First off, fantastic job by Chris Powell in this interview. The host cracked me up when he describes the gold market as “almost like the matrix.” My favorite line from Chris is when he says “the banks are bigger than the government.” Those two lines sum up a lot of what’s wrong with the world today.
Of course, this video was aired when Americans were fast asleep.
If you thought the TBTF banks couldn’t stoop any lower, think again. If this doesn’t prove without a shadow of a doubt that the more you coddle and bailout the big banks, the more brazen, criminal and out of control they become. I guess entering the slumlord business and running the food stamp program just wasn’t good enough. In their latest scheme, we find that JP Morgan (of course), Bank of America and Wells Fargo (Uncle Warren’s pet) are at the center of what can only be called a global loan-sharking business that prays on destitute American citizens. Basically, the way the scam works is payday lenders set up shop overseas in locations such as Granada, Belize or the Isle of Man in order to avoid various state laws against payday loans. The key link in the chain are the TBTF crony banks who process the loans and facilitate the interest charges, which can be well over 500%. So what’s in it for the banks? Huge fees of course. Absolutely disgusting, but par for the course for these guys. From the New York Times:
Major banks have quickly become behind-the-scenes allies of Internet-based payday lenders that offer short-term loans with interest rates sometimes exceeding 500 percent.
With 15 states banning payday loans, a growing number of the lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide caps on interest rates.
While the banks, which include giants like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, do not make the loans, they are a critical link for the lenders, enabling the lenders to withdraw payments automatically from borrowers’ bank accounts, even in states where the loans are banned entirely. In some cases, the banks allow lenders to tap checking accounts even after the customers have begged them to stop the withdrawals.
For the banks, it can be a lucrative partnership. At first blush, processing automatic withdrawals hardly seems like a source of profit. But many customers are already on shaky financial footing. The withdrawals often set off a cascade of fees from problems like overdrafts.
Some state and federal authorities say the banks’ role in enabling the lenders has frustrated government efforts to shield people from predatory loans — an issue that gained urgency after reckless mortgage lending helped precipitate the 2008 financial crisis.
The following article from the Houston Press titled “Country Club Sopranos” is the most comprehensive rundown I have seen of all the various frauds committed by large banks since we bailed them out. What I find particularly infuriating is that the banks seem to really like ripping off members of the armed forces. Veterans pay close attention. The biggest threat to America does not reside outside our borders, but from within. This is a very powerful article and I think could be quite effective in waking up some sheeple so please pass it along. Here are some of my favorite passages:
But despite a colossal civil-rights fraud perpetrated against 30,000 customers, the settlement amounted to just .011 percent of the San Francisco bank’s annual income. It was like forcing a $30,000-a-year working stiff to pay a $240 fine.
These were just the opening salvos of the assault. Bank of America was caught illegally foreclosing on the homes of active-duty soldiers.
But not a single boss went to jail. Some firms settled for just a fraction of what they’d stolen. Most have never admitted wrongdoing. And in the ethics-optional land known as Wall Street, many saw their stock prices rise.
“Unquestionably, that’s true,” says Notre Dame law professor G. Robert Blakey, whose career prosecuting organized crime runs all the way back to the Kennedy administration. “I was looking at stuff on Mulberry Street, and the real theft was on Wall Street…All of the people who ran the scams have their big houses and their airplanes, and they’re laughing — they got away with it.”
“My biggest mistake in life was that I committed my crimes in the 1980s,” he says. “If I committed them today, I wouldn’t even get house arrest. I’d just hire a good lawyer and pay a fine and I’d be free.”
It began the year before, when Dimon’s bank paid a $27 million settlement for systematically screwing 6,000 active-duty soldiers. JP Morgan was caught overcharging on interest rates and illegally foreclosing on the soldiers’ homes. (The bank did not respond to interview requests.)
But when he appointed Eric Holder attorney general, it was like making John Dillinger’s lawyer head of the FBI bank-robbery unit. Holder, a former Wall Street defense attorney, would ramp up big-dollar settlements. But criminal charges quietly sputtered to a trickle.
“Retired criminal” Sam Antar, who now trains the IRS and FBI how to bust corporate looters: “It’s almost like stealing a billion dollars with a pencil is not as bad. You have a lesser chance of going to jail than if you mug somebody on the streets of New York.”
So bad has the leniency become that the feds are allowing bankers to keep much of what they steal. Ask Morgan Stanley.
In August, it settled with the Justice Department over its role in fixing New York City’s electricity rates. The bank played middleman in a deal between two energy providers, KeySpan and Astoria Generating, which then colluded to withhold electricity from the market, artificially driving up prices and costing consumers an estimated $300 million.
Morgan Stanley was paid $21 million for arranging the scheme. But the ever-generous Holder let the bank settle for $4.8 million.
It marked a stunning new low in federal prosecutions, akin to forcing a bank robber to return just $2,500 after stealing $10,000. With no jail time, of course.
