HSBC Bank To Staff Branches With Humanoid Robots

Aaron Kesel
Activist Post

HSBC, will test robots created by SoftBank Robotics, in the lobby of their Fifth Avenue branch in midtown Manhattan, CNBC reported.

The robots are not only designed to interact with customers but also take selfies, dance and tell jokes. Pepper, one of the robots equipped with a tablet on its chest at the HSBC Manhattan branch, danced to a techno beat in a demonstration according to CNBC.

This marks the second known test of robots for banking; the first being a bank in China, Construction Bank (CCB), that opened a Shanghai branch run entirely by robots in a testing phase for finance with little to no human involvement, Activist Post reported.

Robots are beginning to take over every aspect of society.  They are also headed for retail businesses delivering freight and eliminating truckers. But, again, robots malfunction. In fact, it sounds quite dangerous allowing a freight truck to drive itself; if the sensors break down on a big rig truck going  60-70 MPH, that’s potentially 40 tons barreling down the highway unattended except by artificial intelligence. As Activist Post reported back in March, Uber had to halt nationwide testing of its A.I. vehicles following the death of a pedestrian in Arizona. And that was a car actually attended by a human back-up operator.

Automation clearly isn’t a foolproof technology, and it can also be exploited by hackers for malicious purposes that could even include programming a bot to kill an individual.

Not even journalists are safe from robot replacements.

Read more

New Evidence Proves HSBC Avoided Criminal Prosecution Due to “Market Risk”

Michael Krieger 

Liberty Blitzkrieg 

All that said, if anyone is a top contender for the worst of the worst of the Obama Administration, it’s Eric Holder. As head of the Department of Justice, he was the one man who could’ve played an enormously positive role in American society, by punishing those responsible for creating the financial crisis that destroyed tens of millions of lives globally. Instead, he chose to actively protect the financial oligarchs and ushered in a tragic new era for these United States. One in which the world suddenly realized that the U.S. is little more than a glorified oligarchy. Essentially an aggressive Banana Republic armed with nuclear weapons and the swagger of a third world dictator.

– From the post: Cronyism Pays – Eric “Too Big to Jail” Holder Triumphantly Returns to His Prior Corporate Law Firm Job

The precedent was set with the TBTF mega banks, and it was continued last week with the non-indictment of Hillary Clinton.

The rule of law simply no longer exists in America. Laws do not apply to the rich and powerful, only apply to the peasant citizens.

The following is absolutely disgusting. From the BBC:

US officials refused to prosecute HSBC for money laundering in 2012 because of concerns it would cause a “global financial disaster”. 

A US Congressional report released Monday also accused former Attorney General Eric Holder of misleading congress about the decision. 
In 2012 HSBC was accused of violating US sanctions and allowing drug cartels to use its branches to launder funds. 
The bank paid a $1.92bn settlement but did not face criminal charges.
No top officials at HSBC were charged with any crimes.
The report says Mr Holder ignored the recommendations of more junior staff to prosecute HSBC because of the bank’s “systemic importance” to the financial markets.

Read more

See also: HSBC reportedly got top govt help to hamper money laundering probe- reports
 

Britain’s Tax Office, HMRC sold 6oo state owned buildings to offshore property company

 

Graham Vanbergen 
True Publica

There are a number of interesting facts and figures emanating from the various offshore leaks of recent times. One of them involves Britain’s tax office HMRC, where there is a history of double dealing when it comes to tax haven transparency.

Last February HSBC’s Swiss banking arm got caught ‘red-handed’ assisting wealthy customers concealing millions of dollars of assets and then literally and quite unbelievably found to be handing out bricks of untraceable currency to them. HSBC was, at the same time providing these clients the facilities and information needed to circumvent domestic tax authorities, according to a huge cache of leaked secret bank account files.

The leak clearly demonstrated that HSBC was providing account facilities to international criminals, corrupt businessmen and other high-risk individuals from all over the world, Britain included.

The leaked HSBC files, which covered the period 2005-2007, amounted, at the time, to the biggest banking leak in history, shining a very bright light on about 30,000 accounts holding almost $120bn (£78bn) of assets, an average of £2.6 million per account. After the files had been thoroughly checked out, the number of accounts held escalated to 130,000 individuals and organisations.

