American Buddhist Net

Ponzi Schemer Was Assaulted by Another Inmate in December; Officials Deny Incident

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Two former computer programmers at Bernard L. Madoff’s firm were indicted Wednesday by a federal grand jury in Manhattan.

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WASHINGTON — In a giant auction, the federal government has agreed to sell for pennies on the dollar most of the 120,000 formaldehyde-tainted trailers it bought nearly five years ago for Hurricane Katrina victims. But the sale of the units, perhaps the most visible symbol of the government's bungled response to the hurricane, has triggered a new round of charges that it is endangering future buyers for years to come.

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It's a haiku: Big storm, trailers, sold. ABN

As Mongolia struggles to overcome a devastatingly harsh winter, international development organizations, including United Nations agencies and the World Bank, are urging Ulaanbaatar to take a hard look at reforming the country’s nomadic agricultural practices.

Since January, temperatures have hovered around minus 30 degrees Celsius and snow has covered 90 percent of the landlocked nation. Known locally as a "dzud," the harsh winter weather has killed over 3.3 million head of livestock and has threatened food and fuel supplies in rural communities, aid agency representatives say.

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New watchdog report says the Treasury Department sank billions into auto finance giant GMAC without an exit strategy or proof the company was viable - a decision that could cost taxpayers $6.3 billion.

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Socialism for corporations. ABN

States and companies have started investing very differently when it comes to the billions of dollars they are safeguarding for workers’ retirement.

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FDIC wants pension funds to prop up failed banks

...In Islamic banking, returns are reliant on the financial health of the deposit-taking institution and its investments. Common interest is ''earning money from money'', usury or riba as its known in Arabic and is haram, forbidden in Islam. Profit should be something created when money is transformed into capital via personal effort. Conversely, it applies that if a bank makes losses, depositors will bear that burden too. Except most of the world's Islamic economies are doing very well compared with the mostly Christian West that has traditionally dominated global finance.

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It is one of the most potent symbols of the Christian church: the thin, round unleavened wafer used in the celebration of holy communion.

Traditionally this "sacramental bread", representing the body of Christ, has been made by nuns as a source of income for their communities. But the good sisters of France have found that even the body of Christ is subject to free market forces.

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President Ma Ying-jeou is in a hurry to sign an Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement so he can realize his ultimate aim of unification with China, reports quoted experts yesterday.

Ma and his government have been pushing for the ECFA to be signed in May or June, despite widespread opposition within Taiwan.

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...“Ordinary people, farmers and fishermen, taxpayers, doctors, nurses, teachers, are being asked to shoulder through their taxes a burden that was created by irresponsible greedy bankers,” President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson said on Bloomberg Television.

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And in the American case, furthered by corrupt and dishonest government officials. ABN

The US and Japan are set to see the biggest rise in distressed property sales in the first quarter of 2010, says RICS research.

Real estate professionals expect the number of distressed properties coming onto the market to increase across 18 out of 25 countries surveyed.

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Joseph Stiglitz - former head economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a nobel-prize winner - said yesterday that the very structure of the Federal Reserve system is so fraught with conflicts that it is "corrupt" and undermines democracy.

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You know the big banks have gotten bigger.

As Rolfe Winkler noted last September:

For the big have gotten even bigger since the start of the financial crisis. At the end of 2007, the Big Four banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — held 32 percent of all deposits in FDIC-insured institutions. As of June 30th, it was 39 percent.

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The meltdown explained. ABN

Art Nadel Guilty; New hedge fund owner takes over Huffman Aviation

March 1, 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

In a surprise court appearance last Wednesday hedge fund owner Art Nadel pled guilty in a New York Federal court.

It was a bitter disappointment to swindled investors, as well as to interested onlookers anxious for a trial, to get a glimpse of not only how he did it, but who he did it with.

Nadel’s guilty plea may have removed the best—maybe the only—chance to make accountants and bookkeepers and managers at feeder hedge funds, all of whom had front row seats to the scandal, face public scrutiny while testifying about what went on at Scoop Management.

Most people find it impossible to believe he acted alone.

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Despite recent government reports that China's holdings of U.S. Treasury debt declined during the second half of last year, the Asian economic giant almost certainly owns far more Treasury securities than official statistics indicate.

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Residents of Mogok, the center of Burma's gems industry, have been in a panic recently. Since last week, earth-movers and other heavy equipment have begun appearing in the town's residential neighborhoods.

