F6 that is an AWESOME post. You are much better than Matt Taibbi, with Him I only get 'his' view .. with YOU I get MANY more views, and much more important information .. even IF some of it is over my head, I still save it with hopes that as time goes on .. I WILL come to understand some of this 'money/bank/interest/libor/crook stuff better ...thanks so much!
First, there is the issue of when he left Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he founded.
On an August 2011 federal disclosure form, Romney stated that he “retired from Bain Capital on Feb. 11, 1999, to head the Salt Lake Organizing Committee.” The statement continued: “Since Feb. 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and had not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way.”
Furthermore, according to documents obtained by The Huffington Post [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/12/mitt-romney-bain-departure_n_1669006.html ], Romney testified in June 2002 that there “were a number of social trips and business trips that brought me back to Massachusetts, board meetings, Thanksgiving and so forth.” According to The Huffington Post, Romney also testified that he “remained on the board of the Staples Corporation and Marriott International, the LifeLike Corporation.”
Here is where we must split the hair. All these things could be technically true, but that’d rest on a distinction most people wouldn’t make. There is no evidence that Romney played an “active role” in “any Bain Capital entity,” although he was active in the companies that Bain invested in. This depends on what you consider an “entity.”
That may be technically true, but the spirit of the truth as most people engage it doesn’t turn on technicalities.
For most Americans, filings for the Federal Election Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission are foreign concepts that would have limited resonance. But being misleading is a universal concept: most have done it and most frown upon it. The insinuation by the Obama campaign that Romney was either lying then or is lying now (or is shaving the truth down to a sliver) to make a buck and win an office is a much easier and more dangerous concept for voters to wrap their minds around.
Furthermore, the slipperiness of this explanation underscores Romney’s otherness. If you were a construction worker or a schoolteacher, the year you stopped doing your job wouldn’t be ambiguous. Having no “active role” in a parent “entity” feels like a term of art for a con artist.
Second is the issue of Romney’s tax returns.
Romney has only released a complete return for 2010 and an unfinished estimate for 2011. This is less than any other presidential candidate in recent history. As The Times put it in a scathing editorial [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/opinion/mitt-romneys-financial-black-hole.html ] this week, “what information he did release provides a fuzzy glimpse at a concerted effort to park much of his wealth in overseas tax shelters, suggesting a widespread pattern of tax avoidance unlike that of any previous candidate.”
Blind trusts, Swiss bank accounts and Bermuda accounts designed to shield your money from the taxing agency of the country you want to lead just doesn’t sound right. And Romney’s reluctance to reveal more suggests that there is more that’s distasteful.
In general, people are uneasy when politicians are unwilling to disclose details. President Obama learned this as it related to his birth certificate. He may have been withholding it on principle because no other president had been forced to go to such an extent to prove his legitimacy, but, eventually, the damage being done by withholding became greater than the principle. So he released it, and much — but not all — of the second-guessing went away.
Romney may have to reach that decision more quickly than Obama. The narrative is starting to take hold that he is dishonest, devious and irreconcilably different. These are simple, deadly character flaws in a candidate because they’re antithetical to the American ideal of the presidency.
This is the country of George Washington and the cherry tree lore — the tender story of a little boy who would become the nation’s first president and the now famous line “I cannot tell a lie.” Whether truth or fable, it’s a fixture.
My mother used to say: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said.” The simple truth makes sense, stands on its own and can be proved. Nine times out of 10, things that require constant clarification and endless appending aren’t the simple truth.
Hoeard Fineman Posted: 07/13/2012 1:48 am Updated: 07/13/2012 10:41 am
WASHINGTON -- It takes perverse talent to turn a two-day mini-story into a major three-week distraction. But that is precisely what Mitt Romney's campaign has done with a June 21 story in the Washington Post. As a result, they're losing valuable media time playing defense when they should be using every waking second and news cycle to remind voters about how crappy the economy is and why President Barack Obama should be blamed for it.
