Tag Archives: Morgan Stanley

Michael Snyder ~ Goldman Sachs Made $400 Million Betting On Food Prices In 2012 While Hundreds Of Millions Starved

Posted on by
3

The Economic Collapse Blog | January 24 2013

Why does it seem like wherever there is human suffering, some giant bank is making money off of it?  According to a new report from the World Development Movement, Goldman Sachs made about 400 million dollars betting on food prices last year.  Overall, 2012 was quite a banner year for Goldman Sachs.  As I reported in a previous article, revenues for Goldman increased by about 30 percent in 2012 and the price of Goldman stock has risen by more than 40 percent over the past 12 months.  It is estimated that the average banker at Goldman brought in a pay and bonus package of approximately $396,500 for 2012.  So without a doubt, Goldman Sachs is swimming in money right now.  But what is the price for all of this “success”?  Many claim that the rampant speculation on food prices by the big banks has dramatically increased the global price of food and has caused the suffering of hundreds of millions of poor families around the planet to become much worse.  At this point, global food prices are more than twice as high as they were back in 2003.  Approximately 2 billion people on the planet spend at least half of their incomes on food, and close to a billion people regularly do not have enough food to eat.  Is it moral for Goldman Sachs and other big banks such as Barclays and Morgan Stanley to make hundreds of millions of dollars betting on the price of food if that is going to drive up global food prices and make it harder for poor families all over the world to feed themselves?

This is another reason why the derivatives bubble is so bad for the world economy.  Goldman Sachs and other big banks are treating the global food supply as if it was some kind of a casino game.  This kind of reckless activity was greatly condemned by the World Development Movement report…

“Goldman Sachs is the global leader in a trade that is driving food prices up while nearly a billion people are hungry. The bank lobbied for the financial deregulation that made it possible to pour billions into the commodity derivative markets, created the necessary financial instruments, and is now raking in the profits. Speculation is fuelling volatility and food price spikes, hurting people who struggle to afford food across the world.”

So shouldn’t there be a law against this kind of a thing?

Continue reading →

Ross Gittens ~ The Four Business Gangs That Run The US

Posted on by
Reply

Govt Slaves | January 10 2013 | Original Source

If you’ve ever suspected politics is increasingly being run in the interests of big business, I have news: Jeffrey Sachs, a highly respected economist from Columbia University, agrees with you – at least in respect of the United States.

In his book, The Price of Civilisation, he says the US economy is caught in a feedback loop. ”Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,” he says.

Sachs says four key sectors of US business exemplify this feedback loop and the takeover of political power in America by the ”corporatocracy”.

First is the well-known military-industrial complex. ”As [President] Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarization  useless wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then,” he says.

Second is the Wall Street-Washington complex, which has steered the financial system towards control by a few politically powerful Wall Street firms, notably Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and a handful of other financial firms.

Continue reading →

Pat Garofalo ~ Wall Street CEO Gets $6.7 Million Payout After Crashing His Company

Posted on by
Reply

Nation of Change | November 12 2012

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit was pushed out the door of his company in October after overseeing a precipitous decline in his bank’s value. Overall, Citigroup lost nearly 90 percent of its stock price during Pandit’s tenure. But that won’t stop Pandit from walking off with $6.7 million for his last year on the job:

Citigroup said Friday that the former CEO, who resigned last month in a management shakeup, will receive an “incentive award” of $6.7 million for his work at the bank this year.Former president and chief operating officer John Havens, who stepped down along with Pandit, is getting $6.8 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The two men will also continue collecting deferred cash and stock compensation from last year, awards valued at $8.8 million for Pandit and $8.7 million for Havens.

