The corporate recovery departments are essentially designed to take advantage of their customers when they are at their most vulnerable. The British Bankers’ Association ought to be leading the drive for better ethical practices, but they abandoned any such role decades ago.
Over the past 25 years, the NHS has been insidiously converted into a market-based healthcare system. This process is accelerating under the Coalition government and the very existence of a National Health Service is in danger. How did it ever come to this for Great Britain’s most cherished institution?
Iceland’s government has announced that it will be writing off up to 24,000 euros ($32,600) of every household’s mortgage, fulfilling its election promise, despite overwhelming criticism from international financial institutions.
The measure was introduced by the country’s prime minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, the leader of the Progressive Party which won the late-April elections on a promise of household debt relief.
the liquidity pipelines remain stuck throughout the world, and loan creation – that traditional money creation pathway – is permanently blocked (as is the case empirically in both the US and Europe, where private-sector loan creation is declining at a record pace).
When a person becomes a Treasury official it is made clear that the choice is between serving the banks and becoming rich or trying to serve the public and becoming poor. Few make the latter choice.
Meanwhile, almost all of the deal, save a $2 billion penalty to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Sacramento to settle a civil lawsuit, is tax deductible as a business expense. Assuming a 38 percent rate for deductions (as JPMorgan does) on $7 billion in business expenses, this knocks another $2.66 billion off the real cost to JPMorgan Chase. A ballyhooed $13 billion settlement winds up being closer to $2.74 billion.
In April 2009, more than a year before becoming prime minister, Cameron had declared that any government led by him would usher in an “age of austerity”. The media are well aware that this is the real agenda of the coalition—one that is shared by the Labour Party. If they are shocked it is only because Cameron has let the dirty secret of Britain’s ruling elite out of the bag.
A national demonstration in defence of the NHS has been called on 29 September at the Tory Party Conference. This was confirmed by Unite- GMB-Unison! UNITED WE STAND TO SAVE OUR NHS!
The reforms introduced by his government were only the beginning of a vast restructuring of the social welfare system, Kenny declared. “We cannot allow welfare dependency to take root,” he wrote, in defence of his government’s move to slash jobless benefit for those under 25 by more than a third.
Today, Ireland is under a different sort of tyranny, one imposed by the banks and the troika—the EU, ECB and IMF. The oppressors have demanded austerity and more austerity, forcing the public to pick up the tab for bills incurred by profligate private bankers.
On the night before the latest growth figures, no one in this 100-strong hall used the word “recovery” unless it was to be sarcastic. Instead, audience members – middle-aged, smartly dressed and doubtless sizably mortgaged – took it in turn to attack bankers, politicians and, yes, economists. They’d created the mess everyone else was paying for, yet they’d suffered no retribution.
“4,594,000 Mortgages Going Unpaid in the United States.”
Buying a house is a lot like buying a car. If you don’t look under the hood, you could wind up with a lemon. Only with housing, it’s not as simple as checking the dipstick or looking for oil under the rear axle. No, smart home buyers check the data to see what’s really going on. That’s the best way to cut through the hype and separate the fact from the fiction.
