Chris Dillow — Lying for Money: a review

Good read.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Lying for Money: a review

Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Pam and Russ Martens — Here’s Why Americans Are Mad as Hell at Wall Street and Washington

Tens of millions of Americans clearly understand that an entrenched system of corruption such as this, perpetuated through a revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, while enshrined by a political campaign finance system that recycles a portion of the plunder to ensure greater plunders, will inevitably leave the nation’s economy in tatters — again. That’s because systemic corruption and legalized bribery within the financial arteries of the nation can only create grossly perverse economic outcomes.

The actual role of Wall Street is to fairly and efficiently allocate capital to maximize positive economic outcomes for the nation. Under the current model, Wall Street is focused solely on maximizing profits in any manner possible, including fraud and collusion, to maximize personal enrichment. When Senator Bernie Sanders said during his campaign stops and a presidential debate that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud,” there was a long, substantive archive of facts to back up that assertion….

Given these facts on the ground, another President who takes a hands off approach to Wall Street while installing Wall Street cronies in the cabinet, will leave this nation terminally financially crippled.

That would be a good thing. It would end finance capitalism. It would take down the US as an economic power, too, but that cloud might have a silver lining by way of ending US attempts to maintain global hegemony and instead play nice.

Wall Street On Parade
Here’s Why Americans Are Mad as Hell at Wall Street and Washington

Pam Martens and Russ Martens
ht Don Quijones at Raging Bull-Shit

Stephen Gandel — Mortgage Exec At the Heart of Financial Crisis Escapes Charges

Mozilo walks with only a hefty fine, not all of which he paid himself.

Fortune
Mortgage Exec At the Heart of Financial Crisis Escapes Charges
Stephen Gandel, senior editor

Janet Tavakoli — How to Spot a Fraud

THINKADVISOR: Why is it critical for financial advisors to perform a fraud analysis on whatever they’d like to invest in — or when doing any deal? 

JANET TAVAKOLI: You need to protect yourself. The Fed and the [Securities and Exchange Commission] aren’t doing their jobs, and the banks are financing a bunch of bad guys. You’re cruising for a bruising if you don’t take fraud into account and do a fraud analysis. Fraud is the most important thing to evaluate. When there’s fraud, there’s permanent value destruction in investments.…

THINK ADVISOR
Janet Tavakoli: How to Spot a Fraud

THINK ADVISOR interviews Janet Tavakoli

Washington's Blog — Goldman and Wells Fargo FINALLY Admit They Committed Fraud

Goldman Sachs has finally admitted to committing fraud.  Specifically, Goldman Sachs reached a settlement yesterday with the Department of Justice, in which it  admitted fraud:

The settlement includes a statement of facts to which Goldman has agreed.  That statement of facts describes how Goldman made false and misleading representations to prospective investors about the characteristics of the loans it securitized and the ways in which Goldman would protect investors in its RMBS from harm (the quotes in the following paragraphs are from that agreed-upon statement of facts, unless otherwise noted)…

Washington's Blog
Goldman and Wells Fargo FINALLY Admit They Committed Fraud

Why Krugman's Latest Attack on Sanders' Economic Plans Are Wrong — Jaisal Noor interviews Michael Hudson and Bill Black

Fifteen minute video, no transcript (yet). Smackdown.

Real News Network
Why Krugman's Latest Attack on Sanders' Economic Plans Are Wrong

Jaisal Noor interviews Michael Hudson and Bill Black

ht Footsoldier in the comments

Bill Black to Hillary Clinton — It's "fraud," not "shenanigans"

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her debate with Senator Sanders minutes ago, said that she went to Wall Street and told them to stop their “shenanigans.” The context was that she was being asked to respond to the complaint that she was too close to on Wall Street billionaires. She had every incentive, therefore, to demonstrate how tough she would be on Wall Street. In that context, the best she could muster was the pusillanimous “shenanigans.” …

Hillary cannot bring herself to use the “f” word in the context of Wall Street CEOs leading the largest and most destructive fraud epidemics in history – frauds that made them spectacularly wealthy. A few minutes later, Bernie said that “fraud” was Wall Street’s business model.…

New Economic Perspectives

Liar’s Loans, Plus Loan Brokers, Equals Fraud Heaven

Hillary, the Banksters Committed “Fraud” not “Shenanigans”

William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Beverly Mann — Disgusting. Is Whole Foods a victim of fraud, or is it in on the fraud? Who knows?