Continue reading →

QE4? The Big Wall Street Banks Are Already Complaining That QE3 Is Not Enough

Posted on by
Reply

The Economic Collapse | September 24 2012

QE3 has barely even started and some folks on Wall Street are already clamoring for QE4.  In fact, as you will read below, one equity strategist at Morgan Stanley says that he would not be “surprised” if the Federal Reserve announced another new round of money printing by the end of the year.  But this is what tends to happen when a financial system starts becoming addicted to easy money.  There is always a deep hunger for another “hit” of “currency meth”.  Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was probably hoping that QE3 would satisfy the wolves on Wall Street for a while.  His promise to recklessly print 40 billion dollars a month and use it to buy mortgage-backed securities is being called “QEInfinity” by detractors.  During QE3, nearly half a trillion dollars a year will be added to the financial system until the Fed decides that it is time to stop.

This is so crazy that even former Federal Reserve officials are speaking out against it.  For example, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker says that QE3 is the “most extreme easing of monetary policy” that he could ever remember.  But the big Wall Street banks are never going to be satisfied.  If QE4 is announced, they will start calling for QE5.  As I noted in a previous article, quantitative easing tends to pump up the prices of financial assets such as stocks and commodities, and that is very good for Wall Street bankers.  So of course they want more quantitative easing.  They always want bigger profits and bigger bonus checks at the end of the year.

But at this point the Federal Reserve has already “jumped the shark”.  If you don’t know what “jumping the shark” means, you can find a definition on Wikipedia right here.  Whatever shreds of credibility the Fed had left are being washed away by a flood of newly printed money.

Those running the Fed have essentially used up all of their bullets and the next great financial crisis has not even fully erupted yet.

So what is the Fed going to do if the stock market crashes and the credit market freezes up like we saw back in 2008?

How much more extreme can the Fed go?

One can just picture “Helicopter Ben” strapping on a pair of water skis and making the following promise….

“We are going to print so much money that we’ll make Zimbabwe and the Weimar Republic look like wimps!”

Sadly, the truth is that money printing is not a “quick fix” and it never has been.  Just look at Japan.  The Bank of Japan is on round 8 of their quantitative easing strategy, and yet things in Japan continue to get even worse.

But that is not going to stop the folks on Wall Street from calling for even more quantitative easing.

For example, the top U.S. equity strategist for Morgan Stanley, Adam Parker, made headlines all over the world this week by writing the following….

“QE3 will likely be insufficient to significantly boost equity markets and we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Fed dramatically augment this program (i.e., QE4) before year-end, particularly if economic and corporate news continue to deteriorate as they have over the past few weeks.”

Did you get what he is saying there?

Continue reading →

Chris Hedges ~ How Do You Take Your Poison?

Posted on by
2

TruthDig | September 25 2012

We will all swallow our cup of corporate poison. We can take it from nurse Romney, who will tell us not to whine and play the victim, or we can take it from nurse Obama, who will assure us that this hurts him even more than it hurts us, but one way or another the corporate hemlock will be shoved down our throats. The choice before us is how it will be administered. Corporate power, no matter who is running the ward after January 2013, is poised to carry out U.S. history’s most savage assault against the poor and the working class, not to mention the Earth’s ecosystem. And no one in power, no matter what the bedside manner, has any intention or ability to stop it.

If you insist on participating in the cash-drenched charade of a two-party democratic election at least be clear about what you are doing. You are, by playing your assigned role as the Democratic or Republican voter in this political theater, giving legitimacy to a corporate agenda that means your own impoverishment and disempowerment. All the things that stand between us and utter destitution—Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants, Head Start, Social Security, public education, federal grants-in-aid to America’s states and cities, the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and home-delivered meals for seniors—are about to be shredded by the corporate state. Our corporate oligarchs are harvesting the nation, grabbing as much as they can, as fast as they can, in the inevitable descent.

We will be assaulted this January when automatic spending reductions, referred to as “the fiscal cliff,” begin to dismantle and defund some of our most important government programs. Mitt Romney will not stop it. Barack Obama will not stop it.

Continue reading →

Susanne Posel ~ The Fed Now Owns Your Foreclosed Property Under QE3 Purchases Of Toxic Assets

Posted on by
2

theintelhub.com | September 18 2012

On ABC’s “This Week”, George Will, columnist for the propaganda news outlet The Washington Post, spoke out against Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke and his decision to instill QE3 which is essentially, “the government printing money.”

