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In this interview with Der Spiegel Bernie Sanders reflects on the 2016 election. He says that the Democratic Party missed the fact that many people in the midwest, south and other parts of the country, were worse off after president Obama left than when he came in in 2008. He also says Hillary Clinton relied too heavily on speechwriters and advisers upto the point of  having three speechwriters say why she was running for president. He finds the cuts proposed to healthcare, in the budget, and action on climate change, immoral. He also points out about the investigations that Mr. Mueller is someone everybody respects and that it would be wrong to offer a biased opinion, that Trump supporters would see this in the way that he is picked on when he just came in. He also believes Trump supporters are like other voters and are likely to look at the results, how better off they are under the Trump administration.

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Turkish identity is changing as Erdogan pushes through changes in Turkey that replace the secular character established by Kemal Ataturk with his own brand of Ottoman identity. Erdogan appeals to the pious Muslims from the lower classes in Turkey who were ignored earlier, and to people who trust him in the middle class for preserving economic gains. By increasing tension with Kurds and other people in society Erdogan has increased the divisions in Turkish society. It is not clear what will take the place of the secular society and the gains made by it in modernization of Turkey now that the whole region is engulfed by conflict, and Turkey also faces a refugee crisis at its borders with Iraq and Syria.

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The FDIC chairman, Mr. Gruenberg has defined the agency's strategy under the "orderly liquidation authority" given by the Dodd-Frank legislation to deal with financial firm failures. The Lehman Brothers collapse ruffled fianncial markets worldwide because of the lack of such authority and a organzed well defined plan to deal with bank failures. Gruenberg described the plans to the WSJ. Once the Treasury Department and federal agencies agree that a financial institution has to be taken over, the FDIC would first unwind the parent holding compay of the firm by putting it in receivership and revoking its charter. Unlike the situation for Lehman, the firm's subsidiaries can continue to operate, with financial support from the FDIC held parent company provided by the U.S. government under Dodd-Frank legislation. The next step would be for FDIC to create a "bridge company," with most of the firm's assets going into it. At that point equity holders would be wiped out and a debt for equity swap would be made with creditors. The firm would come out of this process as with a Chapter 11 bankrupcy, as a new recapitalized private firm. The FDIC is trying to build credibility in the markets that it has the ability to do this smoothly, and Gruenberg admits that till it happens its hard to convince markets in a decisive way. Another problem is that 85% of the international assets and derivatives of top U.S. banks are in the UK. Former Fed chairman Volcker is guiding the FDIC, and he sees the FDIC's efforts to work closely with the UK very favorably. These efforts are significant and vital to avoid the worldwide disruption in financial markets that ocurred after the Lehman collapse, and provide a well planned action plan in place of an ad hoc day by day response....

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Ring-fencing the retail operations of UK banks from possible losses in the investment banking activities was part of proposals by the Independent Commission on Banking in the UK. Now a parliamentary commission calls for periodic reviews of such ring-fences to ensure this separation is actually still in place, and not been diluted or otherwise removed by bending the rules to favor banks because of lobbying by the banks. It says "over time the ring-fence will be tested and challenged by the banks. Politicians too could succumb to lobbying from banks and others, adding to pressures to put holes in the ring-fence." The report emphasized that a lot more needs to be done to restore standards in banking, especially after recent reports of LIBOR and other revelations of market rigging and corruption. The emphasis in the report is for banks "to be discouraged from gaming the rules."

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Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, has a three part proposal for tackling the "too big to fail" problem and concentration of 70% of the U.S. banking assets in a few banks. It calls for Market Discipline to be exercized in a way that the Dodd-Frank legislation fails to do. This is to be accomplished by having deposit insurance and the Fed's discount window apply only to traditional commercial banks, not the nonbank affiliates and parent holding companies. Customers, creditors and counterparties of all nonbank affiliates and the parent holding companies would be asked to sign a disclosure accepting that there is no government guarantee. In addition the largest financial holding companies would be restructured so that all their corporate entities would fall under a speedy bankruptcy process. Fisher does not clarify how he would do this restructuring. The Fisher idea come after changes in the banking industry through internal management restructuring following trading losses, legal settlements and the passage of a Swiss referendum called the Minder Initiative on compensation. Fisher suggests the U.S. Fed and regulatory authorites in other countries should push for further restructuring and calls for action beyond the limited results from 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. He is critical of Dodd-Frank's often ambiguous and lengthy worded legislation- 849 pages for the law and 9000 pages for the regulations written to implement the law. Fisher emphasizes the point that its hard to implement a law and enforce rules when its not clear and is difficult to understand....

