Research Study on Ongoing Crime Spree by Wall Street Mega Banks Gets News Blackout: Here’s Why

Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall St. On Parade
 
One day before Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee held an historic grilling of the CEOs of the mega banks on Wall Street, the nonprofit watchdog, Better Markets, released an in-depth research report on “Wall Street’s Six Biggest Bailed-Out Banks: Their RAP Sheets & Their Ongoing Crime Spree.” The report detailed facts, figures and this inescapable conclusion:

“[Six Wall Street mega banks] have engaged in—and continue to engage in—a crime spree that spans the violation of almost every law and rule imaginable. Taking the breadth and depth of their illegal conduct as a whole, the six biggest banks in the country look like criminal enterprises with RAP sheets that would make most career criminals green with envy. That was the case not just before the 2008 crash, but also during and after the crash and their lifesaving bailouts…In fact, the number of cases against the banks has actually increased relative to the pre-crash era.”

The six mega banks profiled in the report are: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo.

A reliable source tells us that all major business media received the report on Tuesday, April 9. We know that Politico had the report by 8:00 a.m. because its “Morning Money” column provided a small news nugget at that time announcing that the report was out. Politico did not follow up, however, with any detailed coverage of the shocking revelations in the report.

Wall Street On Parade, after carefully reading and digesting the report, published an article on its contents the next morning, April 10. Then we began to hear from our outraged readers, who wanted to know why they weren’t reading about this report at major business media outlets. We checked the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Reuters, CNBC, and CNN. We could find no mention of the Better Markets report. (We checked again this morning. There is still a news blackout.)

We know that the Wall Street Journal was aware of the report because Lalita Clozel, a banking regulation reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Tweeted on April 10 that Democrats in the House Financial Services Committee room were handing out the report to journalists while the Chair of the Committee, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, was introducing the bank CEOs.

There are four words in this outstanding report from Better Markets that rendered it unpalatable to corporate business media: “rap sheets” and “criminal enterprise.” We searched Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times back to 2004 to see if at any time they had used the words “rap sheet” to describe the unprecedented serial crime sprees of these Wall Street mega banks. They had not. 

Read more

US Congressman Dennis Kucinich: "The US is under attack from within"

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg

Personally, I'm horrified by the fact that Goldman Sachs goons are in total control of the Trump administration's economic policy. I'm also horrified that our new President's first overseas trip will be to the terrorist state of Saudi Arabia, a autocratic, brutal monarchy with undeniable ties to 9/11. I'm likewise disgusted by Attorney General Jefferson Sessions' oppressive and uncivilized relaunch of the misguided and disastrous "war on drugs." Finally, I'm very troubled by the fact Mike Flynn attempted to disrupt a military operation using Syrian Kurds to rout ISIS in Raqqa because Turkey didn't like it, given he was working as a paid agent of Turkey months earlier and never disclosed it.

There are a plethora of things to be deeply concerned about when it comes to Trump, yet the coup attempt against him being launched by elements of the deep state, corporate media and Hillary dead-ender Democrats is more concerning still. It's obvious what's happening right now is not a sincere attempt to hold a President accountable, or fight him on policy or personnel choices. Rather, this all seems to be a very deliberate and premeditated attempt to remove him from office.

What's so troubling about what I just wrote is not so much that I think it, but that it's becoming accepted truth by a growing number of mainstream Americans. For example, can you believe CNBC actually published a post with the following title?  

Read more

Trump Picks Former Goldman Partner And Soros Employee As Finance Chairman

Flashback via Zero Hedge

 

In an oddly ironic twist, today Donald Trump announced that he has picked as chairman of his newly launched fundraising operation none other than a former employee of the bank he has repeatedly criticized in the past, and which he used as a foil to criticize Ted Cruz: Goldman Sachs. 

Trump announced that heading up his own personal fundraising operation as national finance chairman will be Steven Mnuchin, a long-time business associate, chairman and CEO of the hedge fund Dune Capital. More importantly, however, he spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs where he was most recently a Partner, having built a fortung of $46 million before launching his own hedge fund.

While employed at Goldman, he purchased the remains of IndyMac Bank (now known as OneWest Bank), the Pasadena, California-based mortgage lender that collapsed in 2008. "Notoriously press-shy, the executive endured 2011 protests on the lawn of his Bel Air mansion by foreclosed homeowners angered at his lender's handling of soured mortgages."
As Zero Hedge readers are familiar, Trump often critized his main competitor Ted Cruz for his links to the bank because of loans used to finance Cruz’s Senate campaign, and because Heidi Cruz was a one-time employee of Goldman. "I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton,” Trump said in one debate.

He had no qualms, however, in hiring one of the most prominent Goldman alums to raise money for him.

Read more

Donald Trump’s True Colors Emerge as He Snuggles up to Wall Street

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg

Earlier this week, in the post Donald Trump Will Meet War Criminal Henry Kissinger, I pointed out the following:

Since clinching the Republican nomination, Trump’s true colors have started to emerge. He named a former Goldman Sachs partner to run his fundraising efforts, he named petty authoritarian, gangster wannabe Chris Christie to run his transition team, and he chose “everyone’s a terrorist” Rudy Giuliani as his planned head of the domestic gestapo, the Department of Homeland Security. He’s also been endorsed by Orc King Sheldon Adelson, who said he was prepared to spend $100 millionto get him elected. Now he’s off to kiss the blood-soaked hands of Henry Kissinger.