Will pointed out that this latest move is covert “trickle-down economics” where citizens are forced to invest in equities in order to continue to prop up the economy to perpetuate the false sense of reality that the American public lives under.

Last week, Bernanke announced that the Fed would purchase $40 billion in toxic assets, called mortgage-backed securities, per month. While this scheme will devastate the US dollar’s value by the very act of printing more money, there is a secret bailout of certain financial institutions occurring under the radar.

QE3 serves as a “regressive redistribution program” for the banksters who are enjoying a surge in their wealth under current economic conditions.

The Federal Housing Finance Administration (FHFA) recently announced that “strategic defaulters”, i.e. those homeowners who have abandoned their mortgage because they could not continue to make the monthly payments, will be jailed for this “crime”.

The FHFA oversees Freddie and Fannie Mac, the mortgage corporation owned by the US government.

The FHFA are focusing their efforts on criminally persecuting all American citizens “who abuses the FHFA programs” by walking away from their foreclosure.

Statistically speaking, according to the FDIC:

• 1 out of 200 homes will be foreclosed upon
• 250,000 new households enter foreclosure every 3 months
• 6 out of 10 homeowners are delinquent on their mortgage

Morgan Stanley is the financial institution that took in the mortgage-backed securities and offered their derivatives across the global market.

Continue reading →

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

Posted on by
7

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.

Continue reading →

Susanne Posel ~ Morgan Stanley Is Insolvent – Only A Matter Of Time Before Total Financial Collapse

Posted on by
3

Occupy Corporatism | August 30 2012 | Thanks, A.L.

The fall of the House of Morgan has begun as stock prices on the global market at Morgan Stanley (MS) begin to fall on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

According to Rick Wiles : “I’m hearing rumors that another major financial house is going to implode. In fact, the name I’ve been given is Morgan Stanley . . . It’s going to be put on the sacrificial alter by the financial elite.”

MS, technically speaking, is classified as insolvent based on mark-to-market valuation. By selling off non-core assets, MS has been able to “reduce its European exposure” through the manipulation of hedge funds and allocation of funds to failing financial corporations. Some mainstream media outlets tout that the Federal Reserve Bank will come in and assist MS in their insolvency and that MS “just isn’t going out of business anytime soon.”

However, on the bond market, MS is being treated like “a junk-rated company.” Moody’s the rating agency that sells their ratings to whomever will pay for a triple A score, have announced they will downgradge MS’ ratings which would put all US banks at risk.

Otis Caset, director of credit research at Markit confirms: “What has driven that, obviously, is Europe. The perception is — correctly or incorrectly — that Morgan Stanley is one of the U.S. banks most exposed to Europe’s problems.”

In 2008, with the first pre-meditated financial explosion , the cause for the bailout of the banks was a large sum of cash needed quickly to repay China who had purchased large quantities of mortgage-backed securities that went belly-up when the global scam was realized. When China realized that they had been duped into buying worthless securitized loans which would never be repaid, they demanded the actual property instead. The Chinese were prepared to send their “people” to American shores to seize property as allocated to them through the securitized loan contracts.

Continue reading →

Matt Taibbi ~ AG Eric Holder Has No Balls

Posted on by
6

Rolling Stone | RS_News | August 15 2012

OPINION ~ I’ve been on deadline in the past week or so, so I haven’t had a chance to weigh in on Eric Holder’s predictable decision to not pursue criminal charges against Goldman Sachs for any of the activities in the report prepared by Senators Carl Levin and Tom Coburn two years ago.

Last year I spent a lot of time and energy jabbering and gesticulating in public about what seemed to me the most obviously prosecutable offenses detailed in the report - the seemingly blatant perjury before congress of Lloyd Blankfein and other Goldman executives, and the almost comically long list of frauds committed by the company in its desperate effort to unload its crappy “cats and dogs” mortgage-backed inventory.

In the notorious Hudson transaction, for instance, Goldman claimed, in writing, that it was fully “aligned” with the interests of its client, Morgan Stanley, because it owned a $6 million slice of the deal. What Goldman left out is that it had a $2 billion short position against the same deal.

