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They've not blocked the reporters from anything. THIS Is what I mean. Why can't people just ing be honest and objective and instead have to lie?
Why does Obama hate Big Bird? lol
They've not blocked the reporters from anything. THIS Is what I mean. Why can't people just ing be honest and objective and instead have to lie?
sheeeep!
Choice of Mary Jo White to Head SEC Puts Fox In Charge of Hen House
Couldn't they have found someone who wasn't a key figure in one of the most notorious scandals to hit the SEC in the past two decades? And couldn't they have found someone who isn't a perfect symbol of the revolving-door culture under which regulators go soft on suspected Wall Street criminals, knowing they have million-dollar jobs waiting for them at hotshot defense firms as long as they play nice with the banks while still in office?
This whole episode highlights everything that's wrong with modern Wall Street. First of all, everybody's buddies with each other – cops and robbers, no adversarial system at all. As Bill Murray would say, it's dogs and cats, living together.
Here, a line investigator gets a good lead, it's quickly taken out of his hands and the whole thing is negotiated at 50,000 feet by friends and former co-workers of the top regulators now working at hotshot firms.
If Barack Obama wanted to send a signal that he's getting tougher on Wall Street, he sure picked a funny way to do it, nominating the woman who helped John Mack get off on the slam-dunkiest insider trading case ever to cross an SEC investigator's desk.
When I contacted Gary today, his take on it was simple. "Obama is not going to clean up financial corruption," he said, "by pinning a sheriff's badge on Wall Street's protector-in-chief."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/25-5
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lol Great job. They're like, "err, err, err..."
Senator Elizabeth Warren asks federal bank regulators why no banks were taken to trial in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Elizabeth Warren: "Too Big to Fail has become Too Big for Trial"
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Great job TYT, pretty much covers what msm tv won't
"Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) meeting with bank regulators Thursday left bankers reeling, after the politician questioned why regulators had not prosecuted a bank since the financial crisis.
At one point, Warren asked why big banks' book value was lower, when most corporations trade above book value, saying there could be only two reasons for it."*
Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed bank regulators by aggressively hammering one simple question: why have they not prosecuted a single bank since the financial crisis? Wall Street is reeling, perhaps they don't appreciate someone finally treating them like the crooks they are? Cenk Uygur and Ben Mankiewicz break it down.
*Read more from Luke Johnson/ Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02...
TYT: Elizabeth Warren Smacks Down Wall Street Bankers
MSM won't touch it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/bu...ayspaper&_r=1&MANY people became rightfully upset about bailouts given to big banks during the mortgage crisis. But it turns out that they are still going on, if more quietly, through the back door.
The existence of one such secret deal, struck in July between the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Bank of America, came to light just last week in court filings.
That the New York Fed would shower favors on a big financial ins ution may not surprise. It has long shielded large banks from assertive regulation and increased capital requirements.
Still, last week’s details of the undisclosed settlement between the New York Fed and Bank of America are remarkable. Not only do the filings show the New York Fed helping to thwart another ins ution’s fraud case against the bank, they also reveal that the New York Fed agreed to give away what may be billions of dollars in potential legal claims.
Here’s the skinny: Late last Wednesday, the New York Fed said in a court filing that in July it had released Bank of America from all legal claims arising from losses in some mortgage-backed securities the Fed received when the government bailed out the American International Group in 2008. One surprise in the filing, which was part of a case brought by A.I.G., was that the New York Fed let Bank of America off the hook even as A.I.G. was seeking to recover $7 billion in losses on those very mortgage securities.
It gets better.
What did the New York Fed get from Bank of America in this settlement? Some $43 million, it seems, from a small dispute the New York Fed had with the bank on two of the mortgage securities. At the same time, and for no compensation, it released Bank of America from all other legal claims.
Walker F. Todd, a former official at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, warned: “As a public en y, the Federal Reserve needs to take its custody of public funds seriously enough to ask for more than merely nominal compensation when it is giving up things of value to a bank holding company. If the central bank starts releasing binding legal claims for nominal compensation, it looks like just one more element of the secret or back-door bailout of the banking system.”
5 Outrageous Revelations from Matt Taibbi's Takedown on HSBC's Drug Money Laundering
1. By HSBC’s December settlement, the bank had already received two cease-and-desist letters.
First, in 2003, the Federal Reserve sent a cease-and-desist letter to HSBC demanding the bank take strict precaution not to do business with criminals and terrorists. The letter came after revelations that HSBC had opened accounts for shady characters like Sulaiman bin Abdul Aziz Al Rajhi, one of the “20 early financiers of Al Qaeda.”
Essentially, the Feds caught HSBC engaged in criminal activity and told the bank to stop. But they didn’t. After the first cease-and-desist letter, the bank received dozens of warnings from the OCC, which they continued to ignore.
