Tag Archives: Wall Street

Dave Hodges ~ The Government Theft Of Retirement Accounts Has Begun

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TheCommonSenseShow May 22 2013

Many were roundly criticized for daring to say that the Cyprus thefts could visit our shores.  If Treasury Secretary Jack Lew gets his way, Cyprus will look like a walk in the park compared to what’s coming because Cyprus was a beta test for the massive theft of private wealth which is on the horizon.

In fact, I would say to my fellow countrymen who don’t think the government would ever perpetrate a fraud against the American people in which the government would oversee the outright theft of personal assets of American citizens, you might want to jog your memory and look about to a period of time going back four to five years in this country.

Short Term Memory Loss

I, too, was roundly criticized three months ago when I said the Cyprus scenario is coming here. I was told there would be a revolution if this happened and the government would be to afraid to try such a thing. I marvel at people who hold to such naive beliefs. Listening to these people is like listening to a country song played backwards. You know the wife does not leave, the truck still runs and the guy stops drinking. Maybe it is all the fluoride in the water that is causing such widespread ignorance and apathy.

First of all, our government is not the enemy. This is not the government we are dealing with. We are battling organized crime in the form of corporations like Goldman Sachs who have hijacked our government. They are lining up for the last great garage sale before they collapse the economy and roll out martial law. There are forces lining up to steal everything that you and I own. It has already begun but this country is so dumbed down, we do not see that it has already started.

The Greatest Wealth Transfer In History

Hank Paulson Architect of the Bailouts

I am still haunted by the image of former head of the Goldman Sachs crime syndicate and former Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, telling a closed session of Congress that if they did not grant Wall Street “bailouts” there will be martial law in the streets as a result of the economy collapsing. Ask yourself, if almost five years later and three bailouts later, are Americans better off having sacrificed the bailout money in lieu of maintaining roads, improving schools as well as running the national debt through the ceiling and destroying the financial heritage of our children?

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Michael Snyder ~ 10 Scenes From The Economic Collapse That Is Sweeping Across The Planet

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Economic Collapse blog May 13 2013

When is the economic collapse going to happen?  Just open up your eyes and take a look around the globe.  The next wave of the economic collapse may not have reached Wall Street yet, but it is already deeply affecting billions of lives all over the planet.  Much of Europe has already descended into a deep economic depression, very disturbing economic data is coming out of the second and third largest economies on the globe (China and Japan), and in most of the world economic inequality is growing even though 80 percent of the global population already lives on less than $10 a day.  Just because the Dow has been setting brand new all-time records lately does not mean that everything is okay.  Remember, a bubble is always the biggest right before it bursts.  The next major wave of the economic collapse is already sweeping across Europe and Asia and it is going to devastate the United States as well.  I hope that you are ready.

The following are 10 scenes from the economic collapse that is sweeping across the planet…

#1 ~ 27 Percent Unemployment/60 Percent Youth Unemployment In Greece

The economic depression in Europe just continues to get worse with each passing month.  According to the Daily Mail, the unemployment rate in Greece has nearly tripled since 2009…

Greek youth unemployment rose above 60 per cent for the first time in February, reflecting the pain caused by the country’s crippling recession after years of austerity under its international bailout.

Greece’s jobless rate has almost tripled since the country’s debt crisis emerged in 2009 and was more than twice the euro zone’s average unemployment reading of 12.1 percent in March.

While the overall unemployment rate rose to 27 per cent, according to statistics service data released on Thursday, joblessness among those aged between 15 and 24 jumped to 64.2 percent in February from 59.3 percent in January.

#2 ~ Detroit, Michigan Is Insolvent And Is Rapidly Running Out Of Cash

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Pam Martens ~ The Gov’s Plan From Hell: Disgusted With Wall Street Fees Eating Into Your 401(K) . . .

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Wall Street On Parade May 13 2013

You Can Move It To Even Higher Fees At An Insurance Company

Did you just find out your 401(k) is leaking 8 percent in a hodgepodge of Wall Street management fees, transactions costs, sales commissions, and marketing schemes. Maybe you did the math and realized your account value, without your new additions, is still where it was in 2007. Or did you just check BrightScope and find out that your 401(k) is so abysmal that you’ll need 18 additional years of work to make up for the $215,500 in lost retirement savings.

Or maybe you tuned in to the April 23 Frontline documentary on PBS to learn that it is quite possible for Wall Street to gobble up two-thirds of your retirement savings in your 401(k) while keeping you in the dark for the next 50 years.

If so, there’s no reason to seethe in silence. The U.S. Department of Labor wants to hear from you about a potential plan to move you from the clutches of Wall Street to the warm embrace of the insurance industry where companies like AIG – that needed a $182 billion bailout from the U.S. taxpayer to avoid defaulting on its annuity payouts to widows and orphans around the world – would be able to take over the slimmed down assets in your 401(k) in exchange for the promise of a fixed income stream in retirement.

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Pam Martens ~ Pritzker For Commerce: President Obama Sends A Devastating Message To America’s Young People

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Wall Street On Parade May 10 2013

Penny Pritzker

President Obama adds to the rising stench of his nominations to the U.S. Treasury and Securities and Exchange Commission with the nomination of the billionaire Hilton Hotel heiress, Penny Pritzker, to be the next U.S. Commerce Secretary.

With the confirmed nominations of Mary Jo White as Chair of the SEC, Jack Lew as Treasury Secretary and now the nomination of Pritzker to lead Commerce, the President is sending the chilling message to the Nation’s young people that it’s legal if you can get away with it; and if you get away with enough and get rich enough, the President of the United States admires that and you can join the power elite. Building a career through honesty and hard work is for suckers.

Jack Lew, the President’s pick for Treasury, was paid millions as Chief Operating Officer for the very division of Citigroup that collapsed the bank in 2008. He then accepted a personal bonus for himself of $940,000 out of taxpayer bailout funds paid to Citigroup. Lew also invested in a tax dodge in the Cayman Islands. Before that, Lew played a key role in busting a grad students union at New York University while buying a mansion with over $1 million in forgivable loans from the tax subsidized university.

Mary Jo White, installed by the President as Chair of the SEC, and her husband, John W. White, have legally represented the largest Wall Street firms that have been serially charged with looting the public. Mary Jo White came from the corporate law firm Debevoise and Plimpton; her husband is a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

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James Hall ~ The Warren Buffett House of Cards

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BATR November 8 2013

Now that the financial hype is celebrating a new all time high in the stocks, the time to exit the market may well be at hand. So what will that Oracle of Omaha do with all the insider information available from his compadre network?

The business press swoons all over Warren Buffett with every report, while only a few intrepid journalists would dare write about the dark side of Wall Street’s favorite equity cheerleader. The guru of sweet heart deals floats in the rarified air of a political cronyism ongoing honeymoon. So what is likely for his Berkshire Hathaway flagship company now that the ticker is breathing on pure oxygen?

At the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting, the forecast projects that the market will continue to rise. Berkshire Cash Hits Record $49.1 Billion as Profit Climbs, cites Bill Smead, portfolio manager of the Smead Value Fund, “Warren has organized the company around the rebirth of the United States economy over the next 10 years and this is the beginning of that rebirth.”

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Pam Martens ~ Schneiderman To Sue Big Banks

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Wall Street On Parade May 7 2013

Monitor Has Known For Months That Banks Are Flagrantly Violating Mortgage Settlement

Yesterday, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said his office would bring suit against Bank of America and Wells Fargo for “flagrant” violations of last year’s National Mortgage Settlement – a deal signed onto by 49 state attorneys general which promised to reform the shady mortgage servicing practices of five of the largest mortgage lenders in the U.S.

The question that arises is why the Monitor of the National Mortgage Settlement had not already brought a lawsuit in Federal Court to stop the violations.

During his press conference yesterday announcing the lawsuit, Schneiderman said his office has logged 210 complaints against Wells Fargo for violations of the settlement and 129 involving Bank of America. Those figures, however, are dwarfed by the findings of Joseph A. Smith, Jr., the man put in charge of monitoring the settlement and bringing enforcement actions to the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. when serial violations occur. In his February 13, 2013 report, Smith reported receiving 5,763 complaints from consumers from May 2012 through February 1, 2013 and 600 complaints from advocates such as legal aid attorneys.

Even more troubling, the pace of complaints had skyrocketed by 34 percent, rising from an average of 550 per month to 830 complaints per month more recently.

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Top Economist Jeffrey Sachs Says Wall Street Is Full Of ‘Crooks’ And Hasn’t Changed Since The Financial Crash

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The Independent April 29 2013

The IMF adviser also blamed ‘a docile president, a docile White House and a docile regulatory system’

Professor Jeffrey Sachs

In a cutting attack on America’s financial hub, one of the world’s most respected economists has said Wall St is full of “crooks” and hasn’t reformed its “pathological” culture since the financial crash.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs told a high-powered audience at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve earlier this month that the lack of reform was down to “a docile president, a docile White House and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice.”

Sachs, from Colombia University, has twice been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, and is an adviser to the World Bank and IMF.

“What has been revealed, in my view, is prima facie criminal behavior,” he said.

“It’s financial fraud on a very large extent. There’s also a tremendous amount of insider trading – you can even watch when you are living in New York how that works.”

