"End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 18, 2016 12:21 pm

Big banks brace for oil loans to implode
by Matt Egan @mattmegan5
January 18, 2016: 8:03 AM ET


Is $20 the next stop for oil?
Big banks are cringing as crude oil is crumbling.
Firms on Wall Street helped bankroll America's energy boom, financing very expensive drilling projects that ended up flooding the world with oil.
Now that the oil glut has caused prices to crash below $30 a barrel, turmoil is rippling through the energy industry and souring many of those loans. Dozens of oil companies have gone bankrupt and the ones that haven't are feeling enough financial stress to slash spending and cut tens of thousands of jobs.
Three of America's biggest banks warned last week that oil prices will continue to create headaches on Wall Street -- especially if doomsday scenarios of $20 or even $10 oil play out.
For instance, Wells Fargo (WFC) is sitting on more than $17 billion in loans to the oil and gas sector. The bank is setting aside $1.2 billion in reserves to cover losses because of the "continued deterioration within the energy sector."
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is setting aside an extra $124 million to cover potential losses in its oil and gas loans. It warned that figure could rise to $750 million if oil prices unexpectedly stay at their current $30 level for the next 18 months.
"The biggest area of stress" is the oil and gas space, Marianne Lake, JPMorgan's chief financial officer, told analysts during a call on Thursday. "As the outlook for oil has weakened, we would expect to see some additional reserve build in 2016."
Citigroup (C) built up loan loss reserves in the energy space by $300 million. The bank said the move reflects its view that "oil prices are likely to remain low for a longer period of time."
If oil stays around $30 a barrel, Citi is bracing for about $600 million of energy credit losses in the first half of 2016. Citi said that figure could double to $1.2 billion if oil dropped to $25 a barrel and stayed there.
oil stocks hurting banks
Related: $10 oil: Crazy or the real floor beneath the oil crash?
More oil companies will die
The oil crash has already caused 42 North American oil companies to file for bankruptcy since the beginning of 2015, according to a list compiled by Houston law firm Haynes and Boone. It's only likely to get worse. Standard & Poor's estimates that 50% of energy junk bonds are "distressed," meaning they are at risk of default.
"There is a lot of distress in the industry. There will be a lot of pain but they'll get through it," said Buddy Clark, a 33-year veteran of the energy finance space and a partner at Haynes and Boone.
The financial pain has gotten so great that now there's murmurs of a bail out for the U.S. oil industry, though it's clear any assistance would run into political opposition.
Related: Is it time to bail out the U.S. oil industry?
Are banks ready?
All of this raises the question: Is Wall Street doing enough to prepare for the oil storm?
"One year from now, are you going to look back and say, 'Whoops, we didn't get ahead of this enough,'" outspoken banking analyst Mike Mayo asked JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon during Thursday's conference call.
Dimon said if it were up to him, he'd reserve against the potential for even greater losses. However, he said those decisions are limited by accounting rules.
Still, Dimon said the energy portfolio makes up just a small portion of JPMorgan's balance sheet and many of the loans are backed by physical assets. That means banks can sell off assets to recover money if a company defaults on its loans.
"We're not worried about the big oil companies. These are mostly the smaller ones that you're talking," Dimon said.
Paul Miller, a banking analyst at FBR, said oil loans don't represent nearly the same threat to banks that mortgages did last decade. He also pointed out that banks have been forced to stockpile capital to help them absorb losses.
"The big banks might have 1% to 6% of exposure. That's not going to kill them. This is not like 2006 or 2007," Miller said.
Despite the turmoil, JPMorgan isn't planning to run away from the oil patch.
"To the extent we can responsibly support clients, we're going to. And if we lose a little bit more money because of it, so be it," Dimon said.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 16, 2016 5:15 pm

Fed's Kashkari, in first speech, suggests radical Wall St. overhaul
WASHINGTON | BY LINDSAY DUNSMUIR AND JASON LANGE

The U.S. Federal Reserve's newest policymaker and a former point man for the government's bailout of the financial industry on Tuesday called on lawmakers to take radical action to rein in banks and protect taxpayers.

In his first speech as head of the Minneapolis Fed, Neel Kashkari, a Goldman Sachs executive before he worked at the U.S. Treasury, urged Congress to consider "bold, transformational" rules including the breaking up of the nation's largest banks to avoid bailouts.

Kashkari indicated that his work at Treasury, where he managed a key part of the banking and auto industry bailouts during the financial crisis of 2007-2009, helped inform his current view.

A set of regulations introduced since the crisis, known as Dodd-Frank, did not go far enough, he said in prepared remarks that straddled the line between the Fed's policymaking remit and political advocacy.

"Now is the right time for Congress to consider going further than Dodd-Frank with bold, transformational solutions to solve this problem once and for all," Kashkari said, arguing that the biggest banks are still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to the U.S. economy.

He urged lawmakers to consider breaking up large banks into "smaller, less connected, less important entities" and took a swipe at existing rules for winding down failing banks should they run into difficulty amid a weak global economy.

"I am far more skeptical that these tools will be useful," Kashkari said, adding that "we won't see the next crisis coming."

He said Congress should consider compelling banks to hold so much capital that they "virtually can't fail," in effect treating them like public utilities.

Speaking after his address, Kashkari said global economic and financial developments would be an "important" input when the Federal Reserve next meets on March 15-16.

He hewed closely to the Fed's January statement, saying he sees moderate growth and a gradual increase in interest rates. He declined to specify how many rate hikes there might be this year.

Kashkari added he does not expect negative rates will be needed in the United States but it was something the central bank could use if deemed necessary.

Financial markets have plunged amid slowing global growth and several central banks are using negative interest rates to avoid deflation and stimulate economic activity.

Kashkari took the helm of the Fed's smallest regional bank last month, two weeks after the Fed raised its benchmark interest rate for the first time in a decade.

He does not have a vote on the Fed's rate-setting committee until 2017 under its rotation system, but participates in deliberations.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 29, 2016 2:36 pm

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Apr 18, 2016 11:53 pm

Bill Clinton’s Blood Libel of the American People

By William K. Black
April 17, 2016 Bloomington, MN

Hillary Clinton uses a rhetorical device that is too clever by half. Whenever Bernie Sanders points out that she continues to take millions of dollars for her campaign and over $650,000 personally from the infamous “Vampire Squid” whose frauds caused the financial crisis she responds that this means that Bernie is attacking President Obama too, for in 2008 his campaign’s largest donor was those same Wall Street felons. She then says that the Dodd-Frank Act proves that campaign contributions do not affect elected officials. Her devotion to Wall Street funding and her statement that campaign funds have no effect help explain why she does so poorly in the polls on credibility. As I explained in a prior column, academic research confirms what we all know from life – campaign contributions play a substantial role in the decisions of elected officials. Indeed, even Paul Krugman’s lecture notes show that he agrees with this point. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to Bernie on economics, regulation, and criminology.)

President Obama began his term of office by slandering the American people who wanted him to restore the rule of law and bring the banksters to justice. Simon Johnson and James Kwak, the authors of Thirteen Bankers, cite Obama’s claim to the 13 bankers at the infamous March 31, 2009 meeting so close to the start of his term of office that he was all that was protecting them from the public’s “pitchforks” as the defining event of the administration on financial issues.

We chose this meeting because it aptly symbolizes the solidarity between the new Obama administration and the major banks at the depths of the financial crisis and recession. Speaking with reporters after the meeting, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, “We’re all in this together,” a phrase repeated by multiple bank CEOs. This contrasted with the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration of 1933, which largely froze out the bankers, much to their chagrin.

This is also the meeting at which Obama said, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” This was the point at which the government had to decide if it would defend the financial oligarchy from populist outrage, or whether it would reform the financial system that brought us the financial crisis and severe recession. We do not think it was an easy choice. But ultimately Obama and his advisers chose to bet on the bankers they knew. The result has been even larger banks and an even more concentrated financial sector.

The White House, hilariously, tried to spin this meeting as the President being tough on the bankers, but Johnson and Kwak easily saw through this early veil of PR. The administration’s own legal pleadings now admit that Obama was meeting with the leaders of many of the most destructive criminal organizations in the world, but he treated the CEOs as if they and the banks they dominated were the administration’s key allies – “We’re all in this together” was Obama’s catchphrase. Obama’s characterization of the American people was a blood libel. The American people do not want mob rule, we want justice. We want the criminals prosecuted who led the fraud epidemics that caused the financial crisis prosecuted.

Did Obama’s record receipt of Wall Street funds matter? Actions speak far louder than President Obama or Secretary Clinton’s words. How many prosecutions has the Obama administration brought of the Wall Street elites that led the three most destructive epidemics of financial fraud in history? Those are the epidemics of appraisal fraud, “liar’s” loans, and the subsequent resale of these fraudulently originated mortgages through fraudulent “representations (reps) and warranties. The answer is zero. How many of the systemically dangerous banks have been ordered by the Obama administration to shrink a level that they no longer endanger the global economy? The answer is zero. How many times has President Obama said that the crisis was driven by elite Wall Street frauds? The answer is zero. How many times has President Obama fired his Attorney General for failure to prosecute the elite Wall Street felons? The answer is zero.

Krugman claims that the crisis was brought on only by the predatory loans of small, unregulated lenders in the “shadow” sector. That is false, as I will document in detail in a subsequent article, but even if it were true it would pose an obvious question – how many “C” suite leaders of the “shadow” lenders has the Obama administration prosecuted? The answer is zero. “Shadow” lenders also made very large political contributions.

Hillary cannot even bring herself to use the words “fraud” and “predation” to charge Wall Street and shadow elites with their crimes. Instead, she says that no one is too big to prosecute – even though the last decade has proven the opposite. The most Hillary is able to bring herself to charge Wall Street’s felons with is “shenanigans” – which means “youthful pranks.” Yep, Hillary thinks that Wall Street’s elite banksters were just a bunch of 14-year old males out on the equivalent of a “joy ride” in dad’s car. Her refusal to denounce the elite fraudsters and their crimes demonstrates that she is unwilling to use even the most tepid words against them lest she and Bill lose their millions of dollars from their Wall Street patrons. How is she going to actually prosecute the elite Wall Street criminals and break up the systemically dangerous Wall Street banks if she cannot even bring herself to condemn their fraud epidemics?

Fortunately, Bill Clinton is the gift that keeps on giving. He has just given a speech denouncing the Democratic Party’s base, the progressives who are the most loyal and strongest supporters of the Democratic Party. He denounced them because a majority of progressives support Bernie. His fiasco when he tried to claim that Black Lives Matter protesters were defending the murderers of black children because they objected to Hillary’s adopting and using the great slander about black “super predators” being sub human was an unscripted departure from his talk. Bill’s slander of progressive Democrats, however, was clearly a “joke” he had rehearsed and was eager to deliver.

“One of the few things I really haven’t enjoyed about this primary, I think it’s fine that these young students have been so enthusiastic for her opponent and… sounds so good: ‘Just shoot every third person on Wall Street and everything will be fine,’” Clinton said at an event in New York.

Note that Bill hid behind the “joke” label to spread the innuendo that the base of the Democratic Party was a murderous mob suffused with hate for anyone who worked on Wall Street. The truth is the opposite. The base of the Democratic Party wants justice, which requires that no one is above the rule of law. The Wall Street and shadow banksters have both been allowed to commit the most destructive financial frauds in history with total personal impunity. That isn’t the fault of the American people, but of the leaders who have destroyed the rule of law when it comes to finance. Bill Clinton was one of those leaders.

Please review, and if you agree, support the detailed plan of the Bank Whistleblowers United to restore the rule of law to finance. BWU is a non-partisan group that asks the supporters of every candidate to ask him or her to pledge to implement the BWU plan and campaign pledge.

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2016 ... eople.html
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby Sounder » Sun May 15, 2016 11:15 am

I did not verify but heard that Deutsche Bank is offering 5% to buyers of three month notes.

If true, then bankers are more than simply nervous about their balance sheets, they are desperate.
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon May 16, 2016 1:13 am

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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby Freitag » Thu Jul 21, 2016 12:07 am

HSBC's Global Head of Foreign Exchange Trading Arrested at JFK

7/20/2016

A senior official at HSBC has been held in a surprise arrest at JFK International Airport in connection with a case involving currency benchmark rigging, according to reports.

Mark Johnson, the bank's global head of foreign-exchange cash trading, was arrested Tuesday as he prepared to leave the United States, according to multiple reports. He faces charges following a three-year investigation into currency trading practices at multiple global banks.

In addition, Stuart Scott, the former head of the bank's Europe desk, also faces wire fraud conspiracy charges, according to the New York Times, which also reported that Johnson and Scott made a $3 million profit on the trade. The deal in question apparently involved an oil and gas company that wanted to exchange U.S. dollars with British pounds.

HSBC declined comment on the matter. The Justice Department in New York was not immediately available and have not yet released information.

The investigation into currency rigging has been ongoing for three years but has resulted in no individual arrests until this week. Johnson is expected to appear in court Wednesday on a conspiracy to commit wire fraud charge, according to Bloomberg.

Banks have paid billions in fines resulting from investigations, with Citigroup, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, RBS and UBS forced to pay $3.1 billion in fines from Britain's Financial Conduct Authority and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the US. JPMorgan, Citi and Bank of America also had to pay separately $950 million for unsafe practices, while UBS shelled out an additional $138 million to the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority for improper business conduct.
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 08, 2016 4:12 pm

5,300 Wells Fargo employees fired for creating over 2 million phony accounts
by Matt Egan @mattmegan5
September 8, 2016: 3:52 PM ET



Everyone hates paying bank fees. But imagine paying fees on a ghost account you didn't even sign up for.
That's exactly what happened to Wells Fargo customers nationwide.
On Thursday, federal regulators said Wells Fargo employees secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts -- without their customers knowing it -- since 2011.

The phony accounts earned the bank unwarranted fees and allowed Wells Fargo employees to boost their sales figures and make more money.
"Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses," Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a statement.
Wells Fargo confirmed to CNNMoney that it had fired 5,300 employees related to the shady behavior. Employees went to far as to create phony PIN numbers and fake email addresses to enroll customers in online banking services, the CFPB said.
Related: ATM and overdraft fees top $6 billion at the big 3 banks
The scope of the scandal is shocking. An analysis conducted by a consulting firm hired by Wells Fargo concluded that bank employees opened up over 1.5 million deposit accounts that may not have been authorized, according to the CFPB.
The way it worked was that employees moved funds from customers' existing accounts into newly-created accounts without their knowledge or consent, regulators say. The CFPB described this practice as "widespread" and led to customers being charged for insufficient funds or overdraft fees -- because the money was not in their original accounts.
Additionally, Wells Fargo employees also submitted applications for 565,443 credit card accounts without their knowledge or consent, the CFPB said the analysis found. Many customers who had unauthorized credit cards opened in their names were hit by annual fees, interest charges and other fees.
The CFPB said Wells Fargo will pay "full restitutions to all victims."
Related: Goldman Sachs' top 1% can't donate to Trump
Wells Fargo is being slapped with the largest penalty since the CFPB was founded in 2011. The bank agreed to pay $185 million in fines, along with $5 million to refund customers.
"We regret and take responsibility for any instances where customers may have received a product that they did not request," Wells Fargo said in a statement.
Wells Fargo confirmed to CNNMoney that the firings represents about 1% of its workforce.
"At Wells Fargo, when we make mistakes, we are open about it, we take responsibility, and we take action," the bank said in a memo to employees on Thursday.
It's not clear when Wells Fargo hired a consulting firm to investigate the allegations, nor what triggered the response. Wells Fargo did not respond to a request for comment on this.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/investi ... index.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Sep 08, 2016 5:20 pm

FIVETHOUSANDTHREEHUNDRED, as one might write on a check, but it was a MISTAKE! TWOMILLIONACCOUNTS. When WellsFargo "finds out" about mistakes, they correct them! Really! It's not like anyone at WellsFargo management could have known what FIVETHOUSANDTHREEHUNDRED of their peons were doing, heck no. And my, it works so well with making the downsizing look less dramatic. Just get rid of the isolated FIVETHOUSANDTHREEHUNDRED bad apples, who of course acted on their own without it involving the culture, the incentive systems or the wink and the nod (or perhaps the directive) from management. Great organization.
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 15, 2016 9:09 pm

Elizabeth Warren Opens Pandora’s Box With Midnight Letters to DOJ and FBI
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 15, 2016

Senator Elizabeth Warren Questioning Fed Nominee Stanley Fischer on March 13, 2014
Senator Elizabeth Warren
While Elizabeth Warren attempted to deliver her keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in July, which included an unabashed endorsement of Hillary Clinton after Warren had failed to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders during the critical primary campaign, chants of “we trusted you” could be heard reverberating through the cavernous hall in Philadelphia.

Warren rose to fame challenging the corrupt practices on Wall Street. She was now aligned with a Presidential candidate who was using Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains from the customers they had fleeced to finance her path to the Oval Office. There is no doubt that this has caused significant cognitive dissonance among Warren’s constituents in Massachusetts’ – the landing site of the Pilgrims and one of the original 13 colonies.

This bit of background might help to explain why, with less than two months before the November 8 election – and Hillary Clinton running for a third Obama term, promising to continue in his footsteps – Elizabeth Warren issued two letters that draw a sharp focus on the failures of Obama’s Justice Department and FBI to prosecute the myriad criminal acts on Wall Street that led to the 2008 financial collapse. (Warren’s letters were embargoed until midnight last evening, promising a full run of the news cycle today.)

In a 20-page letter to the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, Michael E. Horowitz, Senator Warren asked for an investigation into why the DOJ had failed to indict any of the Wall Street executives that had been referred to it for potential criminal prosecution by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC). In a separate letter, Warren asked FBI Director James Comey for his related files.

The FCIC released thousands of documents in March of this year, showing that it had made multiple criminal referrals to the DOJ. Warren wrote in her letter:

“A review of these documents conducted by my staff has identified 11 separate FCIC referrals of individuals or corporations to DOJ in cases where the FCIC found ‘serious indications of violations[s]’ of federal securities or other laws. Nine individuals were implicated in these referrals (two were implicated twice). The DOJ has not filed any criminal prosecutions against any of the nine individuals. Not one of the nine has gone to prison or been convicted of a criminal offense. Not a single one has even been indicted or brought to trial. Only one individual was fined, in the amount of $100,000, and that was to settle a civil case brought by the SEC.”

This particular paragraph is a Pandora’s Box by a factor of $2.5 trillion. The two individuals Warren refers to who were “implicated twice” in the FCIC’s criminal referrals are Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary in the administration of Bill Clinton, who in the lead up to the crash of Citigroup in 2008 served as Executive Committee Chair of Citigroup’s Board of Directors. (After advocating for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed Citigroup to own both an insured depository bank, an investment bank and brokerage firm, Rubin went straight from his post as Treasury Secretary to the Board of Citigroup, where he collected $126 million in compensation over the next decade.)

The other individual whose name appears twice is Chuck Prince, Citigroup CEO during its implosion. A third Citigroup executive’s name appears as well on the list: Gary Crittenden, the Chief Financial Officer of Citigroup at the time of its crash.

One other individual’s name should have been on this list: Ben Bernanke, the Chair of the Federal Reserve who allowed the funneling of over $2.5 trillion in cumulative, secret loans to Citigroup during the crisis – despite the fact that it was insolvent and thus not legally eligible for the loans. Citigroup was the largest bailout recipient in the crisis, notwithstanding that its share price at one point reached 99 cents.

Sheila Bair, who was head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) during the crisis, confirms this point in her book, Bull by the Horns. Bair writes:

“By November [2008], the supposedly solvent Citi was back on the ropes, in need of another government handout. The market didn’t buy the OCC’s [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that supervises national banks] and NY Fed’s strategy of making it look as though Citi was as healthy as the other commercial banks…Instead, the OCC and the NY Fed stood by as that sick bank continued to pay major dividends and pretended that it was healthy.”

Congressional testimony should also be demanded from John Dugan, a former lobbyist for JPMorgan Chase and the American Bankers Association who became head of the OCC in 2005 and reigned there throughout the crisis. Dugan now heads the Financial Institutions Group at Covington & Burling, the same law firm from which Obama plucked his DOJ Attorney General Eric Holder and its head of the criminal division, Lanny Breuer.

Covington & Burling is the same law firm that fronted for Big Tobacco for four decades and was called out for its unsavory role in a famous Federal court decision.

If Senator Warren is genuinely serious about getting to the bottom of this failure to prosecute, she also needs to demand that the Federal Reserve turn over the details of those 84 secret meetings that Bernanke held during the financial crisis and New York Fed President Tim Geithner’s 29 meet and greets with Citigroup execs, including the one where Sandy Weill, creator of Citigroup, offered Geithner a job at Citigroup.

There is strong evidence that long before the public was fully aware of the teetering condition of Citigroup, the Fed was propping it up with outrageously inappropriate support. On August 20, 2007, more than a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Federal Reserve granted Citigroup an exemption that would allow it to funnel up to $25 billion from its FDIC insured depository bank, Citibank, to mortgage-backed securities speculators at its broker-dealer unit. The Federal Reserve notes in its waiver letter that the bank “is well capitalized.” (Federal Reserve Exemption to Citigroup to Loan to Its Broker-Dealer, August 20, 2007)

It’s long past the time for the U.S. Senate to stop conducting isolated, piecemeal investigations and undertake the type of in-depth hearings that the Senate held from 1929 to 1932 that led to the public’s understanding of the serial criminal activities on Wall Street that had produced the Great Depression and which led to the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act — legislation which protected this nation for 66 years until its repeal in 1999 during the Bill Clinton administration.

