Showing posts with label banking fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label banking fraud. Show all posts
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Friday, November 19, 2010
This bail-out blackmail must be stopped
Taxpayers cannot be expected to pay for all the banks’ bad debts
Jeremy Warner
Telegraph
In a slip of the tongue two years ago, Gordon Brown claimed to have “saved the world” by galvanising his fellow leaders into a collective bail-out of the banking system. As is now ever more apparent, all he did was administer a little bit of roadside pain relief. The underlying injuries still fester.
What’s happening in Ireland right now is not, at root, a sovereign debt crisis, but another banking crisis. The reason it has spilled over into a problem of national solvency is that it has overwhelmed the country’s capacity to afford further bail-outs.
By the same token, the reason European policymakers are trying to force a rescue package on a reluctant Brian Cowen, the Irish prime minister, is not because Ireland has run out of money: in fact, its debt is fully funded until the middle of next year. It is because they fear Ireland’s banking crisis will become their own, as bad loans to Irish banks trigger a wave of insolvencies across Europe. They also worry that excessive use by Irish banks of European Central Bank liquidity, as everyone else dashes to get their money out, is undermining the ECB’s integrity, and therefore that of the euro as a whole.
The problem is that you cannot ultimately fix an underlying solvency problem by forcing a country to borrow even more. That only further reduces the chances of the debt ever being repaid. And if markets begin to believe that the countries on the periphery of the eurozone will be permanently underwritten by the rest, it will weaken the creditworthiness of the core: there is already some evidence of this in German bond yields.
In any case, constantly having to bail out the insolvent fringe will eventually become politically unacceptable among those forced to pick up the tab. In Germany, the EU’s bail-out fund is already subject to legal challenge, while in Britain, there is understandable horror at being roped into the Irish rescue. Why should our highly taxed businesses be forced to subsidise super-low rates of corporation tax in Ireland? It’s unfair and objectionable. Small wonder that senior officials at the Bundesbank have come round to the view that strong countries would do better to concentrate on shoring up their own banks against debt defaults in weaker countries, rather than propping up the weaker economies.
Is there any way out of this mess? One thing is for sure: taxpayers can no longer be expected to pay the costs of all this rotten lending. That game of “bail us out or suffer the consequences” has been played for long enough. It’s not just intolerable, but has become a major part of the problem.
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| Getty image |
Telegraph
In a slip of the tongue two years ago, Gordon Brown claimed to have “saved the world” by galvanising his fellow leaders into a collective bail-out of the banking system. As is now ever more apparent, all he did was administer a little bit of roadside pain relief. The underlying injuries still fester.
What’s happening in Ireland right now is not, at root, a sovereign debt crisis, but another banking crisis. The reason it has spilled over into a problem of national solvency is that it has overwhelmed the country’s capacity to afford further bail-outs.
By the same token, the reason European policymakers are trying to force a rescue package on a reluctant Brian Cowen, the Irish prime minister, is not because Ireland has run out of money: in fact, its debt is fully funded until the middle of next year. It is because they fear Ireland’s banking crisis will become their own, as bad loans to Irish banks trigger a wave of insolvencies across Europe. They also worry that excessive use by Irish banks of European Central Bank liquidity, as everyone else dashes to get their money out, is undermining the ECB’s integrity, and therefore that of the euro as a whole.
The problem is that you cannot ultimately fix an underlying solvency problem by forcing a country to borrow even more. That only further reduces the chances of the debt ever being repaid. And if markets begin to believe that the countries on the periphery of the eurozone will be permanently underwritten by the rest, it will weaken the creditworthiness of the core: there is already some evidence of this in German bond yields.
In any case, constantly having to bail out the insolvent fringe will eventually become politically unacceptable among those forced to pick up the tab. In Germany, the EU’s bail-out fund is already subject to legal challenge, while in Britain, there is understandable horror at being roped into the Irish rescue. Why should our highly taxed businesses be forced to subsidise super-low rates of corporation tax in Ireland? It’s unfair and objectionable. Small wonder that senior officials at the Bundesbank have come round to the view that strong countries would do better to concentrate on shoring up their own banks against debt defaults in weaker countries, rather than propping up the weaker economies.