The second cease-and-desist order came in 2010, after the OCC determined HSBC’s money-laundering controls to be weak. Instead of prosecuting the bank after it had ignored countless warnings, the OCC gave HSBC a second chance.
Taibbi compares the leniency given to HSBC compared to victims of the outrageous “three-strikes” rule: “Three-time losers doing life in California prisons for street felonies might be surprised to learn that the no-jail settlement Lanny Breuer worked out for HSBC was already the bank's third strike.”
2. HSBC covered its tracks when helping oppressive regimes avoid sanctions
Taibbi reports that HSBC used a technique called “stripping” to avoid detection when they did business with countries under U.S. sanction. In particular, HSBC sought to increase its profits by laundering cash for Iran. The author quotes a memo from HSBC’s Middle East subsidiary, HBME:
"It is anticipated that Iran will become a source of increasing income for the group going forward," the memo says, "and if we are to achieve this goal we must adopt a positive stance when encountering difficulties."
To do this, the “bank would remove references to Iran in wire transactions to and from the United States, often putting themselves in place of the actual client name to avoid triggering OFAC alerts,” explains Taibbi.
Taibbi further reports that there is evidence linking HSBC to a slew of other sanctioned countries like, Sudan, Cuba, Burma and North Korea.
3. HSBC ran offshore branches designed specifically for money laundering
In what Taibbi calls the “pinnacle innovation in the history of sleazy banking practices,” HSBC created a so-called “Cayman islands” branch in Mexico that let customers sidestep routine screening when opening accounts. The writer says clients “barely had to submit a real name and address, much less explain the legitimate origins of their deposits.” A 2002 audit revealed that 41 percent of accounts didn’t have complete client information.
When it turned out that American companies used these accounts to sell aircraft to drug cartels, HSBC Mexico finally shutout some of the “Cayman islands branch” clients—but not all of them. Taibbi notes that, “As late as 2012, when HSBC executives were being dragged before the U.S. Senate, the bank still had 20,000 such accounts worth some $670 million.”
4. HSBC did direct business with “the worst trafficking organizations imaginable.”
A part of a major narcotics investigation, federal agents discovered a ton of evidence that implicated HSBC in widespread money laundering. For example, Taibbi reports the bank “played a key role in the so-called Black Market Peso Exchange, which allowed drug cartels in both Mexico and Colombia to convert U.S. dollars from drug sales into pesos to be used back home.” And the dealers HSBC did business with were some of the most violent in the world.
Former federal prosecutor Neil Barofsky told Rolling Stone HSBC worked for Colombia's Norte del Valle and Mexico's Sinaloa cartels — “groups that don't just commit murder on a mass scale but are known for beheadings, torture videos and other atrocities, none of which happens without money launderers.”
Barofsky says he once put a Notre del Valle cartel member behind bars for 10 years on money laundering charges far smaller than what HSBC was involved with.
5. An entire HSBC department was tasked with quickly clearing su ious behavior
After the OCC sent HSBC its second cease-and-desist letter, the bank hired a bunch of unqualified workers to “investigate” su ious alerts. In reality, the Delaware-based department was tasked with clearing out skeletons from HSBC’s closet. Taibbi quotes damning emails from HSBC bosses pressuring workers to clear as many alerts as possible, and praising the entire Delaware office when it erased 60 su ious transactions in a week.
Taibbi interviewed one of these “investigators,” Everett Stern, who described laughably low criteria for clearing an alert.
"Basically, if a company had a website, you could clear them," he told Rolling Stone.
Stern found a slew of su ious transactions that he was hired to scrub away, including exchanges tied to Hezbollah, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. He decided to turn whistleblower and alert the FBI.
After that, Lanny Breur slapped HSBC with a deferred prosecution agreement.
"I thought, 'All that, for nothing?' " Stern told Rolling Stone. "I couldn't believe it."
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...ney-laundering
Not yet a "decent interval" before Breur lands in a $M+/year job in the financial sector, which owes him $Bs in gra ude. LOL if HSBC hires him.
Taibbi continues to riff on HSBC:
http://readersupportednews.org/opini...-loretta-lynchThe Swiss arm of the bank at its height apparently hid as much as $120 billion. The bank unit was essentially, as one observer described it, a "tax avoidance and tax evasion service."
This HSBC story is an incredibly explosive one when one takes into account the recent regulatory history of this company. The bank has been a central player in two recent lurid criminal scandals, one involving the rigging of currency markets, the other the aforementioned case involving money-laundering.
Both cases involved historically enormous schemes to profit from illegal banking activities. HSBC has set aside $378 million to pay fines for its role in the Forex scandal, in which it was one of a handful of banks whose currency traders ripped off their clients in a variety of ways, for instance using inside client info to make prescient bets seconds before a currency's price was set.
better on the same topic: http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=206884
Jail the Fed!
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