Apparently, that was just the beginning. Now he’s out publicly pandering to Wall Street in ways even Hillary Clinton wouldn’t dare do.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said he intends to release a detailed economic policy platform in two weeks that would dismantle nearly all of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, he said in an interview Tuesday with Reuters.

“I would say it’ll be close to a dismantling of Dodd-Frank,” Mr. Trump said, according to the Reuters report. “Dodd-Frank is a very negative force, which has developed a very bad name.”

Read more

Goldman Sachs Rep Discusses Militarizing the Moon

American Intelligence Report

The idea of colonizing Earth’s moon and creating a whole world from scratch has always been a notion of science-fiction, until now NBC reports. The European Space Agency has put in motion a plan to build a ‘moon village‘ accessible to ESA member states and other nations globally. The village will offer fresh business, leisure and community opportunities. “A village is something where different people are gathering with different capabilities, different opportunities, and then they build a community,” Johann-Dietrich Wörner, director general of the ESA, said during this years 32nd Space Symposium. “It’s not one village with some houses, a church.”

As space technology is advancing, the amount of time to reach local planets and moons is decreasing. Forget witnessing a sunset, how about an Earthset? The moon has also been slated to be a tourist and vacationing spot, and the aspirations do not stop  there.

“I think we should go first to the moon and then further on,” Wörner said.

“I would not call Mars the ultimate goal. I am quite sure humans will go further,” he added.
The mission will also make use of state-of-the-art robot and 3-d printing technology .

Robots will land on the moon prior and use 3D printers to construct a safe environment, including daily life-support requirements for travelers and permanent residents.

It’s unsure of what type of government will be established on the moon in the early phases of development, if any.

However, it would not be to far-fetched to believe that the moon would be run by corporate policies, rather than a community run system. Majority of the colony will be employed by big investors to accomplish work on the Earth’s moon.

Read more

US-NATO Military Deployments, Economic Warfare, Goldman Sachs and the Next Financial Meltdown

Michel Chossoudovsky
Black Listed News

What is the relationship between war in a military theater and “economic warfare”? An act of war is invariably an economic undertaking which supports dominant corporate interests. The conduct of US-NATO military operations is carried out on behalf of powerful financial institutions. 

US led wars in the Middle East under the humanitarian mantle of the “global war on terrorism” largely serve the interests of Wall Street, the Anglo-American oil conglomerates, the so-called ‘defense contractors”, the biotech conglomerates (Monsanto et al), Big Pharma and the corporate media.

But modern warfare is by no means limited to the sphere of military and intelligence operations.

Washington not only imposes economic sanctions on countries which do not support its imperial agenda, it also fosters the outright destabilization of national economies. While the Pentagon and NATO coordinate military operations against sovereign countries, Wall Street carries out concurrent destabilizing actions on financial markets including the rigging of the oil, gold and foreign exchange markets directed against Russia and China.

It’s called “financial warfare”, it’s part of the same global agenda, it’s implemented alongside and in coordination with the Worldwide deployment of the US-NATO’s military machine.

In this regard, Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” directed against China involving the deployment of US naval forces in the South China Sea, is reinforced through concurrent destabilizing actions on the Shanghai stock exchange. The ultimate intent is to undermine –through non-military means– the national economy of the People’s Republic of China.

War and Financial Warfare

Is financial warfare coordinated with political decision-making pertaining to major military and intelligence operations?

Acts of financial warfare require intelligence;  they often require consultation and coordination at the highest levels of government. While the decision making process between the military-intelligence apparatus and the corporate financial system is by no means integrated, it nonetheless overlaps through a system of cross appointments and consultations.

Overlapping appointments

Amply documented, the mega-banking institutions on Wall Street and their related hedge funds exert their influence at the highest levels of the US government including the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House.

The system of cross-appointments together with corporate lobbying is part of this process.  National security advisers and former Pentagon officials are appointed to the World Bank,  etc.  Former prime ministers, senior government officials take on consulting positions with major banking institutions,  CIA officials are involved as advisers in key trade negotiations, etc. Conversely, Wall Street bankers are appointed to key positions in government.

In early August, Goldman Sachs appointed NATO’s former Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen as a financial consultant.

Over the last five years (2009-2014), Rasmussen was actively involved in coordinating NATO’s humanitarian bombing raids in the Middle East not to mention NATO military deployments on Russia’s doorstep in Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and the Black Sea.

During his stint as Prime Minister of Denmark (2001-2009), Rasmussen was involved (under a neoliberal policy agenda) in dismantling Denmark’s welfare state alongside the privatization of state assets.
Rasmussen’s consulting advice will be used as part of Goldman’s political lobbying in the EU, namely the process of influencing political and strategic decision making.

Moreover, Goldman’s multibillion dollar investment decisions, its inside trading operations, its various speculative actions on the commodities, forex, precious metals markets, etc, require detailed inside information/ political coordination pertaining to geopolitical and military affairs.