Is there any way out of this mess? One thing is for sure: taxpayers can no longer be expected to pay the costs of all this rotten lending. That game of “bail us out or suffer the consequences” has been played for long enough. It’s not just intolerable, but has become a major part of the problem.
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Thursday, November 18, 2010
Seriously, Jail the Bankers or This Economy Will Never Fully Recover
By refusing to hold the corporate criminals at the heart of the housing crisis accountable for their crimes, we’re creating powerful incentives for future malfeasance.
Joshua Holland
Alternet
The Great Recession showed the world that the crimes that create the most victims are not committed by terrorists, gangbangers or drug traffickers, but by well-heeled crooks in Wall Street’s executive suites. Tens of millions of people have seen their jobs disappear and their pension funds fleeced, and had their homes taken out from under their feet as a result of the crash of Wall Street’s Great Casino. Yet so far, the culprits have been given little more than a slap on the wrist.
Failing to prosecute Wall Street’s high-flying crooks doesn’t only represent a great miscarriage of justice. Powerful voices within the economic establishment are now making the case that holding the bankers criminally culpable is necessary if we ever hope to stop our national economy from moving from one speculation-driven bubble to the next.
Nobel-prize winner Joe Stiglitz recently told AOL’s Daily Finance that major damage resulting from the financial disaster “has not really been taken on board, and that is confidence in our legal system, in our rule of law, in our system of justice.” His prescription? “I think we ought to go do what we did” in the wake of similar financial crises in the past, and “actually put many of these guys in prison.”
His argument is based not on the visceral satisfaction of seeing the high and mighty brought down a peg, but on cold economic grounds. At heart, economics is the study of incentives, and by refusing to hold the corporate criminals at the heart of the housing crisis accountable in any meaningful way, we’re creating powerful incentives for more malfeasance in the future.
As Stiglitz explained, “People have an incentive sometimes to behave badly, because they can make more money if they can cheat. If our economic system is going to work then we have to make sure that what they gain when they cheat is offset by a system of penalties.” With those penalties amounting to a small 5 percent or 10 percent tax on illegal profits, what’s to stop the crooks? “You're still sitting home pretty with your several hundred million dollars that you have left over after paying fines,” Stiglitz said.
Read Full Article
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Alternet
The Great Recession showed the world that the crimes that create the most victims are not committed by terrorists, gangbangers or drug traffickers, but by well-heeled crooks in Wall Street’s executive suites. Tens of millions of people have seen their jobs disappear and their pension funds fleeced, and had their homes taken out from under their feet as a result of the crash of Wall Street’s Great Casino. Yet so far, the culprits have been given little more than a slap on the wrist.
Failing to prosecute Wall Street’s high-flying crooks doesn’t only represent a great miscarriage of justice. Powerful voices within the economic establishment are now making the case that holding the bankers criminally culpable is necessary if we ever hope to stop our national economy from moving from one speculation-driven bubble to the next.
Nobel-prize winner Joe Stiglitz recently told AOL’s Daily Finance that major damage resulting from the financial disaster “has not really been taken on board, and that is confidence in our legal system, in our rule of law, in our system of justice.” His prescription? “I think we ought to go do what we did” in the wake of similar financial crises in the past, and “actually put many of these guys in prison.”
His argument is based not on the visceral satisfaction of seeing the high and mighty brought down a peg, but on cold economic grounds. At heart, economics is the study of incentives, and by refusing to hold the corporate criminals at the heart of the housing crisis accountable in any meaningful way, we’re creating powerful incentives for more malfeasance in the future.
As Stiglitz explained, “People have an incentive sometimes to behave badly, because they can make more money if they can cheat. If our economic system is going to work then we have to make sure that what they gain when they cheat is offset by a system of penalties.” With those penalties amounting to a small 5 percent or 10 percent tax on illegal profits, what’s to stop the crooks? “You're still sitting home pretty with your several hundred million dollars that you have left over after paying fines,” Stiglitz said.