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/09/e ... j-and-fbi/


Published on
Thursday, September 15, 2016
byCommon Dreams
Warren Demands Investigation Into Obama's Failure to Jail the Banksters
"I can think of no matter of 'intense public interest' about which 'the American people deserve the details' than the issue of what precisely happened to the criminal referrals that followed the 2008 crash"
byLauren McCauley, staff writer

Though President Barack Obama is set to leave office in matter of months, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is not willing to let him go without a full explanation as to why his administration refused to jail the Wall Street banksters behind the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

In a letter sent to Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general Michael Horowitz on Thursday, the progressive firebrand demanded an investigation into why the DOJ refused to file criminal charges against individuals despite "'serious indications of violation[s]' of federal securities and other laws," uncovered by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) probe into the causes of the economic crash.

Warren said her staff reviewed thousands of documents recently made public by the FCIC, and identified "11 separate FCIC referrals of individuals or corporations to DOJ in cases where the FCIC found" such evidence. According to Warren, "Nine individuals were implicated in these referrals (two were implicated twice)."

The DOJ, she continued, "has not filed any criminal prosecutions against any of the nine individuals. Not one of the nine has gone to prison or been convicted of a criminal offense. Not a single one has even been indicted or brought to trial."

Further, she notes that her staff review "identified potentially illegal activity at 14 corporations (including five that were implicated in multiple referrals)." Though there were five corporations that reached a settlement with the DOJ, not one was criminally indicted or brought to trial.

Summarizing the letter, financial reporter David Dayen noted that the corporate criminals examined in the FCIC documents included

most of America’s largest banks—Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual (now part of JPMorgan), and Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America)—along with foreign banking giants UBS, Credit Suisse, and Société Generale, auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers, credit rating agency Moody’s, insurance company AIG, and mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The FCIC presented DOJ with evidence that these institutions gave false representations about the loan quality inside mortgage-backed securities; misled credit ratings agencies; overstated assets and earnings in financial disclosures; failed to disclose credit downgrades, subprime exposure and the financial health of their operations to shareholders; and suffered breakdowns in internal company controls. All of these were tied to specific violations of federal law.

And the FCIC named names, specifying nine top-level executives who should be investigated on criminal charges: CEO Daniel Mudd and CFO Stephen Swad of Fannie Mae, CEO Martin Sullivan and CFO Stephen Bensinger of AIG, CEO Stan O’Neal and CFO Jeffrey Edwards of Merrill Lynch, and CEO Chuck Prince, CFO Gary Crittenden and Board Chairman Robert Rubin of Citigroup.

"The DOJ's failure to obtain any criminal convictions of any of the individuals or corporations named in the FCIC referrals suggests that the department has failed to hold the individuals and companies most responsible for the financial crisis and the Great Recession accountable," Warren concludes. "This failure requires an explanations."

Thursday also marks 8 years since Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Warren said the anniversary is "a good occasion to stop and ask where the real accountability is and get some answers out of the Justice Department about why they haven’t prosecuted anyone."

On social media, Warren reiterated that point:


Warren also wrote to James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), on Thursday asking for his department to release "any and all materials related to the FBI's investigations and prosecutorial decisions regarding" the FCIC referrals, noting that the "additional information may help in the examination of this failure."

In the Comey letter, Warren acknowledges that the FBI "does not typically release internal documents from its investigations," but that the bureau under Comey recently set new precedent for doing so with its disclosure of information pertaining to the investigation of presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's email server.

At the time, Comey said that "making these materials available to the public [was] in the interest of transparency."

"These new standards present a compelling case for public transparency around the fate of the FCIC referrals," Warren writes. "If Secretary Clinton's email server was of sufficient 'interest' to establish a new FBI standard of transparency, then sure the criminal prosecution of those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis should be subject to he same level of transparency."

She concludes: "For the uncounted millions of Americans whose lives were changed forever and for those who are still dealing with the consequences of the crash, I can think of no matter of 'intense public interest' about which 'the American people deserve the details' than the issue of what precisely happened to the criminal referrals that followed the 2008 crash."
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/0 ... -banksters
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby Grizzly » Thu Sep 15, 2016 9:58 pm

Image

Watch out! A strongly worded letter! We got a bad ass in the house, uh, er,... Senate. :roll: :roll: :roll:
Add that to the list:

http://statecrimesagainstdemocracy.blogspot.com/
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Sep 16, 2016 2:20 am

