Bloomberg Bond Quotes

Speculators, meanwhile, have seized control of the global economy and the levers of political power. They have weakened and emasculated governments to serve their lust for profit. They have turned the press into courtiers, corrupted the courts, and hollowed out public institutions, including universities. They peddle spurious ideologies—neoliberal economics and globalization—to justify their rapacious looting and greed. They create grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge citizens into crippling forms of debt peonage. And they have been stealing staggering sums of public funds, such as the $65 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that have been unloaded each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash.21 They feed like parasites off of the state and the resources of the planet. Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators who were hanged in the seventeenth century, when speculation was a capital offense. The obscenity of their wealth is matched by their utter lack of concern for the growing numbers of the destitute. In early 2014, the world’s 200 richest people made $13.9 billion, in one day, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.22 This hoarding of money by the elites, according to the ruling economic model, is supposed to make us all better off, but in fact the opposite happens when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, as economist Thomas Piketty documents in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.23 The rest of us have little or no influence over how we are governed, and our wages stagnate or decline. Underemployment and unemployment become chronic. Social services, from welfare to Social Security, are slashed in the name of austerity. Government, in the hands of speculators, is a protection racket for corporations and a small group of oligarchs. And the longer we play by their rules the more impoverished and oppressed we become. Yet, like

The great irony of 2008 was that our belief in a system of accounting, a belief woven so deeply inside our collective psyche that we’re not even aware of it, made us vulnerable to fraud. Even when done honestly, accounting is sometimes little more than an educated guess. Modern accounting, especially at the big, international banks, has become so convoluted that it is virtually useless. In a comprehensive dissection in 2014, the Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine explained how a bank’s balance sheet is almost impossibly opaque. The “value” of a large portion of the assets on that balance sheet, he noted, is simply based on guesses made by the bank about the collectability of the loans they make, or of the bonds they hold, and the prices that they might fetch on the market, all measured against the offsetting and equally fuzzy valuation of their liabilities and obligations. If a guess is off by even 1 percent, it can turn a quarterly profit into a loss. Guessing whether a bank is actually profitable is like a pop quiz. “I submit to you that there is no answer to the quiz,” he wrote. “It is not possible for a human to know whether Bank of America made money or lost money last quarter.” A bank’s balance sheet, he said, is essentially a series of “reasonable guesses about valuation.” Make the wrong guesses, as Lehman and other troubled banks did, and you end up out of business.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of physically comparing different Wall Street trading floors, you needn’t bother. They are all basically alike. The floor itself is a checkerboard of stained carpet squares covering a maze of twisted wires and electronic equipment. These removable squares serve as the lid of a massive trash can, and hidden below are dozens of half-empty Chinese food containers and mice. (Mice love trading floors, and banking employees are constantly discussing creative ways to trap and kill them.) If you stop by virtually any trading floor on Wall Street, this is what you will inevitably encounter: Hundreds of telephones are ringing. Television monitors are blasting news and flashing scattered bond quotes. One of the checkerboard squares is upended, and several maintenance men are taking a break to yell at each other in front of a pile of circuits and cables. Dozens of traders and salespeople are standing at three-foot intervals face-to-face at several long rectangular desks, which are stacked with a rainbow of colorful computers, flashing monitors, blue Reuters and green Telerate screens, beige Bloomberg data systems, and customized black broker quote boxes.

THE POWER OF MSCI, FTSE RUSSELL, and S&P Dow Jones Indices is largely over only stock markets. Of even greater and direct importance to countries are their presence and weighting in various influential bond market indices. These may not have the cachet of the brand-name stock market benchmarks bandied about on TV bulletins, but indices like the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate or JPMorgan’s EMBI and GBI-EM are also powerful in their own way.

brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against Cioffi and Tannin sought to prove that the two men had knowingly deceived their investors, overlooking the possibility that they simply had no idea what they were doing, and failed to grasp the real risk of a triple-A-rated subprime-backed CDO. The case was weak, and turned on a couple of e-mails obviously ripped from context. A member of the jury that voted to acquit the Bear Stearns subprime bond traders told Bloomberg News afterward not only that she thought they were innocent as charged but that she would happily