DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TWO YEARS ALONE, PROFITS FOR HIS CRIMINAL
BANKSTER DONORS HAVE SOARED GREATER THAN 8 YEARS UNDER BUSH!
OBAMA HAS TAKEN MORE LOOT FROM THE BANKSTERS THAN ANY
PRESIDENT IN HISTORY.
HE PROMISED HIS BANKSTER CRONIES NO JAIL TIME, NO-STRINGS
BAILOUT WELFARE AND NO PRISON TIME.
HAS HE DELIVERED?
BANKSTER PROFITS AND CRIMES ARE SOARING… SO ARE
FORECLOSURES!
The JPMorgan scandal also throws into
relief the government’s failure to prosecute those responsible for the 2008
financial meltdown. Despite overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing and criminality
uncovered by two federal investigations last year, those responsible have been
shielded from prosecution.
Records show that four
out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants
- Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and
Citigroup ($358,054).
*
Meanwhile,
an investigation into the mortgage abuses that led to the financial crisis,
promised by President Obama in January, has been slow to produce results.
September 1, 2012
Still No Justice for Mortgage Abuses
It has been six months since the big banks
settled with state and federal officials over evidence of widespread
foreclosure fraud, promising to provide $25 billion in mortgage relief in
exchange for not being sued over past foreclosure abuses.
At the time, it looked like a sweet deal for
the banks. The fines were paltry compared with the damage done to homeowners
and the economy. And much of the relief the banks were obliged to provide could
be met by continuing more or less with business as usual.
It still looks like a sweet deal.
The Office of Mortgage Settlement Oversight, the
monitor of the settlement, released a preliminary report last week showing that
138,000 homeowners had received some form of relief from March 1 through June
30. That is roughly the number that would have been expected under various aid
programs in effect before the settlement. Worse, with some three million
borrowers now in or near foreclosure, according to Moody’s Analytics, it is
nowhere near the level of relief needed to fix the housing market.
The type of relief provided — mostly short
sales, in which a bank allows a homeowner to sell for less than is owed on the
mortgage — had become increasingly common before the settlement.
Short sales are better than foreclosures, in
part because they prevent vacancies that depress house values. But they are not
punishment for wrongdoing in any meaningful sense; rather, they allow banks to
get higher prices for underwater properties than they could have gotten in
foreclosure sales.
Nor do they fulfill the settlement’s main
purpose: to keep underwater borrowers in their homes by reducing the principal
on their mortgage loans. According to the monitor’s report, $8.7 billion of
debt has been written off in short sales versus only $750 million of principal
reduction from loan modifications.
The settlement was not, of course, intended as a
cure for the housing bust. And future progress reports will no doubt show many
more homeowners receiving big loan modifications. But, based on the banks’
performance so far, it also seems likely they will be able to structure the
required relief in ways designed to tidy up their balance sheets, rather than
to save as many homes as possible.
Even the relief that is provided may turn out to
be less than meets the eye. That’s because much of the debt forgiven in short
sales and loan modifications will be counted as taxable income to the
borrowers, creating huge tax bills they will not be able to pay.
Mortgage debt that is forgiven is exempt from
taxation under current law, but only if the debt was used to buy or improve the
house. The law does not exempt debt forgiven on many home equity loans, even
though the foreclosure settlement envisions billions of dollars in
modifications to such loans.
Several bills in Congress call for extending the
law, which is set to expire at the end of the year. But what is obviously
needed is a broader law shielding all forgiven mortgage debt from tax.
Meanwhile, an investigation into the mortgage
abuses that led to the financial crisis, promised by President Obama in
January, has been slow to produce results. The settlement left open the possibility of civil and criminal
suits on mortgage securitizations and other practices that inflated the bubble.
The aim is to produce deeper accountability and larger fines with which to
provide even more mortgage relief, but no suits have yet been filed.
The economy will not recover and justice will
not be done unless and until the mortgage mess is resolved.
*
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE LOOT FROM CRIMINAL
BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA! WHILE HIS DOJ IS OUT HARASSING LEGALS ON BEHALF OF
OBAMA’S LA RAZA PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS, THE BANKSTER GO UNPUNISHED!
DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TWO YEARS ALONE, HIS CRIMINAL
BANKSTERS’ PROFITS SOARED GREATER THAN ALL EIGHT UNDER BUSH!
BANKSTERS’ PROFITS AND CRIMES ARE SOARING… so are
foreclosures!
OBAMA and HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS – THE
LOOTING OF A NATION CONTINUES!
