5 Years After the Financial Crisis, The Big Banks Are Still Committing Massive Crimes

Washington's Blog

Here are just some of the improprieties by big banks over the last century (you’ll see that many shenanigans are continuing today):

• Laundering money for terrorists (the HSBC employee who blew the whistle on the banks’ money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels says that the giant bank is still laundering money, saying:  “The public needs to know that money is still being funneled through HSBC to directly buy guns and bullets to kill our soldiers …. Banks financing … terrorists affects every single American.” He also said: “It is disgusting that our banks are STILL financing terror on 9/11 2013“.  And see this)

• Funding the Nazis

• Financing illegal arms deals, and funding the manufacture of cluster bombs (and see this and this) and other arms which are banned in most of the world

• Launching a coup against the President of the United States

• Handling money for rogue military operations

• Laundering money for drug cartels. See this, this, this, this and this (indeed, drug dealers kept the banking system afloat during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis).   A whistleblower said: “America is losing the drug war because our banks are [still] financing the cartels“, and “Banks financing drug cartels … affects every single American“.  And see this.)
  

• 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

• Manipulating aluminum and copper prices

• Manipulating gold prices … on a daily basis

• 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

• Committing massive fraud in an $800 trillion dollar market which effects everything from mortgages, student loans, small business loans and city financing

• Manipulating the hundred trillion dollar derivatives market

• Engaging in insider trading of the most important financial information

• 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

• Manipulating corporate bonds through derivatives schemes

• Otherwise manipulating markets. And see this

• Participating in various Ponzi schemes. See this, this and this

• Charging veterans unlawful mortgage fees

• Helping the richest to illegally hide assets

• Cooking their books (and see this)

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

• Violently cracking down on peaceful protesters

Read more >>

Argentina Special: Buy a 4% Bond or Go to Jail

President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner wants tax evaders hiding about $160 billion in dollars to help finance Argentina’s oil-producing ambitions. Her offer: Buy a 4 percent bond or face the prospect of jail time.

The tax authority announced the plan May 7, highlighting its information-sharing agreements with 40 nations and warning Argentines who don’t use the three-month amnesty window that they risk fines or arrest. Evaders have two options for their cash and the only one paying interest will be a dollar bond due in 2016 to finance YPF SA (YPF), the state oil company. The 4 percent rate is a third the average 13.85 yield on Argentine debt and less than the 4.6 percent in emerging markets.

A year after seizing YPF, Fernandez is funneling more money into the nation’s energy industry as the government struggles to boost production from the world’s third-biggest shale oil reserves. With Argentina already committed to pumping $2 billion of central bank reserves into a fund for energy investments and the highest borrowing costs in emerging markets keeping it from issuing debt abroad, the government is eyeing the billions of undeclared dollars that Argentines hold to help shore up reserves that have dwindled to a six-year low. Read more >>

Detroit $14 billion in debt

The fiscal crisis plaguing Detroit is now in the hands of Michigan's governor after a state-appointed review team determined the city was in a financial emergency with "no satisfactory plan" to resolve it. Republican Gov. Rick Snyder has 30 days to decide if Detroit needs an emergency manager to take charge of its finances and spending, and come up with a new plan to get the city out of its financial mess.

After spending weeks looking at the city's books, the independent review team released a report Tuesday saying Detroit's deficit could have reached $900 million last fiscal year had it not borrowed enormous amounts of money. The city's long-term liabilities, including underfunded pensions, are more than $14 billion.

The report also said the city's bureaucratic structure makes it difficult to solve the financial problems. Some fiscal experts believe the city's only way out may be municipal bankruptcy, but state Treasurer Andy Dillon said answers could be found if the city and state work together. Read more >>

Nearly half of Americans are one emergency from financial ruin

Nearly 44% of American households are one emergency away from financial ruin.

That means they don't have enough savings to cover basic living expenses for three months if something unforeseen happens such as losing a job or falling sick, according to a recent study by the Corporation for Enterprise Development. Almost a third of Americans have no savings account at all.

"These families have had to prioritize today's expenses over tomorrow's goals," said Andrea Levere, the group's president.

California ranks 38th among all states for the ability of its residents to achieve financial stability, the report says. Those living in the Golden State are bedeviled with an average $13,825 in credit card debt and high housing costs.

Many people living precariously have jobs. About 75% are working full time, and more than 15% are earning middle-class incomes of more than $55,000 a year, according to the report.

But despite steady jobs, many of those surveyed are surviving paycheck to paycheck, trying to cope with the recession's aftermath; one emergency could tip them over "the edge of financial disaster." Read more >>

Fannie, Freddie execs score $100 million payday

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeMortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac received the biggest federal bailout of the financial crisis. And nearly $100 million of those tax dollars went to lucrative pay packages for top executives, filings show.

The top five executives at Fannie Mae received $33.3 million in 2009 and 2010, while the top five at Freddie Mac received $28.1 million. And each company has set pay targets of as much as $17 million for its top managers for 2011.

That's a total of $95.4 million, which will essentially be coming from taxpayers, who have been keeping the mortgage finance giants alive with regular quarterly cash infusions since the Federal Home Finance Agency (FHFA) took control of the companies in September 2008.

Fannie CEO Michael Williams and Freddie CEO Charles Halderman, each received about $5.5 million in pay for last year, and they could receive more when their final deferred compensation for 2010 is set. All the executives receive a significant portion of their pay in the year or years after they earn it. More...

The professed underlying fundamentals of the OWS movement

Image by david_shankbone via FlickrEeyores Enigma
First the most powerful meme of this movement, the one that scares TPTB to there core, is the fact that it is all about;

1% vs the other 99%

The accounting has been done by multiple organizations. The banking industry in the US and probably globally, have the assets to cover peoples deposits, merchant deposits and transactions, basically all of the "REAL ECONOMY's" money.

Unfortunately this only represents a small portion of the banking and finance industries activities. The other 90% of what they have been doing, essentially gambling and fraud, is what is being bailed out, that is what is at risk if (when) banking collapses, NOT the real economy.

This is a bit over simplified as banking collapse would certainly effect all trade and therefore the real economy but not in the way that they are saying and recovery of the real economy would be possible and maybe even reasonable whereas what is happening right now is that the real economy where 99% of us live, is being sucked dry, thrown under the bus, raped, or what have you, in order to cover the bad gambling debts of the 1%.

It's not just banking and finance it is all big corporations most of which have been augmenting low and declining revenues from making and selling stuff by participating in the financial dealings (gambling and fraud) also.

The politicians currently in charge (and those aspiring to be) got there positions and owe complete allegiance to BIG money. They will do what is best for the 1% NOT what is best for the 99%. In all fairness they are convinced that serving the 1% is whats best for the other 99%. I know this for a fact.

Money = a claim on the future.
1% controls all of the money.
99% have no future.

Bottom line This is a crisis of capitalism but this is where it gets tricky.

Debt driven Capitalism is and has been the optimal system to promote exponential growth. Resource depletion, over population, environmental degradation, are just a few of the detrimental results. A version of capitalism is what every Country around the world uses to juice growth, even communist China. Silly people think they can control capital, LOL!

Capitalism functions like a pyramid scheme in that there are always opportunities for more and more people to acquire wealth but only as long as multiples of additional participants are constantly coming in at the bottom. Oh, yeah, capitalism also requires that there is enough cheap, almost free energy coming on line at a similar or greater multiple in order for those participants to generate excess profit$ to pass on up the pyramid.

Right now there are plenty of willing participants but due to the lack of cheap, almost free energy these participants are unable to generate "excess profit$" to pass up the pyramid. Low life bums. So instead of money flowing, being pushed up that is, the relentless, unquenchable demand that "capital" is simply sucks it up anyway it can even if it has to create virtual participants with virtual excess profits. There is no stoping capital…FEED ME SEYMOUR!

Capital has muscle too and is always looking for cheap, almost free energy. Is it any coincidence that last of the light sweet crude is in Iraq and Libya?

Even that is not enough so it just keeps on expanding debt/credit and skimming off the top.

Debt/credit expansion has continued on well beyond anything that this planet can ever support.

Problem is whenever you talk this way people scream "your a damn communist/ socialist".

Clearly humanity needs to operate from a base of support that includes healthcare for all. education for all, security in old age for all, in order to maintain dignity and humanity and this is socialism. Above and beyond that maybe we can have some form of capitalism that allows people to reach there aspirations BUT CAN NEVER INTRUDE ON THE BASIC SOCIALISTIC BASE SYSTEM.

Truth is we kind of had this sort of setup here in the US for a while but then capital noticed this while heading out for some grub one day and…well the rest is history and here we are.

Maybe instead of Debt based Capitalism we should try Gift based Capitalism.

Rasmussen - Consumer Confidence Hits Two-Year Low

Image via WikipediaThe Rasmussen Consumer Index, which measures the economic confidence of consumers on a daily basis, fell three points on Thursday to 67.8. That’s the lowest level in nearly two years, since July 24, 2009. Consumer confidence is down four points from a week ago, down eleven points from a month ago and down ten points from three months ago.

Confidence in the stability of the U.S. banking system is also down.

Following last Friday’s disappointing jobs report, confidence fell to a 2011 low and then regained a bit of lost ground. It often takes a full week before the impact of a jobs report is reflected in consumer confidence data.

Just 30% say their own finances are in good or excellent shape. That’s down from 43% just before Lehman Brothers collapsed in the fall of 2008 and from 35% when Barack Obama took office. At the beginning of 2011, 34% rated their own finances good or excellent.

Twenty-eight percent (28%) rate their finances as poor, up from 23% at the beginning of the year.

Just 21% believe their own finances are getting better while 52% say they are getting worse. Those figures are also more pessimistic compared to the beginning of the year. The first update of 2011 showed that 24% thought their finances were getting better and 43% thought they were getting worse. More...

The crisis in Europe and the financial aristocracy

The latest meeting of European Union (EU) finance ministers held at the start of this week once again revealed the complete subservience of the European political establishment to the European and international banking and finance cartels. (See “EU finance ministers meeting: No agreement on euro crisis”.)

Commenting on the relationship between European governments and the finance markets, British economist Phillipe Legrain writes: “So far, EU governments have decided that banks’ bondholders must be protected at all costs, preferring to impose losses on taxpayers instead—even if this stretches governments’ solvency to breaking point.”

For their part, reassured that they have the full backing of European treasuries behind them, the moguls of the finance world are undertaking their destructive work with renewed vigour.

An editorial in the German Süddeutsche Zeitung at the start of the year describes the activity of the modern breed of finance speculators:

“Just back from their two-week ski holiday, the currency dealers and finance managers have renewed their speculation against highly indebted Euro countries. Their first victim in the new year is Portugal….” Read more...

"Hyperinflation Will Drive Gold To Unthinkable Heights"

We now live in a world where governments print worthless pieces of paper to buy other worthless pieces of paper that combined with worthless derivatives, finance assets whose values are totally dependent on all these worthless debt instruments. Thus most of these assets are also worth-less.

So the world financial system is a house of cards where each instrument’s false value is artificially supported by another instrument’s false value. The fuse of the world financial market time bomb has been lit. There is no longer a question of IF it will happen but only WHEN and HOW. More...

The Bank for International Settlements

Image via Wikipedia

"...the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations."

Professor Carroll Quigley
Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966)
President Bill Clinton’s Georgetown Professor

Gold Screaming On The 1-3-6 Rule

John Galt says,

Years ago a trader explained to me that if the 1 month, 3 month and 6 month Treasury yields dove towards zero and out of their “normal” range during a bull or bear market that there was a fear of a huge risk to the markets or other financial event occurring and that meant the big money as it is called, wanted to be in the safest of short term instruments that could be cashed out at maturity or sold on short notice to raise cash or return to the markets should it prove to be a non-event. Well, let us look at the history of this over the last three years and since the crisis began in February of 2007 when the first of the mid-sized mortgage finance companies started to collapse and a lot of us went “oh crap” and knew what was coming with this credit market implosion and eventual financial system collapse. Here is a 3 year chart of the 1 month Treasury continuous yield with notations.

FHA Picks up Where Subprime Lenders Left Off

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Love this from Pragmatic Capitalist: David Rosenberg has some concise thoughts on a topic we’ve been banging the drum on for a long time – you can’t solve a debt crisis with more debt:

No wonder we are seeing a housing recovery, and it’s not just about the $8,000 tax credit for first-time buyers. How does the White House possibly allow this extra goodie to expire in November? The FHA is picking up where subprime lenders left off: the agency has seen its mortgage business jump 70% in the past year (!) and its market share in just three years has gone from 3.0% to 23% — it is allowing borrowers to finance up to 96.5% of homes priced all the way up to $729,750. Guess what, the default rate has risen to nearly 7% from 5½% a year ago. And, it is the taxpayer that is going to be picking up this tab … again! So, the policy formula here is that after excessive leverage got us into this mess, is to encouraging even more debt and come to think of it, Cash-for-Clunkers did the exact same thing — enticing people who were probably quite content with their jalopy to take on more than $10 billion of new debt. Amazing. It’s like giving another bottle of scotch to the drunken sailor, but hey — we can’t have the economy weak going into a mid-term election year now, can we?

Central Banks Agree to Cap Gold Sales

European central banks agreed to a third five-year cap on gold sales. The European Central Bank and 18 other banks agreed to sell no more than a combined 400 metric tons of the metal a year through September 2014. That’s less than the annual cap of 500 tons in the current agreement, which expires Sept. 26. John Reade, an analyst at UBS AG in London, said it's positive for gold. Having the agreement “removes the small chance that European central banks would have dumped gold onto the market in an unconstrained manner.”