Computer hackers have launched a massive phishing attack on the German Emissions Trading Authority. Reports in Germany claim the hackers reaped millions of euros in fraudulent emissions trading certificates. 

The European trade in CO2 emissions permits has been brought to a virtual standstill after computer hackers cracked security codes to gain access to company accounts last week.

The Financial Times Deutschland reported on Wednesday that the hackers launched a so-called "phishing attack" in which they asked companies involved in the emissions trading scheme to re-register with the German Emissions Trading Authority (DEHSt).

Companies which did so, the newspaper wrote, suffered huge losses as the hackers stole and then sold their carbon permits on the European emissions market.

At the border crossing in the town of Narva, people queue for over two days to take advantage of cheaper petrol prices in Russia. With the Estonian economy faltering, small-time smuggling is on the rise.

According to Vladimir Mižui, who is the director of Transservis-N -- a company which manages Narva's border crossings -- only 5% of people crossing into Russia are going there as tourists or for bona fide business. All of the other visitors to Ivangorod -- the Russian town on the other side of the border where service stations have been springing up like mushrooms -- simply fill their cars with petrol and drive straight back to Estonia.

With unemployment on the rise, large numbers of small-time smugglers are attempting to earn a living from the difference in fuel prices. In Russia, petrol is almost twice as cheap as it is in Estonia, and crossing the border is particularly easy for holders of the special gray passport -- which is usually attributed to members of the Estonia's Russian minority -- because they do not need a visa. In the past, many locals in Narva earned a living by selling contraband cigarettes, but this source of income has now dried up with the introduction of a new law which has made it illegal to bring back more than two packets of cigarettes from Russia.

Arnold Hoek knew that setting up a company renting out motorised Solex bikes would fill a gap in the market. Nevertheless the 57-year-old on sickness pay could not find a single bank willing to grant him a loan. In spite of this, Mr Hoek has been able to fulfil his dream, because of microcredit.
 
Before he got microcredit, he didn't know these kind of loans were available in the Netherlands. But he thinks it is logical that microfinance is not just available to people in developing countries: "The story about a farmer who can buy a cow thanks to microcredit is one I can empathise with, because I'm actually in the same situation."

WARSAW, Poland - Poland's president says his country deserves to become a member of Group of 20 now that its economy has grown to become the 18th largest in the world.

President Lech Kaczynski argued that Poland, the largest of 10 ex-communist nations that joined the European Union in recent years, has grown in influence and belongs in the world's premier forum for discussing major economic issues.

"The place for my country is within the G-20," Kaczynski said Tuesday during a meeting with diplomats in Warsaw.

Poland's economy has enjoyed strong growth since embracing a market economy 20 years ago, and got a further boost with EU membership in 2004.

Switzerland says it will continue to freeze the assets of former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier in a bid to keep them out of the hands of his family.

The latest move in the long-running saga immediately followed a Federal Court decision to reverse a lower court's ruling that a large share of the $5.7 million (SFr6 million) in Swiss accounts should have gone to charities working in Haiti.

Duvalier's family and supporters have petitioned to reclaim the money.

"In view of the criminal origin of these funds, [the government] in this way avoids releasing the approximately $5.7 million for the benefit of the Duvalier clan," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Italy's financial police are seizing 73.3 million euros ($102 million) of assets from Bank of America Corp. and a unit of Dexia SA as part of a probe into an alleged derivatives fraud in the region of Apulia....

Merrill Lynch, bought by Bank of America in January 2009, managed the bond sales for Apulia in 2003 and 2004. The bank didn't provide the municipality with appropriate information on the financing, said the prosecutor. Officials at the municipality didn't speak English, and contracts weren't translated into Italian.

Merrill also recommended that Apulia seek advice from an international law firm, without disclosing that Merrill itself had a long-standing business relationship with the law firm, the prosecutor said.

thass ma boy Harold F.'s joint! He be VICE CHEERMAN... when he ain't taking FABBY to do his business...

Prosecutors allege that when the banks arranged swaps and created a fund that invests money the region set aside to repay the bonds in 2023, they misled the region about the economic advantages of the transaction. Banks skewed the swaps to their advantage to hide fees, the prosecutor said.