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Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, wants to see stricter requirements than Basel III on capital reserves for U.K. banks. The Bank of England has expressed its strong disapproval of UK banks lobbying activities in Brussels to push for a dilution in Basel III standards. The British government and the Bank of England want to have the flexibility to set their own stricter standards and not to be bound by a relaxed standard set by the EU. The risk to British taxpayers is a principal concern. In the U.S. Fed governor Daniel Tarullo is pushing for capital reserve requirements stricter than Basel III's 7% requirement- calling for a requirement of 10-14%.

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Jon Huntsman, Republican candidate for President in 2012, calls for a fee on banks with a size that is above a certain percentage of the GDP. This would cover the cost banks impose on taxpayers when they are bailed out. It would eliminate the advantage banks gain from "too-big-to-fail," a subsidy Huntsman estimates to be one half percentage point in today's market. He points to efforts by the UK and Switzerland for more stringent financial standards than the U.S.

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Adam Nagourney who has covered Governor Jerry Brown of California, describes the Bernie Sanders supporters and the California delegation with many Bernie supporters feeling the loss of their candidate. Jerry Brown says he expects "a convergence around the core issues of this campaign," as the effort to rally people behind Clinton continues.

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As Dr Harsh Vardhan, India's representative and Health Minister, takes on responsibilities as the Chairman of the Executive Board of the World Health Organization this can be said about this critical juncture.The WHO is going through soul searching and a reevaluation of how it has implemented the vision of its founders during the closing years of a world torn apart  by war in 1945, and actual founding in 1946.  At the UN conference in San Francisco in 1945, Dr. Szeming Sze of China, Dr. Geraldo da Paula Souza of Brazil and Karl Ewang of Norway, were keen to set up an international organization for cooperation on health. The Indian representative was Arcot Ramaswamy Mudaliar, a member of Winston Churchill's War Cabinet, who chaired the committee on economic and social problems. He was the president of the Economic and Social Council which called for an international health conference in Feb. 1946. It was at that conference on 19 June 1946 that the World Health Conference came into being. A native of Madras he then returned to Mysore as chief minister. The vision at the time for international cooperation on problems such as smallpox which killed 2 million people each year were quite different from the fast moving epidemics with international travel in 2020. Today 4.4 billion passengers traveled by air in 2018, according to International Travel Association, 100 times compared to less than 40 million in 1950, and about 10 times the 400 million when Nixon's visit opened up China in 1972. The world we live in is different and the World Health Organization needs to be redesigned for the 21st century. The entire process of how the WHO operates has to be rethought. Immediate steps include- 1. The appointment by Executive Board should be reinstated as this is more representative of the world population and the major centres of advanced public health, including the major countries. Throughout its life the WHO made appointments through the Executive Board not by election. The election in 2019 by 200 countries was actually not representative of the world population as it gave India, Brazil and other early founders at the 1945-46 conferences only 1 vote each with population of 1.2 billion and 210 million, the same as tiny countries Barbados population 385,000 and Laos 7 million. 2. Reassessment of the entire process in which nations are requested to give permission of teams from major countries in Europe, North America and Asia, major population centres, so that the 6-7 week delay between the U.S. request to China for a special team to go to Wuhan on January 6, 2020 and the permission granted Feb 16, a costly delay of 7 weeks which added millions of cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths. In a super fast moving pandemic with international sports stadiums and 4 billion air passengers spreading it like wild fire around the world, there is little room for error, every day counts. Never should this happen again, as Dr. Sze Szeming China's representative said once in 1945 we must learn from mistakes, as mistakes were made in the years before World War II that were costly for China, India, North and South America, Other Asia, Africa, large population centres. 3. As was the effort then in 1946 and the early years, the effort to keep the staffing positions of leadership in the World Health Organization should be kept far from politics. Very experienced and capable people are needed from major countries with long records of public health experience and committed to the huge task, as was the vision of the founders.     ...

