Les pouvoirs qui dirigent le monde - Documentaire ARTE

François Hollande Vows to Tax the Rich to Pay Off French Deficit
THE GUARDIAN: Leftwing frontrunner in presidential race launches manifesto on how Socialist party would deal with financial crisis


François Hollande, the leftwing frontrunner in the French presidential race, has vowed to make the rich pay the highest price to help drag France out of its economic crisis, while promising to pump more money into schools and state-assisted jobs.

The Socialist rural MP, who recently declared "my real adversary in this campaign is the world of finance", launched his manifesto on Thursday, a road map of how the left would deal with the financial crisis. Hollande said he would raise taxes for banks and big companies as well as France's richest people, and use the money to help wipe out the nation's crippling public deficit.

By scrapping some €29bn (£24bn) worth of tax breaks for wealthier people introduced under Nicolas Sarkozy, he said he could find €20bn to deal with the corrosion of French society: record unemployment, soaring youth jobless figures and an education system that has been shamed as one of the most unequal in Europe, where one in six children leave with no qualifications. » | Angelique Chrisafis | Thursday, January 26, 2012

Un financement pour les insurgés libyens dans quelques semaines
REUTERS FRANCE: ROME - Le mécanisme de financement des insurgés libyens annoncé jeudi à Rome par le "groupe de contact" sera opérationnel dans les prochaines semaines, a déclaré le ministre français des Affaires étrangères.

Alain Juppé a souligné que Paris n'avait pas renoncé à obtenir le dégel des avoirs libyens gelés au profit des insurgés en dépit des problèmes juridiques posés par une telle démarche.

"Le mécanisme de financement temporaire est maintenant bien défini et sera opérationnel dans les prochaines semaines", a-t-il dit lors d'une conférence de presse à Rome.

Les Etats-Unis ont annoncé qu'ils apporteraient leur contribution, d'autres pays vont le faire aussi et la France "va examiner sa propre contribution", a souligné Alain Juppé. » | John Irish, Gérard Bon pour le service français, édité par Patrick Vignal | Jeudi 05 Mai 2011

Syrian Funding Causes Embarrassment at British University
THE GUARDIAN: University of St Andrews to review acceptance of funding arranged by Bashar al-Assad's controversial regime in Damascus

A prestigious British university is to review the work of one of its academic research centres because its funding was arranged by the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Guardian can reveal.

The University of St Andrews, where Prince William and Kate Middleton studied, has received more than £100,000 in funding for its centre for Syrian studies with the assistance of the Syrian ambassador to the UK, Sami Khiyami.

Following questions on Wednesday from the Guardian about its relations with figures associated with the regime – and "in view of significant international concerns about recent events in Syria" – a spokesman for St Andrews said the university would be reviewing the centre's work "to ensure its high academic standards are maintained".

The university's association with the Assad regime has come under scrutiny in the wake of the violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Syria which is estimated to have claimed 450 lives so far. » | Peter Beaumont and Jeevan Vasagar | Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Historic Wall Street Overhaul Passed by US Senate
TIMES ONLINE: The US Senate has passed legislation that will usher in the biggest overhaul of Wall Street since the Great Depression, fulfilling President Barack Obama’s vow to toughen regulation of the financial sector following the credit crisis.

The Senate voted 59 to 39 to pass the 1,500-page Restoring American Financial Stability Act overnight, after months of argument between Democrats and Republicans over President Obama’s reform proposals.

The House of Representatives passed its own bill based on the President’s ideas last December. Now lawmakers from both branches of Congress must meld the two bills into one piece of legislation.

The Senate’s yes-vote is a significant achievement for President Obama, who made reforming America’s financial regulatory system one of his key domestic priorities. Since passing his historic healthcare reform bill in March, the President has thrown much of his energy into urging Republicans and Wall Street to support the changes, which attempt to plug the holes in America's patchwork of financial monitoring. Read on and comment >>> Christine Seib, New York | Friday, May 21, 2010

NZZ ONLINE: Der US-Senat verabschiedet Obamas Finanzreform: Mehr Kontrolle über die Banken und besserer Schutz für Konsumenten >>> sda/dpa/afp | Freitag, 21. Mai 2010

LE MONDE: La réforme de Wall Street adoptée par le Sénat américain >>> LeMonde.fr avec AFP et Reuters | Vendredi 21 Mai 2010

Ambrose Evans Pritchard’s Viewpoint: Europe's Fiscal Fascism Brings British Withdrawal Ever Closer
TELEGRAPH BLOGS: Just when you thought the EU could not go any further down the road towards authoritarian excess, it gets worse.

The European Commission is calling for EU powers to vet budgets of the 27 member states before the draft laws have been presented to the House of Commons, the Tweede Kamer, the Folketing, the Bundestag, the Assemblee Nationale, or other national parliaments. It applies to Britain even though we are not in EMU.

