Criminal law, Justice, Politics

Just Fine: Don’t Bank on the Justice Department to Prosecute Big Banks

DeptofJusticeSubmitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger

Last December, I wrote a post titled You Call This Justice? DOJ Criticized for Its Settlement with “Too Big to Jail” Bank HSBC. It appears that the US Justice Department isn’t too keen on bringing criminal charges against ANY wealthy bankers—not just those who work for HSBC, a huge international bank that has knowingly laundered money for drug cartels and murderers. The unethical shenanigans of the banksters of Wall Street that led to the near collapse of the US economy and to a recession don’t seem to merit jail time for the perpetrators—just a slap on the wrist and a fine.  No individual fines are paid though. The mega banks pay the fines and the banksters continue to go about their business…and continue to earn hefty salaries and bonuses.

At “Wall Street Reform: Oversight of Financial Stability and Consumer and Investor Protections,” the first Banking Committee hearing attended by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), Warren asked bank regulators how tough they really are on the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street and about the last few times they actually took any banks all the way to a trial.

A few weeks ago, Bill Moyers sat down with Matt Taibbi to talk about the HSBC settlement, UBS and the Libor Scandal, Lanny Breuer, Mary Jo White, and the revolving door in Washington, D.C.

Not long after Taibbi’s appearance on Bill Moyers’s program, his article on HSBC , Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail, was published in Rolling Stone.

Quoting from Taibbi’s article:

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that “they make the guys on Wall Street look good.” The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.

“They violated every goddamn law in the book,” says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business.”

That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis. What is different about this settlement is that the Justice Department, for the first time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular kind of criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap for HSBC might undermine the world economy. “Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges,” said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, “HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.”

It was the dawn of a new era. In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life. But now, when you’re Too Big to Jail, you can cop to laundering terrorist cash and violating the Trading With the Enemy Act, and not only will you not be prosecuted for it, but the government will go out of its way to make sure you won’t lose your license. Some on the Hill put it to me this way: OK, fine, no jail time, but they can’t even pull their charter? Are you kidding?

But the Justice Department wasn’t finished handing out Christmas goodies. A little over a week later, Breuer was back in front of the press, giving a cushy deal to another huge international firm, the Swiss bank UBS, which had just admitted to a key role in perhaps the biggest antitrust/price-fixing case in history, the so-called LIBOR scandal, a massive interest-rate­rigging conspiracy involving hundreds of trillions (“trillions,” with a “t”) of dollars in financial products. While two minor players did face charges, Breuer and the Justice Department worried aloud about global stability as they explained why no criminal charges were being filed against the parent company.

“Our goal here,” Breuer said, “is not to destroy a major financial institution.”

A reporter at the UBS presser pointed out to Breuer that UBS had already been busted in 2009 in a major tax-evasion case, and asked a sensible question. “This is a bank that has broken the law before,” the reporter said. “So why not be tougher?”

“I don’t know what tougher means,” answered the assistant attorney general.

Taibbi added that the Justice Department’s recent $1.9 billion settlement with HSBC was the big bank’s “third strike.”

In late January, PBS aired a Frontline program titled The Untouchables. The following day, David Sirota of Salon wrote about the program. Sirota called it a “stunning report” that exposed how the Obama administration deals with the malfeasance of the bankers on Wall Street.

Quoting Sirota:

PBS Frontline’s stunning report last night on why the Obama administration has refused to prosecute any Wall Streeter involved in the financial meltdown doesn’t just implicitly indict a political and financial press that utterly abdicated its responsibility to cover such questions. It also — and as importantly — exposes the genuinely radical jurisprudential ideology that Wall Street campaign contributors have baked into America’s “justice” system. Indeed, after watching the piece, you will understand that the word “justice” belongs in quotes thanks to an Obama administration that has made a mockery of the name of a once hallowed executive department…

The piece by PBS reporter Martin Smith looks at how Obama has driven federal prosecutions of financial crimes down to a two-decade low. It also documents the rampant and calculated mortgage securities fraud perpetrated by the major Wall Street banks, who, not coincidentally, were using some of the profits they made to become among President Obama’s biggest campaign donors.

As we see, that campaign money didn’t just buy massive government bailouts of the banks, a pathetically weak Wall Street “reform” bill or explicit reassurances from Obama’s campaign that the president would refrain from criticizing bankers. Frontline shows it also bought a Too Big to Jail ideology publicly championed by the white-collar defense lawyer turned Obama prosecutor Lanny Breuer.

I recommend watching Frontline’s The Untouchables. It’s nearly 54-minutes long. Here’s the link:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables/

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail
 How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it (Rolling Stone)

Justice Department’s New Get-Tough Policy Is, Well, Not (Rolling Stone)

Choice of Mary Jo White to Head SEC Puts Fox In Charge of Hen House (Rolling Stone)

Are banks too big to jail?: PBS Frontline’s stunning report shows how the Obama administration undermined the rule of law (Salon)

Why Mary Jo White is the wrong pick for the SEC (CNN Money)

Jack Lew and the Obama Administration’s Finance-Friendly Status Quo (The Daily Beast)

Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer Speaks at the New York City Bar Association–Thursday, September 13, 2012 (The United States Justice Department)

109 thoughts on “Just Fine: Don’t Bank on the Justice Department to Prosecute Big Banks”

  1. Elaine,

    In re the Breuer article: absolutely wrong and revolting in every sense of those words.

  2. Is Jack Lew A Friend to Wall Street?
    Like Tim Geithner, the new Treasury nominee may owe his views to Robert Rubin. So don’t expect him to pursue much in the way of bank reform.
    By Michael Hirsh
    1/10/13
    http://www.nationaljournal.com/whitehouse/is-jack-lew-a-friend-to-wall-street-20130110

    Excerpt:
    It was a little noted event when last fall, during the height of the presidential election campaign, the Treasury Department released Timothy Geithner’s phone records. To the extent anyone paid attention at all—and let’s face it, almost no one did—financial reporters were struck that the Treasury secretary’s most frequent contact was Larry Fink of BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager and Geithner’s principal conduit to his many friends on Wall Street. But the even more telling name of Geithner’s regular confidants, as the Financial Times noted, was the second one on the frequent-contact list: Robert Rubin.

    That might seem odd; after all, it’s been nearly a decade and a half since Geithner worked for Rubin, who is long retired from public life. But Bob Rubin was no ordinary employer. The former Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton all but created Timothy Geithner as we know him today, raising him from a junior Tokyo Embassy staffer to undersecretary of the Treasury in the mid-to-late-’90s, and later sponsoring the still-boyish bureaucrat as president of the New York Fed in 2003 (against resistance from the head of the search committee, Paul Volcker, who according to The Wall Street Journal barked: “Who’s Geithner?”). As he almost always has, Rubin prevailed, and for nearly four years his former protégé has lorded over America’s financial system.

    Rubinomics: It’s the cult that never quits. Now the nation is faced with a potential new acolyte. Is Jacob Lew, who is expected to be named Thursday as the replacement for Geithner, yet another Rubinite who will largely follow the policies of his predecessor? Calm, brilliant, competent at everything he’s tried—from the Office of Management and Budget to deputy secretary of State to chief of staff—Lew has smoothly run the White House in the year since William Daley left. He has a reputation for unimpeachable integrity and total honesty, as well as a mastery of the budget that will be critical over the next four years of fiscal fights. But many critics fear that the picture is different when it comes to Wall Street. On financial reform, Lew is a virtual cipher who, in his few public pronouncements, has appeared to toe the Rubin-Geithner line of minimal interference with America’s giant banks.

    And Lew is taking over as Treasury secretary at a critical time. Two and a half years after enactment, the Dodd-Frank financial law is still not fully implemented. Even as the winds of financial turbulence threaten from Europe, financial-industry officials admit the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has not developed the capacity to liquidate banks in the event of a crisis. Although it never became a 2012 campaign issue, financial regulation has lagged well behind schedule (no one even seemed to care, for example, when Mitt Romney failed to propose an alternative to Dodd-Frank, even though he had promised to do so). Wall Street’s lobbyists have managed to delay the “Volcker Rule” —the closest thing we have today to a Glass-Steagall law separating federally insured commercial banking from risky investment banking—by six months. The banks are also engaged in a behind-the-scenes effort to escape U.S. oversight of their derivatives activities overseas.

    Into this den of super-sophisticated—and savage—lions of finance will walk the gentle-mannered figure of Jack Lew, who is expected to be easily confirmed. Hopes for change—any real progress in containing the power and systemic size of the banks—are not high. “By going with Jack Lew, Obama is making the decision: ‘I don’t want a fight over Treasury secretary. I want someone who’s going to maintain the status quo.’ That’s what Jack Lew represents,” says Jeff Connaughton, who as a senior Senate staffer fought for financial reform and later, in despair, wrote a book titled Wall Street Always Wins.

