Finance

"Bankruptcy in my opinion ever was and yet is considered as a crime, whatever tradesmen may now think of it. It was anciently punished with corporal punishment."

"Donald Trump has America back on the road to bankruptcy, an area where he has unparalleled expertise for a president of the United States. The small band of fiscal conservatives who remain in the Trump administration warned the president about the eventual dangers of his out-of-control spending addiction. In one such meeting, Trump reportedly said, "Yeah, but I won't be here." I never heard him say those words, but it doesn't come as a surprise. That's how he thinks. What does he care if the federal government goes belly-up? By then it won't be his problem."

"Taking out a commission of bankruptcy is a well-known mode of recovering a debt."

"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."

"It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery, and be sold."

"He who desireth to sleep soundly, let him buy the bed of a bankrupt."

"The privileges of creditors to come in under a bankruptcy, and of bankrupts to be discharged, are co-extensive and commensurate."

"'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked. 'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'"

"A woman's whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world: it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul on the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless — for it is a bankruptcy of the heart."

"Bankruptcy is considered as a crime, and the bankrupt in the old laws is called an offender: but it is a principle of natural justice, and of our law, that actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea."

"Such was the origin of that debt which has since become the greatest prodigy that ever perplexed the sagacity and confounded the pride of statesmen and philosophers. At every stage in the growth of that debt the nation has set up the same cry of anguish and despair. At every stage in the growth of that debt it has been seriously asserted by wise men that bankruptcy and ruin were at hand. Yet still the debt went on growing; and still bankruptcy and ruin were as remote as ever."

"A man may be a bankrupt, and yet be honest, for he may become so by accident, and not of purpose to deceive his creditors."

"Our national debt after all is an internal debt owed not only by the Nation but to the Nation. If our children have to pay interest on it they will pay that interest to themselves. A reasonable internal debt will not impoverish our children or put the Nation into bankruptcy."

"One of the bad effects of an anti-intellectual philosophy, such as that of Bergson, is that it thrives upon the errors and confusions of the intellect. Hence it is led to prefer bad thinking to good, to declare every momentary difficulty insoluble, and to regard every foolish mistake as revealing the bankruptcy of intellect and the triumph of intuition."

"One of the biggest lies in capitalism is that companies like competition. They don't. Nobody likes competition."

"w:Travel insurance is a line of insurance we consistently hear problems about. It’s much less regulated than other lines of insurance and tends to include exclusions for things consumers believe they’re covered for.”"

"Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table."

"Microeconomics is the study of how people make decisions in resource-limited situations on a more personal scale. It deals with the decisions that individuals and organizations make on such issues such as how much insurance to buy, which word processor to buy, or what prices to charge for their products or services."

"In June, insurers started filing requests with the Delaware Department of Insurance to change their application forms to specifically ask applicants if they’d had COVID-19"

"A lot were permitted to do this: A regulatory body known as the Insurance Compact has approved 32 such requests since March"

"This is classic insurance reaction [according to Bob Hunter, director of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America and a former Texas insurance commissioner] They did it after AIDS and SARS"

"At bottom, a sound insurance operation needs to adhere to four disciplines. It must (1) understand all exposures that might cause a policy to incur losses; (2) conservatively evaluate the likelihood of any exposure actually causing a loss and the probable cost if it does; (3) set a premium that will deliver a profit, on average, after both prospective loss costs and operating expenses are covered; and (4) be willing to walk away if the appropriate premium can’t be obtained. Many insurers pass the first three tests and flunk the fourth. They simply can’t turn their back on business that their competitors are eagerly writing. That old line, “The other guy is doing it so we must as well,” spells trouble in any business, but in none more so than insurance. Indeed, a good underwriter needs an independent mindset akin to that of the senior citizen who received a call from his wife while driving home. “Albert, be careful,” she warned, “I just heard on the radio that there’s a car going the wrong way down the Interstate.” “Mabel, they don’t know the half of it,” replied Albert, “It’s not just one car, there are hundreds of them.”"

"Basically, the math of intelligently selling insurance is better than the math of intelligently buying insurance."

"In banking or insurance trust is the only thing you have to sell."

"Just as we have the power to harm the ocean, we have the power to put in place policies and modify our own behavior in ways that would be an insurance policy for the future of the sea, for the creatures there, and for us, protecting special critical areas in the ocean."

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history."

"The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish."

"Most of us understand that innovation is enormously important. It's the only insurance against irrelevance. It's the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty. It's the only strategy for out-performing a dismal economy."

"The demutualization of property and casualty insurers raises a series of conceptual and practical problems. The assets of a mutual are essentially community assets built-up over the generations of those living in the community."

