Our government has decided that the too-big-to-jail banks are also too big the bail OUT. Therefore, it is a given that the next banks to crash will refinance themselves by bailing IN, which means conficating their depositors' money. Theoretically, we are all protected by deposit insurance up to $250,000, but the FDIC doesn't have enough to remburse one bank's loss, much less if they all collapse at once. Moral: If you have money deposited in one of the big banks, get out PRONTO and put it in a credit union.

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USAWatchDog interview on new bail-in rules 12-9-14

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Ellen Brown

http://youtu.be/Ey20x-VlDYQ

Published on YouTube Dec 9, 2014

When a financial crash does happen, you can forget about getting immediate access to your money. Ellen Brown of The Web of Debt Blog says, “The banks will say, well, we don’t have it. All the money goes into one big pool since Glass Steagall was repealed. They are allowed to gamble with that money and that’s what they do. I think maybe Bank of America is the most vulnerable because of Merrill Lynch. Everybody is concerned, and they do very risky deals and they are on the edge. I think they have over $50 trillion in derivatives and over $1 trillion in deposits. . . The Dodd-Frank Act says we, the people, are no longer going to be responsible for the big banks when they collapse. It is not clear the FDIC will even be able to borrow from the Treasury, but even if they could, who is going to pay that money back? Let’s say they borrowed $1 trillion. Who is going to pay that $1 trillion dollars back? It will bankrupt all the small banks that had to contribute to this premium. They will say we’re raising your premium to everything you got, basically. Little banks will go out of business, and who is going to survive--the big banks. . . . What we’re going to have left is five big banks, and everybody else is going to be bankrupt.”

Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with Ellen Brown from EllenBrown.com.
The latest is called “Big Banks Will Take Depositors Money In Next Crash -Ellen Brown.” The G-20 met recently in Australia to make new banking rules for the next financial calamity. Financial reform advocate Ellen Brown says these new rules will allow banks to take money from depositors and pensioners globally. Brown explains, “It became rules we agreed to actually implement. There was no treaty, and Congress didn’t agree to all this. They use words so that it’s not obvious to tell what they have done, but what they did was say, basically, that we, the governments, are no longer going to be responsible for bailing out the big banks. These are about 30 international banks. So, you are going to have to save yourselves, and the way you are going to have to do it is by bailing in the money of your creditors. The largest class of creditors of any bank is the depositors.”

It gets worse, as Brown goes on to say, “Theoretically, we are protected by deposit insurance up to $250,000 in the U.S. and 100,000 euros in Europe. The FDIC fund has $46 billion, the last time I looked, to cover $4.5 trillion worth of deposits. So, even though we are protected by the FDIC, the FDIC is not going to have the money. . . . This makes it legal for these big 30 banks to take our money when they become insolvent. They are too-big-to-fail. This was supposed to avoid too-big-to-fail, but what it does is institutionalizes too-big-to-fail. They are not going to go down. They are going to take our money instead.”

Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Ellen Brown from the Web of Debt Blog. Here’s the link: http://usawatchdog.com/big-banks-will... Thank you for considering linking to or embedding this post.

Greg Hunter
USAWatchdog.com

A former Harvard economics professor argues that the Fed’s efforts to strengthen America’s banks have perversely weakened them. He believes that members of the Fed become reverse Robin Hoods as they take from the poor. And he is withdrawing $1,000,000 from the Bank of America to keep it safe in the increasingly likely event that there will be a run on BofA and it won't have enough cash to pay back its depositors.

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Is your money safe at the bank? An economist says ‘no’ and withdraws his

BY TERRY BURNHAM  January 30, 2014 at 12:45 PM EST

The Fed policies of Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, who begins her term Feb. 1, are making former Harvard economist Terry Burnham withdraw his money from Bank of America. Photo by Davis Turner/Getty Images.

Terry Burnham, former Harvard economics professor, author of “Mean Genes” and “Mean Markets and Lizard Brains,” provocative poster on this page and long-time critic of the Federal Reserve, argues that the Fed’s efforts to strengthen America’s banks have perversely weakened them. (See our 2005 segment with Burnham below about how “lizard brains” influence our economic decisions.)

Last week I had over $1,000,000 in a checking account at Bank of America. Next week, I will have $10,000.

Why am I getting in line to take my money out of Bank of America? Because of Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, who officially begins her term as chairwoman on Feb. 1.

Before I explain, let me disclose that I have been a stopped clock of criticism of the Federal Reserve for half a decade. That’s because I believe that when the Fed intervenes in markets, it has two effects — both negative. First, it decreases overall wealth by distorting markets and causing bad investment decisions. Second, the members of the Fed become reverse Robin Hoods as they take from the poor (and unsophisticated) investors and give to the rich (and politically connected). These effects have been noticed; a Gallup poll taken in the last few days reports that only the richest Americans support the Fed. (See the table.)

Why do I risk starting a run on Bank of America by withdrawing my money and presuming that many fellow depositors will read this and rush to withdraw too? Because they pay me zero interest. Thus, even an infinitesimal chance Bank of America will not repay me in full, whenever I ask, switches the cost-benefit conclusion from stay to flee.

