Benjamin Fulford Interview - "The Elites Secrecy Is Breaking!"

Designation of Global 'Too Big To Fail' Firms

Designation of Global 'Too Big To Fail' Firms

When will America Jail their Banksters?

When will America Jail their Banksters?

http://www.batr.org/corporatocracy/110415.html

The most dramatic contrast in the rule of law against the architects of financial theft can be seen in the way America protects their banksters and the accountability that Iceland imposed on their financial crooks. The fact that the orthodox financial press refuses to cover the incarceration of Iceland’s Bankers Face 74 Years in Prison While US Banks Profit After Your Bailout, is clear proof who really controls the political and economic institutions in the United States. As for the courts, America has long ago shredded the rule of law in this country.

“Five top bankers from Iceland’s two largest banks — Landsbankinn and Kaupþing — were found guilty of embezzlement, market manipulation, and breach of fiduciary duties. Though the country’s maximum penalty for financial crimes currently stands at six years, the Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments to extend the limit. Most of those convicted have so far been sentenced to between two and five years.”

Pray tell, when will the public wake up from their systematic induced lobotomy from a culture designed to purge even a fundamental understanding of money, finance and economics? A society based upon psychosurgery has produced the densest population on the planet. Stuck on Stupid does not say enough about the fools that keep obeying the dictates of the financial elites.

In a demonstration of supreme chutzpah, former Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Shalom Bernanke points the finger at his brethren tribe of moneychangers, while spinning out the con that the Fed came to the rescue.  Ben Bernanke: More execs should have gone to jail for causing Great Recession, exemplifies just how inept the media presstitutes are in allowing the bag man for the banksters to deflect the true culprit of the cause of financial ruin.

“With publication of his memoir, The Courage to Act, on Tuesday by W.W. Norton & Co., Bernanke has some thoughts about what went right and what went wrong. For one thing, he says that more corporate executives should have gone to jail for their misdeeds. The Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies focused on indicting or threatening to indict financial firms, he notes, "but it would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything what went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm."

The eradication of honest species is a direct result of the debt created fiat money system operated by the Federal Reserve. Acceptance of the Central Banking scheme, as legitimate is the fundamental curse of modern economics.

It comes as no shock that the street protests against the banksters has been infiltrated by the masters of the universe to insulate the central bank from the authentic outrage that sincere protestors express. However, mere demonstrations will not secure criminal indictments from a Department of Injustice that masquerades as the “Peoples’ Sheriff”.

The Iceland experience is a most hopeful action taken against the monetary criminal elites, who operate as the global alchemist of counterfeit usury.

Zero-hedge published the account, First They Jailed The Bankers, Now Every Icelander To Get Paid Back In Bank Sale.

“Because Icelanders took control of their government, they effectively own the banks. Benediktsson believes this will bring foreign capital into the country and ultimately fuel the economy — which, incidentally, remains the only European nation to recover fully from the 2008 crisis. Iceland even managed to pay its outstanding debt to the IMF in full — in advance of the due date.”

Wow, rejoice and praise the Lord . . .

John 2:15 - King James Bible – And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables.

Now one need not be a Christian or even a believer in a Supreme Being to see the wisdom in righteous anger. The following point is made in Why Did Jesus Drive The Money Changers From The Temple?

“Think about it: Immediately after Jesus dealt with the opportunists, he became a magnet for the very ones whom others so often take advantage of. It may be that when we take a courageous stand for righteousness, some will recognize and appreciate that stand. The world is full of downtrodden people who are looking for someone to stand up for them. If we don’t do it, who will?”

The nation of Iceland stepped up with the greatest of bravery to assert their national sovereignty and righteous inherent autonomy. Defying the banksters cabal and ridding the exploitation of the IMF is not only possible, but necessary.

Since a financial analysis of Corporatocracy dissects business activities, the ordinary protestor opposing Wall Street often makes a mistake by railing against capitalism believing that both are synonymous. The average American has a rudimentary understanding of finance at best. In the current condition of the popular culture, most pay even less lip service to the lessons of scripture.

