It's all Goldman Sachs' fault says Matt Taibbi

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Vampire Squid at it again....

Via Zero Hedge:

Goldman Implicated In Heinz Insider Trading Probe

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/16/2013 10:40 -0500

When the news broke of the SEC's action against the HNZ call option insider traders, and we posted the full SEC charge against the perpetrators whose actions Zero Hedge reported on first, we asked this regarding one of the entities named: "the trade occurred through an "omnibus account located in Zurich, Switzerland in the name of GS Bank IC Buy Open List Options GS & Co c/o Zurich Office (the "GS Account")." Does GS stand for Goldman Sachs one wonders?" This followed our prior post, rhetorically titled "Guess Who Was Buying HNZ Stock From Its Clients", with the answer of course being Goldman Sachs, which had had HNZ stock at a Sell rating for months, and which just days before reiterated its negative sentiment. But for the most part the post was written in jest. Turns out the joke was on everyone else, because just as we feared, or rather knew, Goldman was indeed implicated all along.

From Reuters:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc is cooperating with a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission probe into insider options trading in H.J. Heinz Co before the food company announced it was being acquired, Goldman said on Friday.


Earlier in the day, the SEC filed suit against unknown traders using an account in Switzerland to buy options in Heinz before the company was purchased. The SEC suit does not explicitly name Goldman Sachs but refers to the account in Switzerland as the "GS Account."

While none of this is surprising, we do find it curious that from "Vampire Squid", Goldman Sachs has now metastasized into "he who must not be named."

[Peter Lemkin]

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix
by Matt Taibbi

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this (Photo: Bête à Bon-Dieu / Flickr)out in recent months, when a
series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three and perhaps as many as 16 of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.

"It's a double conspiracy," says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. "It's the height of criminality."

The bad news didn't stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. "Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks many other benchmarks are legit areas of inquiry," CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.

But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

"A farce," was one antitrust lawyer's response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.

"Incredible," says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.

All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

he banks found a loophole, a basic flaw in the machine. Across the financial system, there are places where prices or official indices are set based upon unverified data sent in by private banks and financial companies. In other words, we gave the players with incentives to game the system institutional roles in the economic infrastructure.

Libor, which measures the prices banks charge one another to borrow money, is a perfect example, not only of this basic flaw in the price-setting system but of the weakness in the regulatory framework supposedly policing it. Couple a voluntary reporting scheme with too-big-to-fail status and a revolving-door legal system, and what you get is unstoppable corruption.

Every morning, 18 of the world's biggest banks submit data to an office in London about how much they believe they would have to pay to borrow from other banks. The 18 banks together are called the "Libor panel," and when all of these data from all 18 panelist banks are collected, the numbers are averaged out. What emerges, every morning at 11:30 London time, are the daily Libor figures.

Banks submit numbers about borrowing in 10 different currencies across 15 different time periods, e.g., loans as short as one day and as long as one year. This mountain of bank-submitted data is used every day to create benchmark rates that affect the prices of everything from credit cards to mortgages to currencies to commercial loans (both short- and long-term) to swaps.

Dating back perhaps as far as the early Nineties, traders and others inside these banks were sometimes calling up the company geeks responsible for submitting the daily Libor numbers (the "Libor submitters") and asking them to fudge the numbers. Usually, the gimmick was the trader had made a bet on something a swap, currencies, something and he wanted the Libor submitter to make the numbers look lower (or, occasionally, higher) to help his bet pay off.

Famously, one Barclays trader monkeyed with Libor submissions in exchange for a bottle of Bollinger champagne, but in some cases, it was even lamer than that. This is from an exchange between a trader and a Libor submitter at the Royal Bank of Scotland:

SWISS FRANC TRADER: can u put 6m swiss libor in low pls?...
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: Whats it worth
SWSISS FRANC TRADER: ive got some sushi rolls from yesterday?...
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: ok low 6m, just for u
SWISS FRANC TRADER: wooooooohooooooo. . . thatd be awesome

Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi it's hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector.

Hundreds of similar exchanges were uncovered when regulators like Britain's Financial Services Authority and the U.S. Justice Department started burrowing into the befouled entrails of Libor. The documentary evidence of anti-competitive manipulation they found was so overwhelming that, to read it, one almost becomes embarrassed for the banks. "It's just amazing how Libor fixing can make you that much money," chirped one yen trader. "Pure manipulation going on," wrote another.

Yet despite so many instances of at least attempted manipulation, the banks mostly skated. Barclays got off with a relatively minor fine in the $450 million range, UBS was stuck with $1.5 billion in penalties, and RBS was forced to give up $615 million. Apart from a few low-level flunkies overseas, no individual involved in this scam that impacted nearly everyone in the industrialized world was even threatened with criminal prosecution.

Two of America's top law-enforcement officials, Attorney General Eric Holder and former Justice Department Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer, confessed that it's dangerous to prosecute offending banks because they are simply too big. Making arrests, they say, might lead to "collateral consequences" in the economy.

The relatively small sums of money extracted in these settlements did not go toward reparations for the cities, towns and other victims who lost money due to Libor manipulation. Instead, it flowed mindlessly into government coffers. So it was left to towns and cities like Baltimore (which lost money due to fluctuations in their municipal investments caused by Libor movements), pensions like the New Britain, Connecticut, Firefighters' and Police Benefit Fund, and other foundations and even individuals (billionaire real-estate developer Sheldon Solow, who filed his own suit in February, claims that his company lost $450 million because of Libor manipulation) to sue the banks for damages.

One of the biggest Libor suits was proceeding on schedule when, early in March, an army of superstar lawyers working on behalf of the banks descended upon federal judge Naomi Buchwald in the Southern District of New York to argue an extraordinary motion to dismiss. The banks' legal dream team drew from heavyweight Beltway-connected firms like Boies Schiller (you remember David Boies represented Al Gore), Davis Polk (home of top ex-regulators like former SEC enforcement chief Linda Thomsen) and Covington & Burling, the onetime private-practice home of both Holder and Breuer.

The presence of Covington & Burling in the suit representing, of all companies, Citigroup, the former employer of current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was particularly galling. Right as the Libor case was being dismissed, the firm had hired none other than Lanny Breuer, the same Lanny Breuer who, just a few months before, was the assistant attorney general who had balked at criminally prosecuting UBS over Libor because, he said, "Our goal here is not to destroy a major financial institution."

In any case, this all-star squad of white-shoe lawyers came before Buchwald and made the mother of all audacious arguments. Robert Wise of Davis Polk, representing Bank of America, told Buchwald that the banks could not possibly be guilty of anti- competitive collusion because nobody ever said that the creation of Libor was competitive. "It is essential to our argument that this is not a competitive process," he said. "The banks do not compete with one another in the submission of Libor."

If you squint incredibly hard and look at the issue through a mirror, maybe while standing on your head, you can sort of see what Wise is saying. In a very theoretical, technical sense, the actual process by which banks submit Libor data 18 geeks sending numbers to the British Bankers' Association offices in London once every morning is not competitive per se.

But these numbers are supposed to reflect interbank-loan prices derived in a real, competitive market. Saying the Libor submission process is not competitive is sort of like pointing out that bank robbers obeyed the speed limit on the way to the heist. It's the silliest kind of legal sophistry.

But Wise eventually outdid even that argument, essentially saying that while the banks may have lied to or cheated their customers, they weren't guilty of the particular crime of antitrust collusion. This is like the old joke about the lawyer who gets up in court and claims his client had to be innocent, because his client was committing a crime in a different state at the time of the offense.

"The plaintiffs, I believe, are confusing a claim of being perhaps deceived," he said, "with a claim for harm to competition."