The revelations amplified calls for government’s  the world over to take action and crackdown on offshore illegal tax havens. Politicians got on the bandwagon in an attempt to demonstrate they were on the side of law abiding citizens. HMRC recently issued a statement straight after the Panama papers scandal “HMRC is committed to exposing and acting on financial wrongdoing and we relentlessly pursue tax evaders to ensure that they pay every penny of taxes and fines they owe“.

The hypocrisy of politicians across Europe and America and HMRC in Britain demonstrates the level of lawlessness both are prepared to accept in every day life.

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HSBC Whistleblower: The Biggest Bank Fraud in British History Carried Out on UK Shoppers and Covered Up

Real Media 

 

“In my position, as you can imagine, I’ve got a few enemies.” An anonymous tip off has contacted the DWP to suggest that Nicholas Wilson is frauding the benefits office. “They sent a letter calling me in for a compliance interview.”

The irony is that Nicholas Wilson is a whistleblower, who has been trying to expose what would be the largest bank fraud in the history of the UK, totalling over £1bn. This is made up of illegal charges imposed by HFC Bank – previously a subsidiary of HSBC, onto unsuspecting UK customer debts on high street store cards.

“Everything I do on my campaign with HSBC, it’s all about fraud and corruption and underhand dealings. I do everything up front and transparent and that’s how I have to be. I haven’t got anything up my sleeve.”

Wilson was head of debt recovery for Weightmans LLP – a national solicitors firm which acted for John Lewis – for over 25 years. However, in 2003 when John Lewis sold their accounts to HFC Bank, Wilson noticed they immediately began adding “collection charges” of 16.4% to customer store cards in arrears. These charges were illegal.

Wilson spoke up, complaining to staff and colleagues and refusing to work on the HFC account. The charges were being applied to customers already in debt and hardship; a fraud by the second biggest bank on the some of the nation’s poorest, and yet for standing against this, Wilson’s boss dubbed him ‘Mr Ethical.’

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This Is How HSBC Celebrates 150 Years of Banking Crime & Corruption: Happy Birthday

Wolf Street

HSBC still operates with full UK-government-sanctioned impunity.

By Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET. His blog: Raging Bull-Shit

I’d like to begin with one of the most ignominious – and hence most forgotten – episodes of British colonial history: the Opium Wars against China.

In the mid 19th century the British economy was close to bankruptcy, thanks mainly to its massive trade deficit with China. Put simply, the British couldn’t stop drinking Chinese-produced tea while the Chinese government had no interest in importing anything from Britain. The Manchu emperors believed that the Middle Kingdom already possessed everything worth having, and hence needed no barbarian manufactures. All they wanted was silver, of which the British were fast running out.

What the British did, through its East India Company, one of the world’s largest-ever monopolies, was to flood the Chinese market with the one product the Chinese couldn’t resist and which just happened to be cultivated across vast swaths of British-ruled India: opium. So doing, the British East India Company became the largest-ever drug trafficker in recorded history.

When opium addiction became a national pastime in China, the government tried to ban consumption of the drug, but to no avail. Demand just kept growing, and with it supply. Eventually the Chinese began targeting the trade at its source, seizing shipments from British ships as they docked in ports such as Canton. The British response was to hit back with the full force of its world-leading navy. So began the Opium Wars and China’s Century of Humiliation.

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Banking giant HSBC sheltered cash linked to dictators and arms dealers

Comment: Imagine my 'surprise'...

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Irish Times

The leaked files, based on the inner workings of HSBC’s Swiss private banking arm, relate to accounts holding more than $100 billion. They provide a rare glimpse inside the super-secret Swiss banking system — one the public has never seen before. 

The documents, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists via the French newspaper Le Monde, show the bank’s dealings with many clients engaged in a spectrum of illegal behavior, especially in hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from tax authorities.

Records

They also show private records of other clients including famed soccer and tennis players, cyclists, rock stars, Hollywood actors, royalty, politicians, corporate executives and old-wealth families.

These disclosures shine a light on the intersection of international crime and legitimate business, and they dramatically expand what’s known about potentially illegal or unethical behavior in recent years at HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks.

The leaked account records show some clients making trips to Geneva to withdraw large wads of cash, sometimes in used notes. The files also document huge sums of money controlled by dealers in diamonds who are known to have operated in war zones and sold gemstones to finance insurgencies that caused untold deaths.