If that isn’t fraud, Mr. Holder, just what exactly is fraud?

Still, it wasn’t surprising that Holder didn’t pursue criminal charges against Goldman. And that’s not just because Holder has repeatedly proven himself to be a spineless bureaucrat and obsequious political creature masquerading as a cop, and not just because rumors continue to circulate that the Obama administration – supposedly in the interests of staving off market panic – made a conscious decision sometime in early 2009 to give all of Wall Street a pass on pre-crisis offenses.

No, the real reason this wasn’t surprising is that Holder’s decision followed a general pattern that has been coming into focus for years in American law enforcement. Our prosecutors and regulators have basically admitted now that they only go after the most obvious and easily prosecutable cases.

Continue reading →

Michael C. Ruppert ~ 9/11 Attacks: Criminal Foreknowledge And Insider Trading Lead Directly To The CIA’s Highest Ranks

Posted on by
3

Global Research | August 13 2012

As September approaches, we are reminded that the anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11 will soon be upon us once again. 11 years later, are we any closer to the truth about what really happened on that fateful day?

For the next month until September 11, 2012, we will be posting on a daily basis important articles from our early archives pertaining to the tragic events of 9/11. The following text by Michael C. Ruppert published in October 2001 brings to the forefront the issue of foreknowledge and insider trading pertaining to airline listings on the Chicago Board Options Exchange including United Airlines and American Airlines. ~Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research Editor

CIA Executive Director “Buzzy” Krongard managed Firm that handled “Put” Options on UAL

FTW Publications, 9 October 2001, Centre for Research on Globalisation, globalresearch.ca, 20 October 2001

Although uniformly ignored by the mainstream U.S. media, there is abundant and clear evidence that a number of transactions in financial markets indicated specific (criminal) foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That evidence also demonstrates that, in the case of at least one of these trades — which has left a $2.5 million prize unclaimed — the firm used to place the “put options” on United Airlines stock was, until 1998, managed by the man who is now in the number three Executive Director position at the Central Intelligence Agency. Until 1997 A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard had been Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown. A.B. Brown was acquired by Banker’s Trust in 1997. Krongard then became, as part of the merger, Vice Chairman of Banker’s Trust-AB Brown, one of 20 major U.S. banks named by Senator Carl Levin this year as being connected to money laundering. Krongard’s last position at Banker’s Trust (BT) was to oversee “private client relations.” In this capacity he had direct hands-on relations with some of the wealthiest people in the world in a kind of specialized banking operation that has been identified by the U.S. Senate and other investigators as being closely connected to the laundering of drug money.

Krongard joined the CIA in 1998 as counsel to CIA Director George Tenet. He was promoted to CIA Executive Director by President Bush in March of this year. BT was acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1999. The combined firm is the single largest bank in Europe. And, as we shall see, Deutsche Bank played several key roles in events connected to the September 11 attacks.

The Scope of Known Insider Trading

Before looking further into these relationships it is necessary to look at the insider trading information that is being ignored by Reuters, The New York Times and other mass media. It is well documented that the CIA has long monitored such trades – in real time – as potential warnings of terrorist attacks and other economic moves contrary to U.S. interests. Previous stories in FTW have specifically highlighted the use of Promis software to monitor such trades.

Continue reading →

Joel Kotkin ~ The Screwed Election: Wall Street Can’t Lose, And America Can’t Win

Posted on by
1

NewGeography | August 10 2012

About two in three Americans do not think what’s good for Wall Street is good for America, according to the 2012 Harris poll, but do think people who work there are less “honest and moral than other people,” and don’t “deserve to make the kind of money they earn.” Confidence in banks is at a record low, according to Gallup, as they’ve suffered the steepest fall in esteem of any American institution over the past decade. And people have put their money where their mouth is, with $171 billion leaving the stock market last year alone, and 80 percent of Wall Street communications executives conceded that public perception of their firms was not good.

