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    financial industry

    Rohit Chopra

    In 'Enormous Loss for the American People,' Trump Fires CFPB Head Rohit Chopra

    "For all the claims Trump and the GOP have made about being the voice of working-class voters, firing Chopra... only satisfies unscrupulous corporations and unelected billionaires like Elon Musk," one advocate said.

    Olivia Rosane
    Feb 01, 2025

    U.S. President Donald Trump moved Saturday morning to fire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra, who had earned the praise of consumer advocates and the ire of Wall Street for his efforts to return more than $6 billion to ordinary Americans.

    Chopra announced his firing on social media, also sharing a letter to the president in which he touted the work of the CFPB and outlined possible priorities for his successor.

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    News
    consumer financial protection bureau
    A woman holds a jar of coins marked savings.

    Could the Traditional Pension Plan Make a Comeback?

    The great 401(k) experiment of do-it-yourself retirement plans was always a better deal for the financial services industry that profited handsomely from managing them than for employers and workers.

    James W. Russell
    Mar 02, 2024

    Pension plans never really went away—despite beliefs to the contrary that they are fatally flawed, with 401(k)s being the only sustainable retirement plans. The reality is that there are still 50,000 financially healthy pension plans in the United States. Most public sector workers, for sure a minority of all workers, still have pension plans. The other reality, though, is that progressively fewer workers since the early 1980s have had access to traditional pensions plans.

    The general experience in American workplaces has been that once gone, pension plans do not come back. Here and there the trend has been bucked with pension plans returning to replace 401(k)s. In 2008, West Virgina public teachers voted to return their pension plan that had been taken away by the state legislature in 1991. The 401(k)-like plan that replaced it had produced such poor returns that participants were facing poverty in retirement. In 2012, after a long campaign, Connecticut state employees were allowed on a voluntary basis to switch out of a 401(k)-like plan into the state’s traditional pension plan.

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    Opinion
    retirement
    Sad trader on stock market floor

    How to Diffuse the Derivatives Time Bomb

    Current laws allow the big international banks to run the largest derivatives casino that the world has ever seen.

    Ellen Brown
    Feb 18, 2024

    This is a sequel to a Jan. 15 article titled “Casino Capitalism and the Derivatives Market: Time for Another ‘Lehman Moment’?”, discussing the threat of a 2024 “black swan” event that could pop the derivatives bubble. That bubble is now over 10 times the gross domestic product of the world and is so interconnected and fragile that an unanticipated crisis could trigger the collapse not just of the bubble but of the economy. To avoid that result, in the event of the bankruptcy of a major financial institution, derivative claimants are put first in line to grab the assets—not just the deposits of customers but their stocks and bonds. This is made possible by the Uniform Commercial Code, under which all assets held by brokers, banks, and “central clearing parties” have been “dematerialized” into fungible pools and are held in “street name.”

    This article will consider several proposed alternatives for diffusing what Warren Buffett called a time bomb waiting to go off. That sort of bomb just detonated in the Chinese stock market, contributing to its fall; and the result could be much worse in the U.S., where the stock market plays a much larger role in the economy.

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    Opinion
    wall street

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    Big Brother Trump Is Watching You

    Mike Lee Tries to Sneak Public Land Sale Back Into 'Big, Ugly Bill' Ahead of Senate Vote

    'Just Killed, for Nothing': Israeli Troops Say They Were Ordered to Shoot Aid-Seeking Gaza Civilians

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