The question is how many others are pulling this kind of Potemkin village scam?

Angry Bear
Disgusting. Is Whole Foods a victim of fraud, or is it in on the fraud? Who knows?
Beverly Mann

Jared Bernstein — Imagine that…candidates actually debating substantive differences on economic policy

Democratic candidates, that is.

I think JB needs to spend some time reading Bill Black on control fraud and criminogenic environments.

On The Economy

Imagine that…candidates actually debating substantive differences on economic policy

Jared Bernstein

John Jansen — Probe of Primary Dealers Widens

Via the WSJ: 

Federal prosecutors and the top U.S. commodities regulator have asked banks to turn over information in connection with a broad probe into whether their traders rigged auctions on government debt, according to people familiar with the matter.

Banks are in the process of providing details to prosecutors at the Fraud Section at the Justice Department, as well as investigators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the people said.

Across the Curve
Probe of Primary Dealers Widens
John Jansen

David Dayen — Greenspan Imagines Better, Alternate Universe in Which Greenspan Was Not Fed Chair

Alan Greenspan, the policy failure whose tenure at the Federal Reserve helped create the conditions for the largest financial crisis in nearly a century, was inexplicably given a major newspaper platform on Monday to opine about regulation, which he ideologically abhors.

So it came as a surprise to read the second paragraph of his Financial Times op-ed, wishfully describing an alternative history of 2008, if only there had been robust regulation.

“What the 2008 crisis exposed was a fragile underpinning of a highly leveraged financial system,” Greenspan writes. “Had bank capital been adequate and fraud statutes been more vigorously enforced, the crisis would very likely have been a financial episode of only passing consequence.”

Greenspan must have temporarily forgotten that he had the power to accomplish both of these priorities as Fed chair.

Before the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Fed had primary responsibility over consumer protection, including rule-writing, supervision, and prohibition of unfair and deceptive practices. They even were charged with resolving consumer complaints.

Greenspan famously did none of this during the inflating of the housing bubble from 2002 to 2006, instead extolling the virtues of adjustable-rate loans and mortgage securitization, even as fellow Fed governors and the FBI publicly warned about looming fraud. The responsibility for vigorously enforcing fraud statutes, then, fell to Greenspan, and he ignored it.…

The wizard behind the veil has no clothes.

The Intercept
Greenspan Imagines Better, Alternate Universe in Which Greenspan Was Not Fed Chair
David Dayen

"Balanced Fiat?" Translation: People With The MOST Financial Savings Want YOUR Financial Savings "Payed Back" First.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

It finally occurred to me what the heck "balanced fiat" actually means.

It's just another divide & conquer technique.

As many have noted, for centuries, there is no such thing as aggregate debt to self.

Individuals can always pay personal debt to self, with more PERSONAL INITIATIVE.

Similarly, aggregates can always pay aggregate debt to aggregate self, with more PUBLIC INITIATIVE, which we call fiat.

In fact, you can say that we denominate Public Initiative with fiat currency.

In purely accounting terms, we have fiat transaction units which we as a nation create and distribute for use in any and all transaction chains, no matter how innovative. In purely accounting jargon that currency creation requires a matching, negative number on some double-entry accounting ledger - which accountants call a deficit. Accountants also call the growing currency supply needed by a growing population - you guessed it - yearly accounting "deficits," and the accumulating public "deficits" a "public debt."

Oooh! Tempests in teapots, you say. Any fool can grasp, when asked, that private financial savings (currency in circulation) has to be equal to public currency creation, minus any currency clawed-back and destroyed via various forms of taxes or penalties by the currency issuer.

And yes, it's pure semantics to insist that nominal accounting terms are something real, and are real yearly deficits and are real, accumulating debt to pay back. They're not.

The only way to pay the nominal (imaginary, purely semantic) national debt is to liquidate all private financial savings.

So does anyone in their right mind actually want that? Of course not. Yet some people want you to THINK that they do. Why? Simply so that YOU will agree to start liquidating YOUR personal financial savings.

The trick in any game strategy is to get people to START doing something you want them to do, since it will impact them, while never letting it progress to the point of impacting you as well, or at least not as much as it will impact them.

