Why Bankers Rule the World

[Steven Gaal]

???? ONLY financial institutions hurt ???

=================================

The Victims in the Libor Scandal Include Local Governments and Local Taxpayers

By: David Dayen Thursday July 5, 2012 1:35 pm

As we absorb the Libor banking scandal, one of the things that will drive it is a recognition of who this hurt, at whose expense Barclays and a host of other banks made profits by manipulating the benchmark lending rate. Kevin Drum argues that it’s limited to floating-rate interest note investors, traders on futures exchanges who used Libor, or perhaps investors in Libor-linked CDs. This doesn’t have the kind of victims who are completely sympathetic. You can argue that, since Libor was a benchmark rate, anyone who had any adjustable-rate lending instrument was susceptible to being ripped off. But sometimes banks rigged Libor up and sometimes they rigged it down, frustrating efforts to figure out when they screwed people with those attributes and when they actually helped them. But Barry Ritholtz argues for a much broader view:

Bloomberg’s Darrell Preston explained last year how cities and other local governments got scalped when rates were manipulated downward:

In the U.S., municipal borrowers used swaps to guard against the risk of higher interest costs on variable-rate debt by exchanging payments with another entity and tying how much they pay to an underlying value such as an index. The agreements can backfire if rates move in unexpected directions, resulting in issuers making larger payments.The derivatives were often designed to offset the risks of increases in the short-term rates tied to auction-rate securities, fixing borrowers’ costs by trading their debt- service payments with another party. Instead, rates dropped [...]

Ellen Brown adds:

For more than a decade, banks and insurance companies convinced local governments, hospitals, universities and other non-profits that interest rate swaps would lower interest rates on bonds sold for public projects such as roads, bridges and schools. The swaps were entered into to insure against a rise in interest rates; but instead, interest rates fell to historically low levels. This was not a flood, earthquake, or other insurable risk due to environmental unknowns or “acts of God.” It was a deliberate, manipulated move by the Fed, acting to save the banks from their own folly in precipitating the credit crisis of 2008. The banks got in trouble, and the Federal Reserve and federal government rushed in to bail them out, rewarding them for their misdeeds at the expense of the taxpayers [...]

Banks and borrowers were supposed to be paying equal rates: the fat years would balance out the lean. But the Fed artificially manipulated the rates to the save the banks. After the credit crisis broke out, borrowers had to continue selling adjustable-rate securities at auction under the deals. Auction interest rates soared when bond insurers’ ratings were downgraded because of subprime mortgage losses; but the periodic payments that banks made to borrowers as part of the swaps plunged, because they were linked to benchmarks such as Federal Reserve lending rates, which were slashed to almost zero.

So I think there are plenty sympathetic victims here. Local governments – and that’s basically taxpayer money – were particularly vulnerable.

The fact that what we know of the scandal is a mere head of a pin, and that Bob Diamond and others implicated in the scandal are singing like canaries – “Banks across the world were fixing interest rates,” in his view – suggests that much more will come out about this. After all, Barclays is the one of at least a dozen banks who have COOPERATED in the investigation thus far. Diamond may not be a reliable narrator, but there are plenty that can still come out of the woodwork here.

And everyone is flipping: Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is interested primarily in implicating Labour officials:

As the pressure on Diamond was renewed yesterday, Chancellor George Osborne ramped up hostilities with Labour over Britain’s banking culture, accusing Ed Balls and other Labour former ministers of being “clearly involved” in intervening over the Libor rate.

The carefully-staged intervention by Osborne, immediately dismissed by Balls’s team as “desperate” and “frenzied”, was designed to intensify the pressure on Labour as Ed Miliband tries to establish a judge-led inquiry into the banking scandal.

Nobody will come out looking particularly good here. And ultimately, as the Economist writes in a cover story which splashes the word “Banksters” (!) on the front page, this is about a culture of greed and venality:

The story will probably now shift to civil courts around the world: that could be a long process. From a public-interest perspective, two tasks lie ahead. The first is to find out exactly what happened and to punish those involved. Where the only motive was greed, the individuals directly involved in fraud should face jail. If the rate was lowered to keep the bank afloat, and regulators were involved, both the bankers and their rule-setters should explain why they took it upon themselves to endanger the City’s reputation in this way. In Britain an independent inquiry makes sense—the speedier the better, which argues for the parliamentary sort the government wants rather than the judicial variety the opposition demands.

The second task is to change the way finance is run—and the culture of banking. This after all is not the first price-fixing scandal: Wall Street has had several. A witch hunt would be disastrous (see Bagehot), but culture flows from structure. The case for splitting retail and investment banks on “moral” grounds is weak, but individual banks could do more: drawing fines from the bonus pool is one example. And some rules must change. LIBOR is set under the aegis not of the regulator but of a trade body, the British Bankers’ Association. That may have worked in the gentlemanly days when “the governor’s eyebrows” were enough to keep bankers in order. These days the City is the world’s biggest centre of international finance.