HSBC, which is headquartered in London and has offices in 74 nations and territories on six continents, at first insisted that ICIJ destroy the data.

Read more

See also: Banking giant HSBC sheltered cash linked to dictators and arms dealers 

Big Banks Busted Massively Manipulating Foreign Exchange, Precious Metals … And Every Other Market

Washington's Blog

Currency Markets Are RiggedCurrency markets are massively rigged. And see this and this.

Reuters notes today:

Regulators fined six major banks including Citigroup (C.N) and UBS (UBSN.VX) a total of $4.3 billion for failing to stop traders from trying to manipulate the foreign exchange market, following a year-long global investigation.
HSBC (HSBA.L), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L), JP Morgan (JPM.N) and Bank of America (BAC.N) also face penalties resulting from the inquiry that has put the largely unregulated $5 trillion-a-day market on a tighter leash, accelerated the push to automate trading and ensnared the Bank of England.
In the latest scandal to hit the financial services industry, dealers shared confidential information about client orders and coordinated trades to make money from a foreign exchange benchmark used by asset managers and corporate treasurers to value their holdings. Dozens of traders have been fired or suspended.

***
Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) fined five lenders $1.77 billion, the biggest penalty in the history of the City of London, and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) ordered them to pay a further $1.48 billion.

***
The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates banks, also fined the U.S. lenders $950 million and was the only authority to penalise Bank of America.

 

Gold and Silver Are Manipulated

Today, Switzerland’s financial regulator (FINMA) found “serious misconduct” and a “clear attempt to manipulate precious metals benchmarks” by UBS employees in precious metals trading, particularly with silver.
Reuters reports:

Swiss regulator FINMA said on Wednesday that it found a “clear attempt” to manipulate precious metals benchmarks during its investigation into precious metals and foreign exchange trading at UBS …

Gold and silver prices have been “fixed” in daily conference calls by the powers-that-be.
Bloomberg reported last December:

It is the participating banks themselves that administer the gold and silver benchmarks.

So are prices being manipulated? Let’s take a look at the evidence. In his book “The Gold Cartel,” commodity analyst Dimitri Speck combines minute-by-minute data from most of 1993 through 2012 to show how gold prices move on an average day (see attached charts). He finds that the spot price of gold tends to drop sharply around the Londonevening fixing (10 a.m. New York time). A similar, if less pronounced, drop in price occurs around the London morning fixing. The same daily declines can be seen in silver prices from 1998 through 2012.

For both commodities there were, on average, no comparable price changes at any other time of the day. These patterns are consistent with manipulation in both markets.

 

Derivatives Are Manipulated

Runaway derivatives – especially credit default swaps (CDS) – were one of the main causes of the 2008 financial crisis. Congress never fixed the problem, and actually made it worse.

The big banks have long manipulated derivatives … a $1,200 Trillion Dollar market.
Indeed, many trillions of dollars of derivatives are being manipulated in the exact same same way that interest rates are fixed (see below) … through gamed self-reporting.
Reuters noted in September:

A Manhattan federal judge said on Thursday that investors may pursue a lawsuit accusing 12 major banks of violating antitrust law by fixing prices and restraining competition in the roughly $21 trillion market for credit default swaps.
***
“The complaint provides a chronology of behavior that would probably not result from chance, coincidence, independent responses to common stimuli, or mere interdependence,” [Judge] Cote said.
The defendants include Bank of America Corp, Barclays Plc, BNP Paribas SA, Citigroup Inc , Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG , Goldman Sachs Group Inc, HSBC Holdings Plc , JPMorgan Chase & Co, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and UBS AG.
Other defendants are the International Swaps and Derivatives Association and Markit Ltd, which provides credit derivative pricing services.
***
U.S. and European regulators have probed potential anticompetitive activity in CDS. In July 2013, the European Commission accused many of the defendants of colluding to block new CDS exchanges from entering the market.
***
“The financial crisis hardly explains the alleged secret meetings and coordinated actions,” the judge wrote. “Nor does it explain why ISDA and Markit simultaneously reversed course.”

In other words, the big banks are continuing to fix prices for CDS in secret meetings … and have torpedoed the more open and transparent CDS exchanges that Congress mandated.

