Obama bullied bank to pay racial settlement without proof: report

Newly uncovered internal memos reveal the Obama administration knowingly exaggerated charges of racial discrimination in probes of Ally Bank and other defendants in the $900 billion car-lending business as part of a "racial justice" campaign that's looking more like a massive government extortion and shakedown operation.
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Big banks brace for oil loans to implode

Big banks are cringing as crude oil is crumbling.

Firms on Wall Street helped bankroll America's energy boom, financing very expensive drilling projects that ended up flooding the world with oil.
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J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs among ‘too-big-to-fail’ U.S. banks downgraded by S&P

Standard & Poor's downgraded the credit ratings of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Groups and six other major U.S. banks, saying it is no longer confident that the U.S. government would step in to support them in a future crisis.


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Former Citigroup CEO: Big banks don't work

In an op-ed published in the Financial Times, John Reed says large banks like the one he used to run are now "inherently unstable and unworkable." The man who was one of the chief architects of the "Big Bank" model now says says the United States never should have repealed the Glass-Steagall banking act in 1999.
That's exactly what Democratic presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley have been arguing on the campaign trail. They want the law reinstated. Hillary Clinton and the Republican candidates do not.


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Largest U.S. banks face $120 billion shortfall under new rule

Six big U.S. banks need to raise an additional $120 billion, most likely in long-term debt, under a rule proposed on Friday by the Federal Reserve. The requirements are aimed at ensuring that some of the biggest and most interconnected banks, which include Goldman Sachs Group Inc, (GS.N), JPMorgan Chase & Co, (JPM.N), and Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N), can better withstand another crisis by turning some of their debt, particularly debt issued by their holding companies, into equity without disrupting markets or requiring a government bailout.


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Obama's 'Disparate Impact' Witch Hunt Vs. Banks Gets Surprise Court Blessing

IBD: Last week the Supreme Court gave the White House license to water down, if not destroy, virtually every standard dealing with housing. There's nothing stopping its push for affirmative-action lending and zoning. --In a shocking 5-4 decision, the high bench ruled that housing- and lending-discrimination lawsuits based on no proof other than statistics showing different outcomes by minority groups are within the bounds of civil-rights law. --It agreed with housing-rights zealots that zoning and underwriting policies that have a harmful effect — or disparate impact — on minorities are illegal, even if that harm is unintentional.

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Revealed: The banker who shaped the modern financial world after WWII was a Soviet spy

Harry Dexter White was the architect of the post-war financial system, which paved the way for the West to dominate the 20th century and win the Cold War.

But it has now emerged that the brilliant economist was in fact a staunch anti-capitalist who privately praised the Soviet Union's communism.

Documents unearthed at Princeton University prove that, although White devoted his life to strengthening western capitalism, he secretly despised the system he had created and believed it would eventually be overtaken by the state-controlled economy of the USSR and its allies.

The flawed genius did not live long enough to find out just how wrong he was, as he died in 1948, before both the decades-long boom enjoyed by the U.S. and Europe and the slow decline of the East.

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Audit of the Federal Reserve Reveals $16 Trillion in Secret Bailouts

This summer, I heard a brief newscast teaser stating that $16 Trillion was 'missing' with a reference to the Federal Reserve. I thought details would follow and expected a huge backlash but never heard more until Jean Nelson sent a link to the following article this evening. Jean wrote, "Ron Paul’s persistence has resulted in a tremendous expose of the Federal Reserve Bank." --bc

SILVER BEAR CAFE (via unelected.org), July 21, 2011 - The first ever GAO (Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill (HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out. Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets. Nevertheless, the results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100 year history were posted on Senator Sander’s webpage earlier this morning [July 21, 2011].

What was revealed in the audit was startling:

$16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious - the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.

To place $16 trillion into perspective, remember that GDP of the United States is only $14.12 trillion. The entire national debt of the United States government spanning its 200+ year history is "only" $14.5 trillion. The budget that is being debated so heavily in Congress and the Senate is "only" $3.5 trillion. Take all of the outrage and debate over the $1.5 trillion deficit into consideration, and swallow this Red pill: There was no debate about whether $16,000,000,000,000 would be given to failing banks and failing corporations around the world.

In late 2008, the TARP Bailout bill was passed and loans of $800 billion were given to failing banks and companies. That was a blatant lie considering the fact that Goldman Sachs alone received 814 billion dollars. As is turns out, the Federal Reserve donated $2.5 trillion to Citigroup, while Morgan Stanley received $2.04 trillion. The Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank, a German bank, split about a trillion and numerous other banks received hefty chunks of the $16 trillion.

"This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else." - Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

When you have conservative Republican stalwarts like Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Ron Paul (R-TX) as well as self identified Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders all fighting against the Federal Reserve, you know that it is no longer an issue of Right versus Left. When you have every single member of the Republican Party in Congress and progressive Congressmen like Dennis Kucinich sponsoring a bill to audit the Federal Reserve, you realize that the Federal Reserve is an entity onto itself, which has no oversight and no accountability.

Americans should be swelled with anger and outrage at the abysmal state of affairs when an unelected group of bankers can create money out of thin air and give it out to megabanks and supercorporations like Halloween candy. If the Federal Reserve and the bankers who control it believe that they can continue to devalue the savings of Americans and continue to destroy the US economy, they will have to face the realization that their trillion dollar printing presses will eventually plunder the world economy.

The list of institutions that received the most money from the Federal Reserve can be found on page 131 of the GAO Audit and are as follows...

• Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000)
  
• Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000)
  
• Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000)
  
• Bank of America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000)
  
• Barclays PLC (United Kingdom): $868 billion ($868,000,000,000)
  
• Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000)
  
• Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000)
  
• Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000)
  
• JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000)
  
• Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000)
  
• UBS (Switzerland): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000)
  
• Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000)
  
• Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000)
  
• Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000)
  
• BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000)
  
• and many many more including banks in Belgium of all places

View the 266-page GAO audit of the Federal Reserve (July 21st, 2011): GAO-Fed-Investigation (on scribd.com)
Source: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-696
FULL PDF on GAO server: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11696.pdf
Senator Sander’s Article: http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3
Hat tip: SILVER BEAR CAFE (via www.unelected.org) Read More......

Why There Was No Depression

WASHINGTON POST, 10/5/2009 by Robert J. Samuelson (Hat tip: John Detweiler) - How close did we come to the Great Depression 2.0? That question will spawn a cottage industry of books, studies and conferences. But Christina Romer, the head of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, already has an answer: pretty darn close. Her conclusion deserves attention because Romer, in her previous academic career, was a scholar of the Great Depression. Read more at the Washington Post...

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