would succeed. Our experience with HDFC had been a disaster,' Deepak said. But Deepak had grossly underestimated investors' appetite for the new bank. The issue, which opened on 14 March 1995, was subscribed a record fifty-five times. The stock was listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (now known as BSE Ltd) on 26 May that year at ₹39.95, almost at a 300% premium.

The Federal Reserve System had been established to prevent what actually happened. It was set up to avoid a situation in which you would have to close down banks, in which you would have a banking crisis. And yet, under the Federal Reserve system, you had the worst banking crisis in the history of the United States

Markets are voting machines; they function by taking referenda. In the new world money market, for example, currency values are now decided by a constant referendum of thousands of currency traders in hundreds of trading rooms around the globe, all connected to each other by a vast electronic network giving each trader instant access to information about any factor that might affect values. That constant referendum makes it much harder for central banks and governments to manipulate currency values.

The fact that large, solvent, heavily regulated banks would not lend to each other—or would lend to each other only at historically unprecedented interest rate premiums—and not lend to each other even overnight, was persuasive evidence, universally accepted by policymakers, that the crisis was essentially one of illiquidity.

The Bank of the United States would enable the government to make good on four powers cited explicitly in the Constitution: the rights to collect taxes, borrow money, regulate trade among states, and support fleets and armies.

regulations or restrictions on entry into the banking business. Private banks took deposits and issued their own private currencies backed by gold bullion. As Professor Lawrence White has documented, this system worked well. It was more stable, with less inflation than the more heavily regulated and politicized system of banking and money employed in England during the same period.21 Michael Prowse of the Financial Times summarized Scotland’s free-banking experience: “There was little fraud. There was no evidence of over-issue of notes. Banks did not typically hold either excessive or inadequate reserves. Bank runs were rare and not contagious. The free banks commanded the respect of citizens and provided a sound foundation for economic growth that outpaced that in England for most of the period.”22

Climate-related risk regulations are late, but better late than never.

Countries, divided by regulations, united by one goal; climate change.

India and rest of the world has already taken the sustainable development concept, here two important key problems are context specific solutions and unity in diversity. As world has become one, hereafter no one can stop any foreign visitors, investments or anything that happens within nation. But due to pollution an over population everywhere is succumbed. To reduce population china took one child policy but failed due to lack of genetic diversity and male - femaela ratio and also working population. to meet this problem key solution only sustainable development that touches all scienctific and technological aspects. No technical advancements ahold be stopped but they have to regulated into eco friendly aspects. Industries should evolve into eco friendly and sustainable solutions and also banking sector. They should and should and should minimize pollution at any cost otherwise this chaos will continue and will lead disintegration of society and may also lead to civil war in future. so billionaires should consider humans ans humans just like them not as robots. So try to reach SDGs and policies for any industries that pollutes the environment. And once population is getting stabilized by 2030 as predicted by UN, if it stabilized then obviously fine and if it is not stabilized then it ie better to dismiss the concept of marriage and run into future with science.

The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress in 1913 while most of its members were on Christmas vacation giving all powers to this newly created central bank to issue legal tender and regulate the money supply as it saw fit.

