Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Wall Street’s Euthanasia of Industry Michael interviewed on Guns N Butter with Bonnie FaulknerListen here “When I was in Norway one of the Norwegian politicians sat next to me at a dinner and said, “You know, there’s one good thing that President Obama has done that we never anticipated in Europe. He’s shown the Europeans that we can never depend upon America again. There’s no president, no matter how good he sounds, no matter what he promises, we’re never again going to believe the patter talk of an American President. Topics: The jobless recovery; the debt ceiling and default charade; China; Greece: banks, not countries, receive the bailouts; financial warfare; IMF and EU; European Central Bank; US credit default swaps; US agricultural exports create food dependency; currency devaluation devalues the price of labor; class war of banks against the rest of society. I’m Bonnie Faulkner. That’s why the stock market is down 160 points today. Somebody has to lose when loans go bad. This is happening throughout the world. Rep.

'Occupy Wall Street' Fighting Bankster Greed and the Surveillance State | News & Politics September 27, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The crackdown on the Wall Street protesters this weekend seems to have backfired. The complaints that the media has ignored the sustained protest seem to be resonating—the park has cameras aplenty today, and food trucks line one side of the plaza. ( Local eateries have been taking out-of-town orders for protesters.) While even theoretically like-minded folks had been a bit dismissive of the Wall Street occupation before Saturday, the heavy-handed moves by police to control a small march have brought worldwide attention to Zuccotti Park, formerly Liberty Plaza. The orange mesh net came out on Saturday and the #OccupyWallSt Twitter hashtag was filled with warnings from those who had been there in 2004. “I've been waiting for this for three years,” she said. From Hacktivism to the Streets

The People vs. Goldman Sachs | Rolling Stone Politics They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it. Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. This article appears in the May 26, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. Photo Gallery: How Goldman top dogs defrauded their clients and lied to Congress Read Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs, the 'great vampire squid' Read Taibbi's 2010 piece on how bailed-out banks are recreating the conditions for a crash

We Speak on PBS Newshour About Why No Bank Executives Have Gone to Jail The cynic in me has to note that PBS Newshour decided to cover the issue of why no banksters have gone to jail on what has to be one of their lowest traffic days of the year. And I have a sneaking suspicion I got the call to go on the show because it was not exactly easy to find people willing to be taped late in the afternoon on the day before Thanksgiving (they did have to go to the trouble not only of arranging for a studio in Alabama, but also finding a makeup person, since I’m not in the habit of taking my TV warpaint with me when I travel). I hope you like this segment. PBS prefers a format which keeps the guests from interacting directly. On the one hand, they do allow each speaker to make fairly long, uninterrupted comments, which is refreshing (at least on American TV).

A Privatised Money Supply: Modern Banking and the Fractional Reserve System Philosophy Lovers! Click Here A Privatised Money Supply Modern Banking and the Fractional Reserve System [Figures and illustrations were current when written in 2002.] Do you know where the bank gets the $160,000 for your mortgage? How did the banks gain this oppressive power of charging interest on mere computer entries? Now that our money supply has been essentially privatized, how can we free ourselves from this sly form of economic tyranny? 1) A government can lend interest-free money into existence by borrowing from its own bank, The BoC, or, it can borrow interest-bearing money into existence by borrowing from privately owned banks. 2) A government that borrows with interest from private banks, when it can create its own interest-free money, is a government of idiots or thieves. Unfortunately, the human mind finds it easier to believe a lie it’s heard a hundred times before than to believe a truth it’s hearing for the first time. Thomas Jefferson William Lyon Mackenzie King

Harold Meyerson - Wall Street's financial aftershocks - washingt Like earthquakes, Goldman Sachs can strike anytime. Its work can slumber undetected for years, only to erupt, unanticipated, with catastrophic consequences. Consider: In 2001, Goldman set up some opaque financial transactions for the Greek government, the New York Times reported last month. Last year, when a new government took office, it found that Greece's debt was far greater than the old government had acknowledged, thanks to deals that allowed borrowing to be treated as currency swaps rather than as loans. It also turned out that Greece's deficit wasn't 3.7 percent of gross domestic product but 12.7 percent. The role of Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investment banks in helping the Greek government hide its debt is being investigated. All in a day's work on Wall Street. It's not as though these kinds of transactions hadn't already wreaked havoc with the world economy. So you might expect Congress would have regulated the derivatives market, which it exempted from regulation in 2000.

What's the Wall Street Occupation Really About? by Nathan Schneider There’s a lot of misinformation about the occupation of Wall Street. What’s it really about? posted Sep 23, 2011 Click here for a photo essay from the #OccupyWallStreet protests. Cross-posted from Truthout. A lot of what you’ve probably seen or read about the #occupywallstreet action is wrong, especially if you’re getting it on the Internet. At the center of occupied Liberty Plaza, a dozen or so huddle around computers in the media area, managing a makeshift Internet hotspot, a humming generator and the (theoretically) 24-hour livestream. For someone who has been following this movement in gestation as well as implementation, it’s painfully easy to see which news articles take their bearing entirely from a few Google searches. As is now well known, the anti-consumerist group Adbusters made a call on July 13 for an occupation of Wall Street. It’s a movement in formation. Soon came US Day of Rage, the project of Alexa O’Brien, an IT content management strategist. So it has become.

The Great American Bubble Machine | Rolling Stone Politics The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. Invasion of the Home Snatchers By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. The Feds vs. Wall Street's Big Win

Heist of the century: Wall Street's role in the financial crisis | Business Bernard L Madoff ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, operating it for 30 years and causing cash losses of $19.5bn. Shortly after the scheme collapsed and Madoff confessed in 2008, evidence began to surface that for years, major banks had suspected he was a fraud. None of them reported their suspicions to the authorities, and several banks decided to make money from him without, of course, risking any of their own funds. UBS headquarters forbade investing any bank or client money in Madoff accounts, but created or worked with several Madoff feeder funds. JPMorgan Chase had more evidence, because it served as Madoff's primary banker for more than 20 years. The Securities and Exchanges Commission has been deservedly criticised for not following up on years of complaints about Madoff, many of which came from a Boston investigator, Harry Markopolos, whom they treated as a crank. But not a single bank that had suspicions about Madoff made such a call. This behaviour is criminal.

Fractional reserve banking Fractional-reserve banking is the practice whereby a bank holds reserves in an amount equal to only a portion of the amount of its customers' deposits to satisfy potential demands for withdrawals. Reserves are held at the bank as currency, or as deposits reflected in the bank's accounts at the central bank. Because bank deposits are usually considered money in their own right, fractional-reserve banking permits the money supply to grow to a multiple (called the money multiplier) of the underlying reserves of base money originally created by the central bank.[1][2] Fractional-reserve banking is the current form of banking in all countries worldwide.[3] History[edit] Fractional-reserve banking predates the existence of governmental monetary authorities and originated many centuries ago in bankers' realization that generally not all depositors demand payment at the same time.[4] How it works[edit] In most legal systems, a bank deposit is not a bailment. Economic function[edit] Formula[edit]