Five Major Banks Agree to Parent-Level Guilty Pleas

[U201491]

So why is no one going to Prison with these felonies and who is getting the money from these HUGE fines ??
Just another means to distribute money amongst the bankers ???
Disgusting.

http://www.fbi.gov/washingtondc/pre...utm_source=fbi-in-the-news&utm_content=431691

Read More

 

[boogerhook]

Too big to jail.

 

[U201491]

Too big to jail.

 

[Caveman Jim]

Yep, I agree that money keeps these white collar criminals out of the pokey.
These are the jackholes we should be boycotting!!!

 

[YOURSUPREMECOMMANDER]

 

[Stomper]

They cannot jail the REAL world powers....

 

[308]

Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws
---Mayer Amschel Rothschild

The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from it's profits or so dependent on it's favors, that there will be no opposition from that class.
---Rothschild Brothers of London, 1863

 

[jbett98]

I am going to wait by my mailbox for my refund from Chase.

 

[Classic]

This makes me sick. While these Jackwagons create ways to part Joe Blow from his money illegally they are immune from prosecution??? Oh darn, we (the bank) got fined so they turn around and pay the fine which is really coming out of the stockholders pockets! The only way to slow this type of crime down is to put the person/people responsible in JAIL. Let Bubba have a field day with them!

 

[U201491]

They would probably delegate some peon to serve their time anyway..
Sick part is those people are the one's controlling the entire political process

 

[U201491]

An Interesting Observation and excerpt from a report that a good friend in Canada does monthly.

I posed the question to him about where this money is going.
His reply was: ( I have 100% confidence that his analysis is accurate. Many of the biggest business in the US use his reports monthly to operate their business to a profitable level.)

Regarding your question on the fines and where the money is going I've written quite a lot about that scandal. Its basically going into Obamas "slush fund" for his support groups...La Raza etc. See pgs 14-17 of the attached report I wrote last summer. The DOJ is totally crooked.



The formatting is not the best when pasted here, but very readable and very interesting.
Click to open the quote to expand it.

It is increasingly evident that the the Fed, and the other major central banks around the


world, have in fact become trapped in the financial equivalent of the Eagles Hotel California, as

discussed in our October 2013 Global Risk report, "The Fed's Hotel California Monetary Madness", from

which there is no viable or painless exit strategy. The Fed has in fact passed the point of diminishing

returns with its monetary policy, as rates are already at record lows and concerns grow about the

deterioration in its balance sheet. Unease about the size of the Fed's holdings, and its role in the

Treasury market, where it has purchased over 70% of new issues over the past two years, is clearly

growing in the FOMC. Several members, including Elizabeth George and James Bullard, have expressed concern

that the "additional purchases could complicate the Committee's efforts to eventually withdraw policy

accommodation". They realize that Bernanke, Yellen, and their fellow Keynesians, have blown another massive

stock market and housing bubble, and that we are heading for a "Crash" that will dwarf the market panic of 2008-

09. The fact remains that there is no viable painless exit strategy from the monetary quagmire that "Helicopter

14

Ben" Bernanke created. Today the New York Fed's capital ratio is a measly 0.95%, which means a leverage ratio of

105 to 1 and the entire Fed system has a ratio of 1.83% or 55 to 1, while $2.7 trillion of excess reserves remained

sitting unused on bank and corporate balance sheets at the end of August, up from $2 trillion a year earlier.

However, with the Fed's unrestrained printing of fiat money driving equities seemingly inexorably higher, despite

weak domestic and global economic fundamentals and declining corporate revenue growth, valuations are

becoming increasingly disconnected from reality as investors appear willing to find any rationale, however tenuous,

to justify current levels. In May 1939, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau finally acknowledged that the

massive government intervention and unprecedented fiscal stimulus of the New Deal had been an unmitigated

disaster. "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not

work. After eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And an

enormous debt to boot". But have the Keynesians in Washington and at the Fed learned anything from history.

The answer clearly is no!!