What are your feelings from Bush to Obama? Besides being responsible for the death of half a million people, I feel like Bush dealt a huge economic and social blow to the USA, one from which we may never fully recover. He directly flushed 3 trillion dollars down the toilet on hopeless, pointlessly destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq …and they’re not even over! For years to come, we’ll be paying costs for all the injured veterans (over 50,000) and destabilizing three countries, because you have to look at the impact that the Afghan war has on Pakistan. Bush expanded the use of torture, and created a whole new layer of government bureaucracy (the “Department of Homeland Security”) to spy on Americans. He created Indefinite Detention (at Guantanamo and other US military bases) and expanded the use of executive-ordered assassinations using the new drone technology. On economic issues, his administration allowed corporations to run things and regulate themselves. The agency that was supposed to regulate oil drilling had lobbyist-paid prostitutes sleeping with employees while oil industry lobbyists basically ran the agency. Energy companies like Enron, and the country’s investment banks were deregulated at the end of the Clinton administration and Bush allowed them to run wild. Above all, he was incompetent and appointed some really stupid people to important positions at every level of government. Certainly, Obama has been involved in many of these same activities. A few he’s increased, such as the use of drone assassinations, but most of them he has at least tried to scale back. At the beginning of his first term, he tried to close the Guantanamo prison and have trials for many of the detainees in the United States but conservatives (including many Democrats) stirred up public resistance and blocked this from happening. He tried to get some kind of universal healthcare because over 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. This is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcies and foreclosures because someone gets sick in a family, loses their job, loses their health insurance (because American employers are source of most people’s healthcare) and they can’t pay their health bills or their mortgage. Or they use up all their money caring for a sick family member. So many people in the US wanted health insurance reform or single-payer, universal health care similar to what you have in the UK. Members of Obama’s own party (The Democrats) joined with Republicans to narrowly block “The public option” but they managed to pass a half-assed but not-unsubstantial reform of health insurance that would prevent insurers from denying you coverage when you’re sick or have a “preexisting condition.” The minute it was signed into law, Republicans sued in the courts (all the way to the supreme court) and fought, tooth and nail to block its implementation. Same thing with gun control, even as we’re one of the most violent industrial countries in the world. (Among industrial countries, our murder rate is second only to Russia). Obama has managed to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan over Republican opposition but, literally, everything he tries to do, they blast it in the media and fight it in Congress. So, while I have a lot of criticisms of Obama, he is many orders of magnitude less awful than Bush and many of the positive things he’s tried to do have been blocked. That said, the Democratic and Republican parties agree on more things than they disagree. Both signed off on the Afghan and Iraq wars. Both signed off on deregulation of banks, of derivatives, of mortgage regulations and of the energy and telecom business …and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. I’m guessing it’s the same thing with Labor and Conservatives in the UK. Labor or Democrats will SAY they stand for certain “progressive” things but they end up supporting the same old crap... (2014 interview with iamhiphop)

Cryptocurrency, which was supposedly created as a solution to the myriad failures of our regulated financial system laid bare during the subprime crisis, had effectively reproduced and even amplified the same dynamics, leading to a similar implosion. Thankfully for the broader public, it had all happened on a smaller scale and the real banks were not involved (despite the crypto industry’s efforts to the contrary). But once again, it was regular people who were left holding the bag.

there can be no banking systems without the police power of the state. In chapter 2 we focus, in particular, on the fundamental property-rights problems that societies have to solve in order to create a banking system. The idea that banking systems can exist outside a system of government regulation is simply a libertarian fairy tale.

The basic weakness with America’s railroad system was overbuilding, which forced the roads into endless rounds of rate cuts and wage cuts to service debt. At the same time, the massive power of their largest consumers—notably Rockefeller in oil and Carnegie in steel—forced them to grant preferential rebates to big shippers, enraging small western farmers and businessmen and stimulating calls for government regulation.

The 1907 panic would be the last time that bankers loomed so much larger than regulators in a crisis.

I pressed him not to go. We needed to come up with a rescue plan before Monday, and his presence was crucial as the bank’s primary regulator.

The Banking Act of 1933, also known as Glass-Steagall, regulated the stock market, separated securities dealers from banks, and established the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Though the SEC regulated many securities markets, government securities were considered exempt. That meant that federal securities laws did not apply. The thinking at the time was to let those markets operate free of government regulation, which would allow the Treasury and municipalities to sell debt at a lower cost. Oh, and one more thing. There was a clause known as Regulation Q, which prohibited banks from paying interest on savings accounts.

But three flaws still existed. There was no regulation. With all the growth in the market, there were no calls to regulate Repo financing, securities dealers, or government bonds. The securities rules set up in the 1930s mainly targeted individual investors, the stock market, and banks. For years, there was never an outcry to regulate the government bond market. Large, sophisticated investors buying and selling AAA-rated, risk free, government bonds was not high on the to-do list. And free markets were much more a rallying cry in the 1980s than it is today. Then, and this is a big one, it was still market convention to price Repo transactions without including the coupon accrued interest. Accrued interest was basically just ignored by the Repo market. Third, there was uncertainty in terms of the legal status of Repo. What happened if a Repo counterparty went bankrupt or became insolvent? Was Repo a secured loan or a sale with an agreement to repurchase? No one really knew and it was never tested. Even the bankruptcy court was unsure whether a Repo was a collateralized loan or a sale and buy-back.