Ever notice that frauds continuously campaign to pay back our nominal debt to ourselves, by "balancing fiat," but we've never quite done it? (Except in 1929 & 1999, triggering serious depressions, for obvious reasons.)

Halting growth of currency supply for even one year - zero public "deficit" - is disastrous. No country I've heard of has ever liquidated all the currency they ever created. Countries disappear from history before they ever get that far. Even banksters don't want to kill our entire nation, since they'd go down with it. They just want to see everyone else suffer, so they can take advantage of the average person. It's truly sick behavior, and downright traitorous.

It's amazing that this many people have been bamboozled for this long!

Ask who campaigns the most for "balanced fiat?" Rich people, that's who. And, of course, their mesmerized lackeys, or hired liars.

Why? So that they - just coincidentally, of course - have added buying power for the transaction units they retain, no matter how briefly, and can therefore trigger forced liquidation of real property at deflated prices.

That's the classic strategy of controlling the money supply, and using that control to cause periodic shortages of "currency."

Why would a rich person want to deplete ALL private savings? They don't, obviously. They only want everyone else to START depleting their private savings. Rich people actually have no intention of ever letting it go so far as depleting their own financial savings. They just want to bankrupt you and your fellow serfs, so that you'll have to give them everything you've got, for pennies on the dollar, just to buy a loaf of bread for your starving baby.

If the root cause of the fear of running out of public fiat is that simple ... how do they get away with it? Divide and conquer is obviously one class of methods. Yet there are obviously 1001 ways or more, and an active war is ongoing, between sociopathic throwbacks, and our emerging aggregate.

However it's executed though, the root desire to hoard fiat while depleting the savings of others is so simple that, like the jitterbug, it plumb abates some sociopaths.

The manufactured Fear of Fiat Deficit takes advantage of an indirect form of personal hoarding behavior, a remnant personal behavior retained from archaic times. That old form of hoarding reflex is slowly being replaced by aggregate selection pressure, resulting in an ongoing transition in hoarding patterns, where we re-purpose personal hoarding instincts, from hoarding of commodity goods (e.g., snails), to hoarding of coordination skills (e.g., army ants).

The result is what we call the evolution of Social Species.

And, of course, the pinnacle of that evolutionary spectrum of social species is Homo Sapiens, the most cooperative species known. Excepting, of course, throwbacks like the Koch Brothers, who will champion any cause whatsoever, if it can later be perverted to their selective advantage. Such people suffer from a type of tic, a Cultural Tourettes Syndrome.

In the case of Koch Industries, they plead guilty to environmental crime in Texas, and then started campaigning for milder sentencing laws. When Koch Industries was caught wilfully poisoning an area with benzene, they

"... admitted that its employees engaged in an orchestrated scheme to conceal the benzene violations from state regulators and the Corpus Christi community.”

“Their advocacy for less draconian drug laws could prove to be a stalking horse for their long-standing efforts to protect corporate criminals and roll back environmental, health and safety laws.”

...

In a plea agreement, the charges were dropped against the four employees.
In Charles Koch’s opinion, the federal case was unjust.
“We had four innocent employees indicted,” he said. “Okay, the company can handle it. Okay, we pay a fine and so on. What’s so upsetting is seeing what it did to them personally and their families.”

You might well ask why nothing was done to Charles Koch & his family. If the guilty employees were "innocent," then he's implying that they were just doing what they were encouraged, or told, to do?

Notice how carefully & casually Koch deflects guilt away from himself and the Control Frauds running upper management, who obviously set the expectations for the behavior of those four employees. Maybe Koch personally ordered the actions taken? That wasn't even examined in the lawsuit.

In this case the same person, Charles Koch has been for excessive prison terms for others, but against them if it might ever get to his own Control Frauds, or himself.

That kind of mind is exactly the kind of mind that can campaign for "balanced fiat."

Calls for "balanced fiat" come from unbalanced minds.

Rational minds won't indict you for realizing that.

We could be doing far more with the capabilities we have. Why waste so much time fooling one another? Our only real goal is operational agility.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch cracks down on fraud...wow. 243 arrested for $700 million in medical fraud. Banks do billions $$, get off with fines.

Wow. So happy our new Attorney General, Loretta Lynch is getting tough on fraud. She had 243 people arrested for a $700 million case of medical fraud.

