Business, economy, investments

 
A new research study notes that only a small number of banks are willing to knowingly process what the industry calls "high-risk" transactions. In fact, just three banks, Azerigazbank in Azerbaijan, DnB NORD in Latvia and St.Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla National Bank in the Caribbean, provided the payment servicing for over 95 percent of the spam-advertised goods in the study. Norwegian DnB Nor owns the subsidiary DnB NORD bank in the Baltic States.

“Want to stop junk email? Block payments to spammers,” a new study tells. Researchers who have examined spam supply chains, find cutting off payments is the most effective way to stop influx of nuisance emails

Every day, people buy goods via automatic generated junk mails that offer cheap viagra pills, copies of art works, software, fashion clothing, medicine, fake handbags and everything else of illegal goods that can be obtained via the Internet. And people are buying lots of illegal and pirated goods, through criminal systems that have become a billion dollar industry.

In a new report by 15 scientists at Berkeley, San Diego International Computer Science Institute and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics appointed three banks as the main culprits.

The research notes that only a small number of banks are willing to knowingly process what the industry calls "high-risk" transactions. In fact, just three banks, Azerigazbank in Azerbaijan, DnB NORD in Latvia and St.Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla National Bank in the Caribbean, provided the payment servicing for over 95 percent of the spam-advertised goods in the study. Norwegian DnB Nor owns the subsidiary DnB NORD bank in the Baltic States.

The researchers even went as far as to purchase spam-advertised goods in order to find out who the payment processors are. Finding a way to stifle the operations of a payment processor would be a much more disruptive action than domain blocking, the researchers note.

"It is the banking component of the spam value chain that is both the least studied and, we believe, the most critical," researchers state in the paper. "Without an effective mechanism to transfer consumer payments, it would be difficult to finance the rest of the spam ecosystem."

"The replacement cost for new banks is high, both in setup fees and more importantly in time and overhead," the paper states. "Acquiring a legitimate merchant account directly with a bank requires coordination with the bank, with the card association, with a payment processor and typically involves a great deal of due diligence and delay.

The onus to stop payments would ultimately be on Western banks, the researchers conclude.

"If the U.S. issuing banks (i.e. banks that provide credit cards to U.S. consumers) refused to settle certain transactions (e.g., card-not-present transactions for a subset of Merchant Category Codes) with the banks identified as supporting spam-advertised goods, then the underlying enterprise would be dramatically demonetized. Furthermore, it appears plausible that such a "financial blacklist" could be updated very quickly (driven by modest numbers of undercover buys, as in our study) and far more rapidly than the turn-around time to acquire new banking resources - a rare asymmetry favouring the anti-spam community."

Information Director of DnB Nor, Thomas Midteide, admits to Norwegian DAGBLADET that DnB NORD has had problems with spam-customers. Photo: DNB NOR

In the work, the scientists followed the money, receiving spam from around theworld, making ​​over 100 purchases for three months and found that three banks account for 95 percent of all waste transactions. 
Illustration from the report.

Has thrown out spam customer
- This is as far as I know a group of students who completed about 70 transactions, and so on which banks were clearing bank. One of the banks that came up was thus DnB Nord, "says information officer of DnB Nor in Oslo, Thomas Midteide, to Dagbladet.

He admits that DnB NORD has had problems with spam-customers. 

- We took over the Latvian bank in the New Year. They previously had a customer who had his share of the cash flow from the spam-related activities. This customer was terminated before we took over the bank, and is therefore not a customer of the bank anymore, "Midteide. He says that the exchange amount that went through this account was not big.

- Spam is a big problem for everyone using electronic channels, and we in the banks must also do our part to prevent this type of activity, "says Midteide to the newspaper. 

China, India, USA and New Zealand
All booking software and 85 percent of medication orders used the correct Visa category code that identifies what is sold. The reason for this is that they can get huge fines from Visa when they put the wrong code to hide the fact that they are selling risk goods.

The sale was completed by 13 providers in four countries: USA, India, China and New Zealand. Most of the drugs came from India, most herbal products came from the U.S., probably because of weak regulation of this market in the U.S.

In order to stop selling fake goods researchers suggest that the attack on the infrastructure for payment. The options are few and switching infrastructure costs a lot. They suggest that the U.S. stock rules that make it illegal to carry out transactions for known sellers. They write that it is not working very helpful to keep track of suppliers of illegal goods.

