Just six weeks after the US Treasury decided enough-was-enough with this upstart non-fiat, non-controlled-by-TPTB currency (and applied money-laundering reglations), US financial regulators are now looking for supervisory control over Bitcoin. As The FT reports, CFTC’s Bart Chilton notes “it’s not monopoly money – real people have real risk in these instruments,” and that regulating the controversial cyber-currency “is sure something [CFTC] needs to explore.” Chilton’s remit to regulate this “shadow currency” is predicated on it becoming a basis for derivative contracts as opposed to purely transactional (akin to the monitoring of physical oil transactions that can influence crude futures.) Since the Treasury’s March decision, at least three North American companies have had their accounts seized by the banks but while this attempt to control the virtual currency follows the ECB’s ‘ponzi attack’ last year, the ‘regulators’ may note that, “even if US regulations make it hard for Bitcoin businesses to operate in the US, that doesn’t mean it will make it difficult for people to use Bitcoin as a currency in the US. Bitcoin is a world currency.”
J.P. Morgan is a Rothschild front and the Illuminati do not only control the big banks and the governments, they also took over control of the media a long time ago:
U.S. Congressional Record February 9, 1917, page 2947
Congressman Calloway announced that the J.P. Morgan interests bought 25 of America’s leading newspapers, and inserted their own editors, in order to control the media.
Mr. CALLAWAY: Mr. Chairman, under unanimous consent, I insert into the Record at this point a statement showing the newspaper combination, which explains their activity in the war matter, just discussed by the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. MOORE]:
“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, ship building and powder interests and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press in the United States.
“These 12 men worked the problems out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.
“This contract is in existence at the present time, and it accounts for the news columns of the daily press of the country being filled with all sorts of preparedness arguments and misrepresentations as to the present condition of the United States Army and Navy, and the possibility and probability of the United States being attacked by foreign foes.
“This policy also included the suppression of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served. The effectiveness of this scheme has been conclusively demonstrated by the character of the stuff carried in the daily press throughout the country since March, 1915. They have resorted to anything necessary to commercialize public sentiment and sandbag the National Congress into making extravagant and wasteful appropriations for the Army and Navy under false pretense that it was necessary. Their stock argument is that it is ‘patriotism.’ They are playing on every prejudice and passion of the American people.”
So FORGET about the Illuminati (the real elitists) and just blame their bankster elite puppets, their government elite puppets (like Obama, Bush, Clinton etc.) and their corporate media presstitutes for everything instead!!!
That said, enjoy Matt Taibbi’s otherwise excellent article and writing style.
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget. Continue reading »
In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss a financial journalist so dangerous the frontpage of the Financial Times dare not speak his name and the semaphore of fraud and fraud flows that is high frequency trading and silver manipulation. They also talk about blonde bimbo regulators and the self-police force that never finds any evidence crimes they themselves have committed. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to whistleblower Paul Moore, a former Head of Risk at HBOS, about financial holocaust and the City of London’s role in enabling banking fraud.
There is no point in recapping the ongoing vendetta between former SIGTARP Neil Barofsky and former head of the NY Fed, and current Treasury secretary and resident TurboTax expert Tim Geithner. One need but follow the former on Twitter for a quick and concise sampling of the sentiments harbored vis-a-vis the latter. However, in the following interview Barfosky does touch on some points which in the context of the recent Liborgate, should be brought front and center, especially since the increasingly apathetic US audience seems to not care about one bit (as opposed to their distant cousins across the Atlantic for whom Lieborgate has become a daily distraction). Namely, what Barofsky says is that Geithner and other regulators who allowed Lieborgate to proceed should not only lose their job but we should “see [Geithner] in handcuffs.” Sadly that will never happen as it would actually be a deterrent to future crime among the highest echelons of America: something which is just not allowed to happen in a system whose very survival is increasingly reliant on rampant criminality.
While Geithner pushed for broader reforms of LIBOR, he did not explicitly warn of possible rate manipulations and neglected to notify U.S. regulators at the Department of Justice, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission to the wrongdoing, notes Barofsky.
It was a “message to the banks ‘if we commit fraud, we break the rules, don’t worry, we’re too big — they’ll never bring the appropriate steps against us,’” Barofsky says in an interview with The Daily Ticker. “And that is why we’ve had scandal after scandal after scandal.”
