January 31, 2017: Chargebacks911™, a global risk technologies company and an internationally-renowned leader for risk mitigation, announces the appointment of Tracy Cray as Director of Card Scheme Compliance at Chargebacks911’s new Essex location.

Tracy Cray, former Chargebacks & Disputes Manager for The Royal Bank of Scotland, has led Europe’s most successful chargeback processing division for the majority of her 34-year tenure in the payments industry. She also chaired a number of chargeback and scheme forums, including the European Experts Chargebacks Group.

As an unrivalled expert in the field of chargeback management and risk mitigation, Tracy’s in-depth understanding of card schemes and influential relationships within the industry will serve as the cornerstone of Chargebacks911’s latest venture — services tailored to assist issuers, acquirers and enterprise-level merchants. The service will launch in Q1 in Europe and will be offered to qualified clients, backed by a performance and ROI guarantee.

Tracy says, “When it comes to chargeback management, financial institutions are burdened in many ways — it’s impossible to stay current on constantly-evolving regulations, there is little transparency regarding the processes of other entities, and an inability to maintain compliance becomes a major liability. These hidden issues have continued to accumulate without reprieve.”

According to some reports, internal chargeback-related expenses have climbed by 21% since 2015 and are expected to double in 2017.

“For this reason,” Tracy continues, “the services Chargebacks911 is offering will be a godsend to many, taking the guesswork out of the equation completely with effective results that last. I couldn’t be more pleased to lead this unprecedented industry initiative.”

Monica Eaton-Cardone, co-founder of Chargebacks911, says, “Tracy is undoubtedly the most astute chargeback expert I have met, with an undeniable and persistent approach to positively address the core source of any problem she takes on. Her in-depth understanding of the inner-workings of chargeback management is unmatched, and we’re thrilled to have her join our growing leadership team in the UK.”

Chargebacks911’s new services will include, among other things, personalised consulting and results-oriented strategies to assess current policies and procedures. By identifying oversight, errors, and unrealised opportunities, clients will experience an immediate improvement to their bottom line.

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October 14, 2016: In a decisive move, UK-based VST Enterprises has announced the addition of two former Elavon Vice Presidents to its business development arm in the US.

Joseph Cohane, ex Executive Vice President, and Stephanie Sharp, ex Vice President and Controller of the leading payment processor, bring more than 40 years of combined payments expertise and will be specialising in the financial transactions and fraud prevention functionality of VST Enterprises’ award-winning scanable symbol technology, VCode.

Designed and developed by entrepreneurial partners Louis-James Davis and Andy Giblin, the versatile VCode technology is currently being utilised across many sectors, from document verification, to unattended car park payment systems, and interactive charitable giving transactions.

Cohane said, “I am very pleased to be joining VST Enterprises. My experience tells me that this business is one of few start-ups operating in the authentication space that has the genuine capability to transform lives, and unite security protocol across verticals. I am very excited to be able to play a part in its success.”

Sharp said, “VCode presents a solution to security and authentication issues that continue to hinder the next generation of financial technology. The business is committed to international expansion. So it will be really interesting to see the impact it has on the global payments arena. I have no doubt that this will just be the beginning of even bigger things to come from the team.”

The announcement comes on the back of the news that the company has opened an office in New York, and will be opening a second office in the US in Reno later this year.

Louis-James Davis, chief executive and founder of VST Enterprises, says, “The addition of Joseph and Stephanie comes at a very important stage in our company’s progression. It marks further expansion to the US and demonstrates our commitment to being experts in our vertical markets, such as payments.

“We’ve come an incredibly long way in such a short amount of time. I believe this is due to the growing need for a solution like VCode in the market. We’re delighted to be taking the next step towards offering our scanable, secure image technology to a global and varied customer base.”

The proprietary VCode app is compatible with iOS and Android smart phones and tablets and, unlike traditional bar or QR codes, VCodes can be scanned from any screened media, from distances of up to 100m and virtually any angle. Furthermore, each code is completely unique to eliminate the problem of mainstream counterfeiting.

