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Fraud*
According to the Collins English Dictionary 10th Edition fraud can be defined as: "deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage".[1] In the broadest sense, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation. Defrauding people or entities of money or valuables is a common purpose of fraud, but there have also been fraudulent "discoveries", e.g. in science, to gain prestige rather than immediate monetary gain
*As defined in Wikipedia

Friday, June 24, 2011

The Only Sound From Goldman Sachs is Whimpers

I do not understand why Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan pay such miniscule fines for what is really fraud against the American people and they never have to say they made a mistake or even give out a feeble "sorry" for the egregious tricks they played on investors with their CDOs. It is unconscionable that they reach into petty cash and pay fines that amount to less than a week's profits and continue on their merry way.

Is this all the satisfaction that the public is going to get for all the penury caused by the likes of Goldman Sachs: It is not enough! There have to be proper trials and complete disclosure of all the wrongdoing plus the firings of all the executives, including Lloyd Blankfein, who were in power during the buildup to the financial crisis. The People will not rest until balance is restored to the financial system.

Goldman Sachs guys were so successful in deregulating the financial laws that we seem to have to go back to the 1930's to find laws that will bring some small amount of justice.

JP Morgan Settlement With SEC Recalls Case Against Goldman Sachs
By Hugh Son, Donal Griffin and Jesse Hamilton - Bloomberg Businessweek

JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s deal to settle a U.S. regulator’s claims that the bank misled buyers of mortgage-linked securities before the housing market collapsed echoed a case brought last year against Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

JPMorgan agreed to pay $153.6 million to end a Securities and Exchange Commission suit. The SEC alleged that the New York- based bank failed to tell investors in 2007 that a hedge fund helped pick, and bet against, underlying securities in the collateralized debt obligation they purchased. In July, Goldman Sachs paid a record $550 million for failing to inform clients in 2007 that it allowed a hedge fund that also bet against housing to help formulate the CDOs.

“It’s the same general allegation of wrongdoing,” Robert Khuzami, enforcement chief of the SEC, said yesterday in a Bloomberg Television interview. “The message in both cases is if you engage in this kind of wrongdoing, if you mislead investors, you’re going to pay a fine.”

The SEC is targeting mortgage-industry firms from loan originators including Countrywide Financial Corp. to Wall Street CDO underwriters. The regulator has looked at Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, UBS AG and Morgan Stanley, a person with knowledge of the matter has said.

Like Goldman, JPMorgan’s brokerage unit, JPMorgan Securities LLC, didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing in settling. Unlike Goldman, the claims against the firm relied solely on a section of the Securities Act of 1933 that connotes a “lesser violation,” said Ed B. Horahan, a Washington-based securities lawyer.

‘Messed Up’

Goldman Sachs settled under a section of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that says the accused firm knew what it was doing, while JPMorgan’s case is closer to negligence, Horahan said. Michael DuVally, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment yesterday.

“JPMorgan simply admitted that it ‘messed up’ the documentation,” said Brad Hintz, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. The bank “pays a fine, announces a public mea culpa and has no more liability. This looks like a win for JPMorgan.” JPMorgan rose 1.1 percent to close at $40.91 yesterday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.

The customers misled by the two banks also differed, according to the SEC suits. JPMorgan sold about $150 million of notes in the CDO, known as Squared, to about 15 firms including a not-for-profit Lutheran insurer, Thrivent Financial, and a New York City-based manager of General Motors Co. pensions.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest investors in Goldman Sachs’ Abacus CDO was Dusseldorf, Germany-based IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG. The German bank was aware of the risk associated with the securities and was “among the most sophisticated mortgage investors in the world,” Goldman Sachs said in April 2010.

Read the entire article here

8 COMMENTS:

Anonymous said...

Do you know what you are dealing with?...he does..

- Rapists and Sociopaths

Bind, torture, kill. Not only with ropes and knives, but also with power and money, and the subversion of law. Lawlessness is their addiction, their will to power.