"What, exactly, is the cost of this inaction? Estimates of the total national cost of medical malpractice range from $20 billion to $45 billion annually. But this number hardly tells the whole story. There also is the more hidden cost of defensive medicine, including unnecessary testing and second opinions that send patients scurrying through processes that would not otherwise be ordered and deepen the financial burden of America’s health care system by an estimated three percent of our country’s total health care expenditures. Who ultimately pays these costs? Reckless doctors? Faceless insurance companies? Seldom mentioned, the totality of these expenses ultimately falls exclusively on the consumer, since each malpractice award translates ultimately to increased malpractice insurance premiums, which, in turn, translates to either higher health care costs, fewer physicians (with less competitive pricing pressure), or both."

"Among the phenomena, of the causes of which we are ignorant, there are some, such as those dealt with by the manager of a life insurance company, about which the calculus of probabilities can give real information."

"Almost half of the bankruptcies in the United States are connected to an illness in the family, whether people had health insurance or not. Middle-class Americans, who had the misfortune of either experiencing a medical emergency themselves or watching a family member suffer, were then forced to face the daunting task of pulling themselves out of debt. Bankruptcy law has allowed them to start over. It has given hope. Now this new law will put people on their own. Illness or emergency creates medical bills. We are telling the people that they themselves are to blame. At the same time, we are removing protections that would stay an eviction, that would keep a roof over the head of a working family. We allow the credit industry to trick consumers into using subprime cards, with exorbitant interest rate hikes and fees. Then we hand those same consumers over to an unforgiving prison of debt, to be put on a rack of insolvency and squeezed dry by the credit card industry. We are protecting the profits of the credit card industry instead of protecting the economic future of the American people. Americans are left on their own. That's what this Administration's "Ownership Society" is all about — you're on your own — and your ship is sinking."

"Many seniors understand that Social Security is social insurance as opposed to a program where we put money aside for our own retirement. But most elderly individuals think they're getting their money back. So it isn't selfishness as much as a misunderstanding."

"I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so."

"New Deal liberalism broke with progressivism in many if not most respects. Progressives wanted technocratic economic planning. By the 1940s, New Dealers dropped planning for Keynesianism. Most progressives were nativists who supported immigration restriction on ethnic or cultural grounds. New Deal liberals celebrated the melting pot and liberalized American immigration laws in the 1960s. Woodrow Wilson resegegrated Washington. Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Franklin D. Roosevelt created Social Security and Johnson created Medicare. Wilson opposed national health insurance."

"It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label."

"Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders."

"What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies."

"It is true that the theory of our Constitution is, that all taxes are paid voluntarily; that our government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily entered into by the people with each other; that each man makes a free and purely voluntary contract with all others who are parties to the Constitution, to pay so much money for so much protection, the same as he does with any other insurance company; and that he is just as free not to be protected, and not to pay any tax, as he is to pay a tax, and be protected."

"Life insurance became popular only when insurance companies stopped emphasizing it as a good investment and sold it instead as a symbolic commitment by fathers to the future well-being of their families."

"One recent history of economic thought (Jürg Niehans’s A History of Economic Theory) devotes twenty-four pages to Samuelson’s ideas. Adam Smith only gets thirteen. Samuelson’s work on stock markets and the random walk takes up less than two of those twenty-four pages. He was “the last generalist in economics,” as he liked to say, and for him financial market studies were just a side project that he at times seemed deeply ambivalent about. His intervention was, however, crucial to the triumph of the random walk. Here was one of the most important economists of all time, and he didn’t think the relationship between coin flips and the stock market was a dinner-speech triviality."

"The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world’s most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something like a private viewing of a stolen work of art."

"Let us begin with a definition of economics. Over the last half-century, the study of economics has expanded to include a vast range of topics. Here are some of the major subjects that are covered in this book:"

"The real reason that physicians are mediocre investors is that it never occurs to them that finance is a science, just like medicine."

"FINANCE, n. The art or science of managing revenues and resources for the best advantage of the manager. The pronunciation of this word with the i long and the accent on the first syllable is one of America's most precious discoveries and possessions."

"The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation."

"Nothing in finance is more fatuous and harmful, in our opinion, than the firmly established attitude of common stock investors regarding questions of corporate management. That attitude is summed up in the phrase: "If you don't like the management, sell your stock." [...] The public owners seem to have abdicated all claim to control over the paid superintendents of their property."

"There’s no longer any reason to believe that the wizards of Wall Street actually contribute anything positive to society, let alone enough to justify those humongous paychecks. ... It’s hard to think of any major recent financial innovations that actually aided society, as opposed to being new, improved ways to blow bubbles, evade regulations and implement de facto Ponzi schemes."