This was a “global conspiracy to fix one of the most important interest rates in the world,” Barofsky continues. “[Geithner] heard this information and looked the other way. Geithner and other regulators should be held accountable, they should be fired across the board. If they knew about an ongoing fraud, and they didn’t do anything about it, they don’t deserve to have their jobs. I hope we see people in handcuffs.”
Full clip:
There is no point in recapping the ongoing vendetta between former SIGTARP Neil Barofsky and former head of the NY Fed, and current Treasury secretary and resident TurboTax expert Tim Geithner. One need but follow the former on Twitter for a quick and concise sampling of the sentiments harbored vis-a-vis the latter. However, in the following interview Barfosky does touch on some points which in the context of the recent Liborgate, should be brought front and center, especially since the increasingly apathetic US audience seems to not care about one bit (as opposed to their distant cousins across the Atlantic for whom Lieborgate has become a daily distraction). Namely, what Barofsky says is that Geithner and other regulators who allowed Lieborgate to proceed should not only lose their job but we should “see [Geithner] in handcuffs.” Sadly that will never happen as it would actually be a deterrent to future crime among the highest echelons of America: something which is just not allowed to happen in a system whose very survival is increasingly reliant on rampant criminality.
While Geithner pushed for broader reforms of LIBOR, he did not explicitly warn of possible rate manipulations and neglected to notify U.S. regulators at the Department of Justice, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission to the wrongdoing, notes Barofsky.
It was a “message to the banks ‘if we commit fraud, we break the rules, don’t worry, we’re too big — they’ll never bring the appropriate steps against us,’” Barofsky says in an interview with The Daily Ticker. “And that is why we’ve had scandal after scandal after scandal.”
This was a “global conspiracy to fix one of the most important interest rates in the world,” Barofsky continues. “[Geithner] heard this information and looked the other way. Geithner and other regulators should be held accountable, they should be fired across the board. If they knew about an ongoing fraud, and they didn’t do anything about it, they don’t deserve to have their jobs. I hope we see people in handcuffs.”
Former Goldman appartchik Gary Gensler is about to take the stage (again) and explain why the CFTC should exist at all after allowing not only MF Global but a few weeks ago, Peregrine Financial, to steal hundreds of millions in client money without any regulatory supervision at all. All we can say here is: Free Corzine! Continue reading »
There is a reason why WWII legendary “pineapple” grenade bore the initials MK2. Those who enjoy the works of Mike Krieger and Max Keiser are in for a treat, with this 2 for the price of 1 (technically for the price of zero) interview of Krieger by Keiser, as the MKs of the world unite, and take on financial fraud.
In case you missed it, Josh Brown recently published a list via the Huffington Post of what he believes are the 25 most dangerous people in financial media. He definitely got the first two slots correct. At the very top are Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, who unrelentingly publish their “Financial War Reports” daily here. At the number two position, is Zerohedge, the best financial site on the web. I have been fortunate enough to have collaborated with Max, Stacy and Zerohedge for the past two years and it has been an extremely rewarding experience. To get to the point, below is my just released latest interview on the Keiser Report. I think it’s the best one we’ve done in a while. Enjoy!
We can finally close the case on the massive Libor manipulation issue that we first brough to the world’s attention back in January 2009 when we penned: “This Makes No Sense: Libor By Bank.” As of minutes ago, Barclays is the first bank to admit it has engaged in gross manipulation of the key benchmark rate that sets the cost of capital for $350 trillion in interest-rate sensitive products. As the CFTC notes, as it produly announces an epic wristslap of $200 million for Barclays Bank: “The Order finds that Barclays attempted to manipulate and made false reports concerning two global benchmark interest rates, LIBOR and Euribor, on numerous occasions and sometimes on a daily basis over a four-year period, commencing as early as 2005.” Surely this massive fine will teach them to never do it again, until tomorrow at least, when the British Banker Association once again finds 3 month USD liEbor to be… unchanged. In other news, who would have thought that the fringe “conspiracy” brigade was right all along once again.
