Financial services

Email this page to a friend

Want news about Financial services and more e-mailed to you? Click here for free email alerts

Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown David Steinman See book keywords and concepts

Insurers are "only going to become more articulate and more active on these issues in terms of encouraging clearer government policy on climate change and encouraging their clients to better protect themselves from potential climate change risk," said Brigid Barnett, a senior research analyst who focuses on financial services at Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, in the Globe and Mail article.20 Whole international markets are now devoted to carbon credits.

Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation Charles Barber See book keywords and concepts

The name Zoloft was invented by Frank Delano, a legendary marketing guru, who also created the names of Nissan's Pathfinder and Quest minivans, GMC's Yukon, and Primerica financial services.117 Prozac et al. were among the first drugs to be sold as "lifestyle agents.

Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century Alex Steffen See book keywords and concepts

These days, financial services are critical for creating wealth. For people to move out of poverty there is an acute need to access financial services that not only provide credit but also help in saving, insuring, and investing. But for the poor people of the world, especially in developing nations, available services are usually limited to pawnbrokers or moneylenders who charge interest rates of up to 1000 percent per year—and even those loans are mainly available to people who already have some assets.

Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes Michael J. Panzner See book keywords and concepts

Almost everyone was imbued with a get-it-now, live-for-today perspective, a kind of financial hedonism enabled and repeatedly overstimulated by an aggressively competitive, rapidly innovating, but ultimately self-serving financial services sector. To that end, lenders and borrowers joined hands and helped create a massive real estate and mortgage market bubble, allowing consumers to "extract," as the euphemism went, $2.5 trillion in debt-financed equity from their homes from 2001 through 2005.

This shift helped spur a more aggressive and rapid-fire approach to making money throughout the consolidating financial services industry. Not surprisingly, the generous compensation structure, heightened competition, and widespread emphasis on absolute performance have had a powerful influence on behavior. The focus in the hedge fund community, and around much of Wall Street, has increasingly been to generate the highest possible returns in the shortest amount of time.

Yet along with ultralow interest rates and the active participation of the financial services industry, Fannie and Freddie also helped to boost total mortgage debt to nearly $9 trillion—approximately three-quarters of the GDP and an increase of 42 percent from the levels seen during the 2001 recession. By 2005, the two agencies were guarantors on more than $2 trillion of mortgage-backed securities. The competitive pressures of the marketplace demanded more. Over time, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also became two of the world's largest speculators.

Then they sold these MBSs to large and small fixed-income investors, state and local governments, foreign central banks, and a wide range of other banks and financial services firms. The securitization process proved to be a virtual circle, generating fees for everyone involved, serving as a wellspring of almost unlimited credit that supplanted traditional financing sources, and helping to raise the American home ownership rate from around 64 percent in 1990 to a record 69.2 percent 14 years later.

But it was only a matter of time until the combination of moral hazard, unintended consequences of government actions, and an increasingly competitive financial services environment transformed their mission into a crisis. Arguably, the turning point for both agencies occurred when they were converted into public companies. Once known as the less sexy-sounding Federal National Mortgage Association, Fannie Mae was privatized in 1970. Originally part of the Federal Home Loan Bank system, sister agency Freddie Mac was privatized in 1989.

At the same time, technology, innovation, and a widespread push to realize economy-of-scale efficiencies spurred never-ending consolidation in the financial services industry. Aided by the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which allowed banks, securities firms, and insurance companies to join together under one holding company umbrella, the big were getting bigger. Growing as large as possible made sense, considering how the too-big-too-fail doctrine had been restructured under FDICIA.

Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda Jacky Law See book keywords and concepts

No other industry, except perhaps financial services, is so bound by red tape, so restricted by law in what it can and cannot do; no other industry requires such high standards of proof; and for no other industry is the goodwill of its political paymasters more critical, because they pay the drugs bill at the end of the day — not to mention their obligation to protect public health. But all these rules have the effect of distancing the regulators (the police if you like) from the very people they are trying to protect.

Seeds of Change: Six Plants That Transformed Mankind Henry Hobhouse See book keywords and concepts

Only now, in very different circumstances, are the activities requiring technique, know-how, and imagination beginning to flourish again in England: tourism, design, the media, financial services without the dominance of the City of London.

Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century Alex Steffen See book keywords and concepts

Few Kenyans have bank accounts or credit cards; generally, only the wealthiest citizens use the financial services common in the Global North. People needed an option other than carrying around cash, and that pent-up demand served to trigger innovation—and leapfrogging. In May 2005, Safaricom introduced Sambaza, a service allowing customers to transfer airtime minutes to other subscribers via SMS text messaging.

For people to move out of poverty there is an acute need to access financial services that not only provide credit but also help in saving, insuring, and investing. But for the poor people of the world, especially in developing nations, available services are usually limited to pawnbrokers or moneylenders who charge interest rates of up to 1000 percent per year—and even those loans are mainly available to people who already have some assets. On the whole, state-sponsored rural banks in developing countries have also proved to be a disaster.

Food Politics Marion Nestle See book keywords and concepts

In a larger sense, the term encompasses the entire collection of enterprises involved in the production and consumption of food and beverages: producers and processors of food crops and animals (agribusiness); companies that make and sell fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, and feed; those that provide machinery, labor, real estate, and financial services to farmers; and others that transport, store, distribute, export, process, and market foods after they leave the farm.

The Cancer Industry Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D. See book keywords and concepts

A union-sponsored study of the oil industry discovered a similar establishment, and described it as a structured pattern based on concentration of control, interlocking directorates, financial services, joint ventures, professional conformity, reciprocal fa- *The existence of a "cancer establishment" does not preclude the possibility of conflicts among its constituent parts. In 1976 the FDA refused to allow NCI to distribute experimental drugs to cancer centers for the treatment of terminal cancer patients (Cancer Letter, January 30, 1976).

FAIR USE NOTICE: The research quoted here is provided under the protection of Fair Use provisions and published by the 501(c)3 non-profit Consumer Wellness Center for the purposes of public comment and education. Authors / publishers may submit books for consideration of inclusion here.

TERMS OF USE: Read full terms of use. Citations of text from NaturalPedia must include: 1) Full credit to the original author and book title. 2) Secondary credit to the Natural News Naturalpedia as a research resource and a link to www.NaturalNews.com/np/index.html

This unique compilation of research is copyright (c) 2008 by the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center.

ABOUT THE CREATOR OF NATURALPEDIA: Mike Adams, the creator of this NaturalNews Naturalpedia, is the editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's top natural health news site, creator of the Honest Food Guide (www.HonestFoodGuide.org), a free downloadable consumer food guide based on natural health principles, author of Grocery Warning, The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Natural Health Solutions, and many other books available at www.TruthPublishing.com, creator of the earth-friendly EcoLEDs company (www.EcoLEDs.com) that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting products, founder of Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), a permission e-mail technology company, creator of the CounterThink Cartoon series (www.NaturalNews.com/index-cartoons.html) and author of over 1,500 articles, interviews, special reports and reference guides available at www.NaturalNews.com. Adams' personal philosophy and health statistics are available at www.HealthRanger.org.