Judge Buchwald swallowed this lunatic argument whole and dismissed most of the case. Libor, she said, was a "cooperative endeavor" that was "never intended to be competitive." Her decision "does not reflect the reality of this business, where all of these banks were acting as competitors throughout the process," said the antitrust lawyer Sokol. Buchwald made this ruling despite the fact that both the U.S. and British governments had already settled with three banks for billions of dollars for improper manipulation, manipulation that these companies admitted to in their settlements.

Michael Hausfeld of Hausfeld LLP, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs in this Libor suit, declined to comment specifically on the dismissal. But he did talk about the significance of the Libor case and other manipulation cases now in the pipeline.

"It's now evident that there is a ubiquitous culture among the banks to collude and cheat their customers as many times as they can in as many forms as they can conceive," he said. "And that's not just surmising. This is just based upon what they've been caught at."

Greenberger says the lack of serious consequences for the Libor scandal has only made other kinds of manipulation more inevitable. "There's no therapy like sending those who are used to wearing Gucci shoes to jail," he says. "But when the attorney general says, 'I don't want to indict people,' it's the Wild West. There's no law."

The problem is, a number of markets feature the same infrastructural weakness that failed in the Libor mess. In the case of interest-rate swaps and the ISDAfix benchmark, the system is very similar to Libor, although the investigation into these markets reportedly focuses on some different types of improprieties.

Though interest-rate swaps are not widely understood outside the finance world, the root concept actually isn't that hard. If you can imagine taking out a variable-rate mortgage and then paying a bank to make your loan payments fixed, you've got the basic idea of an interest-rate swap.

In practice, it might be a country like Greece or a regional government like Jefferson County, Alabama, that borrows money at a variable rate of interest, then later goes to a bank to "swap" that loan to a more predictable fixed rate. In its simplest form, the customer in a swap deal is usually paying a premium for the safety and security of fixed interest rates, while the firm selling the swap is usually betting that it knows more about future movements in interest rates than its customers.

Prices for interest-rate swaps are often based on ISDAfix, which, like Libor, is yet another of these privately calculated benchmarks. ISDAfix's U.S. dollar rates are published every day, at 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., after a gang of the same usual-suspect megabanks (Bank of America, RBS, Deutsche, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, etc.) submits information about bids and offers for swaps.

And here's what we know so far: The CFTC has sent subpoenas to ICAP and to as many as 15 of those member banks, and plans to interview about a dozen ICAP employees from the company's office in Jersey City, New Jersey. Moreover, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, or ISDA, which works together with ICAP (for U.S. dollar transactions) and Thomson Reuters to compute the ISDAfix benchmark, has hired the consulting firm Oliver Wyman to review the process by which ISDAfix is calculated. Oliver Wyman is the same company that the British Bankers' Association hired to review the Libor submission process after that scandal broke last year. The upshot of all of this is that it looks very much like ISDAfix could be Libor all over again.

"It's obviously reminiscent of the Libor manipulation issue," Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at Stanford University, told reporters. "People may have been naive that simply reporting these rates was enough to avoid manipulation."

And just like in Libor, the potential losers in an interest-rate-swap manipulation scandal would be the same sad-sack collection of cities, towns, companies and other nonbank entities that have no way of knowing if they're paying the real price for swaps or a price being manipulated by bank insiders for profit. Moreover, ISDAfix is not only used to calculate prices for interest-rate swaps, it's also used to set values for about $550 billion worth of bonds tied to commercial real estate, and also affects the payouts on some state-pension annuities.

So although it's not quite as widespread as Libor, ISDAfix is sufficiently power-jammed into the world financial infrastructure that any manipulation of the rate would be catastrophic and a huge class of victims that could include everyone from state pensioners to big cities to wealthy investors in structured notes would have no idea they were being robbed.

"How is some municipality in Cleveland or wherever going to know if it's getting ripped off?" asks Michael Masters of Masters Capital Management, a fund manager who has long been an advocate of greater transparency in the derivatives world. "The answer is, they won't know."

Worse still, the CFTC investigation apparently isn't limited to possible manipulation of swap prices by monkeying around with ISDAfix. According to reports, the commission is also looking at whether or not employees at ICAP may have intentionally delayed publication of swap prices, which in theory could give someone (bankers, cough, cough) a chance to trade ahead of the information.

Swap prices are published when ICAP employees manually enter the data on a computer screen called "19901." Some 6,000 customers subscribe to a service that allows them to access the data appearing on the 19901 screen.

The key here is that unlike a more transparent, regulated market like the New York Stock Exchange, where the results of stock trades are computed more or less instantly and everyone in theory can immediately see the impact of trading on the prices of stocks, in the swap market the whole world is dependent upon a handful of brokers quickly and honestly entering data about trades by hand into a computer terminal.

Any delay in entering price data would provide the banks involved in the transactions with a rare opportunity to trade ahead of the information. One way to imagine it would be to picture a racetrack where a giant curtain is pulled over the track as the horses come down the stretch and the gallery is only told two minutes later which horse actually won. Anyone on the right side of the curtain could make a lot of smart bets before the audience saw the results of the race.

At ICAP, the interest-rate swap desk, and the 19901 screen, were reportedly controlled by a small group of 20 or so brokers, some of whom were making millions of dollars. These brokers made so much money for themselves the unit was nicknamed "Treasure Island."

Already, there are some reports that brokers of Treasure Island did create such intentional delays. Bloomberg interviewed a former broker who claims that he watched ICAP brokers delay the reporting of swap prices. "That allows dealers to tell the brokers to delay putting trades into the system instead of in real time," Bloomberg wrote, noting the former broker had "witnessed such activity firsthand." An ICAP spokesman has no comment on the story, though the company has released a statement saying that it is "cooperating" with the CFTC's inquiry and that it "maintains policies that prohibit" the improper behavior alleged in news reports.

The idea that prices in a $379 trillion market could be dependent on a desk of about 20 guys in New Jersey should tell you a lot about the absurdity of our financial infrastructure. The whole thing, in fact, has a darkly comic element to it. "It's almost hilarious in the irony," says David Frenk, director of research for Better Markets, a financial-reform advocacy group, "that they called it ISDAfix."

After scandals involving libor and, perhaps, ISDAfix, the question that should have everyone freaked out is this: What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation? The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere. From gold to gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we're forced to trust.

"In all the over-the-counter markets, you don't really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together," Masters notes glumly.

That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it. The problem in each of these markets is the same: We all have to rely upon the honesty of companies like Barclays (already caught and fined $453 million for rigging Libor) or JPMorgan Chase (paid a $228 million settlement for rigging municipal-bond auctions) or UBS (fined a collective $1.66 billion for both muni-bond rigging and Libor manipulation) to faithfully report the real prices of things like interest rates, swaps, currencies and commodities.

All of these benchmarks based on voluntary reporting are now being looked at by regulators around the world, and God knows what they'll find. The European Federation of Financial Services Users wrote in an official EU survey last summer that all of these systems are ripe targets for manipulation. "In general," it wrote, "those markets which are based on non-attested, voluntary submission of data from agents whose benefits depend on such benchmarks are especially vulnerable of market abuse and distortion."

Translation: When prices are set by companies that can profit by manipulating them, we're fucked.

"You name it," says Frenk. "Any of these benchmarks is a possibility for corruption."

The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It's not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever's in your pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy, Space Age stealing and it's only just coming into view.

[Magda Hassan]

How's that 'the markets can regulate themselves' working out for you?

Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi it's hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector.

:what: Not even holdingout for 30 pieces of silver.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix
by Matt Taibbi

(snip)

But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

"A farce," was one antitrust lawyer's response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.

"Incredible," says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.

All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

The banks found a loophole, a basic flaw in the machine. Across the financial system, there are places where prices or official indices are set based upon unverified data sent in by private banks and financial companies. In other words, we gave the players with incentives to game the system institutional roles in the economic infrastructure.

(snip)

Any delay in entering price data would provide the banks involved in the transactions with a rare opportunity to trade ahead of the information. One way to imagine it would be to picture a racetrack where a giant curtain is pulled over the track as the horses come down the stretch and the gallery is only told two minutes later which horse actually won. Anyone on the right side of the curtain could make a lot of smart bets before the audience saw the results of the race.

At ICAP, the interest-rate swap desk, and the 19901 screen, were reportedly controlled by a small group of 20 or so brokers, some of whom were making millions of dollars. These brokers made so much money for themselves the unit was nicknamed "Treasure Island."

Already, there are some reports that brokers of Treasure Island did create such intentional delays. Bloomberg interviewed a former broker who claims that he watched ICAP brokers delay the reporting of swap prices. "That allows dealers to tell the brokers to delay putting trades into the system instead of in real time," Bloomberg wrote, noting the former broker had "witnessed such activity firsthand." An ICAP spokesman has no comment on the story, though the company has released a statement saying that it is "cooperating" with the CFTC's inquiry and that it "maintains policies that prohibit" the improper behavior alleged in news reports.

The idea that prices in a $379 trillion market could be dependent on a desk of about 20 guys in New Jersey should tell you a lot about the absurdity of our financial infrastructure. The whole thing, in fact, has a darkly comic element to it. "It's almost hilarious in the irony," says David Frenk, director of research for Better Markets, a financial-reform advocacy group, "that they called it ISDAfix."

After scandals involving libor and, perhaps, ISDAfix, the question that should have everyone freaked out is this: What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation? The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere. From gold to gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we're forced to trust.

"In all the over-the-counter markets, you don't really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together," Masters notes glumly.

That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it. The problem in each of these markets is the same: We all have to rely upon the honesty of companies like Barclays (already caught and fined $453 million for rigging Libor) or JPMorgan Chase (paid a $228 million settlement for rigging municipal-bond auctions) or UBS (fined a collective $1.66 billion for both muni-bond rigging and Libor manipulation) to faithfully report the real prices of things like interest rates, swaps, currencies and commodities.

All of these benchmarks based on voluntary reporting are now being looked at by regulators around the world, and God knows what they'll find. The European Federation of Financial Services Users wrote in an official EU survey last summer that all of these systems are ripe targets for manipulation. "In general," it wrote, "those markets which are based on non-attested, voluntary submission of data from agents whose benefits depend on such benchmarks are especially vulnerable of market abuse and distortion."

Translation: When prices are set by companies that can profit by manipulating them, we're fucked.

"You name it," says Frenk. "Any of these benchmarks is a possibility for corruption."

The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It's not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever's in your pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy, Space Age stealing and it's only just coming into view.

This is known.

This is business as usual, with the regulators deliberately delayed and sabotaged.

On the rare occasions that these crooks end up in court, the judges opine:

a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

BOHICA.

[David Guyatt]

How's that 'the markets can regulate themselves' working out for you?

Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi it's hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector.

:what: Not even holdingout for 30 pieces of silver.

I think the dead witch probably meant to say "free markets will never regulate themselves", but couldn't force the truthful word 'never' out of her gob, as it would've made her choke. Pity. Her choking would've done us all a favour 30 years ago. Too late now though, crookedness is so endemic that most people don't even bat an eye at it.

Covington & Burling, in my day anyway, were close to the US Treasury via senior guys who used to formerly be senior guys at the treasury.

[Jan Klimkowski]

We're all in this together....

We must protect whistleblowers.....

Keep drinking the Kool Aid, suckers.....


Not all of these statements are true.

One describes the attitude of the self-appointed Elect to us poor Preterite ones.

Answers in the article below:

How HMRC treated its Goldman Sachs tax deal whistleblower as a criminal

Tax officials used intrusive powers to rake through Osita Mba's personal data in attempt to prove he had spoken to the Guardian

Rajeev Syal
The Guardian, Monday 29 April 2013 17.57 BST

Osita Mba blew the whistle on Goldman Sachs tax deal
Osita Mba disclosed that senior managers had quietly let off Goldman Sachs from paying millions of pounds in tax penalties.

Tax officials used intrusive investigative powers meant to catch serious criminals to try to prove that a whistleblower who uncovered a "sweetheart" deal with Goldman Sachs had spoken to the Guardian, it has emerged.

The belongings, emails, internet search records and phone calls of the HM Revenue and Customs solicitor Osita Mba and the phone records of his wife, Claudia, were examined by investigators, according to previously undisclosed documents.

The powers, which are supposed to be used to combat large-scale criminal tax frauds, were used because the tax inspectors suspected that Mba had been in contact with the Guardian's former investigations editor, David Leigh.

Leigh's telephone numbers and email addresses were cross-referenced with Mba's, but investigators found no evidence of contact, documents show.

The disclosure has prompted serious questions about HMRC's behaviour.

Cathy James, the head of the whistleblowers' charity, Public Concern at Work, said the decision to use intrusive powers to examine an employee who made claims using whistleblowing legislation was "outrageous" and "sinister".

"The actions of the HMRC in this case are very much a step in the wrong direction, more likely to result in a culture of silence with more anonymous leaking than anything else. It is a case of shoot and silence the messengers," she said.

Using the Public Interest Disclosure Act, Mba wrote to the National Audit Office (NAO) and two parliamentary committees in confidence in 2011 saying that the head of tax, Dave Hartnett, had "let off" Goldman Sachs from paying at least £10m in interest.

Emails show Mba's identity was disclosed to the revenue in October 2011 by the former clerk of the public accounts committee, who had sought clarification that Mba was their employee. The next day, a member of the HMRC's security staff sought to obtain access to Mba's office cabinet beneath his desk in Whitehall. "Thanks. Did you manage to get cabinet key number?" he asked a colleague.

The man also received an email containing the solicitor's private email address, his mobile number, his home telephone number and his wife's telephone details.

On 11 October 2011, the Guardian published a story under the headline "Goldman Sachs let off paying £10m interest on failed tax avoidance scheme", written by Leigh. Publication prompted members of the revenue's criminal investigative unit to take action. One named internal criminal investigator sent an email on 19 October to a colleague saying that the revenue had begun "a review of the suspect's [Mba's] H drive [the hard drive used within HMRC] and email traffic and internet usage", but inquiries had revealed nothing.

He then proposed a "further interrogation of computer material" and an "itemised billing check", and wrote that "consultations with the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] can proceed".

Using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa), HMRC can see websites viewed by taxpayers, where a mobile phone call was made or received, and the date and time of emails, texts and phone calls. According to the revenue website, these powers "can only be used when investigating serious crime". But the papers disclose that applications were granted to investigate Mba using Ripa.

On 21 October 2011, tax officials applied for an itemised billing request to check a mobile of Mba's, documents show.

One document read: "David Leigh, who was given HMRC material discussing a named taxpayers tax affairs advised a senior employee of HMRC that he had been given access to that material on the 4th or 5th October 2011 and in it he quoted extracts from an HMRC minute of 8/12/2010. He was clearly given information which if provided by an HMRC employee was in contravention of CRCA [Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005]."

Ten days later, another investigator sent a document, entitled leakupdate4, to colleagues showing they had failed to identify any illegal activity through IT checks, emails, intranet and internet usage and checks from Mba's office telephone.

Investigators also circulated Leigh's office and mobile number among staff so that they could be cross-referenced with Mba's numbers.

A memo sent in December 2011 said the revenue had checked Leigh's details but found no evidence of contact with Mba.

Leigh, who retired from the Guardian last month, said: "The revenue's decision to use these powers to try and find a link with a journalist when the disclosure was so obviously in the public interest was heavy-handed and foolish, and shows the level of paranoia over their tax deals."

Mba was suspended from work, as the Guardian revealed on 8 December 2011, when public accounts committee members warned revenue officials not to harass or bully him. However, the organisation continued to receive and detail his phone records, documents show. The inquiry was abandoned on 11 January 2012.

Mba, who trained as a barrister in Nigeria and completed his master's degree at Oxford, worked in the personal tax litigation team that dealt with the Goldman Sachs tax issue. He told the NAO and two parliamentary committees that the bank's settlement had been agreed with a handshake by Hartnett, the permanent secretary for tax at HMRC.

Mba believed the deal could be illegal, and told auditors he was making the disclosure under whistleblowing legislation. His evidence led to Hartnett's being accused of lying to parliament over his role in the Goldman Sachs deal, which he denied. He admitted, however, that his organisation had made a mistake by approving the deal.

In June 2012, Mba filed a claim under the Public Interest Disclosure Act in the central London employment tribunal. In November 2012, HMRC ordered Mba to return to work in a different team.

In 2011, HMRC was authorised under Ripa to view 14,381 items of "communications data" on taxpayers while investigating tax evasion, compared with 11,513 items in 2010, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The employment tribunal claim continues and is expected to be heard in the autumn. HMRC declined to comment when contacted on Monday.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Repeat after me, all ye gullible children:

We're all in this together.

Tax chief waived £20m owed by bank 'for fear of embarrassing chancellor'

Dave Hartnett overruled legal advice and HMRC guidelines to settle dispute with Goldman Sachs, high court hears

Rajeev Syal
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 May 2013 12.33 BST

Dave Hartnett, who wrote that rejecting a tax deal with Goldman Sachs risked 'major embarrassment' to George Osborne. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

The former tax chief Dave Hartnett chose to waive up to £20m that Goldman Sachs owed to HM Revenue and Customs after expressing concerns that it would cause embarrassment to George Osborne and the tax authorities if they failed to settle the dispute, newly released documents suggest.

The previously unseen email has emerged at the high court where UK Uncut Legal Action, the anti-cuts campaign group, has brought a case challenging the decision to waive the charges by HMRC officials.

Hartnett personally overruled legal advice, the HMRC's own guidelines and HMRC's internal review board, which all stated that HMRC was in a position to force Goldman Sachs to pay back the money owed, the court heard.

Shortly after the oral deal had been made between Hartnett and Goldman to waive the £20m that the bank owed, the HMRC's high-risk corporate programme board, an internal oversight board, rejected the deal and recommended that negotiations be re-opened to recoup the money owed.

In the email, sent by Hartnett to other senior tax officials, he states that when Goldman Sachs was informed of the board's decision to reject the deal and force the bank to pay the interest, the bank "went off the deep end".

He also warns of potential political embarrassment, stating: "The risks here are major embarrassment to the chancellor of the exchequer, HMRC, the large business service of the HMRC, you and me, not least if GS withdraw from the code."

In Hartnett's written witness statement, he states: "Goldman Sachs had been involved in tax avoidance in the past and we regarded their signing of the code as a valuable step in securing improved tax behaviour from them. This would have been under threat had we reneged on the settlement (they said they would withdraw from the code if HMRC reopened the settlement)."

Hartnett says that this would be a source of embarrassment for Osborne because a week earlier the chancellor had publicly announced that the government was cracking down on tax avoidance by big banks and had successfully forced the top 15 banks, including Goldman Sachs, to sign up to the code of practice on taxation designed to reduce tax avoidance.

Ingrid Simler, for UK Uncut, said Hartnett's email showed he was worried by the prospect of embarrassing the chancellor. "There was a risk to the chancellor, that is admitted my lord, and it is disclosed in Dave Hartnett's witness statement," she said.

Hartnett says in his statement that Goldman's threat to withdraw from the government's code of practice for banks, which was published in December 2009, worried him.

"I was concerned that withdrawal would have embarrassed the chancellor, who had announced on 30 November 2010 that the top 15 banks including Goldman's had signed up to the code," Hartnett's witness statement reads.

Hartnett stood down as head of tax last summer, following stinging criticisms from the public accounts committee over the Goldman deal.

Murray Worthy, director of UK Uncut Legal Action, said the case had exposed a cover-up at the heart of government by HMRC and Hartnett to avoid political embarrassment for Osborne.

"George Osborne announced the bankers' code for tax avoidance with great fanfare, claiming that he was forcing banks to pay their fair share. Yet on the same day Goldman Sachs were threatening to withdraw from the code if HMRC forced them to pay the tax they owed.

"HMRC waived millions of pounds owed by Goldman Sachs against legal advice and HMRC's own guidelines to salvage Dave Hartnett's personal reputation and George Osborne's veneer of tough tax talk," he said.

Anna Walker, campaigns director at UK Uncut Legal Action, said: "This case shows the lengths that the government will go to in order to preserve the public perception that government is getting tough on tax avoidance. HMRC have tried tirelessly to cover up this deal. They have stonewalled the public accounts committee, whitewashed the NAO report, criminalised a whistleblower and have fought this legal case every step of the way.

"In the runup to the G8, where David Cameron and George Osborne will pronounce themselves as global leaders in tackling tax avoidance, this case shows what is going on behind closed doors and the headline-grabbing announcements tax avoidance as usual, sweetheart deals to avoid red faces of ministers and giving in to threats from big business."

UK Uncut Legal Action is seeking a ruling that the deal reached between Goldman Sachs and HMRC was unlawful because it was in direct contradiction of HMRC's own statutory duty to collect tax properly, and its own guidance.

Simler said HMRC reached a settlement in a dispute over national insurance due on bonuses with Goldman Sachs in 2010 without requiring the payment of interest. The potential cost to the taxpayer is officially put at £8m but a whistleblower, Osita Mba, said the sum could be as high as £20m.

The bank was allowed to skip the interest bill after Hartnett was wrongly advised there was a "legal impediment" to collecting it, said Simler. The error was quickly noticed, but, despite legal advice that the agreement with the bank was not binding, HMRC unlawfully withdrew a county court claim for what was owed without seeking to renegotiate, she said.

This went against HMRC guidelines stating that taxpayers should be treated equally and no discounts or deals should be done. Simler said: "The issues in this case are of great importance both to taxpayers and HMRC as well."

The case continues.

[Peter Lemkin]

THE DIVIDE - by Matt Taibbi: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap is a probing investigation of one of the most pressing issues facing us today: the increasing wealth gap and how it is affecting our system of justice. "The Divide," reveals our two most troubling trends - enormous wealth inequality on one hand and an increasingly punitive, intrusive state on the other, resulting in our basic rights now being determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime.

[Peter Lemkin]

Who Goes to Jail? Matt Taibbi on American Injustice Gap from Wall Street to Main Street

