Bill Moyers & Simon Johnson Discuss The Culture Of Corruption At JP Morgan

I don’t know that much about Simon Johnson other than he used to be a chief economist at the IMF.  And I consider the IMF to be a criminal enterprise used by mostly American but also European interests to loot countries around the world.  That Johnson served there is nothing more than any other situation where countless millions of people serve a corrupt system that is corrupt unbeknownst to them or because out of necessity they need to feed their family or because they delude themselves into believing a false reality because it is convenient to absolve themselves of moral responsibility for what is going on around them.  I must say most forms are certainly the last scenario.  Almost no one is immune from this.  Present company included.

Moyers is really the person steering this conversation in the direction it should go.  This comment is prescient. 

Moyers: Should Jamie Dimon resign? I ask that because as you know and as we’ve discussed, Chase and other huge banks have been using their enormous wealth for years to in effect buy off our politicians and regulators. Chase just had to pay up almost three quarters of a billion dollars in settlements and surrendered fees to settle one case alone, that of bribery and corruption in Jefferson County, Alabama. It’s also paid out billions of dollars to settle other cases of perjury, forgery, fraud and sale of unregistered securities. And these charges were for actions that took place while Mr. Dimon was the CEO. Should he resign?

We have discussed ad nauseam these cases of corruption at JP Morgan and elsewhere.  As it pertains to Jefferson County and other municipalities, we put up a big post on swaps many years ago where we highlighted how Wall Street use opaque and complex instruments to loot our schools, municipalities, companies, states, etc.   Goldman even issued research that told clients to bet against the success of some of our states.  These firms are filled with predatory, violent psychopaths.  There are literally thousands upon thousands of these interest rate swap agreements that have gone the wrong way (ie, the opposite direction Wall Street told its customers the prevailing interest rate trend was headed.)  and are destroying our society and bilking our public institutions.   They almost always involve financial “consultants” that steer our public institutions in the way of some form of corrupt deal and then are paid a fee on the back end by Wall Street for providing their service to municipalities.  It’s the same dynamic as doctors prescribing medication and then receiving financial compensation from the drug companies.  There are many communities near where I live that are having to exit these interest rate swap agreements at massive expense to taxpayers. 

This recent mess at JP Morgan isn’t some isolated incident.  This is how business is done.  But, in the past, we saw very few of these smarmy deals because most of the time the counterparty holding the bag was a JP Morgan “customer” who was being screwed.   Then when customers oftentimes felt there was corruption, lying, misrepresentation and fraud involved, they filed lawsuits.  And, government officials, mostly in Washington or in state capitals, and the cabal of endlessly corrupt lawyers pressured out of court settlements that were sealed.  This secrecy allowed the looting to continue.   If the truth be told, I suspect thousands, if not tens of thousands of people would be behind bars right now were we to have a transparent, functioning legal system.   Those days of other counterparties getting screwed are over because as we have noted untold numbers of times now it’s Wall Street holding the bag on derivatives.  That is what happened with MF Global and now that is what is happening with JP Morgan.  I suspect there are trillions of dollars in losses that are being absorbed by our public institutions as these bets go bad.  Now these massive bets are concentrated in financial firms as they traded counterparties out of financial markets and are now the only major players remaining.  Now we see who is really corrupt and who is really systemically-incompetent.  It’s JP Morgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and other primary dealers for the Federal Reserve.   They have been shielded from their fraud and corruption and massive incompetence by a morally-bankrupt Federal Reserve and by Washington politicians.  

Dodd-Frank fixed nothing.  NOTHING.  It is 2500 pages of rigged legislation written by Wall Street.  As we noted the legislation it replaced was two dozen pages.  2500 pages of anything is full of loopholes.  The Volcker Rule is a scam filled with loopholes.  Dimon even remarked that this didn’t violate the Volcker Rule.  But then  Obama tried to intimate Dodd-Frank would have kept this from happening.  More deception.  More appeasement of evil.   

Huge legislative bills are full of loopholes and special interest bribes bought and paid for.  Dodd-Frank is the best legislation Wall Street could buy.  Not only is Wall Street holding the bag as we said they eventually would, but so is Obama, just as we said he would for appeasing evil.