The infrastructure of a single chain URLs in the spam world.
Illustration from the report.

 
Lithuania was very pleased and grateful when Norwegian Telecom installed a satellite telephone station in the Lithuanian parliament, making it possible for Landsbergis to stay in touch with the world when the Soviets re-invaded Lithuania in 1991. But the country did little to hold on to Telenor and other Western investors. "We don’t need you," said former president Brazauskas.

Aage Myhre, Editor-in-Chief 

To attract more foreign investors is often held up as a good way for Lithuania to follow – in order to achieve a more viable development, raise living standards and develop a more democratic, less corrupt society. 

I began my personal efforts to assist Lithuania exactly 21 years ago, when Parliament President Vytautas Landsbergis announced that he would come to Oslo, on his first so-called official visit to a western country. I and a handful of others were ahead of his visit contacted by a presidential advisor and asked to put the best possible conditions for Landsbergis' visit to my home country Norway. That was how my long relationship to and with Lithuania started...

Landsbergis’ visit to Oslo became a great success and our group was therefore soon thereafter invited to visit Lithuania. 

One thing that we put the most of emphasis on, already when Landsbergis was in Oslo the summer of 1990 and during our group’s  initial visits to Lithuania, was to invite serious Western investors here.

Already during my very first visit here, in November 1990, we brought with us a representative of the governmental Norwegian oil company STATOIL, introducing the company to the Baltic States.

Just two years later STATOIL began developing the now well-known network of petrol stations across the Baltics and Poland. Our main contribution to STATOIL that time was to introduce them to representatives of governments, organizations and individuals we thought might be of help. The last substantial roles I had for the company was as an architect and facilitator of their offices here in Vilnius in the early 1990's, and to advise them when they later met on corruption and other problems. 

During my first visit to Vilnius I also negotiated a contract with Lithuania's communications minister, based on an agreement I had with the Norwegian Telecommunications Administration to provide a satellite telephone station as a gift to Lithuania, and to install it in the parliament here, Parliament President Vytautas Landsbergis had asked our group of ' Lithuania-helpers' about this support when he was on a visit to Norway the summer of 1990. 

Not long after this satellite telephone system turned out as very useful when Soviet troops re-invaded the Baltic States and cut all other calling options with foreign countries.

As a 'thank you for your help' the Norwegian Telecom was offered to create the first network for mobile phones here, but they rejected because they thought the market here was too small. They were also very tired of the treatments they were given by local bureaucrats.

I remember that this deeply disappointed me and Telecom's export director, who I worked closely with for the above mentioned satellite station in 1990-1991, and later on when we both tried to position the Norwegian company in the Baltics. 

During the years that followed, I invited and tried to set stage for a number of Western investors.  Some of them accepted, and some are still in full operation and business here today, very successfully! 

What I quickly discovered, already two decades ago, was the importance of having a good personal contact with representatives of those companies, speaking ‘their language’ and to help them with many different problems and challenges in this misguided country where Soviet laws, structures and modes of action was still largely in force, and corruption a very widespread phenomenon.

I also understood that it was very important to offer ‘concepts’ not just ‘projects’ and investment objects to new investors.

Unfortunately, I seldom saw true understanding and interest from the Lithuanian authorities during those years. Even the largest and most serious firms were most often met with a shrug. "What's in it for me personally," was the question that was often presented when we contacted representatives of local authorities and businesses. 

I will never forget when I in 1995 had lunch with Chicago’s largest builder, in the Neringa Restaurant here in Gedimino Avenue, a Lithuanian-American who had returned to Lithuania four years earlier, full of optimism and dreams of a restored home country. The day he left he told me: “Aage, let me tell you frankly that they have all cheated me. I invested into business, production, a hotel and more. But they all cheated me – from the highest of politicians to the simplest of workers. I am sick and tired of seeing how these people have ruined my homeland, and I’m now leaving it all behind. I will never again put foot on the soil of the country I dreamed of and supported for all my lifetime.”

I will also never forget that Lithuania's president and leader through much of the 1980s and 1990s, Algirdas Brazauskas, by then made ​​it clear that Lithuania did not need foreign investments.

"We have enough money in this country, among our own investors and companies. We simply need no foreigners here," he said… 

One could perhaps have thought that today's leaders would had learned, but the fact is that neither expatriates living here nor people within the country’s own diasporas around the world are much asked for help, advice or contributions. And when the authorities ask, they often ask the wrong people and institutions.