Morgan Stanley offers little defense for its actions. “We will decline comment,” says spokeswoman Mary Claire Delaney. But New York state senator Michael Gianaris will happily fill that silence.
“It’s a good business deal for Morgan Stanley,” he says. “They could break the law and get away with almost $17 million in profits for it, so why not do it again? If they get caught — and that’s a big if — they still get 70 percent of the profits.”
Peter Vallone Jr., a Queens councilman and former prosecutor, has never seen such tender handling of criminals.
I was a prosecutor for six years, and I’ve never seen someone being fined less than they made.”
In less than two years, Bank of America had chalked up six major fraud cases. But there was no talk of three strikes. No indictments for racketeering. Not one executive charged with a crime.
Now here is my favorite one:
A month later, ING paid a $619 million settlement for violating international sanctions and anti-terrorist laws. It spent a decade providing “state sponsors of terror and other sanctioned entities with access to the U.S. financial system,” Assistant Attorney General Lisa Monaco said at the time.
So the American people have sacrificed the Bill of Rights and all civil liberties to fight the phony “war on terror,” yet banks pay a settlement for aiding “terrorists.” What do you think would happen to you if you were caught doing that? A cell in Guantanamo? A drone missile to the head?
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike
We always ultimately see where their loyalty lies when it comes to these guys. Can’t win the Presidency? No problem! Become a whore for the banksters that blew up the economy and now continue to parasitically suck the lifeblood out of it each and every day. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, there is almost no form of life at the moment lower that a United States politician.
From Reuters:
(Reuters) – Former Republican presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty will become the head of the Financial Services Roundtable, a U.S. bank lobbying group that represents JP Morgan Chase & Co and Wells Fargo & Co, among other financial companies, the group said on Thursday.
As the industry’s top lobbyist, he will play a major role in the industry’s efforts to make new Dodd-Frank rules, which Congress passed in 2010 in response to the 2007-2009 financial crisis, more favorable for Wall Street as regulators implement the law.
Is it time to watch American Idol or football yet?
Full Reuters article here.
Mike
Look how cutesy JP Morgan is in their ad talking up the benefits of a cashless society, which is one of the key goals of TPTB. Why is the war on cash a key goal? Well if all your wealth is digital and they don’t like you…sorry we don’t know how your account got deleted sir. Perhaps you shouldn’t have spoken out against the government. Meanwhile, let’s not forget JP Morgan was right there in the middle of the MF Global missing funds and now seems to be there with PFG Best as well. It’s true yet no one wants to talk about it. See this Huffington Post piece. Two words: Gold & Silver.
At the center of the growing Vatican money-laundering scandal is Gotti Tedeschi, who fell afoul of powerful players within the Church for seemingly investigating financial crimes too closely upon becoming head of the Vatican Bank. This is an incredible story that is sure to only grow in scope, and of course America’s number one criminal organization, JP Morgan, finds itself squarely in the middle of it all. This is a lengthy but must read article…
Key Quotes:
The pope had apparently tasked the financial executive with making the Vatican bank more transparent. But by approaching his task with perhaps an excess of zeal Gotti Tedeschi upset powerful forces within the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s administrative and judicial apparatus. Several high-ranking officials within the Curia viewed the bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), as something akin to a trust company for clandestine monetary transactions that is not only used by the Church, but allegedly also by the mafia as well as corrupt politicians and companies. In one of the seized Gotti Tedeschi memos, he wrote: “I’ve seen things in the Vatican that scare me.”
A role in the effort was played by a bank in Benedict’s home country: Germany. In 2009, the same year that Gotti Tedeschi took over as president of the IOR, the bank set up an account with the Milan-based branch of the American bank JPMorgan Chase. From that point on, millions started flowing on an almost daily basis from JPMorgan’s Milan office to the one in Frankfurt, where the IOR also had a JPMorgan account.
The transfers via JP Morgan would likely have remained unnoticed if the IOR hadn’t involved another Italian bank two years earlier in two cases. The attention of Italian financial regulators had been attracted by curious transactions the Vatican bank had made via Credito Artigiano. In 2010, a total of €23 million had been transferred from several accounts at that bank, but without listing the account holders or purposes of the transfers. Of that, €20 million was reportedly supposed to make its way to the Vatican’s JPMorgan account in Frankfurt, while the remaining €3 million was destined for an account at another bank in Rome.
Read the full article here.
JP Morgan is a criminal enterprise sanctioned at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Jaime Dimon is nothing more than a mob boss. Period. End of story.
Key Quotes:
The bank has twice received subpoenas in the last three months to produce 25 e-mails detailing how it bid for energy contracts. The bank has said the correspondence is privileged. The commission, which polices energy markets, is investigating whether the bank manipulated markets to gain $73 million and then failed to be truthful about it.
