Excerpt: All the Presidents' Bankers: The Justice Department Goes Soft

(This excerpt originally appeared in Truthout within a piece entitled: The Real Vice-President of the United States is Wall Street. Thanks to those that have been debating since whether, "President" could have replaced "Vice-President.") This excerpt comes about 400+ pages into the book. 

The Justice Department Goes Soft on Bankers

Many congressional hearings and investigations have probed the bankers' practices since the crisis that began in 2007. Similar to the Pujo hearings after the Panic of 1907, though, they have resulted in nothing material against the bankers with the strongest political alliances. And unlike the impact of the 1932–1933 Pecora Commission hearings, no substantive regulatory act has passed to significantly alter their behavior. Though banks would end up paying various fines and legal settlements, that amounted to fractions of pennies on the dollar relative to their immense asset bases. Their structure and influence remained unaltered.

As of September 1, 2013, the SEC reported it had levied just $1.53 billion in fines and $1.2 billion in penalties, disgorgement, and other money relief against the big banks for their multitrillion-dollar global Ponzi scheme—or as the SEC put it, "addressing misconduct that led to or arose from the financial crisis." Goldman paid a $550 million fine from the SEC for a similar allegation. The firm admitted no guilt for the related activities. Bank of America paid a $150 million fine without admitting any guilt for misleading shareholders regarding its payment of Merrill Lynch's bonuses when it took over the firm. JPMorgan Chase eventually settled the London Whale probe with a $1.02 billion fine, greater than the fines it paid the government for all of its housing-related infractions. Though the firm admitted that it had violated banking rules by not properly monitoring trading operations, that kind of admission was akin to copping a misdemeanor plea while facing a major felony.

On August 1, 2013, a federal judge approved a $590 million settlement by Citigroup in a shareholder lawsuit accusing the bank of hiding billions of dollars of toxic mortgage assets. On that same day, a jury found former Goldman Sachs banker Fabrice Tourre liable for his role in the Abacus deal, which lost some investors $1 billion. The ruling was dubbed a major victory for the SEC. "We are obviously gratified by the jury's verdict and appreciate their hard work," lead SEC lawyer Matthew Martens said.

The Justice Department chose not to criminally prosecute the chairmen from Goldman or JPMorgan Chase (both of whom ranked in the top twenty for Obama's career campaign contributors) or from anywhere else for creating faulty CDOs, trading against them, dumping them on less knowledgeable investors, or otherwise speculating with capital supposedly siphoned off for more productive and less risky purposes.

Similarly, the Justice Department punted on prosecuting Jon Corzine, the former governor of New Jersey and a top-tier bundler for Obama. Steering his firm MF Global into an abyss, Corzine had bet more than $6 billion on European sovereign debt. The $1 billion MF Global "mistake," the multibillion-dollar losses on bets made by Chase, the CDOs chosen by the firm's biggest hedge fund clients that had been set up to fail—these were apparently just minor events in the scheme of making money and maintaining alliances. On October 31, 2011, MF Global filed Chapter 11, with $41 billion in assets and $39.7 billion in debt, the eighth largest bankruptcy in US history. Four days before the collapse, Corzine sent an email to an employee "to strategize how they could use customer segregated funds [and get JPMorgan Chase] to clear MF Global's trades more quickly." He avoided criminal fraud charges.

The general response of Obama and his cabinet toward Wall Street criminality and the sheer unsavoriness of its leaders showed the degree to which nothing had changed and the lack of commitment to reform. If nothing changes fundamentally in the banking landscape, more and larger crises are a given. The most powerful banks are bigger, more interconnected, and more reliant on cheap money and federal largesse than ever. Their leaders are unrepentant and unaccountable. Their political alliances require nothing of them anymore except some fines that can be easily re-earned.

Copyright of Nomi Prins. Cannot be reprinted without permission of Nation Books.

The Seven Sins of Wall Street by Bob Ivry - My Book Review

The Seven Sins of Wall Street: Big Banks, their Washington Lackeys, and the next Financial Crisis by Bloomberg reporter, Bob Ivry is both incredibly scary and ironically extremely funny – in a very dark way. This makes it essential reading for anyone with a finely tuned bullshit meter that doesn’t buy the notion that we’re all economically safer now than before the financial crisis of 2008 – which should be everyone. Ivry’s voice is appropriately sardonic and exasperated, his journalism and on-the-foreclosed-ground research, impeccable. His ability to empathize with readers that don’t hold a PhD in financial jargon (derivatives = “four syllables that launched a thousand naps”) allows him to render otherwise arcane topics simple enough to make you want to throw things at Jamie Dimon.

Most people living in the real world have a sense that the Wall-Street-Washington driven crisis hasn’t exactly evaporated into a haze of CEO repentance, or former politicians choosing to become gardeners rather than bagging plush jobs at elite financial firms. But Ivry’s book shows the ongoing crimes are much, MUCH worse than even the most alert or pessimistic of us think.  Not only has there been no meaningful reform or jail terms for committing fraud in broad daylight, but the same Big Six banks at the core of the crisis, are back to their old, and some new tricks, with a pat on the back from Uncle Sam. They are bigger and badder than ever, despite public rhetoric to the contrary.

