tagged w/ Hedge funds
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On RT tv. the following concerning the next financial target of the Hedge funds, who have more money than the countries they raid. Why aren't these banks and countries revolting? Tell them to go fish.
http://www.youtube.com/user/RussiaToday?blend=1&ob=5#p/u/3/umJ6co__lz8On RT tv. the following concerning the next financial target of the Hedge funds, who... more
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Great analysis on what the Debt Crisis means to the Super Rich and Banksters
We've been told that defaulting on our debt will be a catastrophe, and indeed it would. This is why a routine raise to the debt ceiling is the right thing for Congress to do. So why the "grand deal"? Arguably, the Tea Party caucus could be peeled off and a clean vote achieved with Democrats joining to raise it. Even with Joe Walsh's "stonewall letter" now gaining traction in the House, it could be done.
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/why-oligarchs-dont-want-dealGreat analysis on what the Debt Crisis means to the Super Rich and Banksters... more
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kvb1
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added this
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10 months ago
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When cycle forecaster Charles Nenner told the Fox Business network yesterday that the Dow Jones was set to collapse to the 5,000 level on the back of a “major war” that will shake the globe at the end of 2012, hosts David Asman and Elizabeth MacDonald sat in stunned silence.
Nenner, a former technical analyst for Goldman Sachs, is head of the Charles Nenner Research Center, which purports to be able to predict market trends with a computer program based around pattern forecasting and securities analysis. Nenner predicted the stock market and housing collapse over two years before the fall of Lehman Brothers.
Nenner predicts that the Dow is heading down to just 5,000, a gargantuan drop given that it now hovers above the 12,000 level and only sunk as deep as 6,547 during the lowest ebb of the economic collapse in March 2009.
On the back of this forecast, Nenner has advised his clients to vacate the market almost entirely.
“I told my clients and pension funds and big firms and hedge funds to almost go out of the market, almost totally out of the market,” said Nenner, saying that the collapse will unfold over the course of a couple of months and that the reversal will come when the Dow hits just above the 13000 level.
What could prompt such a dramatic fall? An oil shock that could be kick-started by Friday’s “day of rage” protests in Saudi Arabia or something else?
According to Nenner, who studies war and peace cycles, the collapse will be initiated by “a major war starting at the end of 2012 to 2013,” a startling claim to which the host David Asman merely responded, “wow”.
Excuse me? A financial strategist who has been deadly accurate in the past and has just told all his clients to get out of the market predicts a “major war” that will lead to a stock market collapse and the best Asman can come up with is “wow”?
Since the hosts failed to follow up on Nenner’s astounding statement, who this war will be between and how it will start is anyone’s guess, but it seems inevitable that its roots will be in the current unrest we see spreading like wildfire across North African and the Middle East.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vcTm4XE4EAWhen cycle forecaster Charles Nenner told the Fox Business network yesterday that the... more
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A Hedge Fund Republic?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Earlier this month, I offended a number of readers with a column suggesting that if you want to see rapacious income inequality, you no longer need to visit a banana republic. You can just look around.
My point was that the wealthiest plutocrats now actually control a greater share of the pie in the United States than in historically unstable countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. But readers protested that this was glib and unfair, and after reviewing the evidence I regretfully confess that they have a point.
That’s right: I may have wronged the banana republics.
You see, some Latin Americans were indignant at what they saw as an invidious and hurtful comparison. The truth is that Latin America has matured and become more equal in recent decades, even as the distribution in the United States has become steadily more unequal.
The best data series I could find is for Argentina. In the 1940s, the top 1 percent there controlled more than 20 percent of incomes. That was roughly double the share at that time in the United States.
Since then, we’ve reversed places. The share controlled by the top 1 percent in Argentina has fallen to a bit more than 15 percent. Meanwhile, inequality in the United States has soared to levels comparable to those in Argentina six decades ago — with 1 percent controlling 24 percent of American income in 2007.
At a time of such stunning inequality, should Congress put priority on spending $700 billion on extending the Bush tax cuts to those with incomes above $250,000 a year? Or should it extend unemployment benefits for Americans who otherwise will lose them beginning next month?
One way to examine that decision is to put aside all ethical considerations and simply look at where tax dollars will do more to stimulate the economy. There the conclusion is clear: You get much more bang for the buck putting money in the hands of unemployed people because they will promptly spend it.