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This commentary in the WSJ says it is essential that the U.S. get back manufacturing of all technological goods back to the U.S. or its allies. The dangers of depending on China or other countries not clearly allied with the U.S. is quite clear especially after the pandemic. The U.S. and European supply chains need to be completely remade, restructured, to avoid dependence on China or countries that are not allies. This is what supply chain renewal is about. Yet initiatives alone with hundreds of billions of dollars price tag re not the answer to the problem. What is needed are specific targeted actions such government direct assistance to key sectors to ensure U.S. technological advantages in worldwide competition. Giving a hole range of incentives and direct financial support to industries making everything from electronic and computer components to high tech parts that go to defense and civilian production.   The U.S educational component in this puzzle is university students in all high tech courses which should be kept for U.S. citizens or from key allied nations at American universities. The manufacturing base would mean securing incentives and aid to manufacturing industries, component by component, part by part, to secure American leadership and distinct advantage.  Job losses have to be reversed and industries relocated back to the U.S. And only in cases where it is advantageous to manufacture overseas to relocate in allied countries India, Japan or South Korea. U.S. labor has to be brought into the picture as a key participant in the national interest and given an important role. R& D efforts have to be developed component by component, technological part by part, and technology by technology, so that a systematic plan can be followed to secure American leadership for the rest of this century, is what experts including this one say is required today. ...

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JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's confidence in Ina Drew was based on her hands on abilities, especially demonstrated during the 2008 financial crisis. Current and former bankers in this account by the Times Silver-Greenberg and Schwartz, say things changed in the years that followed. In 2010 Ina Drew was ill with Lyme's disease. The conflicts between the risk taking propensities of traders at the London trading desk under Mr. Macris, and the more risk conscious New York trading desk under Ms. Duersten, had already led to shouting matches under Ina Drew. After her illness and her absence from the office for long periods this spilled out into the open. In early 2011 Ms. Duersten left Chase after 16 years. Her replacement who would be new to Chase could not restrain the risk taking propensities of Mr. Macris and the London trading desk, the way Duersten and Ina Drew had done earlier. Macris and a trader reporting to him, Mr Iksil (referred to as the "London Whale" for his massive trading positions and bets), were free to operate without any restraint in this environment. Ina Drew returned in 2011, but she was not the same hands on person after the illness. She moved to the corporate offices on the 48th floor, instead of being on the floor above the New York trading desk. In 2008 she had held daily meetings with traders required to defend their trading positions. This did not happen in 2011. Jamie Dimon learned about the London Whale in the Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2012. Dimon's efforts in pushing back against stricter regulation, stress tests, and other issues were to lead to the CEO of the 2008 crisis becoming a much more distracted person in 2011. He was taken unawares by the breakdown in the relationship between the London and New York offices of the Chief Investment Office, the changed situation of Ms. Drew, and that risk management controls at the bank were not in place. Risk management overly depended on one person and the trust of the CEO in that person, and was not institutionalized. At the same time it should be noted that Jamie Dimon became CEO of Chase after the acquisition of Bank One in 2005, and Ina Drew was hired in that year, only three years before the crisis of 2008. The merger of other banks into JP Morgan Chase created a bank with $360 billion investment portfolio- even Ina Drew had never previously handled a portfolio of this size and the complex risks brought in with the Washington Mutual portfolio....

