Tag Archives: Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Matt Taibbi ~ Hank Greenberg Should Be Shot Into Space For Suing The Government Over The AIG Bailout

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Common Dreams | January 13 2013

Hank Greenberg

A lot of people are wondering what to think about the news that the board of AIG is considering joining the lawsuit filed by former AIG head Maurice “Hank” Greenberg against the Fed and the U.S. government – a suit that one news outlet describes as charging the state with handing out an “insufficiently generous bailout.”
Hank Greenberg, former CEO of AIG. (ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images)

The editorial in today’s Daily News captures the public feeling over this confusing news story quite well, I think:

If chutzpah were a crime, Hank Greenberg, American International Group’s former chief, would be going away for a long, long time.

Long since driven out of AIG, Greenberg is waging a lawsuit claiming the U.S. hurt the firm’s shareholders — including him — when the government rescued the insurance giant with the most humongous bailout of all time.

If you just read the headlines, the story that AIG is considering suing the government for bailing it out makes no sense at all. What could even be the basis for such a suit? One reader asked the question this way: “If a cop bursts into a motel room and stops you just as you’re about to blow your head off with a shotgun, can you sue him? If the answer is yes, should I try it?”

Former bailout inspector Neil Barofsky put it this way, in an interview with Bloomberg: “The idea that AIG would have been better off by going bankrupt, for the shareholders is a very, very hard thing to sell, I think.”

But here’s the funny thing about the lawsuit filed against the government: It isn’t all wrong. In fact, parts of it are quite on the mark.

The only problem is, the suit is being filed by maybe the biggest douchebag of all time, Hank Greenberg (and his company, Starr International), a man who has not only been proven to be corrupt and a fraud, but who perhaps more than anyone else was responsible for the galactic balance-sheet goat-fuck that caused AIG’s implosion in the first place. If there is such a person as an innocent AIG shareholder who was harmed by the government’s conduct, it sure as hell isn’t Hank Greenberg.

Like all narcissists, Greenberg is physically incapable of admitting any mistake he’s ever made, and he’s made plenty of them.

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Susanne Posel ~ Audit Of NY Fed Reveals Technocrat’s Creation And Cover-Up Of Global Financial Crash

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IntelHub | September 5 2012

Senator Ron Paul has introduced the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2012 ( HR459) much to the upset of Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank.

In August, the House of Representatives voted 327 – 98 in favor, which exceeded the necessary 2/3rd majority.

Paul, who is pushing for “transparency” in America’s relationship with the Fed, said that Americans are “sick and tired of what happened in the bailout and where the wealthy got bailed out and the poor lost their jobs and they lost their homes.”

The Audit legislation will direct the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is an independent congressional agency, to oversee a full review of the Fed’s monetary policy while conducting an audit of them.

Their decisions will be turned over to the Federal Open Market Committee.

In July, the first audit of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) was published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

According to Senator Bernie Sanders :

“As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world. This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”

Between 2007 – 2010, the Federal Reserve banks provided “assistance” of more than a trillion dollars in “emergency loans” to stabilize the financial system.

A source in the Deutsche Bank explained that in 2008 our financial and monetary system completely collapsed and since that time the banking cartels have been “propping up the system” to make it appear as if everything was fine.

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Naomi Wolf ~ This Global Financial Fraud And Its Gatekeepers

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UK Guardian | RS_News | July 15 2012

The media’s ‘bad apple’ thesis no longer works. We’re seeing systemic corruption in banking – and systemic collusion.

OPINION ~ Last fall, I argued that the violent reaction to Occupy and other protests around the world had to do with the 1%ers’ fear of the rank and file exposing massive fraud if they ever managed get their hands on the books. At that time, I had no evidence of this motivation beyond the fact that financial system reform and increased transparency were at the top of many protesters’ list of demands.

But this week presents a sick-making trove of new data that abundantly fills in this hypothesis and confirms this picture. The notion that the entire global financial system is riddled with systemic fraud – and that key players in the gatekeeper roles, both in finance and in government, including regulatory bodies, know it and choose to quietly sustain this reality – is one that would have only recently seemed like the frenzied hypothesis of tinhat-wearers, but this week’s headlines make such a conclusion, sadly, inevitable.