This follows an earlier survey of the area carried out by local officials, the Ministry of Mines and two private companies—Htoo Trading Co, Ltd, owned by junta crony Tay Za, and Ruby Dragon Jade & Gems Co, Ltd, which counts a number of high-ranking generals among its shareholders.

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Orozbek’s daughters are making green tea. As my eyes adjust to the darkness inside his family’s yurt, the little girls fuss with plastic cauldrons of water around a small tin stove stuffed with yak dung.

Here on the Alichur Plateau (at approximately 3,900 meters/12,800 feet), we’re closer to a provincial Chinese hub than the Tajik capital in Dushanbe, three days’ drive in the opposite direction. The region is populated sparsely with ethnic Kyrgyz nomads such as Orozbek. Little vegetation grows here. The skittish yak is the only beast suited to the dry, cold and brawny sun.

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The International Monetary Fund wants more power to police the global financial system and a bigger role in emergency financing, managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said Friday.

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Uh-oh. As a lesson in humility, I want to occasionally try to understand world events from a neocon, or crypto-neocon, point of view, which I shall now do: To wit, Now is a good time to press this IMF policy. When we have greater leverage, if not full control, of the global economy, we will cement our power. The wars are going well--we have mercenaries in Yemen; Saudi Arabia is surrounded as is Iran; we are stronger in Afghanistan and the destabilization of Pakistan is going well. Our enemies (China and Russia) are trapped, surrounded on the north and the south from Europe to the Pacific. China's oil deal with Iran and its energy deals with Central Asia are no stronger than the peace, which Israel helps keep on shaky ground by constantly threatening war with Iran. India has nowhere to go but deeper into our arms. Life is good. If Greece slips on Turkey and breaks the EU, whoopee doo! That puts us back on top again. No one is going to invest in Yuan or Yen. When the war with Iran starts, China and Russia will both be up the creek and they know it. If they fight, we fight back. If they escalate, we can escalate even more. Nuclear war will have the same outcome as economic war--we will be the strongest when the dust clears. How sweet it is to be a philosopher! ABN

Poverty is not first thing that comes to mind when you think of Japan. After all, there are no children begging on the streets in major cities here. You do not often see Japanese citizens publicly venting their frustrations over the country's economic decline. But senior government researcher Aya Abe says Japan has the fourth-highest rate of poverty among developed countries.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- A Madoff in-law has filed for a name change, hoping to rid herself of the notorious moniker that has become synonymous with swindle.

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U.S. accuses ex-Madoff exec with broad role in fraud

Robert Watson, a top ingredient buyer for Kraft Foods, needed $20,000 to pay his taxes. So he called a broker for a California tomato processor that for years had been paying him bribes to get its products into Kraft’s plants.

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As reporter Sebastian Jones points out (see this and this), former Congressman Richard Gephardt runs a lobbying firm representing giant insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Retired General Barry McCaffrey sits on the board of a giant defense contractor, DynCorp, and lobbies for war.

And many other "pundits" interviewed by the mainstream news are really high-level lobbyists for giant companies, pushing their agendas.

And yet they are treated as "independent experts" by the media.

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It's no secret that the distribution of wealth is inequitable in the United States across racial, regional, and socio-economic groups. But there is a distinct variance among and within America's faiths as well. This transparency takes a look at the income levels of America's major religious groups, as compared to the average U.S. income distribution.

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Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.

Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.

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A parable about how one nation came to financial ruin.

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Hospital cleaners are worth more to society than bankers, a study suggests.

The research, carried out by think tank the New Economics Foundation, says hospital cleaners create £10 of value for every £1 they are paid.

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Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren't just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy - they're re-creating the conditions for another crash

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Mongolia’s billions of dollars worth of copper, gold, uranium and coal reserves promise the greatest influx of wealth for the country since Genghis Khan conquered much of the known world in the 13th century.

They also may spawn a crisis. Sudden prosperity can overwhelm an economy, exposing it to commodity-price swings. Mongolia’s leaders, some educated at Harvard and Cambridge, say they are determined to avoid this syndrome, known as “Dutch Disease” -- a sudden surge in wealth that ultimately hampers expansion.

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LONDON: A Mumbai-born entrepreneur plans to relaunch the East India Company after strenuously acquiring shares in the firm that once ruled India.

...Describing it as an achievement, Mehta said "I have this huge feeling of redemption, this indescribable feeling of owning a company that once owned us."

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