Meanwhile the longer the party goes on the worse will be the ultimate hangover when it all falls

apart, as it assuredly will. What will be the catalyst that triggers potentially the greatest economic and

market crash in the past eighty years.? Will it be a plunge in the bond market and soaring interest

rates, as many now believe, as the Fed continues to deleverage its holdings of Treasurys and

mortgage-backed securities, where it has been the buyer of over 70% of new issuance, convincing

domestic and foreign investors that they have been buying into a house of cards, and leading into a

panic liquidation that carries over into all dollar denominated assets and a collapsing currency? The

signs of the negative impact of "tapering" have already been visible in emerging markets. Or will it be

the growing realization that the Obama Administration has been the most incompetent and corrupt government in

U.S. history, as discussed at length in several of our previous Global Risk reports, and that America and many of

its major cities and state governments are effectively bankrupt and that the pensions of millions of its citizens are

worthless and unrepayable? Or will it be a nuclear Armageddon in the Middle East, precipitated by a Sunni-Shia

confrontation in Iraq between the lunatic Shiite millenarian regime in Teheran, believing its insane doctrine that a

holocaust is the necessary precondition for the return of the 12th Imam and the global rule of radical Islam and

sharia law, and the Sunni butchers of ISIS determined to establish a new Islamic Caliphate.? Or will it be a

military confrontation in the Ukraine with a belligerent Russia under a Vladimir Putin intent on restoring the Soviet

Empire, or with Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea.? Or will it be 9/11-type terrorism by ISIS or

Hezbollah on a national scale across America, with major cities and the infrastructure needed for sustaining a

modern economy rendered permanently uninhabitable or destroyed in the simultaneous explosions of nuclear

devices across the land, using either suitcase nukes in the hands of pre-positioned terrorist cells or "martyrs

brigades", or electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) weapons, even one of which could massively damage America's

national grid, food and fuel supply systems, and banking and financial infrastructure, effectively sending the

continental U.S. back to the 19th century, with over half of the population at risk from starvation, lack of clean

water, and societal collapse.?

Wall Street's Rigged Financial Markets, The Corruption of the DOJ, and the Coming Crash.

In addition, with America heading toward economic and social chaos, in a political environment

increasingly reminiscent of Orwell's "Big Brother" world of 1984, a day of reckoning is surely drawing

near for the most rigged, fraudulent, and vulnerable market in American history. As all sectors of the

global economy, output, investment, and trade, slump to recession levels, the fact is that anyone who

believes that financial markets should be driven by fundamentals, as opposed to money printing, is

increasingly aware that the markets have become totally divorced from reality. In his 2012 overview

of the market, Dark Pools, High Speed Traders, A.I (artificial intelligence) Bandits, and the Threat to

the Global Financial System, WSJ reporter Scott Paterson found that "the entire U.S. stock market has

become one vast dark pool" and is driven by massive fraud, and in all probability is heading for the

most devastating crash since the 1930s. Over 70% of current trading volume is taking place in dark pools

operated by the major global banks and hedge funds, with orders hidden from the general public. A July lawsuit

alleges that over half of futures trades in Chicago are illegal wash trades designed to manipulate prices, while

several major banks, including the Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup, have been found guilty and

fined for collusion in the global forex market. Money received by the Department of Justice in settlements for

these frauds, amounting to tens of billions of dollars, including most recently a $16.6 billion payment by the Bank

of America, has however been illegally distributed by the DOJ at the direction of the criminal Attorney General Eric

Holder to liberal activist groups supporting the Obama Administrations immigration and income redistribution

policies, such as La Raza and various offshoots of the former ACORN community organizing group which was

disbanded after conviction for widespread vote fraud. Meanwhile a thoroughly corrupted SEC, the agency nominally

responsible for regulating the industry and prosecuting Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, JP Morgan, and the other

megabanks behind the fraud, has in the words of retiring SEC lawyer, James Kidney, in his devastating indictment

of his former employer in his March 27th farewell speech, become nothing more than "a tollbooth on the Bankster

turnpike", turning a blind eye to the illegal activity on the "penthouse floors". Each day we learn of a new area of

collusion between the U.S. and European megabanks, such as UBS, Credit Suisse, Barclays, and RBS, including the

15

rigging of the interest rate benchmark, Libor, to foreign exchange manipulation, to the rigging of commodities

markets, to the hiring of the sons of senior Chinese and other Asian government officials for investment banking

and research fraud. Yet the SEC and DOJ have yet to charge and prosecute a SINGLE senior executive of a major

bank despite ample evidence of their active involvement in the derivative and other market scandals which led to

the near meltdown of the U.S. and global economies in 2008/09, and trillions of dollars of losses in home prices

and stock market holdings.

