Infinite Unknown

Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

“Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”

I put down my notebook. “Just that?”

“That’s right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What’s more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even “one dollar” just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. “If the allegations in these settlements are true,” says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, “it’s management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims.”

To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. “You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street,” says a former congressional aide. “That’s all it would take. Just once.”

But that hasn’t happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.

Just ask the people who tried to do the right thing.

Continue reading »

Tags: AIG, Bank of America, Banking, Economy, FDIC, Global News, Goldman Sachs, Government, JPMorgan, Justice Department, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, NYSE, Obama administration, Politics, SEC, Stock Market, U.S., Wall Street

Among some of the discoveries of the financial crisis is that the entire financial system is now, following the Lehman bankruptcy, built entirely on fraud. And while Ken Lewis may spend the remainder of his days on some private island with stolen taxpayer money providing for his every last wish, it was he, in following the Fed’s and the Treasury’s orders to make a mockery of fiduciary responsibility, that was among the first people to confirm that there is no rule of low in America, or rather whatever law there is, it only applies to the less than immortal (i.e. the sub-banker class). Below, in an indication that Zero Hedge will never forget, we present the salient highlights from the Ken Lewis deposition on the MAC clause surrounding the Merrill transition, emphasizing the threats from Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke. For as long as neither of these three is in jail for what is documented shareholder (and taxpayer) fraud, we fail to see why the remaining 300+ million Americans continue to diligently pay their share of taxes into a government that is now beyond (and in full documentation) corrupt. Also, how BofA’s lawyer Wachtell was not at all present during the discussion of the MAC clause, makes a complete mockery of the US legal process in its entirety. We wonder just when the official scribe of the kleptocracy, Andrew R. Sorkin, will write a book disclosing the truth of what happened, including a listing of all the laws broken with full premeditation by every single player, and not the watered down, PG13 (and rather expensive)version  that makes everyone come out like a law-abiding superman.

Full transcript highlights, presented without commentary: Continue reading »

Tags: Bailout, Bank of America, Banking, Bankruptcy, Ben Bernanke, Bush administration, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, Fraud, Global News, Government, Henry Paulson, Law, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Politics, U.S., Wall Street

Make no mistake, the financial crisis has only just begun.

This is The Greatest Depression.

Paulson on Paulson

A friend sent me a collage of quotes from former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s memoir of the financial crisis, On the Brink.  The quotes are particularly relevant in view of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s newly issued report which concludes that the 2008 financial crisis was badly mishandled by the government.

The collage paints a stunning picture of a confused and panicked government without a coherent strategy for getting in front of and containing the crisis.  Judge for yourself:

“I misread the cause, and the scale, of the coming disaster.  Notably absent from my presentation was any mention of problems in housing or mortgages.”  (p. 47)

“All of this led me in late April 2007 to say . . . that subprime mortgage problems were ‘largely contained.’  I repeated that line of thinking publicly for another couple of months. . . . We were just plain wrong.” (p. 66)

“Lehman’s UK bankruptcy administrator, PricewaterhouseCoopers, had frozen [Lehman’s] assets in the UK . . .  a completely unexpected  . . . jolt.” (p. 230)

“General Electric . . . was having problems selling commercial paper.  This stunned me.” (p. 172)

“I’d never expected to hear those troubles spreading like this to the corporate world. . . .” (p. 227)

“In a celebratory mood, [Rep.] Pelosi, [Sen.] Reid, [Sen.] Dodd, [Rep.] Frank, [Sen.] Schumer, and I walked together to Statuary Hall to announce the [TARP] deal. . . . Perhaps I should have foreseen the problems ahead . . . .” (p. 314)

“I expected [TARP] to be politically unpopular, but the intensity of the backlash astonished me.” (p. 370)

“I began to seriously doubt that our asset-buying program [TARP] could work.  This pained me, as I had sincerely promoted the [toxic asset] purchases to Congress and the public. . . .” (p. 385)

Continue reading »

Tags: AIG, Banking, Bush administration, Economy, Financial Crisis, General Electric, Global News, Government, Henry Paulson, Lehman Brothers, Politics, U.S.

Added: 28. January 2011

Tags: AIG, Bailout, Bank of America, Banking, Barack Obama, Barclays, Ben Bernanke, Bush administration, Citigroup, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Foreclosures, George Bush, Global News, Goldman Sachs, Inflation, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Obama administration, Politics, Society, Timothy Geithner, U.S., Wall Street

US Outlook: Even regulators have taken to using the phrase “window dressing” to describe Wall Street banks’ habit of reducing their short-term borrowings for a few days around the end of each quarter, in order to make themselves look less risky than they really are.

