Bill Black on the MF Global Financial Collapse and Aftermath - Obama's Hurricane Katrina

Bill Black is interviewed on the Capital Accounts Show on RT.

I would be glad to show a video of Bill Black discussing important financial matters such as this on a mainstream US video program but there don't seem to be any.

There were a number of disturbing things in Gary Gensler testimony to the Congress about the role of the CFTC in this. Some of these things are discussed here.

I doubt very much that justice will be done at MF Global. The Banks have been getting away with everything they have done so far, up to and including the blatant stealing of funds from customers that were being held on account, and not even subject to active trading margin.

He can try to pass the buck on this, and there is plenty of company in this on both sides of the aisle and in the media. But the ultimate responsibility for the handling of this falls on Barack Obama and his Administration. It happened on his watch, and it was their job to make it right. That is price of leadership.

He can continue to ignore it, plead ignorance, and even make excuses, but at the end of the day he should be ashamed at how this was handled, and the Congress and the media along with him.

I can only imagine what they would be saying if the President was George W. Bush, and Jon Corzine was his leading Republican fund raiser. With a few notable exceptions, largely solitary voices, where are the so-called progressives on this? Hypocrites!

I do not expect to see justice done here. There are too many powerful people and interests involved, and justice, being truth in action and not words, is not en vogue for misdeeds of the TBTF financial sector. We are way beyond that with this generation of vipers that has infested the Beltway for the past twenty years.

I would just like to see the stranded customers made whole for what was taken from them, and their long anxiety ended, which is what has happened promptly in every brokerage failure that I am aware of post WW II, including Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. Oh no, you just don't understand. It is different this time.

Yes, because of who is involved. How naive do they think the people are? If the individual customers had not banded together and taken proactive legal measures, the system would have had their way with them. Almost all the good that has come of this wretched affair is due to the actions of the people in the Commodity Customer Coalition, and not those sworn to protect them.

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one,
an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Edmund Burke

And the public relations campaign of spin, leaks, and misinformation that has enveloped this financial scandal since day one is an absolute disgrace and a failure of the greater part of the independent press.

So far they have ignored it. Next they will be ridiculing those who call for reform such as the Occupy Wall Street movement as ignorant and rabble. But reform is inevitable, it will happen, or there will be no sustainable economic recovery, and no peace.

This is Obama's Hurricane Katrina. And viewed not as an isolated incident, but in the context of all that has happened, it is an effect of the credibility trap that grips the nation's leadership, of both financialized political parties.

Taibbi: Gangster Banks Keep Winning Public Debt Business - Surprised By Joy

Matt Taibbi is out with a double barrelled critique of Bank of America and JP Morgan.

It is a very important issue, vital to the public good, and it receives almost no attention from the mainstream media or the political candidates.

Why are a few large financial institutions, the recipients of enormous amounts of public monies, able to maintain an active hand in the public debt markets after multiple violations of the law, punished only by a slap on the wrist, with a promise 'not to do it again.'

Matt asks why they are able to do it. I think that is a good question.

The gangster Mackie Messer was able to get away with a life of crime in the Three Penny Opera because one of his best friends and silent accomplices was 'Tiger' Brown, the Chief of Police.

Life imitates art?

In the case of MF Global, it seems to imitate high school.

Rolling Stone
Gangster Banks Keep Winning Public Business. Why?
By Matt Taibbi
March 22, 9:40 AM ET

A friend of mine sent this article from Bloomberg, along with the simple comment: "Perfect." What's perfect? That the banks that have been caught repeatedly ripping off communities and munipalities -- banks that have paid hefty settlements for rigging bids, bribery and other sordid misdeeds -- keep winning the most public business. Apparently, our public officials aren't concerned about whom they hire to serve as the people's investment bankers.