First, here is what the Romney camp did wrong. They screwed up even before the Post story appeared, by stiffing the paper and not giving the reporter answers to questions about Romney and his company Bain Capital. Bain had invested in companies that were developing business in domestic outsourcing and foreign offshoring of production costs. But rather than answer, Bain issued a bland non-statement. If Romney and Bain had engaged on the story in advance, they might have been able to explain the difference between outsourcing and offshoring. They also might have been able to point out that this was a small part of the business, and an unavoidable trend that, in fact, protected many American jobs by making the American-based companies in question more efficient.
The Romney camp in Boston waited a full six days to hit the alarm box after the story was published, and long after the Obama camp took the headline and facts in the story and twisted them to their own advantage. This is an eon of time in modern campaigning, when every tweet is its own news cycle. And as if to highlight their slow-off-the-mark response, the Mittsters formed a delegation and flew to Washington to personally demand a retraction by the paper, which they accused of conflating outsourcing with offshoring. Having brushed off the paper in advance, they arrived with a dossier and demanded results. Not surprisingly, they failed.
The Romney campaign's next move was to strenuously point out that Obama's stimulus package directly poured money into foreign, as opposed to American, jobs, by funneling grants to overseas energy companies. This would have been a good retort -- had the campaign thought of using it right away, not after Team Obama had gone up with an attack ad.
Around that time, the Romney camp committed its biggest mistake, basing their defense of the candidate on the theory that he had bowed out of any role in Bain as of early 1999, and, as such, could not be blamed for any offshoring, consulting or other work that Bain did thereafter. This was too cute by half.
For one, were they saying that there was a lot of offshoring, but that Mitt wasn't around for it? Or were they saying that there wasn't any offshoring, at least none that Bain was responsible for?
For another, the timeline defense is opening an entire new line of media inquiry about the facts -- and opening a new line of inquiry is the last thing you want to do. And the question was -- and is -- whether Mitt Romney was really and truly dialed out of Bain, and too busy in Salt Lake City with preparing for the Olympics to notice that American jobs were being shipped overseas?
It didn't take reporters long to start digging through documents. Fortune magazine found some documents supporting Romney's narrative. But others found that, in SEC filings, Romney's name was listed as the leader of record of Bain through 2002.
The Huffington Post reported on Thursday that, as he prepared to run for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Romney suddenly had an interest in showing that he WAS involved in Bain business from 1999 to 2002. In a lawsuit filed by Democrats seeking to question his residency, Romney said that he had worked closely on trips back to Boston with at least one Bain-owned company, LifeLike Corp., and had gone to board meetings for Staples and Marriott.
The impression you get is of a guy who was whatever the form in front of him required him to be -- not great advertising for a presidential candidate.
But the larger question: Why did Mitt and his minions behave this way, that is, putting a blowtorch to a campfire?
The first reason is Bain, and the culture that surrounds it. Bain Capital, which Mitt Romney founded, was not and is not now in the business of telling people what it is up to. The press is a pox, at best, in a business that requires stealth attacks on undervalued assets.
The second is the attitude of the Romney campaign, which is staffed by classy, good people who also have no use for the press. With the exception of Fox and perhaps a few other publications and outlets, they think that the press corps is against them. But this is and can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obama's attitude is not really much better, but he makes a show of respect. As far as the Romney camp is concerned, most of the press are aliens from a distant evil planet.
Finally, most important, there is Mitt Romney himself. He has no interest in speaking to the non-Fox media. He is bad at it and hasn't practiced enough to get better. His top adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, is a former tabloid reporter who used to rip politicians to shreds, but now uses his considerable talents to keep other reporters at bay, or in fear, if he can get away with it.
In 2008, Romney talked a lot about his Mormon faith and felt burned by the experience. He reluctantly released one tax return and is loath to release more. For 2012, his basic strategy is to clam up, and try through that aggressive silence to keep the focus on Obama.
But if you don't answer questions when they are asked, the result isn't silence. It is more questions.
Should You Care About Mitt Romney's Swiss Bank Account?
By Matthew O'Brien Jul 12 2012, 11:21 AM ET
The rich are different from you and me. They have Swiss bank accounts.
Well, at least Mitt Romney does.