  3. Breuer Identifies Real Clients on Frontline then Quits
    January 23, 2013
    http://my.firedoglake.com/masaccio/2013/01/23/breuer-identifies-real-clients-on-frontline-then-quits/

    Excerpt:
    Lanny Breuer is out as head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, according to the Washington Post. After his ratlike performance on Frontline (transcript here) it won’t be long before we find him at some creepy New York or DC law firm defending his best friends, the banks and their sleazy employees. His legacy is simple: too big to fail banks can’t possibly commit crimes, so minor civil fines and false promises of reform are punishment enough. Jamie Dimon couldn’t have put it better.
    Breuer tried his best to dodge questions about why he violated his promise to Senator Kaufman that he was actually conducting an investigation of Wall Street fraud. Martin Smith, the interviewer, asks:

    “We spoke to a couple of sources from within the fraud section of the Criminal Division, and through mid-2010 they reported that when it came to Wall Street, there were no investigations going on; there were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps.”

    Breuer responds: “we looked very hard at the types of matters that you’re talking about.” He doesn’t deny that there were no investigations; no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps. Instead, he tries to shift the subject to his pointless insider trading cases, his Ponzi cases, the Lee Farkas case (the mortgage firm Taylor, Whitaker and Bean), and a few hapless mortgage originator cases, and even a policeman defrauded by some fraud or other. Smith won’t let that pass. Eventually we get to the heart of the problem to Breuer:

    “But in those cases where we can’t bring a criminal case — and federal criminal cases are hard to bring — I have to prove that you had the specific intent to defraud. I have to prove that the counterparty, the other side of the transaction, relied on your misrepresentation. If we cannot establish that, then we can’t bring a criminal case.
    …
    “But in reality, in a criminal case, we have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt — not a preponderance, not 51 percent — beyond any reasonable doubt that a crime was committed. And I have to prove not only that you made a false statement but that you intended to commit a crime, and also that the other side of the transaction relied on what you were saying. And frankly, in many of the securitizations and the kinds of transactions we’re talking about, in reality you had very sophisticated counterparties on both sides.”

    Smith says “You do have plaintiffs who will come forward and say that they relied on the reps and warranties, and they relied on the due diligence claims that were made by the bank.”

    Breuer keeps talking, but he can’t worm out of this one. Smith then says:

    “We’ve spoken to people inside the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group who said that when they began their work in January, February, March of 2012 that they found nothing at the Justice Department in the pipeline, no ongoing cases looking at securitization.”

    And lest we forget, Lanny reminds us that these cases have ramifications for the rest of the bank. I don’t know who told Breuer that indicting the investment banking arm of a megabank would destroy the bank, but that’s a piece of idiocy that he claims to believe…

  5. Department of Justice Attacks Frontline As Lanny Breuer Resigns
    By: DSWright
    January 24, 2013
    http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/01/24/department-of-justice-attacks-frontline-as-lanny-breuer-resigns/

    Well that didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after PBS aired Frontline’s The Untouchables, a program focused on the failures of the Department of Justice to make cases against Wall Street bankers despite ample evidence of fraud, the head of DOJ’s criminal division resigns. It’s hard to dismiss as a coincidence given that Lanny Breuer was rather clearly identified in the program – which he participated in – as the person unwilling to go forward with Wall Street prosecutions out of both a fear of losing the cases and some strange fixation on the possibility the firms engaging in criminal fraud might go out of business. I am not sure anyone regrets Enron and Arthur Andersen going out of business. But more to the point, that concern is totally outside a prosecutor’s purview. Breuer was supposed to enforce the law not play systemic risk analyst – a job he is in no way qualified for.

    While establishment media like the Washington Post want to focus on Breuer’s role in the “Fast and Furious” gun running fiasco as a possible reason for his departure it seems those in the know had a different understanding. The Department Of Justice spent the day attacking Frontline claiming their program was a “hit piece” and threatening to “never co-operate” with news stories in the future. It’s so good to see someone will pay for Wall Street’s crimes – not the bankers or the politicians who committed the crimes and profited from them but journalists asking questions about what happened. Sweet justice.

    It is also worth noting that Lanny Breuer was interviewed extensively for the program. He had his say repeatedly as did others whom he worked with, a good deal of the program involved him offering the best arguments he could muster to defend his actions/inactions. For DOJ to now punish the journalists for a program that provided their officials with a forum is truly ridiculous.