From the piece, entitled "JPMorgan Claims No. 1 for Government Debt After Jefferson County":

JPMorgan, which emerged from the worst financial crisis since the 1930s as the most profitable U.S. bank, has parlayed crisis-era loans to cities and states and a willingness to outbid other firms in local government bond auctions into becoming the top underwriter of municipal debt last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It was the first time the firm held that rank.

The turnaround was a milestone for JPMorgan’s municipal- bond department, which has been marred by its involvement in two of the biggest scandals in the history of U.S. public finance: a so-called pay-to-play scheme in Jefferson County, Alabama, that contributed to the biggest-ever U.S. municipal bankruptcy, and a federal probe that uncovered bid rigging of municipal-bond investment products.

This story dovetails with the larger story I have out in the magazine now about Bank of America, another Too-Big-To-Fail behemoth that placed a very close second in the area of municipal bond business, according to the Bloomberg survey. Chase managed $35.7 billion in long-term bond sales, while BOA/Merrill Lynch came in at about $200 million less.

Why does this matter? Because both banks, Chase and Bank of America, have been repeatedly tied to scandals involving the issuance of public debt. Bank of America paid a $137 million settlement for rigging the bids of bond issues in numerous communities (including places as far away as Guam), while Chase also paid a big settlement of $211 million last year for more or less exactly similar offenses involving localities in 25 different states....

Read the rest here.

As a cultural aside, if you look closely at the beginning of this excerpt of film, as the people turn the corner into the square to hear the street singer, there is an address on the building on the corner on their right.

The address is 55 Wall Street, New York.

That was the headquarters at the time of the Crash of 1929 of The National City Bank, which had pioneered the mass selling of securities, under CEO Charlie Mitchell, to 'the little man' and the small speculator. You may remember the interviews with his children in one of the former mansions from the clips of "The Great Crash of 1929" by The American Experience. His son has one of the worst cases of "Long Island lockjaw" that I have heard.

It is a bit of an odd touch for a scene supposed to be of the London Docks even if you are creating a film for a German audience. Looks like the Yanks had a spot on Canary Wharf even back then.

And although I am sure it is not him, the fellow wearing a cap and smoking a pipe on the right when Mackie Messer first appears looks remarkably like Ernest Borgnine.

It is funny how one picks of these bits and pieces of things as you go through life, stuffed in a pocket of the mind for later. And then a chance encounter or thought brings them out again, and we can admire our bits and baubles, and enjoy them, or understand their meaning. Sometimes they merge into a synthesis, a picture, and at other other times they merely sparkle for a moment once again, and are gone.

I remember running across a phrase in a very old volume of Tait's Edinburgh Review many years ago, about 1974 or so, in a LIfe of William Cobbett, that at the time seemed not only antiquated but very odd, at least to me.

"He was at this time living in the bosom of his family on his farm of Botley, in the midst of domestic enjoyment of no ordinary kind, and leading no inglorious or useless life."

At that time despite having a classical education under my belt, I was a bit of a twenty-something wildling, a restless young man making his way, and such things meant nothing to me. Even at that tender, barely human age, I was a budding antiquarian bookman, and incessantly read, even the oddest things, and certainly beyond the range of my maturity and experience. But I tucked it away with many other other things, and thought little of it until now.

I understand it now, perhaps, at least I think that I do, and that is how I finally settled down, after all too many years away, roaming the world, and found real happiness, at of all places, home with loved ones, children and dogs and a small garden, as C.S. Lewis wrote, 'surprised by joy.'

I apologized to my wife a few years ago, after a visit to a friend's new home that was rather expansive, in the 15M+ range, for bringing her along on my current adventure, and causing her to curtail her home and lifestyle to something more fitting with the idea of 'sufficient simplicity.' As the ancients described it, 'in nidulo meo.'

And she looked straight at me, as only a wife of over thirty years can do, and laughed, and said, "Men are stupid. You don't know anything."