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Friday, November 12, 2010
Matt Taibbi: Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners
Retired judges are rushing through complex cases to speed foreclosures in Florida
Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
The Real Reason America’s Cities and Towns Are Broke
The rocket docket wasn't created to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes.
Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's Griftopia
Foreclosure lawyers told me one other thing about the rocket docket. The hearings, they said, aren't exactly public. "The judges might give you a hard time about watching," one lawyer warned. "They're not exactly anxious for people to know about this stuff." Inwardly, I laughed at this — it sounded like typical activist paranoia. The notion that a judge would try to prevent any citizen, much less a member of the media, from watching an open civil hearing sounded ridiculous. Fucked-up as everyone knows the state of Florida is, it couldn't be that bad. It isn't Indonesia. Right?
Well, not quite. When I went to sit in on Judge Soud's courtroom in downtown Jacksonville, I was treated to an intimate, and at times breathtaking, education in the horror of the foreclosure crisis, which is rapidly emerging as the even scarier sequel to the financial meltdown of 2008: Invasion of the Home Snatchers II. In Las Vegas, one in 25 homes is now in foreclosure. In Fort Myers, Florida, one in 35. In September, lenders nationwide took over a rec ord 102,134 properties; that same month, more than a third of all home sales were distressed properties. All told, some 820,000 Americans have already lost their homes this year, and another 1 million currently face foreclosure.
Throughout the mounting catastrophe, however, many Americans have been slow to comprehend the true nature of the mortgage disaster. They seemed to have grasped just two things about the crisis: One, a lot of people are getting their houses foreclosed on. Two, some of the banks doing the foreclosing seem to have misplaced their paperwork.
Read Full Article
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Rolling Stone
The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
The Real Reason America’s Cities and Towns Are Broke
The rocket docket wasn't created to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes.
Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's Griftopia
Foreclosure lawyers told me one other thing about the rocket docket. The hearings, they said, aren't exactly public. "The judges might give you a hard time about watching," one lawyer warned. "They're not exactly anxious for people to know about this stuff." Inwardly, I laughed at this — it sounded like typical activist paranoia. The notion that a judge would try to prevent any citizen, much less a member of the media, from watching an open civil hearing sounded ridiculous. Fucked-up as everyone knows the state of Florida is, it couldn't be that bad. It isn't Indonesia. Right?
Well, not quite. When I went to sit in on Judge Soud's courtroom in downtown Jacksonville, I was treated to an intimate, and at times breathtaking, education in the horror of the foreclosure crisis, which is rapidly emerging as the even scarier sequel to the financial meltdown of 2008: Invasion of the Home Snatchers II. In Las Vegas, one in 25 homes is now in foreclosure. In Fort Myers, Florida, one in 35. In September, lenders nationwide took over a rec ord 102,134 properties; that same month, more than a third of all home sales were distressed properties. All told, some 820,000 Americans have already lost their homes this year, and another 1 million currently face foreclosure.
Throughout the mounting catastrophe, however, many Americans have been slow to comprehend the true nature of the mortgage disaster. They seemed to have grasped just two things about the crisis: One, a lot of people are getting their houses foreclosed on. Two, some of the banks doing the foreclosing seem to have misplaced their paperwork.
Read Full Article
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Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Banks to Cash-In Again on New Fed Plan (VIDEO)
YouTube-TheRealNews
Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith: Banks to Cash In on QE2 "Carry Trade" - Fed's 600 B quantitative easing may well make more profits for bankers
To watch a multi-part episode, click the link Below:
http://www.therealnews.com/t2/index.p...
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Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith: Banks to Cash In on QE2 "Carry Trade" - Fed's 600 B quantitative easing may well make more profits for bankers
To watch a multi-part episode, click the link Below:
http://www.therealnews.com/t2/index.p...