National Medicare Fraud Takedown Results in Charges Against 243 Individuals for Approximately $712 Million in False Billing

Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell announced today a nationwide sweep led by the Medicare Fraud Strike Force in 17 districts, resulting in charges against 243 individuals, including 46 doctors, nurses and other licensed medical professionals, for their alleged participation in Medicare fraud schemes involving approximately $712 million in false billings. Read more. 

Wow.

Hey,  $700 million is not peanuts, but what about the billions, no, tens of billions, hundreds of billions, TRILLIONS, that the banks committed and they get off with nothing but fines.

Shit...last month 5 banks pleaded guilty to currency manipulation and paid fines of $5.5 billion. If that was the fine imagine what the size of the fraud must have been?

Then there was Libor fraud, foreclosure fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, wire fraud, plus more in the past. Not to mention the fact they wrecked the entire global economy.

And what happened?

Nothing. Not a single bank executive was arrested.

What a sham.

"Talk to us nicely when we fuck you over."

Several months ago Warren Buffet was on that piece of crap network, CNBC, where he took some time to complain about Elizabeth Warren saying her approach was too, "angry." Here were his words:

"I think that she would do better if she was less angry and demonizing. I believe in 'hate the sin but love the sinner.'"

All I can say is, you old fool, what a fucking joke you are. (And to think I used to like Buffett.)

Here's Senator Warren, fighting a courageous, almost one-woman effort against the egotism, corruption and FRAUD of the entire financial sector, of which, Buffett is a part and there's Buffet telling her to talk nice. All the while his criminal friends have been allowed to fuck over 99.9% of the population for decades without anything more than some laughable fines.

Any reasonable person who resides outside the coddled ranks of these plutocrat-gangsters would have no trouble understanding Warren's anger. In fact, it's amazing that she is the way she is, because with her privileged background--Harvard law professor, Senator--she could easily stride right into Buffet's clubby world if she wanted to. But, no, she fights the fight for regular folks and fuck-yeah, she's angry and rightfully so.

Still, Buffet scolds her. He doesn't get it. He tells Warren in no uncertain terms that she should talk nice to these psychopathic sociopaths even though they are engaged in a non-stop frenzy of criminality and greed that is gutting nearly the entire human race. (And the planet.)

FUCK. YOU. BUFFET.

The hubris is unfathomable. I mean, seriously...I really cannot believe it. "Talk to us nicely?" Are you kidding me???

It reminds  me of the scene from "A Few Good Men," where Jack Nicholson, who plays the deceitful, scheming Colonel Jessup, tells Tom Cruise's character, Danny, "You have to ask me nicely," when Danny asks for a document that Jessup lied about.

Here's the scene...



"You have to ask me nicely, Danny."

"You have to talk nice to us, Elizabeth."

The Buffet thing is not the end of story by any means, either. We recently heard that egotistical jerk, Jamie Dimon (who shall henceforth be known as, "Mr. 1-percent return") arrogantly attempt to "mansplain" Elizabeth Warren on how the banking system works.

For those of you who are unaware what mansplaining is, it's a condescending way that a man might speak to a woman, not necessarily meant to inform or educate, but to show how he is the smarter or, more superior person.

By the way, Warren put Dimon in his place.

I feel her anger. Believe me, I walk around pissed off all day long.

She's right to be angry. We gotta all get mad.

It's time to get mad.

I'll leave you with this classic clip from the movie, "Network."

Hromadske Telebachennya — 7.5 billion UAH fraud of Yatsenyuk government uncovered in Ukraine

Following the money. Where the money went.

The Kiev junta wanted to expose the fraud of the previous government of Yanukovich, but audits, which continued until a year after the Kiev junta took control of the government also uncovered their own fraud. The head of State Financial Inspection was fired for the findings.

Fort Russ
7.5 billion UAH fraud of Yatsenyuk government uncovered in Ukraine
Hromadske Telebachennya (Ukrainian TV Channel)
Translated from Ukrainian by Kistina Rus

Charter schools...another neoliberal scam

Charter schools are another neoliberal scam. These "pseudo-public," for-profit schools show far worse performance than public schools when evaluated on an "apples-to-apples" basis. (Hint: charter schools can select students whereas public schools must accept all kids in that zone.)

