Tag Archives: UBS

Elaine Magliaro ~ Just Fine: Don’t Bank On The Justice Department To Prosecute Big Banks

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Jonathan Turley’s blog February 25 2013

DeptofJustice

Last December, I wrote a post titled You Call This Justice? DOJ Criticized for Its Settlement with “Too Big to Jail” Bank HSBC. It appears that the US Justice Department isn’t too keen on bringing criminal charges against ANY wealthy bankers—not just those who work for HSBC, a huge international bank that has knowingly laundered money for drug cartels and murderers. The unethical shenanigans of the banksters of Wall Street that led to the near collapse of the US economy and to a recession don’t seem to merit jail time for the perpetrators—just a slap on the wrist and a fine.  No individual fines are paid though. The mega banks pay the fines and the banksters continue to go about their business…and continue to earn hefty salaries and bonuses.

At “Wall Street Reform: Oversight of Financial Stability and Consumer and Investor Protections,” the first Banking Committee hearing attended by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), Warren asked bank regulators how tough they really are on the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street and about the last few times they actually took any banks all the way to a trial.

A few weeks ago, Bill Moyers sat down with Matt Taibbi to talk about the HSBC settlement, UBS and the Libor Scandal, Lanny Breuer, Mary Jo White, and the revolving door in Washington, D.C.

Not long after Taibbi’s appearance on Bill Moyers’s program, his article on HSBC , Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail, was published in Rolling Stone.

Quoting from Taibbi’s article:

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that “they make the guys on Wall Street look good.” The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.

“They violated every goddamn law in the book,” says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business.”

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Pam Martens ~ Obama To America: If You’ve Crashed A Major Bank, I Need You In My Cabinet

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Govt Slaves February 8 2013

President Obama might as well drape the White House with a giant banner declaring in bold red type: “Drop Dead 99 Percent.”

A pattern is emerging in the nominations coming out of the Oval Office. If you’ve played a role in collapsing a major bank, the President has a top slot for you. But only millionaires and billionaires need apply. Union busting scores extra points.

Jack Lew was paid millions as Chief Operating Officer for the very division of Citigroup that collapsed the bank in 2008 and Jack Lew is nominated by the President for U.S. Treasury Secretary. Before that, Lew played a key role in busting a grad students union at New York University.

Billionaire Penny Pritzker was involved in the collapse of the Superior Bank of Illinois, a Chicago savings and loan that went belly up in 2001 and now, according to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Pritzker is on the short list to become the next U.S. Commerce Secretary.

Of course, there are other ways to get a salary and a pension from the taxpayer and play a leadership role in pulling the country out of the greatest banking collapse since the Great Depression. Obama is nothing if not an equal opportunity employer of opportunists. If you didn’t personally collapse anything but were white collar defense lawyer to those that did, you can become the head of Wall Street’s regulator. Mary Jo White, partner at corporate law firm Debevoise and Plimpton, whose clients include JPMorgan, UBS, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, has been nominated by the President to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Michael Snyder ~ Do Wall Street Insiders Expect Something Really BIG To Happen Very Soon?

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The Economic Collapse Blog February 7 2013

Why are corporate insiders dumping huge numbers of shares in their own companies right now?  Why are some very large investors suddenly making gigantic bets that the stock market will crash at some point in the next 60 days?  Do Wall Street insiders expect something really BIG to happen very soon?  Do they know something that we do not know? What you are about to read below is startling.  Every time that the market has fallen in recent years, insiders have been able to get out ahead of time.  David Coleman of the Vickers Weekly Insider report recently notedthat Wall Street insiders have shown “a remarkable ability of late to identify both market peaks and troughs”.  That is why it is so alarming that corporate insiders are selling nine times as many shares as they are buying right now.  In addition, some extraordinarily large bets have just been made that will only pay off if the financial markets in the U.S. crash by the end of April.  So what does all of this mean?  Well, it could mean absolutely nothing or it could mean that there are people out there that actually have insider knowledge that a market crash is coming.  Evaluate the evidence below and decide for yourself…

For some reason, corporate insiders have chosen this moment to unload huge amounts of stock.  According to a CNN article, corporate insiders are now selling nine times more of their own shares than they are buying…

Corporate insiders have one word for investors: sell.

Insiders were nine times more likely to sell shares of their companies than buy new ones last week, according to the Vickers Weekly Insider report by Argus Research.

What makes this so alarming is that corporate insiders have been exceedingly good at “timing the market” in recent years.  The following comes from a recent CNBC article entitled “Sucker Alert? Insider Selling Surges After Dow 14,000“…

“In almost perfect coordination with an equity market that was rushing toward new all-time highs, insider sentiment has weakened sharply — falling to its lowest level since late March 2012,” wrote David Coleman of the Vickers Weekly Insider report, one of the longest researchers of executive buying and selling on Wall Street. “Insiders are waving the cautionary flag in an increasingly aggressive manner.”