The Economist talks of a forfeiture of trust in the leading financial institutions. That was forfeited for many of us a long time ago. But if it takes establishment organs a scandal of this magnitude to come along, so be it.

[Len Colby]

The banks artificially LOWERED the interest rates, the primary victims were other financial institutions.

???? ONLY financial institutions hurt ???

=================================

Straw man fallacy

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/strawman.html

[Steven Gaal]

^{Government and Big Banks Joined Forces to Violently Crush Peaceful Protests}

^{January 1, 2013}

^{Source: Washington’s Blog}

^{The definition of fascism used by Mussolini is the “merger of state and corporate power“.}

^{Government and the big banks are in a malignant, symbiotic relationship. And our economy now exhibits a merger of state and bank power.}

^{Prominent economist Robert Kuttner said in 2009:}

^{What we have is something perilously close to a dictatorship of the Fed and the Treasury, acting in the interests of Wall Street.}

^{The government and banks use anti-terror laws to stifle dissent.}

^{As Naomi Wolf reports, they joined efforts to violently crush the occupy protests:}

^{The violent crackdown on Occupy last fall … was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was}

^{coordinated with the big banks themselves}

^.

^{[ A newly-released document] shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the}

^{cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.}

^….

^{Plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target ….}

^{The FBI – though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a “terrorist threat”….}

^{The executive Director of The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund – the group which obtained the document – Verheyden-Hilliard points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it “police-statism”:}

^{“This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”}

^{The documents show stunning range: in Denver, Colorado, that branch of the FBI and a “Bank Fraud Working Group” met in November 2011 – during the Occupy protests – to surveil the group. The Federal Reserve of Richmond, Virginia had its own private security surveilling Occupy Tampa and Tampa Veterans for Peace and passing privately-collected information on activists back to the Richmond FBI, which, in turn, categorized OWS activities under its “domestic terrorism” unit. The Anchorage, Alaska “terrorism task force” was watching Occupy Anchorage. The Jackson, Michigan “joint terrorism task force” was issuing a “counterterrorism preparedness alert” about the ill-organized grandmas and college sophomores in Occupy there. Also in Jackson, Michigan, the FBI and the “Bank Security Group” – multiple private banks – met to discuss the reaction to “National Bad Bank Sit-in Day” (the response was violent, as you may recall). The Virginia FBI sent that state’s Occupy members’ details to the Virginia terrorism fusion center. The Memphis FBI tracked OWS under its “joint terrorism task force” aegis, too. And so on, for over 100 pages.}

^{Eric Zuesse notes:}

^{The FBI was organizing against the OWS movement even before it was known to the general public, and they kept on their campaign against it, until it was dead.}

^…

^{The FBI’s police-state snooping and tracking of Occupy Wall Street … had begun even before most Americans knew that there was any such movement for the FBI to snoop against.}

^{In other words, the reason why Barack Obama’s “Justice” Department refuses to prosecute even a single one of the mega-bank executives who profited so enormously from having defrauded both mortgagees and the investors in mortgage-backed securities, and who were bailed out by future U.S. taxpayers whose government purchased those remaining “toxic assets” at 100 cents on the dollar, is clear: we live in a police state, and these elite crooks control it. This is not real democracy.}

^{Voters were given a choice in November between a President like that but whose liberal rhetoric is condemnatory of “Wall Street,” versus a professional stripper of corporations, whose rhetoric was overtly supportive of Wall Street. And voters chose the former. But this nonetheless is a police state, not an authentic democracy.}

^{Mussolini would recognize it as fascism.}

[Steven Gaal]

^{Secrets and Lies of the Bailout}

^{The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come}

^{http://www.rollingst...ailout-20130104}

^{Read more: http://www.rollingst...4#ixzz2HOsYkpKL}

^{By Matt Taibbi}

^{January 4, 2013 4:25 PM ET}

^{Illustration by Victor Juhasz}

^{It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?}

^Wrong.

