It looks like banks might have rigged another huge market

The market for US Treasury bonds may have been rigged.

That’s according to a federal antitrust lawsuit, first reported by Bloomberg's Alexandra Scaggs and Matthew Leising.

The plaintiffs — Cleveland
Bakers and Teamsters Pension Fund, represented by law firm Quinn
Emmanuel Urquhart & Sullivan — claim that Treasury dealers including
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley coordinated to manipulate
primary market Treasury auctions.

They cite data from Rosa
Abrantes-Metz, who has testified in other market-rigging cases and is
an adjunct associate professor at New York University.

According to her analysis, 69% of a certain type of Treasury auction — for so-called reissued Treasuries — look suspicious.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

The richest Americans are winning the economic recovery - Yahoo Finance

U.S. Census Bureau data out Wednesday underscore just how lousy the recovery has been if you aren't rich.

Looking at eight groups of household income selected by Census,
only those whose incomes are already high to begin with have seen
improvement since 2006, the last full year of expansion before the
recession. Households at the 95th and 90th percentiles had larger
earnings through 2014, the latest year for which data are available.

Income
for all others was below 2006 levels, indicating they're still clawing
their way out of the hole caused by the deepest recession in the
post-World War II era.

Median household income is 6.5 percent lower than in 2007, the year the recession started.

Overall,
median income was $53,657 in 2014, not a statistically significant
difference on an inflation-adjusted basis from 2013's median of $54,462.
It's the third straight year that there's been no significant change,
after two consecutive years of annual declines.