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Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton said in an interview aired Wednesday night that special interest groups cannot buy her to gain access and influence as she continues to face scrutiny for taking large sums of money in speaking fees from the financial industry in recent years. Speaking over the phone with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Clinton was asked how she will respond to impending attack ads from her main primary challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I, Vt.), who is expected to target her ties to Wall Street. "As anybody who knows me knows, you can't buy me," Clinton said in response, defending...

Bernie Sanders is right about one thing: Hillary Clinton is Wall Street's candidate of choice. It's where she has been leading the real "War on Women" with the good old boys for years. Today, American women earn more bachelor's, associate's, graduate, and doctoral degrees than men. They also open small businesses and create jobs at record rates. Small businesses, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking have long been the engines that have driven the American economy. So why did liberals start waging an all out assault on these foundational values the very moment women rose to parity with men in these measurements? Do...

Reporters were routinely prohibited from covering former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speeches before some of the nation's most exclusive Wall Street financial investment firms, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation. The list of Wall Street firms that barred reporters from covering her speeches reads like Who’s Who of the country's largest and most prestigious wealth management companies. Those confirmed by TheDCNF to have excluded reporters include: the Goldman Sachs Group, UBS Wealth Management, Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts and Company, the Carlyle Group, Apollo Management Holdings, Fidelity Investments, Morgan Stanley and Golden Tree Asset Management.

**SNIP** Together, Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have earned in excess of $125 million in speech income since leaving the White House in 2001, one-fifth of it in the last two years. Mrs. Clinton's own speechmaking was a veritable tour through high finance. She gave paid speeches at GTCR, the Chicago private equity firm that the Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, helped found; Deutsche Bank, the German financial services conglomerate; and the investment bank Morgan Stanley, among other companies. Goldman Sachs alone paid Mrs. Clinton $675,000 for three speeches in three different states, a fact...

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) on Friday said Hillary Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs are "in the past" and not worth delving into. "The fact is that's in the past," she said on MSNBC when asked about Clinton's past speeches to the banking firm. "They're done, so it doesn't matter whether or not you support that or not," Shaheen said. "[It is] just as Bernie's socialism - he claims - is in the past," she added of Clinton's chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders. "The question is what do voters want to...

Goldman Sachs once gave Ted Cruz's campaign a $1.43 million loan. His campaign also got a loan of less than $500,000 from Citibank. According to Donald Trump, in a claim that has been repeated roughly a billion times, that means THEY OWN HIM. Even though, as far as I can tell, all or part of these loans have been repaid. As I reported yesterday, at various times Donald Trump has had hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from Citibank and Goldman, some of which have been repaid, some of which were discharged in bankruptcy when Trump's Altantic City casino...

Well ok. I have never heard of this guy before. I don't know if what he is saying it true, is true. Tried to google the guy, and it wasn't for sure whether he is reputable. But it seems interesting, at least. So here it is: http://thesovereigninvestor.com/exclusives/80-stock-market-crash-to-strike-in-2016/?z=451506

-snip- Her background in finance has proved useful: Quite at ease asking for large sums of money, Mrs. Cruz makes as many as 10 calls a day seeking the maximum contribution couples can make to the campaign. "The $10,800 contributions is my lane," she said. Inside the campaign, Mrs. Cruz has built a model that seems lifted from Wall Street, with donors labeled "investors" who are privy to "quarterly investor meetings" to discuss the "product." She also helped recruit an important fund-raiser, Lila Ontiveros, after Ms. Ontiveros left Goldman Sachs. At times, the dual role of Goldman executive and political...

What does Donald Trump really think about Ted Cruz? Watch this video to see what he says behind closed doors.

If The Big Short, Adam McKay’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book about the 2008 financial crisis and the subject of last month’s Vulture cover story, got you all worked up over the holidays, you’re probably wondering what Michael Burry, the economic soothsayer portrayed by Christian Bale who’s always just a few steps ahead of everyone else, is up to these days. In an email, which readers of the book will recognize as his preferred method of communication, the real-life head of Scion Asset Management answered some of our panicked questions about the state of the financial system, his ominous-sounding water...

