Max! What are the aliens saying about the banks?

Check Bank of America stock quote 

Alrighty then, seems that the universe is watching human economics, warning all intelligent life to remove any currency as to banking from planet Earth!  Well really Max, first intelligent life would not need us now would they?  But Max and Stacy put an interesting spin on the finance news to help your emotions on the pilfering going on around the globe and yes Max we're watching the credit bubble as it can been seen from outer space.

In many articles I mention as the money becomes scarce the Feds would start going after the piles of money stolen from the public.  Just yesterday Fannie Mae sued nine major bank.  The lawsuit targets U.S. banks JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, along with global banks Barclays, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank,Credit Suisse and Rabobank.  The action also accused the British Bankers' Association, which administers Libor.  The task force, comprising state and federal agencies, issued subpoenas and a public call for whistleblowers, amassed millions of documents and farmed out the work to about 10 U.S. attorneys offices.  Wall Street’s six biggest banks have piled up more than $100 billion in legal costs, including settlements and lawyers’ fees, banks being examined for FIRREA (FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS REFORM, RECOVERY AND ENFORCEMENT ACT OF 1989) violations issued a total of $788 billion of non-agency mortgage-backed securities between 2005 and 2007.

You know something this deck was so rigged and dealt around the world where so many we're thrown under a bus that it's amazing there is no hangings yet alone no one has gone to jail.  Well like the NSA gathering all info from around the world the intel was certainly known.  Lets face it the game is rigged it's man made.  So from here on out only do business with the ones who have a good track record. Those are not my words but words from Warren Buffet.  He has said "he would not be interested in a 100 million dollar deal if it's going to leave my stomach burning."  When I was looking for answers on all of this instead of ranting off we need tools for a better tomorrow.  Life is not so much about me but how I leave this place in line for the person behind me, ah that would be humanity, so we do some house keeping and wash the deck before we leave, thank you.

RT



Central Banking Crooks

With a watch there's a watch maker

  Ah wait, there might be intelligent life here on the planet. To help prevent another giant cash squeeze, federal regulators proposed a rule on Thursday that requires big banks to hold a set amount of assets that they can quickly turn into cash. The liquidity rule works by asking large banks to estimate how much cash might flee in a 30-day period.  They then have to have enough assets that they could quickly sell to cover that outflow.  The top quality assets have to account for at least 45 percent of the liquid asset pool.  In today's market, a broker sells securities to a client, the broker takes out its own loan, pledging securities as collateral. The broker makes money from the higher interest on the client loan than it is paying on its own loan.  So know wonder the bottom falls out when deals go south, all the money is borrowed there is no true asset to cover just a fraction of such finance.

This new rule if imposed would reduce the profitability that today is a common practice on Wall Street.  So if you can't back the deal with your own assets don't come crying to the taxpayers that you need a bail out from money that never existed in the first place.  With or without this new rule from the regulators has taught us a hard lesson and education is expensive.  Do yourself a favor every entity has a track record so we're going to be like the NSA and run recon and monitor business of the likes who you do business with because like Warren Buffet explained, "I only do business in which I feel good about the deal and who I'm working with."  With that said we remove the rocket science out of financial scams heading for the rocks, steer clear of these Jack Wagons and pull up to the pier and have a nice walk on the beach.  This is not hard to do, lets just look at one stock en particular, McDonald's on Oct 1st, 1974 the stock price opened that day @ $0.63 today it closed @ $96.52 it's just a lesson in who you do business with and the lesson here is not so much when you buy and sell, but what you are buying.  That alone will make the difference between a Happy Meal and who the hell do you people think you are!  

So why these banksters turtle wax their ass and continue to slide you know who you want to bed with and that's no swinging nut sack you can't trust.    

europarl

Financial Scandal Scorecard

Article By JOE NOCERA
The New York Times
Published: July 20, 2012

Is it my imagination, or does every week bring news of another financial scandal? No, it’s not my imagination.

First up: Peregrine Financial Group. This long-running fraud, which has apparently been going on almost as long as the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, came to light when the firm’s founder and longtime chief executive, Russell Wasendorf Sr., tried to commit suicide a few weeks ago. (He failed.) Helpfully, he left a lengthy note that laid out what he had done. Peregrine, you see, is a commodities broker, and Wasendorf had been stealing the money that customers had on deposit with the firm. As you’ll no doubt recall from the very similar MF Global scandal, where $1.6 billion in supposedly segregated customer funds went missing as the firm careened toward bankruptcy, this is supposed to be the sin of sins for a commodities brokerage. Sinful it may be, but not all that difficult, it would appear.


