Obama's curious friendship w/ UBS CEO Robert Wolf & the Permanent Government & the bankster bailout
Interesting company Obama's been keeping. Not sure why he'd want to be hanging out so much with a bank president whose bank had to shell out $780 million to settle the largest offshore tax evasion case in US history. Maybe it gives some insight into how the 99% stays the 99% and the 1% stays the 1%. In any case, it's not hard to see which of the two groups is going to be pretty happy with an Obama second term. I added a link to a story about how UBS & the AIG backdoor bailout to see how these friendly relationships payoff for the 1 percenters. No wonder homeowners never got their bailout. They probably snub the president when he invites them to play golf & basketball and go on vacation. Idiots.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/02-6
Published on Monday, January 2, 2012 by WhoWhatWhy.com
Obama’s Only Friend Left?
by Russ Baker
<edit>
Who is Robert Wolf? Well, we’ve written about him a few times. Here, when Obama took him on vacation, and here, when we wondered if Obama would whisk him off to an intimate golf foursome for the third year in a row (Yup). Now, its not just golf, but basketball. Oh, and serving as one of Obama’s official economic advisers.
Wolf, it should be noted, helped Obama become president, corralled big bucks for his campaign in 2008, and is doing it again.
Oh—and he runs the US branch of a pretty dirty bank (and that’s saying a lot), which encouraged massive tax evasion by the richest Americans.
Here are some of the tricks UBS used to hide assets of extremely rich Americans from the IRS (and may have cost US coffers $100 billion), as described by an angry Sen. Carl Levin:
Tax Haven Bank Secrecy Tricks
• Code Names for Clients
• Pay Phones, not Business Phones
• Foreign Area Codes
• Undeclared Accounts
• Encrypted Computers
• Transfer Companies to Cover Tracks
• Foreign Shell Companies
• Fake Charitable Trusts
• Straw Man Settlors
• Captive Trustees
• Anonymous Wire Transfers
• Disguised Business Trips
• Counter-Surveillance Training
• Foreign Credit Cards
• Hold Mail
• Shred Files
more...
http://whowhatwhy.com/the-game-that-goes-on-and-on.html
THE GAME THAT GOES ON AND ON:
A SWISS BANK, A PRESIDENT, AND THE PERMANENT GOVERNMENT
By RUSS BAKER
Published: April 21, 2010
<edit>
Wolf, however, is hardly—as the Times suggested— just another donor. For one thing, he is a leading figure in an industry that almost brought down the entire financial system—and then was the recipient of astonishing government largesse. UBS, along with other banks, benefited directly from the backdoor bailout of the insurance giant AIG.
But UBS stands alone in one rather formidable respect—it was the defendant in the largest offshore tax evasion case in U.S. history, accused of helping wealthy Americans hide their income in secret offshore accounts. To settle a massive investigation, UBS forked over $780 million to the US treasury. This settlement came shortly before Wolf rounded out Obama’s golfing party. Given this rather problematical situation, why then would the President choose UBS’s Wolf of all people for this honor?
Wolf declined a request for an interview about his relationship with the President, so it was not possible to pose that question to him. This hardly matters, though, for the story goes far beyond Wolf and UBS. It involves Republicans as well as Democrats, the Bush Administration as well as Obama’s. More importantly, behind the trivialized golf outing on Martha’s Vineyard, lie the interests that increasingly set the course for every administration. And that now game the system so well that the rest of us—wherever we live in the world—are kept fighting for the scraps.
<edit>
UBS is very much a part of that permanent government. Though not a household name in the United States, UBS is a major player in the Beltway game. During the 2008 campaign, while Robert Wolf was courting Democratic hopeful Obama, his UBS cohort, former Senator Phil Gramm, was working the other side of the street. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee in the 1990s, Gramm, a corporate-friendly Texas Republican, played a key role in the deregulation of the banking industry, an act so central to the nation’s financial collapse. Since 2002, Gramm has been UBS Americas’ vice chairman. In 2008, he was the leading economics adviser for Obama’s opponent, John McCain—and even touted as a possible treasury secretary in a McCain administration.
more...
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/01/ubs-good-bank-aig-bailout
UBS: Bank Bailout Good Guy?
—By Corbin Hiar
Fri Jan. 29, 2010 11:19 AM PST
<edit>
UBS was one of eight large investment banks that benefited from the now-infamous backdoor bailout of AIG—resulting in government cash infusions totaling $182.5 billion—in the dark days of September 2008. At the hearing, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Neil Barofsky, revealed to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that UBS was the only bank willing to settle its soured credit default swaps (CDS) contracts for less than their face value. Why did UBS play ball when all the other banks didn't? As the Washington Independent reported, "Barofsky speculated that the firm probably simply recognized that the American taxpayers 'had taken the global economy on its back.'"
The financial crisis has proved time and again, big banks don't account for taxpayers—except when they need their help. And that's the more likely explanation for UBS' good behavior during the AIG rescue. Like the rest of the global financial industry, UBS was hurting from the subprime mortgage meltdown. (The bank's colossally bad bet on the US housing market—it had already written down $38 billion in bad loans as of April 2008—earned UBS the nickname Used to Be Smart.) But unlike its intransigent peers on Wall Street, the Swiss banking giant also faced the mounting threat of a US federal investigation. It was in no position to play hardball.
At the time of the backdoor bailout, UBS was under scrutiny from both the Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission as a result of information disclosed to them by a whistleblower—one of their former bankers, Bradley Birkenfeld. As the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations reported in July 2008, UBS had hidden from American authorities "an estimated 19,000 accounts in Switzerland for US clients with assets valued at $18 billion." Half a year later, UBS would agree to pay a record-breaking $780 million penalty to the US government and turn over 4,500 client names to avoid an indictment that FINMA, the Swiss regulatory agency, said "would have threatened its existence."
Despite what some brazen Wall Street CEOs now claim, the credit crunch was an existential threat to every over-leveraged big bank. What's most shocking about the AIG bailout—besides the dizzying amount of taxpayers' money involved—is that these endangered banks were able to extract such a sweet deal from the government. The banks were paid the full value of all the CDS contracts they had made with AIG—including those mortgage-backed securities they had bought when it was clear the subprime market was collapsing. After the housing market took a nosedive, these contracts were, of course, worth a fraction of their original value on the open market: Similar CDSs issued by other insurers that were settled during the crisis paid out at 13 cents on the dollar. Talking about the AIG deal with New York magazine, a former state insurance commissioner described it as being able "to collect on an insurance policy without having the loss."
more...
= new reply since forum marked as read
either.
Some connect the dots though, thanks for thread.