In the end what they want is to fill the hole in their being, which has tormented them from childhood, by destroying others, and to differentiate themselves from all those other lower being whom they hold in contempt. They find no commonality with human happiness and the normal life, because of the hatred they have for themselves, and their sense of alienation from all that is human. Their compulsion is to rape and destroy.

When societies become lax and complacent, these sociopaths can possess great political power through great amounts of unprincipled money. And over time they become almost anti-human, destroyers of all that is good, all that is life, all that offends their insatiable sickness with its goodness. They twist the public against itself, and turn a broad sweep of society into their killing grounds.

This is the undeniable lesson of the last century. There are monsters, and they walk among us.


http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2011/06/gold-daily-and-silver-weekly-charts_23.html

Anonymous said...

Is this TBTF'S edge?


On The Mysterious Case Of The Phantom Stock Trades


Themis says: "the market has become increasingly dominated by trading
volume from arbitraging index, ETF, and other derivative movements
versus the underlying equities.... Nowadays, in a world of microsecond
trading, these indexes have become phantoms - they reflect some trades
involving their components, but not the majority of them." In other
words it is becoming increasingly obvious why in a world of HFT, ETF,
algo, ATS and everything else penetration, there is now a scramble
between the legacy exchanges to merge. The alternative is a slow,
painful death due to terminal obsolescence brought upon from
unregulated trading venues, which often times see the alternative
trading system operator have exclusive firewall and gateway
privileges, where anything goes and where such obsolete constructs as
Reg NMS are routinely ignored: after all how can the SEC possibly
track down the billions of unique trades each and every day and catch
all the transgressions.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/themis-trading-white-paper-mysterious-case-majority-phantom-stock-trades?

Anonymous said...

Third World America: Drowning in Debt and Choking on Lies
Janet Tavakoli

If a drunk driver crashed his speeding rental car crashed into your house and killed your spouse, you would be outraged if law enforcers took bribes and refused to give the driver a blood test. If the judge then gave the killer a small fine and ordered you to pay the fine and pay for all the damages, you'd be outraged. If the government then handed the drunk-driver keys to a bigger faster rental car, handed the drunk driver an even bigger bottle of whiskey and then gave you the rental bill, you'd storm Washington and blizzard elected officials with protests and organize friends and associates to vote these malefactors, the elected officials that betrayed your trust, out of office.

Yet, we've remained largely silent in the face of the same sort of behavior by Wall Street and Washington.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janet-tavakoli/third-world-america-drown_b_883782.html

Anonymous said...

Without a national referendum Iceland-style, EU dictates cannot be binding

The fight for Europe’s future is being waged in Athens and other Greek cities to resist financial demands that are the 21st century’s version of an outright military attack. The threat of bank overlordship is not the kind of economy-killing policy that affords opportunities for heroism in armed battle, to be sure. Destructive financial policies are more like an exercise in the banality of evil – in this case, the pro-creditor assumptions of the European Central Bank (ECB), EU and IMF (egged on by the U.S. Treasury).

As Vladimir Putin pointed out some years ago, the neoliberal reforms put in Boris Yeltsin’s hands by the Harvard Boys in the 1990s caused Russia to suffer lower birth rates, shortening life spans and emigration – the greatest loss in population growth since World War II. Capital flight is another consequence of financial austerity. The ECB’s proposed “solution” to Greece’s debt problem is thus self-defeating. It only buys time for the ECB to take on yet more Greek government debt, leaving all EU taxpayers to get the bill. It is to avoid this shift of bank losses onto taxpayers that Angela Merkel in Germany has insisted that private bondholders must absorb some of the loss resulting from their bad investments.

