Bill Moyers & Co.: Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith (tangled web of banks and government)
Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith of the website Naked Capitalism
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The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia: How America's biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy - until they were caught on tape
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620
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 the Carollo 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.
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Dimon Plays Humpty Dumpty to Congress
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master— that’s all.”
-Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/06/dimon-plays-humpty-dumpty-to-congress.html
The House Financial Services Committee hearings on the losses in JP Morgan’s Chief Investment Office were an improvement over the Senate version, in that there was comparatively little fawning over Jamie Dimon and more earnest, even if not very successful, efforts to pry information from him (one wonders whether the fact that Chuck Schumer has been hitting Wall Street up for superPac donations was a contributing factor). Even some Republicans got a bit stroopy with him, including the Representative from Bank of America, Patrick McHenry.
But to anyone who knows bupkis about finance, the striking thing was how many times Dimon gave sloppy to downright dishonest answers. And they didn’t have the feel of the kind of careful word parsing that Goldman execs did when under Congressional hot lights in 2010, of people who’ve been scripted and rehearsed to give very narrow answers and duck anything that will put them on rocky ground. While there was nothing wrong with Dimon’s manner, our buddy Amar Bhide was right when he called Dimon’s answers Orwellian. He played remarkably fast and loose with words and definitions. It was disrespectful, but not in a way that anyone could have called him out on it. The five minute limit on questions made it impossible to do the sort of questioning it would have taken to nail down Dimon’s misrepresentations.
Let’s give a few examples of Dimon’s crude propaganda efforts. I wish I had a transcript; I’m working from rough notes, and some of the memorable howlers were quick asides.
At one point, Dimon tried calling making loans proprietary. This was an effort to insinuate that the Volcker Rule’s efforts to ban proprietary trading would interfere with core banking businesses.
Brad Sherman presented Dimon with the results of an IMF study (via Bloomberg) that showed that JP Morgan had lower funding costs due to its implicit government guarantee. Dimon responded by arguing that single A industrial companies pay less for funds than his AA rated bank. Huh? Industrial company funding costs are completely irrelevant and Dimon knows this. It’s a “blow smoke” answer.
McHenry argued that the Dodd Frank orderly liquidation authority preserved too big to fail. I happen to agree because I’ve gotten estimates that 30% to 50% of JP Morgan’s derivatives contracts are under UK law, and therefore the FDIC could not override their termination or cross default clauses if it tried putting the parent into liquidation and keeping the subsidiaries going. Since derivatives are booked in the depositary, it’s hard to see how the FDIC can stop derivatives not under US law being terminated or subject to higher haircuts as a result of a parent company resolution, and that not producing a risk of a run on the depositary (which is what the OLA was meant to avoid). McHenry then asked for Dimon to discuss the difference between OLA and bankruptcy. There’s a considerable difference, but Dimon dissed McHenry (whose poorly worded question gave Dimon too much rope) by telling him he saw them as the same.
Dimon (annoyingly) kept claiming the failed trade was a hedge. That’s only because Dimon uses a wildly personal definition of what a hedge is: something to protect you from Bad Things Happening. No, that is either a reserve or insurance. A hedge is a position taken to reduce or limit losses in a position you already have. And he kept promoting the dubious idea that portfolio hedging should include bets against systemic risks (Dimon kept presenting hedging against systemic risk as if it was a unitary phenomenon).
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