[finance] snippets here and there

Just finished a post on bankers and their questionable behaviour and here's this story today:

Citigroup Inc., the nation's largest bank, is considering cutting about 15,000 jobs, or nearly 5 percent of its work force, as part of a restructuring plan being developed to improve its financial performance, according to a report in Monday's edition of The Wall Street Journal.

This was because last year expenses outstripped profits and so the first to be jettisoned are the human resources. That's as good a place as any to start the article:

# First off is an interesting snippet about Col. Edward M. House's father depositing his profits in gold from his civil war blockade-running with Baring banking house in London. The bank's the interesting thing here. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., Dope, Inc., The New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Company, N.Y. 1978, writes this:

"Baring Brothers, the premier merchant bank of the opium trade from 1783 to the present day, also maintained close contact with the Boston families . . . The group’s leading banker became, at the close of the 19th century, the House of Morgan--which also took its cut in Eastern opium traffic . . . Morgan’s Far Eastern operations were the officially conducted British opium traffic . . . Morgan’s case deserves special scrutiny from American police and regulatory agencies, for the intimate associations of Morgan Guaranty Trust with the identified leadership of the British dope banks."

On the weakness of Woodrow Wilson

# George Creel, Washington correspondent, wrote in Harper’s Weekly, June 26, 1915:

"As far as the Democratic Party was concerned, Woodrow Wilson was without influence, save for the patronage he possessed. It was Bryan who whipped Congress into line on the tariff bill, on the Panama Canal tolls repeal, and on the currency bill."

Mr. Bryan later wrote:

"That is the one thing in my public career that I regret--my work to secure the enactment of the Federal Reserve Law."

# Wilson’s choice [for the Fed] was Thomas D. Jones, a trustee of Princeton and director of International Harvester and other corporations. The other members were Adolph C. Miller, economist from Rockefeller’s University of Chicago and Morgan’s Harvard University, and also serving as Assistant Secretary of the Interior; Charles S. Hamlin, who had served previously as an Assistant Secretary to the Treasury for eight years; F.A. Delano, a Roosevelt relative and railroad operator who took over a number of railroads for Kuhn, Loeb Company; W.P.G. Harding, President of the First National Bank of Atlanta; and Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb Company.

The Senate Banking and Currency Committee scheduled hearings on the fitness of Thomas D. Jones to be a member of the Board of Governors. Wilson then wrote a letter to Senator Robert L. Owen, Chairman of that Committee. Despite the letter, dated June 18, 1914, Thomas D. Jones withdrew his name. Therefore none of the Fed directors was a Presidential appointee, although the Aldrich plan had the Fed ostensibly subject to presidential appointment.

Continued here, if you're game.