Let me explain: Currently, I receive zero dollars in interest on my $1,000,000. The reason I had the money in Bank of America was to keep it safe. However, the potential cost to keeping my money in Bank of America is that the bank may be unwilling or unable to return my money.

They will not be able to return my money if:

Customers wait in line at the IndyMac Bank branch
headquarters in Pasadena, Calif., in July 2008.
Joshua Lott/Bloomberg News

•     Many other depositors like you get in line before me. Banks today promise everyone that they can have their money back instantaneously, but the bank does not actually have enough money to pay everyone at once because they have lent most of it out to other people — 90 percent or more. Thus, banks are always at risk for runs where the depositors at the front of the line get their money back, but the depositors at the back of the line do not. Consider this image from a fully insured U.S. bank, IndyMac in California, just five years ago.
•     Some of the investments of Bank of America go bust. Because Bank of America has loaned out the vast majority of depositors’ money, if even a small percentage of its loans go bust, the firm is at risk for bankruptcy. Leverage, combined with some bad investments, caused the failure of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and would have caused the failure of Bank of America, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and many more institutions in 2008 had the government not bailed them out. 

In recent days, the chances for trouble at Bank of America have become more salient because of woes in the emerging markets, particularly Argentina, Turkey, Russia and China. The emerging market fears caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to lose more than 500 points over the last week.

Returning to my money now entrusted to Bank of America, market turmoil reminded me that this particular trustee is simply not safe. Or not safe enough, given the fact that safety is the reason I put the money there at all. The market turmoil could threaten “BofA” with bankruptcy today as it did in 2008, and as banks have experienced again and again over time.

If the chance that Bank of America will not return my money is, say, a mere 1 percent, then the expected cost to me is 1 percent of my million, or $10,000. That far exceeds the interest I receive, which, I hardly need remind depositors out there, is a cool $0. Even a 0.1 percent chance of loss has an expected cost to me of $1,000. Bank of America pays me the zero interest rate because the Federal Reserve has set interest rates to zero. Thus my incentive to leave at the first whiff of instability.

Surely, you say, the federal government is going to keep its promises, at least on insured deposits. Yes, the Federal Government (via the FDIC) insures deposits in most institutions up to $250,000. But there is a problem with this insurance. The FDIC currently has far less money in its fund than it has insured deposits: as of Sept. 1, about $41 billion in reserve against $6 trillion in insured deposits. (There are over $9 trillion on deposit at U.S. banks, by the way, so more than $3 trillion in deposits is completely uninsured.)

It’s true, of course, that when the FDIC fund risks running dry, as it did in 2009, it can go back to other parts of the federal government for help. I expect those other parts will make the utmost efforts to oblige. But consider the possibility that they may be in crisis at the very same time, for the very same reasons, or that it might take some time to get approval. Remember that Congress voted against the TARP bailout in 2008 before it relented and finally voted for the bailout.

Thus, even insured depositors risk loss and/or delay in recovering their funds. In most time periods, these risks are balanced against the reward of getting interest. Not so long ago, Bank of America would have paid me $1,000 a week in interest on my million dollars. If I were getting $1,000 a week, I might bear the risks of delay and default. However, today I am receiving $0.

So my cash is leaving Bank of America.

But if Bank of America is not safe, you must be wondering, where can you and I put our money? No path is without risk, but here are a few options.

1. Keep some cash at home, though admittedly this runs the risk of loss or setting yourself up as a target for criminals.
2. Put some cash in a safety box. There is an urban myth that this is illegal; my understanding is that cash in a safety box is legal. However, I can imagine scenarios where capital controls are placed on safety deposit box withdrawals. And suppose the bank is shut down and you can’t get to the box?
3. Pay your debts. You don’t need to be Suze Orman to know that you need liquidity, so do not use all your cash to pay debts. However, you can use some surplus, should you have any.
4. Prepay your taxes and some other obligations. Subject to the same caveat about liquidity, pay ahead. Make sure you only pay safe entities. Your local government is not going away, even in a depression, so, for example, you can prepay property taxes. (I would check with a tax accountant on the implications, however.)
5. Find a safer bank. Some local, smaller banks are much safer than the “too-big-to-fail banks.” After its mistake of letting Lehman fail, the government has learned that it must try to save giant institutions. However, the government may not be able to save all failing institutions immediately and simultaneously in a crisis. Thus, depositors in big banks face delays and defaults in the event of a true crisis. (It is important to find the right small bank; I believe all big banks are fragile, while some small banks are robust.)

Someone should start a bank (or maybe someone has) that charges (rather than pays) interest and does not make loans. Such a bank would be a good example of how Fed actions create unintended outcomes that defeat their goals. The Fed wants to stimulate lending, but an anti-lending bank could be quite successful. I would be a customer.

(Interestingly, there was a famous anti-lending bank and it was also a “BofA” — the Bank of Amsterdam, founded in 1609. The Dutch BofA charged customers for safe-keeping, did not make loans and did not allow depositors to get their money out immediately. Adam Smith discusses this BofA favorably in his “Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776. Unfortunately — and unbeknownst to Smith — the Bank of Amsterdam had starting secretly making risky loans to ventures in the East Indies and other areas, just like any other bank. When these risky ventures failed, so did the BofA.)