"Money is created when banks lend it into existence. When a bank provides you with a $100,000 mortgage, it creates only the principal, which you spend and which then circulates in the economy. The bank expects you to pay back $200,000 over the next 20 years, but it doesn't create the second $100,000 - the interest. Instead, the bank sends you out into the tough world to battle against everybody else to bring back the second $100,000."

"Your money's value is determined by a global casino of unprecedented proportions: $2 trillion are traded per day in foreign exchange markets, 100 times more than the trading volume of all the stockmarkets of the world combined. Only 2% of these foreign exchange transactions relate to the "real" economy reflecting movements of real goods and services in the world, and 98% are purely speculative. This global casino is triggering the foreign exchange crises which shook Mexico in 1994-5, Asia in 1997 and Russia in 1998. These emergencies are the dislocation symptoms of the old Industrial Age money system."

"The best scheme of finance is, to spend as little as possible; and the best tax is always the lightest."

"Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!"

"Where returns are concerned, time is your friend. But where costs are concerned, time is your enemy."

"The story of neoliberalism is quite familiar to the millions across the USA whose lives have been ravaged by the "financial crisis of 2007-2008," which led to countless families losing their life savings, homes, and businesses. Commercial media attempted to neutralize the nastiness of neoliberal policies that led directly to this unseemly situation by calling the global emergency "a financial crisis" or "economic downturn," as if these events were unfolding as part of a historical movement or a cyclical part of economic laws. Yet, it was clear that the situation was a direct and logical outcome of the corporate wilding of America, where years of neoliberal policies have resulted in the greatest wealth gap to date in this country. The resulting scenario is violence - but not necessarily the type of violence that media outlets portray. I am not talking about muggings, robberies, or even shootings. I am pointing to a much deeper and sinister type of violence: the type of violence that can be prevented easily, such as the violence of forcing people, especially children, to go perpetually hungry in a society of great abundance; the violence of having people unprotected from the harsh elements when millions of homes are vacant across the country; and the violence of paying people such low wages that they are unable to secure basic human needs such as clean water, healthy food, dental and medical care, a decent home, affordable transportation, and quality education."

"We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come. And yet we seem unable to conceive of alternatives. This too is something new. Until quite recently, public life in liberal societies was conducted in the shadow of a debate between defenders of ‘capitalism’ and its critics: usually identified with one or another form of ‘socialism’. By the 1970s this debate had lost much of its meaning for both sides; all the same, the ‘Left-Right’ distinction served a useful purpose. It provided a peg on which to hang critical commentary about contemporary affairs. On the Left, Marxism was attractive to generations of young people if only because it offered a way to take one’s distance from the status quo. Much the same was true of classical conservatism: a well-grounded distaste for over-hasty change gave a home to those reluctant to abandon long-established routines. Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing."

"The ability to accurately predict cash flow is the best, most universal, and most consistent standard for financial management across all nonprofit institutions, regardless of size and mission."

"Another forerunner of modern organization theorists was Andrew Ure, a professor of chemistry. An enthusiastic proponent of “the factory system,” Ure (1835) took a step beyond Adam Smith. Whereas Smith’s pin factory was solely an example of division of labor, Ure pointed out that a factory poses organizational challenges. He asserted that every factory incorporates “three principles of action, or three organic systems”:"

"Historically, information management has been a fragmented activity shared among the traditionally independent elements of an organization. Many of the critical data-handling activities (payroll, invoices, payments, inventories, etc.) of an organization have been located in the administrative or financial management offices. Automation of these activities has resulted in placing management responsibilities for computers and information systems in the office of an organization's administrator or controller."

"We’ve set two goals: ending extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity. How are we going to get there? Generally speaking, it divides into three main categories. One is economic growth. If you look at the greatest achievements in lifting people out of poverty, China, almost through brute economic growth, lifted 600 million people out of poverty. The second big block is investment in human beings."

"I would encourage every single business in the world, if they haven't done it already, to become climate change literate. There is not a business in the world that can afford to ignore climate change. The investment strategies are going to change - the things we invest in are going to change. The World Bank has already pledged $6bn for building climate resilient infrastructure.. We think that we need $10bn more than that."

"The economy in the Gaza Strip is "collapsing" mainly due to the 11-year blockade on the coastal enclave in addition to cuts in donor aid... unemployment in Gaza had reached more than 50 percent, while 70 percent of young people are jobless... Increased frustration is feeding into the increased tensions which have already started spilling over into unrest and setting back the human development of the region's large youth population... A situation where people struggle to make ends meet, suffer from worsening poverty, rising unemployment and deteriorating public services such as healthcare, water and sanitation, calls for urgent, real and sustainable solutions."

