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Crony Washington Post? “Their reporting on the Menendez story has been amateurish.”
Senator Menendez is a powerful guy from New Jersey. From New Jersey.
The Daily Caller broke the Menendez story and the Washington Post is trying to poke holes in the story. As it should if it can do it using good sources etc. However the Post’s methods may be suspect and Tucker Carlson, editor of the DC, is taking it to the Post.
Regardless of the hookers, I don’t particularly care about that, Menendez has much more important things to answer to, as we discussed in THIS POST. He did fly around on the jet of a guy who owes the taxpayers millions of dollars and who apparently has used his connections to Menendez to intimidate competition in South Florida.
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Gold and Silver • Tom Cloud: How to Sell Gold Without Reporting It
Tom Cloud: How to Sell Gold Without Reporting It
by John Rubino on December 20, 2012 ·
In this week’s talk with National Numismatic Associates’ Tom Cloud, he answers two big questions that confront precious metals buyers: Why are sales of some coins and bars reportable to the IRS and others not? And is it possible to buy and sell precious metals confidentially?
Dollar Collapse: Hi Tom. So, what are you hearing from clients this week?
Tom Cloud: A lot of people are asking for British sovereigns, Swiss francs, and Austrian coronas, coins that don’t require filing 1099s when you sell them.
DC: The fact that some coins and bars have to be reported and some don’t seems both arbitrary and important in deciding what to buy. Could you give an overview of US precious metals reporting rules and how your clients tend to approach the issue?
TC: Sure. When they created the Patriot Act [in 2001], the excuse was that the terrorists who blew up the Twin Towers had used pure gold and silver to finance their flight training. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But the US imposed reporting requirements on sellers of 24-carat gold coins. If you sell more than 24 ounces in one year you’re required to file a Form 1099 with the IRS.
The 24-coin threshold applies to individuals, not families. If a husband and wife buy gold under their own names, they can each sell up to 24 ounces without having to report it. But if they bought the gold jointly, for instance with a check with both their names on it, they can only sell a total of 24 ounces in any given year. If a client sells 12 in March and 13 in December, all 25 ounces have to be reported to the government. If a client comes to me and sells 12 ounces and goes to another dealer and sells 13 ounces, they have triggered the reporting requirement, and it’s their responsibility to report it. Even if they think they’re getting away with something they may not be. I’m required to keep records, so if the government calls I have to reveal them. There are several cases where coin sellers have had to pay huge penalties for trying to avoid reporting by using more than one dealer.
Most 22-carat gold coins are exempt from Patriot Act reporting requirements, the only exception being the krugerrand.
DC: You mentioned European coins. Why are they exempt?
TC: There are some European coins that aren’t being made any more. Technically, people consider them to be rare, semi-numismatic coins. But some of them are actually cheaper than the major bullion coins. For example, the Austrian corona was only made from 1908 to 1915. It has .9802 oz of gold in it. If you’re out there today buying a gold eagle, you’re going to pay 5% – 6.5% over spot. But I buy Austrian coronas from a central bank as bullion coins, and can sell them at 2.75% over spot.
Another good example is the French 20 franc coin, which was made from 1856 to 1914. It contains 0.1867 ounce of gold, so it takes 5.35 of them to equal an ounce. Fractional coins usually have very large premiums. For example, a quarter-ounce gold eagle is somewhere between 10% and 12% over melt. We’ve got French 20 franc coins at 4.5% over spot and we’re selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of them because they’re completely confidential. So the best buy right now is the European coins because of their combination of low premiums and confidentiality. Every major wholesaler that I deal with puts a price out trying to buy these European coins every day. There’s big demand for them.
DC: Let’s summarize with a list of which coins are and are not reportable.
TC: The following one-ounce gold coins are reportable beyond the 24-ounce threshold: the maple leaf, philharmonic, kangaroo, krugerrand, Mexican onza, and buffalo. All one-ounce gold bars are also reportable above 24 ounces.
The following 22-carat gold coins are not reportable: US gold eagle, Mexican 50 peso, Austrian 100 corona, British sovereign, French 20 franc, Swiss 20 franc.
DC: Got it. What about silver?
TC: Silver is very easy. There are only two things. One is a full bag of junk silver which contains 715 ounces and constitutes $1,000 face value. It is reportable in the calendar year that it’s sold. The other is silver bars and coins in any combination – one-ounce, ten-ounce, 100-ounce or 1000-ounce – once the total hits 1,000 ounces. So you can actually sell more ounces in silver bars than you can of junk silver and not have to report it.
DC: Any risk of these rules being tightened?
TC: They tried with the health care bill provision that any transaction over $600 required a 1099, but when everybody realized that whether you bought a high-def TV at Wal-Mart or a gold bar or a car, both the buyer and seller would have to send a 1099 to the government, they dropped that rule. I don’t see anything similar on the horizon.