As evidence, they cite an initial series of e-mails the bank refused to share because they were “privileged.” In reality, the commission says, they were not. To make their point, the commission reprinted several of the e-mails.
In one e-mail from March 2011, the head of principal trading in the bank’s commodities group tells the head of JPMorgan’s commodities group: “I will handle it but it may not be pretty.”
Read the full article here.
Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
Common sense is not so common.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.
In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.
The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.
All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
- All Quotes by Voltaire
Where Food Stamps Go to Die
We all know the economy sucks. We all know we are headed in the wrong direction. We all know our leaders are corrupt, immoral, greedy and violent. You don’t need me to tell you that. One thing that I have noticed recently while watching the financial markets is that despite the fact most stocks charts I pull up look awful, the major indices continue to hang in or grind higher. While it is not new news that a few large cap stocks are holding the major averages up, I want to focus on one in particular. Wal-Mart. Yes we all know Wal-Mart. Everyone has an opinion; whether you love it or hate it. In this instance, I’m not so much interested in the company itself, the stores or disturbing images of some of the people seen shopping there. No, in this case I want to take a look at the stock and ponder what it tells us about the state of affairs in both the U.S. and the global economy as a whole.
Wal-Mart’s stock is up 14% YTD, which is triple the return of the S&P 500. The stock also packs a dividend yield of 2.3%, so the total return is even better. In the last month or so the stock has become a real powerhouse as you can see in the chart below. Crushing any and all shorts under the weight of its rapid appreciation.
Wal-Mart Three Year Chart
I think the above chart, in particular the move in the past month or so, speaks volumes to what is happening on a macro level. First, from a purely flow of capital perspective, the U.S. economy was the last one to hit recession (most money managers still have no idea). With Europe in a situation where monetary and political chaos appears likely here and now (and inevitable ultimately) and the BRICs in total free-fall, we have seen a rush into perceived safe havens. We all know about treasuries and bunds, but at some point people don’t want to continue to funnel money to instruments yielding negative real returns. So what has apparently happened is global money managers have been allocating more dollars to very large cap U.S. shares as an alternative to treasuries and bunds.
There’s more to it of course. Nothing exemplifies the ghetto status of the U.S. economy more than the success of Wal-Mart in the face of the ongoing destruction of what was once a vibrant and strong middle class. In case you missed it, Marion Nestle, Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at NYU, came out with some interesting tidbits regarding the food stamp program. One of them is extraordinarily disturbing. She shows that Wal-Mart’s gets as much as 25% to 40% of revenue at some stores from food stamp dollars. This says it all folks. Food stamps are or course the perfect business for Wal-Mart and JP Morgan, which as I pointed out previously makes a lot of money running the program and keeping the populace in perpetual serfdom. Meanwhile, guess what another of the best performing stocks this year is? Corrections Corp of America, ticker CXW, up 41% YTD! Guess what they do? Yep, you guess it. They lock up the serfs that get out of line. This is the Bloomberg description of CXW.
Corrections Corporation of America provides detention and corrections services to governmental agencies. The Company owns correctional and detention facilities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Services include design, construction, ownership, renovation, and management of new or existing jails and prisons, as well as long distance inmate transportation services.
There you have it folks. What sectors are leading the American economy in the “recovery”: Food stamps and Prisons. They are actually perfectly complimentary. If the food stamps don’t work the prisons will.
Meanwhile, in the real economy we have the latest earnings blowup. Ryder System, a company involved in the leasing, rental and logistical business of trucking lowered its forecast and the shares were smashed. Too bad you can’t lease a truck with an EBT card, although who knows, that might be in the next stimulus package.
Ryder Three Year Chart. Thanks for Playing!
The global economy is currently staring into a cyclical recession in the midst of the biggest structural debt and derivatives ponzi scheme that mankind has ever witnessed. The desperation to keep things looking decent into the election continues at a frantic pace and now there are only four more months left. As I have said before, if they do not allow pressure to be released until after the elections the comeuppance is going to be way more awful than I care to think about. Prepare accordingly.
Peace and wisdom,
Mike
Yesterday I had the pleasure to record another fun and informative radio interview with Dr. Dave Janda out of Michigan. In it we discuss various topics of social, political and economic importance including JPM’s huge loss, Blythe Masters’ sociopathic personality and the derivatives time bomb waiting to explode. Listen below.
Ok this is hilarious…the following is an excerpt from silver manipulation expert Ted Bulter.
You just know that JPMorgan et al‘s price fixing operation in silver has become blindingly obvious when the following question showed up in a crossword puzzle in a major daily newspaper in the Netherlands this past weekend….18 Across: “The price of this precious metal is kept artificially low by the business bank JP Morgan Chase.” In Dutch that reads as follows…”De prijs van dit edelmetaal wordt kunstamtig laag gehouden do”or de zakenbank JP Morgan Chase.”
