NY prosecutors subpoena Goldman Sachs

Reuters, NEW YORK | Thu Jun 2, 2011

(Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group received a subpoena from New York prosecutors seeking information on the investment bank's role leading into the global financial crisis, a person familiar with the matter said.

Goldman shares fell as much as 3.4 percent as news of the subpoena emerged, but then took back much of their losses, trading down 1.3 percent by midmorning.

The Manhattan District Attorney's office subpoenaed the bank to learn more about facts unearthed by a U.S. Senate subcommittee report about Wall Street's role in the housing market collapse.

That report said that in the months leading up to the financial crisis, Goldman dumped bad mortgage exposure on unsuspecting clients and counterparties, and in some cases dragged its heels when clients wanted to close out their losing positions.

The Department of Justice is also looking into claims made by the report from the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, known as the Levin Report for the subcommittee's chairman, Senator Carl Levin.

The Manhattan District Attorney's office was not immediately available to comment.

"We don't comment on specific regulatory or legal issues, but subpoenas are a normal part of the information request process and, of course, when we receive them, we cooperate fully," Goldman said in a statement.

Goldman's shares were down 1.3 percent at $134.41.

(Reporting by Lauren Tara LaCapra; Editing by Dan Wilchins, Derek Caney and Lisa Von Ahn)

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"The Timing of the Great Shift" – Mar 21, 2009 (Kryon channeled by Lee Carroll) - (Text version)

“ ….. Let me give it another name: It's an actual shift to a higher vibration of Human nature. "Kryon, that's impossible. Human nature is Human nature. We can't change it." Well, you've already begun it. You're starting to clean up your financial institutions worldwide. Did you notice? Dear ones, if anyone had ever told you 30 years ago that you were going to clean up your financial institutions, they would have laughed. For don't you know the way society works? Those who have the money win. Banks hold all the cards, and they are run by the those in high places. They are untouchable, since the government is often the same people! Well, why don't you tell them that today. Look around you, because something just happened. It's not working that way, is it? What would make the difference? Consciousness. A new paradigm. You can see it in the news…..”


(Live Kryon Channelings was given 7 times within the United Nations building.)

Oxfam calls for radical rethink of world food system

Deutsche Welle, 2 June 2011

In sub-Saharan Africa, 32 percent
are undernourished

International aid organization Oxfam says world demand for food will skyrocket over the next few decades, while production capacity will decline. It has launched a campaign to change the globe's approach to food.

International aid group Oxfam has released a report on hunger around the world that paints a bleak picture of the global food supply and calls for a restructuring of a "broken" food system, which has resulted in almost one billion people going hungry.

On June 1, Oxfam launched its global GROW campaign, which aims to lobby world leaders to change policies around food subsidies, promote sustainable agricultural methods and strengthen regulations on speculation in the international food market.

The campaign also aims to make consumers in rich countries aware of the consequences of their habits on the world's poor and the environment.

Time for reflection

"Our goal is to radically change the global food system, the way we use and share and consume in order to make it sustainable," Marita Wiggerthale, an expert on trade and food security for Oxfam Germany, told Deutsche Welle.

The report offers a sobering picture of current and future world hunger levels, saying nearly 925 million people - one out of seven – now face hunger every day.

Climate change, including increased
periods of drought, will exacerbate
the hunger problem

While food prices have skyrocketed since 2007, the price for staples such as maize will continue to rise, nearly doubling in the next 20 years, which will push the number of hungry people even higher, Oxfam says.

As global population grows, so will the demand for food, the report adds. By 2050, the demand for food will have increased by 70 percent, even though the ability to increase food production is declining due to flat crop yields and weak harvests caused by a range of factors including environmental problems such as water scarcity and climate change.

"Peak food production has already been reached because there is increased competition between food, fuel and feed," Wiggerthale said, pointing to biofuel production that diverts 15 percent of the world's corn to engines and the world's growing appetite for meat, which pushes farmers to grow food for animal feed at the expense of other food crops.

Poor record on hunger

The global record for tackling hunger is not a particularly good one. In 1995, a UN food summit set a goal to reduce the number of hungry people – then at 820 million – by half. That goal has not been met.

