America

David Rockefeller is a part of American history and the only billionaire in the world who is over 100 years old. The richest oldest man on the planet is due to turn 101 in June.   He is part of a family dynasty whose name is associated with America and has become legend. His grandfather John D Rockefeller who died in 1937 was the founder of Standard Oil and the world’s richest individual. The name Rockefeller has been associated with wealth, power, politics, finance, diplomacy, philanthropy, marijuana prohibition, aliens, UFO’s and conspiracy theories.

A Nobel prize winning economist, former chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, and chairman of the President’s council of economic advisers (Joseph Stiglitz) says that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank loan money to third world countries as a way to force them to open up their markets and resources for looting by the West.

Do central banks do something similar?

Back in 2012, BNP Paribas exited the North American reserve-based lending market, when it sold its RBL unit to Wells in an effort to shore up its balance sheet amid the turmoil generated by the eurozone debt crisis.

A little over two years later, in the fall of 2014, BNP got back into the RBL game in the US. That probably wasn’t a good idea.

Yesterday morning, when musing on the day's key event namely Yellen's congressional testimony, we dismissed the most recent bout of European bank euphoria which we said "will be brief if not validated by concrete actions, because while central banks have the luxury of jawboning, commercial banks are actually burning through funds - rapidly at that - and don't have the luxury of hoping for the best while doing nothing." This morning DB has wiped out all of yesterday's gain.

“In the long run democracy will be judged, no less than other forms of government, by the quality of its leaders, a quality that will depend in turn on the quality of their vision. Where there is no vision, we are told, the people perish; but where there is sham vision, they perish even faster.” – Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership