"The Untouchables - Masters of Fraud"

[WhiskeyGirl]

The Untouchables
Masters of Fraud
by ROB URIE

The most telling line from PBS’s Frontline piece ‘The Untouchables,’ on the absence of criminal prosecutions for the large-scale bank lending fraud behind the financial crisis of 2008, came when the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Enforcement division, Lanny Breuer, voiced his concern that bringing criminal charges might cause thousands of bankers to lose their jobs. This came after voluminous evidence was provided that senior bankers, including former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were culpably aware the mortgage securitization businesses they were running were purchasing, packaging and re-selling trillions of dollars of mortgage loans that were never intended to be paid. It also came after it was known the economic calamity caused by corrupt bankers cost tens of millions of people around the globe their jobs, homes, life savings and all hope for a better future.

As with nearly all reporting on the economic debacle of 2008 – 20??, the story behind the piece was placed in the past tense as regrettable events that should have been attended to but weren’t. But a number of economic reports in recent weeks place the ongoing debacle in the economy squarely in the present. The first was an update on income distribution since the Great Recession began from U.C. Berkeley economist Emmauel Saez illustrating that the benefits of the economic ‘recovery’ have gone exclusively to the reigning plutocracy, the top ‘1%’ of income earners....

Emphasis added.

Why did some refuse to fix or end the broken system?  End the cronyism?  Corruption?

Someone had to generate reports.  Maybe they didn't? 

What then is the relation between the bank lending fraud behind the housing bubble, the continuing decline in the economic fortunes of the great majority of the population and government ‘efforts’ to restore a functioning economy? Bank lending fraud produced three main outcomes—(1) wildly inflated house prices, (2) the placement of a significant proportion of the population into permanent debt servitude against houses now worth far less than the money owed against them and (3) crashing the global financial system, and with it the global economy. In the aggregate, those with mortgages now earn less than they did when they took out the mortgages and the houses they bought / re-financed in the housing bubble are worth less than the mortgage amounts owed against them. In this context, government efforts to restore the Wall Street banks behind this fiasco while doing little / nothing to extinguish the ill-gotten debts leaves most Americans (and peripheral Europeans) in a debt-deflationary spiral. Put another way, companies won’t hire despite alleged government efforts to ‘fix’ the economy because as they see it, the economy has still not been fixed. Those that are hiring are systematically underpaying labor because of weak labor market conditions. And banks (thankfully) won’t lend because they’ve turned their prospective retail customers into debt slaves unqualified for additional credit because of the economic circumstances they (the banks) created...

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...The fools, crooks and sociopaths running the banks were left in place and the ‘liquidity’ provided by the Federal Reserve is fueling new and ‘exciting’ speculative bubbles. The banks retain social control through debt servitude and political and economic control through their franchise to create and control debt-based money. The mainstream press reports ‘the world’ is back to business as usual and except for the economic lot of the overwhelming majority of citizens of the West, they are correct.

Emphasis added.

read more here - http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/22/the-untouchables/

Even if they guarantee a job to everyone, why should anyone work when Obama gives them everything?

Recovery measured by increasing banker salaries?  Benefits?

Increasing welfare payments?

Inflation for the masses?  Less take home pay for the working folks?

What's wrong with this picture?

just my humble opinions

[WhiskeyGirl]

Why is the Federal Reserve, the nations largest private bank seemingly untouchable?

Throughout the speech, Horwitz analyzed the 100-year history of the Federal Reserve and whether it was successful or not in preventing recessions and stabilizing the currency.

His conclusion was not favorable for the U.S. central bank, pointing to the Great Depression and other subsequent recessions as evidence it has been a failure.

“The Fed’s errors have been determined to be a crucial factor in creating the Great Depression,” Horwitz said.

While critics of Horwitz point to recessions and depressions prior to the Federal Reserve, Horwitz said these periods were not true “free banking” either because there were significant regulations placed on banks that caused these downturns.

“The Federal Reserve System was progressive-era legislation that was designed to solve a problem that was caused by government,” he said.

At the end of the speech, Horwitz proposed alternatives to the current Federal Reserve System, such as a consistent rate of inflation. However, Horwitz personally advocated allowing banks to issue their own private currency without government interference.