"The “Accelerating India’s COVID-19 Social Protection Response Programme” will focus especially on making social benefits such as subsidised food under the National Food Security Act, cash transfers and pensions etc, portable so that beneficiaries could access them from anywhere in the country, not just from their home districts... Very clearly, everybody recognises the shock (from the pandemic). The choice is being said to be between lives and livelihoods."

"The Horn of Africa finds itself at the epicentre of the worst locust outbreak we have seen in a generation, most probably in more than a generation...Locust swarms have infested 23 countries across East Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, the biggest outbreak in 70 years... It threatens food supplies in East Africa where nearly 23 million people are facing food shortages... In Kenya, the locusts are eating in one day the amount of food consumed by all Kenyans in two days... The new World Bank programme will help farmers, herders and rural households by providing fertiliser and seeds for new crops, and cash transfers to pay for food for people and livestock. It will also fund investments to strengthen surveillance and early warning systems to make the region more resilient over the medium- to longer-term."

"As we sat around the table discussing world events, we were especially fascinated by McNamara's role as president of the World Bank, a job he accepted soon after leaving his post as secretary of defense. Most of my friends focused on the fact that he symbolized what was popularly known as the military-industrial complex. He had held the top position in a major corporation, in a government cabinet, and now at the most powerful bank in the world. Such an apparent breach in the separation of powers horrified many of them; I may have been the only one among us who was not in the least surprised... I see now that Robert McNamara's greatest and most sinister contribution to history was to jockey the World Bank into becoming an agent of global empire on a scale never before witnessed. He also set a precedent. His ability to bridge the gaps between the primary components of the corporatocracy would be fine-tuned by his successors."

"In 2004, oil began to flow through the World Bank-financed Chad-Cameroon pipeline. The $3.7 billion project is the second largest private investment project in sub-Saharan Africa; oil discovered in Chad’s Doba region in the 1960s would not have finally reached the marketplace but for World Bank finance. The reason: Chad is a war-torn country, the fifth poorest in the world and among the world’s most corrupt. World Bank support meant guarantees of risk insurance for the oil companies involved–Exxon, Chevron and Petronas–in the event of a civil war or other disruptions to the oil supply. World Bank money intended for poverty alleviation is instead being used to buy bullets and guns to fight in one of the most brutal battles being fought in the world today. It is also painfully clear, as the blood spills on both sides of the Chad border, that the consortium of international oil companies and their allies at the World Bank are being careful to make sure nothing stops a drop of oil from flowing to global markets. A fragile peace agreement brokered between Chad and Sudan on December 24 seems to be holding–for the moment. Regardless, those of us who pay taxes support the World Bank, and are thereby helping finance Idriss Deby’s brutal regime. Thanks to the World Bank, we may have plenty of oil in our tanks, but we also have blood on our hands."

"The World Bank’s long-running identity crisis is proving hard to shake. When efforts to rebrand itself as a “knowledge bank” didn’t work, it devised a new identity as a “Green Bank.” Really? Yes, it’s true. Sure, the Bank continues to finance fossil fuel projects globally, but never mind. The World Bank has seized upon the immense challenges climate change poses to humanity and is now front and center in the complicated, international world of carbon finance. It can turn the dirtiest carbon credits into gold. How exactly, does this work, you ask? Quite simply: The Bank finances a fossil fuel project, involving oil, natural gas, or coal, in Poor Country A. Rich Country B asks the Bank to help arrange carbon credits so Country B can tell its carbon counters it’s taking serious action on climate change. The World Bank kindly obliges, offering carbon credits for a price far lower than Country B would have to pay if Country B made those cuts at home. Country A gets a share of the cash to invest in equipment to make fossil fuel project slightly more efficient, the World Bank takes its 13% cut, and everyone is happy. Everyone, that is, who is cashing in on this deal. If you’re after a real solution to the climate crisis, these shenanigans can and should make you unhappy."

"On the morning of May 27th this year, the staff of the Legal Affairs Office of the World Bank encountered an ugly racial slur scrawled on the wall outside their department. Very shortly, however, the words “N–––, go home!” were erased by order of World Bank management. This was the second such episode in as many weeks. The General Counsel’s office filed an incident report with security services, much as you might do about a broken lock or a stolen purse, but word spread rapidly through the Bank. For days, black staff members waited in vain for senior management to condemn the graffiti and inform them about steps that would be taken to ensure that public displays of race hatred would be stopped. This expectation was met with silence. Senior management neither acknowledged nor condemned either incident. One week later, the Bank’s diversity policy was posted on the intranet. Period."