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Andy Grove makes this passionate plea for the dignity of workers in America in 2010. It is worth reading in 2020 what this founder of Intel Corp and pioneering spirit of Silicon Valley has to say. Andy Grove of Intel says there is something seriously wrong when the unemployment rate in the Bay Area is higher than the 9.7% national average for the USA. American companies have added jobs like crazy in Asia, but things are sputtering back home. Hon Hai has 800,000 employees and makes most of the electronic and computer products for American companies. Grove says startups are not the answer, unless they scale up and create jobs the way Intel did starting back in 1968, with a $3 million capital infusion by investors. The move from the first production model to mass production is critical, as companies hire thousands of people. Innovation and scaling up have to go together. He makes his point clearly by pointing out that Apple has 25,000 employees. For every Apple employee there are 10 employees in China working on Apple iMacs, iPods, iPhones. And he adds that the same 10 to 1 relationship applies to other U.S. tech companies. And here Grove asks the tough question by first posing an answer. He says it sounds like- no big deal, we keep the high paying jobs, we keep most of the profits, but what kind of society are we going to have with highly paid professional workers and lots of people unemployed? And he doesn't mention that there are a lot more young people unemployed. He says the US has become very inefficient at creating tech jobs, and it would be a great mistake not to act decisively early on. And adds that the investments in such areas as solar power and electric car batteries have to be made early on to maintain leadership in these areas. Grove faults academics like Alan Blinder and others who say loss of manufacturing jobs and whole industries was no big deal. The U.S. has forgotten the value of manufacturing jobs. He wants to see America focus on jobs and rebuild its industrial base. And less of transferring engineering knowhow and new technologies overseas, technology that can help bring innovation and scaling up of factories at home. In his view individual companies doing their own thing, in a misguided fashion that jobs don't matter, is not the answer to the situation we face. The industrial economies of Asia, China at the present day, have focussed on jobs and technology, and scaled up. Grove reminds readers of the situation in America in 1932, when jobless veterans demonstrating outside the White House in large numbers were dispersed by soldiers with live ammunition and fixed bayonets. This makes him shudder at the very thought of it, and brings back memories of his early years in Hungary, as a young man in 1956. Are we listening? ...

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Wall Street Journal analysis shows top earners at 38 U.S. banks and securities firms will get $145 billion in 2009, an 18% increase over 2008. This even after increasing public anger about exceedingly high levels of executive compensation with no relation to performance, and at a time of high unemployment.

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A behind the scenes account of what happened at JP Morgan Chase after CEO Jamie Dimon discovered the trading losses of the London Whale through the pages of the Wall Street Journal, on April 6, 2012.

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Local customs, tradition and history of development play a part in each region. This is the message from Islamist politicians who want to bridge the differences with the USA in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan. They want to keep some of their Islamic ways of life and still work with the US. These Islamic organizations are working to reduce the violence in the region and promote democratic discourse and electoral representation. This is happening amid widespread mistrust of the U.S. of all Islamist politicians. There are negative perceptions about things Western which are not automatically accepted in these highly tradition bound areas of Pakistan, especially the Afghanistan border regions. Some kind of rapprocement could bring peace to the region and cool growth of militants. Is there a basic misunderstanding of the area and are their other more gradual ways of bringing these areas into the mainstream. Of modernizing these societies over time so they gradually accept women's rights, education and development as opposed to the sudden onset of change. One sign - these areas need hospitals, they need roads and there is no disagreement about this. Once they see the benefits of development and militancy drops then it s easier for them to understand the benefits of schools for girls, women's rights, and education and all other development. Its like the American South trying to baccept negro rights after years of blatant racism, took some time but now some of the southern states can't even be recognized from what they used to be in their perception of black people....

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The largest U.S. bank holding companies, including Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup, and two foreign banks Deutsche Bank and Barclays PLC must submit initial plans for "living wills" by July 1, 2012. The Dodd-Frank legislation requires financial firms to develop plans that lay out how they could be liquidated if they went under in a crisis. This legislation gives the FDIC and other regulators the power to seize and dismantle a failing financial firm, to help mitigate the problems of "too-big-to-fail" firms. The FDIC and U.S. regulators lacked such powers at the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. The FDIC and the U.S. Fed co-wrote the living will rule for "comprehensive and coordinated resolution planning." In all, 124 banks, including 100 foreign banks with U.S. affiliates, which have over $50 billion in assets worldwide, must submit plans and update on a regular basis. Smaller banks will have the deadline extended to December 2013.