That was one of the big revelations when Romney released his tax records in January -- a revelation that Vanity Fair [ (at )] recently looked into, along with the rest of his finances. Of course, it's no secret that Mr. Romney is a man of means. But what is still secret is just how Romney has invested those means.
Maybe not so much secret as secretive. Romney has released his return for 2010 and an estimate for 2011. So we have a broad outline of what his personal finances look like. And they look something like an Epcot of financial investments: There is a blind trust with offshore accounts in Switzerland, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands -- not to mention an almost comically large IRA account. None of this is illegal. But it has raised questions about Romney's Caribbean tax havens and his Swiss bank account. The former makes sense. The latter not as much.
Question #1: Remind me: Why does Romney have money in the Caribbean?
Let's take a quick detour. Imagine that a tax-exempt entity -- like a university endowment -- buys or otherwise acquires a business. Maybe a macaroni company. That company would have a nice little competitive edge. It wouldn't have to pay taxes. That's exactly what happened when some wealthy alums donated the Mueller Macaroni Company [ http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1588&context=fss_papers ] to the New York University Law School in 1948. This loophole prompted Congress to close it 1950. Only a tax-exempt entity's "related" businesses would in fact be tax exempt. Everything else would be taxed as "unrelated business income".
What does this have to do with Mitt Romney? Well, university endowments and public pensions are some of the biggest investors in private equity funds like Romney's Bain Capital. Those investors don't want to be hit with the unrelated business tax -- so Bain Capital sets up shop in the Caymans where it can avoid the unrelated business income tax. You might still be wondering: What does this have to do with Mitt Romney -- at least now? He left Bain Capital in 1999 (or 2001 [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/07/no_romney_didnt_leave_bain_in_1999.php ]). He did, but he didn't. He still gets a share of Bain Capital's profits every year as part of his retirement package. And Bain still has corporate blockers in the Caymans. That's why Romney has investment income from the Caymans [ http://finance.yahoo.com/news/put-money-caribbean-tax-havens-220400118.html ].
Question #2: Why does Romney have a Swiss bank account? And what's so great about a Swiss bank account versus any other tax haven?
Swiss banks are the gold standard of tax havens because of their secrecy and stability. Actually, that sentence should be in the past tense. Swiss banks are not nearly as secret as they used to be. Time was, the Swiss government jealously guarded its banks' reputation for never revealing client information. It was a crime to do so. High-net individuals the world over flocked to the Alps to hide money from tax collectors back home. But that started to change in 2008. A former UBS banker [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/business/20tax.html ] came forward with tales of how he helped wealthy American clients evade taxes -- including such charming details as smuggling diamonds in tubes of toothpaste. The IRS launched an investigation, and came up with a list of 52,000 names it wanted from the Swiss banking giant. A settlement [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125007792394025747.html ] followed, and then a new U.S. law [ http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/03/facta-bank-secrecy-personal-finance-tax-havens.html ]. Now foreign banks have to cooperate with the IRS or face fairly tough penalties. Auf Wiedersehen, Swiss banking secrecy über alles.
But Swiss banks still have plenty going for them. They can thank the Swiss franc for that. It's a safe-haven currency -- and that makes their banks safe havens too. The Swiss are famous for their fiscal prudence and low inflation, which makes their currency particularly strong. That's even more true now thanks to the euro crisis. Demand for Swiss francs is so great that the Swiss National Bank had to cap the value of their currency last year. It was getting so expensive that it threatened to push the Swiss economy into deflation.
The Romney camp has hinted that he only had a Swiss bank account because he wanted Swiss francs. In other words, he was hedging against the dollar declining in value. That's fair, even if it's a bit odd for someone with $250 million [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/76972.html ]. But you don't need a Swiss bank account to get Swiss francs. You can just buy Swiss francs.
Another possibility is that Romney had the Swiss bank account to make it easier to wire money from one European investment to another. We can't say without seeing more tax returns. All we do know is his lawyer closed this Swiss bank account in 2010.
That's the final point. Mitt Romney's long-time lawyer, R. Bradford Malt, has managed Romney's personal finances since Romney was elected governor of Massachusetts. That's when Romney set up a blind trust, to avoid any possible conflicts of interest. Still, there are questions about just how blind [ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/07/03/counterparties-romneys-tangled-murky-finances/ ] the trust has been. And, besides, Romney is ultimately responsible for his own money.
