Pam and Russ Martens — Wall Street Banks Sued Again for Conspiring to Control a Market

As summer draws to a close and the Wall Street titans enjoy the last of their lazy long weekends in the Hamptons, summering next door to the army of lawyers that keep them out of jail, it’s a curious time to be reading about a major new lawsuit that has the potential to shake Wall Streeters right down to their Gucci loafers. The charges include conspiracy to restrain trade in violation of the Sherman Act and unjust enrichment in a $1.7 trillion market.

Since the Senate hearings of the early 1930s, which examined the Wall Street practices and conspiracies that led to the 1929-1932 stock market collapse and Great Depression, there have been rumblings that Wall Street’s system for lending stock for traders to short is a viper’s nest of ripoffs. Now two major law firms, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Cohen Milstein are suing six of the largest Wall Street banks, alleging that they illegally colluded in this market. The defendants are the usual suspects: JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, UBS and their stock lending units. (The only surprise here is that Citigroup is not named.)...

Wall Street On Parade
Wall Street Banks Sued Again for Conspiring to Control a Market
Pam Martens and Russ Martens

John Helmer — Cyprus, Russian Fraud Investigations Close In On Leonid Lebedev – Us Banks Accused Of Money Laundering

Documents uncovered in Cyprus reveal that three banks based in New York – Citibank, Bank of America, and HSBC – were engaged by Imperium Services Ltd., a Cyprus trustee company, to receive Lebedev’s cash and open deposits for a Cyprus entity he called North Sintez International Trust. At opening, Citi (below, left) was holding $98.4 million of Lebedev’s money; Bank of America (right), $17.9 million; and HSBC of New York, $33.4 million.

In their originating transactions with North Sintez, and in their subsequent payments of interest on these funds, the American banks appear to have violated US money-laundering laws and regulations. The banks also appear to have failed to uncover evidence that Lebedev was obliged to report his income to the US Internal Revenue Service. According to unverified sources, the 59-year old Lebedev, who emigrated from Russia to the US in his twenties, and lived there in the 1980s and early 1990s, held a US passport between September 2001 and September 2011.…

Pretty sordid all around. What else is new at the top.

Dances with Bears
Cyprus, Russian Fraud Investigations Close In On Leonid Lebedev – Us Banks Accused Of Money Laundering
John Helmer

Randy Wray — Setting the Record Straight One More Time: BofA’s Rebecca Mairone Fined $1Million; BofA Must Pay $1.3Billion

It doesn’t have to be this way. Stop the fraudsters. Stop the foreclosures. There should be an immediate 5 year Country-Wide moratorium on foreclosures. Investigate the fraud. Jail the fraudsters. Put the biggest banks into receivership. Begin to clean-up the document mess created by the banks and MERS (the banks lost or destroyed all the records of property ownership). Our economy will not recover until this is done.

Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Setting the Record Straight One More Time: BofA’s Rebecca Mairone Fined $1Million; BofA Must Pay $1.3BillionL. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, University of Missouri at Kansas City
Crossposted at New Economics Perspectives

Big time financial fraudsters going to jail!

No it's not Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein or anyone from Bank of America or HSBC. It's Real Housewives' stars Joe and Theresa Giudice. The both took a plea and one of them (probably Joe) will be spending the next 3-4 years in jail.

For fraud.

Now please square that in your head against the massive, decade-long (or longer) frauds, money laundering and illegal market manipulations of the major banks--WHO ADMITTED TO THESE THINGS.

Not a single banker is going to jail, but a couple of two-bit reality TV stars? Yep, they're getting locked up.

Shows you how corrupt (and bought) the system is.

Linette Lopez — Bank Of America Is Reportedly Being Investigated For One Of The Oldest Trading Tricks In The Book

Frontrunning Fannie and Freddie.

Business Insider
Bank Of America Is Reportedly Being Investigated For One Of The Oldest Trading Tricks In The Book
Linette Lopez

Bill Black — The New York Times Authors the Most Ironic Sentence of the Crisis [Smackdown Watch]

The author of the most brilliantly comedic statement ever written about the crisis is Landon Thomas, Jr. He does not bury the lead. Everything worth reading is in the first sentence, and it should trigger belly laughs nationwide.