Let me, finally, also share with you a passage from Steven Levy’s book “How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives”.

President Brazauskas' attitude and the following description explains a lot about why both and Lithuania are still living in a European backwater. Another sad example of how little the leaders of these two countries understood by then – and very often also today...

Here’s what Steven Levy writes:
“Google also made a priority to build centers overseas. Not long after she found the location in Atlanta, Cathy Gordon went to Europe, where Google wanted to build a giant data center similar to the one in the United States. Google had studied the laws and business practices of every country and narrowed the field to a few that might be able to provide the power and water required, as well as a friendly governmental hand. Some of the proposed locations were predictable – Switzerland, Belgium, France – but a couple were not.

One of those were Latvia, which Gordon had never visited before. The Google team flew into a ramshackle little airport and met the economic development committee, a cadre of what seemed to be stereotypical Soviet bureaucrats. Their host escorted them to the potential data centre site, an abandoned Soviet minibus factory. The building was cavernous and gloomy. In the centre of the building was a giant pit, and Gordon could not help but wonder whether any bodies were quietly decomposing in the stew. The group went to the area where the power facilities were located, and it looked to Gordon like they were on an old horror movie set, a ‘Gulag Archipelago’ version of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. One of the hosts leaned over and spoke in a confidential whisper, heavy with Slavic accent. “Don’t go to near those things,” he said. “Basically we don’t know if they could kill you.”

“We eventually ended up doing a deal in Belgium,” says Gordon.

 This can happen if or
when Greece falls

Photo: Dimitri Messinis / SCANPIX / AP

Despite the fact that Greece last year was allocated 110 billion Euros in crisis loan from the EU and the IMF, little has gone in the right direction for the embattled country.

More and more people believe that it is no longer question whether, but when Greece falls. Overall, Greece has total loans of 340 billion Euros.

Several experts expect a collapse in the next few days, writes Swedish Affärsvärlden.

Record Interest
Interest rates for the Greek government debt continues to rise this week, despite the fact that the government met to discuss yet another tightening package. The yield on ten-year government bonds rose to 16.8 percent, the highest level in the Euro zone’s history. The yield on two-year government bonds rose to 25.6 percent.

- There is much bad news out there. We have our doubts about the European cut plans, and its weaker economic data all over. The only thing that has pushed up the stock market is that the earnings season is now ending. It means that people will pull their money away from risk, "said Paul Zemsky at ING Investment Management told Bloomberg.

Refusing to accept the Greek government securities?
Several key players have said that banks will soon not accept Greek government securities as collateral. It will mean that the Greek banking system will be left without funding opportunities.

Economist and columnist Andrew Lilico on his blog made ​​a summary of what he thinks happens when Greece, probably in the next few days, will be unable to meet its payment obligations. 

Swedish Affärsvärlden says this is no reading for the timid…

British economist

It is when, not if

Andrew Lilico

Andrew Lilico’s predictions in ‘The Telegraph’:

It is when, not if. Financial markets merely aren’t sure whether it’ll be tomorrow, a month’s time, a year’s time, or two years’ time (it won’t be longer than that). Given that the ECB has played the “final card” it employed to force a bailout upon the Irish – threatening to bankrupt the country’s banking sector – presumably we will now see either another Greek bailout or default within days.

What happens when Greece defaults. Here are a few things:

