Banksters Admit Guilt to Bank Crimes, Get Away With Murder!

Never in the history of mankind have so few stolen so much from so many and gotten away with it Scott free.  Five major banks pled guilty to criminal manipulation of foreign currency exchange rates. Banksters at Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and Swiss giant UBS all used online chat rooms to rig prices.

(I’m surprised that Bank of America missed its usual inclusion in such lists.)

Yes, the banks were fined anywhere from five to ten billion dollars for their crimes, but they probably profited far more than that. The imbalance between fines and profits, however, is not what I’m reporting here. The fines will do nothing to make banksters more upright in their trading because no individual banker paid for his crime. That is my grave concern.

In what sense have banksters gotten away with murder?

In a very real sense, actually. Banksters got away with murder because it was bankers who destroyed the entire global economy through their greed and deception, and destruction of the economy has certainly had the collateral damage of costing lives or, in the very least, livelihoods. When people lose jobs in mass, some kill themselves, some die because they no longer have medical coverage, some lose their retirement and cannot heat their homes, etc. While I cannot give you a body count for the collateral damage from the Great Recession, there is a real and enormous human cost to bank crimes on this scale.

The crime above is just one out of many that made the Great Recession what it was. Yet, your government proved with this crime that it doesn’t care. It is more interested in saving the banks and protecting cronies than in your inability to heat your home or pay for medical insurance because of the loss of a good-paying job, which was, at best, replaced with a poor paying job (in all likelihood).

You see, at the end of the day, corporations are not greedy and do not rob. People are greedy and people rob. They may rob a bank with a gun, or they may rob their customers, hiding behind corporate protection. It doesn’t matter. It is always people who do the crime. Therefore, it is always people who need to be charged. And none of the people involved in the above crime have been charged with a crime. None have been punished nor even threatened with punishment.

Instead, the bank they work for has been fined. What does that mean, except that, for these people, their employer is paying for their crimes. Most of these banksters won’t even lose their jobs because they are also the people at the top of the corporation who make the firing decisions, and they will protect each other. So, unless their boards step in and fire them, they will personally pay no price at all.

These banksters still profit from their crimes

You can be sure that these bank currency traders, who made big profits for their banks, improved their salaries or their stock options during the days when they were engaged in their criminal activity. Most likely, the banks will not rake that money back from them because most likely the CEO was fully aware of and behind their operation.

Until human beings go to jail in significant numbers for significant amounts of time for their role in creating the Great Recession or profiteering off of it, this kind of corrupt economic activity will not slow down. Not only will these same banksters take such risks again, but other bankers who behaved themselves will be enticed to a life of banksterism, seeing how obeying the rules has caused them to move can i buy zolpidem online more slowly up the ladder and gain less wealth than the banksters and seeing how the banksters paid nothing personally, even when caught. They will be kicking themselves for being so dumb as to be honest … unless they have iron-clad integrity.

The Obama administration shows no inclination to go after banking criminals, and Congress certainly isn’t raising much of a cacophony over it, as they should be. A stunning quiet about this subject pervades both sides of the political aisle.

Banks have been fined nearly $200 billion since the beginning of the Great Recession. Has it changed their behavior for the better? I suppose the answer will depend on who I ask, but I can tell you that banks are trading derivatives full of junk like never before, and the Federal Reserve is still bailing them out by buying their derivative securities so that the banks do not have to hold onto the risk of their junk bundles. ?Since last June, total world derivatives are estimated at $1.5 quadrillion — an increase of 194% over the exposure that triggered the Great Recession — and the banks that were “too big to fail” have doubled in size since we bailed them out.

There is another way in which neither bank nor bankster paid a price

If you are a very large bank, you can break the law with impunity because enforcing the law could damage the economy. In the present case, Rule 405 of the Securities Act of 1933 says that convicted felons can no longer (ever!) engage in underwriting public security offerings. Imagine what that would do if the entire bank could never again work in that market. (The entire bank did say it was guilty and, thereby, become a felon entity.)

None other than the recent chief guardian of justice at the Justice Department, Eric Holder, said,

I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute — if we do bring a criminal charge — it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.

So, the United States has become a nation of justice for all, except for the criminally obese. Because these behemoths of banking are too big to jail, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) gave them a “get out of jail free” card by saying that Rule 405 would be waved in their case. Even though these fat banks — more than any other entity — damaged the true and effective operation of currency exchanges, the commission in charge of regulating exchanges says these banksters can continue to operate in the exchange industry.

This is what happens when you bring a corporation to court (I can’t say “to justice” because that clearly didn’t happen.) instead of a person. I have no problem with the corporation paying huge fees so that the business does not benefit from hiring corrupt leaders — so that shareholders on corporate boards don’t get to rake in the benefit of hiring shady overseers — but I doubt the fine was enough to hurt shareholders as much as it should.

I have no problem with the corporation paying the fine, but it is the individuals involved who need to be charged as felons and barred from operating in exchanges ever again. Until they are barred, go to jail, and are individually fined an amount greater than all they made from their crimes, they will return to their greedy actions.

These banksters damaged the entire world, but apparently they are going to get away with it!

About David Haggith

Please see the "About " page for this site.

May 27, 2015 @ 12:10 pm

Uncategorized

bank crimes, the Great Recession