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Stefan Gleason 

July 12, 2016: Under certain circumstances, seemingly decent human beings are capable of horrific things.So it is with former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who parlayed his sound money bona fides into the top post at America’s private banking cartel and current issuer of our un-backed currency. In betrayal of his own stated free-market principles, Greenspan spent his tenure at the Fed pumping up financial markets with easy money and enabling runaway government spending commitments.

Today, however, the ‘maestro’ of central banking is playing a very different tune. He’s warning against an inevitable crisis resulting from the very policies he helped implement.

Perhaps, it’s a late-life crisis of conscience. Perhaps, he feels guilty. Perhaps, at 90, he just feels free to speak his mind in a way that most current and former Fed officials don’t. In any event, Alan Greenspan is very concerned about the legacy he will leave and now seems genuinely worried about the country’s financial future.

Following the Brexit shock and the market volatility that followed in its aftermath, Greenspan scolded British officials for the ‘mistake’ of allowing the vote to leave the European Union to take place. He predicted more dominos would fall. In an interview with Bloomberg last week, he said, “We are in very early days of a crisis which has got a way to go.”

It’s not surprising to hear Greenspan echo other pro-globalist voices in bemoaning the potential disintegration of the European Union. Central bankers, commercial bankers, governments, and international corporations all have vested interests in pushing for what they call ‘integration’.

Outgoing United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage declared the successful Brexit referendum ‘a victory for ordinary people’ against ‘multinationals’, ‘big merchant banks’ and ‘big politics’.As global stock markets protested, the gold market surged to new 2016 highs post-Brexit.

The success of Brexit, which defied the predictions of pollsters, may bode well for Donald Trump. His unconventional campaign for the presidency hits on similar anti-globalist, anti-establishment themes.

Meanwhile in Congress, renegade Republican Rep. Thomas Massie is pushing what he calls an ‘Amexit’ from the United Nations. Massie’s American Sovereignty Restoration Act (HR 1205) would allow the US to leave the United Nations and cease sending $8 billion per year in ‘contributions’ to the world body.

Anti-establishment politics irks elites in central banking and elsewhere who institutionally prefer the status quo. But what really worries former Fed chair Alan Greenspan isn’t the upcoming election or any bill in Congress. It’s the $19+ trillion national debt and the trillions more in future spending commitments that are already baked into the cake.

The problem, as Greenspan sees it, is the structure of Social Security, Medicare, and other ‘mandatory’ spending programs. Through them, ever growing numbers of people ‘are entitled to certain expenditures out of the budget without any reference to how it’s going to be funded. Where the productivity levels are now, we are lucky to get something even close to two percent annual growth rate. That annual growth rate of two percent is not adequate to finance the existing needs’.

Greenspan’s prognosis: “I don’t know how it’s going to resolve, but there’s going to be a crisis.”

His pessimism stems from the political reality that elected representatives lack the will to address entitlement spending. “Republicans don’t want to touch it. Democrats don’t want to touch it. They don’t even want to talk about. This is what the election should be all about in the United States. You will never hear one word from either side,” Greenspan told Bloomberg.

He is right, of course. Even self-described ‘conservative’ Republicans who tout smaller government in principle don’t actually vote for it in practice. Mathematically, they can’t.

Once you rule out cuts in military and entitlement spending, as most Republicans do, what’s left on the table to cut is small potatoes. Going after waste, fraud and abuse isn’t going to stop the bleeding of red ink as millions of Baby Boomers withdraw from the workforce and expect to collect trillions in unfunded benefits that have been promised to them.

The good news (if you’re a politician) is that under our monetary system, you don’t ever have to cut. You don’t have to ensure that your promises of future benefits can be met with revenues. You can be as fiscally irresponsible as the Federal Reserve’s willingness to expand the currency supply permits you to be. The Fed stands ready to buy up government bonds in unlimited quantities, making a sovereign default practically impossible and enabling the government to borrow at artificially low interest rates.