    It’s time to face the facts, DOJ failed on one of the most important legal issues of our time. They have no one to blame for their bad reputation but themselves.

  6. US high court limits SEC authority to seek penalties
    10:14 AM ET, 02/27/2013 – Reuters

    WASHINGTON, Feb 27 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday limited the authority of the federal government’s top securities regulator to seek civil penalties over conduct that occurred more than five years before investigators took action.

    The court held on a unanimous vote that the five-year clock for the government to act on fraud begins to tick when the fraud occurs, not when it is discovered.

    The case is a win for mutual fund manager Marc Gabelli and colleague Bruce Alpert, whom the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission claimed allowed a firm now known as Headstart Advisers Ltd to conduct hundreds of “market-timing” trades, which involve rapid trading to exploit market or price inefficiencies.

  7. U.S. AG Eric Holder, DoJ Head Lanny Breuer Linked To Banks Accused Of Foreclosure Fraud
    By Scot J. Paltrow
    1/20/12
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/20/eric-holder-banks-lanny-breuer_n_1218452.html

    Excerpt:
    Jan 19 (Reuters) – U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who’s Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows.

    The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington’s biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for.

    Both the Justice Department and Covington declined to say if either official had personally worked on matters for the big mortgage industry clients. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said Holder and Breuer had complied fully with conflict of interest regulations, but she declined to say if they had recused themselves from any matters related to the former clients.

    Reuters reported in December that under Holder and Breuer, the Justice Department hasn’t brought any criminal cases against big banks or other companies involved in mortgage servicing, even though copious evidence has surfaced of apparent criminal violations in foreclosure cases.

    The evidence, including records from federal and state courts and local clerks’ offices around the country, shows widespread forgery, perjury, obstruction of justice, and illegal foreclosures on the homes of thousands of active-duty military personnel.

    In recent weeks the Justice Department has come under renewed pressure from members of Congress, state and local officials and homeowners’ lawyers to open a wide-ranging criminal investigation of mortgage servicers, the biggest of which have been Covington clients. So far Justice officials haven’t responded publicly to any of the requests.

    While Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington, the firm’s clients included the four largest U.S. banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo & Co – as well as at least one other bank that is among the 10 largest mortgage servicers.

  8. Pingback: Elaine Magliaro ~ Just Fine: Don’t Bank On The Justice Department To Prosecute Big Banks | Shift Frequency

  13. Addressing “The Empathy Deficit”: What Lloyd Blankfein could Learn at the DMV
    12/22/2012
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/petersims/2012/12/22/addressing-the-empathy-deficit-what-lloyd-blankfein-could-learn-at-the-dmv/

    Excerpt:
    Did you know, for instance, that the Goldman Sachs Board Member who oversees the Goldman compensation committee is James “Jim” Johnson, who was the CEO of Fannie Mae?

    In their best-selling book, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Created the Worst Financial Crisis of Our Time, Gretchen Morgenson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning business reporter at The New York Times, and Joshua Rosner, an expert on housing finance, describe how under Johnson’s leadership as CEO of Fannie Mae, the company used the mortgage agency backing provided by the government (which essentially functioned as a subsidy) to enrich himself personally to the tune of $100 million, as well as lining the pockets of other executives, including his successor Franklin Raines. The authors cite a 1996 Congressional Budget Office study that discovered that Fannie took about a third of the benefits of the government subsidy when they were meant to pass it onto homeowners like Uncle Joe, or you and me.

    This seems to be the epitome of negligent leadership. That Jim Johnson kept those monies while maintaining his grips on power, seemingly without any accountability reflects what Thomas Friedman has rightly called “a corrupt plutocracy”. Not only has no one amongst these executives gone to jail for leading corrupted company cultures and helping to create both a significant debt burden on citizens like Uncle Joe and those of GenEntrepreneur, but also contributed to a general culture of crony capitalism.

    That culture of crony capitalism is a far cry from the Emersonian brand of American entrepreneurial capitalism that made this country great.

  14. The People vs. Goldman Sachs
    A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges
    By MATT TAIBBI
    MAY 11, 2011
    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-people-vs-goldman-sachs-20110511

    Excerpt:
    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. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn’t leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.

    The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — “a million fraud cases a year” is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin’s small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street’s aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.