CFTC Orders Barclays to pay $200 Million Penalty for Attempted Manipulation of and False Reporting concerning LIBOR and Euribor Benchmark Interest Rates
The Order finds that Barclays attempted to manipulate interest rates and made related false reports to benefit its derivatives trading positions Continue reading »
JPMorgan Chase illegally allowed Lehman Brothers, the investment bank whose 2008 bankruptcy brought the financial system to the brink of collapse, to count customers’ money as its own, according to federal regulators.
The arrangement boosted the amount that Lehman could borrow from JPMorgan, where the customers’ money was deposited, regulators charged Wednesday.
Then, at the height of the financial crisis, JPMorgan refused to release the customer funds for about two weeks, until regulators ordered it to do so, regulators charged.
The charges were spelled out in an enforcement action against JPMorgan by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Without admitting or denying wrongdoing, JPMorgan agreed to pay $20 million to settle the civil case.
The matter adds another dimension of alleged lawbreaking to the history of Lehman’s downfall. It was also another vivid illustration that, even in highly regulated modern financial firms, basic controls can break down.
Last fall, the big brokerage firm MF Global collapsed with as much as $1.6 billion of customer funds missing and unaccounted for. There, too, it appears that clients’ money was treated as if it belonged to the firm.
A number of subscribers asked me if I would comment on what Commissioner Chilton had to say. In commenting, I can’t help but try to be as objective as possible. For the record, I commend Chilton for the role he has taken on the important issues, like position limits, concentration and in addressing allegations of manipulation in silver. He is the only commissioner to have done so. I believe there would be no ongoing silver investigation were it not for him. I think he is one of the good guys and I started writing to him about these issues in 2007.
I agree with most of what Commissioner Chilton had to say, particularly about concentration and position limits and manipulation. I’m glad the interview was mostly about potential manipulation in the silver market. I’m going to skip over all the things I agree with Chilton on and confine my remarks to where I disagree with him. Agreement can be boring. Even though the disagreements are few, I believe they go to the heart of the matter.
Chilton pointed out that it is difficult to prove manipulation in a court of law. He indicated that there are three elements necessary to prove manipulation – the intent to manipulate, the ability to manipulate and the success in the manipulation. I accept his legal definition. Where I respectfully disagree with him is in the degree of difficulty in establishing all three elements in the silver manipulation.
Let’s go through the three elements.
Let’s forget for a moment that silver has been under investigation by the CFTC’s Enforcement Division for almost three and a half years and that countless civil lawsuits have been filed against JPMorgan for allegations of silver manipulation in 2008. Let’s just focus on the last year, when silver experienced two separate 35% price declines in a matter of days. Such a decline in a world commodity for no observable reason. Yet it happened twice in silver within months.
As I have written recently, as a result of the second silver price takedown in September, a tight-knit group of commercials traders bought the equivalent of 165 million ounces in net COMEX futures contracts on the price decline. This is equal to 22% of the world’s annual 740 million oz silver mine production. These same traders came close to buying the same amount in the big May silver price decline as well. This is an extraordinary amount of silver futures, much larger than any manipulative long position attributed to the Hunt Bros. in 1980. It is not possible to buy such a large amount of silver by accident. It had to be intentional. There is the element of intent that Commissioner Chilton speaks of.
The next element necessary to prove manipulation is the ability to manipulate by a concentrated position or otherwise (collusion among different traders). It would seem that the ability to manipulate is also self-evident, as it has been done on more than one occasion in silver. This also ties into Commissioner Chilton’s third element, namely, success being brought about by intent and the ability to manipulate. It couldn’t have been more successful for the COMEX commercial crooks than the results they achieved (at great cost to innocent investors and traders).
I think the problem that Commissioner Chilton and the agency are having is that they have convinced themselves they need proof by wire-taps and emails and other incriminating documentation (like actual confessions) before they can prove manipulation in silver. But the COMEX commercial crooks are not likely to accommodate them. The Commission has something better than that already in hand, namely, the very data that I rely on in analyzing the market. The Commission should stop wishing and waiting for evidence to drop out of the sky and just study the COT and Bank Participation statistics that they produce on a regular basis.
Because it appears so easy for the Commission to prove a silver manipulation on the basis of the three elements outlined by Commissioner Chilton, my guess is that there is something else holding the agency back from ending this scam. They just don’t want to end it. Perhaps there is a political motive or the knowledge that JPMorgan and the CME may be too big to sue. It’s hard to see how the three elements can’t be proved by the public data.
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