Keyword: Wall Street

Ex-Lehman Brothers Investment Banker Illustrates How Wall Street House of Cards Works

In this timely interview, one year after the closure of Lehman Brothers, which coincides with the anniversary of the global financial crisis, The Real News Network talks to Sony Kapoor, Managing Director of Re-define.org. Kapoor is an ex-Lehman Brothers investment banker who now applies his skills for social benefit. He sheds light on the intriguing world of financial markets, exposing the house of cards we familiarly refer to as the international financial system. *** PAUL JAY: Welcome to...

Can Europe Pop the U.S. CEO Pay Bubble?

Picture: Chesi-Fotos CC Sarah Anderson - Since the eruption of the economic crisis last fall, armies of corporate lobbyists have been battling to keep even modest changes in executive compensation rules off the legislative table. Their most common argument: pay restrictions will drive "top talent" out of U.S. firms and into the welcoming arms of higher-paying European companies. This argument has always been laughable. Was it really a résumé-builder to lose trillions of dollars in financial wealth and drive...

Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story'

Capitalism: A Love Story is critically acclaimed and award winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore's upcoming film about the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, the transition from the Bush to the Obama administration as well as the obscene Wall Street bailout package. Moore takes on the entire free-market system in his exquisitely titled movie, as he returns to the issue that began his career: the disastrous impact that corporate dominance and out-of-control profit motives have...

Wall Street Recovery Based on Profits Gained from Intensifying Exploitation

We are told that Wall Street is bouncing back and the recession is bottoming out, but Richard Wolff, economist from the New School in New York City, pokes holes in the economic recovery and false euphoria of Wall Street. He says, what we are seeing now is a peculiar economic phenomenon. Across the United States, business are hurting. Revenues are down for almost every kind of business.  And in response, the businesses have done what businesses always do. Cut back in order to survive....

Noam Chomsky on Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours

MIT professor, author and dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky, spoke at the Riverside Church in Harlem on June 12, 2009 at an event sponsored by the Brecht Forum. More than 2,000 people packed into the Church to hear his address, titled "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours." In his talk, Chomsky discussed the global economic crisis, the environment, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, resistance to American empire and much more. Democracy Now recorded the event on camera...

Madoff and the Flaying Trust in Capitalism

Picture: masternewmedia.org Saliem Fakir - Every-time capitalism is hit by a crisis it is described as being an errant event. The latest scandal which has rocked the US financial sector, where trusted and the likeable figure Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme for almost two decades, is once again dismissed as the work of a rogue element. But rarely will the pundits of the new economy, which rely on the use of innovative speculative financial instruments to make inflated profits from thin air, blame its faulty free market philosophy and...