Posted on 03/17/2010 5:45:48 PM PDT by nickcarraway
City was forced by the treasury to take it over. That was a done deal to avoid a meltdown on a Friday. Then come Monday everything changed and Wells Fargo was the Gubmints chosen one. There is no honor even among thieves now a days.
I admit banking misbehavior in my comment. I am also well aware of why First Union bought Wachovia in the first place: to improve their reputation from a checkered past, just as another Freeper pointed out it their comment. Don’t dispute what you say at all.
What I am saying is, that the Federal Government is not at all above vastly exaggerating the facts in a press release. You should read the government’s account with a healthy dose of skepticism, understanding that they could well be playing politics and a media game. You don’t buy into what Obama and Pelosi are saying hook line and sinker. Neither should you buy into regulatory and justice department press releases without question. Believe you me, government agencies and regulators play politics in the media just like elected officials. I have seen it happen too many times.
The legal authorities being the FDIC and DEA through the SEC actually did their job in this case. They got busted. You can bet that it was the Fed reserve that helped with the data trails but they can't admit it. It's not what they do. It messes up the trust between banks and the reserve. Lack of trust between banks is what killed the markets a little more than a year ago when Lehman went down. It was a Lehman hedge fund that killed the entire system. Fallout brought the rest to their knees.
It was the Federal Reserve that saved the system from total meltdown. I don't blame the Fed. I blame the Congress for loosening banking standards to allow people who should not borrow money to borrow over a trillion dollars with no collateral but the over priced house. They did this by screwing with Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. The rest of the lenders had to follow suit. Wall street had to spread the risks via securities. This turned the trillion into about 60 trillion when they levered it to spread the risk. That is what they do. Much of those securities ended up with banks both big and small, and private investors world wide. When the underlying asset became junk, the entire system collapsed.
It was not the Federal Reserve that put the wrench in the gears of commerce. They can only do what they are authorized to do by government in their charter. It was the House of representatives and more specifically the Black Caucus and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd in the Senate. They used ans abused the system to receive the votes they got in 2006-2008................
Yeah, that was Citi's defense, but treasury has no authority to do that.
That lame excuse was based on a phone conversation with the prior Secretary of Treasury. When all the facts were flushed out, Citi got another 20B loan from the tarp and all was buried under a mountain of paperwork.
I won’t dispute your point about the Feds.
They’ll do what you say while inking “banking regulation” that empowers GS and JPM over and above the powers they already have.
I know, they’re colluding for power and wealth and then they point the finger at each other when the public complains.
Good, Lord.
You are believing a lie.
Start with “Creature form Jekyll Island.”
Please.
And they all got
ZERO days on jail.
So, they will do it again.
NY, LA, people actually brag about their ability to do this stuff.
Quietly, to each other, or to someone who they think is one of “them”, but they do brag.
A bit more here in this Financial times article.
[snip]Concerned about the potential for money laundering, other large US banks took steps over the past decade to curtail their business with these Mexican exchanges, called casas de cambio. But Wachovia ramped up transactions instead, US authorities said.
According to court documents, Wachovia provided a variety of services to these exchanges, which primarily exist so that US immigrants can funnel money back to relatives in Latin America, including wire transfers, bulk cash, pouch and remote capture deposits.
Because Wachovia did not have a rigorous system in place to detect suspicious transactions, some $373bn in wire transfers were made and more than $4bn in bulk cash was transported from the exchanges in Mexico to Wachovia accounts from 2004 through 2007.
Some of that money was used by drug kingpins to purchase aircraft for their trafficking operations. The US attorney’s office said more than 20,000 kilogrammes of cocaine was ultimately seized from those aircraft.
Wachovia also maintained relationships with third-party telemarketing processors that deposited more than $418m using remotely-created cheques. More than 40 per cent of those cheques were returned as unauthorised, yet Wachovia failed to report the suspicious transactions.
“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” Jeffrey Sloman, US attorney, said in a statement.
Wachovia was bought by San Francisco-based Wells Fargo in 2008 after a disastrous expansion into mortgage lending. Wells Fargo said it was aware of the money-laundering investigation prior to the acquisition and had adequately reserved for the settlement.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3eba475c-3219-11df-b4e2-00144feabdc0.html?catid=22&SID=google
Wachovia/First Union will soon be under the Wells Fargo name. Kind of reminds me of the FIOS/XFinity ad.
