"One of the premier institutions of big business,
JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the
10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a
government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama
will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact
of central bank actions in driving inequality between
asset owners and labor."
"JPMorgan
Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who was known as Barack Obama’s
favorite banker and who has been a major donor to the Democratic Party,
centered his annual letter to shareholders on a denunciation of
socialism."
BANKSTER SOCIALISM
Dimon’s bank
received tens of billions of dollars in government bailouts and
many billions more from the Obama administration’s ultra-low
interest rate and “quantitative easing” money-printing policies. He
told his shareholders that “socialism inevitably produces stagnation,
corruption” and “authoritarian government,” and would be “a
disaster for our country.”… UNLESS IT IS SOCIALISM FOR BANKSTERS AND WALL
STREET!
Trump criticized Dimon in 2013 for
supposedly contributing to the country’s economic downturn. “I’m not
Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion to settle a case and then pays $11
billion to settle a case and who I think is the worst banker in
the United States,” he told reporters.
Obama: JPMorgan Is 'One of the Best-Managed Banks'
By Mary Bruce | ABC OTUS News – 2 hrs 31 mins ago
Obama: JPMorgan Is 'One of the …
Lou Rocco / ABC News
Just hours after a top JPMorgan Chase executive
retired in the wake of a stunning $2 billion trading loss, President Obamatold
the hosts of ABC's "The View" that the bank's risky bets exemplified
the need for Wall Street reform.
*
JPMorgan Chase investigated for
manipulating California energy market
By Oliver Richards
23 July 2012
The California Independent Systems
Operator (CalISO), the nonprofit organization that coordinates the state’s
electricity market, has alleged that JPMorgan Chase& Co. manipulated the
state’s energy market, resulting in at least $73 million in improper
payments—costs passed along to the state’s energy consumers.
Global banking
system a network of criminality
23 September 2020
The great 19th century
French writer Honoré de Balzac once noted that behind every great fortune there
is a crime. In the 21st century, one would have to say that behind the great
fortunes of the world’s major banks there is a network of criminality. This reality
is documented in the revelations published over the weekend concerning a small
portion of the international operations of the world’s major banks.
Documents
from the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN,
obtained by BuzzFeed News and
investigated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists,
showed that between 1999 and 2017 more than $2 trillion in transactions were
flagged as involving possible money laundering or other criminal activities.
But as the investigation
revealed, the $2 trillion worth of suspicious transactions was “just a drop in
a far larger flood of dirty money gushing through banks around the world.” The
files examined in the investigation “represent less than 0.02 percent of the
more than 12 million suspicious activity reports that financial institutions
filed with FinCEN between 2011 and 2017.”
The United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime estimates that $2.4 trillion in illicit money is laundered
through the global banking system each year, equivalent to 2.7 percent of
global output, but only 1 percent of the illegal traffic is detected by the
authorities.
The banks involved are some
of the biggest names in the world, including JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Charter
Bank and Bank of New York Mellon. In some cases, they continued to profit from
the dirty money flow even after being previously fined.
Under existing laws, banks
are required to file suspicious activity reports (SARs) that point to potential
criminal activities. But any conception that this is a method of crime
prevention would be completely mistaken. In fact, it is a means of crime
facilitation.
As BuzzFeed News noted:
“Laws that were meant to stop financial crime have instead allowed it to
flourish. So long as a bank files a notice that it may be facilitating criminal
activity, it all but immunizes itself and its executives from criminal
prosecution. The suspicious activity alert effectively gives them a free pass
to keep moving the money and collecting the fees.”
In the rare cases where
authorities do decide to take action, it involves making a deal in which the
bank agrees to pay a fine. But the fine is not imposed on the executives
involved. It is paid for by the bank and treated as a minor operating cost,
while the bank continues to obtain fees and profits from the dirty money
transactions.
It would likewise be a grave
mistake to conclude that the criminal money operations are somehow separate
from the regular activities of the global financial and banking system. In
fact, they are an integral component of them. There is no Chinese wall
separating so-called legitimate activities from illegitimate ones.
In 2011, the US Senate
report on the 2008 financial crisis revealed that major banks such as Goldman
Sachs and Deutsche Bank were engaged in what amounted to outright criminal
activity in the lead-up to the crisis. This included selling financial products
they knew were going to fail, and then making deals to profit from the failure
of the same financial products.
No one was even prosecuted,
let alone jailed, and in an extraordinary admission to the Senate Judiciary
Committee in March 2013, President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder,
revealed why, essentially acknowledging that criminality was not some extraneous
activity, but was deeply embedded in the very foundations of the US and global
financial system.
“I am concerned,” he said,
“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. …”
A similar situation emerged
in 2012. Then-UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne wrote to Fed
Chairman Ben Bernanke and US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner about criminal
proceedings against Standard Charter and HSBC. He expressed “concerns” that a
heavy-handed approach could have “unintended consequences,” and warned of
“contagion.”