Window dressing is too benign a term. What banks, led by Lehman Brothers, but also including Bank of America and Citigroup, have been doing is much worse than simply dressing up their finest wares in the shop-front window. It is more like finding an Oscar de la Renta dress in the window of a Wal-Mart. It is misleading, and often deliberately so.

Thanks to an examiner’s report commissioned by the bankruptcy courts, we know that Lehman even had a name for the accounting trick: Repo 105. At the end of each quarter before its collapse in 2008, Lehman was able to make its balance sheet look $50bn (£32bn) lighter than it really was, deceiving worried investors who were pressing it to reduce its leverage.

Continue reading »

Tags: Bank of America, Citigroup, Economy, Government, Lehman Brothers, Politics, SEC, U.S., Wall Street

From Academy Award® nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson (“No End In Sight”), comes INSIDE JOB, the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, INSIDE JOB traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia.

Narrated by Academy Award® winner Matt Damon, INSIDE JOB was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China.

Tags: Banking, Barack Obama, Bush administration, Documentary, Economy, Financial Crisis, George Bush, Goldman Sachs, Government, Inside job, Lehman Brothers, Obama administration, Politics, Stock Market, U.S., Wall Street

Max Keiser – journalist, former Wall Street broker and options trader, and inventor of the software which is now being used for high frequency trading – claims that the big banks retroactively allocate losing trades to their clients, and keep the winning trades for their own proprietary trading desks:

Keiser Report: Goldman Sachs, Undeclared Enemy of the State

Added: 25. May 2010

This is the second time in the couple of weeks that Keiser has made this allegation. When he first brought this up, Keiser said that he has first-hand knowledge of this unlawful activity because – when he was a trader – he and everyone else did the same thing.

Submitted by George Washington on 05/27/2010 17:08 -0500

Source: ZeroHedge

More on Goldman Sachs ‘doing God’s work’:

- Stock Market Collapse: More Goldman Sachs Market Rigging?!

- Dr. Len Horowitz: Profitable Depopulation Plot Links JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs to Vaccination Contaminations and Big Pharma Corruption

- Goldman Sachs Bankster Blankfein Supports Financial Reform Bill

- Goldman Sachs Banksters ‘Made Fortune Betting Against Clients’

- Computerized Front-Running: How a Computer Program Designed to Save the Free Market Turned Into a Monster

- Goldman Sachs taps President Obama’s former White House counsel, Gregory Craig

- President Obama Repaying His Masters At Goldman Sachs

- Goldman Sachs Banksters Implicated in Shorting Lehman Shares

- Perfect Timing: Goldman Sachs Set to Pay £3.5 Billion in Bonuses For Just 3 Months’ Work!

- SEC Accuses Goldman Sachs of Civil Fraud

- Looting Main Street: How the nation’s biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece

- Goldman Sachs Squeezes Hedge Funds in $110 Billion ‘Collateral Arbitrage’

Continue reading »

Tags: Angela Merkel, Banking, cds, Derivatives, Derivatives market, EU, Euro, Europe, Germany, Global News, Goldman Sachs, Greece, High Frequency Trading, Insider Trading, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Stock Market, Wall Street

Prof. William Black scorched everyone with his testimony on the failure of Lehman Brothers before the House Financial Services Committee today.  His prepared remarks can be found here (PDF).

CHAIRMAN KANJORSKI: And now we’ll hear from Mr. William K. Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law, the University of Missouri, Kansas City School of Law. Mr. Black.

BILL BLACK: Members of the Committee, thank you.

You asked earlier for a stern regulator, you have one now in front of you. And we need to be blunt. You haven’t heard much bluntness in hours of testimony.

We stopped a nonprime crisis before it became a crisis in 1991 by supervisory actions.

We did it so effectively that people forgot that it even existed, even though it caused several hundred million dollars of losses – but none to the taxpayer. We did it by preemptive litigation, and by supervision. We broke a raging epidemic of accounting control fraud without new legislation in the period of 1984 through 1986.

Legislation would’ve been helpful, we sought legislation, but we didn’t get it. And we were able to stop that because we didn’t simply consider business as usual.