Rasmussen joins a long list of  prominent officials and political personalities who are acting as consultants for Goldman Sachs.

Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel who was Obama’s Chief of Staff, was also consultant to Goldman. His role “was to “introduce us to people”, in the words of one Goldman Sachs partner at the time.”

Peter Sutherland who was EU commissioner, trade negotiator and subsequently Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was appointed in 2005 to Goldman Sachs as a non-executive Chairman. He ended his 20 year stint with Goldman in 2015.

Robert Zoellick, former president of the World Bank joined Goldman Sachs in 2013 as chairman of the bank’s board of international advisers. Zoellick had previously held several high ranking positions in the US administration. He was Deputy Secretary of State (2005–2006) under the Bush administration.

It works both ways: government officials are appointed to Goldman; in turn Goldman Sachs officials are appointed to key positions in government.  George W. Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson (2006-2009) (image left) was a former Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO. He was appointed to the Treasury two years before the 2008 financial crash.

These appointments enable Goldman Sachs among other Wall Street mega banks to manipulate government policy.

It also provides them with an inroad into the corridors of the Treasury, not to mention the central banks: e.g, the notorious appointment of  a former Goldman Sachs official (and Canadian citizen) Mark Carney to the position of governor of the Bank of England. Carney previously held  the position of Governor of the Bank of Canada. He also heads the G20′s Financial Stability Board.

Mario Draghi, was vice chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs International (2002–2005), before his appointment as Governor of the Bank of Italy (2005-2009). In 2011, he was appointed Governor of the European Central Bank (ECB).

Goldman Sachs is a Trojan Horse with its former banking officials deployed in key governmental positions.  These appointments provide Goldman Sachs with the ability to influence and oversee the conduct of macro-economic policy.

Moreover, their former officials will provide them with inside information emanating from within the governmental structure. –i.e market rigging by major financial institutions will invariably require advanced knowledge regarding actions or decisions taken  within the government and military-intelligence apparatus.

Regulating The Next Wall Street Financial Crash 

Barely acknowledged by the financial media, another notorious appointment of a Goldman official pertains to the Security and Exchanges Commission (SEC)  In May 2015, Goldman official Andrew J. “Buddy” Donohue  was appointed SEC chief of staff for Mary Jo White which enables him to “regulate Wall Street” so to speak on behalf of Wall Street.

This is a timely appointment. Financial markets including the multi-trillion trade in derivatives are in a state of disarray. They are exceedingly unstable, largely as a result of market rigging and speculative activity by powerful actors, not to mention the lack of regulatory procedures.

Goldman Sachs Inc. played a central role in the 2008 financial meltdown, with their former chairman and CEO Henry Paulson in charge of the US Treasury.

In a bitter irony, Institutional speculators  are in charge of regulating financial markets. The next financial crash, were it to occur, will be be “regulated” by the SEC with former Goldman Sachs official Andrew J. “Buddy” Donohue in the driver’s seat, acting on behalf of a handful of “too big to fail, too big to jail” financial institutions.

Let us not despair: Goldman Sachs does not control the US Treasury.  It’s in the hands of a former Citigroup official Jacob Lew -who according to expert opinion is slated to act “responsibly” in the case of a stock market crisis.

During his stint at Citigroup which preceded the 2008 financial crisis, Lew was in charge of a speculative hedge fund investment unit which consisted according to a 2010 Huffington Post Report in shorting or betting “on the housing market to collapse.”:

[Concern was expressed when he was appointed Budget Director regarding] his unit’s investments in a hedge fund that bet on the housing market to collapse — a reality suffered by millions of American homeowners.  … But in an age in which the housing collapse led to a financial upheaval that cost 8 million American jobs and plunged the nation into its deepest recession since the Great Depression, bets [coordinated by Jack Lew] that profited off the collapse may not be perceived in the best light.

It is worth noting that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was also involved in what is best described as “legal tax evasion” through the transfer of Citigroup funds to the Cayman islands. According to the Weekly Standard (February 2013), Jack Lew:

“oversaw as many as a hundred Cayman Island investments when he worked at Citi Bank as chief operating officer of the alternative investment services unit, SEC disclosures reveal. It has previously been reported that Lew himself had been invested in a fund that was based in the Cayman Islands.  …
SEC documents ending in the year 2007 reveal that at least 90 subsidiaries of Citi were based in the Cayman Islands. A couple weeks later, in January 2008, Jack Lew took the high-ranking executive job at Citi.
Names of the Citi subsidiaries include: Asia Mortgage Finance, Azabu Credit Management Company Ltd., Alternative Investments MGR, Ltd., Asia Enterprise III Offshore L.P., Baltic Pharma Limited, BISYS Hedge Fund Director Services Limited, Brennan Limited, and many, many more.
By the end of 2008 that number of Citi subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, which fell under the jurisdiction Lew was in charge of, jumped to 113.
In the 2012 presidential campaign, the Obama campaign called Mitt Romney’s own Cayman Island investments “bets against America.”
But only months after the election ended, Obama nominated his former chief of staff Jack Lew, who himself had similar investments and even oversaw investment funds there, to be the next treasury secretary.
When asked this morning [February 13, 2013]  at a Capitol Hill hearing about his investment in the Cayman Islands-based fund, Lew plead ignorance. He claimed today that he “actually didn’t know” the fund he invested in was housed in the Cayman Islands. Besides, he said, my “benefit was really very small.”