 

Interest Rates Are Manipulated

Bloomberg reported in January:

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc was ordered to pay $50 million by a federal judge in Connecticut over claims that it rigged the London interbank offered rate.
RBS Securities Japan Ltd. in April pleaded guilty to wire frauda s part of a settlement of more than $600 million with U.S and U.K. regulators over Libor manipulation, according to court filings. U.S. District Judge Michael P. Shea in New Haventoday sentenced the Tokyo-based unit of RBS, Britain’s biggest publicly owned lender, to pay the agreed-upon fine, according to a Justice Department Justice Department.
Global investigations into banks’ attempts to manipulate the benchmarks for profit have led to fines and settlements for lenders including RBS, Barclays Plc, UBS AG and Rabobank Groep.
RBS was among six companies fined a record 1.7 billion euros ($2.3 billion) by the European Union last month for rigging interest rates linked to Libor. The combined fines for manipulating yen Libor and Euribor, the benchmark money-market rate for the euro, are the largest-ever EU cartel penalties.
Global fines for rate-rigging have reached $6 billion since June 2012 as authorities around the world probe whether traders worked together to fix Libor, meant to reflect the interest rate at which banks lend to each other, to benefit their own trading positions.

To put the Libor interest rate scandal in perspective:

• The big banks have conspired for years to rig interest rates … upon which $800 trillion in assets are pegged

• This was the largest insider trading scandal ever … and the largest financial scam in world history

• Local governments got ripped off bigtime by the Libor manipulation

• Even though RBS and a handful of other banks have been fined for interest rate manipulation, Libor is still being manipulated. No wonder … the fines are pocket change – the cost of doing business – for the big banks

 

Energy Prices Manipulated

The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says that JP Morgan has massively manipulated energy markets in California and the Midwest, obtaining tens of millions of dollars in overpayments from grid operators between September 2010 and June 2011.

Pulitzer prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston noted in May that Wall Street is trying to launch Enron 2.0.

 

Oil Prices Are Manipulated

Oil prices are manipulated as well.

 

Commodities Are Manipulated

The big banks and government agencies have been conspiring to manipulate commodities prices for decades.
The big banks are taking over important aspects of the physical economy, including uranium mining, petroleum products, aluminum, ownership and operation of airports, toll roads, ports, and electricity.
And they are using these physical assets to massively manipulate commodities prices … scalping consumers of many billions of dollars each year. More from Matt Taibbi, FDL and Elizabeth Warren.

 

Everything Can Be Manipulated through High-Frequency Trading

Traders with high-tech computers can manipulate stocks, bonds, options, currencies and commodities. And see this.

 

Manipulating Numerous Markets In Myriad Ways

The big banks and other giants manipulate numerous markets in myriad ways, for example:

• Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See this, this and this

• Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here and here

• Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold . And raiding allocated gold accounts

• Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them (and see this)

• Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. See this, this, this, this and this. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car

• Cheating homeowners by gaming laws meant to protect people from unfair foreclosure

• Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves. See this, this, this, this and this

• Engaging in unlawful “frontrunning” to manipulate markets. See this, this, this, this, this and this

• Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices. See this, this and this

• Otherwise manipulating markets. And see this

• Participating in various Ponzi schemes

• Charging veterans unlawful mortgage fees

• Cooking their books (and see this)

• Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments

 

The Big Picture

The experts say that big banks will keep manipulating markets unless and until their executives are thrown in jail for fraud.
Why? Because the system is rigged to allow the big banks to commit continuous and massive fraud, and then to pay small fines as the “cost of doing business”. As Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitznoted years ago:

“The system is set so that even if you’re caught, the penalty is just a small number relative to what you walk home with.
The fine is just a cost of doing business. It’s like a parking fine. Sometimes you make a decision to park knowing that you might get a fine because going around the corner to the parking lot takes you too much time.”

Indeed, Reuters points out today:

Switzerland’s regulator FINMA ordered UBS, the country’s biggest bank, to pay 134 million francs ($139 million) after it found serious misconduct in both foreign exchange and precious metals trading. It also capped bonuses for dealers in both units at twice their basic salary for two years.

