A March lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court accused 17 of the world’s behemoth banks along with the British Bankers’ Association of rigging the London interbank offered rate (LIBOR). The FDIC was suing on behalf of 38 failed banks it’s had to take into receivership since 2008 as a result of the manipulation.
Banks named in the suit include three of the Four Horsemen of US Banking – JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup & Bank of America – along with Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, UBS, Societe General, Royal Bank of Canada and the Four Horsemen of British Banking – Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland.
The suit is unprecedented and could serve as a precursor to looming criminal charges from Attorney General Eric Holder’s office stemming from many ongoing investigations of financial crimes related to the 2008 bank implosions caused by shady sub-prime housing loan deals.
This investigation is being squarely targeted at Goldman Sachs, which has led the transformation of the US economy over the last two decades from one of prosperity and production to its current state of parasitic “financial services” capitalism based on wealth destruction.
(Excerpted from Chapter 19: The Eight Families: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)
For over a century Goldman Sachs has joined the Houses of Morgan, Rockefeller, Rothschild, Warburg and Lazard in lording over the US industrial base – not to mention “our” central bank the Federal Reserve – profiting from boom and depression alike.
In July 1929 Goldman launched the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge investment trusts, at a time when the burgeoning middle classes were eager to hop on the Wall Street easy money bandwagon.
The Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares to public. They peaked at $104. All the while Goldman insiders were selling. By the fall of 1934 the shares were worth $1.75/each.
One of the directors at both Shenandoah and Blue Ridge was Rockefeller cousin and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
Insiders at Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Lehman and Merrill Lynch had also bailed out ahead of the Crash of 1929. Americans were outraged. A resurgent populism led to jail time for bankers such as Citibank President Charles Mitchell. It led to the passage of the Glass-Steagal Act, repealed by President Clinton in 1995, which stated that banks could be either commercial, investment or private banks- but only one of the three. And it led to Congressional inquiries into the Federal Reserve private banking monopoly.
Many of these investigations were conducted by the House Banking Committee, chaired by Rep. Louis McFadden (D-NY). Speaking of the Great Depression, McFadden concluded, “It was no accident. It was a carefully contrived occurence…The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as rulers of all of us.”
His successor, Rep. Wright Patman (D-TX), concurred, stating, “The United States today has in effect two governments. We are a duly constituted government. Then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the Constitution.”
But Goldman Sachs knows full well that there is but one government and that they own it. Carter Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal, Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (now CEO at Citigroup), and Boy Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson are all Goldman Sachs alumni. It was Paulson who held the gun to the collective heads of the American people and demanded $1 trillion to be handed over to the bankers to “avoid another Great Depression”.
Goldman was heavily involved in crafting recent weak bank reform legislation. Part of the legislation sets up a “resolution authority”. This sounds an awful lot like the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), which Daddy Bush set up in 1991 to auction off 680 bankrupt Savings & Loans. The S&L fiasco cost US taxpayers a cool $500 billion, with most of the loot going down the CIA guns for drugs Iran Contra rabbit hole.
According to the Charlotte, NC-based Southern Finance Project, more than half of these 680 S&Ls ended up in the hands of 10 giant US investment banks for pennies on the dollar. The largest purchaser was BRW- a partnership between Goldman Sachs and the Blackstone Group. BRW spent $80 million to pick up assets worth billions.
Similar “resolution authority” was exercised by the Fed with no Congressional approval during the 2008-2009 financial melt down. It wasn’t enough that the megabanks got $1 trillion in TARP money. They also vastly increased their assets, further concentrating their economic power and solidifying their “too big to fail” status.
Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns were handed over to JP Morgan Chase, Wachovia was gifted to Wells Fargo and Merrill Lynch was absorbed by Bank of America. Goldman Sachs curiously became a bank holding company.
Goldman Sachs led the Wall Street delegation which dealt the Russian oil industry to the Four Horsemen – ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, BPAmoco and Royal Dutch/Shell – for a song, leading to the 1998 Russian economic collapse.
The firm lobbied for Enron just before it went belly up, robbing state pension funds before being “sold” to UBS Warburg for the lofty sum of $0.
Around that same time the infamous Richard Perle was hired as an advisor by Goldman Sachs International. His job was to help Goldman find ways to profit from the coming Gulf War, though the 911 terror attacks had yet to occur.
In 2007 Goldman Sachs formed a partnership with BCCI insider/crook Sulaiman Olayan, whose Saudi National Commercial Bank is the largest in the Kingdom. For Goldman Sachs, war is business and business is good.
Goldman has profited from everything from the Internet IPO bubble and bust, to the NASDAQ bubble and bust, the oil and food price spikes, the 1990′s Mexican debt crisis and the current Greek debt crisis.
Now we find that Goldman profited from both the housing bubble it helped create and its imminent demise.
Goldman is not a job creator. It is a job destroyer. They and their LIBOR-rigging Eight Families’ ilk are financial parasites who have historically and consistently profited from the suffering of people, decimation of environment and economic destruction of wealth.
The FDIC lawsuit targets the head of the snake. It is a good start.
Now the Justice Department needs to prosecute the Darth Vader of the global economy – Goldman Sachs.
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