Money

Cyber-criminals could trigger the next global financial crisis by making a major bank ‘disappear’

Cyber-criminals will trigger the next global financial crisis by making a major bank “disappear”, one of the UK’s leading finance chiefs has claimed. Mark Boleat, head of policy for the City of London, said cyber-criminals would go about “destroying bank records and changing the amounts people have in their accounts”, sending shockwaves through the financial system like a “neutron bomb”. People would find that their savings have been wiped out, their records deleted, and they would come up against “denials of service”, stopping them from accessing funds, Mr Boleat told The Sunday Telegraph.

After the VIX ‘super spike,’ is the worst ahead?

Technical strategist Abigail Doolittle is holding tight to her prediction of market doom ahead, asserting that a recent move in Wall Street’s fear gauge is signaling the way. Doolittle, founder of Peak Theories Research, has made headlines lately suggesting a market correction worse than anyone thinks is ahead. The long-term possibility, she has said, is a 60 percent collapse for the S&P 500.

All 2014 Stock Market Gains Have Been Wiped Out

Stocks ended a bloody, turbulent week with a broad-based slump Friday, sending the tech-heavy Nasdaq to its worst weekly losses in 30 months and eviscerating what remained of the Dow Jones industrial average’s 2014 gains. The Dow, down 335 points Thursday in its worst single session performance of the year, fell another 115.15 points to 16,544.

College is ripping you off: Students are cash cows, and schools the predators

An educational publisher wrote to me a few months back; they wanted to reprint an essay of mine that they had seen on the Internet, where it is available for free. The textbook in which they wanted to include it, they said, would be “inexpensively priced,” and authors were therefore being asked to keep their reprint fees to a minimum. The low, low price that students were to pay for this textbook:

Why Americans Are Drowning in Medical Debt

After his recent herniated-disk surgery, Peter Drier was ready for the $56,000 hospital charge, the $4,300 anesthesiologist bill, and the $133,000 fee for orthopedist. All were either in-network under his insurance or had been previously negotiated. But as Elisabeth Rosenthal recently explained in her great New York Times piece, he wasn’t quite prepared for a $117,000 bill from an “assistant surgeon”—an out-of-network doctor that the hospital tacked on at the last minute.

China Makes Bid to Become Part of SDR as New World Currency

The government is very good at making things overly complicated for the purpose of obscuring what’s really going on from the public,” observed hedge fund manager Erik Townsend during our interview in May. He was making a point about the 2008 bailouts. The Federal Reserve played a leading role, applying trillions in paper-clip and rubber-band solutions.

Serious Financial Trouble Is Erupting In Germany And Japan

There are some who believe that the next great financial crash will not begin in the United States. Instead, they are convinced that a financial crisis that begins in Europe or in Japan (or both) will end up spreading across the globe and take down the U.S.

World Bank issues dire warning about Ebola’s economic impact

The economic impact of the Ebola epidemic could reach $32.6 billion by the end of next year if the disease ravaging Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone spreads to neighboring countries in West Africa, the World Bank Group said Wednesday. The World Bank’s assessment said the economic impact of Ebola is already serious in the three countries and could be catastrophic if it becomes a more regional health crisis.

40 Million Dollars Of Taxpayer Money Has Been Spent On Obama Vacations

Three recent and lavish vacations by the first family cost taxpayers more than $6.2 million just for transportation and security, bringing the pleasure price for President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama’s trips to tens of millions of dollars since taking office, according to federal documents. Taxpayer watchdog group Judicial Watch told Secrets that new cost calculations for security showed that the first family’s 2012-2013 vacation to Honolulu and the first lady’s 2014 ski trip to Aspen, Colo.

Feds Spend Half A Million Dollars To Study Why Obese Girls Have A Hard Time Getting Dates

The federal government is spending nearly a half a million dollars to find out why obese teenage girls have a hard time getting dates. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a $466,642 grant last week for the study, which will examine whether social skills have an impact on why obese girls have fewer dating experiences than their less obese counterparts. “Mounting evidence demonstrates that weight influences intimate (i.

Recovery? 60% Of Greeks Live At Or Below Poverty Levels

While Greek government yields (and political leaders) proclaim the troubled peripheral European nation is ‘recovering’, the risk of major political upheaval in Greece has not gone away ahead of next year’s presidential vote next year. As Reuters notes, under growing pressure from anti-bailout leftists, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras desperately needs a new narrative to get the backing of lawmakers and rally Greeks fed up with four years of austerity. We wish him luck as Keep Talking Greece notes, it is high time that the real data of the economic situation of the Greek society come to the surface and so it did this week.

Europe Is Crumbling Into Collapse

The intention was always to make the EU a tide to lift all boats, or even, in the wildest dreams, a boat to lift all tides. That intention has failed in dramatic fashion. But not one single one of the architects and present day leaders is ready to fess up to their failures.

Former Goldman Sachs analyst Charles Nenner warns a major financial collapse is coming in 2018-2020

Charles Nenner, who has claimed to have never been wrong on a market call, appeared on CNBC and warned that deflation and a stock market crash both coming. Nenner, who developed the “Nenner cycle,” which he says can time the ups and downs of any market, said on CNBC that “for the next many years, you will not see the S&P more than 5% higher than [current levels.]” But he warns this period of low returns will be followed years of large losses.

+ More