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Are The Federal Reserve’s Crimes Too Big To Comprehend?

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Ichingcarpenter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-31-11 10:40 AM
Original message
Are The Federal Reserve’s Crimes Too Big To Comprehend?
By David DeGraw, AmpedStatus

What if the greatest scam ever perpetrated was blatantly exposed, and the US media didn’t cover it? Does that mean the scam could keep going? That’s what we are about to find out.

SNIP.....

Here’s a roundup of reports on this BernankeLeaks:

Prepare to enter the theater of the absurd…

I’ll start with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).
In an article entitled, “A Real Jaw-Dropper at the Federal Reserve,” Senator Sanders reveals some of the details:

At a Senate Budget Committee hearing in 2009, I asked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to tell the American people the names of the financial institutions that received an unprecedented backdoor bailout from the Federal Reserve, how much they received, and the exact terms of this assistance. He refused. A year and a half later… we have begun to lift the veil of secrecy at the Fed…

After years of stonewalling by the Fed, the American people are finally learning the incredible and jaw-dropping details of the Fed’s multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America….

We have learned that the $700 billion Wall Street bailout… turned out to be pocket change compared to the trillions and trillions of dollars in near-zero interest loans and other financial arrangements the Federal Reserve doled out to every major financial institution in this country.…

Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations including two European megabanks — Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse — which were the largest beneficiaries of the Fed’s purchase of mortgage-backed securities….

Has the Federal Reserve of the United States become the central bank of the world?…

What this disclosure tells us, among many other things, is that despite this huge taxpayer bailout, the Fed did not make the appropriate demands on these institutions necessary to rebuild our economy and protect the needs of ordinary Americans….

What we are seeing is the incredible power of a small number of people who have incredible conflicts of interest getting incredible help from the taxpayers of this country while ignoring the needs of the people.

In an article entitled, “The Fed Lied About Wall Street,” Zach Carter sums it up this way:

The Federal Reserve audit is full of frightening revelations about U.S. economic policy and those who implement it… By denying the solvency crisis, major bank executives who had run their companies into the ground were allowed to keep their jobs, and shareholders who had placed bad bets on their firms were allowed to collect government largesse, as bloated bonuses began paying out soon after.

But the banks themselves still faced a capital shortage, and were only kept above those critical capital thresholds because federal regulators were willing to look the other way, letting banks account for obvious losses as if they were profitable assets.

So based on the Fed audit data, it’s hard to conclude that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was telling the truth when he told Congress on March 3, 2009, that there were no zombie banks in the United States.

“I don’t think that any major U.S. bank is currently a zombie institution,” Bernanke said.

As Bernanke spoke those words banks had been pledging junk bonds as collateral under Fed facilities for several months…

This is the heart of today’s foreclosure fraud crisis. Banks are foreclosing on untold numbers of families who have never missed a payment, because rushing to foreclosure generates lucrative fees for the banks, whatever the costs to families and investors. This is, in fact, far worse than what Paul Krugman predicted. Not only are zombie banks failing to support the economy, they are actively sabotaging it with fraud in order to make up for their capital shortages. Meanwhile, regulators are aggressively looking the other way.

The Fed had to fix liquidity in 2008. That was its job. But as major banks went insolvent, the Fed and Treasury had a responsibility to fix that solvency issue—even though that meant requiring shareholders and executives to live up to losses. Instead, as the Fed audit tells us, policymakers knowingly ignored the real problem, pushing losses onto the American middle class in the process.”

Even the Financial Times is jumping ship:

Sunlight Shows Cracks in Fed’s Rescue Story

It took two years, a hard-fought lawsuit, and an act of Congress, but finally… the Federal Reserve disclosed the details of its financial crisis lending programs. The initial reactions were shock at the breadth of lending, particularly to foreign firms. But the details paint a bleaker, earlier, and even more disturbing picture…. An even more troubling conclusion from the data is that… it is now apparent that the Fed took on far more risk, on less favorable terms, than most people have realized.