The bankers are trying to get a windfall by using the debt hammer to achieve what warfare did in times past. They are demanding privatization of public assets (on credit, with tax deductibility for interest so as to leave more cash flow to pay the bankers). This transfer of land, public utilities and interest as financial booty and tribute to creditor economies is what makes financial austerity like war in its effect.

http://michael-hudson.com/2011/06/whither-greece/

Anonymous said...

Owning vs. Managing—Democracy vs. Kleptocracy

The La Polar scandal blew from actually two different directions: On the one hand, consumer protection advocates were seeing how La Polar was unilaterally “renegotiating” store-card balances, and tacking on huge interest hikes, fees and penalties. Some people started complaining how one missed store-card payment meant their balances were summarily “renegotiated” by La Polar—in some cases multiplying what they owed the retailer by three or four or even five times the original amount. A US$200 washing machine could wind up costing a lower-income family US$1,000 when all was said and done.

As the defaults rose and became a flood, La Polar found itself drowning. So the retailer’s management had done two things: They tacked on outlandish fees, interests and penalties on their still-performing store-card holders—trying to squeeze every last drop of blood from these lower-income consumers—while simultaneously hiding the actual number of their delinquent customers. La Polar’s management had even gone so far as to set up a separate server system with the actual numbers, so as to hide the truth from their auditors, and of course their shareholders.

What struck me about La Polar’s story is not that there was fraud—there are thieves everywhere, be they mean-street back-alleys or mahogany-lined boardrooms.
http://gonzalolira.blogspot.com/2011/06/ibgybg-owning-vs-managingdemocracy-vs.html

Anonymous said...

Pocket-Change SEC Fines: Barely a Bark and No Bite

Leaving aside, the tepid characterization 'misconduct' instead of say 'racketeering', these fines don't, and won't, change the banking system. And nowhere does this fining regulatory body suggest a way to do so. It would be refreshing for the SEC, founded in conjunction with the Glass-Steagall Act that separated banks into institutions that dealt with the public's deposit and financing needs from those that created and traded speculative securities for private profit purposes, to suggest a modern equivalent of that act. It might help the commission do its job of protecting the public before unnecessary devastation, not years afterwards, or at the very least, untangle the web of layered borrowing and debt manufacturing at the core of these complex giants.

But, that's not going to happen. Not as long as small fines, absent any form of attached probation, stringent monitoring, or cease-and-desist requirements, can slowly make the issue go away. Seriously, it takes longer to argue a traffic ticket than it took Goldman Sachs to 'agree' to a $550 million settlement on July 15, 2010, after the SEC charged the firm with defrauding investors only three months earlier. People caught with minor amounts of crack or pot undergo stricter plea processes, probationary measures and detainments.

To date, the SEC has charged four firms with CDO related fraud, including Wachovia, Goldman Sachs, and JPM Chase, who settled for $11 million, $550 million and $156 million respectively. A case against ICP Asset management remains open.

http://www.nomiprins.com/thoughts/2011/6/22/pocket-change-sec-fines-barely-a-bark-and-no-bite.html

Anonymous said...

The Global Economy’s Corporate Crime Wave


http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sachs177/English

The explosion of corruption – in the US, Europe, China, India, Africa, Brazil, and beyond – raises a host of challenging questions about its causes, and about how to control it now that it has reached epidemic proportions.

Corporate corruption is out of control for two main reasons. First, big companies are now multinational, while governments remain national. Big companies are so financially powerful that governments are afraid to take them on.

Second, companies are the major funders of political campaigns in places like the US, while politicians themselves are often part owners, or at least the silent beneficiaries of corporate profits. Roughly one-half of US Congressmen are millionaires, and many have close ties to companies even before they arrive in Congress.

As a result, politicians often look the other way when corporate behavior crosses the line. Even if governments try to enforce the law, companies have armies of lawyers to run circles around them. The result is a culture of impunity, based on the well-proven expectation that corporate crime pays.

Anonymous said...

Memo to Goldman Sachs: No one gives a flying fuck. Go out of business. Now. Please

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