Blocking out both disciplines inflicts a void of profound economic knowledge. The Banksters of high finance share the lineage of the Pharisees from biblical times. Today, stealing from the public has become a computerized science.

Unless and until the American populace matures and shows the responsibility to confront the very nature and basis of the debt extortion formula, used by the banksters, the successful resistance that Iceland adopted will not be seen in  the United States. In all the discussions during this presidential election cycle, no one is making the case to abolish the Federal Reserve, not even Rand Paul.    

The study of economics is more about human nature than forecasts. As long as the most corrupt are rewarded for their offenses, the banking cartel will remain a den of thieves.

Community banking must be resurrected and a Glass–Steagall Banking Act reinstituted to separate commercial from investment banking. A host of more permanent measures to eliminate the operations and functions of the Fed must then follow.

James Hall – November 4, 2015

The Die Hard risk in your bank account

Izabella Kaminska

| Nov 03 19:14

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/11/03/2143644/the-die-hard-risk-in-your-bank-account/

It is a business now, some of these organisations have complexes not quite as big as Google but it is an office facility and people come to work. Instead of coming to work out how to create things for cell phones, they go after banks because that’s where the money is.

That’s from cyber-security expert Clay Calvert, director of Cybersecurity at MetroStar Systems, who we contacted last week to get some insight on the multiple ways banking is turning into a cyber-security story.
Also, we wanted to know the degree to which everything is spiralling out of control for banks because cyber criminals are now organising themselves in the style of the more materialistic-minded criminal syndicates before them. It is, experts fear, the beginnings of a new cold war, of Spectre-style proportions. The criminals aren’t loan hackers in basements anymore. They’re high level organised networks.

Calvert tells us, for example, it’s not just that these organisations are getting large and sophisticated, they run themselves like modern profit-oriented businesses, with weekly targets and commission-based renumeration. And just like modern corporations, they’re competitively minded and fearful of challenges to their marketshare.
The only difference really is that instead of running enterprises which add value to society, their enterprises destroy it. They don’t contribute to the system. They take from it and never put back.
That one fact alone ensures they operate in a zero sum world. There is, after all, only so much spare output people will get duped into handing over. As a result there’s a maximum extraction rate for cybercriminals at any given time.
Cyber crime really is akin to exploiting exhaustible resources like oil, it seems.
Since you can’t bleed everyone dry in just one go — you’d render your assets dead before you could turn a profit — cyber criminals have learned it’s necessary to coax value slowly out of the system instead.
Indeed, just like the early oil prospectors over in Pennsylvania learned that over-exploitation of resources collapses the market for everyone, cyber criminals have figured out that exploitation only pays if there’s a cap on the number of people doing the exploitation. Cartel-style discipline means everything.
Incidentally, much like with the mafia and Colombian drug cartels, there’s now some serious competition between rival organised cybergang on the dark web.
Clavert tells us:

The cyber gangs are now turning on each other. One site will hack into another site and they will publish the info to out them.
If there were a milion hacking organisations, that would change the world, so they are trying to limit how many people are doing it. Finite resources. They are setting up their territory.

Banking is a cyber security story
Last week, the FT’s Sam Jones outlined last week how commercialised cyber crime has become. For example, on the dark net, off-the-shelf hacking software is available for as little as $30 a pop, meaning that the business of hacking really is accessible to anyone.*
But what really does it mean to hack people for financial gain?
Draining accounts of funds isn’t all that easy. You can’t just Bonnie and Clyde bags of cash out of people’s accounts.
Anti-money laundering rules, paper-trails and know-your-customer regulations ensure hacking is only successful if you have:

1. Cleared accounts to transfer funds into (hence why the cost of remittances or transfers to light-touch jurisdictions where anyone can set up accounts, or even become their own banks is so high).
2. Are able to convince people to voluntarily transfer the money over (usually via extortion, or ransom** based on exploitation of personal information, like naked photos etc, confiscation and ransoming of data).
3. Outright scamming involving promises of outsized financial returns if honest accounts provide proxy services.
4. Hope the victim doesn’t notice that small sums are being skimmed on a regular basis, which when done on a mass scale adds up.
5. Getting privileged information and trading off it.
6. Forcing ATMs to payout paper cash.