The New York Times business section on 12 July shows multiple exposes of systemic fraud throughout banks: banks colluding with other banks in manipulation of interest rates, regulators aware of systemic fraud, and key government officials (at least one banker who became the most key government official) aware of it and colluding as well. Fraud in banks has been understood conventionally and, I would say, messaged as a glitch. As in London Mayor Boris Johnson’s full-throated defense of Barclay’s leadership last week, bank fraud is portrayed as a case, when it surfaces, of a few “bad apples” gone astray.

In the New York Times business section, we read that the HSBC banking group is being fined up to $1bn, for not preventing money-laundering (a highly profitable activity not to prevent) between 2004 and 2010 – a six years’ long “oops”. In another article that day, Republican Senator Charles Grassley says of the financial group Peregrine capital: “This is a company that is on top of things.” The article goes onto explain that at Peregrine Financial, “regulators discovered about $215m in customer money was missing.” Its founder now faces criminal charges. Later, the article mentions that this revelation comes a few months after MF Global “lost” more than $1bn in clients’ money.

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Bill Moyers ~ JPMorgan’s Losses a Canary in a Coal Mine?

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BillMoyers.com | RS_News | May 17 2012

That sound of shattered glass you’ve been hearing is the iconic portrait of Jamie Dimon splintering as it hits the floor of JPMorgan Chase. As the Good Book says, “Pride goeth before a fall,” and the sleek silver-haired, too-smart-for-his-own-good CEO of America’s largest bank has been turning every television show within reach into a confessional booth. Barack Obama’s favorite banker faces losses of $2 billion and possibly more – all because of the complex, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t trading in exotic financial instruments that he has so ardently lobbied Congress not to regulate.

Once again, doing God’s work – that is, betting huge sums of money with depositor funds knowing that you are too big to fail and can count on taxpayers riding to your rescue if your avarice threatens to take the country down – has lost some of its luster. The jewels in Dimon’s crown sparkle with a little less grandiosity than a few days ago, when he ridiculed Paul Volcker’s ideas for keeping Wall Street honest as “infantile.”

To find out more about what this all means, I turned to Simon Johnson, once chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He and his colleague James Kwak founded the now-indispensable website baselinescenario.com. They co-authored the bestselling book 13 Bankers and the most recent book, White House Burning, an account every citizen should read to understand how the national deficit affects our future.

Bill Moyers: If Chase began to collapse because of risky betting, would the government be forced to step in again?

Simon Johnson: Absolutely, Bill. JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail. Hopefully in the future we can move away from this system, but right now it is too big. It’s about a $2.5 trillion dollar bank in terms of total assets. That’s roughly 20 percent of the U.S. economy, comparing their assets to our GDP. That’s huge. If that bank were to collapse – I’m not saying it will – but if it were to collapse, it would be a shock to the economy bigger than that of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and as a result, they would be protected by the Federal Reserve. They are exactly what’s known as too big to fail.

Moyers: I was just looking at an interview I did with you in February of 2009, soon after the collapse of 2008 and you said, and I’m quoting, “The signs that I see, the body language, the words, the op-eds, the testimony, the way these bankers are treated by certain congressional committees, it makes me feel very worried. I have a feeling in my stomach that is what I had in other countries, much poorer countries, countries that were headed into really difficult economic situations. When there’s a small group of people who got you into a disaster and who are still powerful, you know you need to come in and break that power and you can’t. You’re stuck.” How do you feel about that insight now?

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Katrina vanden Heuvel ~ It’s Time to Break Up the Big Banks

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Common Dreams | May 15 2012

Consider $2 billion lost on a bad bet, plus billions more as investors dumped the stock, a providential warning. When Jamie Dimon, the imperious head of JPMorgan Chase, revealed that the bank had lost so muchon a derivatives trade gone bad, it was clear warning that, four years after blowing up the economy, the big banks are still playing with bombs.

This was no rogue trader. Dimon admitted to “many errors, sloppiness, bad judgment” in “poorly executed” derivative trades. Heads may role, but these were authorized trades by the bank’s leading — and notorious — trader, Bruno Iksil, the “London whale.”

Dimon, of course, has been Wall Street’s most vociferous critic of banking reforms, deploying an army of lawyers and lobbyists — at the cost of an estimated $7.4 million in 2010 — to try to delay, dilute and disembowel the Dodd-Frank legislation. The unrelenting legal and lobbying campaign has clearly intimidated the regulators, forcing delays beyond the dates mandated by the statute. Most recently, the bank lobby seemed on the verge of defenestrating the Volcker rule that would limit commercial banks from gambling with depositors’ money. That rule, itself a pale shadow of the Glass-Steagall Act repealed during the Clinton years, might have constrained the kind of opaque, risky bets that led to the losses.

