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The Man Who Busted the Banksters

Submitted by Roanman on Sat, 01/21/2012 - 06:41

 

I had never heard of Ferdinand Pecora.

The fact that his name is never mentioned in anybody's high school government class is a damnable shame.

He should have a day all his own in every government class at every school in every state of this union.

As an aside, his book is presently going for $550.00 at Amazon.

The following excerpt is taken from a short story at Smithsonian.com titled "The Man Who Busted The Banksters.

Click anywhere below for the entire piece.

Way super double highly recommended ..... plus ... and then some.

 

 

Just months before Hoover left office, Pecora was appointed chief counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Banking and Currency.  Assigned to probe the causes of the 1929 crash, he led what became known as the “Pecora commission,” making front-page news when he called Charles Mitchell, the head of the largest bank in America, National City Bank (now Citibank), as his first witness.

“Sunshine Charley” strode into the hearings with a good deal of contempt for both Pecora and his commission.  Though shareholders had taken staggering losses on bank stocks, Mitchell admitted that he and his top officers had set aside millions of dollars from the bank in interest-free loans to themselves.  Mitchell also revealed that despite making more than $1 million in bonuses in 1929, he had paid no taxes due to losses incurred from the sale of diminished National City stock ..... to his wife.  

Pecora revealed that National City had hidden bad loans by packaging them into securities and pawning them off to unwitting investors.  (Ever heard that one before?)  By the time Mitchell’s testimony made the newspapers, he had been disgraced, his career had been ruined, and he would soon be forced into a million-dollar settlement of civil charges of tax evasion.  “Mitchell,” said Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, “more than any 50 men is responsible for this stock crash.”

 

Whoa, a regulator actually doing his job.

As opposed to a regulator spending his time working on his next job.

 

If it ain't Goldman Sachs, it's J.P. Morgan

Submitted by Roanman on Thu, 01/19/2012 - 19:39

 

From Reuters.

It's always interesting when the thieves start turning on each other.

Click on the photo for the entire story.

 

In MF Global, JPMorgan again at center of a financial failure

 

Thu Jan 19, 2012 10:18am EST

 

(Reuters) - In late October, as MF Global Holdings Ltd teetered toward bankruptcy, Jon Corzine phoned his close-knit circle of Wall Street friends for help.

His firm, facing demands from customers and other firms for cash, needed to sell billions of dollars in securities to raise the money. As the week progressed, MF Global executives came to believe that JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of MF Global's primary bankers and a middleman moving that cash, was dragging its feet in forwarding the funds.

 

Scroll down one post to see who the boys are supporting in this years presidential election, having supported Obama in 2008.

 

Your government at work for the banks

Submitted by Roanman on Wed, 11/30/2011 - 07:15

 

From Bloomberg News who had to go to court with the Fed and a consortium of banks in order to obtain the following story under the Freedom of Information Act.

Click on the photo below of Goldman Sachs' personal bag boys for the entire story.

Way super double highly recommended ... READ IT ... you need to understand this stuff.

 

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

 

What really irritates me about all of this is the fact that I could have gone and got that MBA, maybe a JD, moved to New York and become a thief, but noooooo.

 

In 3 and1/2 short hours you will hold a completely different opinion about stuff.

Submitted by Roanman on Thu, 06/30/2011 - 16:06

 

The following video was created somewhere around the middle 1980's and can be purchased, if you wish, along with an accompanying book at The Money Masters.com

It is both good history and remarkably prescient as we are very definitely living in the world it predicted for us 25 years ago.

It is also 3 hours and 35 minutes long.

I know.

The first 3 hours and 10 minutes provide you with a very complete telling of banking practices throughout history.

They're all there, Jesus, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, J.P. Morgan, Joe Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, FDR, a couple Popes, you name it.

In the last 20 or so minutes it also provides a solution for reducing our debt to ..... wait for it ..... zero ....... in a couple years time.

Seriously.

And what's really bizarre, is that it makes perfect sense.

I've watched it now three times, the last two googling quotes and issues presented as facts.

I could find very little to quibble with (and everyone here knows how much I love to quibble).

You know how to eat an elephant right?

One bite at a time.

Take it in 10 - 15 minute bites, which provides the additional benefit of forcing you to hit and re-hit our site. 

You know your Uncle Roany wouldn't lead you astray, despite my obvious self interest.

This is the primo stuff.

 

 

You might want to click the Google logo at the bottom right hand corner for a much larger view or to go directly to the vid's home at Google.

We don't need the hits all that much.

 

Leverage

Submitted by Roanman on Tue, 06/28/2011 - 13:39

 

Those that have been around here the longest know for a fact that I love to wallow in the really scary, bad stuff.

Consistently the scariest of the scary guys I like to read is Martin Weiss at Money and Markets.

I used to call him "The Angel of Death" and everybody at my office would know exactly who I was referencing.

Here's a simple chart and some analysis from Mr. Weiss concerning our ongoing adventure in debt.

Not for the faint of heart.

As always click on the chart in order to link up with the entire piece.

 

 

Lie #3. They insist that America’s largest banks are safe.

The truth: The largest U.S. banks continue to hold nearly all of the derivatives in the country.

Goldman Sachs has $44.9 trillion in derivatives.

Bank of America has $52.5 trillion.

Citibank has $54.1 trillion.

And JPMorgan Chase towers over all others with $79.5 trillion of these potentially dangerous investments.

In total, JPMorgan, Goldman, Citibank, and the BofA alone are exposed to $234.7 trillion in derivatives. In contrast, among the thousands of other U.S. banks, the grand total of derivatives is a meager $9.3 trillion. In other words, these four banks are exposed to more than 25 times the sum total of all derivatives held by every other bank in the United States.

Never before has so much financial power — and risk — been concentrated in the hands of so few!

Yes, these numbers, reflecting the “notional” value of the financial instruments at play, are far larger than the actual amounts invested. But still, the risks are huge …

  • The derivatives held by Bank of America are 36 times larger than TOTAL assets;
  • At JPMorgan Chase, they’re 46.1 times larger than the assets;
  • At Citibank, 46.6 times larger; and
  • At Goldman Sachs Bank, a shocking 533 times larger!

Yes, in recent months, some banks have reduced somewhat their exposure to defaults by their counterparties. But here again, the exposure remains massive: According to the OCC, for each dollar of capital …

  • Bank of America has $1.82 in credit exposure to derivatives;
  • Citibank also has $1.82;
  • JPMorgan Chase has $2.75; and
  • Goldman Sachs is, again, at the greatest risk of all — with $7.81 in credit exposure for each dollar of capital.

That means that if JPMorgan’s counterparties defaulted on 36% of their derivatives, every last dime of the company’s capital would be wiped out. And at Goldman Sachs, defaults on just 13% of its derivatives would wipe out its capital.

 

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