I doubt Wachovia was the only bank involved in these crimes, wittingly or unwittingly.
Thanks for the link; thread. Informative. Educational. Disturbing. BTTT!
Wall street and banks deal with one thing and one thing only when you reduce it down to basics. They use money to make more money. They create wealth!
On the back side of that, the risks they take to do this can also cause them to lose it! It's what they do!
Risks and what you probably call "greed" is always inherent in this endeavor, and you can mitigate it until you reduce the risks, but you also reduce the profits and kill the system so that there is no new venture capital for needed growth. There will always be bubbles or business cycles as it is normal, but big system wide failures are not normal and usually caused by fundamental failures in the regulatory arena or government.
Regulators have contributed to every recession in some way. Most of the time it is nothing we can't deal with, but what Congress did by changing the banking norms to allow more lending to the poorer areas was the killer in this recent debacle, and they are still doing it!
I can only come to one conclusion. The liberals and their Commie aunts and uncles are intentionally destroying the private property system that we have had since our founding. Slowly but surely the government has purchased over half the available land in this country along with the majority of the nations remaining accessible resources. They but more and more each and every year.
The logical next step is to destroy the remaining private ownership by transferring all remaining mortgages to a federal agency.
They now have the bulk of the private residential mortgages and the next big blowout will occur with the commercial sector as many economists have already forcasted.
While government and their payed minions in the media tell people like you that it is wall-street and big banks that are causing the ruination of the country, the misdirection has allowed them to continue in their quest to own and manage the property of the united states in perpetuity and along with health care they will have 70% or more of the wealth in this country. The rest they will get through taxation and fees.
No my FRiend, it is you who has bought the big lie.
Wake up.
Banking is not bad.
Central banking (the socialist version of banking) is evil.
The Fed is a easy political whipping boy for each and every financial issue that become politicized. The Fed at it's core is a simple money changer between the various governmental central banks around the world. Without them, the dollar value would fluctuate wildly with every current and wind, and dollars would pile up here and there with shortages in other places.
They act domestically as a banking referee of sorts, lending window money very short term to banks who need the cash quickly to provide loan payments, allowing them to retain the securities they invested in while serving the needs of their customers. Money, like the gold supply has no constants that stabilizes the supplies from the East to the West or North and South and it depends on someone to perform the balancing act.
The third thing they do is data collection to make it possible to do the tasks previously mentioned.
Is this evil??? I think not.
What flak they get is the fact that all this is done confidentially. In secret if you will, and that gets the goats going with their constant braying.
Congress has over site over the Fed, and Congress wants more and more control to use the fed as it's play toy just as they used Fanny and Freddie to create the financial meltdown.
I am not in favor of any more Congressional meddling and especially not the independent Fed which once compromised with mean the potential financial Armageddon we have all feared will happen.
The feds regulatory ability is limited by charter and could not have stopped what happened. They did their damn best to warn treasury under Bush, and Bush tried to mitigate what was about to occur and was stopped at every attempt by the Democrat Congress in 2006. The Fed did what it could and used it's data to show a bubble forming but it was dismissed by non other than Barney Frank. We knew in the markets that something big was about to happen and there were many warnings from the numbers coming from Lehman and the huge short interest in them and other financial powerhouses.
It takes me right back to my first point. This was caused by Congress for the privilege of getting reelected and given more power by the dumbocrat voters, and as you know, they vote their back pockets.
I will close this out by saying what I think needs to be done about it.
We need to turn the Hill upside down and dump out all the trash, the carpets, the furniture and maybe even bulldoze the buildings. We need to completely neutralize what they have done since Roosevelt, and if necessary give the SCOTUS a vacation while we do.
When we are done, we will be able to start over and reset the clock. It won't be pretty, but if we want a future as a Republic, it has to happen and soon.
over site=oversight
Creature from Jekyll Island
And Murray Rothbard’s “The Case Against the Fed.”
As Mayer Rothschild said, “Give me control of the currency and I care not who makes the laws.”
BTT!!!
STILL waiting to heard one word about this in the MSM.
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