October 05, 2008
CBS News
Steve Kroft looks at some of the arcane Wall Street financial instruments that have magnified the economic crisis.
It began with a terrible bet that was magnified by reckless borrowing, complex securities, and a vast, unregulated shadow market worth nearly $60 trillion that hid the risks until it was too late to do anything about them.
And as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, it’s far from being over.
Continue reading 60 Minutes: A Look at Wallstreet’s Shadow Market
It is the height of irony that Government Senator Hazel Manning should be calling for parliamentary privilege to be reviewed. After all, it was her husband, Prime Minister Patrick Manning, who committed a most flagrant abuse of parliamentary privilege last week.
Prior to the commencement of the TT/Barbados Maritime Boundary Arbitration I wrote in March 2004 to former Minister of Foreign Affairs Knowlson Gift advising that T&T should hold immediate consultations with our Venezuelan treaty partner with respect to collaborating on the defence of the maritime boundary that they jointly established by treaty in 1990. Points 1 to 22 of the boundary are illustrated in the chart below.
DEBATES in Parliament are supposed to be about the interests of those who put Members of Parliament there, not to hurl scandalous allegations at individuals in and out of Parliament. In this regard, there is another aspect of Prime Minister Manning’s parliamentary behaviour that needs noting.
On what basis can PM Manning justify spending an astronomical $503m (one percent of the 2009 budget that is equivalent to the sum for the construction of the Tobago power plant) to host the Summits of the Americas and the Commonwealth in 2009 if not to boost his already inflated ego? What diplomatic goodwill and political and economic benefits will accrue to the pauperized people of T&T from hosting these Conferences when we are burdened with a poverty rate of 27%? The poverty gap is widening and pensioners on fixed incomes are ketching their “nennen”.
It’s the kind of story that would get a cat vex or make a donkey want to commit murder. Imagine a young, imaginative entrepreneur, someone who does not possess a “gimme-gimme” mentality, comes into town and tells the world that he will build an empire that would make anything Sat Maharaj ever dreamed of doing look like a doll’s house. He starts a credit union and offers interest rates unlike anything the nation has ever heard; at least, not since the days of International Trust when my mother got burned because of her greed. People began to invest in this credit union and before you could say Pan-Dey it was the hottest thing in town.
EDITOR: The dismantling of the fuel subsidy has begun, as was predicted by the Food and Fuel Forum, which for the past couple of weeks has been distributing a bulletin linking the dismantling to the upcoming signing of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA).