Free Talk Live

I want to be very clear what I mean when I say the word slavery. If you look it up in Webster's dictionary, the first definition is "drudgery or toil." It's become a metaphor for undue hardship, because we assume that once you legally abolish something, it no longer exists. But as a matter of reality for up to 27 million people in the world, slaves are those forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence. It's a very spare definition.

Your Money in Transition

A series of 1934 $100,000 gold certificate. This is the highest-denomination note ever issued by the United States. These notes were only used in transactions between Federal Reserve banks up until the early 1960s. The largest notes ever to circulate publicly were $10,000 gold certificates and Federal Reserve notes.

This means that the investment bank's European derivatives exposure is now backstopped by U.S. taxpayers. Bank of America didn't get regulatory approval to do this, they just did it at the request of frightened counterparties. Now the Fed and the FDIC are fighting as to whether this was sound. The Fed wants to "give relief" to the bank holding company, which is under heavy pressure.

Collier County, Florida -- Have you heard the one about a homeowner foreclosing on a bank?

Well, it has happened in Florida and involves a North Carolina based bank.

Instead of Bank of America foreclosing on some Florida homeowner, the homeowners had sheriff's deputies foreclose on the bank.

How the end of slavery led to starvation and death for millions of black Americans - Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American civil war died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book. The analysis, by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College, casts a shadow over one of the most celebrated narratives of American history, which sees the freeing of the slaves as a triumphant righting of the wrongs of a southern plantation system that kept millions of black Americans in chains.

When Karyn Howard’s father passed away in 2008, she was convinced that it would be one of the hardest things she’d ever have to deal with. Little did she know that a call from Bank of America a few days later was about to make the ordeal much, much worse.

The systematic process of harassing people for debts they don't owe is something the banking industry is becoming known for. It keeps happening because collection departments are able to intimidate people into paying debts of deceased loved ones -- despite the fact that by law, they don't have to pay.

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail
The bank has defrauded everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed. So why does the government keep bailing it out?

The World Bank has clued in to the fact that many Eastern Europeans prefer to work in the "shadow economy" — that is, off the books and out of sight of tax men, inspectors and other assorted bureaucrats. This has the World Bank very concerned, for a variety of reasons — some convincing, and others, not so much. By the way, World Bank Employees are exempt from income taxes.

Here's a head scratcher: as everyone knows from elementary chemistry courses, gold is the most inert metal in the world - it does not rust, nor corrode. Yet this is precisely what Russian commercial precious metal trading company, International Reserve Payment System, discovered on thousands of (allegedly) 999 gold coins "St George" (pictured insert) issued by the Central Russian Bank.