For more information or to place an order, call 800-247-2812 or email Tom Cloud at tgcloud@bellsouth.net. Mention DollarCollapse.com for free shipping
http://dollarcollapse.com/precious-meta … orting-it/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Fri Dec 21, 2012 9:53 pm
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Advertising, Credit Reporting, and ‘Anti-Objectification’
Jim Harper
You need a set of priors that I lack to stay interested in the forthcoming Suffolk University Law Review article, “Selling Consumers, Not Lists: The New World of Digital Decision-Making and the Role of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.” I think the thing animating authors Ed Mierzwinski and Jeff Chester is what I call “anti-objectification,” a desire at the outskirts of the privacy concept. It is bad, anti-objectifiers appear to believe, when a person is treated as a mere object of commerce, observed and communicated with on that basis alone.
Without anti-objectification, I can’t find much of anything wrong in their description of the emerging world of digital data collection and marketing. There is an impressive and complex array of techniques coming online to discover what people want, learn when they want it, and communicate with them in ways that will spur them to act on their desires.
Given the wrongs they perceive in these developments—which, again, I must guess at—Mierzwinski and Chester make a broad pitch to have online marketing drawn under the blanket of Fair Credit Reporting Act regulation. Not only the Federal Trade Commission, but the new, unconstrained Consumer Financial Protection Board, should look at bringing online advertising within the FCRA, they say.
Given the paucity of (apparent) harms to be rectified, one struggles to examine how broadening regulation of the information economy would improve things. But I don’t know why the Fair Credit Reporting Act would be a model anyway. In forty years, the FCRA has not cured the ills that Senator Proxmire (D-WI) recited when he introduced the law—to judge by the words of self-styled consumer advocates, at least. New challenges have emerged, and the FCRA has turned credit bureaus to the government’s use in financial surveillance. The FCRA preempted state common law—you can’t sustain a defamation action against a credit bureau, no matter how wrong its reporting is—replacing it with opaque and unwieldy bureaucratic procedures for those who believe their credit bureau records are inaccurate.
The FCRA already reduces consumer welfare by keeping new entrants out of the credit reporting business. When companies edge toward providing data that might be used for credit decisions, employment screening, housing, and the like, they quickly learn to eschew that market so they can avoid the FCRA’s obligations and regulator inquests. The result? Our economy is making less intelligent decisions about credit, employment, and housing. Efficiences that would lower costs to consumers across the board are not being found.
I drew lessons from the failure of the Fair Credit Reporting Act to fix things in my paper “Reputation under Regulation: The Fair Credit Reporting Act at 40 and Lessons for the Internet Privacy Debate.”
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Advertising, Credit Reporting, and ‘Anti-Objectification’
By Jim Harper
You need a set of priors that I lack to stay interested in the forthcoming Suffolk University Law Review article, “Selling Consumers, Not Lists: The New World of Digital Decision-Making and the Role of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.” I think the thing animating authors Ed Mierzwinski and Jeff Chester is what I call “anti-objectification,” a desire at the outskirts of the privacy concept. It is bad, anti-objectifiers appear to believe, when a person is treated as a mere object of commerce, observed and communicated with on that basis alone.
Without anti-objectification, I can’t find much of anything wrong in their description of the emerging world of digital data collection and marketing. There is an impressive and complex array of techniques coming online to discover what people want, learn when they want it, and communicate with them in ways that will spur them to act on their desires.
Given the wrongs they perceive in these developments—which, again, I must guess at—Mierzwinski and Chester make a broad pitch to have online marketing drawn under the blanket of Fair Credit Reporting Act regulation. Not only the Federal Trade Commission, but the new, unconstrained Consumer Financial Protection Board, should look at bringing online advertising within the FCRA, they say.
Given the paucity of (apparent) harms to be rectified, one struggles to examine how broadening regulation of the information economy would improve things. But I don’t know why the Fair Credit Reporting Act would be a model anyway. In forty years, the FCRA has not cured the ills that Senator Proxmire (D-WI) recited when he introduced the law—to judge by the words of self-styled consumer advocates, at least. New challenges have emerged, and the FCRA has turned credit bureaus to the government’s use in financial surveillance. The FCRA preempted state common law—you can’t sustain a defamation action against a credit bureau, no matter how wrong its reporting is—replacing it with opaque and unwieldy bureaucratic procedures for those who believe their credit bureau records are inaccurate.
The FCRA already reduces consumer welfare by keeping new entrants out of the credit reporting business. When companies edge toward providing data that might be used for credit decisions, employment screening, housing, and the like, they quickly learn to eschew that market so they can avoid the FCRA’s obligations and regulator inquests. The result? Our economy is making less intelligent decisions about credit, employment, and housing. Efficiences that would lower costs to consumers across the board are not being found.