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Pam Martens ~ May Day Protesters With Sign “It’s Not A Crisis, It’s A Scam,” Cuffed And Jailed By NYPD

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Wall Street On Parade May 2 2013

Police Arrest Protesters at May Day March In New York City; In the Background Is the Dropped Sign Reading, “It’s Not a Crisis; It’s a Scam”

If you’ve spent any time at all on this web site, you know that a seven word poster – “It’s Not a Crisis, It’s a Scam” – neatly sums up what myself, Matt Taibbi, Paul Craig Roberts, Yves Smith, Ellen Brown, and Mike Krauss have devoted millions of words attempting to convey to the American public. Barry Ritholtz has also greatly advanced the topic as have many others.

Despite the veracity of the poster, a number of protesters from among the May Day marchers in New York City today were cuffed and jailed by the NYPD as they marched behind the sign. The police will not, at this time, give the tally of arrests.

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Matt Taibbi ~ Too-Big-To-Fail Takes Another Body Blow

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Rolling Stone May 1 2013

Sen. Sherrod Brown and Sen. David Vitter hold a news conference to announce the details of ‘Too Big to Fail’ legislation.

Minds are changing on Too Big to Fail. A month ago, it was just something in the air. Now, it looks like we’re headed for a real legislative confrontation. And man, is the finance sector freaking.

Last week, on April 24th, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Louisiana Republican David Vitter introduced legislation called the “Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act of 2013 Act,” or the “Brown-Vitter TBTF Act” for short. The bill is a gun aimed directly at the head of the Too-Big-To-Fail beast.

During the Dodd-Frank negotiations a few years ago, Brown teamed up with Delaware Democrat Ted Kaufman to introduce an amendment that would have physically capped the size of the biggest banks. The amendment was bold and righteous but was slaughtered on the floor by a 61-33 margin, undermined by leaders of both parties – 27 Democrats voted against it.

Brown-Vitter offers a different and, in a way, more elegant solution to the problem than Brown-Kaufman. Rather than impose size limits, it simply insists that banks with over $500 billion in assets maintain higher capital reserves than are currently required. Companies like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America maintain $15 real dollars for every $100 lent out.

The bill only has such tough requirements for just those few megabanks, which sounds unfair, except that the aim of the bill, precisely, is to level the playing field. Right now, the biggest U.S. banks enjoy a massive inherent market advantage in that they’re able to borrow money far more cheaply than other banks, because everybody on earth knows the government will never let them fail and will always bail them out in a pinch, making their debt essentially U.S.-government guaranteed. Studies have shown that these banks borrow money at about 0.8 percent more cheaply than other banks, and that this implicit government subsidy is worth about $83 billion a year just to the top 10 banks in America. This bill would essentially wipe out that hidden subsidy and make the banks bailout-proof.

As soon as Brown-Vitter was introduced, a very interesting thing happened. The Independent Community Bankers of America, or ICBA, issued a press release boosting the bill. “ICBA strongly supports this legislation,” the release read, “and urges all community banks to join the association in advocating passage of legislation to end too-big-to-fail.”

This was a big thing. It was the first time since the crisis that a prominent financial industry group opposed the will of the TBTF banks. I remember covering Dodd-Frank and being told by a number of members in the House and the Senate that the sentiment of many community bankers was for breaking up or at least curtailing the power of companies like Chase and Bank of America, but that the community banking lobby was not yet prepared to take that step.

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Pam Martens ~ Now That You Know Wall Street Can Eat Up Two-Thirds of Your 401(k) With Fees . . .

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Wall Street On Parade April 30 2013

. . . You Should Also Know It Formed a Coalition to Block Full Disclosure of That Fact

Last week we reported on a PBS Frontline program showing that a 2 percent mutual fund management fee can gobble up two-thirds of your nest egg for retirement over a span of 50 years of saving. Now comes an equally ugly truth. 

Since at least 1998 the U.S. Department of Labor, which oversees the nation’s 401(k) plans, has known that fee gouging was eroding the ability of workers to adequately build wealth for retirement in 401(k) plans. It took more than a decade for the Federal agency to pass a regulation mandating that 401(k) recipients receive fee disclosure in an annual mailing. Leading the charge against full disclosure was a coalition of trade associations dominated by Wall Street. 

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Sartre ~ From Viet Nam Defiance to Boston Surrender

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BATR April 28 2013

“Justice is incidental to law and order” ~J. Edgar Hoover

Historically, what separated American society from most other countries was a healthy distrust of government and a tradition of civil liberties. The Bill of Rights is a unique safeguard embodied within the constitutional structure of a road map for governmental restraint. One of the most important restrictions placed upon the police powers of the central government is exemplified in Posse Comitias. The militarization of domestic law enforcement is fundamentally in conflict with individual rights and natural law.