^{It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.}

^{How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform}

^{But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue. Money wasn't the only thing the government gave Wall Street – it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us. And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs. "It is," says former bailout Inspector General Neil Barofsky, "the ultimate bait-and-switch."}

^{The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout. The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed. Investors may not actually believe the lie, but they are impressed by how totally committed the government has been, from the very beginning, to selling it.}

^{THEY LIED TO PASS THE BAILOUT}

^{Today what few remember about the bailouts is that we had to approve them. It wasn't like Paulson could just go out and unilaterally commit trillions of public dollars to rescue Goldman Sachs and Citigroup from their own stupidity and bad management (although the government ended up doing just that, later on). Much as with a declaration of war, a similarly extreme and expensive commitment of public resources, Paulson needed at least a film of congressional approval. And much like the Iraq War resolution, which was only secured after George W. Bush ludicrously warned that Saddam was planning to send drones to spray poison over New York City, the bailouts were pushed through Congress with a series of threats and promises that ranged from the merely ridiculous to the outright deceptive. At one meeting to discuss the original bailout bill – at 11 a.m. on September 18th, 2008 – Paulson actually told members of Congress that $5.5 trillion in wealth would disappear by 2 p.m. that day unless the government took immediate action, and that the world economy would collapse "within 24 hours."}

^{To be fair, Paulson started out by trying to tell the truth in his own ham-headed, narcissistic way. His first TARP proposal was a three-page absurdity pulled straight from a Beavis and Butt-Head episode – it was basically Paulson saying, "Can you, like, give me some money?" Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, remembers a call with Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. "We need $700 billion," they told Brown, "and we need it in three days." What's more, the plan stipulated, Paulson could spend the money however he pleased, without review "by any court of law or any administrative agency."}

^{The White House and leaders of both parties actually agreed to this preposterous document, but it died in the House when 95 Democrats lined up against it. For an all-too-rare moment during the Bush administration, something resembling sanity prevailed in Washington.}

^{So Paulson came up with a more convincing lie. On paper, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was simple: Treasury would buy $700 billion of troubled mortgages from the banks and then modify them to help struggling homeowners. Section 109 of the act, in fact, specifically empowered the Treasury secretary to "facilitate loan modifications to prevent avoidable foreclosures." With that promise on the table, wary Democrats finally approved the bailout on October 3rd, 2008. "That provision," says Barofsky, "is what got the bill passed."}

^{But within days of passage, the Fed and the Treasury unilaterally decided to abandon the planned purchase of toxic assets in favor of direct injections of billions in cash into companies like Goldman and Citigroup. Overnight, Section 109 was unceremoniously ditched, and what was pitched as a bailout of both banks and homeowners instantly became a bank-only operation – marking the first in a long series of moves in which bailout officials either casually ignored or openly defied their own promises with regard to TARP.}

^{Congress was furious. "We've been lied to," fumed Rep. David Scott, a Democrat from Georgia. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, raged at transparently douchey TARP administrator (and Goldman banker) Neel Kashkari, calling him a "chump" for the banks. And the anger was bipartisan: Republican senators David Vitter of Louisiana and James Inhofe of Oklahoma were so mad about the unilateral changes and lack of oversight that they sponsored a bill in January 2009 to cancel the remaining $350 billion of TARP.}

^{So what did bailout officials do? They put together a proposal full of even bigger deceptions to get it past Congress a second time. That process began almost exactly four years ago – on January 12th and 15th, 2009 – when Larry Summers, the senior economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, sent a pair of letters to Congress. The pudgy, stubby­fingered former World Bank economist, who had been forced out as Harvard president for suggesting that women lack a natural aptitude for math and science, begged legislators to reject Vitter's bill and leave TARP alone.}

^{In the letters, Summers laid out a five-point plan in which the bailout was pitched as a kind of giant populist program to help ordinary Americans. Obama, Summers vowed, would use the money to stimulate bank lending to put people back to work. He even went so far as to say that banks would be denied funding unless they agreed to "increase lending above baseline levels." He promised that "tough and transparent conditions" would be imposed on bailout recipients, who would not be allowed to use bailout funds toward "enriching shareholders or executives." As in the original TARP bill, he pledged that bailout money would be used to aid homeowners in foreclosure. And lastly, he promised that the bailouts would be temporary – with a "plan for exit of government intervention" implemented "as quickly as possible."}

^{The reassurances worked. Once again, TARP survived in Congress – and once again, the bailouts were greenlighted with the aid of Democrats who fell for the old "it'll help ordinary people" sales pitch. "I feel like they've given me a lot of commitment on the housing front," explained Sen. Mark Begich, a Democrat from Alaska.}

^{But in the end, almost nothing Summers promised actually materialized. A small slice of TARP was earmarked for foreclosure relief, but the resultant aid programs for homeowners turned out to be riddled with problems, for the perfectly logical reason that none of the bailout's architects gave a xxxx about them. They were drawn up practically overnight and rushed out the door for purely political reasons – to trick Congress into handing over tons of instant cash for Wall Street, with no strings attached. "Without those assurances, the level of opposition would have remained the same," says Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a leading progressive who voted against TARP. The promise of housing aid, in particular, turned out to be a "paper tiger."}

^{(SEE SITE FOR MORE)}

Edited January 9, 2013 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

I generally respect Taibbi, especially for his views re:9/11, and one can dispute the necessity for and effects of the bailout but several sources report the Bailout has been almost entirely repaid with interest.

[Steven Gaal]

PAGE 5 of article

==========================

The inherent advantage of bigger banks – the permanent, ongoing bailout they are still receiving from the government – has led to a host of gruesome consequences. All the big banks have paid back their TARP loans, while more than 300 smaller firms are still struggling to repay their bailout debts. Even worse, the big banks, instead of breaking down into manageable parts and becoming more efficient, have grown even bigger and more unmanageable, making the economy far more concentrated and dangerous than it was before. America's six largest banks – Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley – now have a combined 14,420 subsidiaries, making them so big as to be effectively beyond regulation. A recent study by the Kansas City Fed found that it would take 70,000 examiners to inspect such trillion-dollar banks with the same level of attention normally given to a community bank. "The complexity is so overwhelming that no regulator can follow it well enough to regulate the way we need to," says Sen. Brown, who is drafting a bill to break up the megabanks.

Worst of all, the Implicit Guarantee has led to a dangerous shift in banking behavior. With an apparently endless stream of free or almost-free money available to banks – coupled with a well-founded feeling among bankers that the government will back them up if anything goes wrong – banks have made a dramatic move into riskier and more speculative investments, including everything from high-risk corporate bonds to mortgage­backed securities to payday loans, the sleaziest and most disreputable end of the financial system. In 2011, banks increased their investments in junk-rated companies by 74 percent, and began systematically easing their lending standards in search of more high-yield customers to lend to.

This is a virtual repeat of the financial crisis, in which a wave of greed caused bankers to recklessly chase yield everywhere, to the point where lowering lending standards became the norm. Now the government, with its Implicit Guarantee, is causing exactly the same behavior – meaning the bailouts have brought us right back to where we started. "Government intervention," says Klaus Schaeck, an expert on bailouts who has served as a World Bank consultant, "has definitely resulted in increased risk."

And while the economy still mostly sucks overall, there's never been a better time to be a Too Big to Fail bank. Wells Fargo reported a third-quarter profit of nearly $5 billion last year, while JP Morgan Chase pocketed $5.3 billion – roughly double what both banks earned in the third quarter of 2006, at the height of the mortgage bubble. As the driver of their success, both banks cite strong performance in – you guessed it – the mortgage market.

So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we're essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.

Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.

This article is from the January 17th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104#ixzz2Hb4iCmsD

Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

[Steven Gaal]

World Banker Makes Stunning Confession

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Cathleen

Uploaded on May 31, 2011 by PremierLegend

Confession [kənˈfɛʃən] n 1. the act of confessing 2. something confessed 3. an acknowledgment or declaration, esp of one’s faults, intentions, misdeeds, or crimes…

THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD BANK, JAMES WOLFENSOHN, MAKES STUNNING CONFESSIONS AS HE ADDRESS GRADUATE STUDENTS AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY. HE REVEALS THE INSIDE HAND OF WORLD DOMINATION FROM PAST, TO THE PRESENT AND INTO THE FUTURE. THE SPEECH WAS MADE JANUARY 11TH, 2010. THE NEXT 19 MINUTES MAY OPEN YOUR MIND TO A VERY DELIBERATE WORLD!

HE TELLS THE GRAD STUDENTS WHAT’S COMING, “A TECTONIC SHIFT” IN WEALTH FROM THE WEST TO THE EAST. BUT HE DOESN’T TELL THE STUDENTS THAT IT IS HIS INSTITUTION, THE WORLD BANK, THAT’S DIRECTING AND CHANNELING THESE CHANGES.

WOLFENSOHN’S OWN INVESTMENT FIRM IS IN CHINA, POISED TO PROFIT FROM THIS “IMMINENT SHIFT” IN GLOBAL WEALTH.

SEE FULL SPEECH: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCPRhp…

[Steven Gaal]

The Richest 1 Percent Have Captured 121 Percent Of Income Gains During The Recovery

By Pat Garofalo on Feb 12, 2013 at 1:00 pm

Last year, economist Emmanuel Saez estimated that the richest 1 percent of the U.S. captured a whopping 93 percent of the income gains in 2010, as the U.S. was emerging from the Great Recession. Saez is now back with updated numbers from 2011, and they make the picture look even grimmer:

From 2009 to 2011, average real income per family grew modestly by 1.7% (Table 1) but the gains were very uneven. Top 1% incomes grew by 11.2% while bottom 99% incomes shrunk by 0.4%.

Hence, the top 1% captured 121% of the income gains in the first two years of the recovery.

From 2009 to 2010, top 1% grew fast and then stagnated from 2010 to 2011. Bottom 99% stagnated both from 2009 to 2010 and from 2010 to 2011.