Dimon, who was paid $23 million in 2011 (up 11 percent from the year before) has a personal stake in gutting reform. But it is inexcusable for Mitt Romney and Republicans to make repeal of all the Dodd-Frank reforms part of their campaign mantra. Banking is risky, by definition. Markets don’t self-correct. Unless banks are strictly regulated, panics and excesses are inevitable and big banks make them dangerous.

Richard Fisher, the conservative president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, has been raising alarms about the big banks for years. The top five banks now control 52 percent of the financial industry’s assets; they had 17 percent in 1970. The six largest banks control assets equal to 62 percent of the nation’s gross national product. They may be not only too big to fail, but also too big to save.

The biggest of them, Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, has $2.1 trillion in assets and more than 239,000 employees.

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Lord James of Blackheath: Mystery 15 Trillion Dollars Transferred to HSBC For Royal Bank of Scotland Connected to JP Morgan and Federal Reserve

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Intel Hub | February 19 2012

Lord Blackheath

Lord James of Blackheath: My Lords, I hope the minute that that has taken has not come off my time. I do not wish noble Lords to get too encouraged when I start with my conclusions but I will not sit down when I have made them. I will then give the evidence to support them and, I hope, present the reasons why I want support for an official inquiry into the mischief I shall unfold this afternoon. I have been engaged in pursuit of this issue for nearly two years and I am no further forward in getting to the truth.

There are three possible conclusions which may come from it. First, there may have been a massive piece of money-laundering committed by a major Government who should know better. Effectively, it undermined the integrity of a British bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, in doing so. The second possibility is that a major American department has an agency which has gone rogue on it because it has been wound up and has created a structure out of which it is seeking to get at least €50 billion as a pay-off. The third possibility is that this is an extraordinarily elaborate fraud, which has not been carried out, but which has been prepared to provide a threat to one Government or more if they do not make a pay-off. These three possibilities need an urgent review.

In April and May 2009, the situation started with the alleged transfer of $5 trillion to HSBC in the United Kingdom. Seven days later, another $5 trillion came to HSBC and three weeks later another $5 trillion. A total of $15 trillion is alleged to have been passed into the hands of HSBC for onward transit to the Royal Bank of Scotland. We need to look to where this came from and the history of this money. I have been trying to sort out the sequence by which this money has been created and where it has come from for a long time.

It starts off apparently as the property of Yohannes Riyadi, who has some claims to be considered the richest man in the world. He would be if all the money that was owed to him was paid but I have seen some accounts of his showing that he owns $36 trillion in a bank. It is a ridiculous sum of money. However, $36 trillion would be consistent with the dynasty from which he comes and the fact that it had been effectively the emperors of Indo-China in times gone by. A lot of that money has been taken away from him, with his consent, by the American Treasury over the years for the specific purpose of helping to support the dollar.

View video 1 [~11 minutes] | View video 2 [~ minutes]

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Greg Hunter ~ Dollar and America on the Road to Ruin

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USA Watchdog | February 8 2012

In the last week or so, I’ve noticed an unusual amount of really well written and researched articles warning of impending doom and financial horror.  These articles are not written by a bunch of angry uneducated bloggers but by money managers, investors and financial writers.  All are people who got it right leading up to the meltdown of 2008, and my bet is they are right again.  The mainstream media (MSM) told you after the 2008 crash, “Nobody saw that coming,” which is a bold faced lie that will not work again.

Jim Quinn of TheBurningPlatform.com wrote a tour de force of troubling realities you will never hear on the MSM.  Quinn lays out the case for coming ruin with stats, charts and razor sharp logic in a post called “Illusion of Recovery–Feelings vs. Facts.”  In his summation, Quinn says, “There is no avoiding the final collapse of a boom created solely by credit expansion. Those in power will never voluntarily relinquish their grand game of pillaging the wealth of the nation, so economic collapse will be the ultimate result. They will continue to use propaganda, printing presses, and half-truths to further their agenda. But those who examine the facts will come to a logical conclusion that we are being sold a great lie.” 