Fonctionnaires and EU finance ministers will pass judgement on the British (or Dutch, or Danish, or French) budgets before the elected bodies of these ancient and sovereign nations have seen the proposals. Did we not we not fight the English Civil War and kill a king over such a prerogative?

Yet again we are discovering the trick played on our democracies by Europe’s insiders when they charged ahead with EMU, brushing aside warnings by their own staff economists that monetary union was unworkable without fiscal union. Jacques Delors knew perfectly well that this would lead inevitably to a crisis, but it would be the “beneficial crisis” that would force sovereign parliaments to submit to demands that they would never otherwise accept. Read on and comment >>> Ambrose Evans-Pritchard | Friday, May 14, 2010

Nine of AIG's Top Bonus Earners Agree to Repay Cash in Full
THE GUARDIAN: Nine of the top 10 recipients of ­controversial bonuses at the insurer AIG have pledged to hand back the money ­following a public and political outcry over multimillion-dollar rewards at the crisis-stricken company.

New York state's attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, revealed last night that most of the biggest winners from a ­controversial "retention scheme" at AIG have succumbed to pressure by forsaking their awards.

Of those working at AIG's financial products division, which ran up vast losses on toxic derivatives, 15 of the 20 top bonus winners are giving back the money.

Cuomo said: "A number of them have risen to the occasion and I applaud them."

The money being returned amounts to $30m out of the bonus scheme's total payout of $165m. Cuomo, speaking on a conference call, revealed that about $80m of the total went to Americans. Some of the rest is likely to have gone to British staff at AIG's key financial products office in London.

He expressed a hope that more bonuses would be returned and said he expected his office to recoup about $80m. >>> Andrew Clark in New York | Tuesday, March 24, 2009

100 Years After
Photo of J P Morgan courtesy of the BBC
BBC: Almost exactly 100 years ago at 4.45 in the morning of a November day on the corner of Madison and 35th Street in New York a group of some 50 or so exhausted men stumbled out into the street.

Some had not slept for days.

Behind them, on the other side of the monumental brass doors that closed behind them, they left a piece of paper which pledged them collectively to a loan of some $25m - about $10bn (£5bn) in today's money.

Beside it stood a large gentleman with a walrus moustache, who had forced them into the deal which ended a two-week financial panic that had come close to destroying New York's financial system. That man was J Pierpont Morgan.

From 1903 to 1906 the global economy had boomed and the Dow Jones had doubled.

But the global supply of gold to which all hard currency was pegged had not kept pace, and hard cash was increasingly scarce.

A hundred years later our credit squeeze had its genesis in the infamous sub-prime mortgage market of the US. 100 years after the 1907 credit crunch (more) By Jamie Robertson

Financial crises: Lessons from history By Steve Schifferes

Mark Alexander

Is the Party Over for the City of London? Probably Only for the Unlucky Ones
THE TELEGRAPH: Peter Taylor investigates a new report that predicts the credit crisis will see 6,500 financial jobs axed and the total bonus pool cut by 15pc

The City should brace itself for more than 6,000 job cuts and a significant fall in bonuses as the credit crisis weighs down on the financial services industry, according to a leading research group.

City firms will cull 2,000 professional positions by Christmas with employment to fall by 6,500 into 2008, the Centre for Economics and Business Research says in a report released today.

CEBR economist Sarah Bloomfield said one job would be cut for about every two that had been added so far this year.

But the redundancies will have only a small impact on what is otherwise a sector in robust health, with a record 349,100 jobs registered in the City this month.

"It will feel worse than it actually is because the City has become used to adding jobs at breakneck speed," Ms Bloomfield said. Thousands of City workers face redundancy (more)

Mark Alexander

Crisis in the Money Markets
THE SUNDAY TIMES: LEADING bankers are warning of the worst crisis in the money markets for 20 years, which will come to a head this week when $113 billion (£57 billion) of commercial paper – market IOUs – comes up for refinancing.

This huge refinancing, mainly through London, exceeds the $100 billion that became due in mid-August, and which sparked the most serious phase in the money-market crisis, which has seen banks scrambling for funds and market interest rates rising sharply. “This is a serious pressure point,” said one leading banker.

Another senior executive of one of Britain’s top five retail banks said: “These are the worst conditions I have seen in money markets for 20 years”. Worst crisis for 20 years, say banks (more) By David Smith and John Waples

Mark Alexander

Savers Will Gain; Debtors, Lose. Interest Rate Set to Rise Again
THE TELEGRAPH: Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, last night issued a stark warning to indebted households, fuelling fears that borrowing costs could soon rise to six per cent.

He said that families should borrow on the assumption that interest rates were going to rise further.

The warning came amid growing evidence that many thousands of households have over-extended themselves, with consumer debt and insolvencies at record levels. Bank chief hints at rate rise to 6pc (more) By Edmund Conway and Harry Wallop

Mark Alexander