Award-winning journalist Matt Taibbi is out with an explosive new book that asks why the vast majority of white-collar criminals have avoided prison since the financial crisis began, while an unequal justice system imprisons the poor and people of color on a mass scale. In "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap," Taibbi explores how the Depression-level income gap between the wealthy and the poor is mirrored by a "justice" gap in who is targeted for prosecution and imprisonment. "It is much more grotesque to consider the non-enforcement of white-collar criminals when you do consider how incredibly aggressive law enforcement is with regard to everybody else," Taibbi says.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: Today we dedicate much of the hour to a conversation with award-winning journalist Matt Taibbi, who you may know from his reporting on financial crimes. Well, now Taibbi is back with an explosive new book that asks why these crimes have gone unpunished as an unequal justice system targets the most vulnerable. The gap between what the poorest make and what the wealthiest bring home has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression, and the drug war has fueled the mass incarceration of the poor and people of color.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, attorney James Kidney, who was retiring from the Securities and Exchange Commission, gave a widely reported speech at his retirement party. He said that his bosses were too, quote, "tentative and fearful" to hold Wall Street accountable for the 2008 economic meltdown. Kidney, who joined the SEC in 1986, had tried and failed to bring charges against more executives in the agency's 2010 case against Goldman Sachs. He said the SEC has become, quote, "an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors. ... Tough enforcement, risky enforcement, is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening," he said.
Well, for more, we turn to our guest, Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist, formerly with Rolling Stone magazine, now with First Look Media. His new book is called The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.
Matt, we welcome you back to Democracy Now! It's a remarkable, important, certainly needed book
MATT TAIBBI: Oh, thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: in this day and age. Talk about the thesis. What is the divide?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, this book grew out of my experience covering Wall Street. I've obviously been doing it since the crash in 2008. And over and over again, I would cover these very complex and often very socially destructive capers committed by white-collar criminals. And the punchline to all of the stories were basically the same: Nobody would get indicted; nobody went to jail. And after a while, I started to become interested specifically in that phenomenon. Why was there no enforcement of any of this? And around the time of the Occupy protest, I decided to write this book, and then I shifted my focus to try to learn a lot more for myself about who does go to jail in this country, because I thought you really can't make this comparison accurately until you learn about both sides of the equation, because it's actually much more grotesque to consider the non-enforcement of white-collar criminals when you do consider how incredibly aggressive law enforcement is with regard to everybody else.
AARON MATÉ: Now, you spent time with thewith the poor and vulnerable and people of color, who have been targeted by this system. There was one case of a man in New York, who lives in Bed-Stuy, standing outside of his home
MATT TAIBBI: Right.
AARON MATÉ: who was arrested. Can you take it from there?
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, sure. I was actually in aI was in a law office in Brooklyn, and I was actually waiting to speak to a lawyer about another case, when I met this 35-year-old African-American man, a bus driver. And I asked him what he was there for, and he told me that he had been arrested for, quote-unquote, "obstructing pedestrian traffic." And I thought he was kidding. You know, I didn't know what that meant. And I asked him to show me his summons, and he pulled out a littlelittle piece of pink paper, and there it was. It was written, you know, "obstructing pedestrian traffic," which it turns out it meant that he was standing in front of his own house at 1:00 in the morning, and the police just didn't like the way he looked and arrested him.
And this is part of the disorderly conduct statute here in New York, but this is one of these offenses that people get roped in for. It's part of what a city councilman in another city called an "epidemic of false arrests," basically these new stats-based police strategies. The whole idea is to rope in as many people as you can, see how many of them have guns or warrants, and then basically throw back the innocent ones. But the problem is they don't throw back everybody. They end up sweeping up a lot of innocent people and charging them with really pointless crimes.
AARON MATÉ: There's a very comic scene where then he goes to court, and he has a hard time convincing his public defender why he doesn't want to pay a fine for standing in front of his home.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, and this is something that I encountered over and over and over again, is that people who were charged with these minor sort of harassing offenses, theywhen the state discovers that the case against them is not very good, they start offering deals to the accused. And when people protest that "I'm not going to plead, because I didn't do anything wrong," they keep offering better and better and better deals. And no one can understand why they won't plead guilty, because, in reality, most people do. They will end up taking
AMY GOODMAN: Like all the bankers plead guilty.
MATT TAIBBI: Right, yeah, exactly. Of course, it's completely the opposite situation on the other side of the coin. But in the case of Andrew, the guy who was arrested for obstructing pedestrian traffic, he literally could not convince his own lawyer that he was innocent. And it took a long, long time before they got the judge to ask the policeman on duty if there was actually anybody else on the street to obstruct. And it wasn't until that moment that they dismissed the case, and it just took that long.
AMY GOODMAN: So let's talk about the other side. And I want to go to Attorney General Eric Holder, his remarks before the Senate Judiciary Committee last May in which he suggests that some banks are just too big to jail.

ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us toto 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. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large. Again, I'm not talking about HSBC; this is just a more general comment. I think it has an inhibiting influence, impact, on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Attorney General Eric Holder testifying before Congress. His remarks were widely criticized. This is Federal Judge Jed Rakoff speaking last November at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

JUDGE JED RAKOFF: To a federal judge, who takes an oath to apply the law equally to rich and poor, this excuse, sometimes labeled the too-big-to-jail excuse, is, frankly, disturbing for what it says about the department's apparent disregard for equality under the law.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Federal Judge Jed Rakoff. Matt Taibbi, if you could respond? And then talk about the history of Eric Holder, where he came from.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, first of all, this idea that some companies are too big to jail, it makes some sense in the abstract. In a vacuum, of course it makes sense. If you have a company, a storied company that may have existed for a hundred, 150 years, that employs tens or maybe even 100,000 people, you may not want to criminally charge that company willy-nilly and wreck the company and cause lots of people to lose their jobs.
But there are two problems with that line of thinking if you use it over and over and over again. One is that there's no reason you can't proceed against individuals in those companies. It's understandable to maybe not charge the company, but in the case of a company like HSBC, which admitted to laundering $850 million for a pair of Central and South American drug cartels, somebody has to go to jail in that case. If you're going to put people in jail for having a joint in their pocket or for slinging dime bags on the corner in a city street, you cannot let people who laundered $800 million for the worst drug offenders in the world walk.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait, this can't be a parenthetical. Explain what you're talking about with HSBC.
MATT TAIBBI: So, HSBC, again, this is one of the world's largest banks. It's Europe's largest bank. And a few years ago, they got caught, swept up for a variety of offenses, money-laundering offenses. But one of them involved admitting that they had laundered $850 million for a pairfor two drug cartels, one in Mexico and one in South America, and including the notorious Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico that is suspected in thousands of murders.
And in that case, they paid a fine; they paid a $1.9 billion fine. And some of the executives had to defer their bonuses for a period of five yearsnot give them up, defer them. But there were no individual consequences for any of the executives. Nobody had to pull money out of their own pockets for permanently. And nobody did a single day in jail in that case.
And that, to me, was an incredibly striking case. I ran that very day to the courthouse here in New York, and I asked around to the public defenders, you know, "What's the dumbest drug case you had today?" And I found somebody who had been thrown in Rikers for 47 days for having a joint in his pocket. So
AMY GOODMAN: And that'sis that even illegal?
MATT TAIBBI: No, in New York City, actually, it's not illegal to carry a joint around in your pocket. It was decriminalized way back in the late '70s. But with part of the now past stop-and-frisk, what they do is they would stop you, and then they would search you and force you to empty your pockets. When you empty your pockets, now it's no longer concealed, and now it's illegal again. So they hadin that year, they had 50,000 marijuana arrests, even though marijuanahaving marijuana was technically decriminalized at the time.
So, my point was: Here's somebody at the bottom, he's a consumer of the illegal narcotics business, and he's going to jail, and then you have these people who are at the very top of the illegal narcotics business, and they're getting a complete walk. And that's just totally unacceptable.
AARON MATÉ: But back to this doctrine that you can't punish an entire company for the misdeeds of a few because you might hurt the economy, you might hurt shareholders, you know, some of which are pension holders andpension funds and so forth, how do you get from hurting ahow do you equate hurting an entire company to just not jailing a couple of executives?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, that's the whole point. They've conflated the two things. Originallyso, thisto answer the second part of your original question, "Where does this come from? Where does this doctrine come from?" way back in 1999, when Eric Holder was a deputy attorney general in thein Clinton's administration, he wrote a memo that has now come to be known as "the Holder Memo." And in it, he outlined a number of things. Actually, it was originally considered a get-tough-on-corporate-crime memo, because it gave prosecutors a number of new tools with which they could go after corporate criminals. But at the bottom of it, there was this thing that he laid out called the "collateral consequences doctrine." And what "collateral consequences" meant was that if you're a prosecutor and you're targeting one of these big corporate offenders and you're worried that you may affect innocent victims, that shareholders or innocent executives may lose their jobs, you may consider other alternatives, other remedies besides criminal prosecutionsin other words, fines, nonprosecution agreements, deferred prosecution agreements. And again, at the time, it was a completely sensible thing to lay out. Of course it makes sense to not always destroy a company if you can avoid it. But what they've done is they've conflated that sometimes-sensible policy with a policy of not going after any individuals for any crimes. And that's just totally unacceptable.
AARON MATÉ: Is it not the case that some of these cases are just too complex to explain to a jury?
MATT TAIBBI: Yes. And thatwell, they are complex, and juries do have a difficult time with them, but they're not impossible to explain to a jury. I mean, I attended a trial involving bid rigging in the municipal bond markets where they obtained convictions. Now, that case couldn't have been more complicated. That was as hard as a case gets. And I actually watched some of the jurors fighting off sleep in the early days of the trial. That's how difficult it was. And in that case, amusingly, one of the attorneys for the banks got up initially, and he tried to defend his client's behavior by saying, you know, "When you call up aif your washing machine breaks and you call the repairman and he tells you how much it costs, you just have to trust him what the price is because you don't understand how to fix your washing machine, and we do." In other words, this stuff is so complex, you just have to take our word for it that we didn't commit a crime. Andbut that excuse, I think that's a weak excuse that prosecutors give out. It's a cop-out for not taking on, you know, difficult cases. Rich or poor, black or white, if somebody has broken the law, you should want to go after wrongdoers no matter who they are, and the fact that it's a difficult crime to prove should just be more of a challenge for you.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to remarks by Lanny Breuer in 2012 about prosecuting large companies. At the time, he was the assistant attorney general. He spoke before the New York City Bar Association.