In contrast, tax cuts for the wealthy are partly saved — that’s both basic economic theory and recent history — so they are much less effective in creating jobs. For example, Republicans would give the richest 0.1 percent of Americans an average tax cut of $370,000. Does anybody really think that those taxpayers are going to rush out and buy Porsches and yachts, start new businesses, and hire more groundskeepers and chauffeurs?
In contrast, a study commissioned by the Labor Department during the Bush administration makes clear the job-creation power of unemployment benefits because that money is immediately spent. The study suggested that the current recession would have been 18 percent worse without unemployment insurance and that this spending preserved 1.6 million jobs in each quarter.
But there is also a larger question: What kind of a country do we aspire to be? Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent?
Oops! That’s already us. The top 1 percent of Americans owns 34 percent of America’s private net worth, according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The bottom 90 percent owns just 29 percent.
That also means that the top 10 percent controls more than 70 percent of Americans’ total net worth.
Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley who is one of the world’s leading experts on inequality, notes that for most of American history, income distribution was significantly more equal than today. And other capitalist countries do not suffer disparities as great as ours.
“There has been an increase in inequality in most industrialized countries, but not as extreme as in the U.S.,” Professor Saez said.
One of America’s greatest features has been its economic mobility, in contrast to Europe’s class system. This mobility may explain why many working-class Americans oppose inheritance taxes and high marginal tax rates. But researchers find that today this rags-to-riches intergenerational mobility is no more common in America than in Europe — and possibly less common.
I’m appalled by our growing wealth gaps because in my travels I see what happens in dysfunctional countries where the rich just don’t care about those below the decks. The result is nations without a social fabric or sense of national unity. Huge concentrations of wealth corrode the soul of any nation.
And then I see members of Congress in my own country who argue that it would be financially reckless to extend unemployment benefits during a terrible recession, yet they insist on granting $370,000 tax breaks to the richest Americans. I don’t know if that makes us a banana republic or a hedge fund republic, but it’s not healthy in any republic.A Hedge Fund Republic?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Earlier this month, I offended a... more
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By Thom Hartmann
Even though there are Tea Party protests about high taxes, a USA Today analysis of federal data shows that Americans paid the lowest level of taxes last year since the Harry Truman presidency. Federal, state, local, property, sales and other taxes are 9.2 percent of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950.
This is also true of multimillionaires and billionaires, who pay a maximum 35 percent income tax on salaries and not a penny in Social Security taxes on the vast majority of their income. And when, like hedge fund managers, banksters and health insurance company CEOs often do, they can call their income dividends and capital gains and pay a maximum 15 percent income tax.
So billionaires pay 15 percent income tax and virtually no Social Security tax, and they are doing everything they can to keep it that way, funding entire think tanks and PR machines and Tea Parties to keep the anti-tax waters boiling. They're scared to death that anybody may remember that from the 1930s to the 1980s the top income tax rate was between 74 and 91 percent - a level only paid by millionaires - which kept CEO salaries reasonable and built the strongest middle class the world had ever seen.
Now, with those top tax rates down to 15 percent for rich people, the middle class in America is vanishing, while countries like Denmark and Germany that still have 70 percent or higher income tax rates on millionaires have strong, robust, and growing middle classes.
Time to roll back the Reagan tax cuts!By Thom Hartmann
Even though there are Tea Party protests about high taxes, a USA... more
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Wall Street is about to bend over and take it up the.... well, we all hope so anyway. Senators Kaufman and Brown are about to introduce a break-up-the-banks bill in Congress. Meanwhile the SEC has charged Goldman Sacs with fraud. Oh my God! Goldman Sacs committed mass fraud against the American people? Not according to Jim Cramer, who took a break from directing traffic in downtown NYC.Wall Street is about to bend over and take it up the.... well, we all hope so anyway.... more
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by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against Goldman Sachs and underscored what most Americans have believed for some time: Wall Street has rigged the economy in its own favor, and will stop at nothing—not even outright theft—to boost its profits. What’s worse, Goldman’s scam could have been completely prevented by better regulations and law enforcement.
Goldman’s heist
Let’s be clear. “Financial fraud” means “theft.” Goldman Sachs sold investors securities that were stocked with subprime mortgages and had been cherry-picked by a hedge fund manager named John Paulson. Paulson believed these mortgages were about to go bust, so he helped Goldman Sachs concoct the securities so that he could bet against them himself.