"Oh what a lovely big stocking-filler for the Kiev regime this week from Washington. Just in time for Christmas too, and only weeks after President Petro Poroshenko tried to incite a war with Russia from a naval provocation in the Kerch Strait. First we had US government envoy Kurt Volker announcingthis week that an additional $250 million in military weapons were being packaged in Congress for Ukraine. Then the DC-based international lending institutions, the IMF and World Bank, signed off on multi-billion-dollar loans for Poroshenko’s regime. US government-owned Radio Free Europe described the new financial loans as a “victory” for Poroshenko. The apparent investor confidence bestowed by the Washington-based “development agencies” will boost the incumbent president’s re-election prospects in the forthcoming ballot in March. Up until recently, Poroshenko was trailing in opinion polls and looked set for a trouncing defeat in the election. How convenient that the IMF and World Bank – under the control of US government – should step up to the plate with a very big helping hand. And that’s not seen as interference in a country’s sovereign affairs?"

"The World Bank's biggest borrower is China. Well, China has plenty of resources, and it doesn't make sense to have money borrowed in the U.S., using the U.S. government guarantee, going into lending in China for a country that's gotten other resources and access to capital markets. (He told the Council on Foreign Relations in November 2017."

"US President Donald Trump is expected to nominate David Malpass to head the World Bank, a known vocal critic of the institute's lending to China... Malpass would succeed Jim Yong Kim, who announced in January that he is stepping down three years before his term was set to expire amid differences with the Trump administration over climate change and development resources. Kim's departure is likely to become a contentious fight between the Trump administration and other countries who believe the United States exerts too much influence over the bank, which is based in Washington, DC. Kim was first nominated by former US President Barack Obama in 2012... Malpass, the undersecretary for international affairs at the Treasury Department... has been a sharp critic of the World Bank, especially over its lending to China... Last year, Malpass helped negotiate a package of World Bank lending reforms tied to a $13bn capital increase that aimed to limit the bank's lending and focus resources more on poorer countries. The reforms seek to "graduate" countries to private-sector lending and limit World Bank staff salary growth. Malpass... would still need to win approval from the World Bank's 12-member executive board. The US holds a controlling 16-percent share of board voting power and has traditionally chosen the World Bank's leader... China is the World Bank's third-largest shareholder after Japan, with about a 4.5 percent share of voting power."

"Newly installed World Bank Group president David Malpass said on Thursday that the development lender is preparing to become "deeply involved" in Venezuela, "but the situation is still troublesome on the ground". Speaking at a press conference on the opening day of the joint World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) spring meetings, Malpass said that Venezuela is a "deep concern" for the World Bank, but that any decision to intervene in the country or recognise opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela's president would be left to the World Bank's stakeholders... Venezuela is in the throes of a prolonged and worsening economic crisis that has led to severe shortages of food, life-saving medicines and electricity. More than 50 nations including the United States have thrown their support behind the country's self-proclaimed interim president, Juan Guaido. Russia, China, Turkey and Cuba support President Nicolas Maduro, who has vowed to remain in power."

"A contradiction lies at the very centre of the neoliberal project. On a theoretical level, neoliberalism promises to bring about a purer form of democracy, unsullied by the tyranny of the state. Indeed, this claim serves as the model lodestar for neoliberal ideology - a banner under which it justifies radical market deregulation. But, in practice, it becomes clear that the opposite is true: that neoliberalism tends to undermine democracy and political freedom. More than 40 years of experimentation with neoliberalism shows that it erodes the power of voters to decide the rules that govern the economic systems they inhabit. It allows for the colonization of political forums by elite interests - a process known as political capture - and sets up new political forums, such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO, that preclude democratic representation from the outset. Neoliberalism also tends to undermine national sovereignty, to the point where parliaments of putatively independent nations no longer have power over their own policy decisions, but are governed instead by foreign banks, the , trade agreements, and undemocratic international institutions, all of which exercise a kind of invisible, remote-control power."

"People commonly think of neoliberalism as an ideology that promotes totally free markets, where the state retreats from the scene and abandons all interventionist policies. But if we step back a bit, it becomes clear that the extention of neoliberalism has entailed powerful new forms of state intervention. The creation of a global 'free market' required not only violent coups and dictatorships backed by Western governments, but also the invention of a totalizing global bureaucracy – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and bilateral free-trade agreements – with reams of new laws, backed up by the military power of the United States. In other words, an unprecedented expansion of state power was necessary to force countries around the world to liberalize their markets against their will. As the has known ever since the in 1842, when British gunboats invaded China in order to knock down China's trade barriers, free trade has never actually been about freedom. On the contrary, as we have seen, free trade has a tendency to gradually undermine national sovereignty and electoral democracy."

