Pam and Russ Martens — WikiLeaks Bombshell: Emails Show Citigroup Had Major Role in Shaping and Staffing Obama’s First Term

According to emails released by WikiLeaks yesterday, which came from a hack of the email account of John Podesta, a co-chair of Obama’s 2008 Transition Team,  we learn that despite the obvious fact that Citigroup was both corrupt and derelict in handling its own financial affairs, Barack Obama gave executives of that bank an outsized role in shaping and staffing his first term.…

Because Robert Rubin did so well for Bill Clinton.

Conflict of interest if not outright corruption even though technically no cash was passed under the table. Absent quid pro quo, it all legal, and in the world of liberalism, if it is legal it also moral.

Wall Street On Parade
WikiLeaks Bombshell: Emails Show Citigroup Had Major Role in Shaping and Staffing Obama’s First Term
Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Dan Froomkin — Obama Administration Finds New Way to Let Criminal Banks Avoid Consequences

Three top Democrats are accusing the Department of Housing and Urban Development of quietly removing a key clause in its requirements for taxpayer-guaranteed mortgage insurance in order to spare two banks recently convicted of federal crimes from being frozen out of the lucrative market.

HUD’s action is the latest in a series of steps by federal agencies to eliminate real-world consequences for serial financial felons, even as the Obama administration has touted its efforts to hold banks accountable.

In this sense, the guilty plea has become as meaningless to banks as their other ways of resolving criminal charges: out-of-court settlements, or deferred prosecution agreements. “Too Big to Fail” has morphed into “Too Big to Jail” — and then again, into “Bank Lives Matter.”

Sens. Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Maxine Waters fired off a letter to HUD on Tuesday, saying they believe that the timing of the change was designed to clear the way for two banks recently convicted of federal crimes — JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup — to continue to make Federal Housing Administration-insured loans. Last year, JPMorgan Chase wrote $1.67 billion in FHA loans, and Citi wrote $342 million, according to data from the Congressional Research Service.

On May 20 of this year, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup both entered a guilty plea on one felony count of conspiring to rig foreign currency exchange trades, the largest market on the globe.…

Serial criminality. It's not only the banks but also government that is creating a criminogenic environment.

The Intercept
Obama Administration Finds New Way to Let Criminal Banks Avoid Consequences

Dan Froomkin

Wall Street "star" Meredith Whitney blows up and is back giving interviews to Fox News.

"Famed" Wall Street, "star" Meredith Whitney is back to where she started--with nothing, and doing interviews with Fox Business after she swore she'd never go on Fox again. (She considered Fox to be too lowly a network for her highly important stature.)

Say what you want, but I guess this proves what I said right from the very start: that this woman's fame always befuddled me. I worked alongside her for years at Fox News, where she was a business contributor, like me, and never found anything she said to be all that insightful or intelligent. For sure I don't think she had much of a grasp on the markets or, the economy.

I remember back in 2009 when the fiscal stimulus was announced, she said it wouldn't do much because it was a "hodgepodge." (A fucking hodgepodge? Seriously? And she was already big-time famous by then.)

Even the whole, Citi "call," seemed like a sham to me, too. Fadel Gheit, who is an Oppenheimer (where Whitney worked) Managing Director and senior oil and gas analyst once told me that Whitney ripped off that call from her former boss.

Anyway, the media went crazy over her and that made her a star and rich, but then she proceeded to fall flat on her face with a series of blunderous calls. (More hodgepodges, I guess.)

It wasn't long before her research firm had to close its doors because of client defections. At one point she even had John Paulson as a client. Remember Paulson? The obscure money manager who nobody knew for years, but then he rocketed to massive fame and fortune with that rigged, subprime trade that Goldman structured, which was ultimately deemed an exercise in fraud?

Did Whitney also advise Paulson to buy gold? Remember that one, too? Paulson thought that ZIRP and QE would lead to hyperinflation. The "genius" was just another Schiff. Only richer.

There were other terrible calls, too. Like the one where she said that hundreds of municipalities were going to go bankrupt.

When her research firm closed, she moved to Bermuda and started a hedge fund and got some other hedge fund clown to "gift her" $50 million in seed capital, which she proceeded to blow out. Finally the guy couldn't take it anymore and sued to get his money back, but only after she refused to return it.

Wow. You can't make this shit up even if you were writing a script for some crappy Hollywood B movie.

The funniest thing about Whitney, though, is how she married this gung-ho 'murica, cowboy-wrestler, John Layfield, who still, I think, is a regular on Fox's Saturday morning business block. As an aside, you gotta love that about Fox News...they don't give a shit who they put up there as long as it helps ratings. Do you believe anyone would take investment advice from this dude?

And now she, too, is back giving interviews at Fox. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. (Some of them, anyway.)

P.S. There's a lot more about Whitney that we posted up over the years right here on MNE. Check it out.

Dan Brooks — Citigroup’s disappearing plutonomy report

Links to Citi's plutonomy report if you haven't saved them.

Combat
Citigroup’s disappearing plutonomy report
Dan Brooks

Meredith Whitney’s Hedge Fund Said to Be in Turmoil

Well, she had a damn good run on one call--Citigroup--which supposedly wasn't even her call to begin with, but her boss's call when she was an analyst at Oppenheimer.

Since then she predicted 100's of municipal defaults (municipalities did phenomenal and muni bonds soared), she said the 2009 fiscal stimulus was a "mish mash" and wouldn't work; she supposedly advised John Paulson (maybe to buy gold?), then she closed down her advisory, now her hedge fund is failing...

Oh boy.

Perhaps she can go back to being a contributor for Fox.

Here's the Bloomberg story.

Too bad this is not Schiff.

Simon Johnson — Citigroup Will Be Broken Up

Simon Johnson quotes Elizabeth Warren:

“A century ago, Teddy Roosevelt was America’s trustbuster. He went after the giant trusts and monopolies in this country, and a lot of people talk about how those trusts deserved to be broken up because they had too much economic power. But Teddy Roosevelt said we should break them up because they had too much political power. Teddy Roosevelt said break them up because all that concentrated power threatened the very foundations of our democratic system.”

Citigroup is not the only TBTF that needs to be whittled down to size to rebalance political power in the US. Chase, Goldman, etc. also have to be addressed in the same breath.

Then there is the military-industrial complex and other trusts like energy and pharma. The clandestine agencies that have operational arms and agendas in addition to intelligence-gathering arms also need to be addressed. 

All of these have political power that constitutes a shadow government that drives oligarchic "democracy" in which voters are presented with a pre-selected slate of nominees chosen by the oligarchy based on the ability to raise funds from them as the chief donors. Then the public is supposed to believe that the recipients of this largesse are not influenced by it, especially when they need it for their next election and most of lawmakers time between elections is devoted to fundraising.

Baseline Scenario 

Citigroup Will Be Broken Up
Simon Johnson