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Gary Edwards

The Federal Reserve is a privately owned Corporation « orwelliania - 0 views

orwelliania.wordpress.com/...-a-privately-owned-corporation

End-the-Fed Banksters Globalist Rothschild-Banksters Central-Banks

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Jun 12
     
    Incredible.  Watch your breathing rate as you read this.  Otherwise you might pass out. excerpt: Who actually owns the Federal Reserve Central Banks? The ownership of the 12 Central banks, a very well kept secret, has been revealed: Rothschild Bank of London Warburg Bank of Hamburg Rothschild Bank of Berlin Lehman Brothers of New York Lazard Brothers of Paris Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York Israel Moses Seif Banks of Italy Goldman, Sachs of New York Warburg Bank of Amsterdam Chase Manhattan Bank of New York (Reference 14, P. 13, Reference 12, P. 152) These bankers are connected to London Banking Houses which ultimately control the FED. When England lost the Revolutionary War with America (our forefathers were fighting their own government), they planned to control us by controlling our banking system, the printing of our money, and our debt (Reference 4, 22). The individuals listed below owned banks which in turn owned shares in the FED. The banks listed below have significant control over the New York FED District, which controls the other 11 FED Districts. These banks also are partly foreign owned and control the New York FED District Bank. (Reference 22) First National Bank of New York James Stillman National City Bank, New York Mary W. Harnman National Bank of Commerce, New York A.D. Jiullard Hanover National Bank, New York Jacob Schiff Chase National Bank, New York Thomas F. Ryan Paul Warburg William Rockefeller Levi P. Morton M.T. Pyne George F. Baker Percy Pyne Mrs. G.F. St. George J.W. Sterling Katherine St. George H.P. Davidson J.P. Morgan (Equitable Life/Mutual Life) Edith Brevour T. Baker (Reference 4 for above, Reference 22 has details, P. 92, 93, 96, 179) How did it happen? After previous attempts to push the Federal Reserve Act through Congress, a group of bankers funded and staffed Woodrow Wilson's campaign for President. He had committed to sign this act. In 1913, a Senator, Nelson Aldrich, maternal grandfather to the Rockefell
Paul Merrell

Moody's downgrades 4 US giant lenders - RT Business - 0 views

rt.com/...downgrades-four-us-lenders-766

financial-collapse too-big-to-fail bail-ins U.S. Cyprus

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Moody’s is to cut the credit rating of US major banks, including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Bank of New York Mellon. The rating agency thinks the government is now less likely to support the lenders in times of new financial difficulties. The debt rating of the holding company of Goldman Sachs was cut from A3 to Baa1, JPMorgan - from A2 to A3, Morgan Stanley - from Baa1 to Baa2, and Bank of New York Mellon -  from Aa3 to A1.
  • "We believe that US bank regulators have made substantive progress in establishing a credible framework to resolve a large, failing bank," said Robert Young, the Moody’s Managing Director. "Rather than relying on public funds to bail-out one of these institutions, we expect that bank holding company's creditors will be bailed-in and thereby shoulder much of the burden to help recapitalize a failing bank." Lower credit rating can cost the lenders a higher loan price, increasing their financial burden. However the bank executives complained about unfairly assessed downgrades, and optimism overcompensation, the Financial Times reported. The review is similar to one by Standard & Poor's in June and comes from government’s unwillingness to repeat bailouts in a crisis.
  • The decision was made after the ratings of eight American banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and State Street were placed on revision in August, when more details of government’s intention to abandon banks support were unveiled.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Nov 13
     
    So Moody's thinks Cyprus like bail-ins for large failing U.S. banks are more likely than government bail-outs and names the large banks most likely to fail, with their projected likelihood to fail reflected in Moody's adjusted credit ratings. For those who don't understand what a "bail-in" is, it means that the bank gets your deposits and you get back a bit of ownership in a failing enterprise. Try to spend that. 
Gary Edwards

Bankers Get $4 Trillion Gift From Barney Frank: David Reilly - Bloomberg - 1 views

www.bloomberg.com/...barney-frank-david-reilly.html

Dodd-Frank-Act banksters financial-collapse Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Nov 13
     
    excerpt: "While banks opposed the legislation, they should cheer for its passage by the full Congress in the New Year: There are huge giveaways insuring the government will again rescue banks and Wall Street if the need arises. Nuggets Gleaned Here are some of the nuggets I gleaned from days spent reading Frank's handiwork: -- For all its heft, the bill doesn't once mention the words "too-big-to-fail," the main issue confronting the financial system. Admitting you have a problem, as any 12- stepper knows, is the crucial first step toward recovery. -- Instead, it supports the biggest banks. It authorizes Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes. So much for "no-more-bailouts" talk. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into markets this time around. The size of the fund makes the bribes in the Senate's health-care bill look minuscule. -- Oh, hold on, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Secretary can't authorize these funds unless "there is at least a 99 percent likelihood that all funds and interest will be paid back." Too bad the same models used to foresee the housing meltdown probably will be used to predict this likelihood as well. More Bailouts -- The bill also allows the government, in a crisis, to back financial firms' debts. Bondholders can sleep easy -- there are more bailouts to come. -- The legislation does create a council of regulators to spot risks to the financial system and big financial firms. Unfortunately this group is made up of folks who missed the problems that led to the current crisis. -- Don't worry, this time regulators will have better tools. Six months after being created, the council will report to Congress on "whether setting up an electronic database" would be a help. Maybe they'll even get to use that Internet thingy. -- This group, among its many powers, can restrict the ability of a financial firm to trade for its own account. Perha
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, Security vs. Securities | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...ner%2C_security_vs._securities

banksters housing-market foreclosures equity-firms Blackstone Progress-Residential

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • I live in Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood. I can more or less roll out of bed into the House of Representatives or the Senate; the majestic Library of Congress doubles as my local branch. (If you visit, spend a sunset on the steps of the library's Jefferson Building. Trust me.) You can't miss my place, three stories of brick painted Big Bird yellow. It's a charming little corner of the city. Each fall, the trees outside my window shake their leaves and carpet the street in gold. Nora Ephron, if she were alive, might've shot a scene for her latest movie in one of the lush green parks that bookend my block. The neighborhood wasn't always so nice. A few years back, during a reporting trip to China, I met an American consultant who had known Capitol Hill in a darker era. "I was driving up the street one time," he told me, "and walking in the opposite direction was this huge guy carrying an assault rifle. Broad daylight, no one even noticed. That's what kind of neighborhood it was." Nowadays, row houses around me sell for $1 million or more. I rent.
  • Washington's a fun place to live if you're young and employed. But as a recent Washington Post story pointed out, the nation's capital is slowly pricing out even its yuppies who, in their late-twenties and early-thirties, want to start families but can't afford it. "I hate to say it, but the facts show that the D.C. market is for people who are single and relatively affluent," a real estate researcher told the Post. The District's housing boom just won't stop; off go those new and expecting parents to the suburbs. And we're talking about the lucky ones. Elsewhere in the country, vulnerability in the housing market isn't a trend story; it's the norm. The Cedillo family, as Laura Gottesdiener writes today, went looking for their version of the American housing dream and thought they found it in Chandler, Arizona. They didn't know that the house they chose to rent rested on a shaky foundation -- not physically but financially. It had been one of thousands snapped up and rented out by massive investment firms making a killing in the wake of the housing collapse. As Gottesdiener -- who has put the new rental empires of private equity firms on the map for TomDispatch -- shows, the goal of such companies is to squeeze every dime of profit from their properties, from homes like the Cedillos', and that can lead to tragedy.
  • Drowning in Profits A Private Equity Firm, a Missing Pool Fence, and the Price of a Child’s Death By Laura Gottesdiener
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Security is a slippery idea these days -- especially when it comes to homes and neighborhoods. Perhaps the most controversial development in America’s housing “recovery” is the role played by large private equity firms. In recent years, they have bought up more than 200,000 mostly foreclosed houses nationwide and turned them into rental empires. In the finance and real estate worlds, this development has won praise for helping to raise home values and creating a new financial product known as a “rental-backed security.” Many economists and housing advocates, however, have blasted this new model as a way for Wall Street to capitalize on an economic crisis by essentially pushing families out of their homes, then turning around and renting those houses back to them. Caught in the crosshairs are tens of thousands of families now living in these private equity-owned homes.
  • The same month that the family rented the house at 1471 West Camino Court, Progress Residential purchased more homes in Maricopa Country than any other institutional buyer. Nationally, Blackstone, a private equity giant, has been the leading purchaser of single-family homes, spending upwards of $8 billion between 2012 and 2014 to purchase 43,000 homes in about a dozen cities. However, in May 2013, according to Michael Orr, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, Progress Residential bought nearly 200 houses, surpassing Blackstone's buying rate that month in the Phoenix area. The condition and code compliance of these houses varies and is rarely known at the time of the purchase. Mike Anderson, who works for a bidding service contracted by Progress Residential and other private equity giants to buy houses at auctions, was sometimes asked to go out and look at the homes. But with the staggering buying rate -- up to 15 houses a day at the peak -- he couldn’t keep up. “There’d be too many, you couldn’t go out and look at them,” he said. “It’s just a gamble. You never know what you’ve got into.”
  • Global private equity firms have not been, historically, in the business of dealing with pool fences and the other hassles of maintaining single-family houses. But following the housing market collapse, the idea of buying a ton of these foreclosed properties suddenly made sense, at least to investors. Such private-equity purchases were to make money in three ways: buying cheap and waiting for the houses to gain value as the market bounced back; renting them out and collecting monthly rental payments; and promoting a financial product known as “rental-backed securities,” similar to the infamous mortgage-backed securities that triggered the housing meltdown of 2007-2008. Even though the buying of the private equity firms has finally slowed, economists (including those at the Federal Reserve) have expressed concern about the possibility that someday those rental-backed securities could even destabilize -- translation: crash -- the broader market.
  • ince Wall Street was overwhelmingly responsible for the original collapse of the housing market, many have characterized these new purchases as a land grab. In many ways, Progress CEO Donald Mullen is the poster-child for this argument. An investment banker who enjoyed a brief flurry of fame after losing a bidding war to Alec Baldwin at an art auction, he was the leader of a team at Goldman Sachs that orchestrated an infamous bet against the housing market. Known as “the big short,” it allowed that company to make “some serious money“ when the economy melted down, according to Mullen’s own emails. (They were released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 2010.) As Kevin Roose of New York magazine has written, “A guy whose most famous trade was a successful bet on the full-scale implosion of the housing market is now swooping in to pick up the pieces on the other end.”
Paul Merrell

The Dynastic Hillary Bandwagon » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...the-dynastic-hillary-bandwagon

Auction 2016 Hillary Nader Soros Obama nepotism dynasties

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • by RALPH NADER The Hillary Clinton for President in 2016 bandwagon has started very early and with a purpose. The idea is to get large numbers of endorsers, so that no Democratic Primary competitors dare make a move. These supporters include Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), financier George Soros and Ready for Hillary, a super PAC mobilizing with great specificity (already in Iowa). Given this early bird launch, it is important to raise the pressing question: Does the future of our country benefit from Hillary, another Clinton, another politician almost indistinguishable from Barack Obama’s militaristic, corporatist policies garnished by big money donors from Wall Street and other plutocratic canyons? There is no doubt the Clintons are syrupy political charmers, beguiling many naïve Democrats who have long been vulnerable to a practiced set of comforting words or phrases camouflaging contrary deeds.
  • Many Wall Streeters like Hillary Clinton. Expecting their ample contributions, and socializing with their business barons, it is not surprising that Hillary Clinton avoids going after the crooked casino capitalism that collapsed the economy, drained investors, pensions, jobs and taxpayer bailouts. Hillary Clinton is a far cry from the stalwart Senator Elizabeth Warren on this towering pattern of unaccountable corporate abuse.
  • A Clinton Coronation two years or more before the 2016 elections will stifle any broader choice of competitive primary candidates and more important a more progressive agenda supported by a majority of the American people.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Maybe the sugarcoating is starting to wear. Columnist Frank Bruni, writing in the New York Times (Hillary in 2016? Not so Fast), reports her polls are starting to slump. Apparently, as Bruni suggests, she’s being seen as part of the old Washington crowd that voters are souring on. As I wrote to Hillary Clinton in early summer 2008, when calls were made by Obama partisans for her to drop out, no one should be told not to run. That’s everyone’s First Amendment right. However, not voting for her is the prudent decision.
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Nov 13
     
    Nice rundown by Ralph Nader of Hillary Clinton's many sins against the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party base. On the Clinton dynasty issue, Nader might have noted that daughter Chelsea married a former Goldman Sachs bankster in 2010, now a partner in a hedge fund. Chelsea for President in Auction 2020?
Paul Merrell

The Numbers Are In: China Dumps A Record $94 Billion In US Treasurys In One Month | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...billion-us-treasurys-one-month

war & peace economic-warfare China reserves disinvestment de-dollarization

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Shortly after the PBoC’s move to devalue the yuan, we noted with some alarm that it looked as though China may have drawn down its reserves by more than $100 billion in the space of just two weeks. That, we went on the point out, would represent a stunning increase over the previous pace of the country’s reserve draw down, which we began documenting months ahead of the devaluation (see here, for instance). We went on to estimate, based on the projected size of the RMB carry trade unwind, how large the FX reserve liquidation might need to be to offset capital outflows and finally, late last week, we suggested that China’s official FX reserve data was set to become the new risk-on/off trigger for nervous, erratic markets. In short, the pace at which Beijing is burning through its USD assets in defense of the yuan has serious implications not only for investors’ collective perception of market stability, but for yields on core paper, for global liquidity, and for US monetary policy. 
Gary Edwards

Opinion: TheTalented Mr. Paulson's Clever Exit | Opinion | Financial Articles & Investing News | TheStreet.com - 0 views

www.thestreet.com/...d-mr-paulsons-clever-exit.html

finacial-crisis

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Jan 09
     
    The sickening feeling of the average investor and taxpayer being "had" by the economic crisis continues, and continues to come from disappointing quarters. My latest jolt came from a throwaway line from exiting Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in an interview with Maria Bartiromo that aired on CNBC this week. Yikes! This is a frightening look at Goldman Sachs and the foreknowledge Henry Paulson had of financial-crisis to come.
Joseph Skues

United Grand Lodge of England » Who's Who - 0 views

www.ugle.org.uk/...whos-who

grand united lodge socialism finacial-crisis obammunism

shared by Joseph Skues on 09 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Grand Master Prince Edward George Nicholas Paul Patrick was born in 1935, and educated at Eton and Le Rosey, Switzerland. He is a cousin both of the Queen and of the Duke of Edinburgh.
  • His father,
  • Jonathan Spence was born in 1960, and educated at the Mathematical School, Rochester and Trinity College, Oxford. After a career in banking, from which he retired in 2006 as Chief Executive of a London bank, he now holds a senior position in education.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • He has been the Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England since he was first elected in 1967
  • Pro Grand Master Peter Lowndes was born in 1948 and educated at Eton. He is a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).
  • was the fourth son of King George V, and his mother, Princess Marina, was the daughter of Prince Nicholas of Greece.
  • He was appointed Grand Director of Ceremonies in 2003 and served in that office until his appointment as Deputy Grand Master on 11 March 2009.
  • Assistant Grand Master David Williamson was born in Bombay, India, in 1943 and educated at King Edward VI School, Lichfield, Queen Mary College, London and King’s College, Cambridge. He trained as a pilot, and was subsequently appointed as Training Captain and Assistant Flight Training Manager for British Airways until his retirement in 1998.
  • Appointed as Assistant Grand Director of Ceremonies in 1995,
  • Nigel Brown was born in 1948,
  • 12 years as a business consultant specialising in advising clients on winning competitive global tenders.
  • Joseph Skues on 09 Jan 11
     
    He is the Queen's nephew and in line to the throne of Greece,(which is being robbed by the Goldman Sachs in the recession). CONNECT THE DOTS
Gary Edwards

Follow the Money: Banksters & Wall Streeters Top Obama Re-Election Supporters - 0 views

www.moneynews.com/...404563

Banksters financial-collapse financial-oligarchs Obama-re-election banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jul 11
     
    excerpt: A just-released study by the Center for Responsive Politics shows that President Obama is relying more on Wall Street to fund his re-election this year than he did in 2008, according to CNBC, which obtained an advance copy of the report.  The report says that one-third of the money Obama's elite fund-raising corps has raised on behalf of his re-election has come from the financial sector.  "Individuals who work in the finance, insurance, and real estate sector are responsible for raising at least $11.3 million for Obama's campaign and the Democratic National Committee," the report says.  And, all of Obama's "bundlers" - top fundraisers who obtain donations from people and groups in their business, professional, and personal networks - have raised a minimum of $34.95 million.  Obama has even added new Wall Streeters who did not work for him in 2008, including former Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine, Evercore Partners executive Charles Myers, Greenstreet Real Estate Partners CEO Steven Green, and Azita Raji, a former investment banker for JPMorgan.  Obama and the DNC combined are on pace to far exceed the amounts Obama raised from Wall Street donors in 2008, both in raw dollar amounts and as a percentage of what he raises overall.
Gary Edwards

Who Gave Warren Buffett The Authority To Discuss Billionaire Guilt? - 1 views

www.businessinsider.com/scuss-billionaire-guilt-2011-8

Banksters Buffett-phony

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Stop coddling the super-rich he says.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 16 Aug 11
       
      Disclosure here:  I actually met Buffett back in the 70's while workign at the Millyard Restaurant in Manchester NH.  Buffett purchased the old Amoskeag Mills "Berkshire Hathaway" shirt manufacturing building just across the Merrimack River.  Nice guy, very friendly, polite and considerate.  Of course, that was years before he made it big investing in the worldwide, McDonald's led USA franchise explosion of the late 80"s.  For sure he made a great call predicting that President Reagan would succeed in ending the Cold War, collapsing the walls, and unleashing the capitalist forces of both free and merchantilist trade.  And that the USA Franchise system was extremely well prepared to launch worldwide as soon as the barriers fell.  He made billions off this call.  Knowing Paul Volker does pay off.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Aug 11
     
    What is it with billionaires these days? Buffett suggesting we need to tax him more? Stop coddling the super-rich he says.  In other words, he's saying "I've done such a fine job with my money, now I want to give more to a government that hasn't."  Mr. Buffett, has someone changed your suppositions? It seems counter intuitive to your "invest in great management" philosophy.  Shouldn't you really be telling the government to cut costs? Just like you demanded of your Netjets, Clayton Homes, and Helzberg Diamond Shops executives.
Gary Edwards

Derivatives - The $600 Trillion Time Bomb Set to Explode | InvestorPlace - 0 views

www.investorplace.com/...llion-time-bomb-set-to-explode

Banksters Derivative-time-bomb financial-collapse

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • The world’s gross domestic product (GDP) is only about $65 trillion, or roughly 10.83% of the worldwide value of the global derivatives market, according to The Economist. So there is literally not enough money on the planet to backstop the banks trading these things if they run into trouble.
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Oct 11
     
    Pay Attention Alert!  This is why the Banksters are hoarding cash and not lending ...... excerpt:  Do you want to know the real reason banks aren't lending and the PIIGS have control of the barnyard in Europe? It's because risk in the $600 trillion derivatives market isn't evening out. To the contrary, it's growing increasingly concentrated among a select few banks, especially here in the United States. In 2009, five banks held 80% of derivatives in America. Now, just four banks hold a staggering 95.9% of U.S. derivatives, according to a recent report from the Office of the Currency Comptroller. The four banks in question are JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM), Citigroup (NYSE:C), Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS). Derivatives played a crucial role in bringing down the global economy, so you would think that the world's top policymakers would have reined these things in by now - but they haven't. Instead of attacking the problem, regulators have let it spiral out of control, and the result is a $600 trillion time bomb called the derivatives market.
Gary Edwards

'The Destruction of the Rule of Law' according to Ratigan, Black and DeGraw - 1 views

www.thedailybell.com/...-Law-according-to-David-DeGraw

Banksters Dylan-Rattigan OWS Occupy-Wall-Street crony-capitalism

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Oct 11
     
    Amazing video discussion about Occupy Wall Street movement, and the outrageous Bankster fraud that has not been prosecuted by the Obama DOJ. Dylan Rattigan interviews White Collar Crime expert, Attorney William Black and, OWS organizer David DeGraw. Attorney Black points out that both the FBI and the Financial Services Bank . "We put the Treasury Secretary up for auction, and lately Goldman Sachs has been the highest bidder". Clinton-Reuben, Bush-Paulsen, Obama-Geitner. Get rid of the systemically dangerous institutions.
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Paul Merrell

WSJ Reports: Bank of North Dakota Outperforms Wall Street | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...dakota-outperforms-wall-street

banksters public-owned-banks

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • While 49 state treasuries were submerged in red ink after the 2008 financial crash, one state’s bank outperformed all others and actually launched an economy-shifting new industry.  So reports the Wall Street Journal this week, discussing the Bank of North Dakota (BND) and its striking success in the midst of a national financial collapse led by the major banks. Chester Dawson begins his November 16th article: It is more profitable than Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and hasn’t seen profit growth drop since 2003. Meet Bank of North Dakota, the U.S.’s lone state-owned bank, which has one branch, no automated teller machines and not a single investment banker.
  • He backs this up with comparative data on the BND’s performance:
Paul Merrell

US Investigates World's Largest Banks for Precious Metals Price-Fixing / Sputnik International - 0 views

sputniknews.com/...1018669832.html

banksters price-fixing precious-metals HSBC Credit-Suisse Goldman Societe-Generale

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The US Department of Justice is investigating a possible breach of law by 10 major banks during the price-setting process for precious metals, the Wall Street Journal reported. US prosecutors are currently examining the pricing for gold, silver, platinum and palladium in Britain's capital London, while the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has started a civil investigation, the newspaper said Monday, citing undisclosed sources close to the inquires.
  • The US Department of Justice is investigating a possible breach of law by 10 major banks during the price-setting process for precious metals, the Wall Street Journal reported. US prosecutors are currently examining the pricing for gold, silver, platinum and palladium in Britain's capital London, while the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has started a civil investigation, the newspaper said Monday, citing undisclosed sources close to the inquires.
  • Both agencies have already requested that banks provide the information necessary for the probe and even issued a subpoena to the world's second largest bank, the UK-based HSBC Holdings PLC. The list of banks under scrutiny also includes such giants as Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and Societe Generale. The investigation, which is currently in its early stages, is part of the US Justice Department inspection of alleged banking manipulation of financial standards, including the rigging of lending rates between banks as well as the handling of currency markets.
Paul Merrell

Is NSA Surveillance Mastermind Keith Alexander Selling US Secrets to Wall Street? | VICE United States - 0 views

www.vice.com/...-us-secrets-to-wall-street-630

surveillance state NSA Alexander revolving-door

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Perhaps you already assume that there's some kind of twisted marriage between Wall Street megabanks and the US global surveillance regime. Why wouldn't there be? But not even a total cynic could have anticipated spymaster Keith Alexander cashing in this hard, this fast. As Bloomberg recently reported, the former National Security Agency chief, who resigned in March at the age of 62, quickly offered his cyber-security expertise at the eye-popping price of $1 million per month to an assortment of shady business lobbies. And now at least one member of Congress is probing this most delightfully dystopian of arrangements, raising the possibility that Alexander will be shamed out of the practice, if nothing else. “Disclosing or misusing classified information for profit is, as Mr. Alexander well knows, a felony. I question how Mr. Alexander can provide any of the services he is offering unless he discloses or misuses classified information, including extremely sensitive sources and methods,” Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson wrote one of the business groups, the Security Industries and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), which holds it down for Wall Street in Washington. “Without the classified information that he acquired in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to you.”
  • In an interview Monday, Grayson was even more strident in his criticism. "Frankly, what the general is doing is beginning to resemble an extortion racket," he told me. "This is a man who basically lied for a living, and he continues to do that." To be clear, what's uniquely outrageous about Alexander, who has apparently lowered his asking price to $600,000, is not that he is a former US official dangling his alleged expertise and the allure of privileged access to government officials before Wall Street. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who served under Barack Obama and is the odds-on favorite to succeed him, does this all the time, usually at a rate of about $250,000 a pop. (Indeed, one might argue that the very fact she has managed to do so while enjoying a stellar national reputation is what signaled to Alexander he might as well dive headlong through the revolving door.) But the former NSA head presumably knows things about sophisticated intelligence-gathering practices that very, very few people on Earth have been privy to—information that could be useful in the private sector, which has a tendency to collude with the military in ways that made former President and World War II General Dwight Eisenhower very sad.
  • "What could he possibly have that's worth $1 million a month other than classified information?" wonders Melanie Sloan, founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a good government group. "That's more than former presidents make." Indeed, even former President Bill Clinton, whose corruption since leaving office is by now the stuff of legend, doesn't have the gall to ask for that much per gig. There's a sort of "fuck it!" attitude to what Alexander is doing, seemingly kicking sand in the face of everyone angry at his surveillance regime by getting paid to reflect on the experience of assembling it. More ominously, there's the prospect that Alexander, whether deliberately or otherwise, may have left behind vulnerabilities while running the NSA so as to put himself in prime position to effectively hold the banks hostage now. Certainly, there have been reports suggesting the agency was aware of some vulnerabilities it either could or did not address.   "What is especially troubling is he might actually be worth it," says former North Carolina Democratic Congressman Brad Miller, who worked extensively on financial regulation and Wall Street reform in Congress. "He's obviously not a computer geek. Some of the things that might have seemed paranoid a few years ago now seem more than plausible given what we've already learned the NSA has been doing."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In an email, former New York Times reporter and Goldman Sachs regulatory guru Stephen Labaton—who is currently president of communications and influence powerhouse RLM Finsbury and apparently fielding the General's media inquiries—dismissed Grayson's critique and Miller's concerns. "The letter is ludicrous," he wrote me, before adding about Miller, "The congressman’s kidding, right? Will he [Alexander] next be tied to the Kennedy assassination?" But as Marcy Wheeler points out, given that the former NSA boss has spent the last year hyping the incredible risk of catastrophic cyber-attack, as well as the alleged damage done by Edward Snowden (an assessment his successor does not seem to share), it's fair to ask if his consultancy is essentially a scam. That the victims are, for now, Wall Street bankers—some of the least sympathetic human beings around—is a sweet bit of irony. But it doesn't change the bigger picture: In this age of total surveillance and unchecked financial power, the frontiers of corruption never seem to stop expanding.
Paul Merrell

Jeb Bush's Administration Steered Florida Pension Money to George W. Bush's Fundraisers - 0 views

www.ibtimes.com/ge-w-bushs-fundraisers-1880592

Auction 2016 Jeb-Bush bribery

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Four years before the financial collapse, Goldman Sachs executive George Herbert Walker IV had much to be thankful for. "I've been fortunate to be a small part of teams leading U.S. restructurings, European privatizations, global pension management and now hedge fund and private equity investing,” he said in the annual report of a banking colossus that would soon be known as the “great vampire squid” of Wall Street. “The world,” said Walker, “just keeps getting more interesting." As the head of Goldman Sachs’ alternative investment unit, Walker’s ebullience was understandable. At the same time he was raising $100,000 for his cousin George W. Bush’s successful presidential re-election effort, the administration of another cousin, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, returned the family favor, delivering $150 million of Florida pension money to an alternative investment fund run by Walker’s firm. Like other executives whose companies received Florida pension money, Walker is now renewing the cycle, reportedly attending in February a high-dollar fundraiser for Jeb Bush’s political committee.
  • Walker is not alone: He is one of 19 top fundraisers for George W. Bush -- known as “Pioneers” and “Rangers” -- whose financial firms received state business from Jeb Bush’s administration in Tallahassee. In all, an International Business Times’ review of government documents shows Jeb Bush oversaw Florida directing at least $1.7 billion of state workers’ retirement money to the financial firms of his elder brother’s major donors. As Jeb Bush oversaw the State Board of Administration (SBA) that runs Florida’s massive public pension system, the state shifted billions of dollars into higher-risk, higher-fee alternative investments, benefiting the same sector of the investment industry he would work in upon leaving office. Many of those state deals delivered returns that fell short of projections. Roughly 20 percent of that system’s 53 private investment deals during Bush’s governorship went to companies that employed his brother’s Pioneers. Those financial firms, in turn, delivered more than $5 million of campaign cash to George W. Bush, the Republican National Committee and Jeb Bush’s Republican Party of Florida. (Click here to see the full list of Bush Pioneers whose firms received Florida pension investments from Jeb Bush’s administration).
  • Ethics experts say the connection between Bush family donors and Florida pension deals raises questions about whether the investments were properly insulated from political influence. “If not an actual conflict of interest, these examples would provide fodder for apparent conflicts of interest,” said Common Cause Florida’s Peter Butzin. “Those folks who give … expect something in return. And if that something in return is not blatantly sending business their way or resulting in a particular vote, it most certainly is at least providing an opportunity for access, to get the foot in the door, so that they can make the case with that official.” Jeb Bush’s aides did not respond to questions from IBTimes, and Walker declined to comment for this story. Dennis MacKee, an SBA spokesperson, said the agency’s “elected Trustees do not now, nor did they during Governor Bush’s term, participate in the selection of individual investments.” MacKee’s statement conflicts with emails reviewed by IBTimes that show that, as governor, Jeb Bush was deeply involved in the state’s investment decisions, periodically brokering conversations between Florida officials and individual financial firms, including one whose top executive was a longtime Bush family donor.
Paul Merrell

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya - Turkish-ISIL Oil Trade: Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Russia All Accuse Turkey of Smuggling Oil (I) - Strategic Culture Foundation - on-line journal > Turkish-ISIL Oil Trade: Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Russia All Accuse Turkey of Smuggling - 0 views

www.strategic-culture.org/...mosul-protect-oil-trade-i.html

war & peace banksters ISIL Kurdistan Syria Iraq oil-smuggling must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Because of the Turkish government’s role in the multi-spectrum US-led war against the Syrian Arab Republic, a war of words has ignited between Ankara and Moscow. Russia, however, is not alone in accusing Turkey of being involved in the theft of Syrian and Iraqi oil. Turkish opposition politicians, Turkish media, and various governments in the Middle East have also raised their voices about the role of Turkish officials in smuggling from the conflict zones in Syria and Iraq.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Jan 16
     
    This is the first of a must-read, in-depth, four-part series of articles on the ISIL/Kurd oil smuggling from Syria and Iraq via Turkey to world markets. The series details the involvement of western banksters (including Goldman Sachs) in setting up the capitalization of a new company created to plunder the natural resources of Iraq, Syria, and other nations targeted by the U.S. for destabilization. The second article, Turkish-ISIL Oil Trade: Did the Turkish Military Enter Mosul to Protect its Oil Trade? (II), is here. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/12/18/turkish-isil-oil-trade-did-turkish-military-enter-mosul-protect-oil-trade-ii.html The third article, Turkish-ISIL Oil Trade: The Roles of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Britain, and Israel (III), is here. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/12/19/turkish-isil-oil-trade-did-turkish-military-enter-mosul-protect-oil-trade-iii.html The final article, Turkish-ISIL Oil Trade: US and NATO Culpability (IV), is here. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/12/20/turkish-isil-oil-trade-us-and-nato-culpability-iv.html   
Paul Merrell

Brazil's Epic Scandal Takes Down a Banker - Bloomberg Business - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ic-scandal-takes-down-a-banker

banksters Brazil Esteves criminal-prosecution litigation obstruction corruption

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Brazilians have become inured to seeing politicians and businessmen marched off to prison for corruption. But the mug shot of banker André Esteves—unshaven and frowning—that flashed across TV screens in early December was a shock. Part of a cadre of mavericks who got astonishingly rich from Brazil’s transformation into one of the world’s top 10 economies in the 2000s, Esteves helped turn Grupo BTG Pactual into Latin America’s biggest standalone investment bank. Supremely confident, Esteves—who was a billionaire by his mid-30s—liked to quip that the initials in his company’s name stood for “Better than Goldman.”Around dawn on Nov. 25, Esteves’s fortunes soured in an instant. Police showed up at his apartment, which faces Rio de Janeiro’s legendary Ipanema beach, and hauled him away on allegations of obstructing a federal investigation into a massive pay-to-play scheme centered on Brazil’s state-run oil giant, Petrobras. Now Esteves, 47, resides in a cell block with concrete beds and communal toilets at Bangu, a high-security prison in Rio better known for housing drug traffickers and murderers.
  • Having its founder, chief executive officer, and chairman behind bars has pushed BTG Pactual to the brink of insolvency as clients pull their money out. Within days of his arrest, Esteves had relinquished his controlling stake in the firm, and his partners had begun a wholesale selloff of assets. To avert disaster, Brazil’s central bank helped engineer a $1.6 billion rescue line from the country’s privately funded deposit guarantee fund. Still, the bank’s shares have lost half their value since Esteves’s arrest. On Dec. 7, prosecutors formally accused the banker of obstruction of justice. Antônio Carlos de Almeida Castro, Esteves’s lawyer, says his client has done nothing wrong.The metastatic graft scandal that sent Esteves to jail threatens more than the survival of BTG. So many legislators are implicated, Congress has been unable to pass legislation to contain an exploding budget deficit. President Dilma Rousseff has grown so unpopular that lawmakers are maneuvering to impeach her for allegedly cooking the government’s books. Meanwhile, the economy is sliding into what Goldman Sachs calls a full-blown depression.
  • BTG’s collapse won’t cause Brazil’s capital markets to seize up as Lehman Brothers’ failure did in the U.S. in 2008. Yet having one of the country’s most prominent financiers behind bars is a body blow to the confidence of investors at a time when Brazil needs their cash. “It very much gives you the impression that the corruption scheme is so widespread that it induces a kind of counterparty risk,” says Monica de Bolle, a former International Monetary Fund economist. “You enter into transactions with people in Brazil without knowing whether or not they might be implicated in something.” The result: “Nothing gets done. There’s no business,” she says.
Paul Merrell

Holder Defends Record of Not Prosecuting Financial Fraud - 0 views

theintercept.com/...ot-prosecuting-financial-fraud

banksters too-big-to-jail Holder DoJ Bernanke federal-reserve

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Former attorney general Eric Holder was the honored guest at a Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reception on Wednesday (leading investigative reporter Murray Waas to reasonably wonder: How’s that again?). And while I was primarily interested in hearing whether Holder regretted whiffing on torture prosecutions during his tenure (see story: “Holder, Too Late, Calls for Transparency on DOJ Torture Investigation”), I also asked him about whiffing on financial fraud prosecutions. Specifically, I noted his failure to hold accountable the people responsible for the wide-scale financial fraud that led to the massive economic recession of 2007-2009. And I noted that after he stepped down from his post in April, he went back to his job at Covington & Burling, the gigantic D.C. law firm whose clients have included many of the big banks that Holder chose not to prosecute. (The reception was actually held at Covington & Burling’s swanky new building downtown. While it was being built — while Holder was still attorney general! — the firm actually kept an 11th-story corner office reserved for his return. He was making over $3 million a year from the firm before his sojourn at the Justice Department; his current salary has not been disclosed.)
  • Holder bristled at my suggestion that there might be a connection between his current employer and his conduct at Justice, saying that many top prosecutors at Justice had pursued cases as best they could. “We were simply unable to do it under the existing statutes that we had, and given the ways the decision-making worked at those institutions,” he said. However, Holder had all the statutory authority he needed to prosecute straightforward crimes such as robosigning fraud, perjury in front of Congress by Goldman Sachs executives, or for that matter, HSBC’s money laundering for Mexican drug cartels. He simply chose not to. (In response to another questioner, he denied that any of his decisions not to prosecute were based on the massive legal teams that were fielded against the government.) Moreover, he actively waved off offers of additional help such as the suggestion from Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, that Congress give him more staff for his Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, or extend the statute of limitations on some crimes. At Wednesday’s event, Holder continued: “It’s an easy thing for people who are not a part of the process” to “ask questions,” he said. “It pisses me off, on the other hand,” for people “not conversant” in the process to “somehow say that I did something that was inconsistent with my oath or that I’m not a person of integrity.” “I’m proud to be back at the firm,” he said. “It’s a great firm. And I’m proud of the work I did at the Justice Department.”
  • Holder’s comment was only the most recent in a series of pronouncements from formerly powerful government officials that they were in fact powerless — while talking tough once they no longer have the ability to do anything about it. See, for instance, my colleague David Dayen’s recent article, “Bernanke Talks Tough But Was Weak When It Mattered,” about former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke saying that more Wall Street executives should have gone to jail for criminal misconduct that led to the financial crisis. As Fed chair, Beranke could have initiated criminal referrals to the Justice Department, but chose not to. As attorney general, Holder could have made pursuing financial fraud a top priority. And he did not.
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