"Its job is to do in the financial sphere what, in the past, was done by military force. The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it’s not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers. In this case the loss of life occurs in the debtor countries. Population growth shrinks, suicides go up. The World Bank engages in economic warfare that is just as destructive as military warfare. At the end of the Yeltsin period Russia’s President Putin said that American neoliberalism destroyed more of Russia’s population than did World War II. Such neoliberalism, which basically is the doctrine of American supremacy and foreign dependency, is the policy of the World Bank and IMF."

"[The World Bank]... was set up basically by the United States in 1944, along with its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Their purpose was to create an international order like a funnel to make other countries economically dependent on the United States. To make sure that no other country or group of countries – even all the rest of the world – could not dictate U.S. policy. American diplomats insisted on the ability to veto any action by the World Bank or IMF. The aim of this veto power was to make sure that any policy was, in Donald Trump’s words, to put America first. “We’ve got to win and they’ve got to lose.” The World Bank was supposed to make loans for what they call international development. “Development” was their euphemism for dependency on U.S. exports and finance. This dependency entailed agricultural backwardness – opposing land reform, family farming to produce domestic food crops, and also monetary backwardness in basing their monetary system on the dollar."

"Most World Bank loans are for transportation, roads, harbor development and other infrastructure needed to export minerals and plantation crops. The World Bank doesn’t make loans for projects that help the country develop in its own currency. By making only foreign currency loans, in dollars or maybe euros now, the World Bank says that its clients have to repay by generating foreign currency. The only way they can repay the dollars spent on American engineering firms that have built their infrastructure is to export – to earn enough dollars to pay back for the money that the World Bank or IMF have lent. This is what John Perkins’ book (2004) about being an economic hit man for the World Bank is all about. He realized that his job was to get countries to borrow dollars to build huge projects that could only be paid for by the country exporting more – which required breaking its labor unions and lowering wages so that it could be competitive in the race to the bottom that the World Bank and IMF encourage."

"When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other Western leaders were starting to plan for the postwar world, they had the recent past very much in their minds in other ways. They wanted to build a robust world order that would prevent the world from sliding, yet again, into another deadly conflict. The interwar years had been unstable ones, partly because the League of Nations had not been strong enough. Key powers, the United States in particular, had not joined or, like Germany and Japan, had dropped out. This time, Roosevelt was determined that the United States should be a member of the new United Nations. He was also prepared to do a good deal to keep the Soviet Union in. What had been a precariously balanced international order was put under further strain in the 1930s by the Great Depression, which encouraged countries to turn inward, throwing up tariff walls to protect their own workers and their own industries. What may have made sense for individual nations was disastrous for the world as a whole. Trade and investment dropped off sharply and national rivalries were exacerbated. To avoid that happening again, the Allies, with the Soviet Union's grudging acquiescence, created the economic institutions known collectively as the Bretton Woods system. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Trade Organization (this last did not materialize as the World Trade Organization until much later) were designed to provide stability to the world's economy and to encourage free trade among nations. How much difference these all made to the international order after 1943 will always be a matter of debate, but the world did not get a repeat of the 1930s."

"The International Monetary Fund (IMF) provides funds to governments which have short-term liquidity problems. The World Bank invests in infrastructural projects. Both institutions are based in Washington and are controlled by the US. The head of the World Bank is always an American, and the IMF is always headed by a European, usually French. The IMF provided resources for France and Portugal to resist challenges in their colonies, and without these funds, decolonisation would have begun earlier. In the new Third World states, the World Bank and IMF favoured those states which adopted the American model. They became powerful instruments in the hands of the US and often influenced private bank lending as well. When the US left the gold standard in 1971, it became easier for Third World states to access loans. The rapid rise in oil prices after 1973 made more funds available as the oil-rich states sought to invest their new-found wealth, but the Third World fell into the trap of accepting cheap loans and gradually became heavily indebted. US banks were happy to lend to Third World states assuming that Washington would bail them out if these states defaulted on their debts. The newly independent states were often dependent on exporting raw materials, but prices fell as technology advanced. The US aim was to create an international environment which promoted convergence between communism and capitalism, but the opposite occurred. Hence US policy made it more diffi cult for developing states to raise living standards as so much wealth had to be used to service debt. This, inevitably, contributed to the growth of left-wing movements."

