bank

Norway’s largest bank, DNB says that banking is now outdated and cash should be completely phased out.  Citing the “dangers and disadvantages” of cash, an executive from the bank said that Norway should start the process of becoming cashless straight away. The Local.no reports: Norway’s largest bank, DNB, has said that cash has fallen out of favour with everyday Norwegians and is instead primarily used on the black market and in laundering schemes. “Today, there is approximately 50 billion kroner in circulation and [central bank] Norges Bank can only account for 40 percent of its use.

When it comes to picking a poster child for everything that’s wrong with Wall Street and the financial industry in general, it’s sometimes difficult to decide just who gets the blue ribbon for “most nefarious.”

Indeed, since 2008 we’ve learned that virtually every systemically important financial institution on the face of the planet has at one time or another engaged in some manner of chicanery be it the manipulation of the world’s most important benchmark rates, the peddling of worthless mortgage bonds, or the rigging of FX markets.

Submitted by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

Part 1 is HERE.

Since looking at Goldman's Q4 EPS was going to be a meaningless attempt at comparing apples to oranges due to the bank's recently announced $3 billion after-tax RMBS settlement, which reduced diluted earnings per common share by $6.53, we decided to instead do what we normally do with Goldman's earnings report and focus on its top line, where we found that in the fourth quarter the bank had generated only $7.3 billion in revenue, a 5.4% drop from a year ago, and underscoring just how difficult the environment is even for the bank that does god's work, this was the weakest Q4 revenue from Go

The central banks of the United States, England, and German - as well as 2 Nobel-prize winning economists - have all shown that banks create money out of thin air ... even if they have no deposits on hand.

The failure of most governments and most mainstream economists to understand this fact - they instead believe the myth that people make deposits at their bank, and these deposits are then lent out to new borrowers - is the main cause of our rampant inequality and economic problems.