Question #3: Is it fair for the Obama campaign to go after the Swiss bank account?
When most people hear the words "Swiss bank account" they think "tax evasion". That's not always fair. There are plenty of good reasons [ http://reason.com/archives/2012/07/10/the-dark-side-of-anti-swiss-bank-account ] an American might have a Swiss bank account. Maybe they live abroad. Or work for a Swiss company. But those are good reasons that don't apply to Mitt Romney. He didn't live abroad. And he didn't work for a Swiss company.
That doesn't mean Mitt Romney was up to no good. There's no evidence of that. It's entirely possible that Romney really was just hedging against the dollar. That's the legitimate reason a very wealthy person would want a Swiss bank account. The not-so-legitimate reason is the secrecy -- to hide money from the IRS. It's unfair for the Obama campaign to insinuate Romney was doing the latter. But it'd be a lot more unfair if Romney was more transparent. We just don't know enough to say anything definitively. We don't know how long the account existed. We don't know whether Romney's lawyer or Romney himself set it up.
What we do know is that this kind of stuff doesn't seem weird to Romney. It's what the über-wealthy do. But it is weird to most everyone else. It's not what the 99 percent do. Actually, we know one more thing. Romney can end this controversy whenever he wants. He just has to release more tax records. He's running for office for Pete's sake. He should say something.
In other words, Romney should take a page from the Swiss. Even they're less secretive nowadays.
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney promises to usher private lenders back into the federal student loan market in a bid to decrease default rates and increase efficiency if he becomes president, but such a move could cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars over a decade without saving students money, according to several higher education analysts.
The prime beneficiaries, critics say, would be banks and loan companies that stand to reap a financial boon through subsidies to make nearly risk-free, government-backed loans. They are the same firms that benefited from the system that existed for decades before 2010, when President Obama required that the government issue all federal student loans.
“The old guaranteed loan program was rife with lobbyists and will go down in history as a system that existed far longer than it needed to simply because it was enriching private companies,” said Jason Delisle, director of the Federal Education Budget Project at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. Inviting private lenders back into the program, he said, appears misguided: “What’s in it for students or taxpayers? Nothing.”
Private lenders, however, argue that Obama’s move in 2010 cost the industry thousands of jobs as companies went out of business or shut down divisions that dealt with the servicing of such loans. And the Romney campaign says reintroducing private competition would spur innovation that could help prevent students from borrowing more than they should.
The current market for loans to help students and parents pay skyrocketing tuition rates is dominated by government-backed loans made exclusively through the Department of Education’s federal direct loan program. In addition, the private market offers more loan options with no such backing — typically at higher interest rates. Before 2010, private firms also made government-backed loans.
Romney has long had financial ties to the student lending industry, a lucrative sector that has come under intense scrutiny in recent years because of some questionable practices.
The sector has contributed more than $29,500 to Romney’s campaign this election cycle, making him the top recipient of all candidates, presidential and congressional, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In comparison, Obama, who ranks ninth, has received $5,250 from student loan companies.
The industry’s top campaign contributors — SLM Corp., NelNet Inc., and College Loan Corp. — have donated to Romney but have not given to Obama. SLM Corp. owns Sallie Mae, a former government-sponsored enterprise that began to privatize in 1996. Though it now provides only private loans, it remains the largest originator of federal loans that until 2010 made up the bulk of its business.
In 1991, when Romney was chief executive of Bain Capital, the venture capital firm invested in EduServ Technologies, a now-defunct Minnesota company that processed student loans.
“Here’s a guy putting out an education policy that’s essentially putting the middleman back in for an industry that he used to have financial ownership in,” said Ty Matsdorf, senior adviser at American Bridge, a Democratic super PAC.
Romney’s plan for student loans, embedded in a 35-page white paper on education reform, is largely devoid of details. Other than criticizing Obama for driving away private lenders, Romney has not addressed why he would like to allow private lenders to make federally insured loans once again. But his campaign flatly denies charges that Romney was motivated to make the changes to enrich private companies.