"The World Bank on Friday announced a $1-billion programme aiming to integrate India’s 400-plus fragmented social-security programmes for migrant workers hit by the coronavirus pandemic, part of an initiative that seeks to rebalance access to safety nets between rural and urban India., The “Accelerating India’s COVID-19 Social Protection **World Bank to fund $1bn for mobile safety nets for Covid-19 hit migrants in India, Zia Haq Hindustan Times (15 May 2020)"

"If the World Bank wants to streamline our social safety nets, first off, they are getting into very complicated things. The issue sometimes is not so much about how to reach the people as it is about how to get two wings of the government talking. The arguments are on two things, One, don’t over-centralise things. Where the World Bank can intervene and should is portability. Two, if I had to give out a billion dollars, then, I would give very little of that to the federal government and most of it to the states, in fact, more to the municipalities."

"The lawmakers’ letter (pdf) was sent Wednesday to World Bank president David Malpass and IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva... The letter’s demand for debt cancellation—not merely temporary suspension and deferment—for more than 70 International Development Association (IDA) countriesas well as an urgent infusion of financial support was backed by hundreds of lawmakers from more than two dozen nations, including Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, France, Italy and Argentina."

"We call on all G-20 leaders through these [international financial institutions] to support the cancellation of debt obligations held by all IDA countries during this unprecedented pandemic... The vulnerable communities that lack the resources and privileges to adopt adequate public health measures will ultimately face the disproportionate burden of coronavirus... We also urge you to support a major issuance of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in order to provide developing countries with urgent financial support... An issuance of SDRs on the order of trillions of dollars will be required to avert major increases in poverty, hunger and disease."

"This is a global economic and public health crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetimes. We as a global community must seize this opportunity to get relief to those who are suffering by cancelling debt for nations who cannot afford it. As the largest contributor to the IMF and the leading force behind the establishment of the World Bank, the United States should take the lead in this effort."

"Osama Bin Laden and George Bush were both terrorists. They were both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people’s lives. Bush with the Pentagon, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. Bin Laden with Al-Qaeda. The difference is that nobody elected Bin Laden... The United States supported Saddam Hussein and made sure that he ruled with an iron fist for all those years. Then they used the sanctions to break the back of civil society. Then they made Iraq disarm. Then they attacked Iraq. And now they’ve taken over all its assets."

"Without sweeping relief, poor nations could be forced to “dedicate money that should be going towards protecting the health and safety of their people to pay off unsustainable debts. We cannot allow these countries to be deprived of the resources they need to purchase food, medicine, protective gear, and medical equipment. The steps that our international coalition of lawmakers is proposing are not radical. It is the very least that these financial institutions should do to prevent an unimaginable increase in poverty, hunger, and disease that threatens hundreds of millions of people."

"The World Food Program projects that the number of people facing acute hunger will nearly double this year, from 135 to 260 million. This is mainly a result of the economic impact of the pandemic: as the World Bank has noted, this is the worst global recession since the end of World War II, and the worst ever (since 1870) in terms of the number of countries pushed into recession. It creates poverty, extreme poverty and food shortages for hundreds of millions of people in developing countries."

"Credit card defaults have become an increasingly conspicuous feature on the bankruptcy landscape. In 1996, bank credit card delinquencies exceeded 3.5 percent—the highest delinquency rate since 1973, when statistics were first collected. ... Bank credit card chargeoffs also veered upward to 4.5 percent per year, exceeding all but the levels recorded during the years 1991-1992. ... At the same time, personal bankruptcy filings reached a record high 290,111 in the quarter ending September 30, 1996—up thirty-one percent from the corresponding period one year earlier—and surpassed one million for the first year ever in 1996. ... Both credit card defaults and bankruptcies soared amid a generally healthy economy with relatively low unemployment4 and reasonable growth in gross domestic product."

"Credit card frauds are committed in the following ways: • An act of criminal deception (mislead with intent) by use of unauthorized account and/or personal information • Illegal or unauthorized use of account for personal gain • Misrepresentation of account information to obtain goods and/or services. Contrary to popular belief, merchants are far more at risk from credit card fraud than the cardholders. While consumers may face trouble trying to get a fraudulent charge reversed, merchants lose the cost of the product sold, pay chargeback fees, and fear from the risk of having their merchant account closed."

"... More than a decade ago Churaman (1988) reported on college students' use of consumer credit. It was during this period that the banking industry began permeating the student credit card market in the late 1980's (Manning, 2000). Churaman reported that in 1985-86 over half of all college students had bank credit cards. This figure has been on the rise as some 70% of all undergraduates at four-year colleges have at least one credit card today. The increased number and type of credit cards on university campuses has seen an explosive level of growth in the past decade, with most credit card companies targeting college students. What remains still unanswered is what effect credit card circulation among college students has had on the financial attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes of young Americans."