Financial Meltdown. Could it happen Again?

Who are the main actors?

We are dealing with a complex process of rigging and manipulation. This article has skimmed the surface focussing on selected key appointments on behalf of Wall Street’s mega banks.

Let us address the issue of so-called “fiscal responsibility”:

A speculator and tax evader (Jack Lew) is in charge of fiscal and monetary policy at the US Treasury and the regulation of major US stock markets at the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) is in the hands of Goldman Sachs, which also means that the SEC cannot be used to indict Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup et al. on charges of inside trading and financial fraud.

What's the real story behind the $3.8 trillion Chinese correction?

Pepe Escobar
RT.com

The recent Mother of All Corrections in Chinese stocks - which wiped out a $3.8 trillion on paper - inevitably led the usual US "experts" to forecast, once again, China's imminent collapse. Hong Kong even resuscitated the "regime change" meme.

Nonsense.

The roller coaster lasted a few days. And then it was gone. Significantly, major US funds - including Fidelity and Goldman Sachs - were among the first to declare the turbulence over, and move on. Goldman Sachs, by the way, soon reverted to bullish. Its chief China economist, Kinger Lau, predicted that Shanghai will rally 27 percent over the next 12 months.

So this is not a bubble. At least not yet. Beijing has a lot of tools to - as newspeak goes - "support the market." According to Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping's maxim, "Socialism with Chinese characteristics," which will stop at nothing to control the "irrational exuberance" of the markets.

The IMF - considering its disaster capitalism record all across the developing world, not to mention the post-1997 Asian financial crisis - is never a reliable source. But in this case, IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard at least did not make a fool of himself; he emphasized China's casino stock market "doesn't reflect on the fundamentals" of its economy. The slump, he added, "was very much a sideshow."

Read more
 

Banker Deaths Climb to 15, as Goldman Sachs Managing Director Found Dead

The Daily Sheeple

Another high level banker has been found dead.

Nicholas Valtz, a 39-year old managing director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York, was found dead Sunday afternoon in Napeague Harbor where he had reportedly gone earlier that day to kiteboard. Valtz’ body was found still tied to his kite.

Kiteboarding, also called kitesurfing, combines elements of windsurfing and paragliding which can garner speeds of up to 40 mph. His brother told Bloomberg that Valtz was still new to the sport.

“As a cross-asset sales executive, he helped manage orders for trading clients and pitch them products and ideas among different types of securities. His wife, Sashi Valtz, also works at Goldman Sachs as head of global third-party research sales, according to her LinkedIn profile,” Bloomberg reported.

While the majority of articles have made it clear the police are still investigating this incident and the cause of death is yet unknown, the Daily Mail already ran with the headline, “Goldman Sachs managing director, 39, found dead after kiteboarding accident“.

The incident marks the 15th reported death of a senior banking and finance executive in recent months as just a few weeks ago, JP Morgan Executive Director Julian Knott shot his wife Alita to death with a shotgun before turning the weapon on himself.

Zero Hedge posted the recap of recent banker deaths below after a 52-year-old female banker at France’s Bred-Banque-Populaire jumped from the 14th floor of the bank’s Paris headquarters back in April:

*Note: The count is not actually 16, as #2 on the list Karl Slym was not actually a banker but the managing director of a major car company.

Read more

Hillary Clinton: Warmonger For The Bankster Elite

Silver Bear Cafe

Unfortunately, it takes the media mouthpiece of the Russian government to tell the truth about Hillary Clinton and the War Party.

You’ll never get the truth from the U.S. government’s media mouthpiece who self-righteously and disingenuously claim they are independent and “fair and balanced” (cue laugh track).

Clinton, of course, is no different than your garden variety Republican, including the any number of neocons. All of them are propped up by the military-industrial-intelligence complex and the banksters who run the show and who laughingly pretend we all live in a pluralistic democracy. Of course, anybody who has more than two brain cells to rub together and is not in serious denial knows we live in an authoritarian plutocracy run for the sake of a small clique of mega-rich and powerful global internationalists.

Read more

Genetically Modified Crony Capitalism, The Monsanto Infographic

Crony Capitalism

Monsanto has done a particularly good job of working its way into the nooks and crannies of government. They are right up there with GE and Goldman Sachs.

Forget ".Com"; Welcome To ".Luxury" With Violin-Shaped Pools & Vitamin-C-Infused Showers

Zero Hedge

With Thomas Piketty's book on inequality topping the charts among the book-reading common-folk, ambitious ex-bankers are enjoying the high-life in ways not even Gordon Gecko could have dreamed up. If greed is good, then this is better as former Lehman execs sell the first ".luxury" website domain names and ex-Goldmanites pitch "curated environments that optimize health" for home living with 'Vitamin-C-infused showers'. Of course, as one banker opines philosophically, "it's all about balance...it's important that people who have the capital are making it as useful as possible."