Grizzly » Thu Sep 15, 2016 8:58 pm wrote:Watch out! A strongly worded letter! We got a bad ass in the house, uh, er,... Senate. :roll: :roll: :roll:
Add that to the list:

http://statecrimesagainstdemocracy.blogspot.com/


To be fair it's not like there's much else she can do as a senator, absent at least 50 others who side with her.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby Grizzly » Fri Sep 16, 2016 7:21 pm

Anywho, thought this might interest some of you...
A Loud Sound Just Shut Down a Bank's Data Center for 10 Hours
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-loud ... ce=popular

September 11, 2016 // 02:00 PM EST

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“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Sep 21, 2016 8:26 pm

This thread has been a fascinating journey for me. If I go back to the beginning, I'll see so many ways I had not understood fundamentals of how money actually works.


http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/19/ ... n-banking/

Central Bank Digital Currencies: a Revolution in Banking?

Posted By Ellen Brown On September 19, 2016 @ 1:57 am


Several central banks, including the Bank of England, the People’s Bank of China, the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve, are exploring the concept of issuing their own digital currencies, using the blockchain technology developed for Bitcoin. Skeptical commentators suspect that their primary goal is to eliminate cash, setting us up for negative interest rates (we pay the bank to hold our deposits rather than the reverse).

But Ben Broadbent, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, puts a more positive spin on it. He says Central Bank Digital Currencies could supplant the money now created by private banks through “fractional reserve” lending – and that means 97% of the circulating money supply. Rather than outlawing bank-created money, as money reformers have long urged, fractional reserve banking could be made obsolete simply by attrition, preempted by a better mousetrap. The need for negative interest rates could also be eliminated, by giving the central bank more direct tools for stimulating the economy.

The Blockchain Revolution

How blockchain works was explained by Martin Hiesboeck in an April 2016 article titled, “Blockchain Is the Most Disruptive Invention Since the Internet Itself“:

The blockchain is a simple yet ingenious way of passing information from A to B in a fully automated and safe manner. One party to a transaction initiates the process by creating a block. This block is verified by thousands, perhaps millions of computers distributed around the net. The verified block is added to a chain, which is stored across the net, creating not just a unique record, but a unique record with a unique history. Falsifying a single record would mean falsifying the entire chain in millions of instances. That is virtually impossible.

In a speech at the London School of Economics in March 2016, Bank of England Deputy Governor Ben Broadbent pointed out that a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) would not eliminate physical cash. Only the legislature could do that, and blockchain technology would not be needed to pull it off, since most money is already digital. What is unique and potentially revolutionary about a national blockchain currency is that it would eliminate the need for banks in the payments system. According to a July 2016 article in The Wall Street Journal on the CBDC proposal:

[M]oney would exist electronically outside of bank accounts in digital wallets, much as physical banknotes do. This means households and businesses would be able to bypass banks altogether when making payments to one another.

Not only the payments system but the actual creation of money is orchestrated by private banks today. Nearly 97% of the money supply is created by banks when they make loans, as the Bank of England acknowledged in a bombshell report in 2014. The digital money we transfer by check, credit card or debit card represents simply the IOU or promise to pay of a bank. A CBDC could replace these private bank liabilities with central bank liabilities. CBDCs are the digital equivalent of cash.

Money recorded on a blockchain is stored in the “digital wallet” of the bearer, as safe from confiscation as cash in a physical wallet. It cannot be borrowed, manipulated, or speculated with by third parties any more than physical dollars can be. The money remains under the owner’s sole control until transferred to someone else, and that transfer is anonymous.

Rather than calling a CBDC a “digital currency,” says Broadbent, a better term for the underlying technology might be “decentralised virtual clearinghouse and asset register.” He adds:

But there’s no denying the technology is novel. Prospectively, it offers an entirely new way of exchanging and holding assets, including money.

Banking in the Cloud

One novel possibility he suggests is that everyone could hold an account at the central bank. That would eliminate the fear of bank runs and “bail-ins,” as well as the need for deposit insurance, since the central bank cannot run out of money. Accounts could be held at the central bank not just by small depositors but by large institutional investors, eliminating the need for the private repo market to provide a safe place to park their funds. It was a run on the repo market, not the conventional banking system, that triggered the banking crisis after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

Private banks could be free to carry on as they do now. They would just have substantially fewer deposits, since depositors with the option of banking at the ultra-safe central bank would probably move their money to that institution.

That is the problem Broadbent sees in giving everyone access to the central bank: there could be a massive run on the banks as depositors moved their money out. If so, where would the liquidity come from to back bank loans? He says lending activity could be seriously impaired.