In mid-July the DOJ announced a long-awaited $7 billion civil settlement with Citigroup over the

sale of toxic mortgage-backed bonds to investors between 2006-09. This was almost exactly the

period when current Treasury Secretary, and long-time Obama associate, Jack Lew oversaw divisions

at Citi that presided over failed mortgage investments. But though Justice, five states and the FDIC are

prying $7 billion from the bank for allegedly misleading investors, there's no mention in the settlement

of clawing back even a nickel of Mr. Lew's compensation. We also see no sanction for former Treasury

Secretary Timothy Geithner who allowed Citi to build colossal mortgage risks outside its balance sheet

while overseeing the bank as president of the New York Federal Reserve. In fact Holder remains

remarkably forgiving of his current and past cabinet colleagues in the Obama Administration, none of

which, along with their former bosses at Citigroup, Goldman, JPM et al, have been brought to account

for their blatantly criminal behavior. In fact the material facts the DOJ released to the public in its skimpy 9-

page Statement of Facts set a new low for bare bones disclosures. Instead of Appendix 1 being filled with

incriminating emails or whistleblower letters proving Citigroup's intent to defraud, it was instead a meaningless

listing of deal names which tell the public absolutely nothing. Why would a serious law enforcement agency release

such a worthless document to the public? In sharp contrast in the evidentiary record produced for public benefit by

the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the matter of JPMorgan's London Whale derivative

bets gone bad with depositors' money, the public was presented with a 306-page report, 98 pages of meaningful

exhibits including internal emails with names, and two volumes of testimony under oath. Adding further insult to

public sensibilities, the Justice Department correctly summed up the impact of the wrongdoing by Citigroup,

writing: "…our teams found that the misconduct in Citigroup's deals devastated the nation and the world's

economies, touching everyone." But no names of the culpable individuals in this massive fraud that nearly brought

down the US and global economies were included in the DOJ's 9-page release, although detailed evidence of the

massive wrong-doing by top executives at Citi had previously been provided to the Financial Crisis Inquiry

Commission (FCIC).

This information had in fact been provided by an internal whistleblower Richard Bowen, who had

taken his findings on toxic mortgages all the way to Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary who

sat on the Executive Committee of Citigroup and collected a whopping $115 million in compensation

over a decade of watching the hubris pile up. The FCIC Report tells us: "At Citigroup, meanwhile, Richard

Bowen, a veteran banker in the consumer lending group, received a promotion in early 2006 when he was named

business chief underwriter. He would go on to oversee loan quality for over $90 billion a year of mortgages

underwritten and purchased by CitiFinancial. These mortgages were sold to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and others.

In June 2006, Bowen discovered that as much as 60% of the loans that Citi was buying were defective. They did

not meet Citigroup's loan guidelines and thus endangered the company—if the borrowers were to default on their

loans, the investors could force Citi to buy them back. Bowen told the Commission that he tried to alert top

managers at the firm by 'email, weekly reports, committee presentations, and discussions'; but though they

expressed concern, it 'never translated into any action.'.He finally took his warnings to the highest level he could

reach—Robert Rubin, the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors and a former U.S.

treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, and three other bank officials. He sent Rubin and the others a

memo with the words 'URGENT—READ IMMEDIATELY' in the subject line. Sharing his concerns, he stressed to top

managers that Citi faced billions of dollars in losses if investors were to demand that Citi repurchase the defective

loans. Rubin told the Commission in a public hearing in April 2010 that Citibank handled the Bowen matter

promptly and effectively. 'I do recollect this and that either I or somebody else, and I truly do not remember who,

but either I or somebody else sent it to the appropriate people, and I do know factually that that was acted on

promptly and actions were taken in response to it. According to Citigroup, the bank undertook an investigation in

response to Bowen's claims and the system of underwriting reviews was revised. Bowen told the Commission that

after he alerted management by sending emails, he went from supervising 220 people to supervising only 2, his

bonus was reduced, and he was downgraded in his performance review." Bowen provided even more detail in a

December 4, 2011 interview on 60 Minutes, ironically titled: "Prosecuting Wall Street". Bowen told viewers that

after bringing his findings to higher ups, his duties were reassigned and he was told to remain off the premises.