"Donald Trump can typically do no wrong - until he attacks Ted Cruz."HOUSTON, Texas — Today, at a rally held in Myrtle Beach, SC, New York billionaire Donald Trump attempted to attack Ted Cruz using a New York Times hit piece and was booed by the crowd. Watch the video here:Donald Trump Booed for Attacking Ted Cruz (Video)NBC News: Donald Trump Booed By Conservative Crowd After Attacks on Ted Cruz Among conservatives, Donald Trump can typically do no wrong - until he attacks Ted Cruz.On Saturday, Trump drew boos from a grassroots conservative crowd during remarks at the South Carolina...

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz on Saturday was briefly trapped in an elevator before giving a speech at the South Carolina Tea Party Convention. The Texas senator quipped after he was released that GOP rival Donald Trump was to blame. "All right, so who put Donald Trump in charge of the elevator?" he said to reporters gathered outside of the elevator.

We just saw The Big Short. It was an interesting and entertaining movie. The language was pretty coarse, but I've no doubt that's the way those high rollers converse. It was s serious subject, but there were many humorous exchanges. Most of the bad guys were hit pretty hard blame wise (banks, lenders, rating agencies), but there was no mention of the role of government policy over many years (Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac) in leading to the subprime mortgage crisis. Surprisingly, Bush wasn't blamed! I did take issue with the observation at the end that minorities and...

The Washington Post published a glowing profile Friday morning about Heidi Cruz - highlighting her professional accomplishments - beyond the fact that she is Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)'s wife. The profile was mostly flattering, pointing to her career at Goldman Sachs in Houston before she stepped down when her husband decided to run for president. Curiously, however, the article began pointing out the similarities between Heidi and Hillary Clinton: -snip- Is that a compliment?

Characterizing Wall Street as an industry run on "greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance," Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders pledged to break up the country's biggest financial firms within a year and limit banking fees placed on consumers, should he become president, in a fiery speech on Tuesday. He coupled that promise, delivered in front of a raucous crowd just a few subway stops from Wall Street, with a series of attacks on rival Hillary Clinton, arguing her personal and political ties make her unable to truly take on the financial industry. "To those on Wall Street who may be listening...

When Heidi and Ted Cruz came to the Atlanta suburbs to campaign a few weeks ago, she perfectly played the role of political spouse: a loving gaze for her husband as he spoke, hands on the shoulders of their two daughters, beaming smiles for supporters. A few days earlier during a solo swing through Missouri, Heidi Cruz made clear that her other identity - hard-charging career woman with ambitions of her own - was never far from her mind. "I want to tell you, I did take a leave of absence from work," she told her audience, standing among shiny...

The market turmoil in China, the world's second-biggest economy after the United States, continues to have global reverberations. Chinese stocks plunged again on Thursday, by more than 7 percent, forcing officials to halt trading for the second time this week - but this time closing the market for the rest of the day. The reverberations carried over to Europe, where markets fell sharply once again on Thursday. And futures trading indicated that Wall Street might open down by about 2 percent, after a sharp sell-off in the United States the day before. The big question now is how much of...

Wall Street braces for more big losses after China rout... more at link

Few will argue with the claim the Republican Party's 2016 presidential nomination process has been a wild ride.Candidates Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush have all made strong pushes in the polls at one time or another, but only business tycoon Donald Trump has managed to sustain his base of support (and even add significantly to it). According to Real Clear Politics, Trump has been king of the GOP mountain since the end of July.Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has stood somewhat quietly in the background throughout all of the election chaos. Like his career in the...

Senator Ted Cruz has demonstrated time and time again that he is not afraid to take on the Washington establishment — a powerful bipartisan group of insiders and special interests that benefits and grows regardless of the way the public votes, even when the margin of victory is large or when conservatives control both chambers of Congress. With the Republican Party’s primary now front and center and getting daily headlines and front-page articles in the media, it is past time that Miami learns more about Ted Cruz — the other senator of Cuban descent running for president. I had every...