Americans are angry at the big-time bankers and brokers, and yet, far from a populist attack on crony capitalism, Wall Street is sitting pretty, looking ahead to a presidential election that it can’t possibly lose. They have bankrolled a nifty choice between President Obama, the largest beneficiary of financial-industry backing in history and Mitt Romney, one of their very own.

One is to the manner born, the other a crafty servant; neither will take on the power.

Think of this: despite taking office in the midst of a massive financial meltdown, Obama’s administration has not prosecuted a single heavy-hitter among those responsible for the financial crisis. To the contrary, he’s staffed his team with big bankers and their allies. Under the Bush-Obama bailouts the big financial institutions have feasted like pigs at the trough, with the six largest banks borrowing almost a half trillion dollars from uncle Ben Bernanke’s printing press. In 2013 the top four banks controlled more than 40 percent of the credit markets in the top 10 states—up by 10 percentage points from 2009 and roughly twice their share in 2000. Meantime, small banks, usually the ones serving Main Street businesses, have taken the hit along with the rest of us with more than 300 folding since the passage of Dodd-Frank, the industry-approved bill to “reform” the industry.

Yet past the occasional election-year bout of symbolic class warfare, the oligarchs have little to fear from an Obama victory.

Continue reading →

Greg Hunter ~ Weekly News Wrap Up July 20 2012 [Video]

Posted on by
Reply

USA Watchdog | July 20 2012

Syria is on fire.  Top aides of President Assad were killed in a bombing attack this week by rebels.  The government responded by shelling neighborhoods around Damascus.  Syria is threatening to take its chemical weapons out of storage.  Israel is worried these weapons could fall into the hands of Hezbollah and is threatening a preemptive attack.  Increased sanctions against Syria were vetoed in the U.N. by China and Russia.  Russia has called for an immediate cease fire on all sides with no luck.  This civil war is 16 months old and has claimed the lives of more than 14,000 Syrians.  Remember, this was just this week.

Meanwhile, in Bulgaria, a suicide bomber killed seven people on a tour bus packed with Israelis.  Many others were badly injured.  Benjamin Netanyahu claims Iranian-backed Hezbollah did the crime and promises a response.  He also said, “The most dangerous country in the world cannot have the most dangerous weapons on earth.”  That should speak volumes on where this is heading, and the Middle East is experiencing a very big military build-up on all sides.

Closer to home, not everyone was on the winning end of the fraudulent rigging of Libor interest rates.  It is a key rate used in setting interest rates on as much as $800 trillion in transactions globally.  Things such as credit cards, mortgages and derivatives are affected.  Now, some big Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are contemplating lawsuits.  Wall Street banker Jim Rickards says an avalanche of litigation could bring down the banking system.  I will feature Rickards in a One-on-One interview Monday.

Continue reading →

Greg Hunter ~ Weekly News Wrap Up June 22 2012

Posted on by
Reply

USA Watchdog | June 22 2012

Moody’s dropped a bomb on global banks this week. It handed out credit rating cuts to 15 of the biggest banks in the western world. JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citi were all cut two notches and Credit Suisse three notches. Since the 2008 financial crisis, it’s really been all about propping up the banks and nothing else. That’s why there has been growing talk of a world-wide money printing drop for weeks now, and one is coming soon.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti says there is “only a week to save the Eurozone.” Remember, Mr. Monti is an un-elected technocrat banker, and this is all about saving the banks and not the people. Congress wants documents in the failed “Fast and Furious” gun sting operation where a border patrol agent was killed with guns given to a Mexican drug cartel by undercover federal agents. The White House is invoking “Executive privilege” in order to not comply with Congress. This is turning ugly and may set off a Constitutional battle. Congress and the Executive Branch are supposed to be equal. There was another meeting this week concerning Iran’s nuclear program. The U.S., Russia, China, Germany, UK, France and, of course, Iran were all present. The only thing agreed upon was they would meet again. How long will Israel wait is the only question to me. Greg Hunter gives his analysis of these stories and more in the Weekly News wrap-Up.

Enhanced by Zemanta