Bill Hansen, a Romney adviser on higher education policy, said in an interview the presumed Republican nominee does not intend to replicate the old system, which entailed the government paying banks billions of dollars in subsidies and fees to cover their exposure in making student loans at low rates.
Although Hansen said new private programs would not necessarily be government-subsidized, he added that the campaign has yet to discuss the parameters, so it remains unclear how much money Romney’s plan would cost or save.
“The bottom line is we’re trying to design a better program that would hold default rates down, holds excessive borrowing down, and creates a better marketplace to help students and families, and not be so government-centric,” said Hansen, former deputy secretary of education under President George W. Bush and chief executive of Madison Education Group, a Virginia-based consulting company. “The current framework is a one-size-fits-all government solution that will never be customer-friendly and is totally subject to the political winds of the day.”
He said private lenders, working with nonprofits and state agencies, often did a better job than the federal government on debt counseling and tracking students for repayment. They are also able to offer incentives such as further reducing interest rates for students who make payments on time or have payments automatically deducted from their bank accounts. A lower default rate could end up saving taxpayers money, he said.
Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University and director of The Center for College Affordability & Productivity, said he agrees in principle with Romney that private competition is better than a government monopoly. But, he said, “Romney’s idea doesn’t deal with the bigger problem,” such as rising college costs and a school’s failure to properly prepare graduates.
Neal McCluskey, higher education analyst at the Cato Institute, said Romney’s plan does not go far enough. He would like a system run entirely by private companies in which the federal government does not guarantee anyone a profit and does not absorb the risk of default.
What Romney is proposing, “would be an almost meaningless change from a college affordability and consumption standpoint,” he said. “Obviously it would have an effect for banks and lenders, who would be happy to go back to that. It was a great gig for them.”
Other higher education experts say they are wary of returning to a system in which private lenders played the primary role. They cite a 2007 kickback scandal involving nearly two dozen lenders.
Several state attorneys general — most notably Andrew Cuomo, now governor of New York, but also Martha Coakley of Massachusetts — investigated the firms for unscrupulous practices such as providing university financial aid officials with perks or revenue-sharing agreements in exchange for helping to steer loans their way. Cuomo’s investigation resulted in $13 million in settlements with 28 colleges and 22 lenders.
One of the companies he investigated, College Loan Corp., has contributed at least $10,000 to Romney’s campaign. In 2007, Cuomo linked the company, then the nation’s seventh-largest student loan provider, to 28 schools, including two in Massachusetts, whose financial aid officers were given meals, entertainment, and trips for sitting on advisory boards. In addition, the company hosted financial counseling sessions on behalf of schools and misused them as a marketing opportunity. Federal law required that the sessions provide lender-neutral information.
The company ultimately paid a $500,000 settlement to a fund Cuomo established to educate students about their loan options, and it agreed to stop offering such perks.
Asked what Romney would do to curb the abuses by private lenders were they to reenter the market, Hansen said, “Those are very real concerns that need to be addressed in designing a new program, but it’s a small issue compared to the larger issue of student debt.”
For more than four decades the government had backed all federal student loans against default, even when they were issued by private companies.
By cutting out the middlemen and the generous subsidies the government had been paying them, the 2010 move saves more than $60 billion over a decade. More than half the savings were plowed into Pell grants, which students do not have to repay.
Obama has sought to capitalize on his role in moving the system toward direct lending, telling students at the University of North Carolina during his visit to Chapel Hill in April that doing so helped make college more affordable because the government was able to issue more Pell grants.
Delisle, a Republican who supports Romney on most other issues aside from student loans, said Obama deserves credit for reforming a broken system.
“On this issue, Romney is just ridiculous,” said Delisle, who nevertheless says he will most likely vote for Romney. “His campaign staff doesn’t have any new ideas, so they said, ‘Let’s just go back to what we were doing before the Obama administration came into place.’?”