Capping bonuses at twice base salary?  That’s not a punishment … it’s an incentive.
Experts say that we have to prosecute fraud or else the economy won’t ever really stabilize.
But the government is doing the exact opposite. Indeed, the Justice Department has announced it will go easy on big banks, and always settles prosecutions for pennies on the dollar (a form of stealth bailout. It is also arguably one of the main causes of the double dip in housing. And there is no change in the air.)
Indeed, the government doesn’t even force the banks to admit any guilt as part of their settlements.  In fact:

“The banks have been allowed to investigate themselves,” one source familiar with the investigation told Reuters. “The investigated decide what they want to investigate, what they admit to, and how much they will pay.

Wall Street has manipulated virtually every other market as well – both in the financial sector and thereal economy – and broken virtually every law on the books.
And they will keep on doing so until the Department of Justice grows a pair.
The criminality and blatant manipulation will grow and spread and metastasize – taking over and killing off more and more of the economy – until Wall Street executives are finally thrown in jail.

It’s that simple …

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See also:  Cartels R Us: Tab for Rigging Foreign Exchange $3.3 Billion and Rising

The Banker Purge Continues: Global Banking System is Now Operating at DEFCON1

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.

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 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

 

HSBC Bank on Verge of Collapse: Second Major Banking Crash Imminent

There's only so much money laundering and corruption an institution can take

iacknowledge.net/

Concerns about an imminent bank crash were further fuelled today at news that HSBC are restricting the amount of cash that customers can withdraw from their own bank accounts.  Customers were told that without proof of the intended use of their own money, HSBC would refuse to release it.  This, and other worrying signs point to a possible financial crash in the near future. 

HSBC Collapse

HSBC is scrambling to manage a seemingly terminal liquidity crisis (a lack of hard cash) that could see the bank become the next Northern Rock – and trigger a bank crash.  The analyst’s advice is for shareholders to sell HSBC investments, and customers to move their accounts elsewhere before the crash.
This from the Telegraph: 

Forensic Asia on Tuesday began its coverage of Britain’s largest banking group with a ‘sell’ recommendation, warning the lender had between $63.6bn (£38.7bn) and $92.3bn of “questionable assets” on its balance sheet, ranging from loan loss reserves and accrued interest to deferred tax assets, defined benefit pension schemes and opaque Level 3 assets.

According a report by the BBC’s MoneyBox Programme, HSBC customers have gone to withdraw cash from their accounts, only to find HSBC would not release the funds.  Customers were told to make a bank transfer instead, unless they provided documentation proving the intended use of the money. Stephen Cotton attempted a withdrawal and told the programme:

“When we presented them with the withdrawal slip, they declined to give us the money because we could not provide them with a satisfactory explanation for what the money was for. They wanted a letter from the person involved.”

Mr Cotton says the staff refused to tell him how much he could have: “So I wrote out a few slips. I said, ‘Can I have £5,000?’ They said no. I said, ‘Can I have £4,000?’ They said no. And then I wrote one out for £3,000 and they said, ‘OK, we’ll give you that.’ “

He asked if he could return later that day to withdraw another £3,000, but he was told he could not do the same thing twice in one day. 

As this was not a change to the Terms and Conditions of your bank account we had no need to pre-notify customers of the change”

He wrote to complain to HSBC about the new rules and also that he had not been informed of any change. 

The bank said it did not have to tell him. “As this was not a change to the Terms and Conditions of your bank account, we had no need to pre-notify customers of the change,” HSBC wrote.

Mr Cotton is not alone, with other customers seeking to withdraw cash amounts over £3,000 facing the same obstacles.  While HSBC argue there is comes customer security interest here, the story simply doesn’t add up.  Customer identification is required for large withdrawals, not customer intentions – a person’s cash is theirs to withdraw and place wherever they so wish.  Instead, HSBC has been found to have a capitalization black hole (gap between actual cash and obligations) of $80bn.

The message is simple, get your money out now. 

The Gold Rush 

The major banks and states appear to be preparing for impending crisis, while pretending to the public that the economic situation is improving.

There is a gold rush underway, with Banks and States frantically buying up as much gold reserve as they can, stoking fears that confidence in currency is at an all-time low.  In recent months and weeks, banks like HSBC and JP Morgan, and states such as the US, Germany and China have joined the gold rush, making vast purchases of stocks.