Goldman Sachs, like Paulson, also bet against the securities. But when Goldman sold the securities to investors, it didn’t tell them that Paulson had devised the securities, or that he was betting on their failure. By withholding crucial information from investors, Goldman directly profited from the scam at the expense of its own clients. If ordinary citizens did what the SEC’s alleges Goldman did, we’d call it stealing.
As Nick Baumann emphasizes for Mother Jones, the SEC’s suit against Goldman is just the tip of the iceberg. During the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, literally thousands of bankers were jailed for financial fraud. Today’s crisis was much larger in scope, yet the Goldman allegations are among the first serious charges of legal wrongdoing to emerge (other complaints have been filed against Regions Bank and former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo). If the SEC or the FBI are doing their jobs, we should see many more of these cases.
Bust ‘em up.
How do banks get away with these kinds of shenanigans and still secure epic taxpayer bailouts? It’s all about their political clout, as Robert Reich notes for The American Prospect. So long as banks are so enormous that they can ruin the economy with their collapse, the institutions will always carry tremendous political clout.
Even in the case of Goldman Sachs, which is too-big-to-fail by any reasonable standard, the SEC’s fraud case is being filed three years after the company’s alleged offense. That’s well after the company rode to safety on the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the AIG bailout and billions more in other indirect assistance—and only after multiple journalists made Goldman’s offensive transactions general public knowledge.
If we don’t break up the big banks, politically connected Wall Street titans will make sure they get bailed out when the next crisis hits, regardless of whatever laws we have on the books.
Fix the derivatives casino
If Congress doesn’t soon pass a bill to break up behemoth banks, it will be neglecting the gravest problem in our financial system today. But several other reforms are needed if Wall Street is ever going to serve a useful economic function again.
As Nomi Prins emphasizes for AlterNet, much of the Wall Street profit machine has been divorced from the economy that the rest of us live in. These days, banks make most of their money from securities trades and derivatives deals. Their actual lending business is taking a beating. That means big banks have very little incentive to promote economic well-being for every day citizens. We need to create these incentives by banning economically essential banks from engaging in securities trades, and make sure all derivatives transactions are conducted on open, transparent exchanges, just like ordinary stocks and bonds.
Better derivatives regulations could help protect against fraud. If Goldman Sachs’ sketchy subprime deal had been subject to market scrutiny on an exchange, it’s very unlikely that any investor would have bought into it. Goldman Sachs almost got away with it because the deal was secretive and beyond the scope of most regulatory oversight.
Protect whistleblowers
The Goldman case also raises significant questions about the government’s enforcement of existing financial fraud laws. Bradley Birkenfeld, a banker for Swiss financial giant UBS, helped the Department of Justice bring the largest tax fraud case in history against his company, which was helping rich Americans hide money from the IRS in offshore bank accounts.
For his cooperation, Birkenfeld was rewarded with a four-year prison sentence, even though nobody else at UBS—nobody—has been sentenced to prison over the scam. As Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman emphasize for Democracy Now!, Birkenfeld’s imprisonment could have something to with who exactly is hiding money with UBS.
Gonzalez discusses an interview with Birkenfeld, in which the former banker notes that the bank had a special office to handle the accounts of “politically exposed persons”— American politicians. Moreover, the top brass at UBS includes key advisors to top politicians in both parties. This is exactly the kind of influence smuggling that breaking up the banks would help fix. UBS is a multi-trillion-dollar institution with no less than 27 U.S. subsidiaries.
But protecting Birkenfeld would accomplish still more—by jailing him, the Justice Department is actively discouraging others from coming forward, and making it more difficult for regulators to enforce the law.
Greenspan’s failure
It’s abundantly clear that almost every major regulatory agency charged with curtailing financial excess failed to prevent the Crash of 2008. But that failure doesn’t mean that effective regulation is impossible—it only shows that the regulators in power failed. The top bank regulator in the U.S., John Dugan, was a former bank lobbyist.
As Christopher Hayes demonstrates for The Nation, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has never had any interest in regulation whatsoever. After the crash, Greenspan insisted that nobody could have seen it coming. But as Hayes notes, many people did—Greenspan simply didn’t listen to them. These days, Greenspan is revising his story, claiming that he did in fact see the crisis coming, but that nobody could have prevented it. That is simply not credible.
Hayes draws a useful parallel Hurricane Katrina, a problem sparked by a natural event that became a catastrophe when regulators failed to take the necessary precautions. The lesson from both Katrina and the financial crash is not that government always screws up—we have plenty of examples of government preventing floods and economic calamity. The lesson we should learn is that people who don’t believe in government will never do a good job governing. As Hayes notes:
If Greenspan couldn’t figure things out, that doesn’t mean others can’t. In fact, developing systems for doing just that is called—quite simply—progress, and Alan Greenspan continues to be one of its enemies.
