Free Republic

A familiar face from a past economic disaster could be on the verge of profiting off the current Silicon Valley Bank calamity. SVB, taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation at the request of California regulators, is arguably the second-biggest bank failure of its kind in America — but that clearly doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to capitalize off of its collapse. According to a report from Bloomberg, the managers of the investment banking arm of Silicon Valley Bank, SVB Securities, are seeking a “management buyout of the business.” They are reportedly looking to expedite a deal because regulators...

China's troubled property sector suffered another blow this month when frustrated homebuyers stopped making mortgage payments on units in unfinished projects. The boycott came with many developers struggling to manage mountains of debt, and fears swirling that the crisis could spread to the rest of the Chinese -- and global -- economy. Colossal. Property and related industries are estimated to contribute as much as a quarter of China's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The sector took off after market reforms in 1998. There was a breathtaking construction boom on the back of demand from a growing middle class that saw property...

One thing that that has puzzled a lot of people since the selection of Pope Francis two years ago is how a left-leaning Pope could succeed two very serious conservative Popes—John Paul II and Benedict XVI—who you would have thought had stacked the ranks of the Cardinals with clergy that would perpetuate their theological and philosophical outlook. Was Benedict hounded out of office by some kind of internal Vatican scandal perhaps? Was there some ecclesiastical version of a coup?There’s no evidence that I’m aware of—until now. Three days ago the National Catholic Register ran a very curious article about...

The gyrations in Deutsche Bank’s shares last week together with a June report from the International Monetary Fund indicating that the bank was “the most important net contributor to systemic risks” has cast a trading pall over all of the global banks. Against that backdrop, most Americans would be stunned to learn that the German Deutsche Bank, which perpetually finds itself on the wrong side of the law, was bailed out in five separate U.S. emergency lending operations during the 2007-2010 financial crisis, receiving more than twice the emergency financial assistance as that received by Lehman Brothers, the failed U.S....

Donald J. Trump has criticized Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio at numerous debates, including for his tenure as a managing general partner at a bank that was central to the financial crisis. Now, America Leads, the “super PAC” supporting Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is putting some money behind Mr. Trump’s accusations in a withering attack ad aimed at Mr. Kasich. It begins with Mr. Kasich saying “I was a banker and I was proud of it,” before cutting to Mr. Trump’s criticism, and rifling through Mr. Kasich’s record as both a congressman and a businessman, accusing him...

Within weeks many of you will be looking across just hundreds of feet of water at some of the most modern technology ever invented in America. Unfortunately, it is on Soviet ships. - Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, May 25, 1983, to graduating class at Annapolis . ... Almost 70 percent of the present Soviet merchant fleet has been built outside the Soviet Union. This has released Soviet shipyards and materials for Soviet naval construction. All diesel engines in Soviet ships use a technology originating outside the Soviet Union. The Soviets provided 80 percent of the supplies for the...

-snip- As president of the United States, I will use all the powers of my office to disrupt the political culture of a dysfunctional Washington, D.C. We need to clean house and it must start by eliminating the crony capitalism that is pervasive throughout the federal government. There are tens of billions of dollars of corporate welfare subsidies tucked into the federal budget. -snip- The influence peddling industry in Washington will fight every step of the way to defend their fiefdoms and special favors. It is going to take a president with a stiff spine and a proven record of...

It was early 2008, and Florida lawmakers were under pressure to explain how the state’s pension officials had come to buy massive quantities of toxic assets from Lehman Brothers. After the investments defaulted, politicians wanted to know whether Jeb Bush -- who joined the Wall Street firm in 2007 as a consultant just months after leaving the governor’s office -- had been involved in persuading his former government colleagues to invest state money in Lehman. Bush has denied any involvement in the transactions, which might eventually cost Florida taxpayers as much as $1 billion. But a state official named Michael...

Donald Trump's latest comments earned him a rebuke from a Jeb Bush spokesman for "trafficking in false conspiracy theories" about the former investment bank Lehman Brothers, where Bush worked for a stint after leaving the governor's office in Florida in 2007. Amid Trump's 33 attacks against the Bush family in a 35-minute interview with The Washington Post, he managed numerous times to drop his suspicions that Bush's high salary from Lehman was a "reward for helping direct Florida state funds to the firm, whose collapse in 2008 helped kick off the Great Recession," The Post reports. "That’s a Hillary Clinton...

Donald Trump's latest comments earned him a rebuke from a Jeb Bush spokesman for "trafficking in false conspiracy theories" about the former investment bank Lehman Brothers, where Bush worked for a stint after leaving the governor's office in Florida in 2007. Amid Trump's 33 attacks against the Bush family in a 35-minute interview with The Washington Post, he managed numerous times to drop his suspicions that Bush's high salary from Lehman was a "reward for helping direct Florida state funds to the firm, whose collapse in 2008 helped kick off the Great Recession," The Post reports. "That’s a Hillary Clinton...