There have been more than nine insider sales for every one buy over the past week among NYSE stocks, according to Vickers. The last time executives sold their company’s stock this aggressively was in early 2012, just before the S&P 500 went on to correct by 10 percent to its low for the year.

“Insiders know more than the vast majority of market participants,” said Enis Taner, global macro editor for RiskReversal.com. “And they’re usually right over a long period of time.”

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Michael Snyder ~ Who Runs The World? Solid Proof That A Core Group Of Wealthy Elitists Are Pulling The Strings

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Govt Slaves | January 29 2013

Does a shadowy group of obscenely wealthy elitists control the world?

Do men and women with enormous amounts of money really run the world from behind the scenes?

The answer might surprise you.  Most of us tend to think of money as a convenient way to conduct transactions, but the truth is that it also represents power and control.

And today we live in a neo-fuedalist system in which the super rich pull all the strings.  When I am talking about the ultra-wealthy, I am not just talking about people that have a few million dollars.  As you will see later in this article, the ultra-wealthy have enough money sitting in offshore banks to buy all of the goods and services produced in the United States during the course of an entire year and still be able to pay off the entire U.S. national debt.

That is an amount of money so large that it is almost incomprehensible.  Under this ne0-feudalist system, all the rest of us are debt slaves, including our own governments.  Just look around – everyone is drowning in debt, and all of that debt is making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier.  But the ultra-wealthy don’t just sit on all of that wealth.  They use some of it to dominate the affairs of the nations.

The ultra-wealthy own virtually every major bank and every major corporation on the planet.  They use a vast network of secret societies, think tanks and charitable organizations to advance their agendas and to keep their members in line.  They control how we view the world through their ownership of the media and their dominance over our education system.  They fund the campaigns of most of our politicians and they exert a tremendous amount of influence over international organizations such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.

When you step back and take a look at the big picture, there is little doubt about who runs the world.  It is just that most people don’t want to admit the truth.

The ultra-wealthy don’t run down and put their money in the local bank like you and I do.  Instead, they tend to stash their assets in places where they won’t be taxed such as the Cayman Islands.  According to a report that was released last summer, the global elite have up to 32 TRILLION dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe.

U.S. GDP for 2011 was about 15 trillion dollars, and the U.S. national debt is sitting at about 16 trillion dollars, so you could add them both together and you still wouldn’t hit 32 trillion dollars.

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Stuart Wilde ~ The Cashless Society

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Stuart Wilde | January 12 2013

The Governments want a cashless society for several reasons, the first is to combat tax avoidance, and the second is to drive business and fees to the debt-riddled banks. And the third reason is a form of silent hatred. It’s envy. They want to become rich but they don’t really want any of the citizens being like them, wealthy. It forms a social competition they don’t like.

Of course, once the rules and regulations and the taxes and impost and fines and fees are all in place, one winds up with a cashless society anyway, as everyone is so broke they don’t have any cash, like in Spain say, or Greece where old age pensioners are eating from garbage dumpsters.

The EU are just about to change the rules and the maximum you will be able to take out of the bank in one go will be Euro 500. In part, it’s about holding the money in the banks in case there is a run on the banks in the future. And it is to do with money for the credit card machine companies. Little businesses that don’t qualify for a debit card terminal will be out of business.

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Greg Hunter ~ Bagmen Not Statesmen

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USA Watchdog | December 26 2012

What has been going on in Washington, D.C., since the financial meltdown of 2008 has been a disaster for the country.  Taxpayers bailed out crooked, incompetent bankers while tens of millions lost their homes and jobs.  The bailouts have cost trillions of dollars, and they’re not finished.  The Federal Reserve has set a key interest rate to near zero percent until 2015, and it is printing $85 billion a month to prop up the banks and our own government.  The Fed calls this little operation “open-ended.”  No one has gone to jail for causing this enormous hardship on ordinary Americans, and not a word is spoken in the halls of Congress about stopping the bailouts or bringing criminals to justice.  This is immoral, disgusting, repugnant, nonexistent leadership.

This could have been handled in 2008 with the debt wiped clean.  We should have only protected depositors.  Bankers, bondholders and shareholders be damned—that’s capitalism.  It would have cost about $6 trillion back then, and we’d be on our way to a real recovery by now.  That is exactly what Iceland did.  It told bankers, shareholders and bondholders to take a big hit instead of giving a bailout for incompetence and fraud.  Oh, and it prosecuted the bankers and government officials that allowed the implosion to happen!  (Click here for more on Iceland’s turnaround.)  Instead, the Federal Reserve alone pumped out $16 trillion in the wake of the 2008 meltdown.  That is only part of the banker bailout that is still going on to the tune of $40 billion a month.  Not a single financial elite has been prosecuted and put behind bars for obvious crime and fraud—not one!