Investment analysts at Seeking Alpha have been monitoring the strange activity on the COMEX, stating:

“keeping track of COMEX inventories is something that is recommended for all serious investors who own physical gold and the gold ETFs (SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), PHYS, and CEF) because any abnormal inventory declines may signify extraordinary events behind the scenes.”

Another Bank Crash? Why? 

The crash is in come ways a replay of the last one.  The US dollar is a fiat currency (as is the pound sterling, the euro and most other major currencies).  This means, it is monopoly money.  There is no gold reserve that its values are pegged to.  It is simply made up.  So how does money get made? A private, for profit central bank prints it and lends it to the government (or other banks) at an interest rate.  So the Central Bank prints $100, and gives it to the government on the basis that it returns $101.  You may have already spotted the first flaw in this process.  The additional $1 can only ever come from the Central Bank.  There is never enough money. The second issue is that all money is debt.

This used to be the way pretty much all of the money in circulation came to be.  That is, until Investment and Retail Banks got tired of this monopoly on debt based currency, and kicked off the commercial money supply.  You might assume that when you take out a loan or other form of credit, a bank gives you that money from its reserves, and you then pay back that loan to the Bank at a given interest rate – the Bank making its profit on the interest rate.  You would be wrong. The Bank simply creates that loan on a computer screen.  Let’s say you are granted a loan for $100,000.  The moment that loan is approved and $100k is entered on the computer – that promise from you to the bank creates $100k for the bank, in that instant.  This ledger entry alone creates the $100k, from nothing. Today, over 97% of all money that exists, is made this way.

This is what drove the dodgy lending practises that created the last crisis.  But since then, the failure to regulate the markets means that while bailouts hit public services and the real economy – banks were free to continue the same behaviour, bringing the next crash.

The world’s second richest man, Warren Buffet warned us in 2003 that the derivatives market was ‘devised by madmen’ and a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ and we have only seen the first blast in this debt apocalypse. 

The news that should have us all worried is: the derivatives market contains $700trn of these debts yet to implode.

Global GDP stands at $69.4trn a year.  This means that (primarily) Wall Street and the City of London have run up phantom paper debts of more than ten times of the annual earnings of the entire planet.
Not only can the Bankers not pay it back, the combined earning power of the earth could not pay it back in less than ten years if every last cent of our productive power went solely to pay off this debt.
This is why answering the issues with our currencies, our banking practices and economic system are not theoretical or academic – they are a matter of our very survival.

Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke

Rolling Stone

If you’ve ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you’ve ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or “drug paraphernalia” in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.

Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who’s ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a “record” financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.

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HSBC fined 10.5m over mis-selling

A little dent in its activities. At least it's something I suppose....

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Independent

Banking giant HSBC is set to pay out £40 million in fines and compensation after one of its subsidiaries sold savings products to elderly customers who were likely to die before the recommended investment period was up, the City regulator said today.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has issued its biggest ever retail fine of £10.5 million to HSBC after NHFA "inappropriately" advised 2,485 customers to invest in "unsuitable" investment bonds between 2005 and 2010. The FSA estimates NHFA customers will be paid a total of £29.5 million in compensation.

In a number of cases, the individual's life expectancy was below the recommended five-year investment period and as a result customers with shorter life expectancies had to make withdrawals from their investments sooner than recommended.

The products were sold to elderly individuals entering, or already in, long-term care and in many cases these elderly customers were reliant on the investments to pay for their care.

HSBC has apologised for what happened at NHFA, which closed for new business in July, and reassured affected customers that they would be contacted within weeks.

HSBC expected to shed 30,000 jobs in cost-cutting drive

Guardian

At least 30,000 jobs are expected to be axed at HSBC over three years as the UK's largest bank cuts costs in an effort to bolster returns to shareholders.

As he presents the first-half figures on Monday, HSBC's chief executive, Stuart Gulliver, is braced for questions about how many roles will be shed from the bank's 300,000-strong global workforce.

Even before the results were published, he tried to demonstrate that he was pressing ahead with his strategic goals announced in May by unveiling the sale on Sunday of 195 US branches, largely in upstate New York, to enable the bank to focus on commercial and retail banking.

The $1bn sale to First Niagara Bank, which has been growing through acquisitions of rivals, leaves HSBC with 265 branches in the US, mostly in New York. [...]