Wall Street fraud

Video of the Day – Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

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Of course our world is in shambles. The best salaries are paid to the people whose professions add the least value to society.

I know, I know. Lots of people are capable of being garbagemen, but not everyone has the skills to be a parasitic financial criminal.

I agree.

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Wall Street’s Latest Retail Fleecing Product Exposed – Structured CDs

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Ms. Bailey, the Citizens Bank customer in Massachusetts, had sold a condo in Maine in 2013, a year after the death of her husband, who she says had handled their finances. She went to a Citizens branch in Arlington, a suburb of Boston, to deposit the money. She says bank employees pressured her not to just park the money in a savings account.

She says she was directed to Citizens broker Andrew Jurkunas, who steered her to a CD called the GS Momentum Builder Multi-Asset 5 ER Index-Linked Certificate of Deposit Due 2021. It is one of a series of CDs based on a Goldman Sachs-designed index that tracks the performance of up to 14 exchange-traded funds and a cash-like holding. The index aggregates the performance of different combinations of some or all of the underlying funds, relying on a complex formula designed to smooth volatility.

When Ms. Bailey received her first statement showing that the value of her CD had dropped by more than $4,000, she complained to Massachusetts state securities regulators. This January, the office filed civil charges against the bank alleging that Mr. Jurkunas, who wasn’t named or accused of wrongdoing, didn’t adequately disclose the risks of the market-linked CD.

– From yesterday’s excellent Wall Street Journal article: Wall Street Re-Engineers the CD—and Returns Suffer

Wall Street is an industry that should have been allowed to go down in flames back in 2008. Bailing out these career criminals and sociopaths was one of the gravest errors in American history. An error that we as a nation continue to suffer from to this day.

As an example, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reported on the industry’s latest scheme to pocket the hard earned savings of those dwindling Americans who still have a few pennies left — structured CDs.

What follows are some key excerpts from this must read article, Wall Street Re-Engineers the CD—and Returns Suffer:

Mary Bailey, a 79-year-old widow in Arlington, Mass., made a big deposit for her grandchildren at her Citizens Bank branch when a financial adviser there sold her on a newfangled $100,000 certificate of deposit. It would, he said, double her savings in six years, according to a later state enforcement action.

So she was irate when her first statement showed the CD’s value had fallen to $95,712, thanks to upfront fees. “This was not a CD as I know a CD,” Ms. Bailey says.

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Video of the Day – Ralph Nader Blasts Harvard Law School for Serving “Corporate Crooks on Wall Street”

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Would you be proud of representing the corporate crooks in Wall Street? What is the purpose of the Harvard Law School? Well, you know who knows what the purpose is? The corporate giants. They know exactly what the purpose of the Harvard Law School is. It’s to provide endless relays of lawyers who service their interests.

Harvard Law is not an institution that provokes any kind of consternation or fear among the power structure, just the opposite. It’s an institution, and I’ll get around to the exceptions. On the whole, it’s an institution that rationalizes corporate power brilliantly, services corporate power brilliantly with its graduates and some of its departments here.

– Ralph Nader during a recent speech at Harvard Law School

Ralph Nader is a Harvard Law School graduate. Here’s what he had to say about the institution’s shameless decay into the worship of greed and cronyism.

Two words: Banana Republic.

For related articles, see:

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Wall Street Wins Again: The Much Vaunted Mortgage Task Force “Does Not Exist”

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You know why Jaime Dimon is always smiling and why the oligarchs in general are so arrogant?  They keep pillaging the American public and no one does anything about it.  The sheeple are so brainwashed at this point most of them will fall for anything.  Now, for the outrageous story of the day… From Salon:

Recent profiles of this event have called last night’s State of the Union the “anniversary” of the formation of the working group.  But you can’t really have an anniversary of something that never existed in the first place.  There never was a Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities working group, never a so-called task force dedicated to ferreting out Wall Street fraud — the deceptive origination of mortgage loans, sale of worthless mortgage-backed securities for huge sums, and subsequent unloading of toxic debt to unsuspecting buyers. The working group fails to exist as a tangible entity to this day.  What does exist is the same years-old Financial Fraud Enforcement Group that serves as a conduit for press releases about investigative actions already in progress.

Schneiderman’s “task force” (a generous appellation) was merely a politically motivated shell organization grafted onto that public relations strategy.  This was evident almost from the moment of the announcement, but the coalition of self-proclaimed bank accountability advocates, who had backed the administration into a corner over the lack of prosecutions, decided to align with Schneiderman and his kabuki task force, losing whatever leverage they may have had.  If those same groups who feel “betrayed” and “lied to” had stayed on the outside and shamed those in power into action, we would probably have more accountability today.

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