 - Every bank in Greece will instantly go insolvent.
- The Greek government will nationalise every bank in Greece.
- The Greek government will forbid withdrawals from Greek banks.
- To prevent Greek depositors from rioting on the streets, Argentina-2002-style (when the Argentinian president had to flee by helicopter from the roof of the presidential palace to evade a mob of such depositors), the Greek government will declare a curfew, perhaps even general martial law.
- Greece will redenominate all its debts into “New Drachmas” or whatever it calls the new currency (this is a classic ploy of countries defaulting)
- The New Drachma will devalue by some 30-70 per cent (probably around 50 per cent, though perhaps more), effectively defaulting 0n 50 per cent or more of all Greek euro-denominated debts.
- The Irish will, within a few days, walk away from the debts of its banking system.
- The Portuguese government will wait to see whether there is chaos in Greece before deciding whether to default in turn.
- A number of French and German banks will make sufficient losses that they no longer meet regulatory capital adequacy requirements.
- The European Central Bank will become insolvent, given its very high exposure to Greek government debt, and to Greek banking sector and Irish banking sector debt.
- The French and German governments will meet to decide whether (a) to recapitalise the ECB, or (b) to allow the ECB to print money to restore its solvency. (Because the ECB has relatively little foreign currency-denominated exposure, it could in principle print its way out, but this is forbidden by its founding charter.  On the other hand, the EU Treaty explicitly, and in terms, forbids the form of bailouts used for Greece, Portugal and Ireland, but a little thing like their being blatantly illegal hasn’t prevented that from happening, so it’s not intrinsically obvious that its being illegal for the ECB to print its way out will prove much of a hurdle.)
- They will recapitalise, and recapitalise their own banks, but declare an end to all bailouts.
- There will be carnage in the market for Spanish banking sector bonds, as bondholders anticipate imposed debt-equity swaps.
- This assumption will prove justified, as the Spaniards choose to over-ride the structure of current bond contracts in the Spanish banking sector, recapitalising a number of banks via debt-equity swaps.
- Bondholders will take the Spanish Banking Sector to the European Court of Human Rights (and probably other courts, also), claiming violations of property rights. These cases won’t be heard for years. By the time they are finally heard, no-one will care.
- Attention will turn to the British banks. Then we shall see…

Andrew Lilico is an Economist with Europe Economics, and a member of the Shadow Monetary Policy Committee. He was formerly the Chief Economist of Policy Exchange.

Sources: http://www.dn.no/
and: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/andrewlilico/100010332/what-happens-when-greece-defaults/

BY ROBERT MORLEY

http://www.thetrumpet.com/?q=8225.6887.0.0

Rates on Greek debt soared to an astounding 21 percent last week. The end game on the Greek debt crisis could be near. If Greece defaults on its debt, it could trigger a domino collapse across Europe. But do the strategizers behind the euro have a secret plan that could totally reform the union?
One thing for sure is that the Greek government cannot long afford to borrow money at such high rates. It is virtually locked out of the debt market. That means that sooner or later, somebody isn’t going to get paid. In this case it mostly means big banks in France, Germany, Austria and Belgium.
The consequences could easily go global. European Central Bank executive member Jurgen Stark warned on April 23 that Europe may be about to suffer a banking crisis worse than that of 2008. It “could overshadow the effects of the Lehman bankruptcy,” he warned.
Bigger than Lehman?
According to Stark, a default by Greece would be the worst option for the eurozone. This would trigger massive and immediate government spending cuts and the inevitable social unrest that would ensue.
More critically, it could easily cause lenders to balk at loaning money to other troubled states like Ireland and Portugal—causing interest rates to soar in those countries and causing them to default too. Even Spain and Italy could be pushed over the edge, which would throw the whole eurozone into question.

Before they realized what is going on and who was robbing them, the Lithuanian people got clubbered by PM Kubilius’ ambitious austerity policy and the younger ones started emigrating in catastrophic numbers, seeing no future in the country whose GDP was reduced (from a low post-Soviet level) by some 20% by the combination of the old nomenklatura rent-seeking policies and the global Great Recession. Lithuania is hollowing out, unfortunately.

Palemonas Legend: A Tale of Two EU Nations

Since the annus mirabilis 1989 the theory was that Central and Eastern Europe, CEE, would use its abundant and relatively educated labor force to grow faster and on a more sustainable and consumer-oriented (prosperity) basis due to shift to markets and euro-integration.

What got in the way is the theory of (rational?) expectations?

True, CEE did receive a sort of a very modest version of Marshall Plan from the EU. True to four EU freedoms, Western Europe is opening to labor movements (emigration) from CEE. So when new CEE policymakers were implementing liberal market reforms, they should have anticipated some outflows of labor force to higher bidders in Western Europe due to simple demonstration effect.

What got in the way is the law of unintended consequences in complex processes?
When the British opened their labor markets to the East, they anticipated some 10-12 thousand immigrants from Poland, for example, what they got is some one million and rising. Who knows what the figure will be when Germany opens this May?
The tale of two EU nations: What got in the way is the paradigm of hard-to-calculate policy externalities?