The Government Securities Act (GSA) of 1986 was passed and signed by President Reagan, which required government securities dealers to register with the SEC or be regulated as subsidiaries of banks. The Secretary of the Treasury had the authority to make rules for custody, the proper use of customer securities, net capital ratios, and the allowable leverage for Repo transactions. Not surprising, customers were still unwilling to invest their cash in hold-in-custody Repo after 1984.

and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, a set of reforms which became commonly known as “McCain-Feingold” after Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Russell Feingold (D-WI) had sponsored similar legislation in the Senate. The BCRA had made sweeping changes to campaign finance regulations in federal elections, including higher individual contribution limits and the banning of so-called soft money raised by parties in unlimited sums. Soft money was ostensibly for “party-building” activities such as phone banking or party (not candidate) advertising, but in practice, the line between “party” functions and “campaign” activities—that expressly advocated the election or defeat of an individual candidate—was often blurry (Magleby 2010). By the end of the 1990s, donors could write massive checks to aid the campaigns of their favored candidates (Gill and Lipsmeyer 2005). The Democratic and Republican Parties combined raised a little more than $85 million in soft money in 1992; in 2002 the combined figure was nearly $500 million (Gill and Lipsmeyer 2005, Table 1). By banning such funding, the BCRA was widely seen as an impediment to the ability of moneyed interests to “buy votes” (see: Corrado 2003; Malbin 2003).

To the river?” he suggested, pointing ahead down the road. The Recorah River, which flowed south out of the Nineyre Mountains before curving to the west, marked both our eastern and southern borders, and was the reason construction of the wall was necessitated only along the boundary we shared with the Kingdom of Sarterad. “Won’t there be patrols?” He shook his head. “One of my duties is to regulate the patrols. I know exactly where they are. So--to the river?” I nodded, and we lined our horses up as best we could, for our mounts had caught our excitement and were straining against their bits. We locked eyes and counted down together. “Three, two, one--” I dug my heels into King’s sides and he sprang almost violently forward. My father had never liked me racing. It was dangerous--the horse could fall, I could drop the reins or lose my seat, and at a full gallop, my chances of survival would be slim. But he had always loved to do it, and so had I. There was such freedom in letting a horse have its head, such joyful abandonment in the feel of the animal’s hooves striking the earth time after time, as fast and as hard as they could go. There was power and exhilaration in leaning forward, moving with the animal, feeling the wind on my cheeks, my hair whipping back. There was a oneness that could not be achieved in any other way, a single purpose represented by the finish line that loomed ahead. King and I had the advantage at the start, and I turned my head to grin at Saadi before giving my full concentration to the task at hand. I would leave him far behind, but there was no point in testing fate. It wasn’t long before my confidence and my lead were challenged--I caught sight of the gelding’s front legs to my left, gaining ground as they arched and reached in beautiful rhythm. We bumped and battled, following the winding road, the horses breathing hard. Then it was Saadi’s turn to grin. He gave me a nod, urging his horse up the slight incline that lay before us, gradually inching ahead until he succeeded in passing me completely as we flew down the other side. Knowing the race would be won or lost on the remaining flat ground from here to the river, I lay low against King’s neck, and the stallion pressed forward, sensing my urgency. Race for Papa, King, I thought. You can win for Papa. The Recorah River spread before us, and both Saadi and I would have to slow soon to avoid surging into it. King’s burst of speed was enough to put us neck-and-neck once more, but my frustration flared, for I doubted we could push ahead. At best, the race would be a tie. And a tie wasn’t good enough, not when King needed to come home with me. Then suddenly I was in front. I glanced over at Saadi in confusion, and saw him check his gelding, letting me win. King did not want to stop, but I pulled him down just before the river, swerving to let him canter, then trot, along its bank. Saadi came alongside me and we halted, dismounting at the same time. I leaned for a moment against my saddle, panting from my own exertion, then slid it off King’s back. Without a word, Saadi likewise stripped his mount, and we freed the horses to go to the water for a drink. Muscles aching, I flopped down on the grass and stared up through the branches of a tree to the graying sky above. A shadow passed over me, then Saadi lay down beside me. “You won,” he said. “You let me.” There was a silence--he hadn’t expected me to know. Then I heard the grass rustle as he shrugged. “You’re right. I did.” Laughing at his candor, I sat up and looked at him. He was relaxing with his arms behind his head, his bronze hair damp and sticking to his forehead.

This article is a continuation of our first part paper on the regulation of money related markets in the Southern African district. Having characterized the limits of the hypothetical structure of money related markets regulation in the main part, it is anything but difficult to display the present condition of budgetary markets inside the Southern African area and an outline of key issues and difficulties.