Other headlines read “Many of Us Will Never See Happy Days Are Here Again.”  The reports site a multitude of statistics showing America in ruin.  Did you know “49 percent of all Americans live in a home that gets direct monetary benefits from the federal government”?  How about this little post titled “Why The Notions Of Systemic Failure Or Going To Zero Are On Par With Bigfoot & Unicorns For Most Investors.”  Money manager Graham Summers cites two ugly monstrous facts, “1) US commercial banks currently sit atop $248 TRILLION in derivatives  2) The US Federal Reserve is now buying 91% of all long-term new US debt issuance (at the same time China and Russia are dumping US bonds).”  

Other titles include:  “A Financial Crisis in 2012 is Inevitable! Here’s Why,”  “Government Is Dead Man Walking-The Fiscal Situation Is Much Worse Than Most People Realize,” and “The Financial Crisis Of 2008 Was Just A Warm Up Act For The Economic Horror Show That Is Coming.”   All these were written in the last week or so, and all feature sound analysis.  (There were several more I left out for the sake of brevity.)  Please keep in mind, these stories only talk about the facts and fundamentals of the economy.  War in the Middle East is not mentioned in any article.  When you consider hostilities featuring Syria, Iran, Israel, China, Russia and the United States, the mind boggles.  War would bring collapse, chaos, and financial calamity in very short order.  Oh, and by all means, let’s throw the European debt crisis into the mix for good measure.

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Pentagon Unable to Account for Missing Iraqi Millions

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Eamon Javers (CNBC News) | Reader Supported News | January 31 2012

Pallets stacked with shrink-wrapped US $100 bills arriving in Iraq in May of 2004. (photo: Scott Applewhite/AP)

The Pentagon doesn’t know what happened to more than $100 million in cash held at Saddam Hussein’s palace in Baghdad during the Iraq war, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

What’s more, the Pentagon can’t find documents to explain what it spent as much as $1.7 billion on from funds held on behalf of the Iraqi government by the New York Federal Reserve, the report says.

The missing records raise new questions about how the US government handled billions of dollars in Iraqi funds during the war.

The new report, the latest in a multi-year investigation by the inspector general into missing money in Iraq, paints a picture of Pentagon officials digging through boxes of hard copy records looking for missing paper copies of Excel spreadsheets, monthly reports and other paper documents that should have been kept detailing what the money was spent on and why those expenditures were necessary. Apparently, there are no electronic records to back up the spending.

The Inspector General’s report concludes that the problem is simply one of “records management.” But the report explains the missing records make it impossible to conduct a complete accounting of what happened to the funds.

The missing money came from the Development Fund for Iraq, a cache of billions of dollars in frozen Saddam Hussein regime assets that was held at the New York Federal Reserve on behalf of the Iraqi people.

After the Coalition Provisional Authority turned over sovereignty to the new government of Iraq in 2004 after the US invasion, the government of Iraq turned over about $3 billion of the money to the Pentagon to help pay for contracts the CPA had authorized before it ceased operations. Of that money, most was held in an account worth about $2.8 billion at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the remainder, $217.7 million, was held in cash in Saddam’s palace.

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White Hats Report ~ The Bush Cabal – Nuking The Outhouse! (Thanks, VK)

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The White Hats Report | January 18 2012

The White Hats and Ed Falcone have been in London all this week meeting daily with key parties interfacing with the House of Lords and UK Agencies. Multiple agendas are in play at the highest levels. The White Hats are using the U.K. arena to commence their work due to the total control that the Dark Cabal … Bushes, Clintons, Obamas and all of their Minions … has had in the United States, including the American Main Stream Media. It is difficult to believe the Bushes have gone undetected for 50 years with a hidden agenda that is so deep they have compromised every American virtue.

Look at some of the items we are working with:

• Nominee accounts used by parties fronting for the CIA and Bush Sr. /Josef Ackermann/ Michael Herzog and Paul Guenette, are being discussed and tracked. Using the integrity of the London Capital Markets to fund unauthorized Agency and Military activities, as well as to self-enrich key Political and Government employees, is also under review and being evidenced to appropriate authorities. This week and next, as exposure mounts, more will be presented and played out.