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Former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh's views on the need for greater transparency and disclosure from the large U.S. banks and the risks to the financial system from "too-big-to-fail" banks in 2012-2013. He says the U.S. should not be dependent on the Basel standards for capital requirements and use its own system of stricter requirements similiar to the UK and Switzerland. His views are that the Dodd-Frank law puts too much dependence on regulators doing the right thing, information transparency is lacking for markets to impose discipline, and delegates too much to Basel standards which are not rigorous enough for protecting the U.S. economy.

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Warren Stephens, head of Stephens Inc, in Little Rock, Arkansas, says repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act was a mistake. U.S. banks should have a 5% cap on holdings of total deposits in the U.S., and no "grandfathering" of banks over the 5% limit. Five institutions controlling 50% of the deposits in the U.S. creates too much systemic risk in another financial crisis. Banks should be expected to be one or the other, commercial banks or investment banks, not both. These recommendations are not new. Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, called for breaking up the largest banks or shrinking the size of the largest banks during the global financial crisis in 2008. This position for banks that are smaller in size is supported by veteran bankers Paul Volcker, Thomas Hoenig and other experts.

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Anat Admati, is a professor of finance and economics at Stanford University School of Business. He says banks should depend on generating 30% of their assets from equity, something the banking industry of today in the U.S. and Europe considers heretical. More of the bank's assets should come from equity and much less from borrowed funds. Outside of banking healthy corporations in the U.S. carry debt at about 70% of assets and there is no reason banks should not do the same. In 2013 says Admati, the situation is not much different from that after the 2008 global financial crisis- large banks carry liabilities and debt at over 90% of their assets. The $2.2 trillion in debt at JP Morgan Chase bank is about 91% of assets of $2.4 trillion. Basel III regulations allow banks to borrow upto 95% of assets, and proposed banking regulations in the U.S. put this at 95%, with the way this is measured still being debated. At such high levels of debt the margin of error is small, and systemic risk which is high in a globally interconnected banking system means the whole banking system can freeze from one large bank going into failure such as Lehman Brothers. This happened in 2008 and the margin of error is still small, which is why global banking is such a high wire act with the U.S. Federal Reserve, the ECB and other central banks issuing regular warnings and regulators faced with the task of keeping the banking system in check through vigilance and investigations of banks violating laws. How much difference has Dodd-Frank legislation in the U.S. made after 2008? Jason from Atlanta says in response to Admati's article, that the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was 37 pages and the banking system did not freeze up in the way it did in 2008 for the rest of the twentieth century until its repeal. The 879 page Dodd-Frank legislation of 2011 is overly voluminous and still leaves 243 rules to be written by regulators in consultation with the financial industry. Banks are larger now than they were in 2008 and have an outsized influence in shaping the rules, leaving the U.S. Federal Reserve's supervisory committee and Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo with the job of somehow keeping banks out of trouble. JP Morgan Chase, Admati reminds readers, has $2.4 trillion in assets as of June 30, 2013, and debts of $2.2 trillion, with $1.2 trillon in deposits and $ 1 trillion in other debt owed to money market funds, other banks, bondholders and the like. ...

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Bernie Sanders points out in this NYT op-ed the idea that Donald Trump could benefit from the same discontent among working class voters that helped the Leave campaign is a wake up call for the Democratic Party. He calls for global trade and a global economy that works for working class, middle class Americans.  Sanders is pushing for a Democratic Party that embraces the concerns of working class Americans, that understands the impact of factory closings and loss of jobs, of economic uncertainty, of declining incomes and shrinking opportunities.

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Guerrera describes the vital role that FDIC chairman Gruenberg's plan for unwinding failing financial institutions will play in tackling the "too-big-to-fail" problem facing the U.S. He points to the increasing importance of this after the failure of risk management systems at JP Morgan Chase bank.

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Robert Gordon of Northwestern University describes the problems in American Education and how this is the first generation which will not do better than its parents in educational attainment. The cost says Gordon comes in lower potential economic growth rates.