By late 2008, Citigroup's serial hubris, mismanagement, and hiding tens of billions of dollars of

debt off its balance sheet, had turned it into a financial basket case, effectively rendering it insolvent,

as its stock traded for under $1 a share. Under the law, the U.S. government is not allowed to prop up

insolvent banks with taxpayer money. But from 2007 to 2010, in the largest bank bailout in history,

over $2.3 trillion was lavished on the serial recidivist Citigroup. No other Wall Street bank received the

amount of life support from the U.S. taxpayer that was received by Citigroup. Citigroup received $25

16

billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds on October 28, 2008. Less than a month later, Citigroup had

blown through those bailout funds and required another $20 billion TARP infusion. But its situation was so wobbly

that the government had to simultaneously provide another $306 billion in asset guarantees. After Bloomberg

News fought years of court battles to find out what Citigroup and other banks were getting in bailouts behind the

dark curtain of the New York Fed, the public finally learned in 2011 that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was

providing trillions of dollars in below-market rate loans to Wall Street banks and foreign financial institutions.

According to the Government Accountability Office, Citigroup received more in New York Fed loans than any other

bank – over $2 trillion dollars. Many of its loans were made at rates below one percent while it was charging double

digit interest rates to some of its struggling credit card customers. On August 27th, Wall Street's self-regulator, the

Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), charged Citigroup with cheating its customers out of fair prices on

preferred stock trades — 22,000 times. Citigroup was fined a meager $1.85 million, ordered to pay $638,000 in

restitution, allowed to neither deny or admit the charges, and sent on its merry way to loot the next unwary

investor. But the latest FINRA fine was the 408th fine that FINRA has levied against Citigroup Global Markets or its

predecessor, Smith Barney, for trading violations, market manipulations or failure to supervise its traders or

brokers. And that's just FINRA – the light-handed disciplinarian with industry ties. Citigroup has kept other Federal

regulators, including the U.S. Justice Department, very busy as well. The facts show that Citgroup, along with the

other major international investment banks, is an out-of-control serial market manipulator which has made its

senior executives indescribably wealthy through their ties to the Obama Administration, the Treasury, and the DOJ.

But the manipulation of the MBS, forex, futures, and other securities markets by the

international banks may well pale in comparison to the profits generated by their transformation of the

entire U.S. market into what WSJ reporter, Scott Paterson, in his 354-page overview of the corrupt

structure of the present financial industry, has described as "one vast dark pool". According to

Patterson, "Orders are hidden in every part of the market. And the complex algorithm AI-based trading

systems that control the ebb and flow of the market are cloaked in secrecy. Investors – and our

esteemed regulators – are entirely in the dark because the market is dark." According to some industry

estimates, as much as 40 percent of stock trading in the U.S. may now be occurring off of public stock exchanges.

Five firms who are among the major shareholders of the New York Stock Exchange/Euronext: Citigroup, 6.5 million

shares; Morgan Stanley, 5.9 million shares; JPMorgan Asset Management (UK) Ltd., 4.9 million shares; Merrill

Lynch & Co. Inc., 4.2 million shares; Goldman Sachs & Co., 3.1 million shares, account for a good chunk of that in

their own dark pools which function as unregulated stock exchanges that do not make the bids and offers of the

stocks they trade publicly available. In addition to having their fingers in these other trading pots, each of these

five Wall Street behemoths also own and operate their own dark pools which are collectively trading billions of

shares a week. One of the most sprawling of these global trading operations is owned by Citigroup. The company

owns Automated Trading Desk whose web site says it is trading approximately 200 million shares a day (1 billion a

week). Citigroup also owns the following dark pools: Citi Match, Citi Cross, Liquifi, and LavaFlow.

While Wall Street executives in their testimony before Congress continue to claim that the U.S.

markets are the deepest, widest, and most liquid markets in the world, it is increasingly obvious that

this purported liquidity is rigged and distorted by High Frequency Trading (HFT) and wash trading

among the major participants. Both the SEC and FINRA clearly believe these Wall Street dark pools may be

gaming the trading of stocks in wash trades, as indicated by their issuance on June 30th of Rule 5210 which states

"self-trades by a single algorithm or trading desk or related algorithms or trading desks raise heightened concerns

that this type of trading may not reflect genuine trading interest, particularly if there is a pattern or practice of

such trades. This type of trading becomes increasingly problematic when it accounts for a material percentage of

the volume in a particular security". According to the NY State Attorney General's office which is investigating HFT

operations on the U.S. securities exchanges, "the current market structure offers a slam-dunk opportunity for high

frequency traders to loot the unsophisticated with impunity". The SEC which oversees stock exchanges has

allowed both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to create a bifurcated market. The unsophisticated investor

is given trading data on which to base trading decisions on a slow data feed called the Securities Information