That is exactly the task that now presents itself before Congress: Developing a system to prevent and constrain economic destruction wielded by Wall Street. The U.S. had a system that did exactly this for more than fifty years. For the last thrity years, it has been systematically dismantled. How well Congress lives up to that challenge will define much of our economic future for decades to come.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
Last week, the Securities and Exchange... more
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What work do we value most?
In 2009, the worst economic year for working people since the Great Depression, the top 25 hedge fund managers walked off with an average of $1 billion each. With the money those 25 people "earned," we could have hired 658,000 entry level teachers. (They make about $38,000 a year, including benefits.) Those educators could have brought along over 13 million young people, assuming a class size of 20. That's some value.What work do we value most?
In 2009, the worst economic year for working people... more
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This weekend Federal investigators arrested a billionaire by the name of Raj Rajaratnam accusing him of being the kingpin in a huge multi-million dollar insider trading ring.
Rajaratnam, who founded the Galleon Group in 1997, was arrested with five alleged conspirators on Oct. 16 in what prosecutors called the biggest insider-trading ring targeting a hedge fund. Prosecutors said he and his firm reaped as much as $18 million by investing on tips from a hedge fund, a credit- rating firm and employees within companies including Intel Capital, McKinsey & Co. and IBM Corp.
Reports are today this this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown on insider trading. Given that Congress is mulling new financial regulations, is this perhaps a politically opportune time to go after villains in the financial system?
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- 7 stories you missed this week – Sarkozy’s son, Mussolini the spy, Bribing the Taliban and moreThis weekend Federal investigators arrested a billionaire by the name of Raj... more
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The founder of the Galleon Group, a big New York hedge fund, was charged on Friday with insider trading in the stocks of several companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Clearwire and Akamai, earning about $20 million in the processThe founder of the Galleon Group, a big New York hedge fund, was charged on Friday... more
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"Two "Terminator Salvation" producers have sued the Pacificor hedge fund and one of its former employees alleging financial wrongdoing in a pair of suits.
The Halcyon Co., owner of the rights to the movie franchise, accused former Pacificor employee Kurt Benjamin of fraud, double-dealing and conspiring with the fund's CEO, Andy Mitchell.
Dominion Group, which is owned by Halcyon toppers Derek Anderson and Victor Kubicek, accused Pacificor in a second suit of wrongfully filing a lien on Dominion's assets to block it from obtaining financing for Halcyon.
The suits, filed Monday in state court in Los Angeles, each seek about $30 million in damages. Pacificor and Benjamin were not available for comment.
Santa Barbara-based Pacificor provided the financing for Halcyon's acquisition of the motion picture and related rights to the "Terminator" franchise in May 2007.
The suit against Benjamin alleges that when he introduced Anderson and Kubicek to Pacificor he presented himself as an independent contractor acting on Halcyon's behalf when he was actually an employee of Pacificor.
The action also alleges that Benjamin did not disclose to Pacificor that he was being compensated by Halcyon for arranging the deal.
The lawsuit accuses Mitchell and Benjamin of taking advantage of their knowledge of Halcyon's confidential business information to manipulate the company into a position where they could threaten to ruin it if their demands for under-the-table compensation were not met.
The suits were filed four months after an amicable settlement was reached in fellow "Terminator" producer Moritz Borman's lawsuit against Anderson, Kubicek and Halcyon. Borman had alleged fraud and breach of contract for unpaid producing fees on the pic (Daily Variety, March 9).
"Terminator Salvation" grossed $125 million domestically and $244 million internationally. ""Two "Terminator Salvation" producers have sued the Pacificor hedge... more
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OMG, those wonderful hedge funds were all so sexy with their “rich people only” requirements and secretive investments. But when Bernard Madoff finally admitted his hedge fund was just one big lie and a giant Ponzi scheme, his investors had lost over $65 billion. Five months later, very little of his victims’ money has been found. Ooops!
But our very own Secret, Super-Duper Professional Accountant Team has been working hard in an undercover investigation of every tiny, itsy-bitsy detail of this horrible financial web. And lo and behold, they've just found some money that has been hidden away in that Ponzi-Scheme Hedge Fund! Yes indeedy, the financial figures are looking ever-better, and our two Super-Duper Accountant Investigators are goin’ to celebrate their glorious achievement by having a little drink! Or maybe two. Or just maybe more….
