Corruption

• This headline needs updating: Creditors set bailout ultimatum for defiant Greeks (Reuters)
• Greece’s Fragile Banks Leave Alexis Tsipras Few Options in Bailout Talks (WSJ)
• Dueling Greece Plans Presented as Ministers Race for Aid Deal (BBG)
• Icahn Cashes In His Netflix Chips (WSJ)
• Meet the Health-Law Holdouts: Americans Who Prefer to Go Uninsured (WSJ)
• ECB holds Athens lifeline unchanged as Bundesbank protests (Reuters)
• Supreme Court Guide: Six Big Decisions Remain (WSJ)
• The Rise of the Compliance Guru—and Banker Ire (BBG)

CEOs are not the most trustworthy figures in society. They will lay off thousands of employees to beat analysts' estimates, and yet they have no trouble looting the stock to pay themselves millions while the company loses money. However, one theme that keeps coming up is that unethical behavior has a price tag. With this in mind, consider the implications when the New York Fed tells us that economic activity declined because of the weather. Now that it's summer, it's not clear how cold weather is interfering. Perhaps the Fed has a South Pole subsidiary? When will the market crash and the Fed be replaced for lying about poor performance?

Many people see national finances as an impenetrable fog of numbers and acronyms, which they feel is best left up to financial specialists to interpret for them. But try to see national finances as a henhouse, yourself as a hen, and financial specialists as foxes. Perhaps you should pay a little bit of attention - perhaps a bit more than one would expect from a chicken?

"...my personal strategy for change has morphed from speaking to power in favor of becoming a monk rather than a martyr. If I could stand in front of a tank and have it force positive change I would do so but clearly that opportunity won’t happen or present itself in this leaderless, narrowing, putrefied, lying lawless system of festering corruption. Beyond 2015, I fear it will continue to be everyman for himself and thus divided we'll fall having rejected the spirit of one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Rome didn't fall so much as erode away. That's the template for collapse. While collapse may be sudden, the decay that generated the collapse had been rotting away the foundation for years or decades.

Greece, Europe and the world are being crucified on a cross of Keynesian central banking. The latter’s two-decade long deluge of money printing and ZIRP has generated a fantastic worldwide financial bubble, and one which has accrued to just a tiny slice of mankind. That much is blindingly evident, but there’s more and it’s worse. The present replay of high noon on Greece’s impossible mountain of debt clarifies an even greater evil. Namely, that the central bank printing presses have also utterly destroyed the fundamental requisite of fiscal democracy. To wit, in the modern world of massive, interventionist welfare states, fiscal governance desperately needs an honest bond market.

Nobody can deny that the chances of war are increasing in the world.

We have now reached the point where the euro does not have a problem – the euro is the problem. De-risking it should be a priority for European leaders, as it now poses a chronic risk to global financial stability. Either the outliers need to leave or the countries inside the eurozone needs to move down the pathway to full political, economic and monetary union.

As so often, Mr. Tsipras makes a number of fair points. However, it seems to us that everybody is skirting the main issues. Greece cannot become a “socialist Utopia”, unless its citizens are happy with being condemned to a hand-to-mouth existence for a long, long time indeed. Whether or not Greece defaults, the one thing the government will be unable to fund is the very socialism that is its basic ideology.

It’s not difficult to see that the foundation is crumbling...

We want to highlight today's absolute failure at investigative reporting, and the worst example of journalistic capture by the Federal Reserve that we have ever seen because at stake is the criminality, competence and corruption of that most important of organizations in modern society, the US Federal Reserve.

"China, the world’s largest car market by sales, has been the main engine of profitability for the likes of BMW, Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz car division and Audi in recent years, helping paper over structural weakness in Europe. But according to one Chinese dealer representative: “the cash cow is dying”.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed ‘Trade’ deals are actually about whether the world is heading toward a dictatorial world government - a dictatorship by the hundred or so global super-rich who hold the controlling blocks of stock in the world’s largest international corporations - or else toward a democratic world government - which will be a global federation of free and independent states, much like the United States was at its founding, but global in extent. These are two opposite visions of world government; and Obama is clearly on the side of fascism, an international mega-corporate dictatorship... What’s at stake here is nothing less than whether the future of the United States, and perhaps even of the world, will be democracy, or else fascism.

Neither control for its own sake, nor bail-ins, are the primary drivers of going cashless. It's something more serious than power or loot.

A classic tale of buying ridiculously low and creating massive value in the process