Ivry divides his book into chapters paralleling the seven sins  - gluttony, wrath, envy, pride, lust, sloth, and greed. He doesn’t just excoriate the big bankers that played, and continue to play, freely and loosely with what he refers to as “Grandma’s money”, but embarks on an investigative search for the people living personal nightmares at the hands of these banks years after the “supposed” economic recovery and great reform myth of Dodd-Frank. Though the banks have supposedly repaid their bailout money with $20 billion interest to the American people (sure, no one got a check, but whatever), Ivry shines a harsh light on this irrelevant political babble. The big banks are not only bigger,  but they are also "fail –i- er” he says. Take note, Stephen Colbert.

Ivry’s aim is “not to re-litigate the bailouts, but to illustrate their legacy.” As he writes, “In the months and years after the financial crisis, the top people in Wall Street and Washington had engineered a closed loop the insured their feet never touched the dirty ground. Wall Street would originate the mortgages, and Washington would buy them. The Treasury would sell debt, and Wall Street would buy it, then sell it back to the Federal Reserve. (This was called “quantitative easing.”) The Federal Reserve would print money, and mostly would use it to push up prices on stocks and all sorts of commodities. Bankers traded derivatives…without anyone in the outside world catching a glimpse of the details. Ordinary people only got in the way.”

Ivry tells the tale of whistle-blower Sherry Hunt at Citi Mortgage who supplied Dick Bowen, her boss, with much of the data he used to first blow the whistle on Citi Mortgage’s quality-control department failures post crisis of 2008. Though she feared losing her job, as he actually did, and was demoted during the process of alerting the federal regulators to Citi’s ongoing frauds and cover-ups, she feared saying nothing more.

Ivry describes a January 2010 staff meeting, in which 1000 Citi Mortgage employees “gathered to listen to pep talks and sales reports. Then it came time to announce the workers of the month award. It went to the quality rebuttal crew.” Quality rebuttal was Citi’s way of stifling employees like Hunt that raised red flags about fraudulent practices.

Ivry’s more emotional passages relate to the efforts that Mark Pittman, fellow reporter-tour-du-force at Bloomberg, made to force the Federal Reserve to disclose details of the loans provided in particular to the Big Six US banks during the crisis that most of the media ignored. Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley got far less from TARP openly, than they got from the Fed behind the scenes. The secrecy surrounding those extra trillions of dollars of loans was what Pittman sought to uncover. Pittman died too young, a moment Ivry captures poignantly, but Ivry continues to forge ahead unveiling ongoing secrets and deception -  no longer at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis, but at the heart of its aftermath. Of Pittman, Ivry writes "He knew what was at stake. Not just money. Not just economic policy. Not just the functioning of the world financial system. But the future of capitalism. The credibility of democracy.”

Ivry reveals the myriad Big Six bank schemes that continue unabated; the shadiness still rampant in the mortgage market, how the Fed is permitting banks with FDIC deposit support to make leveraged bets with Grandma’s money on everything from arcane derivatives to aluminum to copper, the Obama assistance programs that assisted the banks and not borrowers, the disgusting remorseless of Wall Street.

Ivry introduces us to people like Rebecca Black, one of the borrowers forced to leave her home at 698 Hazelwood Road. Her lender, a division of J.P. Morgan Chase called EMC Mortgage was part of Bear Stearns before it was taken over - with government aid - by J.P. Morgan Chase in late 2008. As Ivry says, "overnight borrowing by J.P. Morgan Chase, peaked on October 1, 2008 at $68.6 billion. Jamie Dimon, the lender’s Chief Executive Officer, got $23 million in compensation for 2011. All Rebecca Black got was the landscaping bill (for a house she could no longer afford, in the face of payments that blew up in her face, a by-product of some very shady practices.)

When Ivry visited Hazelwood Road in 2012, it was “four years after bad mortgages triggered a meltdown in the world's most resilient economy.” At the time,  “the biggest banks were reporting record profits and government agencies were trumpeting statistics showing a robust recovery.” On Hazelwood Road, there was just unnecessarily shattered lives, boarded homes and crime After the 2008 financial crisis, “an economic and political apartheid had emerged,” Ivry writes, “Washington, in the form of the federal government and Federal Reserve, the country's bank for banks, sacrificed the common good for the profit of the few.” And so the cycle of crime-and-no-punishment continues.

Ivry concludes with his stance “on the whole too big to fail thing: get rid of it. It's anti-competitive and antidemocratic.” Ivry calls out the Dodd-Frank Act for the sham it is: an Act that did nothing to level the playing field in which the biggest banks enjoy the most government-perks, and the lion’s share of the ability to abuse, and extort from, ordinary citizens. His book is an eye-opener, a wake-up call for those in Washington to get their heads out of Wall Street’s asses, a state unthinkable for most politicians. But, it’s also a wake-up call to us, to be ever more vigilant with every one of our financial dealings, because the worst is yet to come. 

Power Inequality Dwarfs Income Inequality

This piece originially appeared on Truthdig.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the historically high levels of income and wealth inequality lately—mostly from people on the shorter end of that stick—with good reason: There’s no end in sight.