I drew lessons from the failure of the Fair Credit Reporting Act to fix things in my paper “Reputation under Regulation: The Fair Credit Reporting Act at 40 and Lessons for the Internet Privacy Debate.”
Advertising, Credit Reporting, and ‘Anti-Objectification’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Business • Govt to supervise credit reporting for first time
Govt to supervise credit reporting for first time
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NEW YORK (AP) — The companies that determine Americans’ credit scores are about to come under government oversight for the first time.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Monday that it will start supervising the 30 largest firms that make up 94 percent of the industry. That includes the three big credit reporting firms: Equifax Inc., Experian and TransUnion.
In remarks prepared for a speech Monday, Richard Cordray, the government agency’s director, said that scorekeeping by credit bureaus plays such a large role in Americans’ financial lives, it requires scrutiny.
The CFPB said its oversight may include on-sight examinations, and that it may require credit bureaus to file reports.
Cordray said the agency’s oversight will extend to niche companies that "focus on payday loans or checking accounts, as well as resellers of credit reports and those that analyze credit report information."
The announcement wasn’t a total surprise, said Jon Ulzheimer, president of consumer education at SmartCredit.com and a former Equifax employee. He said the CFPB had hinted earlier this year that it was considering supervising the industry.
To Ulzheimer, the CFPB’s move implies that it will soon clarify what the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires of credit bureaus, a constant source of debate in the consumer credit world. When a person challenges what’s in their credit report, the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires the bureaus to investigate.
"But what exactly constitutes a reasonable investigation?" Ulzheimer asks. "The act doesn’t say."
Each of the three biggest credit reporting agencies maintains files on more than 200 million Americans. These reports are filled with details on an individual’s payment history with credit cards, mortgages, auto loans and other borrowing, applications for credit, medical account information and other financial details. Past behavior, like late payments or carrying high balances on credit cards, is used to determine credit scores.
Lenders, like banks or auto finance companies, use credit scores to measure eligibility for mortgages, credit cards and a wide variety of other consumer loans. Low scores based on missed or late payments, for instance, can mean higher interest rates or rejected applications.
There have been thousands of complaints about the bureaus by consumers who claim they are unsuccessful getting credit reporting agencies to correct inaccurate information contained within credit reports.
The protection bureau will start regulating the industry after the new rule takes effect on Sept. 30.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/ … 6-14-39-45
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Mon Jul 16, 2012 2:00 pm
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Agriculture • EPA withdraws proposed livestock reporting rule
EPA withdraws proposed livestock reporting rule
NCBA | Updated: July 16, 2012
Late Friday afternoon, July 13, 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) withdrew its proposed Clean Water Act (CWA) Section 308 CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) Reporting Rule. The rule sparked controversy within the agricultural community due to what was referred to as a serious overreach of EPA’s authority. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s (NCBA) primary concern was the likelihood the proposed rule could put the nation’s food system at risk of increased terrorist attacks. NCBA President J.D. Alexander said this move by EPA is a victory for cattlemen and women and illustrates the importance of the beef cattle community working together to educate government officials.
“Early on, we called for EPA to pull this rule. It turns out they listened. This really showcases the importance of cattlemen and women becoming engaged in the regulatory process and making sure their concerns are heard,” said Alexander. “We encourage the agency to redirect its focus to working with states and other partners to attain already publicly available information that would allow them to work toward their goal of improved water quality. This can be done in a way that does not put our food system at increased risk.”
The proposed rule required all cattle operations meeting the regulatory definition of a CAFO to report a long list of information about their operations to EPA, including latitude and longitude (or street address) of the production area, acres available for land application of manure, type and number of head and contact information for the owner or authorized representative. EPA stated it would place this information on the agency’s website in an easily searchable database, where NCBA feared extremists could access the information with the intent to do harm to cattle operations or the nation’s food system. Any non-compliance with the proposed rule would have been a violation of the CWA, which would have resulted in fines of up to $37,500 per day.
Alexander said NCBA worked with EPA to convey the privacy concerns on behalf of cattlemen and women. On Feb. 3, 2012, NCBA invited EPA to attend its annual convention in Nashville, Tenn., to discuss the proposed rule face-to-face with the beef cattle community. Ellen Gilinsky represented EPA at NCBA’s convention, where she acknowledged the industry’s biosecurity and privacy concerns. Alexander said cattlemen speaking directly with EPA officials makes a lot of difference.
“EPA resides in Washington, D.C., and seldom gets the opportunity to hear directly from the providers of food for this country,” said Alexander. “It is paramount that we continue being engaged in the regulatory process. They need to hear from us. We must not take this lightly. This recent announcement by EPA proves that we can make a difference.”
http://www.cattlenetwork.com/cattle-new … 04796.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Mon Jul 16, 2012 11:20 am
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