How is it possible for the 1 percent to capture more than all of the nation’s income gains? The number is due to the fact that those at the bottom saw their incomes drop. As Timothy Noah explained in the New Republic, “the one percent didn’t just gobble up all of the recovery during 2010 and 2011; it put the 99 percent back into recession.”

Saez added that “In 2012, top 1% income will likely surge, due to booming stock-prices, as well as re-timing of income to avoid the higher 2013 top tax rates…This suggests that the Great Recession has only depressed top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s.”

[Steven Gaal]

===================

Song - Brian Cowen's Lament

Lyrics

IRELAND NEEDS THE IMF

LIKE ANNE FRANK NEEDED A DRUM KIT

IRELAND NEEDS THE IMF

LIKE GHANDI NEEDED A HAIRCUT

IRELAND NEEDS THE IMF

LIKE THE CHILDREN NEED THE VATICAN

COWEN STOOD THERE

BEFORE THE WORLDS PRESS

DID HIS LEVEL BEST

TO DUELY IMPRESS

HIS SUIT AND HIS TIE

TO SOFTEN THE LIES

BUT HIS FIDGETING HANDS

AS HE SOLD OFF OUR LAND

TOLD US THE TRUTH

CORPORATE TAX

12 PER CENT STAYS INTACT

SOLIDARITY

IS EVERYTHING NOW

LENIHAN TOO

HAD HIS WORDS TO CHOSE

100 BILLION, AND NO MORE (yeah, right!)

AS HE SOLD OFF OUR LAND

OUR CHILDRENS LAND

WHAT WE GIVE TO THE BANKS

THEY PLY AS A TRADE

MAKING MONEY OUT OF MONEY

IN DEVIOUS WAYS

AND WHEN IT GOES WRONG

THEY SING US THIS SONG

AND WE GET TO PAY FOR THE PAPER.

[Steven Gaal]

The Banks Show No Mercy: 10 Foreclosure Horror Stories That Will Blow Your Mind

February 25, 2013

Michael Snyder, BLN Contributing Writer

During the last housing crash, the big banks begged the federal government for help and they received it, but when average Americans ask the big banks for help most of the time the banks show no mercy whatsoever. If you fall behind on your mortgage payments, the big banks have shown that they are willing to be absolutely ruthless. They will change locks in the middle of the night, they will toss disabled veterans and families with children out into the street in the middle of winter, and sometimes once the foreclosure process has begun they will not even allow someone to come forward and offer to pay off the loan if they think that they can make more money by selling the home. The big banks will often string homeowners along for months or even years with loan modification promises, only to drop the hammer on them at the most inopportune time. Over the past several years there has been case after case where mortgage documents have “disappeared”, where big banks have “manufactured” missing documents out of thin air and there have even been cases where big banks have tried to foreclose on homes that do not even have a mortgage. Once in a while, the big banks get a small slap on the wrist, but nobody ever really gets into much trouble for any of this. In fact, the big banks just continue to gain even more market share and even more power. Hopefully when some of these foreclosure horror stories start to become publicized more widely we will start to see some real changes in the marketplace.

The following are 10 foreclosure horror stories that will blow your mind…

#1 If you get behind on your mortgage, your family might be tossed into the street at gunpoint in the middle of the night…

This week, Christine Frazer and her family were thrown out of the Atlanta home they’d lived in for 18 years, at gunpoint in the dead of night.

They were not set upon by robbers, but by the Dekalb County Sheriff’s department, which evicted the family at the request of Investors One Corporation. As

Steven Rosenfeld reported for AlterNet

, it was the fourth company to buy the family’s mortgage in eight months.

#2 Time after time we have seen authorities show absolutely no mercy when conducting these evictions…

It was bad enough when 62-year-old disabled veteran Ramsey Harris was evicted from a foreclosed house on Jamaica Lane where the former owner had been letting him live.

Then it started to rain as all his worldly possessions sat in a heap by the side of the road and Harris noticed some of his valuables were missing.

“It was just ugly,” Harris said Friday. “I was just broken-hearted. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. I ended up standing, watching all my life’s work go down the tubes.”

#3 Sometimes financial institutions will promise you a loan modification for many months and then turn around and foreclose on you anyway…

When the economy crashed and his business slowed down, Wells Fargo offered to modify Steve Bailey’s loan to lower his payments. After making a series of trial payments, Wells Fargo notified Steve that his modification was on the way.

A few days later he received a letter stating that his modification had been denied. The Wells Fargo representative he spoke with reassured him that they had made a mistake and that he should keep making the payments, which he did for seven months.

Steve then started to receive foreclosure notices. Again, the bank representative assured him that the notices had been sent in error.