“Bank of America, one of the nation’s largest banks, was found liable on Wednesday of having sold defective mortgages, a jury decision that will be seen as a victory for the government in its aggressive effort to hold banks accountable for their role in the housing crisis.”

“The government,” as a statement of fact so indisputable that it requires neither citation nor reasoning, has been engaged in an “aggressive effort to hold banks accountable for their role in the housing crisis.” Yes, we have not seen such an aggressive effort since Captain Renault told Rick in the movieCasablanca that he was “shocked” to discover that there was gambling going on (just before being handed his gambling “winnings” which were really a bribe).

There are four clues in the sentence I quoted that indicate that the author knows he’s putting us on, but they are subtle....

New Economic Perspectives
The New York Times Authors the Most Ironic Sentence of the Crisis
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in the Department of Economics and the School of Law

Randy Wray — Setting the Record Straight: BofA's Rebecca Mairone Found Liable for Fraud

Now here's poetic justice. Back in the fall of 2010, Bill Black and I wrote a two part essay for the Huffington Post calling on Washington to go after the foreclosure fraudsters. Specifically, we pointed our fingers at the serial fraudsters at Bank of America. See here, and here.

We argued it is time to put Bank of America in receivership....

Predictably, we got the usual attacks by trolls. Whenever you write a piece that argues that the biggest banks need to be held accountable for their frauds, they roll out the trolls. Usually, the trolls will not sign their defense of fraud with their real names.
However, that time, BofA tasked Rebecca Mairone, Default Servicing Executive of Bank of America Home Loans, with writing an article to counter our piece. You can read her piece here.

In it she proposes to Set the Record Straight on Bank of America foreclosures. Instead, she offers nothing but obfuscation...

Irony of irony. Guess what, folks. Mairone is now a outed fraudster. Read here.
She and her bank have been found guilty of the types of activities that we had outlined.

The Huffington Post
Setting the Record Straight: BofA's Rebecca Mairone Found Liable for Fraud
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics and Research Director of the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, University of Missouri–Kansas City

It is not a surprise to us that the fraud was found. Fraud is everywhere at the biggest banks. Their business model was, and remains, fraud. Fraud can be found everywhere you look. All you have to do is look. Up to now, Washington has turned a blind eye to fraud at the nation's biggest fraudsters. While it is nice that they are finally going after some of the small fry fraudsters, like Mairone, it is time to go after the top fraudsters -- those who oversaw and rewarded (and were rewarded for) fraud....

It doesn't have to be this way. Stop the fraudsters. Stop the foreclosures. There should be an immediate 5 year Country-wide moratorium on foreclosures. Investigate the fraud. Jail the fraudsters. Put the biggest banks into receivership. Begin to clean-up the document mess created by the banks and MERS (the banks lost or destroyed all the records of property ownership). Our economy will not recover until this is done. [emphasis added]

Andrew Gavin Marshall — How Does a Bank That Engaged in Massive Fraud and Money Laundering Get a Free Pass from the Govt? It's Who You Know

Not so much "who you know" as interlocking power structure.

Bit Coin portals shut down for money laundering. Bank of America, not so much as a wrist slap.

AlterNet

How Does a Bank That Engaged in Massive Fraud and Money Laundering Get a Free Pass from the Govt? It's Who You Know

Andrew Gavin Marshall

Yves Smith — Launching Our First (Free) Ebook on the OCC/Fed Foreclosure Review Fiasco Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/04/launching-our-first-free-ebook-on-the-foreclosure-review-fiasco.html#AbmWJVFCIILO2RWO.99

As a result of many reader requests, we’ve turned our series based on testimony from whistleblowers at Bank of America and PNC on the whitewash more formally known as the Independent Foreclosure Reviews into an ebook, which we are releasing today. This was the very same OCC mandated process, billed as a way to provide wronged mortgage borrowers with the opportunity to get a measure of justice, that instead turned into a costly and embarrassing fiasco. But it still worked out well for the banks. The amount they paid, even with a mind-boggling $2 billion of fees to consultants and another $3.6 billion in cash payments to borrowers, is far less than they would have shelled out if the process had been designed to conduct the investigations fairly and give meaningful awards.

We hope you will download this ebook, read it, and circulate it widely. It’s timely because the botched foreclosure reviews are coming back into focus.

Naked Capitalism
Launching Our First (Free) Ebook on the OCC/Fed Foreclosure Review Fiasco

Yves Smith