LANNY BREUER: I personally feel that it's my duty to consider whether individual employees, with no responsibility for or knowledge of misconduct committed by others in the same company, are going to lose their livelihood if we indict the corporation. In large multinational companies, the jobs of tens of thousands of employees can literally be at stake. And in some cases, the health of an industry or the markets are a very real factor. Those are the kinds of considerations in white-collar cases that literally keep me up at night, and which must, must play a role in responsible enforcement.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Lanny Breuer in 2012, who was like number two in the Justice Department.
MATT TAIBBI: He was the head of the Criminal Division, so he's basically the top cop in America at the time.
AMY GOODMAN: He was at the Justice Department; of course, Eric Holder is the attorney generalboth from the same company. Respond to what he said, and then talk about Covington & Burling.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, first of all, histhat whole thing about the innocent white-collar employees perhaps losing their livelihoods keeping him up at night, I want to know what his response is to, you know, the idea that maybe a single mother on welfare is going to lose her kids because she's going to lose custody in an $800 welfare fraud case. You know, I saw so many of these cases that it wasthat is was just overwhelming to me. Those are the kinds of things that would keep me up at night if I were the attorney general, thinking about the consequences that ordinary people feelsuffer when they are caught up in the criminal justice system.
Peoplefor instance, again, going back to welfare fraud, your relatives can lose their Section 8 housing. So, you know, if you'reagain, if you're on welfare and you get caught in a fraud case, that may just involve checking the wrong box or having somebody, one of your neighbors, say that you have a boyfriend living in your house, when you really don't, your mother or your grandmother can lose their housing because of something like that. That would be the stuff that would keep me up at night. I mean, I wouldn't be worried about millionaire and billionaire executives, you know, who are working at these banks, if I were Lanny Breuer. So that tells you a lot about the priorities of somebody like him.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about Lanny Breuer, Eric Holder, where they come from, where they go back to.
MATT TAIBBI: So they both came from a law firm called Covington & Burling, which in the 2000s represented basically every single one of the too-big-to-fail banks. They were also involved in the setting up of the electronic mortgage registry, so they played an enormous role in the subprime mortgage crisis.
But here's the key thing about the presence of these two people at the head of the attorneyof the Justice Department. Prosecutors, by and largeand I interviewed a lot of prosecutors for this bookthey basically all have the same personality, the old-school prosecutors. They're justif you think of somebody like Eliot Spitzer, they're all like bulldogs. They just want to get theiryou know, get their target; by hook or crook, it doesn't really matter. They have this ferocious aspect to their personalities. And it's an admirable quality in a prosecutor. They're all kind of the same, in a certain way. Cops are the same way. But in the 2000s, that kind of person started to be replaced in the regulatory system by a new kind of figure who tended to come from the corporate defense community. And their attitude was not, you know, get their target at all costs; it was more: "Let's bring a bunch of people in a room and hammer out a solution where all the sides are going to end up walking out happy." And that's why we end up with settlements, like the $13 billion Chase settlement last year or the $1.9 billion HSBC settlement, instead of prosecutions.
AMY GOODMAN: Covington & Burling represented JPMorgan Chase.
MATT TAIBBI: They did, yeah, and a host of other banks that also were involved in nonprosecutions during this time. So, I mean, it'syou have a whole bunch of people sort of at the top of the regulatory agencies, whether it's Justice, the SEC, the CFTC, maybe the Enforcement Division of the SEC, who all came from these big banks or from law firms that represented these big banks. And it's a very incestuous community. And just like you talked about with James Kidney, the SEC official who left, as a result of this kind of merry-go-round of people who all work for the same companiesand they're going to go to government for a while, then they're going to go back to the corporate defense community after they leave and make millions of dollarsthey're very, very reluctant to be aggressive against these companies, because it's theirculturally, they're the same people as their targets, whereas there isn't that same simpatico with the very poor. And I think that's a veryit's an important distinction to make, and people don't understand it.
AARON MATÉ: You also suggest that Holder and Breuer are perhaps overly concerned with their conviction rate
MATT TAIBBI: Oh, yeah.
AARON MATÉ: and that's why they don't go after these banks.
MATT TAIBBI: Again, that's something I heard over and over again from people within the Justice Department, that once those two came in, the edict came down from above that we were only going to go after cases where we were absolutely sure we were going to win. Now, you can never guarantee a victory in any criminal case, and oftentimes the cases are difficult to prove or the evidence may not be 100 percent there, but the state has a moral obligation to proceed with investigations and, in many cases, criminal cases against people who are guilty. You know, the fact that it's difficult shouldn't be a limiting factor. And that's why you sawinstead of cases against these big banks, you saw ridiculously large amounts of resources devoted to things like prosecuting Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens, you know, cases where there are like only a couple of pieces of evidence and it was hard to screw up. And yet, you know, they didn't always succeed even in those cases. So, it was a terrible, terrible thing for the Justice Department during that period.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break, then come back to this conversation. The award-winning journalist Matt Taibbi is with us, formerly with Rolling Stone magazine. His new book is called The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. When the government does go after banks, what banks do they go after? We'll talk about that in a minute.

[Peter Lemkin]

AARON MATÉ: Well, we are speaking with Matt Taibbi, the award-winning journalist formerly with Rolling Stone magazine, now with First Look Media. His book is The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. Now, turning to the banksor the bank that was prosecuted, Abacus Bank, last May it became the first bank to be indicted in Manhattan in over two decades. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced the indictment.

CYRUS VANCE JR.: Today we are announcing the indictment or guilty pleas of 19 individuals on charges including mortgage fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy, as well as the indictment of Abacus Federal Savings Bank, a federally chartered bank that has been catering to the Chinese immigrant community since 1984. Now, these defendantsthe bank and former employees and managers from its loan departmentare charged with engaging in a systematic scheme to falsify and fabricate loan applications to the Federal National Mortgage Association, commonly known as Fannie Mae, so that borrowers who would otherwise not legally qualify for Fannie Mae's mortgages could obtain them unlawfully. This is a large-scale mortgage fraud case that we estimate to include hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of falsified loan applications. If we have learned anything from the recent mortgage crisis, it's that at some point these schemes unravel, and taxpayers can be left holding the bag. Financial institutions, in short, have to obey the law and follow the rules. Our financial system is predicated on this basic concept.