A 2008 spike in food prices pushed an additional 100 million people into poverty. The number stabilized somewhat in the second half of that year, but has been rising again.

The largest number of the world's hungry live in Asia-Pacific region

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says food prices are higher than they have been in the last 20 years, surpassing the 2008 price spike that set off food riots in cities around the world.

Most of the world's hungry are in Asia, and particularly on the Indian subcontinent. However, Africa is the continent where the largest percentage of the population faces hunger. In 2010, some 239 million, or 30 percent, faced hunger there.

"In most African countries, there is not enough long-term investment made in the agricultural sector," Tobias Reichert, a senior advisor on trade and food at the NGO Germanwatch, told Deutsche Welle.

EU policy making it worse

That is a result, at least partly, of European Union agricultural policy, he said. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the EU changed from a net importer to a net exporter of food, especially when it came to wheat and other grains as well as animal products such as beef, milk, pork and chicken.

"The EU focused on exporting to developing markets such as Africa, which ended up hurting local producers who couldn't compete," he said. "It gave local governments the signal that they didn't need to invest in their own agricultural sector since the products were cheaper on the world markets."

But when world food prices started going up, at first slowly, then dramatically, developing countries couldn't react quickly enough. The long neglect of their own infrastructure meant they could not increase domestic production to offset rising import prices.

The low import prices also had an impact on local food customs as people began to use imported wheat and corn for cooking instead of locally grown crops such as millet and sorghum. That hurt local farmers who saw their markets shrink.

Many of those who tried to switch to wheat or corn found that the soil or local climate wasn't suited to the cultivation of those crops, Reichert said.

Speculators

Other analysts place some blame for growing hunger on increased speculation in commodities markets, which has led to food price volatility.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, lobbying by investment banks and hedge funds led to weaker regulations on food speculation. Key financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital created new investment products to help financial companies make money on food prices.

Oxfam's GROW program is pushing
to give women the same rights to land
as men

This speculation, betting that food prices would rise, ended up pushing the prices to much higher levels than would have been expected otherwise.

"It has had a devastating impact on people around the world," Murray Worthy, a policy officer at the World Development Movement in London, told Deutsche Welle. "It's forcing millions of people into poverty."

His group and others are calling for new regulations that would bring more transparency to financial markets and limit the amount of food that can be held and traded by banks and investment funds.

"Food is a fundamental right, it shouldn't be traded with at the whim of bankers and other financial speculators," he said.

Oxfam says that the world is actually capable of feeding all of the world's people, but that short-term thinking, failed government policies and vested interests - including 300 to 500 powerful companies who "benefit from (the current system) and lobby to maintain it" – has exacerbated the problem of hunger, which hits the world's poorest the hardest and threatens to affect millions of more men, women and children.

Oxfam's Wiggerthale said she was heartened by the fact that hunger was high on the agenda of this November's meeting of G20 leaders. There, they will decide whether and how to manage food prices and regulate markets to protect against future price volatility and food crises.

"We want to put pressure on governments so they really act," she said. "We are in an urgent situation and if we can't manage to effect change in the next few years, the situation will be much worse."

Author: Kyle James

Editor: Nathan Witkop

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Exposed: EU chief's private jet, plush hotel and cocktail bill

José Manuel Barroso racked up €249,000 on air travel, as UN debated climate change

guardian.co.uk, James Ball and Caelainn Barr, Wednesday 1 June 2011

European Commission president José Manuel Barroso and 35 others
spent €28,000 at a luxury New York hotel during their visit to the UN
climate change convention in 2009. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters

The office of José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission, racked up a €249,000 bill for private jets during the same period he attended the 2009 UN convention on climate change.

Barroso's jet bill for the nine-month period is just a small part of €7.5m worth of trips on private jets chartered by EU commissioners over the last five years, uncovered in research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The commission declined to comment on the specifics of the spending on private jets, other than to confirm €249,000 was a private jet spend for 2009 for the president's office, but refused to say whether he took such a jet – which releases around 55 tonnes of carbon dioxide each transatlantic flight – to the convention itself.