"Some individuals borrow extensively on their credit cards. This paper tests whether present-biased time preferences correlate with credit card borrowing. In a field study, we elicit individual time preferences with incentivized choice experiments, and match resulting time preference measures to individual credit reports and annual tax returns. The results indicate that present-biased individuals are more likely to have credit card debt, and to have significantly higher amounts of credit card debt, controlling for disposable income, other socio-demographics, and credit constraints."

"Analysis of survey data collected from 6,520 students at a large Midwestern University affirmed that financial knowledge is a significant factor in the credit card decisions of college students but not entirely in expected ways. Results of a double hurdle analysis indicated that students with relatively higher levels of financial knowledge were not significantly different from students with relatively lower levels in terms of the probability of having a credit card balance. Contrary to expectations, those with higher levels of financial knowledge had significantly higher credit card balances. Overall, the present findings highlight the complex nature of the relationship between personal financial knowledge and credit card behavior."

"With the help of a commercial bank in China, we studied consumer credit card debt behavior ... in correlation with demographics, attitude, personality, and credit card features factors. The study was conducted by using mail-in questionnaires, which were sent to credit card holders who was using or had used either revolving credit or petty installment plans. According to regression functions, we found that demographic variables and credit card features had limited explanatory power compared to attitude variables and personality variables. Specifically, we found that revolving credit use and petty installment use were closely related to attitudes about credit cards, money and debt. Risk attitude efficiently predicted petty installment use; however, it did not correlate with revolving credit use. Personality factors of self-control, self-esteem, self-efficacy, deferring gratification, internal locus of control and impulsiveness were significantly correlated with revolving credit use; on the other hand, sensation seeking, impulsiveness, and deferring gratification were correlated with petty installment use. We also found that some credit card features easily led to an “illusion of income” that facilitated consumer credit card debt behavior."

"Publix Super Markets, which operates in the Southeast, and W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, are owned by employee stock ownership plans. America still harbors small worker cooperatives owned and operated by their employees, such as the Cheese Board Collective in my hometown Berkeley, Calif. But since the 1980s, profit-sharing has almost disappeared from large corporations. That’s largely because of a change in the American corporation that began with a wave of hostile takeovers and corporate restructurings in the 1980s. Raiders like Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken targeted companies they thought could deliver higher returns if their costs were cut. Since payrolls were the highest cost, raiders set about firing workers, cutting pay, automating as many jobs as possible, fighting unions, moving jobs to states with lower labor costs and outsourcing jobs abroad. To prevent being taken over, C.E.O.s began doing the same. This marked the end of most profit-sharing with workers."

"Jeff Bezos, who now owns 11.1 percent of Amazon’s shares of stock, is worth $165 billion overall. Other top Amazon executives hold hundreds of millions of dollars of Amazon shares. But most of Amazon’s employees, including warehouse workers, don’t share in the same bounty. If Amazon’s 840,000 employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s—a quarter of the company—each would now own shares worth an average of about $386,904. There are many ways to encourage profit-sharing. During this pandemic, for example, Congress should prohibit the Treasury or the Federal Reserve from bailing out any corporation that doesn’t share its profits with its employees. It’s impossible to predict what kind of America will emerge from the crises we’re now experiencing, but the four-decade trend toward higher profits and lower wages is unsustainable, economically and politically. Sharing the profits with all workers is a logical and necessary first step to making capitalism work for the many, not the few."

"Our employees are the reason for our success and creating the ESOP will recognize and reward them for their efforts going forward... Being employee-owned allows us to preserve our culture for many years in the future, and provides us a way to move forward seamlessly and achieve our goals, while preserving the service our customers have come to expect... Recent research has shown companies who are ESOPs are typically faster, more productive, growing more, and more profitable with less turnover,” Mike Hedge shared. “These are all important to us as we enter into a new phase in the life of our organization. This will help in recruiting, retaining, and engaging employees as we move forward — I’m very pleased to announce Birkey’s is going into this new year 100 percent employee-owned."

"I call myself a promiscuous spender and I think that caught Harlequin's eye. It's more peer-oriented and not 'ivory tower' talking"

"“Digital Asset has evolved from an ambitious idea to a truly global software engineering firm. We are fortunate to have a deep bench of accomplished executives on the management team and board, including AG [Gangadhar], who have the requisite experience to take the company to the next level. Having come to know and trust AG as an advisor and board member, I am convinced that he brings what’s needed to guide the company through its next phase.”"

"“What in the long run this all meant was that credit, which is a vital part of the lifeblood of any economy, the global economy, became a more readily available asset""

"“And the thinking was that that would be an unambiguously positive thing.”"

"“Unfortunately, tools that transfer risk can also increase systemic risk if major counterparties fail to manage their own risk exposures properly,”"