Mitt’s overhyped Olympic gold Yes, he saved the Utah games. But he did it, as you would expect, by slashing costs and begging for big checks Jul 8, 2012 http://www.salon.com/2012/07/08/mitts_big_olympic_break/ [with comments]
===
Banks, crumbling ethics and a shrinking middle class
The symbol of Justice, with sword and scales, is seen in a lawyer’s office in Nice, southeastern France, October 9, 2009. REUTERS/Eric Gaillard
Instead, the Libor scandal is emerging in dribs and drabs and drawing little public attention. The middle class is being victimized, and there is little protest.
Last month, the British bank Barclays agreed to pay [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/27/us-barclays-libor-idUSBRE85Q0J720120627 ] $453 million to American and British authorities to settle allegations that it manipulated key interest rates for profit between 2005 and 2009, specifically the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. American and British investigators are now examining whether traders at a dozen other banks – including the “too-big-to-fail” U.S. banks JPMorgan, Citibank and Bank of America – also manipulated rates.
So Barclays’ victims weren’t just other banks and traders. They included taxpayers in dozens of communities who are believed to have paid millions more in interest than they should have at the height of the financial crisis. Teachers and other public servants may have been laid off because of bankers’ pursuit of ever-higher profits.
I do not believe all bankers are evil. I admire business owners who innovate, create jobs and strengthen communities. But theft – whether the perpetrator is clad in a business suit or blue jeans – is theft.
Around the world, a globalized economy is creating planetary-sized profits – and relentless pressure. A May survey [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/23/corruption-survey-idUSL5E8GME7220120523 ] by Ernst & Young of 400 chief financial officers around the world found that a growing number of them were willing to pay bribes and falsify their firm’s financial performance to survive the financial downturn.
The number of chief financial officers who said they would engage in bribery to stay in business grew from 9 percent in 2011 to 15 percent in 2012. And the number who said they would misstate their company’s financial health to get though a downturn rose from 3 percent in 2011 to 5 percent in 2012.
“One of the most troubling findings of the survey is the widespread acceptance of unethical business practices,” Ernst & Young said in a statement. “It is particularly alarming that respondents are increasingly willing to make cash payments.”
Corporate boards and other overseers, meanwhile, appear to be looking the other way. Eighty-one percent of those surveyed worldwide by Ernst & Young said anti-bribery and anti-corruption codes of conduct were in place in their companies. But nearly half said they did not believe employees had been punished for violating those polices.
The same problem exists in American institutions. Senior executives at Wal-Mart tried to bury internal reports of bribes being paid. Leaders of Congress continue to hand out shamefully light punishments to their peers, such as the 2010 censure of New York Representative Charles Rangel.
And a report [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-usa-crime-sandusky-idUSBRE86B05D20120712 ] released today by former FBI Director Louis Freeh found that Joe Paterno and other senior leaders at Penn State covered up Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children for over a decade to protect the university’s multi-million dollar football program.
A liberal, capitalist democracy – and a middle class – can only thrive in a culture where the rule of law is respected, information is reliable and the playing field is as level as possible. If we abandon that, we lose much more than self-respect. We squander a way of life.
David Rohde is a columnist for Reuters, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and a former reporter for The New York Times. His forthcoming book, "Beyond War: Technology, Economic Growth and American Influence in the New Middle East" will be published in March 2013.
The Real Loss For Jamie Dimon And JPMorgan Chase: Their Integrity 7/13/2012 JPMorgan Chase & Co., the nation’s biggest bank, revealed on Friday that it had discovered information that “raised questions about the integrity” of the valuations used by traders at its chief investment office, suggesting “certain individuals may have been seeking to avoid showing the full amount of the losses” earlier this year related to the bank’s trading debacle. The blockbuster disclosure is the latest blow to Jamie Dimon, the nation’s most high profile banker and the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. It comes at a time when the integrity of the big banking sector in general is being questioned, most recently because of allegations major banks manipulated a key interest rate in previous years. ... [...] http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2012/07/13/jamie-dimon-and-jpmorgan-chase-lose-their-integrity/ [with comments]
As I have argued at full book length [ http://www.theatlantic.com/china-airborne ], China's ambitions in this field offer a revealing look into the nature, strengths, and weaknesses of its system. The same is unfortunately true of ours. Does this remind you of anything else you're hearing about in the news?
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