Records
show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial
industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase
($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
Consider the Obama
administration's choices for the four most important positions in financial
sector law enforcement. The attorney general (Eric Holder) and the head of the
Justice Department's criminal division (Lanny Breuer) both come to us from Covington &
Burling, a law firm that
represents and lobbies for most of the major banks and their industry
associations; indeed Breuer was co-head of its white collar criminal defense
practice, and represented the Moody's rating agency in the Enron case. Mary
Schapiro, the head of the SEC, spent the housing bubble in charge of FINRA, the
investment banking industry's "self-regulator," which gave her a $9 million severance for a job well done. And her head of
enforcement, perhaps most stunningly of all, is Robert Khuzami, who was general counsel for Deutsche Bank's North American
business during the entire bubble. So zero prosecutions isn't much of a
surprise, really.
Banking Is a Criminal Industry Because Its Crimes Go
Unpunished
Posted: 07/16/2012 8:23 am
Consider just this
month's news in financial services.
First,
Barclay's has been manipulating the Libor, the main interest rate upon which
most other interest rates and financial transactions are based, since 2005.
Moreover, Barclay's traders were colluding with traders in many other banks to
assist them in manipulating the Libor too, so that they could all profit from
their bets on it.
Second,
JP Morgan Chase is having a really great month. Recent reports describe how it
is resisting Federal subpoenas related to
price-fixing in U.S. electricity markets. It is also accused (by former
employees among others) of deliberately inflating the performance of its
investment funds to obtain business. And finally, JP Morgan's failed "London
whale"
trade, which has now cost over $5 billion, is being investigated to determine
whether the loss was initially concealed from regulators and the public.
Third,
HSBC is paying a fine because it allowed hundreds of
millions, perhaps billions, of dollars of money laundering by rogue states and
sanctioned firms, including some related to terrorist activities and Iran's
nuclear efforts. But HSBC is only one of at least 12 banks now known to have
tolerated, and in some cases aggressively courted, money laundering by rogue
states, terrorist organizations, corrupt dictators, and major drug cartels over
the last decade. Others include Barclay's, Lloyds, Credit Suisse, and Wachovia
(now part of Wells Fargo). Several of the banks created special handbooks on
how to evade surveillance, created special business units to handle money
laundering, and actively suppressed whistleblowers who warned of drug cartel
activities.
Fourth,
a new private lawsuit cites documents indicating that Morgan Stanley
successfully pressured rating agencies into inflating the ratings of
mortgage-backed securities it issued during the housing bubble.
Fifth,
Visa and Mastercard have just agreed
to pay
$7 billion to settle a private antitrust case filed by thousands of merchants,
who alleged that Visa and Mastercard colluded to fix fees and terms of service.
Just
another month in financial services. Is it unusual? No, it's not. If we go back
just a little further, we have UBS, HSBC, Julius Baer, and other banks actively
marketing tax evasion services to wealthy U.S. and European citizens. We have
senior executives of several banks (including JP Morgan Chase and UBS) strongly
suspecting that Bernard Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, but deciding to make
money from him rather than turn him in. And then, of course, we have the
financial crisis and everything that led to it. As I show in great detail in my
book Predator
Nation,
we now possess overwhelming evidence of massive securities fraud, accounting
fraud, perjury, and criminal Sarbanes-Oxley violations by mortgage lenders,
investment banks, and credit insurers (including senior executives of
Countrywide, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, AIG, and
Lehman Brothers) during the housing bubble that caused the financial crisis. If
we go back to the late 1990s, we have the massively fraudulent hyping of
Internet stocks, and several banks (including Merrill Lynch and Citigroup)
actively aiding Enron in committing its frauds.
So,
July 2012 really isn't abnormal at all. The reason for this is very simple.
Over the past two decades, the financial services industry has become a
pervasively unethical and highly criminal industry, with massive fraud
tolerated or even encouraged by senior management. But how did that happen?
Well,
deregulation helped, of course. But something else was far more important. It
is the one critical factor that unites all of the episodes cited above,
including those of this month. This critical unifying factor is the total
number of criminal prosecutions of major firms and senior executives as a
result of all of these crimes combined.
And
what is that number?
Zero.
Literally zero. A
number that neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney shows the slightest
interest in changing.
Consider the Obama
administration's choices for the four most important positions in financial
sector law enforcement. The attorney general (Eric Holder) and the head of the
Justice Department's criminal division (Lanny Breuer) both come to us from Covington &
Burling, a law firm that
represents and lobbies for most of the major banks and their industry
associations; indeed Breuer was co-head of its white collar criminal defense
practice, and represented the Moody's rating agency in the Enron case. Mary
Schapiro, the head of the SEC, spent the housing bubble in charge of FINRA, the
investment banking industry's "self-regulator," which gave her a $9 million severance for a job well done. And her head of
enforcement, perhaps most stunningly of all, is Robert Khuzami, who was general counsel for Deutsche Bank's North American
business during the entire bubble. So zero prosecutions isn't much of a
surprise, really.
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