George Monbiot — The City’s stranglehold makes Britain look like an oh-so-civilised mafia state

To an extent unknown since before the first world war, economic relations in this country are becoming set in stone. It is not just that the very rich no longer fall while the very poor no longer rise. It’s that the system itself is protected from risk. Through bailouts, quantitative easing and delays in interest-rate rises, speculative investment has been so well cushioned that – as the Guardian economics editor, Larry Elliott, puts it – financial markets are “one of the last bastions of socialism left on Earth”.…

Property in this country is a haven for the proceeds of international crime. The head of the National Crime Agency, Donald Toon, notes that “the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK.”…

The speculative property market is just one current in the great flow of cash that sluices through Britain while scarcely touching the sides. The financial sector exploits an astonishing political privilege: the City of London is the only jurisdiction in the UK not fully subject to the authority of parliament. In fact, the relationship seems to work the other way. Behind the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons sits the Remembrancer, whose job is to ensure that the interests of the City of London are recognised by the elected members. (A campaign to rescind this privilege – Don’t Forget the Remembrancer – will be launched very soon.)

The City is a semi-offshore state, a bit like the UK’s crown dependencies and overseas territories, tax havens legitimised by the Privy Council. Britain’s financial secrecy undermines the tax base while providing a conduit into the legal economy for gangsters, kleptocrats and drug barons.

Even the more orthodox financial institutions deploy a succession of scandalous practices: pension mis-selling, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance con, Libor rigging.…

How can this be?

At next month’s Conservative party conference, corporate executives will pay £2,500 to sit with a minister. Doubtless, because we are assured that there is no link between funding and policy, they will spend the day discussing the weather and the films they have seen. If we noticed such arrangements overseas, we might be inclined to regard them as corruption. But that can’t be the case here, not least because the invitation explains that “fees associated with business day & dinner are considered a commercial transaction and therefore do not constitute a political donation”.

The government also insists that there is no link between political donations and seats in the House of Lords. But a study by researchers at Oxford University found that the probability of so many major donors arriving there by chance is 1.36 x 10-38: roughly “equivalent to entering the National Lottery and winning the jackpot 5 times in a row”. Why does the Lords remain unreformed? Because it permits plutocratic power to override democracy. Both rich and poor are kept in their place.….

These are just some excerpts. It's worse, much worse. The culture is corrupt.

The Guardian | Comment Is Free
The City’s stranglehold makes Britain look like an oh-so-civilised mafia state
George Monbiot

A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com

William K. Black — The City of London is so Criminogenic That It Boggles Even Its Banking Apologists

Forget Wall Street as the global bad guy. The City is worse. Wall Street actually conducts its worst deals there because the rules and regulators are even laxer. The leaders of the UK have concluded that finance is really the only game they have left and to loose financial hegemony would be disastrous for Britain. So most anything goes.
New Economic Perspectives
The City of London is so Criminogenic That It Boggles Even Its Banking Apologists
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Randy Wray — Join the Protest Against Hometheft

Randy hits another home run. Here are some high points.

It is not an overstatement to say that the Global Financial Crisis would not have happened without MERS. MERS was absolutely essential to the “efficient” securitization model that led up to the crisis.

It is all illegal. There was never any law that permitted the industry to create MERS to evade US property law (and to avoid paying recording fees in local jurisdictions).
Many brave homeowners have fought against the banksters, taking their cases to court.

The banks have lost some cases, but have also won some. So, predictably, our lawmakers and other policymakers are moving to legalize home theivery. Make it all completely above-board. Create a national electronic registry along the model created by MERS. The intention is to destroy property law and to undermine local property records that protect American homeowners. It is led, of course, by the banksters, but also–I guess not surprisingly–by the Fed.

You see, the Fed does not like local proptery law. It acts like sand in the securitization-foreclosure cogwheels created by the banksters. They want the cheapest, quickest way to turn your home into a money-making machine. Making money for them, that is. They do not want local yokels slowing that down by actually trying to protect the interests of local homeowners. What, you want accurate property records? You want to know who owns your mortgage? You want to know when a bank sells your mortgage to some foreign bank? You want to be able to track down who you are supposed to make payments to, and whether they actually received them? No, the Fed and the Bankers do not think you have a right to this sort of information. They’ll keep it for you in a national electronic registry. No more going down to your local recording office to find out.

In truth, you cannot do that any more. MERS and the banksters already destroyed the chain of title. The Fed wants to rubberstamp what the industry already did.

Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Join the Protest Against Hometheft
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, University of Missouri at Kansas City
Market "efficiency" at work.

The Fed wants to keep securitization cheap–indeed, the Fed is quite open about that. It wants to reboot 2004 all over again. It wants to bring back the subprime bubble. Steamrolling a new–legal this time–MERS is part of the plan to boost another real estate bubble. It was so much fun last time around! And there are still some Americans among the 99% who still own their homes. The banks need to mortgage those so they can foreclose and move the rest of the real estate to the top 1%.

In an environment of low rates, the best way to get a safe return is to buy up foreclosed houses on the cheap, rent them at a risk-weighted rate of return higher than otherwise available in the market, and then flip them for a tidy gain in the next engineered bubble.