It’s as much about psychology and persuasion as it is outright force-based theft.
The Carbanak cybergang robbery, which saw up to $1bn stolen in about two years from financial institutions worldwide, is an excellent example of such strategies.
As Kaspersky noted, a combination of strategies 1, 3, 4 and 6 were used. People didn’t notice the missing sums because the hack literally involved creating bank liabilities in the form pure money printing, which inflated account balances before the funds were transferred into proxy accounts controlled by the criminals or directly debited via ATMs.
The vulnerability was the ease with which hackers could create bank liabilities without any legitimate offsetting assets on the banks’ ledgers or balance sheet.

The hack, in other words, was based on outstandingly detailed knowledge of bank operations — above all knowledge that loan decisions create money-like liabilities which the system at large views as cash.

That’s a big problem for banks because it equates to the very same thing as originating bad assets, which have no repayment possibility and certainly no interest income.

If you thought subprime write-downs were bad, just think how much worse bank balance sheets full of “hacker-lifestyle”-backed assets are. Especially when banks themselves are probably unsure of how many fake assets (or loans) may have been created.

The looser a bank’s loan creation criteria — the basic input of core personal data: identification numbers, addresses, credit scores and so forth rather than assessment via face-to-face qualitative means — the easier for a hacker to convince the system an asset with an offsetting liability has been created.

That’s the paradox in the system. The more automated, streamlined and people-lite the banking process — especially back-office confirmation and settlement — the easier it is for a hacker to game the system. But the more costly it is to police the system, which is already being pressured by capitalisation costs, the lower the profit margins for banks.

Small wonder the banks are suddenly obsessed with permissioned blockchain ledgers.

On the surface the technology promises to do the impossible: allow banks to cut human costs with automated tools — improving margins — and remain hacker resilient.

The way it plans to do this? Mostly, by taking banking back into the medieval age of single-entry accounting – wherein outstanding liabilities alone determined “value” on a banks books, with no consideration of the asset side.

Furthermore, chances are, it will take collective algorithmic action to permission new liabilities based on asset origination, meaning asset quality will no longer be determined by competing banks but by the group. It’s the re-cartelisation of banking to the point of near single unity status, especially once all the human intelligence is gone. Banking union like you’ve never seen before.

Will this be effective? Probably not. As Calvert tells us a lot of hacking is based on taking control of legitimate processes. It’s about impersonating instructions from member-network banks and hoping the rest of the network doesn’t notice they’ve come from a corrupted computer or source.

Which is why for as long as individual banks retain the right to create assets according to their own competitive IP-based prerogative — rather than be dictated to by the standards of the cartel — hacking risk remains. That’s blockchain or no blockchain.

And since limiting the outstanding number of liabilities to some arbitrary number makes no sense for a fluctuating economy, banking with blockchain is simply a route to a single non-competitive monetary authority issuing asset-backed liabilities in the system (i.e. a central bank).

Not that issuance via a single-central authority running an internal blockchain would contain the hacking risk. The point of failure will always and forever be connected to the weakest individual in the group. We know this, well, because Die Hard tells us so:

Takagi: [Hans is threatening to kill Takagi if he doesn't divulge the code to the vault] I don’t know it, I’m telling you. Get on a jet to Tokyo and ask the Chairman. I’m telling you, you’re just going to have to kill me.
Hans Gruber: Okay.
[shoots Takagi in the head]
Hans Gruber: We do it the hard way.

Which is why the only line of defence is in loading up on trustworthy, vetted, socially commended people. A costly proposition for banks.

