They’ve set back property records to the early
1900s, skipping the recording of deeds in county registry offices and
using their own front called MERS. They lobbied to kill fixed pension
plans and then shaved a decade of growth off our 401(K)s with exorbitant
fees, rigged research and trading for the house.
When much of Wall Street collapsed in 2008 as a direct result of their
corrupt business model, their pals in Washington used the public purse
to resuscitate the same corrupt financial model – allowing even greater
depositor concentration at JPMorgan and Bank of America through
acquisitions of crippled firms.
And now, Wall Street may get away with the biggest heist of the public
purse in the history of the world. You know it’s an unprecedented crime
when the conservative Economist magazine sums up the situation with a one word headline: “Banksters.”
It has been widely reported that Libor, the interest rate benchmark
that was rigged by a banking cartel, impacted $10 trillion in consumer
loans. Libor stands for London Interbank Offered Rate and is supposed
to be a reliable reflection of the rate at which banks are lending to
each other.
The Libor rate was used to manipulate, not just tens of trillions of consumer loans, buthundreds of
trillions in interest rate contracts (swaps) with municipalities across
America and around the globe. (Milan prosecutors have charged
JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, UBS and Depfa Bank with derivatives fraud and
earning $128 million in hidden fees.)
Rigging Libor also inflated the value of the trash that Wall Street was
parking in 2008 and 2009 at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to
extract trillions in cash at near zero interest-rate loans from the
public purse.
When rates rise, bond prices decline. When rates decline,
bond prices rise. The Federal Reserve made loans to Wall Street based
on a percentage of the face value of their bonds and mortgage backed
securities that they presented for collateral.
By pushing down interest
rates, the banks were getting a lift out of their collateral, allowing
them to borrow more.
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