Peregrine, which is based in Cedar Falls, Iowa, didn’t operate on the kind of scale as MF Global. But what it lacked in heft, it more than made up for in imagination. In his note, Wasendorf said that, over the years, he had used the money, among other things, to build the company’s $18 million headquarters and to “pay Fines and Fees charged by the regulators.” At the point at which the fraud was discovered, the firm was supposed to have more than $200 million on deposit for customers. Instead, it had $5 million.

Other news of Peregrine:  Peregrine which operated as PFGBest, filed for bankruptcy protection last week. Peregrine ran a unit called PFG Precious Metals Inc, which offers investors "whole sale prices, fast & fully insured shipping" for gold, silver and platinum coins, as well as novelty items created through a partnership with the Auckland-based minting firm.


A four-coin set of SpongeBob Squarepants, housed in a "distinctive" treasure chest, went for $259, according to a website that displays both the PFGBest logo and that of the New Zealand Mint. Each coin in the set shows a character from the Nickelodeon animated series and bears the inscription "IN SPONGEBOB WE TRUST."


And where were the regulators? Fooling them was child’s play, he said in his note. Or words to that effect.

Next up: HSBC. Who knew that the British bank was the favored institution of money launderers everywhere? As it turns out, the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee knew. This week, it released a 335-page report and held a scorching daylong hearing, excoriating a half-dozen of the bank’s executives.


Perhaps because we’re bank-scandaled out, this story hasn’t gotten the attention it truly deserves. Unlike, say, the JPMorgan Chase “London whale” scandal — in which the bank’s traders simply made a big, dumb bet — what HSBC did amounts to serious wrongdoing. It was also a recidivist. Twice before, in 2003 and 2007, the bank had been cited by regulators for what The Times described as its “extensive money laundering ways.” Despite the reprimands, it continued to do business with banks that laundered money for drug traffickers and institutions suspected of having ties to terrorists. At the hearing, HSBC’s top compliance executive strayed from his prepared remarks to announce that he would be leaving that post. The others, of course, promised to do better. Don’t they always?


And where were the regulators? “Subcommittee investigators found that the OCC” — that’s the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is the nation’s primary bank overseer — “had failed to take a single enforcement action against the bank, formal or informal, over the previous six years, despite ample evidence” of money laundering, reads the report.

Let’s now turn to “Liborgate,” where the plot continues to thicken. When last we left this scandal, Barclays had agreed to pay $450 million in fines, and a handful of top officials, including its chief executive, Bob Diamond Jr., had lost their jobs because the bank had been manipulating the London interbank offered rate, a key benchmark for all kinds of loans and derivative transactions. In recent days, however, the story has begun to revolve more and more around ... hmmm ... the regulators.


It turns out that in 2008, Barclays told the New York Federal Reserve what it was up to. Timothy Geithner, then the president of the New York Fed, sent a note to Mervyn King, the leader of the Bank of England, that suggested that the British regulators “eliminate incentives to misreport.” Nothing of the sort took place, and Barclays continued to lowball its Libor reporting well into 2009. The British Parliament has held a series of hearings with King and other top British regulators of the “what-did-you-know-and-when-did-you-know-it” variety.


Meanwhile, it has become clear since the scandal broke that Libor is a problematic benchmark in any case, because a lot of the unsecured interbank lending it is supposed to represent doesn’t even occur anymore. “It is clear that the Libor system is structurally flawed,” Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, told the Senate this week. Now he tells us.

But, finally, there’s this: On Wednesday, Capital One, the big purveyor of credit cards, agreed to pay $210 million — including reimbursing customers to the tune of $150 million — because one of its vendors had deceptively marketed and sold customers needless add-on products.


Where were the regulators? In this case, it was the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that conducted the investigation and brought the action against the bank. It was the agency’s very first enforcement action.


These days, I guess, that amounts to progress. (end report)


Ownerless

EVEREST // Ownerless

The concept of ownership has such a weird place in our culture. Too much of the time, ownership is talked about in relation to “owning up” to something—which is usually admitting a mistake or stepping up to a lie. Meanwhile, getting “owned” is generally tantamount to having your ass handed to you, which is almost never a good thing.


In bygone eras, ownership was often a term used only in relation to the buying of land (which almost no one can afford to do these days) or, in some cases, the “taking” of a wife (yikes). These days, a generation raised on after-school specials and healthy doses of therapy-speak recognize that ownership is often about control—as in, taking control of one’s own messy, crazy life, or assuming ownership over one’s problems (because they are usually your own damned fault).


EverestChannel