Includes a number of very funny pictures and a hilarious 30 sec. short film.OMG, those wonderful hedge funds were all so sexy with their “rich people... more
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Not sure how accurate all this is but it's interesting to look at.
It reminds me of:
The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis.
www.crisisofcredit.comNot sure how accurate all this is but it's interesting to look at.
It reminds... more
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A Congressional panel grilled five of the world's richest and most powerful hedge fund managers Thursday as lawmakers sought to understand how much blame they could assign the little-understood hedge fund industry for the global economic collapse.
The managers testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform included John Paulson, George Soros, Philip Falcone, James Simons and Kenneth Griffin, a group that made on average more than $1 billion in 2007.
Committee Chairman Henry Waxman said his reasons for holding a hearing were twofold: He wanted these men, "some of the most successful and knowledgeable investors in our financial markets," to discuss how to nurse the financial system back to life. And he wanted the committee to examine how hedge funds contributed to the current financial crisis, whether they pose a systemic risk to the financial system, and how best to regulate the industry, which is now subject to very little oversight.
Noting that we are in the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, George Soros told the committee: "The salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock... The crisis was generated by the financial system itself."A Congressional panel grilled five of the world's richest and most powerful hedge... more
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Hedge fund manager Andrew Lahde, whose Lahde Capital's Short Credit Fund returned 886 percent in 2007 by betting against the sub-prime market, wrote a not-so-fond farewell letter, burning Wall Street and Washington, DC, a new one.
In it, he talks about how much money he made off of "idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA" and the corruption of government, ending with a proposal to use Hemp to help solve the US's dependence on foreign oil (and also name-brand pharmaceuticals).
You can download the letter here: http://www.hedgefund.net/dailyemailreports/Andrew_Lahde_Farewell.pdf
[Is it just me or does this guy sound just a little bitter?]
Hedge fund manager Andrew Lahde, whose Lahde Capital's Short Credit Fund returned... more
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sajh
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3 years ago
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In a move suggesting how the credit crisis could disrupt American higher education, Wachovia Bank has limited the access of nearly 1,000 colleges to $9.3 billion the bank has held for them in a short-term investment fund, raising worries on some campuses about meeting payrolls and other obligations, The New York Times’s Sam Dillon and Katie Zezima reported.
Wachovia, the North Carolina bank that agreed this week to sell its banking operations to Citigroup, has held the money in its role as trustee for a fund used by colleges and universities and managed by a Connecticut nonprofit, Commonfund.
On Monday, Wachovia announced that it would resign its role as trustee of the fund, and would limit access to the fund to 10 percent of each college’s account value. On Tuesday, Commonfund said that by selling some government bonds and other assets held in the fund, it had succeeded in raising its liquidity to 26 percent.
Still, Wachovia’s announcement sent shock waves through higher education, sending hundreds of college presidents rushing to check their financial vulnerability on every front.
Some smaller colleges that had not previously arranged lines of credit were feverishly seeking to negotiate those on Wednesday. And some large institutions said they were facing, at the least, a major financial inconvenience as a result of Wachovia’s action.In a move suggesting how the credit crisis could disrupt American higher education,... more
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a_mo
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3 years ago
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NEW YORK - A hedge fund swindler who set off a national manhunt when he faked his suicide to avoid reporting to prison rode his scooter to a small-town police station in Massachusetts on Wednesday and turned himself in while talking to his mother on his cell phone.
Authorities say Samuel Israel III showed up at the police station in Southwick at about 9:15 a.m., after hiding out for the last three weeks in his RV. The U.S. Marshals Service had been in touch with the mother for several days as the feds zeroed in on her fugitive son.
“Obviously, she probably had some kind of influence, which mothers usually do,” said Frank Dawson, public information officer for the U.S. Marshals Service in Boston. “He knew they were getting close to him, so he probably did the right thing.”NEW YORK - A hedge fund swindler who set off a national manhunt when he faked his... more
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In a sweeping report with 68 recommendations aimed at revitalizing rural Canada, senators also said a new Department of Rural Affairs ought be created; that financial support for a host of rural programs should be increased; and that hedge funds and commodity traders be investigated to see what, if any, role they are playing in driving up fuel and energy prices.
In a sweeping report with 68 recommendations aimed at revitalizing rural Canada,... more
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