AARON MATÉ: That's Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. Matt Taibbi, you were at this trial. You heard Prosecutor Vance there suggesting some link here to the financial crisis, but that wasn't the case.
MATT TAIBBI: So, this isI mean, it's almost humorous. It's not humorous for the bank involved, obviously. But here he is holding this grand press conference. They actually had a chain gang, where they chained 19 of the defendants together and hauled them into court for thisfor this exercise.
AMY GOODMAN: All working for Abacus?
MATT TAIBBI: All working for Abacus. And these are working-class Chinese immigrants, basically. The highest-ranking official in this entire case made $90,000 a year. Many of them didn't speak English. This is a small bank wedged between two noodle shops in Chinatown. And this was the target they chose to go against as a symbol of the financial crisis? In the chain gang incident, actually, three of thethree of the defendants had actually already been arraigned, but they asked them to volunteer to come down to the courthouse for the photo op that day, brought them in, chained them up to the rest of the defendants so they could be re-arraigned for the benefit of the cameras.
But the point of this whole thing is that Abacus Federal Savings Bank, which is a small, community, minority bank in Manhattan, this was the sole target of any reprisal by the federalby the government in the wake of the financial crisis. And they're a stone's throw from all these gigantic skyscrapers, you know, housing all of these other major banks that committed crimes that were hundreds of times worse than Abacus was even accused of. And it was such a visually striking contrast for me that that's where I wanted to start the book, because here you have this bank being arraigned in downtown Manhattan, and they looked northward towards Chinatown for their target as opposed to, you know, a few blocks south, where they could have foundyou know, walked in any direction and found an appropriate target.
AMY GOODMAN: Contrast that with Jamie Dimon testifying beforewhat was itthe Senate Judiciary Committee, the head of JPMorgan Chase. And talk about what his bank was fined for and what he ultimatelywhat happened to him.
MATT TAIBBI: So, Jamie Dimon is the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and theylast year that bank paid $20 billion in fines, which is an extraordinary number. Think about it. I think it beats by a factor of five the record for the largest amount of regulatory fines in a single year, which was previously held by BP for their Deepwater Horizon incident. They were accused of an extraordinary array of things, everything from being Bernie Madoff's banker and not raising red flags early enough, to manipulating energy prices in Michigan and California, to failing to disclose to investors the extent of losses in the London Whale episode, to abuses during the subprime mortgage period by some of their subsidiaries. The list of things goes on and on and on and on. And
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, if this were translated into common criminal law
MATT TAIBBI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: this isthis is sort of replacing hundreds of years in prison for many different people.
MATT TAIBBI: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I made the point in another casethere was another case involving a company called General Reinsurance where a bunch of executives were charged with a $750 million stock fraud, that that amount of fraud that year was more than the total value of all the cars stolen in the American Northeast that same year. So you think about everybody who's doing time for a stolen car that year, and, you know, these guys ultimately got off on a technicality.
So, again, going back to Chase, they paid $20 billion in fines. And what the government always says in response to the question of why aren't these guys in jail, they always say, "Well, we don't have enough evidence. These cases are hard to make." But my question is, over and over again, they somehow seem to have enough leverage to get billions of dollars of fines out of these companies, but not enough leverage to get even a day in jail for any of their executives? It doesn't add up. Logically, it's a total non sequitur. There's no way you can have a company paying that much money and not have somebody guilty of a crime. It's justit's not possible.
AARON MATÉ: And Jamie Dimon, of course, gets a 74 percent raise.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the punchline to this whole thing, right? I mean, if you were, you know, the head of any other businessAlex Pareene of Salon.com made this point, that if he were running a restaurant and he got the biggest fine in the history of restaurants, there is no way that he would be kept in, kept on the job as the head of the company. But he was not only not fired, not only not prosecuted, but he was kept in the job, and he got a 74 percent raise. And they essentially paid for $20 billion fines by laying off 7,500 lower-level workers that year, and so that's where the pain came from.
AMY GOODMAN: Let's go to Richard Fuld, the final chair and chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers. In 2008, he spoke before the House of Representatives Oversight Committee and was grilled about his own exorbitant earnings as the bank went under. This is Committee Chair Henry Waxman questioning Fuld.

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: You've been able to pocket close to half-a-million dollars. And my question to you is, a lot of people ask: Is that fair for the CEO of a company that's now bankrupt to have made that kind of money? It's just unimaginable to so many people.