As Bloomberg reports, two former Goldman bankers (Jay Dweck and Paul Scialla) are launching Live Better Systems LLC...

“We’re launching this brand and launching this movement,” Paul Scialla said before a tour of the $50 million penthouse his company, Delos Living LLC, is selling with posture-boosting cork floors, purified air and antimicrobial coatings in New York’s East Village. “There’s so much attention focused on the environmental impact of buildings, and we didn’t think there was enough focus on the human.”

...

Scialla, 40, was co-head of U.S. interest-rate products cash trading at Goldman Sachs last year when he and his twin brother Peter left the firm’s partnership pool to expand Delos. It’s bringing “curated environments that optimize health” to Las Vegas hotel suites, Philadelphia dorms and Los Angeles offices, according to a website that describes lighting built around circadian rhythms and Vitamin C-infused showers.

...

“If we can scale this and get this to as many people as we can through real estate, that’s a real big win,” he said, citing hospitals and affordable apartments as options, along with housing for Haitian orphans the company has pledged to build. “Anything with four walls and a roof can be infused with this thought.”

Other former bankers working on what they call boutique projects are more explicit about selling to their own kind.

Read more
 

Goldman Sachs Drops a Bombshell on Wall Street

Wall St. on Parade

The caribou have vanished on Wall Street and the wolves are in a feeding frenzy against each other. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Goldman Sachs is considering shuttering its Sigma X dark pool, a business that brought in $7.17 billion from equity trading in 2013, before accounting charges.

There are only three reasons that a Wall Street mega bank shutters a $7 billion business instead of selling it: it’s crazy; its regulators told it to shutter it; there’s more bad news ahead about this business and the firm is trying to get out in front of the fallout. We know Goldman Sachs is only crazy like a fox, so that leaves options two and three.

On March 13, Bloomberg News reported that Goldman Sachs sent refund checks to some of its customers for trades that had occurred in August 2011 where it had failed to execute trades at the National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO), a requirement under U.S. securities laws. Whether that is happening routinely within dark pools is anyone’s guess since…well, they’re dark…and the Securities and Exchange Commission still doesn’t have a consolidated audit mechanism able to keep up with the market it is charged with overseeing.

What triggered this benevolent refund action on the part of Goldman Sachs has yet to be explained. Who discovered the errors is left unanswered as is why we are just learning about something that occurred in 2011 three years later.

There is also the major Goldman snafu that disrupted markets last summer. On August 20, 2013, Goldman sent thousands of erroneous trading orders for options into the exchanges, wildly moving prices in the opening minutes of trading. The problem was blamed on a computer systems upgrade gone awry. Most of the trades were cancelled by the exchanges involved but the matter evoked outrage at the top of the firm since it put Goldman’s customers on the other sides of those trades at risk and could have resulted in big trading losses and/or lawsuits to Goldman and alienation of key clients.

Read more
 

How the Bankers Stand to Profit from the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Susan Posel
 
Concerning the future of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the president is expected to accelerate talks and negotiations to play import/export with other nations to ensure profits for rich countries and control one-third of global trade.

Payoffs for successful positioning regarding the TPP have left some bankers just a little bit richer.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan & Chase, Blackstone Group, Fannie Mae, Northern Trust and Northrop Grumman extend financial kickbacks for government service.

Stefan Selig, investment banker for Bank of America (BoA) has been paid an estimated $9 million in bonuses and $5.1 million in incentives to work on international trade with the Department of Commerce.
Citigroup will offer executive contracts for “full time high level positions with the US government or regulatory body.”

Michael Froman, former Citigroup banker and current representative for US Trade has been given more than $4 million to join the Obama administration; while still receiving millions in investment funds.

Read more

Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail

Comment: The superb Matt Taibbi offers another slice of reality about the Banksters and this time he's focussed on HSBC. 

I'd been with this bank for years and years. I only recently moved to a building society which is by far the lesser of two evils as its run by members as a mutual trust effectively, so it doesn't have shareholders. (I suppose these are credit unions or savings and loans organisations in the states). 

Laziness and convenience had stopped me from making the move. But the hypocrisy finally got my goat and I switched accounts which was surprisingly easy thanks to relatively new method called, unsurprisingly: "SWITCH".  So, those of you who haven't don't have all your funds in one basket and spread them over a wide area - preferably Building Societies.  Another re-run of 2008 global financial crash is coming and it's likely to be a whole lot bigger.

Hopefully HSBC's demise and the current system of banking as we know it is not far off.

--------------------------

 

 Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone

The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses.

People may have outrage fatigue about Wall Street, and more stories about billionaire greedheads getting away with more stealing often cease to amaze. But the HSBC case went miles beyond the usual paper-pushing, keypad-punching­ sort-of crime, committed by geeks in ties, normally associated­ with Wall Street. In this case, the bank literally got away with murder – well, aiding and abetting it, anyway.

Daily Beast: HSBC Report Should Result in Prosecutions, Not Just Fines, Say Critics

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that "they make the guys on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.

"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business."

