It’s high time I updated the APGMI part of the saga of Virgin Gold Mining Corporation. Here’s a round-up of the relevant parts of this sprawling series.
Read more...HSBC’s top brass have “no idea” about Mossack Fonseca. Here’s a primer.
Read more...Bond Star Sir Roger Moore, Three Million Phantom Geese in China, and a New Zealand Financial Services Provider
Read more...GXG Markets expels dubious broker London Capital (NZ)
Read more...The last piece in our series on Virgin Gold Mining Corporation, for the moment
Read more...Yet more twists in the tale of the giant pyramid fraud, Virgin Gold Mining Corporation: Plan “C” starts to come unravelled.
Read more...More shenanigans from Virgin Gold Mining Corporation and its little helpers.
Read more...First in a series of posts exploring Virgin Gold, an immense ($2Bn?) pyramid scheme with a messy aftermath
Read more...Yves here. Richard Smith is on the trail of what looks to be his biggest international scam find ever, orders of magnitude larger than the usual below the radar single to low double digit million dollar/pound/euro operation that he has ferreted out in the past. And mind you, even though he focuses on the dubious looking inter-corporate relationships and the often evident lack of normal investors protections and business substance, these companies sell hope and glamour to typically credulous retail investors who lose their money and have no recourse.
Read more...Mirabile dictu, is a revolution against private equity secrecy starting on the other side of the pond, meaning in of all places, finance-dominated England?
Read more...Yves here. This is a terrific interview with Lord Adair Turner, former head of the FSA. Most of it focuses on the things missed in contemporary economics, particularly macroeconomics, and how some disciplinary “back to the future” would be desirable. A major topic of discussion is how wealth is becoming as concentrated as it was in the 18th century, and the driver then and now was the disproportionately large role real estate has come to play. Then, it was income-producing agricultural land. Now it is urban property, bid up by domestic and international elites who want to live in particularly prized cities. Turner points out the irony that access to cheap finance for housing, meant to help middle and lower income buyers, has instead contributed to rising wealth inequality. He also describes how the ability of banks and financial markets to supply virtually unlimited amounts of credit, against a limited stock of particularly sought-after locations, has the potential to create tulip-mania type results.
Perhaps due to time constraints, Turner didn’t venture into the views of classical economists, that profiting from land, which they derided as rentier capitalism, was economically unproductive. As Michael Hudson has stressed, they urged heavy taxation of land as the remedy.
Read more...Shady NZ shell company merchant GT Group’s global footprint just keeps growing, as do its links to the dreamy nonsense that is the “Maharal Network”. In our latest global tour, let’s visit Romania and Moldova first, via Ukraine and New Zealand.
Read more...