In true Fed fashion, they didn’t even fully comply with Congress. In a report entitled, “Fed Withholds Collateral Data for $885 Billion in Financial-Crisis Loans,” Bloomberg puts some icing on the cake:

For three of the Fed’s six emergency facilities, the central bank released information on groups of collateral it accepted by asset type and rating, without specifying individual securities. Among them was the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, created in March 2008 to provide loans to brokers as Bear Stearns Cos. collapsed.

“This is a half-step,” said former Atlanta Fed research director Robert Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisors Inc. in Sarasota, Florida. “If you were going to audit the facilities, then would this enable you to do an audit? The answer is ‘No,’ you would have to go in and look at the individual amounts of collateral and how it was broken down to do that. And that is the spirit of what the requirements were in Dodd-Frank.”
http://ampedstatus.org/the-wall-street-pentagon-papers-biggest-scam-in-world-history-exposed-are-the-federal-reserves-crimes-too-big-to-comprehend/


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saras Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-31-11 12:02 PM
Response to Original message
1. Their crimes are nothing that couldn't be remedied by 10,000 executions
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Demeter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-31-11 08:25 PM
Response to Reply #1
4. Or only ten. Or evn just one
if it's Jamie Dimon, or Lloyd Blankfein, or Harry Paulson, or someone in that category.
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saras Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Aug-01-11 12:38 AM
Response to Reply #4
5. You're more optimistic than I.
One down would produce a worldwide wave of fascist repression, and a battle among the competitors of the dead one for the newly empty alpha male spot. No, I think a tribe that large would take a substantial amount of disruption before failing as a social system.

But short of an alliance with a somewhat benevolent but somewhat sinister alien species, I can't imagine how this might be done more with more precise results than, say, the French Revolution.
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Demeter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Aug-01-11 05:58 AM
Response to Reply #5
7. You don't think these cowards would be intimidated?
Perhaps a series of interventions would save the smart ones from their lives of crime...say, one hanging a week...you may be right, though. We'll have to have some controlled experiments.
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Ichingcarpenter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Aug-01-11 06:07 AM
Response to Reply #7
8. Professor Farnsworth says 'they need a mental examination
"I think in France they call it the guillotine.'

I love the good news the professor always gives
because you know what's coming next.


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Veri1138 Donating Member (10 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-31-11 12:03 PM
Response to Original message
2. There are three forms of warfare...
but to begin with, a quote...

“There’s class warfare, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” - Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett did not declare war. He warned the middle- and poor-class what was happening. And when they did not respond, he hedged his bets to the side of the winners: The Wealthy. Who benefited generously by The Fed's largess in a war upon the poor.

There are three forms of warfare and two causes. They are,

1. Military Conflict - using violence.
2. Social Conflict - replacing the values of a society with another society's values (i.e. Hollywood)
3. Financial Warfare - disrupting and destroying the economic vitality of a nation using finance (ex. Currency Wars, unfavorable trade advantage, onerous tariffs, mercantilism)

The two reasons for War: Economics and Religion.

The world is is now in the throws of Financial Conflict. The losers look to be the poor. You are being waged war on by your economic betters. They have the gold, they write the rules, suck it up. Or do something. This is asymmetrical warfare being waged by non-State actors. They have corrupted governments. They have seized the reigns of power. And they are looking to exterminate - economically - you.

You are the parasitical poor. The Welfare Kings and Queens who drive Mercedes and use copious amounts of drugs while collecting a welfare check. That is their thinking. Why should they pay for you? After all, they made it; so can you.

The Federal Reserve? The crimes are incomprehensible? No, they have propped up the corrupt institutions that allow this war to continue. And they did it using you as collateral. Your future earnings and taxes. Your children's children's children. Tax cuts for them, poverty for you.

You are at war. What are you afraid of?
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BadGimp Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-31-11 07:55 PM
Response to Reply #2
3. well said
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Ichingcarpenter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Aug-01-11 01:41 AM
Response to Reply #2
6. Welcome to DU
Yes its Economic Warfare and the criminals are in charge
Let no one forget who profited from the down turn.
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