The current Kubilius Government of Lithuania adopted a very ambitious (no IMF help even sought!) and rather harsh austerity modeled on the reigning EU thinking in order to clean the Augean stable of Lithuania's finance wrecked fo by former Soviet nomenklatura hijacked governments that largely used EU money to place their cronies in plum jobs (to the exclusion of younger generation of course!), "prikhvatize" real estate and keep it from any taxation, etc. Consequently, Lithuania did not attract much Western direct investment so the productivity remained at low post-communist levels at the time when emerging Asia provides stiff global competition.

Before they realized what is going on and who was robbing them, the Lithuanian people got clubbered by this new ambitious austerity policy and the younger ones started emigrating in catastrophic numbers, seeing no future in the country whose GDP was reduced (from a low post-Soviet level) by some 20% by the combination of the old nomenklatura rent-seeking policies and the global Great Recession. Lithuania is hollowing out, unfortunately.

While the Lithuanians sobered rather in time, the Greeks have been continuing the party until the last bottle:)

Greeks won, Lithuanians lost! This is the tale of two integrating nations: they are even related since ancient times according to a Greek Palemonas legend.
Wishing you all the best, I remain

Yours Sincerely
Valdas Samonis, PhD, CPC
The Web Professor of Global Management(SM)
Institute for New Economic Thinking, New York City, USA
and Royal Roads University, Canada
Knowledge Management Editor, Transnational Corporations Review (TNCR)

Valdas Samonis

Val Samonis, PhD, CPC, (val@samonis.com) has worked with top business, technology, and policy leaders in many countries, e.g. Nobel Laureates in Economics and Finance (Tobin, Arrow, Solow, Leontieff, Klein) as part of The Stanford Economic Transition Group; Polish Deputy Prime Minister L. Balcerowicz, Czech Deputy Prime Minister P. Mertlik; other top experts globally; lectured internationally on trade, investment, corporate governance/finance and enterprise restructuring, competitiveness, and ICT & knowledge management (KM) in the global economy; and has been extensively published.

He has been contributing research to The Joint (Business, Government, Academia) Committee on Corporate Governance (Canada); on FDI and knowledge economy clusters to Columbia University's VCC Center on Sustainable Investment; publishing at The Knowledge Board, the European Union's main KM think tank. Also, Val Samonis has been serving as a knowledge management expert in global business and advisor to a number of governments, international organizations, business, and academia on four continents; individually and via his virtual network organization SEMI Online (www.samonis.com) established since the mid-1980s.

Dr. Samonis managed and/or worked in international research and advisory ("blue ribbon") teams sponsored by The Business at the Bottom of the Pyramid Initiative (Cornell University and the University of Michigan); The African Capacity Building Foundation (G-7 countries and global institutions); The Virtual Consultation Forum for the First Inter-American Meeting of Ministers and High-Level Authorities on Sustainable Development; The Hudson Institute; World Bank; The OECD-World Bank Private Sector Advisory Group on Corporate Governance; USAID; CASE Warsaw; EU (ACE, TEMPUS); Soros Foundations; The Center for European Integration Studies (ZEI Bonn); ACCC/AUCC/CIDA (Canada); and a number of governments, e.g. in Baltic States, Poland, Canada. Dr. Samonis served as an advisor to the Czech Government, the Lithuanian Parliament, international organizations (e.g. UNCTAD, WTO, ITC), and multinational corporations (e.g. CARE, Medley Global Advisors, Andersen Consulting). Prof. Samonis has been teaching online, onsite, and his DualModeInstruction(SM) comprehensive and specialized courses, modules, seminars, training sessions, briefing sessions, occasional lectures, as well as doing research and supervising graduate (EMBA, MBA, MA, PhD, DBA) students at the University of Toronto (Canada), Royal Roads University (Canada), Lansbridge University (Canada, Asia), University of Maryland UC (USA), Center for University Studies (USA & Mexico), National American University, (USA and globally), Touro University International (USA and globally), Warsaw School of Economics (Poland), The International Trade Research Institute (Poland), University of Tasmania (Australia), The Center for European Integration Studies (Germany), Vilnius University and Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania), The Baltic Management Institute (Baltic states), Kyiv University (Ukraine), and other institutions internationally. Last but not least, Dr. Samonis is one of the two founding editors of the globally acclaimed Journal of East-West Business (Routledge), and has been serving on review and advisory boards of many other international scholarly journals in business/finance/high tech.