My point is that the Federal Reserve’s actions have myriad, unanticipated, negative consequences. Over the last week, we saw the impact on the emerging markets. The Fed had created $3 trillion of new money in the last five-plus years — three times more than in its entire prior history. A big chunk of that $3 trillion found its way, via private investors and institutions, into risky, emerging markets.

Now that the Fed is reducing (“tapering”) its new money creation (now down to $65 billion a month, or $780 billion a year, as of Wednesday’s announcement), investments are flowing out of risky areas. Some of these countries are facing absolute crises, with Argentina’s currency plummeting by more than 20 percent in under one month. That means investments in Argentina are worth 20 percent less in dollar terms than they were a month ago, even if they held their price in Pesos.

The Fed did not plan to impoverish investors by inducing them to buy overpriced Argentinian investments, of course, but that is one of the costly consequences of its actions. If you lost money in emerging markets over the last week, at one level, it is your responsibility. However, it is not crazy for you to blame the Fed for creating volatile prices that made investing more difficult.

Similarly, if you bought gold at the peak of almost $2,000 per ounce, you have lost one-third of your money; you share the blame for your golden losses with Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. They removed the opportunities for safe investments and forced those with liquid assets to scramble for what safety they thought they could find. Furthermore, the uncertainty caused by the Fed has caused many assets to swing wildly in value, creating winners and losers.

The Fed played a role in the recent emerging markets turmoil. Next week, they will cause another crisis somewhere else. Eventually, the absurd effort to create wealth through monetary policy will unravel in the U.S. as it has every other time it has been tried from Weimar Germany to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

Even after the Fed created the housing problems, we would have been better of with a small 2009 depression rather than the larger depression that lies ahead. See my Making Sen$e posts “The Stockholm Syndrome and Printing Money” and “Ben Bernanke as Easter Bunny: Why the Fed Can’t Prevent the Coming Crash” for the details of my argument.

Ever since Alan Greenspan intervened to save the stock market on Oct. 20, 1987, the Fed has sought to cushion every financial blow by adding liquidity. The trouble with trying to make the world safe for stupidity is that it creates fragility.

Bank of America and other big banks are fragile — and vulnerable to bank runs — because the Fed has set interest rates to zero. If a run gathers momentum, the government will take steps to stem it. But I am convinced they have limited ammunition and unlimited problems.

What is the solution? For you, save yourself and your family. For the system, revamp the Federal Reserve. The simplest first step would be to end the dual mandate of price stability and full employment. Price stability is enough. I favor rules over intervention. We don’t need a maestro conducting monetary policy; we need a system that promotes stability and allows people (not printing presses) to make us richer.

The criminality of the megabanks caused the present recession, yet the Federal government treats them as too big to fail and too big to jail. But what if the states were to sue individual bankers accused of defrauding the public? How sweet that would be! And California's Attorney General is contemplating doing just that. Support her!

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Will JPMorgan Chase Bankers Finally Pay the Piper?

By Richard Eskow

Will California Attorney General Kamala Harris hang tough in her new lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, the first to target individual bankers accused of defrauding the public? If so, it would be the first time in five years that executives at a major bank have personally paid a price for their misdeeds.

Weekend at Jamie’s

Recent revelations have shown the world that JPMorgan Chase comes as close as any institution in America to embodying all that is corrupt, contemptible, and criminal about today’s megabanks.  This is gratifying, at least on a personal level, since that was not a popular assessment when we first started writing about JPM and CEO Jamie Dimon a few years back.

In those days Dimon was help up as the “good banker” by the president and the press. His institution was considered well-managed and ethical by some of the more shallow members of the popular press, despite the plethora of scandals and crimes like the Alabama bribery case.

Since then we’ve had a variety of Chase revelations: the “Burger King kids” details behind its massive foreclosure fraud; its confessed criminal mistreatment of active duty military personnel; its deeds in fraudulently propping up a failed mortgage lender (it was like a financial Weekend at Bernie’s); and (speaking of “Bernies”) its negligence (at best) in the handling of the fraudulent Madoff accounts, which should have triggered all sorts of red-flag warnings.

Now there’s the London Whale scandal and what appears to be a subsequent case of investor deception.

The bank wound up paying a staggering $16 billion in fines and settlements over a four-year period, more than 12 percent of its net income during that time.

The Scandal of Our Time

An ethically healthy society would never have lionized a CEO like Jamie Dimon or an institution like JPMorgan Chase. That’s why we’ve called it “the scandal of our time.” What explains Dimon’s inability to stem the lawbreaking and correct his organization’s broken ethical system? The most generous interpretation is that he’s an incompetent manager — so incompetent that, even after numerous suits, revelations, and settlements, “Jamie didn’t know“ about all the illegal and unethical behavior that continued unabated in his institution.

Jamie Dimon

Needless to say, there are more plausible explanations.

And yet, in those cases where the bank has been called to account with fines and settlements, it has been shareholders and not the wrongdoing bankers themselves,who have paid cost. Ironically, that even happens when the shareholders themselves are the ones who were defrauded. That’s why we say that bank fraud is the only crime on Earth in which the victims make restitution on behalf of the wrongdoers.

Is this ugly pattern finally changing?