The government debt bubble is a product of the fiat monetary system. Under a gold standard, Congress would be limited by what it could actually extract from the people in taxes.

Here’s what one of the world’s most famous economists said recently about gold: “If we went back on the gold standard and we adhered to the actual structure of the gold standard as it existed prior to 1913, we’d be fine. Remember that the period 1870 to 1913 was one of the most aggressive periods economically that we’ve had in the United States, and that was a golden period of the gold standard.”

Remember that the period 1870 to 1913 was one of the most aggressive periods economically that we’ve had in the United States, and that was a golden period of the gold standard.”

The self-described ‘gold bug’ economist quoted above is none other than Alan Greenspan!

Yes, the longest-serving chairman of the world’s most powerful fiat money establishment.

The same Alan Greenspan who helped both Republican and Democrat administrations drive up the national debt from $2.4 trillion to $8.5 trillion in the years 1987-2006.

The same Alan Greenspan whose implicit open-ended backing of US debt markets helped Congress grow unfunded liabilities by untold trillions more than is even reported in official debt figures.

The same Alan Greenspan who engaged in shocking interventions and currency devaluations, starting with bailing out Long Term Capital Management in 1998 and followed by a blowing up of the tech bubble, and, after its crash, the housing bubble.

At last, Greenspan sees the light. Perhaps in private, he always did. Before he helmed the Fed, he was known as a free-market advocate who associated with novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand and strongly favored a gold standard. But unlike a Randian hero, Greenspan compromised his principles in his pursuit of power, fame, and social status.

Taken to its extreme, the phenomenon of Greenspan’s tenure was akin to the ‘banality of evil’, a concept that came into prominence following Hannah Arendt’s book about the Nazi trials. Arendt’s thesis, as described by author Edward Herman, was that people who carry out unspeakable crimes aren’t necessarily crazy fanatics, but rather ‘ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good bureaucrats’.

Why did Greenspan play a key role in undermining sound fiscal policies and sound money while he was at the height of his power and influence at the Fed? Why did he do so much to fuel asset bubbles and reckless debt spending? Only Alan Greenspan himself knows for sure, but we’re the ones paying the price.

Stefan Gleason is President of Money Metals Exchange This article was originally published on Money Metals Exchange

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Suparna Goswami Bhattacharya

February 2, 2016: Europe had been in the news in 2015, not every time for the right reasons though. Grexit, the Volkswagen scandal, migration crisis, Paris attacks were some of the low points which made economists and investors wonder whether or not to pin their hopes on this continent for 2016.

Though shakiness in the world economy, oil price slump, China’s slow growth did contribute to the sombre mood, not much improvement in the scenario is expected.

Angela Bouzanis, senior economist at FocusEconomics, believes that Europe’s recovery will continue in 2016. “We see Eurozone economy expanding 1.6%, slightly above what we predicted in 2015 (1.5%), amid solid domestic demand and continuation of an accommodative monetary policy,” she says.

Dan Kemp, Chief Investment Officer, EMEA, Morningstar, an investment research and management firm, says that while looking at Europe one needs to separate economic outlook from that of capital markets. “In economic terms, there is clear strength in business and consumer survey data and increased support from domestic demand. These indicate underlying trends remain robust,” says Kemp. However, in capital market terms, much of the good economic news appears to have been already priced into European equities and, consequently, most equity markets look expensive. “The risks appear to be on downside. Opportunities stem mainly from the structure of their capital markets, like their exposure to energy companies,” he said.

Though energy companies have been a drag on returns, the fact is that they are now materially underpriced and, therefore, represent an attractive long-term investment opportunity. “As we create our expected returns at a country and regional level from the bottom up, the value we perceive in these stocks is having a positive impact on our expected returns for those countries with significant exposure to energy companies,” he says.

However, a number of challenges remain, namely the political landscape, persistent high unemployment and very low inflation expectations. In addition, while a weak euro is conducive to export growth, external conditions are not. The emerging market slowdown, particularly in China, and overall pattern of slowing global trade will weigh on growth prospects this year.

Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of Age of Stagnation (published as A Banquet of Consequences in UK, Europe, Australia and NZ), says, “One has to understand that Europe’s tentative recovery was driven by negative short term rates, massive QE, a weaker euro (driven in part by these policies) and low oil prices. But the continent has a deteriorating outlook.”

For instance, German exports to emerging markets are slowing. Exports in August 2015 for Germany were 5.2 per cent lower than July, the sharpest monthly fall since the financial crisis, according to the national statistics office. Germany, which happens to be Europe’s biggest exporter, sends 6.5% of its exports to China, which has been experiencing a slowdown.

“Additionally, the Volkswagen emissions scandal has brought into question much vaunted European technical prowess. European debt problems remain unresolved. In the aftermath of the attacks in Paris, the French government has announced that they will not abide by deficit and debt limits. Italy refuses to bring public finances under control, despite a worsening debt-to-GDP ratio,” says Das.

As far as Greece is concerned, it is likely to be in spotlight this year as well. “Our panel sees Greece’s economy worsening this year, as tough economic reforms and austerity measures are expected to dampen private consumption and stifle the recovery. High unemployment, tax increases and pension reductions will likely push the economy to a 0.7% fall this year,” says Bouzanis

To be honest, Greece’s situation remains in flux. While the current government has been largely compliant with last summer’s bailout agreement, a number of key and controversial reforms still need to be passed. “The government holds a slim three-seat majority and political stability (or willingness to comply with creditor demands) is far from guaranteed. In addition, in the long-run, there is a large risk that this bailout could suffer from the same obstacles as its predecessor: foot-dragging on reforms, poorer than expected economic growth or political upheavals and the question of request of debt relief is yet to be answered,” adds Bouzanis.

Das echoes these views. “The government will find it difficult to meet bailout conditions raising the issue of default, Grexit or both, amidst growing reluctance for further support,” he says.

Greece apart, Portugal too has nothing positive to offer. Its new government, an uneasy coalition of foes, has sworn allegiance to the EU and the euro but is seeking major concessions. “With the highest total debt-to-GDP in the EU, a Portuguese debt restructuring, explicit or de facto, is not unimaginable,” Das says.

Despite positive talks, Spain’s public finances remain poor and unemployment unsustainably high. The recovery remains uneven with excessive reliance on domestic consumption and exports, primarily automobiles, to other European countries. With no clear winner emerging in the 2015 election, Spain remains vulnerable to political instability.

Adding to all these woes is Europe’s refugee crisis. “The current refugee situation in Europe is incredibly complex.  However, it is worth noting that the productive capacity of Europe has increased through the influx of a large number of additional workers,” says Kemp. The key challenge faced by governments is how to quickly integrate these new arrivals and manage the additional strain on the social infrastructure of the countries they settle in.

Das says that though Europe’s refugee crisis may boost economic activity but it is expensive, at around €10,000 per refugee per year initially, putting pressure on weak finances. “It has also highlighted deep divisions within the EU. Serious opposition to immigration and free movement of people required by the Schengen treaty has emerged.”

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IFM Correspondent

October 8, 2014: Holmdel-based Vonage Holdings Corp. on October 7, 2014 announced the appointment of Alan Masarek, former Google Inc executive, as CEO of the company. The appointment will be effective November 6, 2014. Masarek succeeds Marc Lefar, who is retiring from the CEO post and the board of directors.

“Alan is a proven business leader with more than 20 years of C-level experience at technology-centric companies that span corporate, venture and entrepreneurial settings,” said Jeffrey Citron, chairman, Vonage Holdings.

“Alan’s leadership qualities, deep experience in technology innovation and proven ability to develop breakthrough products and services that drive profitable growth, make him the ideal choice to be Vonage’s CEO. The board is confident in Alan’s ability to take Vonage into its next phase of growth and innovation, and in the overall future of the company under his leadership.”

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