Banks

A Crisis Worse Than ISIS? Bail-Ins Begin

December 30, 2015 Ellen Brown, www.ellenbrown.com Educate! Bailout, Banks

By Ellen Brown for Web of Debt Blog - At the end of November, an Italian pensioner hanged himself after his entire €100,000 savings were confiscated in a bank “rescue” scheme. He left a suicide note blaming the bank, where he had been a customer for 50 years and had invested in bank-issued bonds. But he might better have blamed the EU and the G20’s Financial Stability Board, which have imposed an “Orderly Resolution” regime that keeps insolvent banks afloat by confiscating the savings of investors and depositors. Some 130,000 shareholders and junior bond holders suffered losses in the “rescue.”

Spain Says “No”

December 29, 2015 Conn Hallinan, www.counterpunch.org Resist! Banks, European Union (EU), Spain

By Conn Hallinan for Counter Punch - For the third time in a year, the tight-fisted, austerity policies of the European Union (EU) took a beating, as Spanish voters crushed their rightwing government and overturned four decades of two-party reign. Following in the footsteps of Greek and Portuguese voters earlier this year, Spaniards soundly rejected the economic formula of the Troika—the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund—that has impoverished millions of people and driven the jobless rate to almost a quarter of the country.

Bank Of America Actions Send Strong Message To #DumpDominion

December 18, 2015 Staff, www.wearecovepoint.org Resist! Bank of America, Banks, Protests

By Staff of We Are Cove Point - December 16, activists with We Are Cove Point visited 10 Bank of America locations around the mid-Atlantic to call on the bank to stop financing Dominion Resources. This day of action was taken as part of We Are Cove Point’s Dump Dominion campaign that was launched with an occupied banner hang from the upper deck of Bank of America Stadium in the bank’s hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, during the middle of a Monday Night Football game in early November. Bank of America is the most recognizable part of a group of banks that have extended Dominion a $4 billion line of credit ...

Bank Crimes Pay: Under The Thumb Of Global Financial Mafiocracy

December 1, 2015 Andrew Gavin Marshall, www.occupy.com Educate! Banks, Fraud, United Kingdom (UK)

By Andrew Gavin Marshall for Occupy - On Nov. 13, the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced it was charging 10 individual bankers, working for two separate banks, Deutsche Bank and Barclays, with fraud over their rigging of the Euribor rates. The latest announcement shines the spotlight once again on the scandals and criminal behavior that have come to define the world of global banking. To date, only a handful of the world’s largest banks have been repeatedly investigated, charged, fined or settled in relation to a succession of large financial scams, starting with mortgage fraud and the Libor scandal in 2012, the Euribor scandal and the Forex (foreign exchange) rate rigging.

Negative Interest Rates: Lose Money As You Save

November 21, 2015 Ellen Brown, www.ellenbrown.com Educate! Banks, Money

By Ellen Brown for The Web of Debt - Remember those old ads showing a senior couple lounging on a warm beach, captioned “Let your money work for you”? Or the scene in Mary Poppins where young Michael is being advised to put his tuppence in the bank, so that it can compound into “all manner of private enterprise,” including “bonds, chattels, dividends, shares, shipyards, amalgamations . . . .”? That may still work if you’re a Wall Street banker, but if you’re an ordinary saver with your money in the bank, you may soon be paying the bank to hold your funds rather than the reverse.

Open Letter To Chairwoman Yellen From Savers Of America

November 2, 2015 Staff, www.blog.nader.org Educate! Banks, Federal Reserve

By Staff of The Nader Page - Dear Chairwoman Janet Yellen: We are a group of humble savers in traditional bank savings and money market accounts who are frustrated because, like millions of other Americans over the past six years, we are getting near zero interest . We want to know why the Federal Reserve, funded and heavily run by the banks, is keeping interest rates so low that we receive virtually no income for our hard-earned savings while the Fed lets the big banks borrow money for virtually no interest. It doesn’t seem fair to put the burden of your Federal Reserve’s monetary policies on the backs of those Americans who are the least positioned to demand fair play.

When Bank Workers Occupy the Banks

October 30, 2015 Michelle Chen, www.thenation.com Resist! Banks, Organizing, Workers Rights and Jobs

By Michelle Chen for The Nation - After about eight years of seeing Main Street households get owned by Big Finance, front-line bank workers are now trying to reclaim Wall Street, branch by branch. In Los Angeles, where communities are still reeling from the financial crisis, front-line bank employees, and activists last week occupied the lobbies of Wells Fargo and Bank of America and demanded fair terms for the customers and the workforce. As we’ve reported previously, bank workers have been organizing to demand more equitable banking practices for those buying and selling some of the most lucrative financial products at the community level.

State Created A Banking System That’s 83% Locally Owned

October 24, 2015 Stacy Mitchell, www.ilsr.org Create! Banks, North Dakota

By Stacy Mitchell for ILSR - Across the country, people are suffering the consequences of a banking system that’s dominated by a handful of giant banks. Local businesses can’t get the credit they need to grow. College graduates are stumbling under the weight of student debt with sky-high interest rates. Neighborhoods are being stripped of their assets through predatory mortgages and consumer loans. And taxpayers are on the hook for municipal finance schemes peddled by Wall Street and loaded with hidden costs. Banking has become untethered from communities, and indeed, from the very economy it is supposed to serve.

Find Banks That Invest In The Local Economy

October 24, 2015 Olivia LaVecchia, www.ilsr.org Create! Banks, Local Economy

By Olivia LaVecchia for ILSR - The reasons to choose a community bank or credit union range from getting the same services at a lower cost to supporting productive investment instead of speculative trading. But while it’s one thing to think about the qualities that are important in our banks, it’s another to find particular local banks that are enacting them. A new tool, called Bank Local, aims to make that process easier. Bank Local maps every banking institution in the U.S., and uses data from three federal agencies, plus its own algorithm, to assign them a Local Impact Rating.

Iceland Sentences Bank CEOs To Prison

October 24, 2015 James Woods, www.usuncut.com Educate! Banks, Iceland

By James Woods for US Uncut - In a move that would make many capitalists’ head explode if it ever happened here, Iceland just sentenced their 26th banker to prison for their part in the 2008 financial collapse. In two separate Icelandic Supreme Court and Reykjavik District Court rulings, five top bankers from Landsbankinn and Kaupping — the two largest banks in the country — were found guilty of market manipulation, embezzlement, and breach of fiduciary duties. Most of those convicted have been sentenced to prison for two to five years. The maximum penalty for financial crimes in Iceland is six years, although their Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments to consider expanding sentences beyond the six year maximum.

We Want Our $25 Trillion Back! Audit & Recoup Extracted Wealth

June 25, 2015 David DeGraw, www.exit.media Petitions and Online Actions Banks, Corporatism, Corruption, Finanace and the Economy, Inequality

By David DeGraw for ExitMedia. We demand a publicly transparent commission to audit and recoup wealth that has been extracted from the US economy through corrupt practices. Preliminary estimates lead us to believe that at least $25 trillion has been extracted. To give some context, $1 trillion is $1000 billion. With $25 trillion, we can dramatically rebuild and evolve society for the benefit of all. “Lawmakers” and "regulators" who have received any compensation from companies they regulated or wrote laws for, before or after holding government office, will be barred from further government activity and be fined in an amount at least equivalent to past compensation for such activities. All offshore wealth will be confiscated and individuals will be fined twice the amount they hid, and they will be prosecuted based on theft laws.

Only Half Of Global Banks Have Policy To Respect Human Rights

December 9, 2014 Carey L. Biron, www.ipsnews.net Organize! Banks, Finance and the Economy, Human Rights

Just half of major global banks have in place a public policy to respect human rights, according to new research, despite this being a foundational mandate of an international convention on multinational business practice. Further, of the 32 global banks examined, researchers found that none has publicly put in place a process to deal with human rights abuses, if identified. None has even created grievance mechanisms by which those impacted by potential abuses can complain to the banks. “The findings of this report are quite sobering about what can be expected from self-regulatory principles.” -- Aldo Caliari

New G20 Rules: Bail-Ins To Hit Depositors, Pensioners

December 7, 2014 Ellen Brown, www.ellenbrown.com Educate! Banks, Finance and the Economy, G20

On the weekend of November 16, the G20 leaders whisked into Brisbane, posed for their photo ops, approved some proposals, made a show of roundly disapproving of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and whisked out again. It was all so fast, they may not have known what they were endorsing when they rubber-stamped the Financial Stability Board’s “Adequacy of Loss-Absorbing Capacity of Global Systemically Important Banks in Resolution,” which completely changes the rules of banking. Russell Napier, writing in ZeroHedge, called it “the day money died.” In any case, it may have been the day deposits died as money. Unlike coins and paper bills, which cannot be written down or given a “haircut,” says Napier, deposits are now “just part of commercial banks’ capital structure.” That means they can be “bailed in” or confiscated to save the megabanks from derivative bets gone wrong.

Fed Must Act Now To Get Money To Ordinary People

September 3, 2014 Ellen Brown, www.alternet.org Educate! Banks, Federal Reserve, Finance and the Economy

When an article appears in Foreign Affairs, the mouthpiece of the policy-setting Council on Foreign Relations, recommending that the Federal Reserve do a money drop directly on the 99%, you know the central bank must be down to its last bullet. The September/October issue of Foreign Affairs features an article by Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan titled “Print Less But Transfer More: Why Central Banks Should Give Money Directly To The People.” It’s the sort of thing normally heard only from money reformers and Social Credit enthusiasts far from the mainstream. What’s going on? The Fed, it seems, has finally run out of other ammo. It has to taper its quantitative easing program, which is eating up the Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities needed as collateral for the repo market that is the engine of the bankers’ shell game. The Fed’s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) has also done serious collateral damage. The banks that get the money just put it in interest-bearing Federal Reserve accounts or buy foreign debt or speculate with it; and the profits go back to the 1%, who park it offshore to avoid taxes. Worse, any increase in the money supply from increased borrowing increases the overall debt burden and compounding finance costs, which are already a major constraint on economic growth.

The Holder Doctrine: Bank Settlements Without Criminal Prosecutions

August 23, 2014 Naked Capitalism, www.nakedcapitalism.com Educate! Banks, Corruption, Housing, Regulation

Even though there is tacit acceptance, or perhaps more accurately, sullen resignation, about regulators’ failure to make serious investigations into financial firm misconduct (probes on specific issues don’t cut it), occasionally a pundit steps up to remind the public of the farce that passes for bank enforcement. Today William Cohan tore into Attorney General Eric Holder, and by implication the Administration, for its raft of bank “settlements” which have come is a sudden spurt, no doubt intended to boost the Democrat’s flagging standing in the runup to the Congressional midterms. We’ve pointed out that the comparatively few commentators who have looked past the overhyped Department of Justice press releases into the details of the agreements have been appalled at the embarrassing lack of detail, meaning the almost total absence of any admission of wrongdoing. It’s critical to understand why this silence is important. It means that regulators have accepted as a condition of the settlement that they are to protect the bank from private suits by remaining as silent as possible about precisely what horrible things were done. The absurd part is that regulators and prosecutors could easily call the banks’ bluff by threatening to go a few rounds in court: “Would you rather have us start discovery and see what we can get in the record, or would you rather make some admissions right now?”

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