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The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix.
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Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
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Two of America's top law-enforcement officials, Attorney General Eric Holder and former Justice Department Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer, confessed that it's dangerous to prosecute offending banks because they are simply too big. Making arrests, they say, might lead to "collateral consequences" in the economy.
If one of the little people commit a crime, like rob a bank, or perhaps blow up a few people, then people are up in arms about bringing them to justice.
But, if you own a bank or two and some politicians and commit criminals acts that effect the whole nation of people, they get off free to do it again and again. Where are the pitchforks and angry citizens demanding justice upon these financial terrorists?
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After scandals involving libor and, perhaps, ISDAfix, the question that should have everyone freaked out is this: What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation?
The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere. From gold to gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we're forced to trust. "In all the over-the-counter markets, you don't really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together," Masters notes glumly.
That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities – jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it.
The problem in each of these markets is the same: We all have to rely upon the honesty of companies like Barclays (already caught and fined $453 million for rigging Libor) or JPMorgan Chase (paid a $228 million settlement for rigging municipal-bond auctions) or UBS (fined a collective $1.66 billion for both muni-bond rigging and Libor manipulation) to faithfully report the real prices of things like interest rates, swaps, currencies and commodities.
When a few powerful people get together to rig the markets in their favor, no-one seems to have a problem. Any mention of many of the people of this nation getting together to make decisions at the national level like the above cockroaches do, gets frowned upon as socialism or some other insulting name.
All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing.
Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.
Anyone that can defend the Big Banks must not really believe in having Capitalist Financial Institutions, when the Banks believe in colluding rather than competing or buying politicians to rig the markets to their favor rather than working in the markets like everyone else, or by going into politics to rig it for your financial cronies.
Anyone that can defend the Big Banks must not really believe in having Capitalist Financial Institutions, when the Banks believe in colluding rather than competing or buying politicians to rig the markets to their favor rather than working in the markets like everyone else, or by going into politics to rig it for your financial cronies.
This problem isn't going anywhere because while we can control the amount of money politicians receive from these institutions while in office, every elected official knows that if they faithfully do the bidding of their corporate masters while in office that even if they are run out of office for their misdeeds, their corporate buddies will be certain to reward them handsomely once they leave office. Those now in office need only to see how their corrupt predecessors have faired after their political careers ended to understand they will not be disappointed if they throw their constituents under the bus to accommodate the financial interests involved.
"On October 18, 1999, Citigroup announced that former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin was joining the firm. But what exactly would Mr. Rubin do at Citigroup? Citi's SEC filing eight days later noted that Mr. Rubin would be joining the bank's board of directors."
"As for Phil Gramm, the Republican Senator from Texas left Washington to become Vice Chairman for UBS Investment Bank, a Swiss bank that used the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to purchase Paine Weber and become the largest private financial services bank in the world."
This problem isn't going anywhere because while we can control the amount of money politicians receive from these institutions while in office, every elected official knows that if they faithfully do the bidding of their corporate masters while in office that even if they are run out of office for their misdeeds, their corporate buddies will be certain to reward them handsomely once they leave office. Those now in office need only to see how their corrupt predecessors have faired after their political careers ended to understand they will not be disappointed if they throw their constituents under the bus to accommodate the financial interests involved.
This is unfortunately true.
They get put into office by the corrupt to do their bidding and not the best interests of the nation.
And, when they leave, they have a cushy job waiting for them.
People usually say they go into government to perform public service. If they came from Wall Street, however, their former employers often provide another service.
Banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, all have provisions that allow acceleration of payments owed to senior executives if they take government jobs, a new study finds.
Such a benefit was highlighted recently during the confirmation hearing for Jacob J. Lew as Treasury secretary. His previous employer, Citigroup, had guaranteed him preferential financial treatment if he were to leave to take a job in the government. When Mr. Lew left Citigroup he held stock that he could not immediately cash worth as much as $500,000, according to a government filing.
“These companies seem to be giving a special deal to executives who become government officials,” says the study, to be released Thursday by the Project on Government Oversight. “In exchange, the companies may end up with friends in high places who understand their business, sympathize with it, and can craft policies in its favor.”
You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours and lets pretend we live in a democratic republic with free market capitalism.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
No surprise there with that article.
They preach globalism, not nationalism, unless it benefits them by expanding their reach in other places, by using our nations military under the guise of nationalism.
The banks learned their lesson from the savings and loan scandals of the 1980's - if you're going to do something illegal, do it big. The S&L entities were subject to crackdowns and prosecutions because most of them were fairly small, and therefore manageable.
But if you do everything on a massive, systemic scale, enforcement becomes nearly impossible due to the potential consequences of a crackdown to the financial system itself. Sort of like taking the system hostage and strapping a bomb to its neck, then daring police to do something about it. So far, it has worked.
The banks learned their lesson from the savings and loan scandals of the 1980's - if you're going to do something illegal, do it big. The S&L entities were subject to crackdowns and prosecutions because most of them were fairly small, and therefore manageable.
But if you do everything on a massive, systemic scale, enforcement becomes nearly impossible due to the potential consequences of a crackdown to the financial system itself. Sort of like taking the system hostage and strapping a bomb to its neck, then daring police to do something about it. So far, it has worked.
If you've seen my posts you know I tend to lean left and I tended to be pro bailout and so forth. I gotta admit, though: the above is spot-on. I think this is a right-on thread, and I've been feeling this way recently. I think the banks are becoming an elite class - almost untouchable. The banks are, in fact, becoming the government; big business is becoming our democracy. And you're right: it goes back to this whole notion of 'too big to fail.' They know they can get away with it. Privatized and individualize the risk -- socialize the losses. The amount of money that ordinary people owe will only continue to get bigger. It will get to the point where a person's daytime working salary -even at a good job- will no longer purchase anything close to the lifestyle that he/she grew up with. It will pay the rent, the commuter car, the necessities, and day-to-day living costs, but the future will have to be paid for with risks. I think people have been doing this for the past 20 or 30 years. Working to get through the month or the year and hoping they don't get seriously ill or injured, and then betting money on the markets. Retirement is basically a book-making operation now. The American Dream...that's dying, if not already dead.
You know, liberals and conservatives are always on here and in real life arguing loudly over this and that, but in reality, I don't really think we disagree on the problems. I think we disagree only on the solutions. We all want the same things - well, mostly. I think the Tea Party and Occupy have a lot more in common than they realize.
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