Business

The following is an excerpt from David Enrich's nonfiction financial and legal thriller The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History.  (Read part of the prologue here; another excerpt can be found here) This excerpt takes place shortly after the accused mastermind of the Libor scandal, Tom Hayes, is fired from his job at Citigroup, kicking government investigations into interest-rate-rigging into a higher gear.

Authored by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,

In our recent report, Banks Are Evil, we pulled no punches in making the accusation that the financial system is the root cause of injustice in today's society.

It's a good blood-boiler. You should read it if you haven't already.

Its main premise is this:

In the first few months of the year, a trading desk rumor emerged that even as institutional traders dumped stocks and retail investors piled into ETFs, a "mystery" central bank was quietly bidding up risk assets by aggressively buying stocks.

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

This week, the world of banking and finance waited with baited breath for the Federal Reserve in the United States to hike… or not to hike… interest rates.

This happens several times each year as the central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee gathers to set monetary policy in the Land of the Free.

To be clear, there is no greater power over a nation than having control of its money supply and interest rates.

With the Nasdaq 100 index making new record highs on practically every day of 2017, and returning 32% during the past 12 months vs. "only" 19% for the S&P 500, Goldman's clients are starting to  get concerned. And, as Goldman's David Kostin writes in his latest weekly letter, increasingly nervous investors are asking "whether NDX outperformance will continue."