As I gather my thoughts here in order to get to the point, I am reminded of a joke Zafar made when he was still in banking. I say joke, but Zafar was always rather serious about banking and often talked about accountability, as he called it. This stuff is so esoteric, he once said, that the only people who understand it are in the business. What about regulators? I asked. Regulators, he replied, have one eye on the revolving door. Academics make money teaching traders their latest research, and politicians don’t know their arses from their elbows. Can you imagine the people on a march against finance? The guy on a megaphone shouting: What do we want? And everyone answering: Specific curbs on short selling in certain circumstances. When do we want it? In phases and at appropriate times. That’s the joke. It was funny at the time.

Our thinking diverged in several areas. I championed, and he distrusted, formal policy frameworks like inflation targeting, which were intended to improve the Fed’s transparency. He had even made jokes about his own strained relationship with transparency. He told a Senate committee in 1987, “Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.” Also, he did not put much stock in the ability of bank regulation and supervision to keep banks out of trouble. He believed that, so long as banks had enough of their own money at stake, in the form of capital, market forces would deter them from unnecessarily risky lending. And, while I had argued that regulation and supervision should be the first line of defense against asset-price bubbles, he was more inclined to keep hands off and use after-the-fact interest rate cuts to cushion the economic consequences of a burst bubble.

Smaller than Delaware, packed with 2.7 million people, the core of a proposed future Palestinian state, the occupied West Bank is partitioned by the Oslo Accords into zones of Palestinian and Israeli control: Areas A, B, and C. Each of the zones has its own restrictions, guidelines, regulations. A political map of the territory looks like an X-ray: a diseased heart, mottled, speckled, clotted, hollowed out.

The result of this complicated process was something that was deceptively simple but never previously possible: a financial network that could create and move money without a central authority. No bank, no credit card company, no regulators.

A regulator cannot easily challenge the fundamental strategy of a badly run financial services business, such as Lehman or Royal Bank of Scotland. No one within the businesses themselves was willing to challenge Dick Fuld or Fred Goodwin—including the genuinely distinguished figures who sat on the RBS board (that of Lehman was decorated by friends of Fuld). Even the head of an agency may enjoy less access to the powerful than the senior executives of large corporations—if for no other reason than that the latter have considerably more largesse to dispense. Recall Gordon Brown’s fulsome tribute to Fuld and Lehman (see Chapter 1), and note that Goodwin and his (then) wife enjoyed weekend hospitality at Chequers, Prime Minister Brown’s official residence, even as the bank was sliding towards bankruptcy. It is not an accident that both Lehman and RBS were run by unpleasant, domineering individuals with good political connections: these characteristics are common pointers to the combination of personal success and corporate failure. Now

The Passionate Educator: Lily Lapenna has created MyBnk, the UK’s first independent, peer-led youth banking program approved by the national banking regulator. In doing so, Lapenna is developing the next generation of financially literate and entrepreneurial citizens. Such literacy will be crucial as the UK economy struggles to avoid another recession. In just five years, thanks to its partnership with dozens of schools and youth organizations, MyBnk has evolved from a pilot project to now reach thirty-five thousand 11-25 year olds in underprivileged neighbourhoods of London. These tech-savvy youth learn about managing money and the basics of entrepreneurship through cellphone-based games.

The attempt to manage conflicts through regulation has failed because it has spawned complex rules without achieving its underlying objective. Those who handle other people’s money, or advise on the management of other people’s money, are agents of those whose money it is. Financial intermediaries can act as custodians of other people’s money, or they can trade with their own money, but they must not do both at the same time. The effective application of principles of loyalty and prudence towards clients, and insistence that conflicts of interest be avoided, puts an end to the current business model of the investment bank, which relies on its multiplicity of activities to provide ‘the Edge’.