It's the same, neoliberal profit scam that businesses use, that is, pay workers (teachers) less, make them do more, funnel more of the income to the top, fraudulently gin up the performance statistics (like the widely used accounting control frauds used by banks and Wall Street) and strip money and resources (equipment, physical space) from public schools (privatizations).

No wonder Wall Streeters here in Manhattan love to send their kids to these schools. It's a private school on the public dime. Carl Icahn and other big hedge fund guys back NY Governor Andrew Cuomo with big $$$ to keep expanding these schools and sucking the NYC public school system dry.

What a fucking scam.

New York's charter school defenders downplay teacher inexperience amid strong performance. http://t.co/H8S0YYVcm8 pic.twitter.com/DMMPAZBrNm
— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) March 18, 2015

Do "The police exist to maintain the divide between the upper class and everyone else. Nothing more." ?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

You can't blame some citizens for considering the overall validity of the title conjecture, given our current context.

I wonder how long it takes, on average, for the average local cop on the beat - fresh out of a police academy - to become aware of, let alone come to grips with, the default institutional lobbying that comes from perennial class competition, whether overt or "Innocent Fraud".

With current education practices, the bulk of our citizens seem to remain politically naive for most of their lives, so there's no reason to expect the bulk of police officers to catch on much faster, if ever.

Progress requires much more organizational effort to get all citizens on the same page, and realizing that we're all in this together.

There's so much to gain from social coordination (teamwork), and each year we've less to lose.

Meanwhile, it's still true that adversarial approaches are unlikely to work. In fact, they'll play into classic methods for confusing, dividing & conquering electorates by default, i.e., narrow business lobbies & politics as usual. Here's yet another example.

How FBI Illegally Stole Ross Ulbricht's Laptop & Brought Down The Silk Road

In response, a contact wrote:

"The police exist to maintain the divide between the upper class and everyone else. Nothing more."

I'm not the only one wondering why the FBI action against Ross Ulbricht & Silk Road was such a priority.

Especially given persistent unemployment levels, student loan debt, poor K-12 schools*, white collar crime, blue collar crime, etc, etc.

Not to mention money laundering & other financial terrorism by Wall St. banks

   ----

* Compare schools today with Sam Adam's early education, 200+ years ago. Read it and weep.

"Sam Adams, like five of the fifty-six signers of the Declarations of Independence, attended Boston Latin School [at ~age 7]. Required reading at the Boston Latin School for a student's first four years included Aesop's Fables, one of the first of which is a tale of a wolf who devoured a lamb despite the lamb's refutation of all the wolf's accusations against him. The moral of the story, according to Aesop, is that 'The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.' ...

In years five through seven of the school, students progressed to reading letters, essays and orations of the Roman politician Marcus Tullius Cicero.  ... 

[Subsequently,] Sam Adams entered Harvard in 1736 at age 14." 

Which was normal for that day, at least for motivated families in and around Boston. So why isn't a similar educational rate "normal" today? After all, a human mind is a terrible thing to waste, and so is a national group mind.

Eric Zeusse — Obama Lied About His Intent to Prosecute Wall Street Banksters

Shilling for Wall Street (donors).

Global Research
Obama Lied About His Intent to Prosecute Wall Street Banksters
Eric Zeusse

Bill Black — Jeffrey Sachs Channeled His Inner Bill Black – and Obama and Holder Ignored Him Too

Jeffrey Sachs is finally redeeming himself from the destruction wrought by "the Harvard boys"on the post-USSR emerging economies, especially Russia, which turned Russia into a neoliberal Mafia-style state. Now he is waking up to the criminogenic environment called Wall Street and call them on it.

New Economic Perspectives
Jeffrey Sachs Channeled His Inner Bill Black – and Obama and Holder Ignored Him TooWilliam K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Even The Onion Can't Get Fiscal Policy Jokes Straight

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Never mind the figure, or reality ...

Comrades Behind Noodle Curtain Watch U.S. National Debt Crock Strike $18 Trillion

How bad are comedians, when they don't even know that the joke's on them? Or that they've put their foot in a crock?

This is worse than the endorsement-of-fraud movies that other comedians poured serious $ into making. Maybe sociopaths seizing power really wasn't a joke at all.

If YOU meet a comedian, please show them this plot too. Maybe someday reality might sink in.

How do you teach accounting to comedians? With a house of mirrors?