The basic character of the American spirit envisioned narrow intrusion into the personal affairs of citizens. The federal government is burdened with thoughtful and precise limitations on its powers for the essential reason to inhibit the aggressive expansion of despotic tendencies. Once upon another era, the people of the Republic understood this vital social construct of control against the destruction of liberty, by the very government entrusted to preserve the essence of the union.

Fifty years ago, the nation entered into a morass of a foreign conflict that altered the very fabric and substance of the post World War II mentality. As the Viet Nam war expanded, the consciousness of a youthful generation exploded into a fundamental counter cultural resistance against the mindset that built the military-industrial-complex and perpetuated an interventionist global foreign policy.

The campuses and streets of America were filled with swarms of dissenters opposing the war and the repression of a burgeoning police state. The gambit of defiant speeches to civil disobedience saw the corridors of power crumple in the wake of a nation galvanized against the Sovietization of our authorities, when the war, was supposedly fought, to stop the spread of Communism.

Even with the incomplete success in ending the Viet Nam hostilities, the political loss of that war, did not prevent the uninterrupted march toward the Orwellian collectivist state, that we now live under and the oppressive compliance that Homeland Security so aptly represents.

Corrosive incrementalism of totalitarian policies developed in an environment of gradual apathy, over the last half century. Dissenting opposition movements, persistently confrontational against the establishment became less organized and vocal. As a result, institutions of influence descended into deeper depths of moral corruption, as the agencies of bureaucratic dominance expanded their reach and scope of tyranny.
vietnam.jpg
The generations of the post Viet Nam period, developed a materialistic career oriented motivation, at the expense of abandoning the search for spiritual and social responsibility, toward their fellow neighbor and their country. The flower power experienced at the opposite end of a National Guard bayonet is now replaced with a corporatist stock option in a company that builds the drone surveillance society.

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Pam Martens ~ PBS Drops Another Bombshell: Wall Street Is Gobbling Up Two-Thirds of Your 401(k)

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Wall Street On Parade April 25 2013

Frontline Chart Showing Impact of 401(k) Fees Over 50 Years of Saving for Retirement

If you work for 50 years and receive the typical long-term return of 7 percent on your 401(k) plan and your fees are 2 percent, almost two-thirds of your account will go to Wall Street. This was the bombshell dropped by Frontline’s Martin Smith in this Tuesday evening’s  PBS program, The Retirement Gamble.

This is not so much a gamble as a certainty: under a 2 percent 401(k) fee structure, almost two-thirds of your working life will go toward paying obscene compensation to Wall Street; a little over one-third will benefit your family – and that’s before paying taxes on withdrawals to Uncle Sam.

To put it another way – you work for Wall Street. You are their slave, their lackey and as long as their toadies dominate in Congress, nothing is going to change on the legislative front to stop the looting. Wall Street seized millions of homes through illegal foreclosures and stripped the equity from the owners. They got away with it. Some Wall Street firms further enriched themselves making bets that the housing market would collapse, using their inside knowledge of the bogus loans they had made. They got away with that also. Now Wall Street is busy asset stripping the retirement plans of the working class in America while President Obama proposes to cut Social Security benefits through a discredited calculation called Chained CPI – conveniently causing people to save more in their 401(k) plans to make up for the potential loss. But the more you save, the more Wall Street asset strips. 

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Pam Martens ~ Meet The New Enforcement Chief Of The SEC

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Wall Street On Parade April 23 2013

. . . The Guy Who Orchestrated Last Year’s Discredited National Mortgage Settlement on Behalf of Wall Street

Andrew Ceresney of Debevoise & Plimpton, LLP

Yesterday, Mary Jo White, the new Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, announced that a law partner from the firm she just left, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, would become the new Co-Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement – the unit that decides who gets prosecuted and who gets a pass.

In making the announcement that Andrew Ceresney of Debevoise & Plimpton will share the post with the Acting Director, George Canellos, White called Ceresney a “former prosecutor.” That hardly does justice to the cozy ties between Ceresney and Wall Street. (Ceresney worked for the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York in a prior career but has been employed at Debevoise since 2003.)

This time last year, Ceresney was basking in the glow of a herculean accomplishment for JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Ally. While directly employed as counsel to JPMorgan Chase, Ceresney had played a pivotal role in directing the negotiations between the U.S. Justice Department, 49 state attorneys general and an array of Federal regulators to tie up with a neat little red ribbon charges of mortgage, foreclosure and servicing fraud into the infamous National Mortgage Settlement – a deal big on promises and short on cash.

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