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Investors now view a default by the U.S. Treasury as more likely than a default by the Coca-Cola Company.

Along with giving Ben Bernanke another term, the Senate voted yesterday to boost the federal debt ceiling by another $2 trillion to a titanic $14.3 trillion. Yet as Democrats debate whether to use the headroom to launch a new trillion-dollar health care entitlement, the choice may not reside with the House (which must still vote on the debt ceiling) but with the bond market.

Trading in the credit-default swap market this week shows that investors now view a default by the U.S. Treasury as more likely than a default by the Coca-Cola Company. Until very recently, this scenario seemed about as likely as Coke winning a taste infringement suit against Coke Zero. Now the United States has taken its place next to Italy and Spain in a special club that no major country wants to join -- countries whose debt is considered less safe than that of Blue Chip businesses.

Mr. Obama may not be deterred by the verdicts rendered by voters in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia lately. But he won't be able to ignore investors if they send Washington's currently cheap borrowing costs soaring. That would surely be the result if markets become convinced that spending and inflation are destined to run out of control under the combo of Nancy Pelosi and Ben Bernanke. To be sure, we're not there yet. But the recent financial crisis should have taught us that, when markets make up their mind that the story has changed, they can turn against you with blinding speed.

One of the premises of your work is the notion that "ideas have consequences". You are interested primarily in the power of ideas and particularly in the way ideas fail in reality. But your work seems to lack the opposite approach - how material circumstances (or perceptions of how circumstances can change) shape ideas. Take neoliberalism. Hayek, arguably its founding father and also an aristocrat, believed with a Blair-like conviction that his world was under material threat from political ideas such as the welfare state. He did not just pluck these beliefs out of thin air; they were a response to a world in which he thought he would quickly find himself if he did not act. The crisis in self-belief of the West that began in the 1960s (the Paris events of 1968, `postmodernism', the rise of the counterculture, etc) were as much a response to the economic difficulties of the end of the post-war boom in the late 1960s as they were some strange set of new ideas, and the principal actors were the baby-boomer generation that had been the young beneficiaries of that boom. Crucially, ideas require fertile ground in order to gain mass acceptance. It was the subsequent economic meltdown of the late 1970s that prepared the way for the mass acceptance of the radical neoliberal reforms that Thatcher would make to Britain. There are historians like Robert Brenner who show in epic detail (e.g. in his book The Economics of Global Turbulence) how it was the emergence of production centres like Japan that caused of the end of the post-war boom in the West, and how all the ideas about countering that development, including forty years of neoliberalism, have failed - witness also the rise of China etc -- culminating in the material crisis of neoliberalism that we are enduring right now.

At Saturday's Tea Party conference in Dallas I'll be outlining how Tea Party Democrats can run against Obama administration policies that are counter to both Tea Party and traditional Democratic values. It is the Washington elite that have moved away from the ideals of Jefferson and Jackson with policies that are, at best, regressive, elitist, and destructive to our quality of life. And who's benefiting? Not the millions who voted Democratic who are losing their jobs and their homes. And with GDP now moving higher while unemployment rises, all that additional wealth is flowing up to the top. This Democratic President and Congress was not elected to enrich the bankers, insurance executives, drug companies, and union leaders at the expense of the rest of us, in a perversion of true core Democratic values. Unfortunately, the so-called economic experts have confused themselves and their political masters with contrived explanations for the way the economy works, and their limited vision has limited the range of policy choice. The result has been a monumental economic and social disaster caused by an obvious shortage of aggregate demand. The spending power needed to make mortgage payments, car payments, and do a bit of shopping- all of which would fix the economy and end the financial crisis- just isn't there.

The answer is a full payroll tax holiday, where the US Treasury would make all FICA payments for both employees and employers that regressively remove 15% of every pay check from dollar one up to $106,800 of income. The take home pay of a husband and wife with a combined income of $100,000 per year would increase by over $650 a month, and quickly restore output and employment. Rather than funding the banks from the top down with an improbable trickle down theory that would have made Reagan blush, this tax cut restores the incomes necessary to support all economic activity from the bottom up. Instead of funding the financial sector with $trillions, the payroll tax holiday instead simply stops taking $trillions away from people working for a living.

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trippy

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.