That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis. What is different about this settlement is that the Justice Department, for the first time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular kind of criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap for HSBC might undermine the world economy. "Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized."

It was the dawn of a new era. In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life. But now, when you're Too Big to Jail, you can cop to laundering terrorist cash and violating the Trading With the Enemy Act, and not only will you not be prosecuted for it, but the government will go out of its way to make sure you won't lose your license. Some on the Hill put it to me this way: OK, fine, no jail time, but they can't even pull their charter? Are you kidding?

But the Justice Department wasn't finished handing out Christmas goodies. A little over a week later, Breuer was back in front of the press, giving a cushy deal to another huge international firm, the Swiss bank UBS, which had just admitted to a key role in perhaps the biggest antitrust/price-fixing case in history, the so-called LIBOR scandal, a massive interest-rate­rigging conspiracy involving hundreds of trillions ("trillions," with a "t") of dollars in financial products. While two minor players did face charges, Breuer and the Justice Department worried aloud about global stability as they explained why no criminal charges were being filed against the parent company.

"Our goal here," Breuer said, "is not to destroy a major financial institution."

A reporter at the UBS presser pointed out to Breuer that UBS had already been busted in 2009 in a major tax-evasion case, and asked a sensible question. "This is a bank that has broken the law before," the reporter said. "So why not be tougher?"

"I don't know what tougher means," answered the assistant attorney general.

Also known as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC has always been associated with drugs. Founded in 1865, HSBC became the major commercial bank in colonial China after the conclusion of the Second Opium War. If you're rusty in your history of Britain's various wars of Imperial Rape, the Second Opium War was the one where Britain and other European powers basically slaughtered lots of Chinese people until they agreed to legalize the dope trade (much like they had done in the First Opium War, which ended in 1842).

A century and a half later, it appears not much has changed. With its strong on-the-ground presence in many of the various ex-colonial territories in Asia and Africa, and its rich history of cross-cultural moral flexibility, HSBC has a very different international footprint than other Too Big to Fail banks like Wells Fargo or Bank of America. While the American banking behemoths mainly gorged themselves on the toxic residential-mortgage trade that caused the 2008 financial bubble, HSBC took a slightly different path, turning itself into the destination bank for domestic and international scoundrels of every possible persuasion.

Three-time losers doing life in California prisons for street felonies might be surprised to learn that the no-jail settlement Lanny Breuer worked out for HSBC was already the bank's third strike. In fact, as a mortifying 334-page report issued by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last summer made plain, HSBC ignored a truly awesome quantity of official warnings.

In April 2003, with 9/11 still fresh in the minds of American regulators, the Federal Reserve sent HSBC's American subsidiary a cease-and-desist­ letter, ordering it to clean up its act and make a better effort to keep criminals and terrorists from opening accounts at its bank. One of the bank's bigger customers, for instance, was Saudi Arabia's Al Rajhi bank, which had been linked by the CIA and other government agencies to terrorism. According to a document cited in a Senate report, one of the bank's founders, Sulaiman bin Abdul Aziz Al Rajhi, was among 20 early financiers of Al Qaeda, a member of what Osama bin Laden himself apparently called the "Golden Chain." In 2003, the CIA wrote a confidential report about the bank, describing Al Rajhi as a "conduit for extremist finance." In the report, details of which leaked to the public by 2007, the agency noted that Sulaiman Al Rajhi consciously worked to help Islamic "charities" hide their true nature, ordering the bank's board to "explore financial instruments that would allow the bank's charitable contributions to avoid official Saudi scrutiny." (The bank has denied any role in financing extremists.)

Read more

 

Bailout Architect Runs For California Governor; World Laughs

 

Neel Kashkari

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone

I want to apologize for this space being blank for quite some time. I actually spent the bulk of the last two days on a long blog post about the "Dr. V." story in Grantland. But then I got all the way to the end, and realized I was completely wrong about the entire thing.

So, I spiked my own piece. Now I've been in Talk Radio-style "This is totally dead air, Barry" territory for about two weeks. I could swear I saw a cobweb when I logged on this morning.

So thank God for Neel Kashkari, and the news that this goofball footnote caricature of the bailout era has decided to run for Governor of California. Never in history has there been an easier subject for a blog post.

If you don't remember Kashkari's name, you might be excused – he was actually better known, in his 15 minutes of fame five years ago, as "The 35 year-old dingbat from Goldman someone put in charge of handing out $700 billion bailout dollars."

Now you remember. That guy! Neel Kashkari when he first entered the world of politics was a line item, usually the last entry in a list of ex-Goldman employees handed prominent government and/or regulatory positions, as in, ". . . and, lastly, Neel Kashkari, the heretofore unknown Goldman banker put in charge of the TARP bailout program . . ."

Kashkari was not just a former Goldman banker handed a high government post – he was a former Goldman banker handed a high government post by a former Goldman banker, in this case former Goldman CEO and then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

Neel was also the human parallel to the original TARP proposal written by Paulson, which was famously just three pages long.

Paulson's TARP proposal was essentially the last, unaired episode of Beavis and Butthead, with the three pages of script just containing a single scene in which Butthead walks into the U.S. Senate and says, "Can you, uh, like, give us 700 billion dollars? Uh-huh-huh."