Meet the Does

Blogger and finance expert Yves Smith thinks so. California Attorney General Kamala Harris is suing JPMorgan Chase and individual bankers (named as “Does 1 through 100″) for “commit(ting) debt collection abuses” against Chase credit card holders, “flooding California’s courts with… collection lawsuits based on patently insufficient evidence.”

The Harris suit calls on the Court to assess $2,500 against each defendant for each violation of “Business and Professions Code section 17200,” and an additional $2,500 penalty for each violation perpetrated against a senior citizen or disabled person.

That may not sound like a lot of money for a banker but, as Smith points out, there are more than 100,000 potential violations. Smith writes: “If (Harris) can get the individuals who were supervising the robosigning operations (better yet, the C level execs ultimately responsible) and the complicit law firms, she might bankrupt some well-placed people. This could be extremely entertaining.”

Indeed. In fact, I’ll buy the popcorn.

Walking the Walk

From Yves Smith:

“Now Harris has been widely depicted as an opportunist. But she’s kicking up more dirt on the banking front right now than any other official … This case has enough headline value that Harris might go a few rounds before settling. JP Morgan is known for throwing vast amounts of lawyers at opponents to bury them in legal costs and busywork, so this case, sadly, is unlikely to go to trial. But if she can get the goods on the right sort of DOES, she might make some individuals pay in a serious way, which would have far more deterrent effect.

Adds Smith: “If nothing else, we should applaud what she’s so far and press her to keep going.”

I generally agree with all of the above. But some of us have been burned by even the most cautious cheerleading for seemingly promising Wall Street investigations and lawsuits.  That’s especially been true when the actions in question are being conducted by elected officials with any sort of connection to the Obama White House, an institution which has become synonymous with efforts to protect bankers and restrict their punishment to the merely symbolic.

Attorney General Harris is considered close to the president. She’s undoubtedly being either cajoled or pressured (or both) to cave on this issue.

Reaching Out

So I’m going to emphasize the words “press her” in Smith’s last sentence.  If Harris is determined to see this through, her suit is potentially the kind of sea change in banker law enforcement we’ve been waiting for. But that means she’ll need emphatic expressions of support to strengthen her resolve (and to explain to the Administration why she can’t and won’t back down).

And if this is merely another publicity stunt, she needs to know that a choreographed cave-in will be very poorly received by her constituents.

Harris therefore deserves strong expressions of support, along with statements that citizens expect her to see this action through — at least far enough to ensure that the malefactors involved pay some personal penalty for their misdeeds.

(Contact information for Kamala Harris, Attorney General for the State of California, can be found here.)

RJ Eskow

Republished from Huffington Post with the author’s permission.
Saturday, 11 May 2013

Economist and white-collar criminologist Bill Black paraphrasing a column by Matthew Yglesias: "...it was essential, if you're going to bail out the biggest banks, that you not allow any proscecutions, because if you had allowed any proscecutions, then the banks would have been driven by proscecutions back into insolvency. ... this is even worse than blaming the victims ... you have to make sure that the victims get no recovery from the frauds, because if the victims got recovery, well, the victims suffered such massive losses, roughly $20 trillion lost in wealth, that it would bankrupt the fraudulent banks."

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 theREALnews                                                                               Permalink

February 3, 2013

Creative Finance: Leaving Felons in Charge of the Banks

Bill Black: Obama Administration following logic that to not investigate and prosecute banking fraud builds trust in the institutions
Watch full multipart The Black Financial and Fraud Report


Bio

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

These banksters are responsible for crashing the economy, yet they got interest-free bailouts from us taxpayers and seem to be exempt from going to jail for their provable criminality thanks to their regulators being revolving-door members of their own staff.

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CORPORATE ACCOUNTABILITY AND WORKPLACE

BillMoyers.com / By Bill Moyers, Matt Taibbi

Bill Moyers and Matt Taibbi: Everyone Pays If the Banksters Don't Go to Jail

"The rule of law isn’t really the rule of law if it doesn’t apply equally to everybody," Taibbi tells Moyers.

February 1, 2013  |  From Bill Moyers.com:

Journalist Matt Taibbi assesses the Obama Administration’s approach to holding banks accountable for their behavior, and early indications are not promising. Taibbi tells Bill that fearing another economic calamity is no excuse for turning a blind eye to shockingly unethical decisions and management.



Full transcript available at original.

Followup on the PBS documentary "The Untouchables"

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 theREALnews                                                                               Permalink

January 29, 2013

Obama Admin. Fails to Prosecute Banking Fraud to 'Save the System'

James S. Henry commenting on PBS documentary "The Untouchables": If one of these institutions was indicted and made an example of, it would have a profound affect on the whole industry - but Obama raises money on Wall St.
Watch full multipart Obama: Rhetoric or New Direction?


Bio

James S. Henry is a leading economist, attorney and investigative journalist who has written extensively about global issues. James served as Chief Economist at the international consultancy firm McKinsey & Co and as an investigative journalist his work has appeared in numerous publications like Forbes, The Nation, and the The New York Times. He was the lead researcher of the recently released report titled “'The Price of Offshore Revisited.'

Blogger's Note: Don't miss the Frontline video at the bottom.