RICHARD FULD: I would say to you the 500 number is not accurate. I would say to you that although it's still a large number, I think, for the years that you're talking about here, I believe my cash compensation was close to $60 million, which you have indicated here. And I believe the amount that I took out of the company over and above that was, I believe, a little bit less than $250 million.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response to the last head of Lehman Brothers talking about his salary?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, first of all, there was a whistleblower within Lehman Brothers who wrote to the SEC before Lehman Brothers collapsed, talking about how Fuld had actually earned a significantly larger amount of money than he represented there in Congress. It's quite possible that if the SEC had followed up on some of those complaints by that whistleblower, that they might have uncovered some of the corruption at Lehman Brothers ahead of time and maybe, possibly even headed off that disaster.
But what's interestingwhat's symbolic about Richard Fuld is that here's a guy who nearly blew up the planet by, you know, loading up his company with deadly leverage and making a string of irresponsible decisions to over-invest in subprime mortgages, and the collapse of the company resulted in all of us having to pay these enormous bailouts. But Fuld walked away with, by his count, $300 million, maybe $350 [million], but by the count of some others, more closer to half-a-billion dollars, and he kept the money. And that is a consistent theme of the financial crisis. Not only were these guys not prosecuted, they got to keep all of their money, all of the ill-gotten gains that they made during these periods.
AMY GOODMAN: You call that chapter "The Greatest Bank Robbery You Never Heard Of."
MATT TAIBBI: Right, yeah. No, there was something that happened at Lehman Brothers at the end of theyou know, when the company went out of business. It wasthere was essentially a merger with the British bank, Barclays, and there was an incredibly interesting episode where a series of Lehman insiders agreed to take upwards of $300 million in compensationin future compensation from Barclays, before they did the process of valuating the company for sale to Barclays. I know that sounds complicated, but basically they took jobs at Barclays, and then they basically marked down the price of Barclays so that the Lehman creditors got less money in the end. So, if you wereif you lost money in the Lehman debacle, you can probably lay some of the blame at the feet of those executives.
AARON MATÉ: And it was so shady that didn't most of this happen in the middle of the night?
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, actually, they madethey struck many of the deals with these Lehman insiders before dawn on the day of the last board meeting. Literally before dawn, you had emails going back and forth between some of these Lehman Brothers executives saying, "Well, how much did you get? You know, I got $15 million," and, you know, etc., etc.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, the way the media covers, and the prosecutors go after or don't, these institutions, it's all from the perspective of those who would be or should be charged. When it comes to people on the street, it's always from the perspective of the victim.
MATT TAIBBI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Which, by the way, it should be.
MATT TAIBBI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, if someone is raped or murdered, you should hear their story, their name
MATT TAIBBI: Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: and a person should be held responsible. But in this case, you never hear about the victims.
MATT TAIBBI: That's right.
AMY GOODMAN: Instead, you are identifying with those who are charged. They say they have families; they're really a wonderful person.
MATT TAIBBI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the victims of these crimes that JPMorgan Chase was fined for.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, I mean, we're all victims of these crimes. I mean, that's the difficult thing about this new era of financial corruption is that, you know, these crimes are executed on such a massive scale that we can all be victimized and basically not know it. If you think about something like the Libor scandal, right, where the world's biggest banks got together and colluded to monkey around with world interest rates, well, that crime affected anybody who held a variable rate investment of any kind. So if you have a floating rate credit card or a floating mortgage, or if you're a town that has swaps, you may be paying more, you may be paying less. It doesn't knowyou don't know, but they've been affecting the amounts of your holdings. There have recently been charges that some of the banks have been monkeying around with the prices of things like metals, like aluminum and tin and zinc and copper. So if you go to buy a can of soda, you may be paying more than you would have otherwise.
In the subprime mortgage crisis, typically the victims were people who held pensions, because what would happen often was the banks would create these gigantic masses of essentially phony subprime loans. They would disguise them as AAA-rated investments. Then they would sell them to an institutional investor like a pension fund. So you're some, you know, working stiff, a toll booth operator in Minnesota. You've got a state pension. And you wake up one morning, and 30 percent of your pension fund is gone. Well, you're a victim of this stuff.
But it's very hard to trace that back to these people. And it's hardand journalists don't want to do the work of identifying who the victims are in these scandals, because it's too complicated. And that's why you often see these crimes described from the point of view of the perpetrator and not from the victim, because we're all the victims. These crimes are ethereal. They're existential. They're on such a gigantic scope that it's difficult for us to get awrap our heads around. And that's aso that's a very good question to ask.
AARON MATÉ: You mentioned earlier people who are targeted for welfare fraud. In one case, you went to San Diego and profiled a woman who was targeted by this program P100
MATT TAIBBI: Right.
AARON MATÉ: a very invasive action in her home. Can you talk to us about that case?
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, they have this program in San Diego where if you apply for welfare, the state gets to pre-emptively search your house to make sure that you're not lying about, for instance, having a boyfriend. You know, so you're a single mom. You go to the welfare office. You need financial assistance. You represent on the form that you're not cohabiting with anybody. And just to check, they tell you to go sit tight in your house. And I've heard stories of people who waited, literally sitting in their house for a week, not knowing when the inspector is going to come, because if you're not there when they come, you don't get your welfare.
So, the person comes finally. It's not a social worker. It's very often a law enforcement official. They go in, and they search your house. I talked to a number of women who have recounted the experience of having their underwear drawers rifled through. You know, one woman talked about an inspector sticking his pencil end into the underwear drawer and picking out a pair of sexy panties and saying, you know, "Who do you need these for? If you don't have a boyfriend, what's this for?" And this is the kind of thing that people have to go through.
And I understand that, to many middle Americans, you know, welfare recipients are notare perhaps not the most sympathetic people. But it's very striking that, for instance, the recipients of bailouts, we don't have the right to go in and check their books, but somebody who applies for federal assistance to feed their kids, we have the right to go through their underwear drawer. And I thought that was a striking comparison.
AMY GOODMAN: Matt, the cover of The Divide, of your book, American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, is very striking. And you have this artwork throughout your book. Explain who did this.
MATT TAIBBI: So this is Molly Crabapple. She's a great artist. I met her during the Occupy protests. We hadwe have a mutual friend, and Molly had done these amazing posters for the Occupy protests that werethat were basedsome of them were based on my work, because there was a vampire squid theme to some of them.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain vampire squid.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, I had referred to Goldman Sachs as a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity. So she had done these series of posters that were like, you know, "starve the vampire squid," "stop the vampire squid." So we got together, and she wasshe ended up becoming sort of famous as like the semi-official artist of Occupy. And we decided to work together on this project. And what's so perfect about her is that she really specializes in doing these kind of grotesque, horrifying, Boschian portraits of dysfunction, you know, like the cover. It actually looks quite beautiful from a distance, but if you look at it closely, it's this horrifying image of people being ground up in this mindless justice machine. So it's beautiful stuff, and Molly should getshe gets all the credit in the world, I think. They're incredible images.
AARON MATÉ: At sentencing hearings, you have sometimes family members and friends coming to plead to the judge for leniency. And you sort of contrast this in your book. You have one scene where you have executives bringing in hundreds of people.
MATT TAIBBI: Mm-hmm.
AARON MATÉ: Can you compare what happens there to what happens to people on the bottom?
MATT TAIBBI: So this is interesting. Again, this is that same Gen Re case I talked about, the $750 million stock fraud where these guys all got off. And what was so interesting about that isso, if you go to court, the judges almost never are from the same neighborhoods as the accused. But when you do have a case where it's, you know, somebody from the suburbs who lives in Connecticut and the judge is also somebody who's from the suburbs and lives in Connecticut, and he has members of the local PTA come out and say that, you know, "This guy is somebody who wouldn't even jaywalk. You know, he's a God-fearing person. Yes, maybe he might have committed a $750 million stock fraud, but he's a very decent person," they will very frequentlylike, bail is never an issue for this kind of defendant, which is very, very important. You know, theseand beyond that, in that particular case, after they were convicted, all of these defendants were allowed to remain free pending appeal, which removed all of the leverage the state might have had to roll up these defendants up into higher targets, whereas that's exactly the opposite of what happens to poor defendants, who are frequently thrown in jail. Their, you know, bail is set at a level that's higher than they can afford. And then, while you're in jail waiting for trial, you start to do the math, and you realize that you could stay in jail longer in bail than you would do if you were sentenced. And that's one of the reasons why people plead out, even when they're innocent, because the math just works in the state's favor. They have all these tricks they can use to keep you in jail longer than you're supposed to be.
AMY GOODMAN: Who was tougher on corporate America, President Obama or President Bush?
MATT TAIBBI: Oh, Bush, hands down. And this is an important point to make, because if you go back to the early 2000s, think about all these high-profile cases: Adelphia, Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen. All of these companies were swept up by the Bush Justice Department. And what's interesting about this is that you can see a progression. If you go back to the savings and loan crisis in the late '80s, which was an enormous fraud problem, but it paled in comparison to the subprime mortgage crisis, we put about 800 people in jail duringin the aftermath of that crisis. You fast-forward 10 or 15 years to the accounting scandals, like Enron and Alelphia and Tyco, we went after the heads of some of those companies. It wasn't as vigorous as the S&L prosecutions, but we at least did it. At least George Bush recognized the symbolic importance of showing ordinary Americans that justice is blind, right?
Fast-forward again to the next big crisis, and how many people have we gothave we actually put in jail? Zero. And this was a crisis that was much huger in scope than the S&L crisis or the accounting crisis. I mean, it wiped out 40 percent of the world's wealth, and nobody went to jail, so that we're now in a place where we don't even recognize the importance of keeping up appearances when it comes to making things look equal.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you end with the story of Patrick? And we just have a minute.
MATT TAIBBI: Sure, yeah. There was a saxophonist named Patrick Ocean Jewell who was assaulted by police here in New York City. They mistook a hand-rolled cigarette for a joint.
AMY GOODMAN: He had brought his girlfriend to the subway, liked to walk with her every morning.
MATT TAIBBI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: He actually did not know who attacked him.
MATT TAIBBI: Right, yeah. No, the police can be anyone these days. That's another thing that most people don't know about. They don't always come in uniform, and they don't always come in those unmarked Plymouths that they used to drive. They can drive fancy cars. They can drive beaters. They can be dressed in plainclothes. They can be black, white. You don't even know who the cops are anymore. And this guy was just sitting there at a train station smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, and all of a sudden he's being beaten up by all these people, you know, and he only later figured out that they were cops.
AMY GOODMAN: When he called to a police officer, started crying for help.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, he's crying for help, and a uniformed police officer comes and tells him to shut up. And that's when he realizes that they were cops. But this isthis is sort of stop-and-frisk expanding its universe of targets. So, you know, now, even if you're white and middle-class, you know, now you, too, can be part of this whole process. And that's
AMY GOODMAN: And your point in bringingputting this in The Divide?
MATT TAIBBI: Is thatyou know, is that this is now beginning to affect everybody. I think one of the problems that the increasing wealth gap is bringing to us is that there's a smaller and smaller group of untouchables, and then there's a sort of widening group of everybody else, and we all have the same lack of respect from the law enforcement.