    To date, there has been only one successful prosecution of a financial big fish from the mortgage bubble, and that was Lee Farkas, a Florida lender who was just convicted on a smorgasbord of fraud charges and now faces life in prison. But Farkas, sadly, is just an exception proving the rule: Like Bernie Madoff, his comically excessive crime spree (which involved such lunacies as kiting checks to his own bank and selling loans that didn’t exist) was almost completely unconnected to the systematic corruption that led to the crisis. What’s more, many of the earlier criminals in the chain of corruption — from subprime lenders like Countrywide, who herded old ladies and ghetto families into bad loans, to rapacious banks like Washington Mutual, who pawned off fraudulent mortgages on investors — wound up going belly up, sunk by their own greed.

    But Goldman, as the Levin report makes clear, remains an ascendant company precisely because it used its canny perception of an upcoming disaster (one which it helped create, incidentally) as an opportunity to enrich itself, not only at the expense of clients but ultimately, through the bailouts and the collateral damage of the wrecked economy, at the expense of society. The bank seemed to count on the unwillingness or inability of federal regulators to stop them — and when called to Washington last year to explain their behavior, Goldman executives brazenly misled Congress, apparently confident that their perjury would carry no serious consequences. Thus, while much of the Levin report describes past history, the Goldman section describes an ongoing? crime — a powerful, well-connected firm, with the ear of the president and the Treasury, that appears to have conquered the entire regulatory structure and stands now on the precipice of officially getting away with one of the biggest financial crimes in history.

  15. E-Mails Imply JPMorgan Knew Some Mortgage Deals Were Bad
    By: Jessica Silver-Greenberg
    2/7/13
    http://www.cnbc.com/id/100441246/EMails_Imply_JPMorgan_Knew_Some_Mortgage_Deals_Were_Bad

    Excerpt:
    When an outside analysis uncovered serious flaws with thousands of home loans, JPMorgan Chase executives found an easy fix.

    Rather than disclosing the full extent of problems like fraudulent home appraisals and overextended borrowers, the bank adjusted the critical reviews,according to documents filed early Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan. As a result, the mortgages, which JPMorgan bundled into complex securities, appeared healthier, making the deals more appealing to investors.

    The trove of internal e-mails and employee interviews, filed as part of a lawsuit by one of the investors in the securities, offers a fresh glimpse into Wall Street’s mortgage machine, which churned out billions of dollars of securities that later imploded. The documents reveal that JPMorgan, as well as two firms the bank acquired during the credit crisis, Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, flouted quality controls and ignored problems, sometimes hiding them entirely, in a quest for profit.

    The lawsuit, which was filed by Dexia, a Belgian-French bank, is being closely watched on Wall Street. After suffering significant losses, Dexia sued JPMorgan and its affiliates in 2012, claiming it had been duped into buying $1.6 billion of troubled mortgage-backed securities. The latest documents could provide a window into a $200 billion case that looms over the entire industry.In that lawsuit, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has accused 17 banks of selling dubious mortgage securities to the two housing giants. At least 20 of the securities are also highlighted in the Dexia case, according to an analysis of court records.

    In court filings, JPMorgan has strongly denied wrongdoing and is contesting both cases in federal court. The bank declined to comment.

    Dexia’s lawsuit is part of a broad assault on Wall Street for its role in the 2008 financial crisis, as prosecutors, regulators and private investors take aim at mortgage-related securities. New York’s attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, sued JPMorgan last year over investments created by Bear Stearns between 2005 and 2007.

  16. Raff,

    Look at how much chase bank admitted to laundering…. If you launder money…. They seize it…. And criminally prosecute you…. if the banks do it… They pay a civil fine….

  19. The Federal Reserve “Bernanke” is continuing to bail out the banks by “printing” and buying $85 billion per month of mortgage-backed securities
    still – an unbelievable outrage. We MUST close down the Fed. It is truly the head of the banking system – a cartel. It enables the banks to commit the financial crimes by manipulating the currency; as well as tits government cronies’ collusion committed against the American people. The tentacles of the Federal Reserve reach far and wide as does their terrible consequences: unending wars unpaid for, invasions, drones by which the US destroys the peoples of many countries as well as the quality of life of the middle class of the US (the true “producers” and drivers of the American economy and wealth). These are unspeakable crimes that will result in complete collapse, wholly avoided by the perpetrators in their Lear Jets leaviing it behind as the bewitching hour has come and gone. Govern accordingly.

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