Additional notes and caveats:

* When data goes on sale for $30, this can really be treated as a liquidity-prompted asset swap. A good way to think of it is as follows: the hacker selling the data knows the data has value but he does not have the time or the resources to employ it to its full potential. He offers it, as a result, at a discount to those in the market with current liquidity who do have the potential to maximise its value beyond its current trading price. People like professional cyber extorters, vindictive spouses or colleagues, or organised hackers operating mass-market hacking operations.

** Just wait until hackers start taking control of your IoT connected devices — especially self-driving cars — and threatening you with near certain death unless you make a legitimate transfer.

Related links:
If you call it a blockchain, it’s not a single-entry system - FT Alphaville
Exposing the “If we call it a blockchain, perhaps it won’t be deemed a cartel?” tactic – FT Alphaville

Insider Trading in ECB style

November 2, 2015 4:54 pm

ECB officials met bankers before key decisions

Claire Jones in Frankfurt

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7a9d5d9a-8155-11e5-a01c-8650859a4767.html

©Reuters

ECB's Frankfurt headquarters

Some of the European Central Bank’s top decision-makers met bankers and asset managers days before major policy decisions, and on one occasion just hours before, copies of their diaries reveal.
The diaries, which cover meetings of the six members of the ECB’s executive board between August 2014 and August 2015, were given to the Financial Times under Freedom of Information rules and reveal engagements with the private sector, officials and the media.

The disclosure of the meetings comes at a time of heightened scrutiny of the contacts between central bankers and the financial services industry. Earlier this year, the ECB launched its own review of the issue, setting out new principles for how its officials should interact with the private sector.

The meetings offer a sharp contrast with the Bank of England, which prohibits members of its rate-setting committee from talking to media and “other outside interests” on monetary policy matters in the week before a policy decision.

The diaries show two members of the ECB’s executive board, Benoît Cœuré and Yves Mersch, met people from UBS the day before a two-day policy meeting of the central bank’s rate-setting governing council on September 3 and 4 2014.

Mr Cœuré also met BNP Paribas on the morning of September 4, the day the ECB’s governing council surprised markets by cutting interest rates. It also announced it would begin buying private sector assets to save the eurozone’s economy from the threat of deflation. UBS and BNP Paribas declined to comment.

Mr Cœuré met asset manager BlackRock the day before a policy meeting in March this year, when the council unveiled the details of how it would carry out its €1.1tn asset purchase, or quantitative easing, programme. BlackRock declined to comment.

The ECB’s vice-president, Vítor Constâncio, and its chief economist, Peter Praet, met Algebris, a hedge fund, at the height of this summer’s Greek crisis, when the governing council was holding daily conference calls on whether to continue sanctioning emergency loans to keep Greece’s banks afloat. Mr Constâncio and Mr Praet met Algebris on June 23. Mr Praet also met BNP Paribas Fortis on June 22 and bond fund Pimco on June 25. Algebris and Pimco declined to comment.

All members of the ECB’s executive board declined to comment.

Concerns were raised earlier this year over the links between central bankers and the private sector after an event at the Berkeley Hotel in London in May when Mr Cœuré told an audience of hedge fund managers, academics and finance officials that eurozone policymakers planned to front-load their asset purchases in May and June. 

The remarks were not made publicly available until the following morning, because of what the ECB described as an “internal procedural error”.
ECB officials regularly talk to market participants. Like their counterparts at other central banks, they have a duty to explain their policies to markets, and believe that doing so can make their actions more effective. An ECB spokesman said it was also important for policymakers “to understand financial markets, since this is how monetary policy is transmitted into the real economy”.

On Friday, the central bank said it would begin to publish the diaries of members of the executive board three months later. Mr Cœuré also said in August that he had “absolutely nothing against” publishing diaries of meetings with external parties.

