TAG Team, part 3: Precisely how Central banks help Banksters

In three stories, I have just laid out how this
anti-democratic, banker coup works and yet
nobody with any power is willing to stop it.

Central banks are run by the banks. They are
not government organs, despite the propaganda
and the political appointments.

So, when they play like democrats, that's Orwellian
-speak.

Read this with TAG Team 1 and 2, below

Checkit: Forbes

Shah Gilani

It's Not Libor, Stupid. Central Banks Are The Problem

Not only are at least twenty more big banks under investigation as part of a massive fraud to manipulate interbank lending rates that affect some $800 trillion in loans and derivatives, but the Bank of England is about to take center stage in the scandal.

And that’s bad news for central banks around the world.

Well, actually, it could be good news, as in really good news if it’s the beginning of the end of what central banks do to manipulate free markets to the benefit of their only real constituents, the world’s big banks.

First the good news.

It’s already come out that traders at Barclays with huge derivatives positions leaned on co-workers who sit on “panels” that submit internal bank borrowing cost data to Thompson Reuters, who averages the middle lot of submissions to determine Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate) “fixings” (not my word, but actually the established nomenclature for what it apparently is that they do…as in “fix” rates) all under the auspices of the British Banking Association.

What’s good is we now know for a fact that the traders (crooks?) were aided and abetted by their co-workers, the submitters (crooks?), who were overseen by managers and top executives, who design most of these schemes (crooks?), and were all blessed by the British Banking Association, an illustrious association of 200 some-odd banks, whose many members (crooks?) are panel members submitting crooked (no question mark necessary) data.

Still don’t get why that’s good news? Because it’s proof there are crooks out there and this time it’s easy to see where the “fix” actually occurs. It’s also good news because according to one multinational banking executive, just quoted in the Economist, it’s “the banking industry’s tobacco moment.”

He was referring to the potential mountain(s) of litigation being drawn up already to claim that gross manipulation of interest rates caused billions, maybe trillions, of dollars of harm to borrowers and financial players of all stripes. Back in 1998 big tobacco had to settle class-action suits that cost them over $200 billion.

The bad news is the Bank of England, one of the world’s stalwart and oldest central banks, is about to face its own potential Lehman moment (at least we can hope). That’s on account of the fact that Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England (and its supposed next top dog), is going to have to come clean in front of Parliament very shortly.

Mr. Tucker is apparently on record (according to Bob Diamond’s phone call notes) suggesting that the Bank of England wanted Barclay’s to manipulate it’s Libor submissions downward so as to not panic counterparties and the country who might view tight interbank lending conditions as a sign of stress across the entire banking system.

So, here’s why the bad news for the central bank (encouraging, no, make that, demanding fraud) is really good news for free markets.

Central banks have done nothing to countermand the trend (nothing but encourage) leading to big banks getting bigger; so big, in fact, that now all of the big banks around the world are all too-big-to-fail.

The bigger the world’s banks are (bankers want size, because more size equals more power to price, to manipulate markets, and to pay bigger bonuses) the more important central banks become, both to the big banks, nations, and the global economy.

Central banks are the saviors of big banks that get in trouble, especially when economies and systems are leveraged for profits that backfire and they all have to be bailed out.

Central banks are supposed to be above what’s going on below their ivory towers, but, in fact, they are the puppets being manipulated by the big banks. It’s a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Why are central banks pouring money into banks, really? Why aren’t governments printing money to pour into ailing economies but aiding and abetting central banks instead?

It’s because central banks are independent supra-national bodies who have been ceded monetary power by governments almost everywhere to benefit banks and bankers the world over, who are their only constituents, and for all intents and purposes, effectively “own” legislators and governments.

They’re pouring money into banks to keep them solvent. That’s what central banks are there for. The banks aren’t lending the money (massive reserves are sitting on balance sheets to shore up appearances) because they need it to meet reserve requirements and offset the illiquidity evident in the interbank lending market…the same interbank (Libor) market that the Bank of England wanted to make look more liquid than it was viscous back in 2008.

...We need free markets not manipulated markets. We need to break up all the world’s big banks so they can fail when they overleverage themselves, and entire systems, nations, economies and the global economy aren’t all brought to their knees.....

TAG Team, part 1: Taibbi- how lawbreaking works for bankers

This awesome article is the linchpin
to the whole deal, showing how bankers
are now, in this regulatory vacuum,
destroying whole countries, because
countries don't dare to get them
under control.

IT’S A SMALL STEP FROM BANKING 
CORRUPTION/COLLUSION TO INVASION 
OF THE PENCIL NECKS. coming to a 
country near you 

checkit: Rolling stone 

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

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

By Matt Taibbi

April 25, 2013 1:00 PM ET

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.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia

Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.

"It's a double conspiracy," says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. "It's the height of criminality."

The bad news didn't stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. "Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry," CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.

But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

"A farce," was one antitrust lawyer's response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.

"Incredible," says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.

… Yet despite so many instances of at least attempted manipulation, the banks mostly skated. Barclays got off with a relatively minor fine in the $450 million range, UBS was stuck with $1.5 billion in penalties, and RBS was forced to give up $615 million. Apart from a few low-level flunkies overseas, no individual involved in this scam that impacted nearly everyone in the industrialized world was even threatened with criminal prosecution.

Two of America's top law-enforcement officials, Attorney General Eric Holder and former Justice Department Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer, confessed that it's dangerous to prosecute offending banks because they are simply too big. Making arrests, they say, might lead to "collateral consequences" in the economy.

.. In practice, it might be a country like Greece or a regional government like Jefferson County, Alabama, that borrows money at a variable rate of interest, then later goes to a bank to "swap" that loan to a more predictable fixed rate. In its simplest form, the customer in a swap deal is usually paying a premium for the safety and security of fixed interest rates, while the firm selling the swap is usually betting that it knows more about future movements in interest rates than its customers.

… All of these benchmarks based on voluntary reporting are now being looked at by regulators around the world, and God knows what they'll find. The European Federation of Financial Services Users wrote in an official EU survey last summer that all of these systems are ripe targets for manipulation. "In general," it wrote, "those markets which are based on non-attested, voluntary submission of data from agents whose benefits depend on such benchmarks are especially vulnerable of market abuse and distortion."

Translation: When prices are set by companies that can profit by manipulating them, we're fucked.

"You name it," says Frenk. "Any of these benchmarks is a possibility for corruption."

 

Tag team: Taibbi and CBC prove that illegality helps bankocracy

In a few words, the illegal banking activity that
has been the rule of the day, especially since
2008, has been done so that banks are
too big to fail, and yet connected and powerful
enough to take down countries.

All I'm going to do is prove that a mildly
interested citizen with a blog can easily piece
together one big scam from two smaller ones
and then I can also ask:
"just when the hell will this bullshit end?"

 While Taibbi shows that banks are using
one scam on top of another to take down
whole countries,
the CBC shows that the banks' representatives,
the Central Banks of the world, are deciding
the money supply issues that allow them to
cover for the scamming bankers and feed them
more free money.

Result: the central bankers are helping other
bankers take over countries. We will end up
with the same major countries owning
financial colonies all over the world, including
now the "First" World (soon to be Second).

Did you notice any politicians acting on behalf
of their democratic electors? nope, neither did I.

 This text will be followed by the two TAG TEAM
stories.