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The Untouchables: How the Obama administration protected Wall Street from prosecutions
A new PBS Frontline report examines a profound failure of justice that should be causing serious social unrest

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Glenn Greenwald 
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 23 January 2013 12.27 GMT
Original Here

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Eric Holder talks to DOJ Criminal Chief Lanny Breuer in 2010. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

(updated below - Update II)

PBS' Frontline program on Tuesday night broadcast a new one-hour report on one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering. What this program particularly demonstrated was that the Obama justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable.

What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly what they did in the face of high-level Bush era crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping: namely, acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with immunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.

Worst of all, Obama justice officials both shielded and feted these Wall Street oligarchs (who, just by the way, overwhelmingly supported Obama's 2008 presidential campaign) as they simultaneously prosecuted and imprisoned powerless Americans for far more trivial transgressions. As Harvard law professor Larry Lessig put it two weeks ago when expressing anger over the DOJ's persecution of Aaron Swartz: "we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House." (Indeed, as "The Untouchables" put it: while no senior Wall Street executives have been prosecuted, "many small mortgage brokers, loan appraisers and even home buyers" have been).

As I documented at length in my 2011 book on America's two-tiered justice system, With Liberty and Justice for Some, the evidence that felonies were committed by Wall Street is overwhelming. That evidence directly negates the primary excuse by Breuer (previously offered by Obama himself) that the bad acts of Wall Street were not criminal.

Numerous documents prove that executives at leading banks, credit agencies, and mortgage brokers were falsely touting assets as sound that knew were junk: the very definition of fraud. As former Wall Street analyst Yves Smith wrote in her book ECONned: "What went on at Lehman and AIG, as well as the chicanery in the CDO [collateralized debt obligation] business, by any sensible standard is criminal." Even lifelong Wall Street defender Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chair, said in Congressional testimony that "a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud."

A New York Times editorial in August explained that the DOJ's excuse for failing to prosecute Wall Street executives - that it was too hard to obtain convictions - "has always defied common sense - and all the more so now that a fuller picture is emerging of the range of banks' reckless and lawless activities, including interest-rate rigging, money laundering, securities fraud and excessive speculation." The Frontline program interviewed former prosecutors, Senate staffers and regulators who unequivocally said the same: it is inconceivable that the DOJ could not have successfully prosecuted at least some high-level Wall Street executives - had they tried.

What's most remarkable about all of this is not even Wall Street had the audacity to expect the generosity of largesse they ended up receiving. "The Untouchables" begins by recounting the massive financial devastation the 2008 crisis wrought - "the economy was in ruins and bankers were being blamed" - and recounts:

"In 2009, Wall Street bankers were on the defensive, worried they could be held criminally liable for fraud. With a new administration, bankers and their attorneys expected investigations and at least some prosecutions."

Indeed, the show recalls that both in Washington and the country generally, "there was broad support for prosecuting Wall Street." Nonetheless: "four years later, there have been no arrests of any senior Wall Street executives."

In response to the DOJ's excuse-making that these criminal cases are too hard to win, numerous experts - Senators, top Hill staffers, former DOJ prosecutors - emphasized the key point: Obama officials never even tried. One of the heroes of "The Untouchables", former Democratic Sen. Ted Kaufman, worked tirelessly to provide the DOJ with all the funds it needed to ensure probing criminal investigations and even to pressure and compel them to do so. Yet when he and his staff would meet with Breuer and other top DOJ officials, they would proudly tout the small mortgage brokers they were pursuing, in response to which Kafuman and his staff said: "No. Don't show me small-time mortgage guys in California. This is totally about what went on in Wall Street. . . . We are talking about investigating senior level Wall Street executives, even at the Board level". (The same Lanny Breuer was recently seen announcing that the banking giant HSBC would face no criminal prosecution for its money laundering of funds for designated terrorist groups and drug networks on the ground that the bank was too big to risk prosecuting).

As Kaufman and his staffers make clear, Obama officials were plainly uninterested in pursuing criminal accountability for Wall Street. One former staffer to both Biden and Kaufman, Jeff Connaughton, wrote a book in 2011 - "The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins" - devoted to alerting the nation that the Obama DOJ refused even to try to find criminal culprits on Wall Street. In the book, this career-Democratic-aide-turned-whistleblower details how the levers of Washington power are used to shield and protect high-level Wall Street executives, many of whom have close ties to the leaders of both parties and themselves are former high-level government officials. This is a system, he makes clear, that is constituted to ensure that those executives never face real accountability even for their most egregious and destructive crimes.

The reason there have been no efforts made to criminally investigate is obvious. Former banking regulator and current securities Professor Bill Black told Bill Moyers in 2009 that "Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong." In the documentary "Inside Job", the economist Nouriel Roubini, when asked why there have been no such investigations, replied: "Because then you'd find the culprits." Underlying all of that is what the Senate's second-highest ranking Democrat, Dick Durbin, admitted in 2009: the banks "frankly own the place".

The harms from this refusal to hold Wall Street accountable are the same generated by the general legal immunity the US political culture has vested in its elites. Just as was true for the protection of torturers and illegal eavesdroppers, it ensures that there are no incentives to avoid similar crimes in the future. It is an injustice in its own right to allow those with power and wealth to commit destructive crimes with impunity. It subverts democracy and warps the justice system when a person's treatment under the law is determined not by their acts but by their power, position, and prestige. And it exposes just how shameful is the American penal state by contrasting the immunity given to the nation's most powerful with the merciless and brutal punishment meted out to its most marginalized.

