NEOLIBERAL SYSTEM is BASED ON
FRAUD AND CORRUPTION.
CURRENCY MARKETS ARE RIGGED. More evidences
Six Banks
to Pay $4.3 Billion in First Wave of Currency-Rigging Penalties By Suzi Ring, Liam Vaughan and Jesse
Hamilton Nov 12, 2014 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-12/banks-to-pay-3-3-billion-in-fx-manipulation-probe.html Citigroup will pay $1.02 billion to three
regulators in the U.S. and U.K., and JPMorgan $6 million less, according to
statements from the firms today. They are among six firms that will pay $4.3
billion to four regulators ranging from the U.S. to Switzerland’s Financial
Market Supervisory Authority.
Reuters notes today:
Regulators fined six major banks including Citigroup
(C.N) and UBS (UBSN.VX) a total of $4.3 billion for failing to stop traders
from trying to manipulate the foreign exchange market, following a year-long
global investigation.
HSBC (HSBA.L), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L), JP Morgan
(JPM.N) and Bank of America (BAC.N) also face penalties resulting from the
inquiry that has put the largely unregulated $5 trillion-a-day market on a
tighter leash, accelerated the push to automate trading and ensnared the Bank
of England.
In the latest scandal to hit the financial services
industry, dealers shared confidential information about client orders and
coordinated trades to make money from a foreign exchange benchmark used by
asset managers and corporate treasurers to value their holdings. Dozens of
traders have been fired or suspended.
***
Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) fined five
lenders $1.77 billion, the biggest penalty in the history of the City of
London, and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) ordered them
to pay a further $1.48 billion.
***
The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which
regulates banks, also fined the U.S. lenders $950 million and was the only
authority to penalise Bank of America.
Gold and Silver Are Manipulated
Today, Switzerland’s financial regulator (FINMA) found
“serious misconduct” and a “clear attempt to manipulate precious metals
benchmarks” by UBS employees in precious metals trading, particularly with
silver.
Reuters reports:
Swiss regulator FINMA said on Wednesday that it found a
“clear attempt” to manipulate precious metals benchmarks during its
investigation into precious metals and foreign exchange trading at UBS …
Gold and silver prices have been
“fixed” in daily conference calls by
the powers-that-be.
Bloomberg reported last December:
It is the participating banks themselves that administer
the gold and silver benchmarks.
So are prices being manipulated? Let’s
take a look at the evidence. In his book “The Gold Cartel,” commodity analyst Dimitri
Speck combines minute-by-minute data from most of 1993 through 2012 to show how
gold prices move on an average day (see attached charts). He finds that the
spot price of gold tends to drop sharply around the London
evening fixing (10 a.m. New York time). A similar, if less pronounced, drop in
price occurs around the London morning fixing. The same daily declines can be
seen in silver prices from 1998 through 2012.
Derivatives Are Manipulated
Runaway derivatives – especially credit default swaps
(CDS) – were one of the main causes of the 2008 financial crisis. Congress
never fixed the problem, and actually made it worse.
The big banks have long manipulated derivatives … a $1,200 Trillion Dollar market.
Indeed, many trillions of dollars of derivatives are
being manipulated in the exact same same way that
interest rates are fixed (see below) … through gamed self-reporting.
A Manhattan federal judge said on Thursday that investors
may pursue a lawsuit accusing 12 major banks of violating antitrust law by fixing
prices and restraining competition in the roughly $21 trillion
market for credit default swaps.
***
“The complaint provides a
chronology of behavior that would probably not result from chance, coincidence,
independent responses to common stimuli, or mere interdependence,”
[Judge] Cote said.
The defendants include Bank of America Corp, Barclays
Plc, BNP Paribas SA, Citigroup Inc , Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG ,
Goldman Sachs Group Inc, HSBC Holdings Plc , JPMorgan Chase & Co, Morgan
Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and UBS AG.
Other defendants are the International Swaps and
Derivatives Association and Markit Ltd, which provides credit derivative
pricing services.
***
[[European skiped..
go to the web above]]
***
Energy Prices Manipulated
The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says that
JP Morgan has massively
manipulated energy markets in California and the Midwest, obtaining tens of
millions of dollars in overpayments from grid operators between September 2010
and June 2011.
Pulitzer prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston noted in May that Wall Street is trying to
launch Enron 2.0.
Oil Prices Are Manipulated
Oil prices are manipulated as well.
Commodities Are Manipulated
The big banks and government agencies have been conspiring to
manipulate commodities prices for decades.
The big banks are taking over important aspects of the physical
economy, including uranium
mining, petroleum products, aluminum, ownership and operation of airports, toll
roads, ports, and electricity.
And they are using these physical assets to massively
manipulate commodities prices … scalping consumers of many billions of dollars each
year. More from Matt Taibbi, FDL and Elizabeth Warren.
Everything Can Be Manipulated
through High-Frequency Trading
Traders with high-tech computers can manipulate stocks, bonds, options, currencies
and commodities. And see this.
MANIPULATING NUMEROUS MARKETS IN
MYRIAD WAYS
The big banks and other giants
manipulate numerous markets in myriad ways,
for example:
- Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here
- Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold . And raiding allocated gold accounts
- Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them (and see this)
- Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. See this, this, this, this and this. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car
- Cheating homeowners by gaming laws meant to protect people from unfair foreclosure
- Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves. See this, this, this, this and this
- Engaging in unlawful “frontrunning” to manipulate markets. See this, this, this, this, this and this
- Participating in various Ponzi schemes
- Charging veterans unlawful mortgage fees
- Cooking their books (and see this)
THE BIG PICTURE
The experts say that big
banks will keep manipulating markets unless and until their executives are
thrown in jail for fraud.
Why? Because the system is
rigged to allow the big banks to commit continuous and massive fraud, and then
to pay small fines as the “cost of doing business”.
As Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz noted years ago:
“The system
is set so that even if you’re caught, the penalty is just a small number
relative to what you walk home with.
The fine is just a cost of doing
business. It’s like a parking fine. Sometimes you make a decision to park
knowing that you might get a fine because going around the corner to the
parking lot takes you too much time.”
Switzerland’s regulator FINMA ordered UBS, the country’s
biggest bank, to pay 134 million francs ($139 million) after it found serious
misconduct in both foreign exchange and precious metals trading. It also capped
bonuses for dealers in both units at twice their basic salary for two years.
Capping bonuses at twice base
salary? That’s not a punishment … it’s an incentive.
Experts say that we have to
prosecute fraud or else the economy won’t ever really
stabilize.
But the government is doing the exact opposite. Indeed,
the Justice Department has announced it will go easy on big banks, and always settles
prosecutions for pennies on the dollar (a form of stealth bailout. It is also
arguably one of the main
causes of the double dip in housing. And there is no change in the air.)
Indeed, the government doesn’t
even force the banks to admit any guilt as part of their settlements.
In fact:
“The banks have been allowed to
investigate themselves,” one source familiar with the investigation told
Reuters. “The investigated decide what they want to investigate, what they
admit to, and how much they will pay.
Wall Street has manipulated
virtually every other market as well – both in the financial sector and
the real economy – and broken virtually every law on the books.
And they will keep on doing so until the Department of
Justice grows a pair.
The criminality and blatant manipulation will grow and
spread and metastasize – taking over and killing off more and more of the
economy – until Wall Street executives are finally thrown in jail.
It’s that simple …
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