NO
PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN BARACK
OBAMA!
This
was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the
contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013
that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their
CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM
THE FED'S OLD BOY NETWORK
By Attorney Jonathan Emord
Author of "The Rise of Tyranny" and
"Global Censorship of Health Information"
December 19, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News, performed an enormous
service for the American public when it sued the Federal Reserve and the Clearing
House Association LLC, an institution created by several of the nation’s
largest banks, to force disclosure of secret loans made by the Federal Reserve
principally to the six largest U.S. banks but also to certain foreign banks.
The treasure trove of evidence ultimately obtained by Bloomberg reveals that
while the public Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailed out leading Wall
Street firms for the whopping sum of $700 billion, the Fed at the same time
doled out some $7.77 trillion (an astronomical sum equal to have the gross
domestic product). To make matters worse, the Fed expanded its emergency
discount lending program, giving tens of billions more to the same banks at an
interest rate of 1%, while the prime lending rate stood at over 3%. The banks
getting these funds often turned them into profit centers, lending out proceeds
from them at higher interest rates and pocketing the difference, profiting on
federal largesse.
The President and his top economic advisers bought the “too
big to fail” concept, the notion that regardless of how profligate,
irresponsible, even criminal, heads of the leading financial institutions in
America had been, it would be worse for the nation if those institutions were
to collapse. Consequently, while pushing a legislative agenda of public
bail-outs, the Obama Administration maintained a secret program of
multi-trillion dollar loans, including billions at below market interest rates.
The principal recipients of the funding were JPMorgan, Bank of America,
Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan
Stanley.
The General Accounting Office audit of the Federal Reserve
revealed that some $16 trillion was supplied in secret loans from the Federal
Reserve between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010. The largest single
recipients were Citigroup ($2.5 trillion); Morgan Stanley ($2 trillion);
Merrill Lynch ($2 trillion); Bank of America ($1.3 trillion); Barclays PLC
($868 billion); Bear Stearns ($853 billion); Goldman Sachs ($814 billion); the
Royal Bank of Scotland ($541 billion); JP Morgan Chase ($391 billion); and
Deutsche Bank ($354 billion).
Bloomberg discovered that while top banks were touting in
their press releases during the crisis that they had fiscal soundness, their
balance sheets were made up primarily of federal funds, most from the Federal
Reserve. Moreover, while many banks paid back the TARP funds, they most often
did so in reliance on the secret receipts of tens of billions of dollars in
Federal Reserve money (in other words, the pay back was in that sense a
charade: federal money paid back federal loans). In short, the
Administration was complicit in the orchestration of a massive fraud on the
American public, making it seem that the banks largely responsible for the
financial crisis were weathering the storm of their own accord when in fact
they were on board the good ship U.S. Taxpayer.
Meanwhile, the bad lending and financial dealing practices
that helped produce the financial crisis have been largely kept in place,
underwritten by the federal government. The top banks suddenly realized that
far from having to suffer ignominy and defeat for their abuses, they would be
kept alive by a seemingly endless flow of federal cash. Indeed, the feds
accepted as collateral for loans securities of virtually no worth and other
properties that would never support private commercial lending. By propping up
the major banks despite their irresponsible lending practices, the federal
government has given them a privileged financial status whereby private lenders
will give them terms far more favorable than their smaller competitors because
they understand the federal government will not let them fail. Economist call
this safety net a “moral hazard” (effective federal underwriting for heightened
risk taking that permits these lenders to profit at above market rates of
return in speculative investing without suffering financial liability for
loss). The amounts doled out by the federal government to the banks could
have paid off as much as one tenth of all of the delinquent mortgages,
Bloomberg determined.
Rather than be forced to take their losses on their enormous
junk portfolios and interbank lending practices, the top six banks were allowed
to keep the junk portfolios, maintain their dubious lending practices, and turn
to the Federal Reserve for money on demand whenever problems arose. Repeatedly
when the banks should have gone under due to poor lending practices and grossly
speculative profiteering, they were complimented by the Federal Reserve,
rescued, and then allowed to tout the falsehood that their success came from
sharp management rather than from secret loans. At the same time, these banks
and others have shut down commercial lending for small businesses nationwide.
The “too big to fail” justification for the massive federal
welfare dole to the top six United States banks was based on a faulty premise.
Without question the demise of the leading banks would entail hardship,
particularly for the employees of those institutions, but the long term
prognosis was good for a restructuring of the financial market through
bankruptcies and takeovers. The alternative to allowing the market to impose
its own swift and harsh corrective involves imposing a massive burden on every
American citizen for generations to come for the trillions spent to prop up a
few dozen Wall Street moguls. Rather than have the taxpayers pay an inflated
sum to keep the banks responsible for the financial crisis alive, the nation
could have spared itself an assumption of massive debt and witnessed the demise
of these banks and the rise of new competing financial institutions based on a
solid financial model.
The Bush and Obama Administration’s role as Santa Claus for
Wall Street has kept from Wall Street the needed lessons that would have
otherwise come from the collapse of the major lending institutions. Painful as
it may seem to some, it is far better to allow the market to experience a
correction for profligate lending practices than to force the American
taxpayers for generations to come to pay for the bad decisions made by a few
and to let those few go without suffering a single consequence beyond temporary
embarrassment.
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