It truly is the little things that make life worth living.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Welcome to the Jungle

"It is critical that the derivatives markets – both futures and swaps – work for hedgers, the farmers, ranchers, producers and commercial companies in the real economy. Futures and swaps markets allow them to lock in a price and focus on what they do best – servicing customers, producing products and investing in our country’s future. As it’s the hedgers in the real economy – the non-financial side – that provide 94 percent of private sector jobs, it’s all the more important that these markets work for America’s job providers.

The derivatives markets that the CFTC oversees are where hedgers across the country meet financial firms, and others generally called speculators. Over time, the makeup of these markets has shifted dramatically. Financial firms and speculators now make up the vast majority of these markets.

For instance, producers, merchants, processors and other end-users make up approximately 15 percent of the crude oil futures market. Swap dealers, managed money accounts and other financial actors make up the remaining 85 percent. In Chicago Board of Trade wheat contracts, end-users make up nine percent of the long and 29 percent of the short positions, meaning that over 70 percent of this market consists of financial interests.

The CFTC is not a price-setting agency. Our critical mission is to ensure that derivatives markets are transparent, and free of fraud, manipulation and other abuses. Our mission is particularly important considering hedgers, America’s job creators, use these markets to lock in a price and make their investments. Given the dominance of financial actors and speculators in these markets, it’s that much more crucial that the CFTC is well funded so that we can ensure these markets work for hedgers. The need for adequate funding is highlighted by rising gas prices at the pump."

Futures Magazine, CFTC's Gensler Addresses Budget at Senate Hearing, March 21, 2012

Most astute market participants do not need Mr. Gary Gensler to tell them that the financial interests dominate the US commodity markets.   But it is good to hear nonetheless.

Perhaps he can drop a note to his boss, President Obama.  And cc a certain Nobel-Prize-winning economist whose models apparently inform him it is impossible for the financial tail to wag the dog, even when those financiers dominate the market with virtually free money supplied to them by the Federal Reserve Bank.

While it is obviously necessary for Chairman Gensler to have more funds if he is asked to regulate the much larger swaps market, I would be negligent in not mentioning that the figures he quotes about market distortions represent areas that are already under his purview and not some new addition.

The futures industry in America is starting to look like a modern day version of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Except in the update they slaughter people's livelihoods and wealth to feed the greed of Wall Street, instead of butchering animals to eat.

The CFTC has been almost notorious in its failure to act on repeated complaints of market manipulation under its existing authority except in the most symbolic of ways, as if handing out tickets for jay-walking, during a period of all out gang war on the public interest.   And the public is getting tired of it. 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Poltergeist, the Presidency

The political demonstrators of days gone by, when people actually cared about things,  assumed a posture of non-violence.

The leadership class of today has adopted a culture of general non-involvement in almost everything about what they have agreed, or even sworn, to do, except collecting enormous paychecks for not doing it, of course.

When anything goes wrong, none of the leaders knows anything, and no one in charge is involved. Money vaporizes, people disappear, decade long wars continue on, and things just happen by themselves.

A person elected on a reform platform of change immediately brings back the people who created the problem in the first place, and smothers most of the impulse for reform, cutting deals and giving it away to a renegade business class and their representatives. He accepts massive campaign contributions from those he was hired to bring to justice, prosecuting no one. 

And one of his top financial advisors and campaign fund raisers, considered a top candidates for Treasury Secretary, presides over an abuse of customer funds so repugnant and rarely done that even Wall Street recoils in horror.

And yet his opponent, the pre-selected alternative, is from that very same predatory class, with a penchant for forgetting almost everything he has ever said or done in the past whenever he chooses, even denying things that he has said just yesterday, where it is not possible to claim non-involvement due to a preoccupation or some random out of body experience.  His own people liken his record to a slate, which can be wiped clean at will.

And amongst his peers he is the one judged to be 'most reliable.'   Are the American people gone barking mad?

Its like a very bad sequel to the long national nightmare from which people thought they had just escaped.  We are bit players and extras in Poltergeist, the Presidency.  And no matter who is elected, they keep coming back.