Lehman’s failure is a story in large part of fraud. And it is fraud that begins at the absolute latest in 2001, and that is with their subprime and liars’ loan operations.

Lehman was the leading purveyor of liars’ loans in the world. For most of this decade, studies of liars’ loans show incidence of fraud of 90%. Lehmans sold this to the world, with reps and warranties that there were no such frauds. If you want to know why we have a global crisis, in large part it is before you. But it hasn’t been discussed today, amazingly.

Financial institution leaders are not engaged in risk when they engage in liars’ loans – liars’ loans will cause a failure. They lose money. The only way to make money is to deceive others by selling bad paper, and that will eventually lead to liability and failure as well. Continue reading »

Tags: Bankruptcy, Ben Bernanke, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Fraud, Global News, Government, Lehman Brothers, Politics, SEC, Timothy Geithner, U.S., Wall Street, William Black

- Perfect Timing: Goldman Sachs Set to Pay £3.5 Billion in Bonuses For Just 3 Months’ Work! (Times)

Goldman Sachs has been drawn into a fresh controversy as lawyers demand to know whether it was partly responsible for triggering Lehman Brothers’ downfall by shorting its rival’s shares.

Goldman has filed 8m documents with the SEC in relation to the investigation Photo: AP

The Wall Street behemoth is already being investigated by a number of financial regulators around the world in addition to the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud charges over derivatives mis-selling. It has now been named in a court filing seeking information about short-selling Lehman shares.

Goldman has been subpoenaed to hand over documents to Lehman’s Bryan Marsal, the man responsible for winding up the bank’s affairs and repaying creditors. Goldman was named in the court filing along with four other firms, including hedge funds SAC Capital and Citadel. Goldman declined to comment on the Lehman case.

In a further potential legal case, it emerged that AIG is considering suing Goldman over about $2bn (£1.3bn) of losses it incurred from past derivatives instruments. The troubled insurer is understood to be considering action as a result of protection it was forced to pay to buyers of credit-default swaps when collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) in Goldman’s Abacus programme lost their value.

The new worries came as Goldman hit back against the SEC’s charges, which it said are “completely unfounded both in law and fact”. Continue reading »

Tags: Banking, cds, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Economy, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Wall Street

Hiding behind the complexities of our financial system, banks and other institutions are being accused of fraud and deception, with Goldman Sachs just the latest in the spotlight. This has become the most pressing election issue of all

Goldman Sachs was in the spotlight last November when demonstrators protested outside its Washington offices against executive bonuses. (Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The global financial crisis, it is now clear, was caused not just by the bankers’ colossal mismanagement. No, it was due also to the new financial complexity offering up the opportunity for widespread, systemic fraud. Friday’s announcement that the world’s most famous investment bank, Goldman Sachs, is to face civil charges for fraud brought by the American regulator is but the latest of a series of investigations that have been launched, arrests made and charges made against financial institutions around the world. Big Finance in the 21st century turns out to have been Big Fraud. Yet Britain, centre of the world financial system, has not yet levelled charges against any bank; all that we’ve seen is the allegation of a high-level insider dealing ring which, embarrassingly, involves a banker advising the government. We have to live with the fiction that our banks and bankers are whiter than white, and any attempt to investigate them and their institutions will lead to a mass exodus to the mountains of Switzerland. The politicians of the Labour and Tory party alike are Bambis amid the wolves.

Just consider the roll call beyond Goldman Sachs. In Ireland Sean FitzPatrick, the ex-chair of the Anglo Irish bank was arrested last month and questioned over alleged fraud. In Iceland last week a dossier assembled by its parliament on the Icelandic banks – huge lenders in Britain – was handed to its public prosecution service. A court-appointed examiner found that collapsed investment bank Lehman knowingly manipulated its balance sheet to make it look stronger than it was – accounts originally audited by the British firm Ernst and Young and given the legal green light by the British firm Linklaters. In Switzerland UBS has been defending itself from the US’s Internal Revenue Service for allegedly running 17,000 offshore accounts to evade tax. Be sure there are more revelations to come – except in saintly Britain. Continue reading »

Tags: Bailout, Banking, Citigroup, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Deutsche Bank, Economy, Fraud, Goldman Sachs, Hedge Funds, Iceland, John Paulson, Lehman Brothers, Meltdown, SEC, Taxes, Taxpayers, U.K., U.S., UBS, Wall Street