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Greg Hunter ~ Weekly News Wrap Up December 21 2012 [Video]

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USA Watchdog

Don’t expect a debt deal Christmas present.  It ain’t going to happen.  This is a political football. It is also about putting blame on the other party and getting a deal that hurts the other party’s base the worst.  Solving this debt crisis problem will involve real pain and sacrifice if we ever want to balance the budget.  Even the so-called Erskine-Bowles plan only meant a total of $4 trillion to the budget over the next decade.  That plan slowed the growth of government, forget about actually cutting it.  What Congress and the President should be doing is a full court press on the economy.  Instead, the Fed is propping up the banks and the government to the tune of $85 billion a month.  And there is not a single word about that enormous pink elephant in the room.  The economy is headed into a tailspin, and inflation is going to crush the middle class.

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Keiser Report ~ Hang ‘Em High!

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RussiaToday | July 28 2012 | Thanks, Thomas

In this episode, Max Keiser presents a double header with co-host, Stacy Herbert, to discuss crime and punishment in the financial sector. In London, JP Morgan banker, Tony Blair, has responded to the Keiser Report with his claim that hanging 20 bankers will not help and that, in fact, he asserts, public anger with the financial crisis is wrong. They also discuss the ‘blazer over cuffs look’ being the new black this season as Sean Fitzpatrick is arrested in Dublin, while over in Pennsylvania, Joe Paterno’s statue is draped in blue tarpaulin and hauled away as bond investors punish the university with higher rates and Moody’s threatens a downgrade. Finally, in Los Angeles, victims of vandalism are shocked to discover that it was a senior UBS banker who was smashing windows with a slingshot.

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Madison Ruppert ~ Report: At Least $20.3 Trillion Hidden In Offshore Banks By Global Elite

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TheIntelHub | July 23 2012

According to the most detailed study of the so-called offshore economy to date, conducted by James Henry, former chief economist with the consultancy McKinsey, the world’s richest people have taken advantage of cross-border tax laws in order to put away a shocking $20.31 trillion in offshore banks.

While this likely isn’t all that crazy to those who are familiar with the massive conflicts of interest in the Federal Reserve and the fact that the Federal Reserve works with banks to put Americans on the line for the failures of banks, it might be surprising to those who have no clue how the international financial system works.

The astounding sum uncovered by the Henry is slightly less than the 2011 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Japan ($5.87 trillion) on top of the 2011 United States GDP ($15.09 trillion).

The findings were published in the new report, “The Price of Offshore Revisited,” which shows that money continues to leak out of major nations and into infamous tax havens like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

These transactions are enabled by private banking institutions which all battle to get the accounts of what the Guardian calls the “global super-rich elite,” also known as high net-worth individuals.

Henry demonstrates that sums between £13 trillion ($20.3 trillion) and £20 ($31.23 trillion) have made their way from countries around the world into these secretive banking jurisdictions.

Thus, the wealth of these ultra-rich individuals is “protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy.”

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Ellen Brown ~ Titanic Banks Hit LIBOR Iceberg: Will Lawsuits Sink the Ship?

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Nation of Change | July 22 2012

At one time, calling the large multinational banks a “cartel” branded you as a conspiracy theorist.   Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts.  Charges includeracketeering (organized crime under the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO), antitrust violations, wire fraud, bid-rigging, and price-fixing.  Damning charges have already been proven, and major damages and penalties assessed.  Conspiracy theory has become established fact.

In an article in the July 3rd Guardian titled “Private Banks Have Failed – We Need a Public Solution”, Seumas Milne writes of the LIBOR rate-rigging scandal admitted to by Barclays Bank:

It’s already clear that the rate rigging, which depends on collusion, goes far beyond Barclays, and indeed the City of London. This is one of multiple scams that have become endemic in a disastrously deregulated system with inbuilt incentives for cartels to manipulate the core price of finance. 

. . . It could of course have happened only in a private-dominated financial sector, and makes a nonsense of the bankrupt free-market ideology that still holds sway in public life.

. . . A crucial part of the explanation is the unmuzzled political and economic power of the City. . . . Finance has usurped democracy. 

Bid-rigging and Rate-rigging

Bid-rigging was the subject of U.S. v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, a ten-year suit in which the U.S. Department of Justice obtained a judgment on May 11 against three GE Capital employees.  Billions of dollars were skimmed from cities all across America by colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion.  Other banks involved in the bidding scheme included Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and UBS.  These banks have already paid a total of $673 million in restitution after agreeing to cooperate in the government’s case.

