Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

"It's A Weird Suicide Mission That Will Have A Very Dark End"
ZeroHedge | author | 02/11/16

Earlier today we reported that Saudi Arabia has made a “final” decision to invade Syria.

Of course they won’t use the term “invade.” They’ll say the same thing the US says, which is that they need to send in a limited number of ground troops to help fight ISIS.

The timing of the announcement quite clearly suggests that the Saudis are going to try and shore up the rebels who are facing imminent defeat at Aleppo where Hezbollah, backed by Russian airstrikes, is about to overrun the opposition. ... Read more

Online Public Schools Are a Disaster, Admits Billionaire, Charter School-Promoter Walton Family Foundation
AlterNet | Steven Rosenfeld | 02/11/16

For the second time in three months, the Walton Family Foundation -- which has spent more than $1 billion to create a quarter of the nation's 6,700 public charter schools -- has announced that all online public school instruction, via cyber charter schools, is a colossal disaster for most K-12 students.

"If virtual charters were grouped together and ranked as a single school district, it would be the ninth largest in the country and among the worst performing," co-wrote Walton's Marc Sternberg and Marc Holley, respectively the foundation's director of educational giving and its evaluation unit director, in a recent Education Week commentary. "Online education must be reimagined. Ignoring the problem -- or worse, replicating failures -- serves nobody." ... Read more

Donald Trump's The Art Of The Deal: The Movie (trailer) (02/10/16) [1:09]

European Sovereign Risk Soars As Systemic Fears Mount
ZeroHedge | author | 02/11/16

"Whatever it takes" is not enough, it would appear as the fragility and interconnectedness forced upon the European banking/sovereign finance ponzi has rapidly come home to roost for Draghi and his followers. Peripheral bond risk has flipped from "hold your nose" buys to panic sells with Portugal risk exploding 200bps in the last week. As the European banking system's credit risk rises 2012-crisis-like, it seems belief in a bigger bazooka is fading fast.

It's not just Deutsche Bank... Read more

Deutsche Bank Is Back: 5 Year Sub CDS Soar To Record High
ZeroHedge | author | 02/11/16

"Worse than Lehman" is how one European bond market trader described the carnage this week as the brief respite that ECB monetization and debt-buyback rumors provided yesterday have morphed into utter destruction this morning. European (and US) banks are a sea of contagious red with Deutsche Bank the tip of the collapse spear. Credit risk on Deutsche has exploded this morning with Sub CDS trading up 85bps to a record high 540bps... eerily reminiscent of the pre-Lehman bankruptcy week in 2008. ... Read more

There's A Lesson In Spain's Surreal, Unfinished Cities (PICTURES)
HP | Kate Abbey-Lambertz | 02/11/16

In a memorable scene in "The Big Short," the Oscar-nominated 2015 movie about the financial crisis, a real estate agent shows the main characters around a desolate Florida subdivision. She insists that the market is just in a lull as they drive past rows and rows of vacant homes.

But it wasn't just a lull. It was the housing bubble bursting, and that emptiness was replicated in communities around the world as people lost their homes and developers' projects went bust. One of the worst cases was in Spain, where there were more than 3 million unoccupied homes in 2014. ... Read more