“This kind of system would avoid inflation and deflation and provide a more stable monetary environment,” Horwitz said.

read more here - http://wkuherald.com/news/article_30eac02e-7b19-11e2-9c52-0019bb30f31a.html

When you earn a dollar, you should take a dollar home.  When you save a dollar, it should retain the same value when you spend it decades later.

just my humble opinions

[WhiskeyGirl]

"Don't Blink, or You'll Miss Another Bailout "

...last week’s details of the undisclosed settlement between the New York Fed and Bank of America are remarkable. Not only do the filings show the New York Fed helping to thwart another institution’s fraud case against the bank, they also reveal that the New York Fed agreed to give away what may be billions of dollars in potential legal claims.

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Let’s recap: For zero compensation, the New York Fed released Bank of America from what may be sizable legal claims, knowing that A.I.G. was trying to recover on those claims.

To anyone interested in holding banks accountable for mortgage improprieties, the Fed’s actions are bewildering. If the Fed intended that Maiden Lane II own the right to sue Bank of America for fraud, why didn’t it pursue such a potentially rich claim on behalf of taxpayers? The Fed made $2.8 billion on the Maiden Lane II deal, but the recovery from Bank of America could have been much greater. Why did it instead release Bank of America from these liabilities and supply declarations that seem to support the bank in its case against A.I.G.?

The New York Fed would not discuss this matter, citing the litigation. But taxpayers, who might have benefited had the New York Fed brought fraud claims, deserve answers to these questions.

In an interview, Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, who serves on the Banking Committee, said the New York Fed’s behavior in this case “underscores that the more we learn about these bailouts, gifts and advantages that Wall Street gets, the clearer it becomes that one set of rules applies to the largest megabanks and another set of rules to the smaller financial institutions and the rest of the country.”

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But Walker F. Todd, a former official at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, warned: “As a public entity, the Federal Reserve needs to take its custody of public funds seriously enough to ask for more than merely nominal compensation when it is giving up things of value to a bank holding company. If the central bank starts releasing binding legal claims for nominal compensation, it looks like just one more element of the secret or back-door bailout of the banking system.”

emphasis added

Why do taxpayers keep getting the short end of the stick?

Never ending cases of 'privatized profits and socialized losses'?

read more here - http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/14744-dont-blink-or-youll-miss-another-bailout

Where are the politicians that stand up for the masses?  Put Joe and Susie six pack first?  Care about future generations?

Maybe they're lined up for Swiss citizenship and foreign bank accounts?

just my humble opinions

[WhiskeyGirl]

"They Have No Idea
Power Grab at the Fed"

...The Fed does what it wants, when it wants”. It answers to no one, which is why their books still remain closed to public inspection despite the myriad legal challenges to pry them open.

Sure, the Fed will “rob us blind”; that’s their job, isn’t it? Let me jog your memory a bit: Do you remember the Repo 105 scandal? Think back to April 2010 when the New York Fed (which Dudley now heads) was directly involved in a cover up by the nation’s largest banks that were engaged in shady accounting activities to conceal the amount of debt on their balance sheets. According to the Wall Street Journal:

    “Major banks have masked their risk levels in the past five quarters by temporarily lowering their debt just before reporting it to the public, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A group of 18 banks….understated the debt levels used to fund securities trades by lowering them an average of 42 per cent at the end of each of the past five quarterly periods, the data show. The banks, which publicly release debt data each quarter, then boosted the debt levels in the middle of successive quarters.” (“Big Banks Mask Risk Levels”, Kate Kelly, Tom McGinty, Dan Fitzpatrick, Wall Street Journal)

The “repo 105″ flap was further complicated by suspicions that Lehman was assisted in its effort by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York which, at the time, was headed by former Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner. Here is a short recap of what transpired between the Geithner’s NY Fed and Lehman according to ex-regulator William Black and former NY governor Eliot Spitzer from an article on Huffington Post:

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read more here - http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/22/power-grab-at-the-fed/

Why does the borrowing continue?  Why not shed some light on all the transactions at the Federal Reserve?