Kashkari then was more or less an equally blank slate, a little-known tech banker from Goldman's San Francisco office who somehow ended up being Paulson's choice to administer a bailout that Paulson wanted to feature no oversight whatsoever. The original three-page proposal specified no review "by any court of law or any administrative agency."

It never came to that, not exactly – Paulson had to expand his three-page proposal – but it's worth remembering now that the Treasury's original plan for the bailout was to give literally unlimited powers to distribute $700 billion of taxpayer money to a low-level banker that prior to 2006, even Hank Paulson had never heard of.

So Kashkari takes the job as bailout czar and starts hurling fistfuls of cash at the banks, in a fashion that turned out later to have been beyond haphazard. Critically, even though the Treasury promised only to give out TARP funds to institutions that were "healthy" and "viable," Kashkari had no protocol in place to even decide whether a bailout recipient was solvent or not.

They forked over billions in cash to failing institutions and then failed to enforce crucial provisions, like for instance measures put in place to prevent executives from bailout-out companies from giving themselves huge bonuses.

This latter failure was what led to one of Kashkari's more infamous public appearances, in which Maryland congressman Elijah Cummings raked Kashkari over the coals for allowing AIG executives to give themselves $503 million in bonuses. "I wouldn't want to be asking my friend for some money to stay afloat," hissed Cummings. "Then my friend, who can barely afford to go to McDonald's, sees me in a restaurant costing $150 a meal. There's absolutely something wrong with that picture!" He added:

I'm just wondering how you feel about an AIG giving $503 million worth of bonuses on the one hand, and accepting $154 billion from hard-working taxpayers. You know, because I'm trying to make sure you get it. What really bothers me is all these other people who are lined up. They say, well, is Kashkari a chump?

After this "chump" episode, and others, Kashkari apparently became despondent. He and his wife reportedly were particularly upset by a snickering item in Gawker. The item read, "Financial Crisis Taking a Toll on Our Favorite Asshole Banker," and made the neatly cruel observation that that Kashkari, who was a fit/lean/bald banker of Paulsonian persuasion when he arrived in Washington, had begun "putting on classic stress-related weight under his chin."

The item featured before and after photos. The "after" photo was shot from just below chin level. It was brutal.

Now, a lot of people have been ripped in Gawker. I think everyone with a Q rating above 0.00003 has been ripped in Gawker. I personally remember having to Google-image Peter Beinart because Gawker described me as looking like the computer-generated love child of Beinart and Ashton Kutcher. It's an Internet-age rite of passage and they give great service – I mean, Gawker's insults are almost always really good. Probably most people who get ripped on the site flip out at first, and then laugh about it later.

Not Kashkari. He was so mortified by items like the Gawker bit that he literally disappeared into the woods like Ted Kaczynski and committed himself to a vengefully ascetic fitness regimen, apparently determined to return someday to society and have the last word.

Read more

 

Lloyd Blankfein And The "Mega-Wealthy" Are Rushing To Buy Into This $1 Billion Miami Condo

Zero Hedge

What do you do if you have more money than you can ever spend, and own residences in most major metropolises around the world. You invest in the most exclusive "third" (or fourth, or fifth) vacation "house" that can be purchased by people for whom money is no object, such as the $1 billion Faena Miami Beach, which has lined up as buyers none other than the creme of the (bailed out courtesy of a multi-trillion ongoing taxpayer bailout) Wall Street crop including Apollo's Leon Black, and of course Goldman's very own resident of a duplex in 15 CPW, Lloyd Blankfein. The Faena oceanfront development for the megarich is financed by another billionaire, chairman of Access Industries, Len Blavatnik, whose $16.1 billion net worth puts him 49th in the Bloomberg Billionaires index.

What is it? Bloomberg covers the bases:

The project will feature an 18-story tower with 47 residences priced at $3 million to $50 million, two luxury hotels and an arts center designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Rem Koolhaas.

Faena’s residential tower, designed by Norman Foster’s Foster + Partners, also has attracted New York dealer Larry Gagosian among the buyers, according to the people.

Some residences will have 20-foot ceilings to accommodate large artworks, and many buyers requested to install special film in the windows to protect the art from direct sunlight, he said.

Anchored by the historic Surf Club, where Winston Churchill came to paint and Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor came to play, it will include a five-star hotel and two 12-story residential buildings designed by another Pritzker winner, Richard Meier. The Surf Club Hotel & Residences will be Meier’s first project in Miami, he said at a Dec. 5 poolside brunch celebrating the development.

The 8-acre (3.2 hectare) project includes more than 800 feet (244 meters) of beach, according to developer Nadim Achi. The 150 units will include nine penthouses, each with a private garden and a swimming pool. Three of the penthouses have sold for prices from $20 million to $25 million, he said.

“The mega-wealthy are looking for exclusivity, service and design,” Achi said, drinking bottled water at a cabana overlooking the ocean and a giant construction pit. “A lot of buyers who are deciding to make Miami their second or third residence came through Art Basel.”