The bureau found that Barroso and 35 others spent €28,000 at the luxury Peninsula New York hotel during the visit to the UN climate change convention. This figure was confirmed by the commission.

The research also uncovered public money being used to fund a €75,000 cocktail party at a science conference – Discovery 09 – which was "filled with wonder like no other ... with trendy cocktails, surprising performances and top DJs", as much of the EU was in the grip of recession.

The commission funded €300,000 worth of events described in internal documents as cocktail parties in the same year. At least a further €1.2m was spent on hotel and conference costs in 2009, including stays in San Diego, Prague and Balmoral.

An additional €20,000 was spent on gifts for commission guest speakers since 2008, including cufflinks, fountain pens and Tiffany jewellery.

The findings will further raise tension in negotiations over the commission's bid for a 4.9% budget increase next year, which the British government has already vowed to oppose.

The examples of commission spending have also drawn criticism from EU parliamentarians in other countries. "It is extremely disappointing to see how easily the commission spends the EU taxpayers' money on private jet travel and luxury hotels," said Martin Ehrenhauser, an independent Austrian MEP who helped uncover details of the spending.

The study also showed the continued lack of transparency in how the commission spends its money. More than €42m of transfers to "natural persons" – individuals, whose names the commission keeps private – were found between 2007 and 2009, though these had fallen from €27m in 2008 to just over €1m in 2009.

However, a further €381m was spent on "confidential" activities, which the commission refuses to disclose for security reasons. The degree of confidential spending in 2009 was more than double its 2007 level, at €221m.

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Germany to lead in green energy with nuclear shutdown: Merkel

English.news.cn 2011-05-31

German Chancellor Angela Merkel receives the report of the
so-called Ethics Commission for a Secure Energy Supply
from former German Environment Minister Klaus Toepfer (L) and
Matthias Kleiner, president of the German Research Foundation DFG
in Berlin May 30, 2011. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

BERLIN, May 30 (Xinhua) -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday that Germany could set an example in achieving a transition to efficient and renewable energies, after her government decided to close all 17 nuclear power plants in the country by 2022.

"We believe that we, as a country, can be a pioneer for a new age of renewable energy sources," Merkel said at a press conference hours after her coalition government drew up a nuclear phase-out timetable.

According to the ambitious plan, Germany's seven oldest reactors, which are taken off the grid following Japan's Fukushima disaster, will not be wakened up any time. The Kruemmel plant, which has been offline for years due to technical problems, will also be abandoned forever.

However, one of these old plants will be kept on "standby" from 2013, in case of possible electricity shortages. Another six plants will be closed by the end of 2021 and the three newest will remain operational until 2022.

The plan, which needs parliament approval, labeled Germany as the first major industrialized nation set to entirely abandon the atomic energy.

Germany could show to the world how a developed economy can achieve "such a transformation toward efficient and renewable energies, with all the opportunities that it has, for exports, development, new technologies and jobs," Merkel said.

"We will need a new architecture for our energy production," she added, acknowledging that Germany has to explore new sources for the vacancy left by the outgoing nuclear power, which currently accounts for 22 percent of the country's electricity production.

On Monday, the Federation of German Industry (BDI) expressed its worries, saying that the shutdown would force Germany to build more coal and gas power plants to stabilize the energy supply and price. As a result, it would lead to more greenhouse gas emissions.

"We don't only hope to give up nuclear energy by 2022, but also to reduce our CO2 emissions by 40 percent and double our share of renewable energies, from about 17 percent today to then 35 percent, " Merkel said.

Monday's decision was also seen as a return to the policy made by a previous Social Democrat-Green coalition government a decade ago. Last year, Merkel's coalition managed to extend the lifespan of nuclear power plants to around 2035, which was opposed by the majority of Germans and sparked rounds of protests afterwards.

Germany's anti-nuclear moods intensified after Japan's nuclear crisis starting in March. Merkel and her Christian Democrats had to change their pro-nuclear stance after suffering painful defeats in several local elections, including the one in Baden- Wuerttemberg, traditionally a stronghold for the conservatives.

Editor: yan

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