Then Steve checked his credit. Wells Fargo had reported him delinquent on his mortgage for the last six months. The reduced payments that Steve had agreed to pay for the previous months had been put into a separate trust by Wells Fargo, and they had not gone towards his mortgage.

Steve took the case to court but lost despite mountains of evidence in his favor. He lost his home and his business.

#4 Other homeowners have found themselves trapped in loan modification hell for years…

I am self-employed, have been all my life and have owned a home for 30 years. When I started my Loan Modification process in August of 09 I WAS NOT behind on any payments. I sent full documentation, over 150 pages, with the things they needed to verify my income. I am now 2 payments behind and I am getting nowhere. They keep flipping me between Loss Mitigation and Imminent Default, back and fourth month end month out. I made a habit of calling every week, then every two weeks just to be sure all was moving forward. From the middle of November I was told my file was with the underwriter and it would only be 30-60 days. I began automatically updating my income verification, verification that I still resided at the property and an updated 4506-T every month. In the middle of April a rep finally told me I was not in the loan modification process. In fact, that I had been denied on March 2. Keep in mind, I’m talking to these people every 2 weeks. She did a financial interview and sent me a new packet so that I could start all over, resubmitting all the documentation yet again. She told me she was my Account Manager. I completed the packet, called with a question (2 weeks later – over a week to receive the packet and another few days to complete it and gather all my documents again) and learned that my “Account Manager” was on maternity leave and I now didn’t have an account manager. Also, I was told that I had received the incorrect packet…it was the old version rather than the updated version. She asked me to fax four or five pieces of information in the hopes it would, quote, “jump start my file back into the process” and said she we send me another packet. That was mid April. Here we sit, 2-1/2 months later, I have still not received anything in writing about my rejection. And, though I’ve now had people tell me on three separate occasions that I would receive a new packet, it has yet to show up on my door step. I asked several times why my application was denied and the answer I finally got last week was that it was because I was DELIQUENT in my payments. Call me crazy but I thought that was the whole point??!! I almost hired a third party but am so hesitant to take that step. Every time I get on the phone with them it takes an hour out of my day and I am usually so upset I find it difficult to work, so I just don’t call. I’m going to sit back and regroup and decide what I need to do next.

#5 Sometimes a big bank will kick someone out of their home and then never actually take possession of the house. As a result, many former homeowners now find themselves stuck with thousands of dollars of unpaid bills. For example, a recent CNN article told the story of Rose Nathan, a 37-year-old office manager…

Nathan lost her South Bend, Ind., home in January 2009, after working out a deal with CitiMortgage to voluntarily walk away in a “deed in lieu of foreclosure.”

“On Christmas Eve, the bank called and told me a sheriff’s sale was coming and I had to move out right away,” she said. “So that’s what I did — seven days after New Year’s.”

She sold her belongings and moved to Hawaii. Nearly two years later, she received a property tax bill from the City of South Bend for $5,000. The bank had never taken possession of the house.

These unpaid taxes that she didn’t even know about have absolutely destroyed Nathan’s finances…

Meanwhile, the unpaid debt has crushed Nathan’s credit score. The deed-in-lieu alone lowered her score by 80 to 120 points, but the unpaid debt meant her credit kept taking a hit. Eventually her credit card companies cut her off, even though she said she was making her payments

.

Her auto loan now carries a 25% rate. Her car insurance premiums have skyrocketed

.

She can only afford a one-bedroom apartment where she lives with her three kids. And forget about buying another home. “Nobody will give me a mortgage,” she said.

#6 Sometimes a big bank will decide to foreclose on you even when you have been making all of your payments. Just check out what real estate agent Mark Conca went through with one major bank…

He decided to approach his lender, Bank of America, to see if he’d qualify for a modification. After he applied, many months passed and Conca heard nothing from the bank. Knowing lenders had huge backups in modification requests, he remained patient.

Conca, 41, continued to make the full payment on the mortgage for his Caldwell home, on time, every month.

But that’s not what Bank of America said when it sent Conca a letter about its intent to foreclose.

“I would have been better going to a loan shark and borrowing all that money,” Conca said. “At least with the street mafia, you know where you stand.”

#7 Sadly, the customer service at many of these large financial institutions is almost non-existent. In fact, sometimes representatives from these companies will literally tell you that they won’t lift a finger to help you…

After a car accident

wound up on disability and had trouble making her mortgage payments. She had a friend who was willing to help her make her back payments, but that friend wanted to see a payment history before giving her the money. Nava called her mortgage lender to request that history—and was told it would cost her $50 per hour, and take 90 days to receive it.

So she tried again, calling the president of the company. She got a voicemail response that shocked her so much she recorded it and saved it.