“Miami real estate is on steroids,” said Mera Rubell, a local art collector who attended the Faena dinner. “The fantasy is about the community. But what are the chances all these billionaires will show up at the same time?”

From the building's website:

• Architecture and interiors designed by Foster+Partners
• Porte-cochère entrance with travertine paved drive
• Dramatic 27’ triple height lobby defined by polished black concrete fin walls
• Floor-to-ceiling window wall systems with wide, custom designed and engineered sliding panels
• Lobby walls in polished architectural concrete with blackened steel finish on all lobby doors
• Tranquil pools through the lobby area into the surrounding landscape
• Lobby and elevator flooring in polished stone
• Three passenger elevators with interiors in Bendheim glass and Japanese silk paper running at 500 feet per minute
• Dedicated service elevator running at 350 feet per minute

Interior Features

• Atlantic Ocean, bay and city panoramas through floor-to-ceiling glass
• Private or semi-private elevator vestibules
• Service entrances in 2 to 5 bedroom homes
• 10?-6? Ceiling Heights, 11?  or 13? in Penthouses
• Entry foyers with stone flooring and teak entry doors
• Master bathrooms with double sink vanities, separate bathtubs and glass showers
• Morning Kitchens in master bedrooms of all penthouses
• Laundry Rooms with full sized side-by-side washer and dryers in most residences
• Choice of flooring: White Venetian Terrazzo or 8? Light White Oak
• Fan coil system with multiple zones to maintain better temperature and humidity control
• Integrated motorized blinds in dual tone fabric throughout residences
• Trapex door handles designed by Foster+Partners
• Trufig flush-mounted electric fixtures
• Optional Staff Quarters

Grand Scale

• Interiors range from 1,307 to 4,730 sq ft (121.4 to 439.4 sq m)
• Aleros range from 420 to 1,516 sq ft (39.0 to 140.8 sq m)
• Half floor Penthouses range from 4,243 to 6,399 sq ft (394.2 to 594.5 sq m)
• Half floor Aleros range from 2,727 to 3,887 sq ft (253 to 361 sq m)

Penthouse Features

• Total Living 18,253 sq ft (1695.8 sq m)
• Indoor 8,273 sq ft (768.6 sq m)
• Alero 7,299 sq ft (678.1 sq m)
• Private Rooftop with pool 2,681 sq ft (249.1 sq m)

And the punchline from none other than Blavatnik, wearing his best salesman outfit:

“I remind you, there are very few apartments left,” he told the crowd from a stage. “Hurry.”

Hurry indeed, before the music stops, the Fed's liquidity tide recedes, and people start asking questions.

In the meantime, this is what Lloyd and company will buy with the Fed's "wealth effect."

Obama's Money Cartel

Wall St. On Parade
Pam Martens | May 5, 2008


Wall Street, known variously as a barren wasteland for diversity or the last plantation in America, has defied courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for decades in its failure to hire blacks as stockbrokers. Now it’s marshalling its money machine to elect a black man to the highest office in the land. Why isn’t the press curious about this?

Walk into any of the largest Wall Street brokerage firms today and you’ll see a self-portrait of upper management’s racism and sexism: women sitting at secretarial desks outside fancy offices occupied by predominantly white males. According to the EEOC, as well as the recent racial discrimination class actions filed against UBS and Merrill Lynch, blacks make up between 1 per cent to 3.5 per cent of stockbrokers –  this after 30 years of litigation, settlements and empty promises to do better by the largest Wall Street firms.

The first clue to an entrenched white male bastion seeking a black male occupant in the oval office (having placed only five blacks in the U.S. Senate in the last two centuries) appeared in February on a chart at the Center for Responsive Politics website. It was a list of the 20 top contributors to the Barack Obama campaign, and it looked like one of those comprehension tests where you match up things that go together and eliminate those that don’t.  Of the 20 top contributors, I eliminated six  that didn’t compute.  What remained   was a Wall Street cartel of financial firms, their registered lobbyists, and go-to law firms that have a death grip on our federal government.

Why is the “yes, we can” candidate in bed with this cartel?  How can “we,”  the people, make change if  Obama’s money backers block our ability to be heard?

Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a lifetime.

These seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. There is also a large hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group, which is a major source of fee income to Wall Street. There are five large corporate law firms that are also registered lobbyists; and one is a corporate law firm that is no longer a registered lobbyist but does legal work for Wall Street. The cumulative total of these 14 contributors through February 1, 2008, was $2,872,128, and we’re still in the primary season. 

But hasn’t Senator Obama repeatedly told us in ads and speeches and debates that he wasn’t taking money from registered lobbyists?  Hasn’t the press given him a free pass on this statement?

Barack Obama, speaking in Greenville, South Carolina on January 22, 2008:

“Washington lobbyists haven’t funded my campaign, they won’t run my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president.”

Barack Obama, in an email to supporters on June 25, 2007, as reported by the Boston Globe:

“Candidates typically spend a week like this – right before the critical June 30th financial reporting deadline – on the phone, day and night, begging Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs to write huge checks.  Not me. Our campaign has rejected the money-for-influence game and refused to accept funds from registered federal lobbyists and political action committees.”

Read more
This article originally appeared at www.CounterPunch.org.