Thought of the Day

It is Pi day (assuming you live in a country that insists on writing dates in the frankly barking mad MM/DD format)

-- The Register, published 14 March 2018

"The charges against Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani make clear that there is no exemption from the anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws simply because a company is non-public, development-stage, or the subject of exuberant media attention."

-- Steven Peikin, Securities and Exchange Commission, USA speaking about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

U.S. Bank systemically and continually devoted an inadequate amount of resources to its AML program. Internal testing by U.S. Bank showed that alert capping caused it to fail to investigate and report thousands of suspicious transactions. Instead of removing the alert caps, the bank terminated the testing.

-- FinCEN re US Bank, NA.

ABLV may be used for some legitimate purposes. However, the high number of shell company customers banking at ABLV, some of which are themselves engaged in money laundering or illicit activity, as described above, indicates that ABLV is extensively used for illicit purposes.

--- FinCEN statement
see World Money Laundering Report story

Mr. President, there has been some apprehension about the instantaneous broadcasts of Presidential press conferences such as this one, and the contention being that an inadvertent statement is no longer correctable, as in the old days, could possibly cause some grave consequences"

-- Reporter's question to US President John F Kennedy on the occasion of the first live broadcast of a Presidential Press Conference, 25 Jan 1961

Today's thought is the simplest of all: Click on this, from the BBC. Can it make Aaron Heslehurst read it, too, please?

http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...

‘We’re planning to use our technology and advisory skills to transform legal services and help address many of the challenges lawyers, whether in practice or in-house, are facing in today’s increasingly complex legal environment."

-- Matt Ellis, Managing Partner, Tax and Legal, Deloitte UK

It seems to me we need to rethink a lot of our money laundering laws some of which ... were written back in the 1970s and are badly out of date.

-- US Senator Eliz. Warren - US Congressional hearing - 9 January 2018

Ultimately, Keynes may still turn out to be prescient, as the finance sector, not unlike the transportation sectors such as railroads, trucking and airlines in earlier waves, or the communication sector such as telecom companies in recent years, has been plagued by predatory mergers of the big fish eating the smaller fish, after which the big fish, having grown accustomed to an unsustainably rich diet that damaged their financial livers, begin to die from self-generated starvation from a collapse of the food chain.

-- Henry Liu of Liu Investment Group, New York, writing "The Presidential Election Cycle Theory and the Fed" in Asia Times Online, 2004

That's it for 2017. We'll be back on 8 January 2018.(8-1-18)

We wish everyone a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Intelligent artificial "being"?

The only obvious error was to say "historical" when it meant "historic." Remarkable.

The first version of Sophia, a year earlier, was also interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Nearly half of the USD3,500 million in corruption proceeds we have restrained is related to just one enforcement action. That action was related to a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund known as 1MDB.

-- US Attorney General Jefferson Sessions - 4 December 2017

"Natural disasters have sadly become the new normal. "

- President Jean-Claude Juncker, 23 November 2017