The FinCEN files
investigation details countless cases where authorities not only turned a blind
eye to money-laundering operations, but facilitated them. One of the more
egregious examples concerns UK-based HSBC, the largest bank in Europe. In 2012,
it admitted it had laundered some $881 million for Latin American drug cartels.
The US government deferred criminal charges for five years in return for the
payment of a $1.9 billion fine and a pledge by the bank that it would halt such
activities.
During the five-year
probation period, HSBC continued to shift money from criminal sources,
including Russian money launderers, but in December 2017 the government allowed
the bank to declare it had “lived up to all of its commitments” and the
criminal charges were dismissed.
What the FinCEN files
investigation has revealed is that the criminal activities of the major banks
do not take place in defiance of government authorities, but with their active
cooperation because they are so integral to the entire financial system.
Consequently, the force of
the state is not brought against the criminals at the top of the banking system
but utilized against those who expose them. There is a direct parallel here
with the case of the journalist Julian Assange, now facing extradition to the
US and 175 years in jail for exposing the war crimes of US imperialism.
After the US Treasury
Department received a series of questions on the FinCEN files, it issued a
statement that it was aware that various media outlets intended to publish a
series of articles based on “unlawfully disclosed” SARs. It said that “the
unauthorized disclosure of SARs is a crime that can impact the national
security of the United States, compromise law enforcement investigations, and
threaten the safety and security of the institutions and individuals who file
such reports.” It said Treasury was referring the matter to the Justice
Department.
Back in the early 1970s, UK
Prime Minister Edward Heath, confronted with the exposure of the corruption of
the British company Lonhro in Africa, referred to the “unacceptable face of
capitalism.” But the passing off of its activities as an “excess”—in order to
cover up the collaboration of the British government with Lonhro—cannot be
repeated today. The “unacceptable” or “ugly” face of capitalism has become the
norm.
This transformation is
rooted in the vast changes in the capitalist economy over the past 50 years,
above all, the rise of financialization. The accumulation of profit through
speculation, the creation of arcane derivatives, share buybacks and other forms
of “financial engineering” means there is now a seamless transition from
supposedly legitimate to outright criminal activity. They are virtually
indistinguishable.
The FinCEN files exposure is
yet another devastating refutation of all those who maintain there is some kind
of reformist solution at hand. What has been revealed is that all the arms of
the state—the financial regulators, the Treasury and the Fed—are facilitators
for the decay and rot that lies at very heart of the global financial system.
The banks occupy a central
position in the commanding heights of the capitalist economy. Their activities
determine the fate of billions of people around the world, wreaking havoc in
the pursuit of profit. The case for their expropriation, bringing them into
public ownership under democratic control, as the first step in laying the
basis for a planned economy based on human need, is overwhelming.
Biden has elated Wall Street so much that for the first time in a decade, more financial executives are donating to Democrat candidates than Republicans, the latest Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals.
CNN: ‘All the Big Banks’ on Wall Street Backing Joe Biden Against Trump
3,632
3:20
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is raking in Wall Street cash from all the big banks at five times the rate of President Trump, a CNN report admits.
An analysis by CNN found that “all the big banks are backing Biden” against Trump, with the former vice president taking a larger margin of Wall Street donations than even failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
CNN reports:
The securities and investment industry donated just $10.5 million to Trump’s presidential campaign and outside groups aligned with it, according to a new tally by OpenSecrets. It has sent nearly five times as much cash, $51.1 million, to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. [Emphasis added]
That means Trump is losing the fundraising race among Wall Streeters by a slightly greater magnitude than in 2016. During that cycle, former New York Senator Hillary Clinton and groups aligned with her raised $88 million from the securities and investment industry, while Trump took in just $20.8 million. [Emphasis added]
…
But a CNN Business analysis of OpenSecrets research shows that Biden is beating Trump in fundraising from all of America’s big banks — in some cases by wide margins. [Emphasis added]
At the big banks — which saw little-to-no consequences for their role in the 2008 financial crisis — Biden is sweeping up donations from employees by huge margins. At Goldman Sachs, for example, Biden has raised more than $156,000, while Trump has taken less than $12,000.
JPMorgan Chase employees have given three times as much campaign cash to Biden as Trump. Biden has taken nearly $380,000. At Morgan Stanley, Biden has taken more than twice as much as Trump, taking nearly $258,000 from the bank’s employees compared to Trump’s $96,010.
Despite pitching himself as a defender of blue-collar Americans, Biden has not only been widely backed by Wall Street but also by wealthy residents on Park Avenue.
Biden’s campaign has raised over $1 million from donors living on Park Avenue, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings, as Breitbart News reported. This is more than eight times the $127,000 raised by the Trump campaign from the same area.
This month, Biden touted Wall Street’s support for his plan to abolish America’s suburbs by seizing control of local zoning laws to construct housing developments and multi-family buildings in neighborhoods. Likewise, Wall Street is behind Biden’s plan to hugely expand legal immigration levels, beyond already historical highs at 1.2 million green cards and 1.4 million visa workers a year.
Biden has elated Wall Street so much that for the first time in a decade, more financial executives are donating to Democrat candidates than Republicans, the latest Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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