A price tag is now emerging for what last year's collapse of investment giant Lehman Brothers could cost the state of Florida: more than $1 billion. The losses could make Florida and its citizens among the biggest casualties in the biggest bankruptcy ever. -snip- The storied bank hired former Gov. Jeb Bush as a consultant in June 2007, five months after he left office. As governor, Bush also served as a trustee for the State Board of Administration, which invests public money. Lehman was the dominant Wall Street broker that sold the SBA $1.4 billion of risky, mortgage-related securities that...

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog, At this point, it almost feels like kicking someone while he’s down. Jeb Bush can’t even stand up to Donald Trump, let alone his own growing series of scandals. In the latest revelation from David Sirota and team at International Business Daily, we learn that: For Florida taxpayers, the move by the administration of then-Gov. Jeb Bush to forge a relationship with Lehman Brothers would ultimately prove disastrous. Transactions in 2005 and 2006 put the Wall Street investment bank in charge of some $250 million worth of pension funds for Florida cops,...

For Florida taxpayers, the move by the administration of then-Gov. Jeb Bush to forge a relationship with Lehman Brothers would ultimately prove disastrous. Transactions in 2005 and 2006 put the Wall Street investment bank in charge of some $250 million worth of pension funds for Florida cops, teachers and firefighters. Lehman would capture more than $5 million in fees on these deals, while gaining additional contracts to manage another $1.2 billion of Florida's money. Then, in the fall of 2008, Lehman collapsed into bankruptcy, leaving Florida facing up to $1 billion in losses. But for Jeb Bush personally, his enduring...

Jeb Bush says he released 33 years of tax returns this week because he wants to be the most transparent candidate to run for president in 2016. But if that’s really the case, why is he continuing to obfuscate some of his most lucrative and potentially controversial business dealings he had before announcing his candidacy, like his work as an “adviser” for investment bank Lehman Brothers? So, if Jeb won’t tell you what Jeb exactly did while working on Wall Street, in the interests of transparency and disclosure, I will try. Not much is known about what Bush actually did...

n the summer of 2008, as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression was unfolding, Jeb Bush, Florida’s former governor and brother of then President George W. Bush, traveled to Mexico to ask Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helú to rescue Lehman Brothers, The New York Times reported. In a front page article on Monday, The Times revealed that within a year of ending his term as Florida’s governor, Bush had signed on as consultant to Lehman Brothers, where he was enlisted to reach out to Carlos Slim in a plan code-named Project Verde (Green Project). Slim, says the...

<p>Jeb Bush apparently doesn’t want people to know that he worked at Lehman Brothers, the now-defunct investment bank whose collapse led to the broader financial meltdown in 2008.</p> <p>That’s the only conclusion I can come to after receiving a series of occasionally bizarre emails from his press people to what I thought was a fairly simple question about Bush’s work before he became a Republican presidential candidate.</p>

Earlier this month, Deutsche Bank’s co-CEOs Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen were shown the door ... Jonathan Pollack, the bank’s global head commercial real estate, is leaving after 16 years. ... Pollack's departure comes just one month after the bank's head of structured finance Elad Shraga left to start his own fund. Shraga was instrumental in helping Deutsche become "an award-winning arranger of asset- and mortgage-backed debt." Shraga had been with Deutsche Bank for 15 years. All of this seems to lend credence to the idea that Deutsche Bank may be in trouble. The employee exodus appears to be gathering...

Submitted by NotQuant.comLooking back at the Lehman Brothers collapse of 2008, it’s amazing how quickly it all happened.  In hindsight there were a few early-warning signs,  but the true scale of the disaster publicly unfolded only in the final moments before it became apparent that Lehman was doomed.First, for purposes of drawing a parallel, let’s re-cap the events of 2007-2008:There were few early indicators of Lehman’s plight.   Insiders however, were well aware:   In late 2007, Goldman Sachs placed a massive proprietary bet against Lehman which would be known internally as the “Big Short”.  (It’s a bet that would later profit from during...

The "Deflationary Vortex": Global Dollar Economy Suffers Biggest Plunge Since Lehman, Down $4 Trillion One of the macroeconomic observations that has gotten absolutely no mention in recent months is the curious fact that while global economic growth has not imploded in recent quarters, it is because GDP has been represented, as is customary, in local currency terms. Of course, this comes as a time when local currencies (at least those which are not the USD) have been plunging against the greenback on the back of the expectations that the Fed will hike rates some time in the summer or later...

President Obama gave a speech touting how far the US has come since the jarring Lehman Brothers collapse five years ago. “The U.S. has come a long way since September 2008,” according to President Obama. Well, not in terms of household income since REAL median household income continues to decline. household-income-monthly-median-growth-since-2000 (1) And the less than 1% of the population continues to suffer. [Note how the top 1% fared under President Clinton!] inomr Mortgage purchase applications have tanked along with the employment-to-population ratio. empopombapurch And the labor force participation rate continues to fall along with M2 Money Velocity. lfpm2v We...