These crises are really a form of domestic default that governments employ in countries where financial repression is a major form of taxation. Under financial repression, banks are vehicles that allow governments to squeeze more indirect tax revenue from citizens by monopolizing the entire savings and payments system, not simply currency. Governments force local residents to save in banks by giving them few, if any, other options. They then stuff debt into the banks via reserve requirements and other devices. This allows the government to finance a part of its debt at a very low interest rate; financial repression thus constitutes a form of taxation. Citizens put money into banks because there are few other safe places for their savings. Governments, in turn, pass regulations and restrictions to force the banks to relend the money to fund public debt. Of course, in cases in which the banks are run by the government, the central government simply directs the banks to make loans to it

Diamond and Dybvig argue that deposit insurance can prevent bank runs, but their model does not incorporate the fact that absent effective regulation, deposit insurance can induce banks to take excessive risk.6

Congress shall have power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.” It is most evident that by this provision, Congress alone should be the money-creating agency of the nation.[78] Although the Constitution has been set aside through the intrigue and power of the Illuminati, the Congress of the United States is authorized by the Constitution to do as Abraham Lincoln did in order to finance the Civil War, to-wit: “issue the money required against the credit of the nation, debt-and interest free”. Lincoln didn’t want to borrow money from the Rothschilds and Co. The interest rate set by the banks was twenty-eight percent. For Lincoln Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 5 was sufficient authority to disregard the powerfully entrenched bankers. So, in spite of the greedy bankers’ protests he caused to have printed in the Bureau of Printing and Engraving a total of $450,000,000 of honest money, constitutionally created on the credit of the nation.

It is understood that the Bank need not relinquish the bonds it holds, but will continue to collect interest on them. The Bank then loans the new printed currency into circulation to anyone who can provide it with satisfactory collateral. In less than twenty years the Federal Reserve brought the money system, banks, exchanges and economy to utter ruin.[77] Every dollar in circulation in the United States is a borrowed dollar and pays its toll of interest to the Illuminati bankers. Nearly eleven trillion dollars in debt has been created since 1913. The American people cannot even pay the interest! Every month more than two billion dollars interest has to be paid. It is madness that a government hands over so much power to a private bank that is not controlled by anybody. A power that can create money out of nothing! Why the United States borrow its own money, based on its own credit, at interest, from private bankers? Please bear in mind the fact that the founding fathers made sure that provisions were made by the Constitution for an honest and debt free money system. In part Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 5 of the Constitution states: “Congress shall have power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.” It is most evident that by this provision, Congress alone should be the money-creating agency of the nation.[78] Although the Constitution has been set aside through the intrigue and power of the Illuminati, the Congress of the United States is authorized by the Constitution to do as Abraham Lincoln did in order to finance the Civil War, to-wit: “issue the money required against the credit of the nation, debt-and interest free”. Lincoln didn’t want to borrow money from the Rothschilds and Co. The interest rate set by the banks was twenty-eight percent. For Lincoln Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 5 was sufficient authority to disregard the powerfully entrenched bankers. So, in spite of the greedy bankers’ protests he caused to have printed in the Bureau of Printing and Engraving a total of $450,000,000 of honest money, constitutionally created on the credit of the nation.

John Cryan, the former chief financial officer of UBS, will replace Mr Jain. Mr Fitschen will not be replaced, meaning that from next year, Mr Cryan, a 54-year-old Briton, will be in sole charge. Following Brady Dougan at Credit Suisse and Peter Sands at Standard Chartered, Mr Jain and Mr Fitschen are the latest heads to roll at top banks, which since the financial crisis have been hit by tougher regulation, sluggish markets and conduct problems. The news comes just over a month after Deutsche unveiled a strategy designed to bolster shareholder returns, which were just 2.7 per cent in 2014 and have been hit by a slew of fines, including a $2.5bn penalty for Deutsche’s involvement in the Libor scandal.

Verified and traced all the shell corporations myself. Every major bank in the US is owned by a handful of European aristocrats who are all related to each other by birth." "Why haven't the antitrust regulations been triggered?" "Come on, Luke, you know the answer to that. It takes special access to some deeply-buried information to put it together. Security agencies have it, but they're all busy monitoring for terrorism these days.

They need only to give up the idea of forcing us to acquiesce to their groups and series, their socialized projects, their free- credit banks, their Graeco-Roman concept of morality, and their commercial regulations. I ask

For life is immortal youthfulness, and it hates age that tries to clog its movements - age that belongs not to life in truth, but follows it as the shadow follows the lamp. Our life, like a river, strikes its banks not to find itself closed in by them, but to realise anew every moment that it has its unending opening towards the sea. It is a poem that strikes its metre at every step not to be silenced by its rigid regulations, but to give expression every moment to the inner freedom of its harmony.

The common wealth has been used to build highways, develop the Internet and the satellite system, uphold the banking system, regulate the stock market, and support the court system, which guarantees contracts. No business functioning in the market could exist