  • A vast multi-Trillion dollar fraud involving a Central Intelligence Agency owned Foundation known to us all is also under formal investigation by the British authorities with the Attorney General being kept appraised. This Foundation is bypassing Congress, but benefiting the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Homeland Security and private parties. A well-known Asian Fraudster, Wilfredo Saurin, has been allowed to gain a complicit, FRB NY supported role, protecting him from arrest as an Agent of these entities. Working in conjunction with FRB NY, Saurin and corrupt Bankers have been instrumental in assisting cross wired bogus asset backed SWIFTS, which have been used to generate MTN’s and to participate in substantial inter-bank trading. A complex arena of fraud is now being unraveled. The records are lodged with investigating authorities. The White Hats have copies of the governing documents and the chain of SWIFT sequences and the accounts used.
  • As part of this very deep investigation, Edward Falcone’s case has also been raised as a further example of the criminal complicity of banks, and the extent to which the Shadow Government operates with impunity. To start, the Banks involved and the Bank auditing firms will be officially put on notice to respond to their obvious negligence in enforcing international banking regulations and money laundering laws.

The money stolen from and owed to Ed Falcone would have been used to fund United States projects including Florida, the Gulf Coast region and Katrina victims, as well as city regeneration, jobs, taxes, recovery, and dignity for Americans. Instead, Falcone’s money ended up with the Bush Cabal, U.S. Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney, Vice President Joe Biden, Michael Herzog, Paul Guenette, Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, his brother Don Nevin, and the CIA agents used to launder it across multiple banks for Bush Sr. and Biden.

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NY Fed’s $40 Billion Iraqi Money Trail

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By Eamon Javers | CNBC
October 25 2011

Why am I not surprised? ~ Gillian

It has been called the largest airborne transfer of currency in the history of the world. But finding out what happened to all the money involved has become one of the biggest financial mysteries of all time.

Beginning in the very earliest days of the war in Iraq, the New York Federal Reserve shipped billions of dollars in physical cash to Baghdad to pay for the reopening of the government and restoration of basic services.

The money was packed onto pallets inside a heavily guarded New York Federal Reserve compound in East Rutherford, New Jersey, trucked to Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington, and flown by military aircraft to Baghdad International Airport.

By one account, the New York Fed shipped about $40 billion in cash between 2003 and 2008. In just the first two years, the shipments included more than 281 million individual bills weighing a total of 363 tons. But soon after the money arrived in the chaos of war-torn Baghdad, the paper trail documenting who controlled it all began to go cold.

Since then, investigators have spent years trying to trace what happened to the enormous amount of money shipped in the frantic days of the occupation of Iraq. Although there have been hundreds of pages of reports, Congressional hearings, and inquiries from Washington to Baghdad, no one in Congress, a special inspector general’s office, the Department of Defense or the Iraqi government itself can say with certainty what exactly happened to all of that money.

Much of it may have been spent on the things it was intended for—but billions of dollars may have simply been stolen. The thefts likely ranged from complicated contracting schemes to brazen appropriations of billions in cash still in their New York Fed plastic wrappers.

To find out what happened, a special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction has focused on the chain of custody—who was responsible for the money, minute by minute, as it made its way to Baghdad.

And although the money was handled by a variety of trained American officials and military officers in the first legs of its trip halfway around the world, CNBC has learned that something unusual happened on the Baghdad side of the transaction: Each of the money flights to Baghdad was met at the airport in Iraq by the same man.

The previously unknown Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) official was tasked with picking up the bales of billions as they were unloaded from C-17s and arranging for them to get to the Central Bank of Iraq in downtown Baghdad. It was a perilous journey of about seven miles over a road the U.S. military called “Route Irish” through territory often controlled by insurgents. Travelers faced the threat of rocket propelled grenades, mortars, car bombs and IEDs.

Transit was so dangerous that returning American GI’s often posted YouTube videos of their trips on Route Irish, just for the bragging rights of having been there.

The CPA official was a stocky, middle-aged naturalized American citizen of Lebanese descent who was born in Saudi Arabia. His first name is Basel. At his request, CNBC has agreed to withhold his last name from this story. Basel ferried cash in Baghdad for the CPA and the American embassy from 2003 until 2008—all told handling, he said, about $40 billion in cash.

His job made him the very last American to see that money before it disappeared into the vaults at the Central Bank of Iraq. And it may have made him the only person in the history of the world to oversee the movement of $40 billion in a combat zone.

It doesn’t seem that anyone in the US government planned ahead of time to put so much responsibility—and temptation—into the hands of just one man. Former Republican Connecticut Congressman Christopher Shays co-chaired the Commission on Wartime Contracting, digging into waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq. He has traveled to Iraq scores of times to oversee US efforts there. Shays did a double take when CNBC told him how much money Basel said he handled in Iraq.

“Wait, one person?” Shays asked. “One person received $40 billion?”

Asked what he thinks about that, Shays said, “It just blows you away.”

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