See also:

New Economic Perspectives
Survey of Bankers Unintentionally Documents their Depravity
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Washington's Blog — The Government Has It Bass-Ackwards: Failing To Prosecute Criminal Fraud by the Big Banks Is Killing – NOT Saving – the Economy

Failure to Prosecute Fraud Causes Economic Downturns

Washington's Blog
The Government Has It Bass-Ackwards: Failing To Prosecute Criminal Fraud by the Big Banks Is Killing – NOT Saving – the Economy
WashingtonsBlog

Mark Gongloff — Eric Holder Admits Some Banks Are Just Too Big To Prosecute

When the Attorney General of the United States admits some banks are simply too big to prosecute, it might be time to admit we have a problem -- and that goes for both the financial and justice systems.

Eric Holder made this rather startling confession in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, The Hill reports. It could be a key moment in the debate over whether to do something about the size and complexity of our biggest banks, which have only gotten bigger and more systemically important since the financial crisis.

"I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy," Holder said,according to The Hill. "And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large."

Holder's comments don't come as a total surprise. His underlings had already made similar confessions to The New York Times last year, after they declined to prosecute HSBC for flagrant, years-long violations of money-laundering laws, out of fear that doing so would hurt the global economy. Lanny Breuer, formerly in charge of doling out the Justice Department's wrist slaps to banks, told Frontlineas much in the documentary "The Untouchables," which aired in January.

Some observers have defended the Justice Department, suggesting that prosecuting law-breaking banks would amount to a death penalty that could upset the financial system and trigger another recession -- although nobody really knows if it would do any such thing. But by not prosecuting law-breaking banks, and confessing to its terror of prosecuting those banks, the Justice Department has waved a big checkered flag to the biggest banks to go ahead and break all of the laws they want.

The Huffington Post
Eric Holder Admits Some Banks Are Just Too Big To Prosecute
Mark Gongloff

And these are the institutions that the federal government has delegated its money creation power to?

Holder confirms that both capitalism and democracy have broken down. It looks like the only viable option to preserve democracy, eliminate privilege  and reestablish the rule of law is to nationalize the banking system by turning it into a public utility with only government having the money power.

The private sector has demonstrated that it cannot handle the money power responsibly and has grown so large that it cannot be controlled from within or without. It's a herd of rogue elephants on the rampage, where the great beasts have to compete ruthlessly with each other to survive.

Contra Yglesias — Bill Black and Randy Wray

It’s early, but Salon has published on January 30, 2013 either the funniest or saddest column of the year to date: “Are Banks Too Big To Prosecute?” 

The column is attributed to Matthew Yglesias, a blogger who studied philosophy as an undergraduate. It could be a brilliantly ironic satire of the Geithner, Holder and Breuer doctrine of immunity for banksters (which I am dubbing “GHB” for short). GHB is the “roofie” that the Obama administration gave us so the banksters could screw us repeatedly with impunity. Alternatively, and far more likely, Yglesias has written the saddest and most immoral apologia for elite white-collar crime that has yet made it into electronic bits. It takes a rerouted beginning student of philosophy, posing as a commentator on finance, to replace what should be a discussion that includes virtue ethics with a virtue-free, criminology-free, and economics-free apologia for the felons who became wealthy by costing the Nation $20 trillion and 10 million jobs.

Matthew Yglesias wrote a similar column on April 14, 2011 embracing the Geithner immunity doctrine. He titled it: “The Fraud Free Financial Crisis” – and it proves our family’s rule that it is impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody.

New Economic Perspectives
Yglesias pours the Geithner, Holder, Breuer (GHB) banksters immunity doctrine in our drinks
William K. Black | Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

The often interesting Matthew Yglesias wonders “Are Banks Too Big To Prosecute?” See here.

Here’s his thesis. Sure, Megabanks committed tons of fraud. But we cannot prosecute banks for the fraud because that would bring them down. And the bigger they are, the more fraud they perpetrated, but the bigger the insolvency hole if we investigated them. So best to bail them out and look the other way.

But here’s the deal. Banks don’t commit fraud. Banksters commit fraud.

This is what all the gun nuts are teaching us. Guns never kill people. Insane people kill people. Guns are just a tool that allows the insane to kill massive numbers in schools, shopping malls and offices.

Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Banks Don’t Commit Fraud; Banksters Commit Fraud: Response to Yglesias
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, UMKC

Black, especially, excoriates Yglesias for being having majored in philosophy major, but now displays no understanding of ethics, and seems to think that expediency is a rational criterion in moral choice. So he is not only accepting of a double standard of justice based on privilege deriving from position but also attempts to justify it based on pragmatism and moral relativism. Flunk in ethics, and makes one wonder if he is a political flunkie.

Randy Wray — More on the Bankster License to Steal (Homes)

Fraud on Fraud is where you commit a second fraud to try to cover up the first. What this latest settlement tries to do is cover up the flaws of the first settlement. So what we essentially have here is settlement on settlement.

Better for them to throw money at us than face the harsh light of day. The banks recognized it was going to be too expensive and too unwieldy for them to go through with these reviews.

Economonitor | Great Leap Forward
More on the Bankster License to Steal (Homes)
L. Randall Wray