ECB meeting calendar

Details of the meeting calendars of the European Central Bank’s six executive board members, including Mario Draghi, president.
Read more
 

There is no suggestion that either Mr Cœuré, who is the executive board member responsible for markets, or Mr Mersch, Mr Constâncio or Mr Praet broke ECB rules and discussed market-sensitive information. One of Mr Cœuré’s engagements was an informal dinner held with a long-term contact.
The ECB’s rules impose a “quiet period” that forbids decision-makers from speaking in public the week before scheduled policy meetings. The central bank also confirmed that officials never discuss market-sensitive information in private meetings.
“The quiet period refers to public communication ahead of monetary policy governing council meetings. The same underlying principles — guarding against signalling future monetary policy — are of course applied to bilateral meetings. In any case, no market-sensitive information is disclosed by the ECB in any non-public forum,” an ECB spokesperson said.
On the meetings that took place around the time of the Greek crisis, the spokesperson added: “The governing council teleconferences were ad hoc meetings dealing with the acute situation at the time in Greece. Again, the principle of never disclosing market-sensitive information applies.”

The ECB’s rules on quiet periods are echoed in other jurisdictions. The US Federal Reserve observes a blackout period over the seven days before its regular rate-setting meetings. The policy requires Federal Open Market Committee participants to refrain from expressing views about macroeconomic developments or monetary policy issues in meetings or conversations with the public during that period.

The Bank of England’s code of conduct for its Monetary Policy Committee prohibits talking to media or “other outside interests” on monetary policy matters in the week before a policy decision.

The so-called “purdah” starts with the pre-MPC meeting, which is typically held on the Wednesday of the week before any decision is taken, and ends at midnight on the Thursday of the policy announcement.
The code of conduct states that particular care should be taken in the three days immediately before the MPC announcements, when rate-setters are barred from talking to journalists or market participants.
The BoE does not disclose details of private meetings between MPC members and market participants or other outsiders. It does publish details of public events as well as gifts.
While the Bank falls within the remit of the UK Freedom of Information Act, certain functions including monetary policy or financial operations intended to support financial institutions to maintain stability are explicitly exempted.
The ECB complied with all the terms of the FT’s freedom of information request, except in relation to information it asserted should be withheld under confidentiality rules.
Additional reporting by Sam Fleming and Ferdinando Giugliano.

Iran’s Central Bank Will Have Its Day in the Supreme Court

Iran’s Central Bank Will Have Its Day in the Supreme Court

Swiss group has signatures for 'sovereign money' referendum

REUTERS Business News | Sat Oct 31, 2015 11:22am GMT

Related: Business

Swiss group says it has signatures for 'sovereign money' vote

ZURICH | By John Miller

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/10/31/uk-swiss-sovereign-money-idUKKCN0SP0FW20151031

 

A Swiss group pushing a sovereign money initiative on grounds it will make the country's banking system more secure has collected 100,000 signatures necessary to eventually put the matter to a popular vote, it said on Saturday.The group, Monetary Modernization, wants to make the Swiss National Bank alone responsible for creating the country's money, not just coins and banknotes, but also so-called "electronic money" that makes up most bank accounts.
The group says the current fractional reserve system - where banks "create" money each time they issue loans - is unstable because it is secured by reserves representing just a fraction of the currency actually created by the national bank.
Raffael Wuethrich, a spokesman, said his group would formally hand over the 100,000 notarized signatures to federal administration officials in Berne on Dec. 1. He added it could take as long as five years before the measure goes to voters.
"Banks would no longer be able to create their own money when they extend credit," Wuethrich said, adding such a system would minimize the potential for a banking system collapse as all money would be backed by the Swiss National Bank.
Discussions over sovereign money are also underway in Iceland. A leader in Iceland's parliament produced a report suggesting such changes as a remedy for an unstable system in which the island nation's banks collapsed starting in 2007.
Critics counter such radical reforms have negative consequences, including putting public money at risk by making the central bank the most important creditor of commercial banks and by increasing potential for political favouritism.
"The central bank would have to evaluate the lending practices of banks and the allocation of credit to different sectors of the economy," wrote researchers from Bank J. Safra Sarasin this week. "Political meddling in the credit allocation process is very likely and often results in directed loans to politically well-connected clients."
Switzerland has a robust system of direct democracy where citizens regularly vote on popular initiatives.

(Reporting by John Miller)