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“George Washington” ~ U.S. Gave Tens of Billions to Libor-Manipulating Banks … Even AFTER Learning about the Manipulation George Washington’s picture

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Zerohedge | July 11 2012 | Thanks, Thomas

You know that Libor is the largest economic scam in world history and the largest insider trading scandal ever.

You know that the Federal Reserve knew about the manipulation by August 2007. And see this.

But did you realize that the Fed and Treasury threw billions of dollars of taxpayer money at Barclays and the other Libor-manipulating banks after they knew about the manipulation … and did nothing to stop it?

As Richard Eskow notes:

Thanks to the GAO audit of the Fed — an audit which it vigorously resisted — we know that Barclays was the fifth largest recipient of emergency loans. Bailout loans for Barclays came to $868 billion. That means that Barclays probably made billions off the reduced interest rate alone, courtesy of the American people.

Those loans were granted between December 2007 and July 2010. That means the Fed was doling out billions to Barclays after it learned that the bank was lying about its LIBOR rates.

Indeed, all of the probable Libor manipulators – including Citi, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, RBS and Deutsche – were huge recipients of bailout money courtesy of the American taxpayer:

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“George Washington” ~ Big Banks Have Criminally Conspired Since 2005 To Rig $800 Trillion Dollar Market

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ZeroHedge | July 1 2012 | Thanks Thomas!

We noted Friday:

Barclays and other large banks – including Citigroup, HSBC, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lloyds, Bank of America, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland– manipulated the world’s primary interest rate (Libor) which virtually every adjustable-rate investment globally is pegged to.

***

That means they manipulated a good chunk of the world economy.

We actually understated the impact of the Libor scandal.

Specifically, more than $800 trillion dollars worth of investments are pegged to the Libor rate. As the Wall Street Journal reports today:

More than $800 trillion in securities and loans are linked to the Libor, including $350 trillion in swaps and $10 trillion in loans.

Remember, the derivatives market is approximately $1,200 trillion dollars. Interest rate derivatives comprise the lion’s share of all derivatives, and could blow up and take down the entire financial system.

The largest interest rate derivatives sellers include Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Goldman and JP Morgan … many of which are being exposed for manipulating Libor.

They have been manipulating Libor on a daily basis since 2005.

They are still part of the group of banks which sets Libor every day, and none have been criminally prosecuted.

They have received a light slap on the wrist from regulators, which – as nobel economist Joe Stiglitz points out – is just the cost of doing business when fraud is the business model.

Indeed – as Bloomberg notes – they’re probably still manipulating the rate:

The U.K. bankers and regulators charged with reviewing Libor in the wake of regulatory probes are resisting calls to overhaul the rate because structural changes risk invalidating trillions of dollars of contracts.

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Matt Taibbi ~ Banks Paying Huge Fines For Wall Street Scam

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Rolling Stone | RS_News | June 30 2012

A Huge Break in the LIBOR Banking Investigation

OPINION ~ This is a huge story:

On Wednesday, Barclays won the race to reach a deal with U.S. and British regulators, beating UBS, which was reportedly the first bank to begin cooperating with international antitrust authorities. Barclays agreed to pay at least $450 million to resolve government investigations of manipulation of Libor and the Euro interbank offered rate (or Euribor): $200 million to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, $160 million tothe criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice and $92.8 million to Britain’s Financial Services Authority.

I wrote about the Libor investigation in the current issue of Rolling Stone, in “The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia,” about muni bond bid-rigging. Throughout this spring, while the Carollo bid-rigging case played out in a Manhattan courtroom, negotiations between banks and regulators were going on in this far larger cartel-corruption case. It’s been clear for some time now that a number of players had begun cooperating, and the only question was which bank was going to settle first.

Despite widespread expectation that it would be UBS, it turned out to be Barclays. You know how in Law and Order Jack McCoy always puts the two murder accomplices in separate rooms and tells them both that whoever talks first wins? Something like that happened here. In any case, the Department of Justice filing on the settlement contained excerpts of emails and other evidence that recall the taped phone conversations in the Carollo case: once again, we have seemingly incontrovertible evidence of wide-scale market manipulation. From Alison Frankel at Reuters:

Barclays employees agreed to manipulate the rates they submitted to the banking authority that oversees the daily Libor report for seemingly anyone who asked them to monkey with it: senior Barclays officials concerned that the bank would look weak if it reported too high a borrowing rate; interest rate swap traders trying to improve Barclays’ derivatives trading position; even former Barclays traders begging for favors. We’re talking naked, blatant manipulation. Here’s one exchange cited in the DOJ filing:

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