Some Serious Economists have signed a letter supporting the TransPacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The missive says a lot about the discipline, and not in a good way.
Read more...It’s high time I updated the APGMI part of the saga of Virgin Gold Mining Corporation. Here’s a round-up of the relevant parts of this sprawling series.
Read more...HSBC’s top brass have “no idea” about Mossack Fonseca. Here’s a primer.
Read more...Elizabeth Warren is clearly getting on the Administration’s nerves.
Read more...In case you haven’t noticed, nurses unions have emerged as a particularly powerful and credible labor/lobbying group. So it’s encouraging to see them use their bully pulpit to rally voters to contact their Congresscritters and voice opposition to the upcoming vote on so-called fast track authority for the TransPacific Partnership. I’m heartened to see, in the Real News Network video below, that the nurses’ representative puts forward compact, factually sound arguments as to why this misnamed “trade deal” is a sop to major corporations at the expense of citizens.
Read more...Bond Star Sir Roger Moore, Three Million Phantom Geese in China, and a New Zealand Financial Services Provider
Read more...Rose focuses on an issue that reader Swedish Lex and other have pointed out: the heavy-handed actions of Germany in the tempestuous negotiations between the Eurozone and Greece have wound up being a major own goal.
But the bigger issue that Rose raises is that last week’s ugly negotiations, in combination with the fiasco in Ukraine, is exposing Germany as a lousy hegemon, which he argues is producing a political crisis in Germany and fracture lines in Europe.
Read more...Obama’s pending trade deals, the TransPacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, have few fans at Naked Capitalism. But we are always looking for ways for like-minded readers to to alert friends and colleagues to the dangers of the proposed pacts and hopefully take action against them. This post gives concrete, accessible examples of some of the uses made of investor-state dispute settlement panels, which Gaius calls trade courts (even though they are actually secret arbitration panels) by Big Tobacco.
Read more...In his State of the Union speech, President Obama said he would submit a bill to Congress that would grant him the fast track authority to finalize the TransPacific Partnership (TPP)—a trade pact with Pacific Rim countries such as Japan, Malaysia, Peru, and Chile. While free trade has brought benefits in the past, tariffs in the world economy are at an all time low and new deals like the TPP offer few new gains in terms of growth and jobs for the American people. And the TPP in particular comes at unacceptably high cost.
Read more...Even cherry-picked data shows only modest gains for trade agreements, and more comprehensive looks tell a very different tale. And that’s before you get to all the nasty sovereignty-gutting provisions of the TTP and TTIP.
Read more...GXG Markets expels dubious broker London Capital (NZ)
Read more...Here’s another New Zealand FSP scam, involving a “Malaysian billionaire”, who doesn’t look genuine, and princes from Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, who do look genuine!
Read more...The last piece in our series on Virgin Gold Mining Corporation, for the moment
Read more...Yet more twists in the tale of the giant pyramid fraud, Virgin Gold Mining Corporation: Plan “C” starts to come unravelled.
Read more...More shenanigans from Virgin Gold Mining Corporation and its little helpers.
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