In his new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” economist Thomas Piketty argues that worsening inequality is inevitable in a mature capitalist system, based on his analysis of 200 years of data. But inequality isn’t just an evolving condition like a crippling allergy that comes and goes, or just grows, enumerated by horrifying statistics. Nor is it just the result of a capitalist-utopian idea of free markets in which everyone gets a fair shot armed with equal information (which simply don’t exist in the real world, where markets are routinely gamed by the biggest players).

Inequality is endemic to the core structure of an America that operates more as a plutocracy than a democracy. It is an inherent result of the consolidation of a substantial amount of both financial power and political influence in the hands of a few families.

In my upcoming book, “All the Presidents’ Bankers,” I trace the lineage of the banking and political families and their associates who have had the most combined influence on American policy. Inequality of income or wealth is a byproduct of the predisposition and genealogy of this coterie of America’s power elite. True, being born into wealth means having a greater chance of accumulating more of it—but take it a step further. Expanding on the adage of “it takes money to make money,” we get a much better idea of why inequality is so rampant: Because aside from income and wealth issues, it takes power to keep power.

By nature of the construct and self-reinforcing behavior of a small circle of American families and their enterprises—particularly over the past century since financial capitalism replaced productive capitalism as the means to expand power, wealth and influence—a comparative handful of families and their connections run Wall Street and Washington collectively. They run America as two sides of one political-financial coin, not as divided factions but as co-influencers of policy through public and private office.

There have been times during the past century when the specific individuals commanding this joint effort paid credence to the public interest, or were imbued with more humility. During those times, levels of inequality happened to decrease. At other times, the power elite solely promoted private gain, as from WWI through the crash of 1929, and since the 1970s, particularly since the 2008 crisis. At those times,  inequality happened to grow. This is not to imply that the moods of the elite were the sole arbiters of the direction of inequality, but that whatever the direction of these levels, general economic health is more dependent on the actions of this long-term, tightknit and concentrated few than on the ideal of a democracy. In this environment of such power inequality, economic inequality is unavoidable—and unsolvable.

Today, the focus of this power structure is so skewed that any notion of “public good” is mere campaign fodder for presidents or presidential hopefuls, and nonexistent for the banking elite. That’s why inequality for the rest of the population has leapt back up to 1928 levels and will continue to rise from there. That’s why Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton or both may run for president, while JPMorgan Chase, J.P. Morgan’s legacy, remains the most powerful bank in the world, as it was designed to be more than a century ago.

In the Economic Policy Institute’s February 2014 report “The Increasingly Unequal States of America,” authors Estelle Sommeiller and Mark Price chronicle income inequality on a state-by-state basis from 1917 to 2011. Starting in 1979 until 2011, as the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers rose by 18.9 percent, the average income of the top 1 percent rose by 10 times more, or 200.5 percent. Conversely, between 1928 and 1979, the share of income held by the top 1 percent fell in every state but one.

More recently, their results show that between 2009 and 2011, not only did income inequality grow in all 50 states, but all income growth went to the top 1 percent in 26 states. New York and Connecticut led the pack in terms of income inequality by virtue of their disproportionate share of financial industry millionaires and billionaires, whose fortunes were in turn bolstered by federal and Fed policies that championed the banks that had first access to cheap money and a place to dump their toxic assets. In these states, the average income gap in 2011 had the top 1 percent making 40 times more than the bottom 99 percent. (The gap in California was 26.8 times, confirming that on average Wall Street money trumps tech and entertainment money. The smallest average gap was in Hawaii at 12.1 times.)

Not only are current income inequality levels near the 1928 peak, but the systemic risk posed by this inequality is worse now. There is no counterbalance to the banking elite who possess no imbedded public spirit underlying their political influence and command more instruments of leverage capital than ever before. There’s no strong labor force, no large swaths of the population demanding reform by any means necessary, no revolution. Instead, we have an overhang of debt, stagnant wages and inferior jobs, all exacerbating income inequality.

Risk inequality means that those who have less to begin with have more to lose in adverse circumstances, whereas those with more have less to lose. This extra inequality dynamic is as dangerous to individuals as it is to the greater economy. It is particularly damaging in the wake of the epic Wall Street bailouts and ongoing zero-interest rate monetary policy and quantitative easing of the Federal Reserve policy, which helps the same banks whose family legacies worked with the Washington leaders who were their friends to create the Fed to back their bets and preserve their wealth a century ago.

Inequality has been given nothing but pithy lip service by the political-financial elite, elected or selected, or those aspiring to more of it. Last fall, Hillary Clinton was paid $400,000 to tell two Goldman Sachs gatherings that the financial crisis was a shared responsibility, implying that Wall Street had been unfairly demonized in its wake.

The Economic Policy Institute report authors conclude, “In the next decade, something must give. Either Americans must accept that the American dream of widespread mobility is dead or new policies must emerge that will restore broadly shared prosperity.” But the cards have already been dealt—and the verdict is in. Not only will the American dream remain dead, but also income and wealth and risk inequality will escalate by virtue of the government-supported consolidation of banking family and firm power.