Processor or SIP. The SIP is not only slow in getting the data to the technology-challenged investor, but it has

limited data. For the rich and powerful on Wall Street who can afford massive fees, there is another high-speed

data feed offered by the exchanges called the Direct Feed. The Direct Feed data, which has far more useful

information, arrives in the hands of High Frequency Traders and Wall Street's proprietary traders ahead of the

arrival of the SIP data. This allows the Direct Feed users to buy a stock on the cheap and sell the stock back to the

SIP user at a higher price. In the words of Professor Mercer Bullard, former Assistant Chief Counsel at the

Securities and Exchange Commission, "In a market dominated by electronic trading, investors are having their

pockets picked — and individual investors and mutual fund shareholders are among the likely victims. The

securities exchanges' practice of selling early access to their trading data to insiders — as the term 'insiders'

suggests — is a practice that looks like illegal insider trading."

At a Senate hearing on June 18, Senator Elizabeth Warren compared the above to the skimming

scam depicted in the movie, Office Space. Warren stated: "For me the term high frequency trading

seems wrong. You know this isn't trading. Traders have good days and bad days. Some days they make

17

good trades and they make lots of money and some days they have bad trades and they lose a lot of

money. But high frequency traders have only good days. In its recent IPO filing, the high frequency

trading firm, Virtu, reported that it had been trading for 1,238 days and it had made money on 1,237 of

those days. High frequency trading reminds me a little of the scam in Office Space. You know, you take just a

little bit of money from every trade in the hope that no one will complain. But taking a little bit of money from

zillions of trades adds up to billions of dollars in profits for these high frequency traders and billions of dollars in

losses for our retirement funds and our mutual funds and everybody else in the market place. It also means a tilt

in the playing field for those who don't have the information or have the access to the speed or big enough to play

in this game." In the words of Wall Street on Parade, which has been at the forefront of exposing the corruption

which now pervades Wall Street and the fraudulent trading in securities markets worldwide, "The concentration of

insured deposits in the U.S. among these firms; the fact that over 90 percent of derivative trading is controlled by

these same firms; that the same firms, over and over again are jointly owning pieces of the same trading venues;

that they are now trading billions of shares a week in darkness, should be enough to send Congressional banking

committees into a frenzy of drafting new legislation to rein in this mess". As Senator Dick Durbin famously said

about Congress in 2009, the banks "frankly own the place."

So why has this not occurred? Why, in the absence of Congressional action, other than the

disastrously flawed Dodd-Frank Act whose pernicious effects have only served to increase the major

banks control of the financial markets, has the DOJ, other than as we stated earlier levying multibillion

dollar fines on the corrupt Big Five banks, not brought clearly jusified criminal charges against

the senior executives who have presided over and condoned these patently fraudulent and illegal

trading practices, and become incredibly wealthy in the process? Thanks to the watchdog organisation

Judicial Watch (JW), which has belatedly been able to obtain the information from documents

subpoenad under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), we now know the answers. According to JW

president Tom Fitton, the subpoenad documents reveal that, under Obama's direction, the fines are part of an

ongoing scheme in which the DOJ puts the money it has received from the bank settlements, now totaling close to

$50 billion, into a slush fund from which it is funelled to liberal groups supporting the Community Organizers farleft

agenda. The principal groups benefiting from the lawsuit, according to Investor's Business Daily, are the

National Council of La Raza, Operation Hope, National Community Reinvestment Coalition and Neighborhood

Assistance Corporation of America. The money also went to "delinquent borrowers" in Chicago, Oakland, Detroit,

Philadelphia and other major "Democrat strongholds. "This is a wealth redistribution scheme disguised as a

lawsuit," Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told The Daily Caller. "And who benefits from the distribution?

Interest groups the administration relies on, outside interest groups, allies and politicians in communities trying to

benefit as well." Fitton noted that these liberal groups are basically what's left of the Association of Community

Organization for Reform Now (ACORN) network, which Obama was chief legal council for in the early 90s in

Chicago. "You have La Raza that's getting money, their former head is at the White House in a top position whose

funding from the feds has gone up immensely under the Obama administration," Fitton said. La Raza, Operation

Hope, National Community Reinvestment Coalition and Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America have all

intimidated banks to give loans to minorities, even if they can't afford to pay them back, while the DOJ, like

Tammany Hall, is extorting money on behalf of the Obama administration and its political allies. For their part,

the executives of the major banks, who have fleeced the American sheeple out of hundreds of billions

of dollars, are happy to pay this extortion money to the DOJ as a small price for their protection from

criminal prosecution, and the lengthy jail terms for which they would assuredly be liable.