The real mystery from all of this is that it has not led to greater social unrest. To some extent, both the early version of the Tea Party and the Occupy movements were spurred by the government's protection of Wall Street at the expense of everyone else. Still, Americans continue to be plagued by massive unemployment, foreclosures, the threat of austerity and economic insecurity while those who caused those problems have more power and profit than ever. And they watch millions of their fellow citizens be put in cages for relatively minor offenses while the most powerful are free to commit far more serious crimes with complete impunity. Far less injustice than this has spurred serious unrest in other societies.

[The one-hour Frontline program can be viewed in its entirety here.]

Watch The Untouchables on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

UPDATE

The New York Times' Dealbook section hosted a Q-and-A today with Martin Smith, the producer of "The Untouchables". Here is one quite revealing exchange from that (via @QuietAmerican55):

The Obama administration is not accustomed to actual adversarial journalism that sheds light on their malfeasance. They do not like it. And when they see it, they respond about as petulantly as possible: we will never cooperate with you again! It's not Frontline's fault that the Obama administration actively shielded Wall Street from all forms of criminal accountability. If, as seems to be the case, that fact embarrasses them, they should blame those responsible (themselves), not those reporting it.

UPDATE II

The Washington Post is reporting this afternoon that Breuer is planning to leave the DOJ. Don't worry: he'll be fine. Given how valiantly he protected Wall Street and HSBC, one need not be Nate Silver to predict with a fair degree of confidence that he'll land on his feet. When public officials use their government power to serve the interests of private sector elites, they are often lavishly rewarded by the faction they served upon leaving government. That's one of the key dynamics greasing the sleazy revolving door of Washington. Beyond that, Breuer's contacts in and influence with the DOJ will be in high demand by corporations, banks and other assorted oligarchs seeking to exercise the legal immunity which US political culture has bestowed on them.

WHILE MANY ORDINARY AMERICANS ARE SENTENCED TO LIFE IMPRISONMENT FOR THE MOST TRIVIAL NON-VIOLENT CRIMES, TODAY'S TOO-BIG-TO-FAIL BANKS COMMONLY COMMIT MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR CRIMES, YET ARE ALLOWED TO KEEP THEIR BOOTY AND LET OFF BY THE U.S. JUDICIAL SYSTEM WITHOUT SO MUCH AS A SLAP ON THE WRIST.

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HSBC, too big to jail, is the new poster child for US two-tiered justice system

DOJ officials unblinkingly insist that the banking giant is too powerful and important to subject to the rule of law

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Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 December 2012 10.14 GMT

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Assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer said taking away HSBC's US banking licence
could have cost thousands of jobs. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP

(updated below)

The US is the world's largest prison state, imprisoning more of its citizens than any nation on earth, both in absolute numbers and proportionally. It imprisons people for longer periods of time, more mercilessly, and for more trivial transgressions than any nation in the west. This sprawling penal state has been constructed over decades, by both political parties, and it punishes the poor and racial minorities at overwhelmingly disproportionate rates.

But not everyone is subjected to that system of penal harshness. It all changes radically when the nation's most powerful actors are caught breaking the law. With few exceptions, they are gifted not merely with leniency, but full-scale immunity from criminal punishment. Thus have the most egregious crimes of the last decade been fully shielded from prosecution when committed by those with the greatest political and economic power: the construction of a worldwide torture regime, spying on Americans' communications without the warrants required by criminal law by government agencies and the telecom industry, an aggressive war launched on false pretenses, and massive, systemic financial fraud in the banking and credit industry that triggered the 2008 financial crisis.

This two-tiered justice system was the subject of my last book, "With Liberty and Justice for Some", and what was most striking to me as I traced the recent history of this phenomenon is how explicit it has become. Obviously, those with money and power always enjoyed substantial advantages in the US justice system, but lip service was at least always paid to the core precept of the rule of law: that - regardless of power, position and prestige - all stand equal before the blindness of Lady Justice.

It really is the case that this principle is now not only routinely violated, as was always true, but explicitly repudiated, right out in the open. It is commonplace to hear US elites unblinkingly insisting that those who become sufficiently important and influential are - and should be - immunized from the system of criminal punishment to which everyone else is subjected.

Worse, we are constantly told that immunizing those with the greatest power is not for their good, but for our good, for our collective good: because it's better for all of us if society is free of the disruptions that come from trying to punish the most powerful, if we're free of the deprivations that we would collectively experience if we lose their extraordinary value and contributions by prosecuting them.

This rationale was popularized in 1974 when Gerald Ford explained why Richard Nixon - who built his career as a "law-and-order" politician demanding harsh punishments and unforgiving prosecutions for ordinary criminals - would never see the inside of a courtroom after being caught committing multiple felonies; his pardon was for the good not of Nixon, but of all of us. That was the same reasoning hauled out to justify immunity for officials of the National Security State who tortured and telecom giants who illegally spied on Americans (we need them to keep us safe and can't disrupt them with prosecutions), as well as the refusal to prosecute any Wall Street criminals for their fraud (prosecutions for these financial crimes would disrupt our collective economic recovery).

