Free Republic

It’s amazing what you can get away with when you have friends in high places. Here’s an example. •Jeffery Epstein, a billionaire financier formerly with Bear Stearns, was sentenced to just 13 months jail time when he was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution. •Epstein’s prosecutors in the sex trial made donations to Hillary Clintons 2008 presidential campaign. •Interestingly Epstein also donated $3.5 million to the Clinton Foundation, with the money coming from a Swiss bank account. But wait – there’s more… •His private jet was nicknamed the “Lolita Express” in the British press •Guests who traveled on it...

A close associate of convicted businessman Tony Rezko testified in Rod Blagojevich’s trial this afternoon that a onetime National Republican Committeeman loaned him $600,000 — no questions asked. As it turned out though, there was a hitch. Businessman Joseph Aramanda, testifying under a letter of immunity, said Springfield lobbyist and onetime National Republican Committeeman Bob Kjellander was “very receptive,” to loaning him the money so Aramanda could build up his pizza franchises. Prosecutors appear to be trying to link money that was in Aramanda’s account to earlier testimony, which indicated that more than half a million dollars was routed through...

Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking By Matt Taibbi | November 6, 2014 "It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street," she says. "I thought, 'I can't sit by any longer.'" Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing. Back in 2006, as a...

Over the past few years, British businesses operating in America have learned the hard way exactly how brutal the US can be when things go wrong. British banks have had to pay billions of dollars in fines to settle investigations by US regulators, ranging from allegations that Barclays rigged LIBOR to claims that Standard Chartered breached US sanctions against Iran. … The US Department of Justice has hardly given JP Morgan an easy ride of late. Last week, America’s biggest bank was fined $5.1 billion, most of which related to wrongdoing at Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, companies JP Morgan...

"'Your No. 1 client is the government,' John J. Mack, Morgan Stanley's chairman and chief executive from 2005 to 2009, told current CEO James Gorman in a recent phone call. Mr. Gorman, who was visiting Washington that day, agreed." - Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2013. The five year anniversary of the ‘financial crisis' has predictably generated all manner of commentary about its presumed causes. What's most unfortunate five years later is that ‘financial' and ‘crisis' are still used together. It's unfortunate simply because despite what you read, the crisis was decidedly not financial, nor was it caused by a...

OCTOBER 17, 2009 Rajaratnam Surfaced in U.S. Terrorism Probe By EVAN PEREZ and MATTHEW ROSENBERG WASHINGTON—The hedge-fund billionaire charged as part of a vast insider-trading case surfaced in an earlier, separate probe into U.S. fundraising by a Sri Lankan terrorist group, people familiar with the probe said. As part of that investigation, federal agents said they uncovered documents showing that Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group, was among several wealthy Sri Lankans in the U.S. whose donations to a Maryland-based charity made their way to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, according to people familiar with the probe. Raj...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Let's go back, audio sound bite-wise, to me on my program, this program. This is March 12th of this year... RUSH ARCHIVE: The TARP money was not used for its original purpose. There's something else out there, Jordan, you need to know. The Federal Reserve, before the TARP bailout, made loans totaling $2 trillion and they will not tell us to whom. We don't know who got the money. Whether the Fed loans it or the government prints it, it's our money. So you can talk about the $700 billion TARP. You can talk about the $787...

THE TERRIBLE LIE THAT IS DESTROYING AMERICA by Porter Stansberry Jimmy Cayne is a truly despicable liar. You might not be familiar with his name, but Cayne was, until late 2007, a titan of Wall Street. He was the CEO and chairman of Bear Stearns. For a long time, he was also the single-richest banker in history. Over his long career, he amassed more than $1 billion in compensation from Bear, mostly in the form of stock. Today, Cayne testified before Congress that the collapse of Bear Stearns wasn't his fault. In fact, if you believe Cayne, the collapse of...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers were found not guilty on all charges on Tuesday in the first major criminal trial stemming from the housing and financial meltdown. A jury in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, N.Y., acquitted Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin. Both had worked as hedge fund managers at Bear Stearns, which went bankrupt in March 2008. Federal prosecutors had accused Cioffi and Tannin of falsely inflating the value of their portfolios, even as they knew that the mortgage-backed assets in the funds were at risk of collapse.