“Let me enlighten you, Kathy. First of all, there’s nothing in your contract with us says we owe you any history, now, next year, five years from now or the next time…I’ve begun foreclosure today. I bet you’re sorry now that you made that phone call. I don’t need to put up with your crap, OK?…Bottom line, I’m doing nothing for you now.”

Indeed, she did end up losing her home.

#8 Sometimes the big banks will try to foreclose even when you paid cash for your house and you don’t even have a mortgage…

Charlie and Maria Cardoso are among the millions of Americans who have experienced the misery and embarrassment that come with home foreclosure.

Just one problem: The Massachusetts couple paid for their future retirement home in Spring Hill with cash in 2005, five years before agents for Bank of America seized the house, removed belongings and changed the locks on the doors, according to a lawsuit the couple have filed in federal court.

#9 Dealing with these big banks is so incredibly frustrating that some homeowners have completely snapped. For example, one very frustrated homeowner in Ohio decided to crash his SUV into his own home…

30-year-old Steve Doak told deputies he was recently served with foreclosure papers and wanted to destroy the house rather than turn it over to the bank. The sheriff’s office says Doak drove the vehicle into fencing and then into the rear of the house

#10 Another very frustrated homeowner literally bulldozed his own home…

“The average homeowner that can’t afford an attorney or can fight as long as we have, they don’t stand a chance,” he said.

Hoskins said he’d gotten a $170,000 offer from someone to pay off the house, but the bank refused, saying they could get more from selling it in foreclosure.

Hoskins told News 5′s Courtis Fuller that he issued the bank an ultimatum.

“I’ll tear it down before I let you take it,” Hoskins told them.

And that’s exactly what Hoskins did.

Meanwhile, the big banks that are doing all of this continue to receive billions of dollars in assistance from the federal government. The following is from a recent Bloomberg article…

When JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon testifies in the U.S. House today, he will present himself as a champion of free-market capitalism in opposition to an overweening government. His position would be more convincing if his bank weren’t such a beneficiary of corporate welfare.

To be precise, JPMorgan receives a government subsidy worth about $14 billion a year, according to research published by the International Monetary Fund and our own analysis of bank balance sheets. The money helps the bank pay big salaries and bonuses. More important, it distorts markets, fueling crises such as the recent subprime-lending disaster and the sovereign-debt debacle that is now threatening to destroy the euro and sink the global economy.

Sadly, when the next wave of the economic crisis strikes, we are probably going to see millions more foreclosures and thousands upon thousands of more stories just like these.

[Steven Gaal]

Bank Of America Is Spying On Private Citizens

Anonymous reveals Bank of America secrets.

CNET BusInsider

Last week Par:AnoIA, a group linked to Anonymous, released 14 GB of data implicating Bank of America and others in a massive spying operation. The data dump reveals the bank employed security firms to spy on hackers, social activists and numerous other private citizens across the web.

A statement issued Feb. 27 indicates the data contains detailed information about hundreds of thousands of executives at companies around the world, including Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, TEKSystems and BofA.

The group says the data was not acquired during a hack but rather was retrieved from an unsecured server in Israel.

The documents leaked by Anonymous include "intelligence" reports allegedly compiled by TEKSystems on "daily cyber threats" from around the world and Internet activity related to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The data dump comes three weeks after the Federal Reserve confirmed that one of its internal Web sites had been hacked.

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The group says that Bank of America employed private IT firms such as TEKsystems to spy on hacker forums and social media networks. Special software was created to use keywords to xxxxx the internet in order to judge sentiment about BoA among other things.

According to the website of TEKsystems,

We have the largest global network of credentialed IT professionals to lead and support your engagements. With over 100 locations, nearly 3,500 employees throughout North America, Europe and Asia and an IT consultant network that encompasses over 81% of the IT workforce, we deploy more than 80,000 technical professionals annually to support critical engagements at more than 6,000 client sites, including 82% of the Fortune 500.

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Related Story from Another Group within Anonymous

ANONYMOUS Strikes Wall Street CEOs, Releases Data

The leak is associated with Operation Wall Street, a new protest launched by Anonymous hacktivists against the US government, Wall Street and the financial services industry. The operation seeks justice for those “who have lost their homes and had their lives destroyed” by “the crimes of Goldman Sachs and other firms.”