A new episode unveiled on Tuesday is one of the most vivid examples yet of this mentality. Over the last year, federal investigators found that one of the world's largest banks, HSBC, spent years committing serious crimes, involving money laundering for terrorists; "facilitat[ing] money laundering by Mexican drug cartels"; and "mov[ing] tainted money for Saudi banks tied to terrorist groups". Those investigations uncovered substantial evidence "that senior bank officials were complicit in the illegal activity." As but one example, "an HSBC executive at one point argued that the bank should continue working with the Saudi Al Rajhi bank, which has supported Al Qaeda."

Needless to say, these are the kinds of crimes for which ordinary and powerless people are prosecuted and imprisoned with the greatest aggression possible. If you're Muslim and your conduct gets anywhere near helping a terrorist group, even by accident, you're going to prison for a long, long time. In fact, powerless, obscure, low-level employees are routinely sentenced to long prison terms for engaging in relatively petty money laundering schemes, unrelated to terrorism, and on a scale that is a tiny fraction of what HSBC and its senior officials are alleged to have done.

But not HSBC. On Tuesday, not only did the US Justice Department announce that HSBC would not be criminally prosecuted, but outright claimed that the reason is that they are too important, too instrumental to subject them to such disruptions. In other words, shielding them from the system of criminal sanction to which the rest of us are subject is not for their good, but for our common good. We should not be angry, but grateful, for the extraordinary gift bestowed on the global banking giant:

"US authorities defended their decision not to prosecute HSBC for accepting the tainted money of rogue states and drug lords on Tuesday, insisting that a $1.9bn fine for a litany of offences was preferable to the 'collateral consequences' of taking the bank to court. . . .

"Announcing the record fine at a press conference in New York, assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer said that despite HSBC"s 'blatant failure' to implement anti-money laundering controls and its wilful flouting of US sanctions, the consequences of a criminal prosecution would have been dire.

"Had the US authorities decided to press criminal charges, HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking licence in the US, the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilised.
"HSBC, Britain's biggest bank, said it was 'profoundly sorry' for what it called 'past mistakes' that allowed terrorists and narcotics traffickers to move billions around the financial system and circumvent US banking laws. . . .

"As part of the deal, HSBC has undertaken a five-year agreement with the US department of justice under which it will install an independent monitor to assess reformed internal controls. The bank's top executives will defer part of their bonuses for the whole of the five-year period, while bonuses have been clawed back from a number of former and current executives, including those in the US directly involved at the time.

"John Coffee, a professor of law at Columbia Law School in New York, said the fine was consistent with how US regulators have been treating bank infractions in recent years. 'These days they rarely sue individuals in any meaningful way when the entity will settle. This is largely a function of resource constraints, but also risk aversion, and a willingness to take the course of least resistance,' he said."

DOJ officials touted the $1.9 billion fine HSBC would pay, the largest ever for such a case. As the Guardian's Nils Pratley noted, "the sum represents about four weeks' earnings given the bank's pre-tax profits of $21.9bn last year." Unsurprisingly, "the steady upward progress of HSBC's share price since the scandal exploded in July was unaffected on Tuesday morning."

The New York Times Editors this morning announced: "It is a dark day for the rule of law." There is, said the NYT editors, "no doubt that the wrongdoing at HSBC was serious and pervasive." But the bank is simply too big, too powerful, too important to prosecute.

That's not merely a dark day for the rule of law. It's a wholesale repudiation of it. The US government is expressly saying that banking giants reside outside of - above - the rule of law, that they will not be punished when they get caught red-handed committing criminal offenses for which ordinary people are imprisoned for decades. Aside from the grotesque injustice, the signal it sends is as clear as it is destructive: you are free to commit whatever crimes you want without fear of prosecution. And obviously, if the US government would not prosecute these banks on the ground that they're too big and important, it would - yet again, or rather still - never let them fail.

But this case is the opposite of an anomaly. That the most powerful actors should be immunized from the rule of law - not merely treated better, but fully immunized - is a constant, widely affirmed precept in US justice. It's applied to powerful political and private sector actors alike. Over the past four years, the CIA and NSA have received the same gift, as have top Executive Branch officials, as has the telecom industry, as has most of the banking industry. This is how I described it in "With Liberty and Justice for Some":

"To hear our politicians and our press tell it, the conclusion is inescapable: we're far better off when political and financial elites - and they alone - are shielded from criminal accountability.

"It has become a virtual consensus among the elites that their members are so indispensable to the running of American society that vesting them with immunity from prosecution - even for the most egregious crimes - is not only in their interest but in our interest, too. Prosecutions, courtrooms, and prisons, it's hinted - and sometimes even explicitly stated - are for the rabble, like the street-side drug peddlers we occasionally glimpse from our car windows, not for the political and financial leaders who manage our nation and fuel our prosperity.

"It is simply too disruptive, distracting, and unjust, we are told, to subject them to the burden of legal consequences."

That is precisely the rationale explicitly invoked by DOJ officials to justify their decision to protect HSBC from criminal accountability. These are the same officials who previously immunized Bush-era torturers and warrantless eavesdroppers, telecom giants, and Wall Street executives, even as they continue to persecute whistleblowers at record rates and prosecute ordinary citizens - particularly poor and minorities - with extreme harshness even for trivial offenses. The administration that now offers the excuse that HSBC is too big to prosecute is the same one that quite consciously refused to attempt to break up these banks in the aftermath of the "too-big-to-fail" crisis of 2008, as former TARP overseer Neil Barofsky, among others, has spent years arguing.