NEW YORK – Two Bear Stearns executives who ran hedge funds that crashed in 2007 amid the subprime mortgage meltdown were acquitted Tuesday of lying to investors about the looming crisis on Wall Street. Jurors found Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin not guilty of conspiracy and other charges in an alleged fraud that cost 300 investors about $1.6 billion and nearly caused the demise of Bear Stearns itself. The firm barely avoided bankruptcy in a rescue buyout by JPMorgan Chase & Co. The jury began deliberating on Monday. Both men had been charged with three counts of securities fraud and...

In the summer of 2008, two months before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Richard S. Fuld Jr., the firm's chairman, was continuing his desperate efforts to find a lifeline. They had begun in March, shortly after the demise of Bear Stearns, when Mr. Fuld called the legendary investor Warren E. Buffett seeking a capital infusion, to no avail. Lehman had raised money elsewhere, but that didn't help for long, and its condition again was worsening.Adapted from "Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — And Themselves." The book, being published Tuesday by...

<p>On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.</p>

Regulators today won't define 'systemic risk,' unlike 25 years ago. With Congress back in session and the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers failure upon us, the Obama Administration is resuming its quest for greatly expanded authority to bail out American businesses. Under the Treasury reform blueprint, any financial company, whether a regulated bank or not, could be rescued or seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation if regulators believe it poses a systemic risk. If recent history is any guide, when the feds stage their next intervention, they will not define "systemic risk" and they will refuse to release the...

Most people think we started stimuli and bailouts back in September with TARP. I go back even further. I go back to May of last year when the government bailed out Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns was days away from filing for bankruptcy when the Federal Reserve, in one weekend, stepped in and brokered a deal in which JP Morgan Chase would buy them out. Such a deal would normally take months to work out. Yet, this was worked out all in one weekend. You could say, as Michael Corleone would say, the Federal Reserve gave each an offer they couldn't...

The U.S. Federal Reserve drew back the curtain on its emergency repairs to the financial system on Wednesday, showing $5.3 billion in losses on assets taken over from firms it bailed out in 2008. In a report on its $2.1 trillion balance sheet, the Fed also said it earned $1.2 billion from loan programs and $4.6 billion in interest on its holdings of Treasury and other securities in the first three months of the year. The Fed is making more information available about its finances, and its rescues of investment bank Bear Stearns and insurer American International Group (AIG.N) in...

In 72 nail-biting hours, an investment bank turned from healthy to nearly insolvent Bear Stearns Cos., the 85-year-old Wall Street firm known for its tough trading culture, was rescued from impending bankruptcy by a deal with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. on March 16, 2008 -- making Bear the first major casualty of the financial crisis. The firm spiraled from being healthy to practically insolvent in about 72 hours. The meltdown began in earnest the evening of Thursday, March 13, 2008, when Bear executives made a shocking discovery: They were nearly out of cash. Faced with a slew of withdrawals...

Sorry for the vanity, but received an unexpected check in the mail from "Bear Stearns Distribution Fund" today. The check and the letter are dated May 15, 2009. Has anyone heard of this? They set up a web site at http://www.bearstearnsfairfundsettlement.com/ - just trying to make sense of it all, since the fund they mention (Credit Suisse Japan Equity Fund) is something I am not aware of, let alone ever purchased any shares of. With the check is a letter which states "CAUTION: Before you deposit or otherwise negotiate this check, it is very important that you understand the tax...

The fall of Bear Stearns Bearing all Mar 5th 2009 From The Economist print edition A new book analyses how the near-collapse of Bear Stearns, exactly a year ago, marked the moment when Wall Street was knocked to its senses THE bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 will probably go down as the single most spectacular event in the humbling of Wall Street. But it was the near-collapse of Bear Stearns, six months earlier, that first exposed the fragility of America’s seemingly mighty investment banks, perched atop mountains of debt and dangerously reliant on short-term funding. And it was...

The stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones average, has dropped about 3500 points since Obama pulled ahead in the polls last October, and today, it dropped another 300 points as Obama signed his pork-stimulus bill. Investors, in dealing with their own money, are giving a clear message: this is about the most stupid thing we could be doing at this time, and the history of the period from 1932 to 1942 proves it. It was the collapse of the monumental bubble in the housing market combined with an accompanying period when gasoline was selling for $4.00 per gallon...

We have all been had. It seems that so many people I have talked to don't understand the enormity of what has been done, and what congress is trying to do to us now, that I decided to sit down and write it all out. How did we get here? 1) in 1977 the Community Reinvestment bill passes a democrat Congress and is signed by Jimmah Caaaaartar. This opened federal dollars to organizations like ACORN. 2) ACORN is the brainchild of a couple of very evil people named Cloward and his wife Piven. They stated that the best way to...