Early Headlines: Wall St $2 Billion – NYC Pensions Zero, Oil Strike South of London, Iceland May Separate Public and Private “Money” and More

Early Bird Headlines 12 April 2015

Econintersect: Here are some of the headlines we found to help you start your day. For more headlines see our afternoon feature for GEI members, What We Read Today, which has many more headlines and a number of article discussions to keep you abreast of what we have found interesting.

U.S.

• Wall Street Fees Wipe Out $2.5 Billion in New York City Pension Gains (The New York Times) Hat tips to Edward Seidle and Roger Erickson. NYC pension funds paid fees to Wall Street totaling more than $2 billion while getting no return.
• The Ten Most Beautiful Neighborhoods in America, Ranked (Thrillist)
  

UK

• Oil discovery near Gatwick airport ‘significant’ (BBC)
  

Greece

• Laid Low: The IMF, The Euro Zone and the First Rescue of Greece (CIGI Papers) Jean-Claude Trichet, the then ECB president, blew up at the idea of a meaningful restructuring of Greek debt in 2010 when that could have resolved the crisis. Instead he insisted on the path of that has increased the problems by one or more orders of magnitude. It may have been a course of action that will prove to remove the effectiveness of the IMF in dealing with future crisis.
  

Iceland

• Iceland Sets Precedent: Jails Four Top Bankers for Fraud (We Are Anonymous) Hat tip to Roger Erickson who wonders if Iceland is the last honest nation on earth?
• Iceland’s grand monetary experiment? (FT Alphaville) We (Econonintersect) have suggested separating public and private “money” (actually separating control of money [by the state] from control of credit [by the banks]) and this great article by Matthew Klein discusses how Iceland may be setting about to do just that.

Russia

• Inside the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors (The Guardian) Fake news stories. Doctored photographs. Staged TV clips. Armies of paid trolls. This is the new ‘psychosphere’ of Russia’s international relations.
  

China

• ‘Great Cannon’ Is China’s New Weapon That Shoots Down Internet Sites (TechCrunch) “China is widely suspected to be behind the recent attacks on Github and internet freedom group Great Fire. Now we have the most concrete evidence that indeed it was, and it looks like it did so using a new weapon to boot.”
• Will China’s Infrastructure Bank Work? (Kenneth Rogoff, Project Syndicate) Prof. Rogoff says that the funding aspect of the China sponsored AIIB will not have a big impact but if the AIIB views itself mainly as a knowledge bank, rather than a funding vehicle, it could provide real added value.
  

Japan

• Japanese Court Orders Google To Delete Critical Reviews From Google Maps (TechCrunch) Anonymous reviews critical of a Japanese medical clinic orered removed.

Venezuela

• Venezuela Inflation Seen Pushing 200% as Rationing Deepens (Bloomberg)

Ecuador

• Chevron Whistleblower Videos Show Deliberate Falsification Of Evidence In Ecuador Oil Pollution Trial (DeSmogBlog)

Chevron has already lost the lawsuit filed against the company by a group of Indigenous villagers and rural Ecuadorians who say Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, left behind hundreds of open, unlined pits full of toxic oil waste it had dug into the floor of the Amazon rainforest.

That hasn’t stopped the oil titan from attempting to retry the case, though, in both the court of public opinion and a New York court, where it counter-sued the Ecuadorian plaintiffs under the RICO Act, claiming their original lawsuit was nothing more than extortion.

But the Chevron case is being destroyed by new evidence of wrongdoing. See the two following videos.

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