And, of course, these HSBC-protectors in the Obama DOJ are the same officials responsible for maintaining and expanding what NYT Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal has accurately described as "essentially a separate justice system for Muslims," one in which "the principle of due process is twisted and selectively applied, if it is applied at all." What has been created is not so much a "two-tiered justice system" as a multi-tiered one, entirely dependent on the identity of the alleged offender rather than the crimes of which they are accused.

Having different "justice systems" for citizens based on their status, wealth, power and prestige is exactly what the US founders argued most strenuously had to be avoided (even as they themselves maintained exactly such a system). But here we have in undeniable clarity not merely proof of exactly how this system functions, but also the rotted and fundamentally corrupt precept on which it's based: that some actors are simply too important and too powerful to punish criminally. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz warned in 2010, exempting the largest banks from criminal prosecution has meant that lawlessness and "venality" is now "at a higher level" in the US even than that which prevailed in the pervasively corrupt and lawless privatizing era in Russia.

Having the US government act specially to protect the most powerful factions, particularly banks, was a major impetus that sent people into the streets protesting both as part of the early Tea Party movement as well as the Occupy movement. As well as it should: it is truly difficult to imagine corruption and lawlessness more extreme than having the government explicitly place the most powerful factions above the rule of law even as it continues to subject everyone else to disgracefully harsh "justice". If this HSBC gift makes more manifest this radical corruption, then it will at least have achieved some good.

UPDATE

By coincidence, on the very same day that the DOJ announced that HSBC would not be indicted for its multiple money-laundering felonies, the New York Times published a story featuring the harrowing story of an African-American single mother of three who was sentenced to life imprisonment at the age of 27 for a minor drug offense:

"Stephanie George and Judge Roger Vinson had quite different opinions about the lockbox seized by the police from her home in Pensacola. She insisted she had no idea that a former boyfriend had hidden it in her attic. Judge Vinson considered the lockbox, containing a half-kilogram of cocaine, to be evidence of her guilt.

"But the defendant and the judge fully agreed about the fairness of the sentence he imposed in federal court.

"'Even though you have been involved in drugs and drug dealing,' Judge Vinson told Ms. George, 'your role has basically been as a girlfriend and bag holder and money holder but not actively involved in the drug dealing, so certainly in my judgment it does not warrant a life sentence.'

"Yet the judge had no other option on that morning 15 years ago. As her stunned family watched, Ms. George, then 27, who had never been accused of violence, was led from the courtroom to serve a sentence of life without parole.

"'I remember my mom crying out and asking the Lord why,' said Ms. George, now 42, in an interview at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee. 'Sometimes I still can't believe myself it could happen in America.'"

As the NYT notes - and read her whole story to get the full flavor of it - this is commonplace for the poor and for minorities in the US justice system. Contrast that deeply oppressive, merciless punishment system with the full-scale immunity bestowed on HSBC - along with virtually every powerful and rich lawbreaking faction in America over the last decade - and that is the living, breathing two-tiered US justice system. How this glaringly disparate, and explicitly status-based, treatment under the criminal law does not produce serious social unrest is mystifying.

About this series 

A critical, campaigning column on vital issues of civil rights, freedom of information and justice – and their enemies, from the award-winning journalist, former constitutional litigator and author of three New York Times bestsellers. 

Follow @ggreenwald on Twitter or email him at glenn.greenwald@guardiannews.com

OBAMA PROMISED THAT IF HE WAS REELECTED HE WOULD ENTER INTO WHAT HE TERMS "THE GRAND BARGAN," WHICH IS MORE ACCURATELY DESCRIBED BY ECONOMIST BILL BLACK AS "THE GRAND BETRAYAL" -- THAT IS LETTING WALL STREET TAKE FEES FOR MANAGING SOCIAL SECURITY BUT SUFFER NO LOSSES WHEN, DUE TO THEIR PERENNIAL MISMANAGEMENT, THE RECIPIENTS LOSE MOST OF THEIR SAFETY NET IN THE NOT-TOO-FAR-OFF STOCK MARKET CRASH.

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November 11, 2012

Drums Beating to Privatize Social Security Bill Black:

A group of Democrats called "The Third Way" are working with President Obama towards the "grand betrayal" on social security
Watch full multipart The Black Financial and Fraud Report:


Bio

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri -- Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" -- frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

DISTINGUISHED RESEARCH PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, MICHAEL HUDSON, DESCRIBES BEN BERNANKE'S QE3 AS "BASICALLY A PROGRAM FOR THE FEDERAL RESERVE TO GIVE MONEY TO THE BANKS UNTIL BEETHOVEN WRITES HIS 10TH SYMPHONY. THERE IS NO CONNECTION TO EMPLOYMENT WHATSOEVER."

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September 23, 2012

Michael Hudson: QE3 Another Fed Give Away to the Banks

Shoveling money to the banks not meant to create jobs, it’s a way to give banks even more speculative capital and prepare them for another meltdown


Bio

Michael Hudson is a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971).