[Steven Gaal]

Profiting From Genocide: The World Bank's Bloody History in Guatemala

Friday, 08 March 2013 00:00

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http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/14823-profiting-from-genocide-the-world-banks-bloody-history-in-guatemala

[Steven Gaal]

_{Top Banking Analyst: Subsidies to Giant Banks Exceed $780 Billion Dollars Per YEAR}

_{March 13, 2013}

_{Source: Washington' Blogs}

_{Trillions In Subsidies to the Giant Banks Are Continuing to This Day}

_{Chris Whalen is one of America’s top banking analysts.}

_{Well-known economist Nouriel Roubini notes:}

_{Chris Whalen is one of the leading independent analysts of the US banking and financial system.}

_{Whalen notes today that the big American banks get a subsidy in excess of $780 billion dollars per year.}

_{Specifically, Whalen estimates the following types of subsidies to the giant banks:}

• _{$360 billion in Federal Reserve subsidies, by creating an artificial “spread” in interest rates}
  

• _{$120 billion in federal deposit insurance (through the FDIC, backed by the Treasury)}
  

• _{At least $100 billion in government-guaranteed loans, especially mortgages}
  

• _{At least $100 billion in monopolistic advantages in the secondary market for home mortgages. Specifically, the government subsidies the big banks to steal away fees earned from smaller banks, gain on sale into the TBA market and servicing. Whalen quotes a veteran banker explaining:}
  

_{The smaller players lived on the bleeding edge of the mortgage market, but they were also far more efficient lenders than the large banks. Now, care of the Fed, we have a highly inefficient oligopoly in the US mortgage market that is built around the largest banks.}

• _{More than $100 billion in fees in the over-the-counter (OTC) derivative market. Whalen explains}
  

_{The lack of capital required in these transactions and other special dispensations from the Fed provide the zombie banks with unlimited leverage and almost no public scrutiny. The fact that OTC contracts are exempt from the automatic stay in bankruptcy is a huge subsidy. The bilateral market structure is another.}

_{That totals $780 billion per year.}

_{But Whalen notes that there are many other subsidies as well:}

_{The above points are only a}

_{partial list}

_{of the subsidies and other flows that allow the members of the banking industry to pretend to be profitable, risk-taking organizations in a free market economy.}

_{The bailouts of the big banks amount to trillions of dollars, are never-ending … and continue to this day. (Indeed, the government is arguably paying trillions of dollars more in unnecessary interest payments just to have the banks “create” money, instead of creating it itself … as the Founding Fathers may have envisioned.)}

_{Whalen notes that the big banks are not really profitable:}

_{[These are] structural subsidies blessed by Congress and the Fed that make large banks look more profitable than they truly are. In fact, the TBTF banks are}

_{not really profitable at all.}

_***

_{The reality, sad to say, is that banks in 21st Century America are government sponsored enterprises ….}

_{Indeed, they are government sponsored enterprises where all of the profits are privatized, and all of the losses socialized.}

_{And the big banks are not helping – but are rather destroying – the economy. Indeed, failing to break up the big banks– and the malignant, symbiotic relationship between D.C. politicians and the banking giants – is destroying our country.}

Edited March 15, 2013 by Steven Gaal

[Steven Gaal]

WOW !!!

[Steven Gaal]

Eurozone/IMF Trigger Collapse For a Lousy €10 Billion! – Are They Pulling the Plug?

Submitted by Bill Holter: silverdollar.com

The news over the weekend is that the Cyprus banking system will have a “holiday” on Monday which was “scheduled” AND at least Tuesday which was not. The ECB and IMF wanted a 40% haircut and apparently the deal reached is one where balances under €100,000 will be reduced by 6.75% and by 9.9% for those over €100,000. Understand that much of what is deposited in Cyprus are funds from wealthy Russian oligarchs and mafia.

This is a disaster on so many levels I can’t even count them all. First off, what happened to the rule of law? I thought that in a capitalistic society that equity holders lose first, then preferred shareholders followed by unsecured then secured debtors…DEPOSITORS are the absolute last in line to lose money. This is being called a “tax”, when in reality it is outright theft!

In this case the depositors are first in line which will surely cause a bank run in Cyprus…which will be followed by runs in other places like Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal. Make no mistake, this could turn into something ugly and HUGE very quickly as the world runs entirely on confidence and won’t run without it.

Investors (depositors) the world over will see this and shortly understand that the rule of law is no longer and that “possession” is now more than 9/10th’s of the law. The possibility exists that within 2 weeks the entire system is shuttered.

more at http://www.silverdoc...lling-the-plug/

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COMMENT WHATREALLYHAPPENED

Folks, economically, it appears that the excrement is about to hit the ventilation shaft.

Please, when you can, have absolutely no more money in your checking account than you need to pay immediate bills.

And I say this because I believe that what has happened in Cypress...will not stay in Cypress, in terms of a potential economic shake-down of the entire system.

IF European central banks believe they can do this with impunity, and without the actual formal approval of individual sovereign governments, (the Cypriot government was supposed to formally approve of this yesterday, but the vote got postponed), such a maneuver may appear "attractive" to other financial entities, such as the US's Federal Reserve.

Edited March 18, 2013 by Steven Gaal