Matt Taibbi on How Wall Street Hedge Funds Are Looting the Pension Funds...

After they steal the money. Their politicians will say we've got to cut back because their is no money to give you for what we've allowed to be stolen. Let's move on. Nothing to see here.

Matt Taibbi, Sam Seder on Alex Pareene Popping CNBC's Bubble

From Democracy Now: Matt Taibbi: Libor Rate-Fixing Scandal "Biggest Insider Trading You Could Ever Imagine"

Matt Taibbi on Imus the heisting of America by the banks and GE

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia | Politics News | Rolling Stone

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia | Politics News | Rolling Stone:

'via Blog this'

Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won't hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you're probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government's massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo.

But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.

The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from "virtually every state, district and territory in the United States," according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being ­cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime.

In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business. What's more, in the manner of old mob trials, Wall Street's secret machinations were revealed during theCarollo trial through crackling wiretap recordings and the lurid testimony of cooperating witnesses, who came into court with bowed heads, pointing fingers at their accomplices. The new-age gangsters even invented an elaborate code to hide their crimes. Like Elizabethan highway robbers who spoke in thieves' cant, or Italian mobsters who talked about "getting a button man to clip the capo," on tape after tape these Wall Street crooks coughed up phrases like "pull a nickel out" or "get to the right level" or "you're hanging out there" – all code words used to manipulate the interest rates on municipal bonds. The only thing that made this trial different from a typical mob trial was the scale of the crime.

USA v. Carollo involved classic cartel activity: not just one corrupt bank, but many, all acting in careful concert against the public interest. In the years since the economic crash of 2008, we've seen numerous hints that such orchestrated corruption exists. The collapses of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, for instance, both pointed to coordi­nated attacks by powerful banks and hedge funds determined to speed the demise of those firms. In the bankruptcy of Jefferson County, Alabama, we learned that Goldman Sachs accepted a $3 million bribe from J.P. Morgan Chase to permit Chase to serve as the sole provider of toxic swap deals to the rubes running metropolitan Birmingham – "an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior," as one former regulator described it.

More recently, a major international investigation has been launched into the manipulation of Libor, the interbank lending index that is used to calculate global interest rates for products worth more than $3 trillion a year. If and when that case is presented to the public at trial – there are several major civil suits in the works here in the States – we may yet find out that the world's most powerful banks have, for years, been fixing the prices of almost every adjustable-rate vehicle on earth, from mortgages and credit cards to interest-rate swaps and even currencies.

But USA v. Carollo marks the first time we actually got incontrovertible evidence that Wall Street has moved into this cartel-type brand of criminality. It also offered a disgusting glimpse into the enabling and grossly cynical role played by politicians, who took Super Bowl tickets and bribe-stuffed envelopes to look the other way while gangsters raided the public kitty. And though the punishments that were ultimately handed down in the trial – minor convictions of three bit players – felt deeply unsatisfying, it was still a watershed moment in the ongoing story of America's gradual awakening to the realities of financial corruption. In a post-crash era where Wall Street trials almost never make it into court, and even the harshest settlements end with the evidence buried by the government and the offending banks permitted to escape with no admission of wrongdoing, this case finally dragged the whole ugly truth of American finance out into the open – and it was a hell of a show.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620#ixzz1yTEU6EWm

Matt Taibbi talks JP Morgan's $2+ Billion Dollar Gambling Loss

Matt Taibbi on what the jobs act means to Wall Street

#F29 Matt Taibbi on Bank of America | Occupy Wall Street Video

Selling oregano as weed.

Bank of America In Trouble? | Common Dreams

Bank of America In Trouble? Common Dreams

It’s a very bad sign that a bank is in a desperate cash crunch when it tries repeatedly to gouge its customers. David Trainer, an analyst for Market Watch, a WSJ publication, wrote that the new fees are a sign of series trouble at BAC. He writes:

In my opinion, there are four actions taken by financial services that signal the company is headed to serious trouble.

1. Management shake-up and major layoffs - lots of layoffs over the past year

2. Exploiting accounting rules to boost earnings - SFAS 159

3. Drawing down reserves to boost earnings: to the tune of $13.3 billion in 2011 and 2012

4. Bilking customers with new fees: tried it before and trying it again

Bank of America has taken all four steps. Bilking customers with new fees is a desperate measure of last resort because it requires exploiting the one asset the bank has left, namely its customers.

Trainer in an earlier column urged investors to dump Bank of America for a number of reasons, but mostly because he had reservations about some of the numbers in the bank’s most recent SEC filing.

02-29-12 4 - Occu-Spy, with Matt Taibbi - Countdown with Keith Olbermann

Why Wall Street Should Stop Whining | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

Why Wall Street Should Stop Whining Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone

When I read things like this I’m simultaneously amazed by two things. The
first is the unbelievable tone-deafness of people who would complain out loud,
during a time when millions of people around the country are literally losing
their homes, that their bonuses – not their total compensation, mind you, but
just their cash bonuses, paid in addition to their salaries and their
stock packages – are barely enough to cover the mortgage payments for
their new condos, the taxis they take when walking is too burdensome, and their
girlfriends with expensive tastes.


The second thing that amazes me is that Sherman is buying all this. I don’t
know this reporter at all, and I’m happy to concede that he probably hangs out
with more Wall Street people than I do. But I’m still in touch with plenty of
people in the business, and I have yet to have any investment bankers crying on
my shoulder about how the Dodd-Frank bill is forcing them into generic breakfast
cereals.Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-wall-street-should-stop-whining-20120208#ixzz1lqRgQeYF

According to Matt Taibbi Obama in the middle of pushing for a deal to help alleviate the suffering banks, who stole millions from the Americans

Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal

POSTED: August 24, 11:17 AM ET

Eric Schneiderman and President Barack Obama

Michael Nagle/Getty Images and JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

A power play is underway in the foreclosure arena, according to the New York Times.

On the one side is Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, who is conducting his own investigation into the era of securitizations – the practice of chopping up assets like mortgages and converting them into saleable securities – that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
On the other side is the Obama administration, the banks, and all the other state attorneys general.
This second camp has cooked up a deal that would allow the banks to walk away with just a seriously discounted fine from a generation of fraud that led to millions of people losing their homes.

Full Story here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/obama-goes-all-out-for-dirty-banker-deal-20110824

Covering Up Wall Street Crimes: Matt Taibbi Exposes How SEC Shredded Thousands of Investigations

Matt Taibbi on democracy now. Investigations go forward on the big banks as the bank servants in Washington, one in them sitting white house, tries to block the investigation. Oh by the way can I have a check.

Covering Up Wall Street Crimes: Matt Taibbi Exposes How SEC Shredded Thousands of Investigations

Matt Taibbi on Tom Hartman

Matt Taibbi one of the best reporters around here his latest story here.

Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?

A whistle-blower claims that over the past two decades, the agency has destroyed records of thousands of investigations, whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals.

Comment 96

By Matt Taibbi

August 17, 2011 8:00 AM ET

Pete Gardner/Getty

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.
That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

Rest of story here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/is-the-sec-covering-up-wall-street-crimes-20110817

Great Matt Taibbi article. Federal Government actually thinking of giving some of America's richest corporations with a tax holiday

I concur with Matt Taibbi where is the outrage.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/22-14

Showing my outrage weeks earlier