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Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Want to get away with murder? Become a bank
Fortune
October 26, 2010
The biggest danger to the U.S. capitalist system doesn’t come from communists or community activists or left-wing academics. It comes from some of the nation’s biggest financial institutions. These companies, which helped create the financial meltdown that touched off the Great Recession, have now found yet another way to undermine the public’s faith in capitalism and markets: the foreclosure fiasco.
Even before the foreclosure problem appeared, the level of public distrust of our financial and political systems was approaching the pathological. It’s going to get even worse when the true lesson of this episode sinks in. To wit: If you screw up big-time when you deal with a giant bank, you’re toast. If the giant bank screws up when it deals with you, it gets a do-over.
Sure, many — probably most — of the people whose mortgages are being foreclosed got in trouble because they overreached or lost their jobs, not because anyone cheated them. But if we’re going to have rules, they ought to be binding on everyone. If I’m supposed to obey the law and pay my bills, the people I’m paying ought to have to obey the law too.
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Sunday, October 24, 2010
Foreclosure Mess Scares Away Investors as 'Fear has Taken Hold'
 |
| Dees Illustration |
Investors who have been snapping up foreclosed homes are backing off in the wake of the U.S. foreclosure fiasco, driven off by sagging inventory and fears over legal title. Some economists say the trend could hurt the overall housing market.
With foreclosed properties accounting for a large portion of housing sales, and investors accounting for a large portion of buyers — particularly in some key markets with very high foreclosure rates — the implications for the broader economy could be serious.
Investors who would buy, rehabilitate and then sell or rent foreclosures were playing a "huge role," in helping to clear the market, said housing economist Tom Lawler.
But many of those investors are now staying on the sidelines.
"We're like a plane flying around in a holding pattern, waiting to land," said Tony Alvarez, an investor in southern California who is currently renting out 40 former foreclosed homes. "Nothing is going on, and why? Fear has taken hold in the marketplace."
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Friday, October 22, 2010
Vatican Banking Fraud Probe Widens: Church 'Astonished' It Must Adhere to Money Laundering Laws
The Associated Press reported today that the Vatican expressed "astonishment" when an Italian court rejected the release of Vatican bank funds seized by authorities for failing to comply with international money laundering laws.
Prosecutors claim that the $30 million seizure that occurred last month is due to non-disclosure of the transfer destination of large sums of money. Although the Vatican bank -- Institute for Works of Religion -- vows that it is working within international banking rules, the prosecutor found "exactly the opposite" was true. The AP reported:
Under the investigation, financial police seized the money Sept. 21 from a Vatican bank account at the Rome branch of Credito Artigiano Spa, after the bank informed the Bank of Italy about possible violations of anti-money laundering norms. The bulk of the money, euro20 million ($26 million), was destined for JP Morgan in Frankfurt, with the remainder going to Banca del Fucino.
The prosecutors' document suggests confirmation of Italian press reports that the probe was widening, looking into possible violations in earlier years linked to Italian corruption, in addition to the two most recent cases.
The document cites suspicious transactions involving checks drawn from a Vatican bank account at Unicredit bank in 2009, involving the use of a false name.
The prosecutors also cited a euro650,000 withdrawal from a Vatican ban account at Intesa San Paolo bank where the Vatican didn't specify the money's ultimate destination despite a specific request by the Italian bank.
The prosecutors called this "a deliberate failure to observe the anti-laundering laws with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital." The Italian banks have declined comment.This is not the first major banking fraud case involving the Vatican. They were involved in one of the largest banking fraud cases in Italy following the mysterious 1980s collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, a scandal that was shrouded in murder and deceit, where:
Banco Ambrosiano collapsed following the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans the bank had made to several dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans.
While denying any wrongdoing, the Vatican bank agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano's creditors.It appears that this new Catholic Church banking fraud scandal is not unusual for the Vatican, and probably a welcome distraction from sex scandals. In the end, a modest fine will likely be paid, or perhaps a low-level paper pusher will be sacrificed to the authorities. Such is the modern justice for large institutional sinners.
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