Perhaps, but here is another idea. What if the central bank supplanted not just the depository but the lending functions of private banks? A universal distributed ledger designed as public infrastructure could turn the borrowers’ IOUs into “money” in the same way that banks do now – and do it more cheaply, efficiently and equitably than through banker middlemen.

Making Fractional Reserve Lending Obsolete

The Bank of England has confirmed that banks do not actually lend their depositors’ money. They do not recycle the money of “savers” but actually create deposits when they make loans. The bank turns the borrower’s IOU into “checkable money” that it then lends back to the borrower at interest. A public, distributed ledger could do this by “smart contract” in the “cloud.”

There would be no need to find “savers” from whom to borrow this money. The borrower would simply be “monetizing” his own promise to repay, just as he does now when he takes out a loan at a private bank. Since he would be drawing from the bottomless well of the central bank, there would be no fear of the bank running out of liquidity in a panic; and there would be no need to borrow overnight to balance the books, with the risk that these short-term loans might not be there the next day.

To reiterate: this is what banks do now. Banks are not intermediaries taking in deposits and lending them out. When a bank issues a loan for a mortgage, it simply writes the sum into the borrower’s account. The borrower writes a check to his seller, which is deposited in the seller’s bank, where it is called a “new” deposit and added to that bank’s “excess reserves.” The issuing bank then borrows this money back from the banking system overnight if necessary to balance its books, returning the funds the next morning. The whole rigmarole is repeated the next night, and the next and the next.

In a public blockchain system, this shell game could be dispensed with. The borrower would be his own banker, turning his own promise to repay into money. “Smart contracts” coded into the blockchain could make these transactions subject to terms and conditions similar to those for loans now. Creditworthiness could be established online, just as it is with online credit applications now. Penalties could be assessed for nonpayment just as they are now. If the borrower did not qualify for a loan from the public credit facility, he could still borrow on the private market, from private banks or venture capitalists or mutual funds. Favoritism and corruption could be eliminated, by eliminating the need for a banker middleman who serves as gatekeeper to the public credit machine. The fees extracted by an army of service providers could also be eliminated, because blockchain has no transaction costs.

In a blog for Bank of England staff titled “Central Bank Digital Currency: The End of Monetary Policy As We Know It?”, Marilyne Tolle suggests that the need to manipulate interest rates might also be eliminated. The central bank would not need this indirect tool for managing inflation because it would have direct control of the money supply.

A CBDC on a distributed ledger could be used for direct economic stimulus in another way: through facilitating payment of a universal national dividend. Rather than sending out millions of dividend checks, blockchain technology could add money to consumer bank accounts with a few keystrokes.

Hyperinflationary? No.

The objection might be raised that if everyone had access to the central bank’s credit facilities, credit bubbles would result; but that would actually be less likely than under the current system. The central bank would be creating money on its books in response to demand by borrowers, just as private banks do now. But loans for speculation would be harder to come by, since the leveraging of credit through the “rehypothecation” of collateral in the repo market would be largely eliminated. As explained by blockchain software technologist Caitlin Long:

Rehypothecation is conceptually similar to fractional reserve banking because a dollar of base money is responsible for several different dollars of debt issued against that same dollar of base money. In the repo market, collateral (such as U.S Treasury securities) functions as base money. . . .

Through rehypothecation, multiple parties report that they own the same asset at the same time when in reality only one of them does—because, after all, only one such asset exists. One of the most important benefits of blockchains for regulators is gaining a tool to see how much double-counting is happening (specifically, how long “collateral chains” really are).

Blockchain eliminates this shell game by eliminating the settlement time between trades. Blockchain trades occur in “real-time,” meaning collateral can be in only one place at a time.

A Sea Change in Banking

Martin Hiesboeck concludes:

[B]lockchain won’t just kill banks, brokers and credit card companies. It will change every transactional process you know. Simply put, blockchain eliminates the need for clearinghouse entities of any kind. And that means a revolution is coming, a fundamental sea change in the way we do business.

Changes of that magnitude usually take a couple of decades. But the UK did surprise the world with its revolutionary Brexit vote to leave the EU. Perhaps a new breed of economists at the Bank of England will surprise us with a revolutionary new model for banking and credit.

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
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Re: "End of Wall Street Boom" - Must-read history

Postby Grizzly » Thu Sep 22, 2016 2:38 am

http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-rev ... -N5nEJMFdY
Charles Murray talks to Sean Collins about the new class war.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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