Baltic Dry Index. 1049 +11
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"If the financial system goes down, our business is going down and, trust me, yours and everyone else's is going down, too."
Lloyd Blankfein. CEO Goldman Sachs. November 8, 2009
Scroll down to Crooks Corner where the veil is
falling off the Fed and the Goldmanites. A Black Swan arrives. Stay long gold
and silver.
“The world is a place that’s gone from being flat to round to crooked.”
Mad Magazine.
At the Comex silver depositories Friday final figures were: Registered 66.49 Moz,
Eligible 116.89 Moz, Total 183.38 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, so who owns the Fed? God’s workers at
Goldman apparently. This whole casino capitalism system is rigged and rotten to
its taxpayer bailout core. But it gets worse, Goldie even seems to control US
Federal judges. Is there anyone left on planet earth that still thinks that
foreign banks, oil companies or Latin American countries can get justice in a
US based court?Below, welcome to our new and expanding lawless age.
“Call
it the Goldman Sachs test. If this is something Goldman would do to its
clients, don't do it."
Felix
Salmon.
Whistleblower’s tapes suggest the Fed was protecting Goldman Sachs from the inside
Updated by Dylan Matthews on September 26, 2014, 1:00 p.m. ET
One of the most troubling aspects of the financial crisis was that
government regulators let it happen in the first place. And the most compelling
explanation is also the most disturbing: regulators were unduly influenced or
even controlled ("captured" is the term of art) by the very banks and
financial firms they were meant to rein in. This argument, popularized most
notably by MIT economist Simon Johnson, has strong circumstantial evidence supporting
it, but concrete proof from within regulatory agencies has, understandably,
been hard to come by.On Friday, This American Life and ProPublica announced they had found such proof. A joint report produced by ProPublica reporter Jake Bernstein (who previously won a Pulitzer for his investigative reporting on Wall Street for the two outlets) revealed the existence of 46 hours of audio recordings made inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which, as the Fed's interface with the financial sector, serves as one of country's most powerful bank regulators. Taken by former Fed bank examiner Carmen Segarra, the recordings suggest a culture within the Fed that was at best overly cautious in confronting bank wrongdoing, and at worst in bed with the banks it was regulating.
The TAL episode is worth listening to in full, and the ProPublica report is worth reading in full, but here are the very basics of what they found in case you're in a rush.
Segarra found three clear cases where Goldman appeared to be engaged in wrongdoing, but where Fed staff pushed back at her attempts to correct it. The latter two incidents have audio evidence from Segarra's recordings corroborating them.
The wealthy clients incident
A senior Goldman executive, at a meeting with Fed officials early in Segarra's tenure, expressed the view that "once clients were wealthy enough, certain consumer laws didn’t apply to them," in Bernstein's words; this is corroborated by minutes from the meeting in questions. When Segarra tried to look into the issue further, a Fed colleague protested, saying the executive didn't say that, or if he did, that he didn't mean it.The Santander incident
In early January, Goldman was closing a deal with the Spanish bank Santander, the point of which, Fed regulators discerned, was to take risky assets off of Santander's hands so as to increase its ratio of capital to assets so as to comply with European regulators. The deal required Goldman to notify the Fed about the deal and get it to sign off, which Goldman hadn't done.While Fed officials, including Michael Silva, initially sounded outraged, in the end Silva only brought it up once, at the very end of a meeting with Goldman officials, and in a tone that Segarra found overly deferential. She thought the debrief from the meeting with other Fed officials suggested the Fed feared Goldman retaliation if they were too aggressive. This was despite the fact that Goldman was required to hand over information and the Fed could punish it, including criminally, if it failed to comply.
The most forceful action they considered taking against Goldman for the deal was sending them a letter; Bernstein couldn't confirm that one was ever sent.
The conflict of interest policy incident
The Fed requires banks like Goldman to have firmwide conflict of interest policies that fit certain requirements. Segarra concluded that Goldman lacked such a policy, not least because Goldman's staffer in charge of managing conflicts of interest told her the firm's policy had no definition of "conflict of interest."Silva agreed with her. But after he got pushback from another Fed examiner, he changed his view, just as Segarra was about to take regulatory action to force Goldman to adopt a real policy. Silva protested that the bank had a conflict of interest policy, but Bernstein notes that it was "just a few paragraphs long and very general .… We showed it to two experts: former Fed examiners familiar with the Fed’s guidance on this issue. They both said it wouldn’t qualify as a policy."
Silva urged her to recant her statement that there was no policy, despite the fact that he could have easily overridden her. Segarra suggests this was because, to quote Bernstein, "if she submitted her conclusions, it would create a formal record that her bosses didn’t want." Eventually, Segarra agreed to say there was was a policy, albeit a "very poor policy," but privately insisted to Silva that there was "no way this is a policy." A week later, she was fired.
More
How Goldman Controls The New York Fed: 47.5 Hours Of "The Secret Goldman Sachs Tapes" Explain
----It didn't: in April, the NY Fed won the dismissal of her lawsuit:U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams in Manhattan ruled that the failure by the former examiner, Carmen Segarra, to connect her disclosure of Goldman's alleged violations to her May 2012 firing was "fatal" to her whistleblower lawsuit. Abrams also said Segarra could not file an amended lawsuit.
"Congress sought to protect employees of banking agencies ... who adequately allege that they have suffered retaliation for providing information regarding a possible violation of a 'law or regulation,'" the judge wrote. "Plaintiff has not done so."
Segarra's findings that Goldman's conflict-of-interest practices may have violated merely an "advisory letter" that did not carry the force of law did not entitle her to whistleblower protection under the Federal Deposit Insurance Act, Abrams said.
The fact that the judge on the case was conflicted, and had a close relationship to Goldman which was represented by her husband also a lawyer, clearly was "irrelevant":
In her ruling on Wednesday, Abrams also rejected a move by Stengle for greater disclosure by the judge about her husband's relationship with Goldman Sachs. Abrams disclosed on April 3 that she had just learned that her husband, Greg Andres, a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell, was representing Goldman in an advisory capacity.
Stengle said at the time she would not seek Abrams' recusal, the judge said, and went ahead the next day with scheduled oral arguments on the defendants' bid to dismiss the case.
But on April 11, Stengle made a written request for a "more complete disclosure" of Andres' relationship with Goldman, and Abrams' own working relationship with another defense lawyer.
Abrams said that was too late, given that Segarra by then would have had a chance to "sample the temper of the court" and perhaps anticipate she would lose unless Abrams recused herself. "The timing of plaintiff's requests suggests that she is engaging in precisely the type of 'judge-shopping' the 2nd Circuit has cautioned against," Abrams wrote, referring to the federal appeals court in New York. "Such an attempt to engage in judicial game-playing strikes at the core of our legal system."
One has to either laugh, or weep, because that statement alone merely confirmed what we said a year ago when we said that "the judicial branch is also under the control of the two abovementioned entities", namely the NY Fed and Goldman.
In any event, the Segarra case disappeared from the public eye, and was promptly forgotten by the just as corrupted media and the public.
More
"God, no, we don't club baby seals. We club babies."
Goldmanite, quoted in The Times of London. November 8 2009
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished Aug.
DJIA: +152 Down. NASDAQ: +312 Down. SP500: +231 Down.
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