Steaming Mad about a Big Bank Con: Email from a Concerned Senior

Everyday I receive anguished emails from concerned citizens regarding the state of the economy, Wall Street, the political-financial system, and how their future stability is impacted by the powers that be. This one stood out for its clarity, as well as being indicative of one of the many ways in which the banking system regularly undermines people’s economic stability by targetting their savings accounts (which thanks to the Fed's zero-interest-rate policy receive no interest, and thus, no relatively risk-free returns) for high-fee asset management services.

The Clinton administration’s 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall, plus the two prior decades of various measures that weakened the intent of this 1933 Act that separated banks’ speculation activities from deposit and lending ones, has enabled big banks to engage in all manners of trading, leverage, and ill-concocted investment schemes, while holding trillions of dollars of individuals’ deposits.

It was Charles Mitchell, head of National City Bank (now Citigroup) back in the 1920s that realized if his bank could corner the deposits of ‘the Everyman’, it would be better positioned to engage in the bigger transactions that would catapult it to a financial superpower, as well as use the accounts for additive domestic gain. Nearly a century later, this aspect of converting depositor/savers to commission-providing risk-takers, provides fees to bankers, absent true responsibility for any related downside (as in the ‘past behavior is not indicative of future results’ small print.)  

But people should not act upon the “guidance” of the investment advisors resident at the very big banks where they keep their savings and other money – this leaves too much room for manipulation of their trust and money. And if legislation and politicians won’t divide these two financial items, people must do so for themselves.

For the evolution of institutionalized, government and central bank supported speculation has left populations footing the bill for bets taken beyond their knowledge and certainly, control. Even those people that believe they are taking the prudent steps with respect to their own financial situations as they approach old-age, are victims of a churn-and-burn mentality that incurs unnecessary fees and bonuses for the perpetuators, at their expense.

Having checked with the writer, who prefers to remain anonymous, I am leaving the contents of this email intact. The writer wanted others to know “how the nation’s banks target senior citizens and steal their life savings.“  These are the warning words I received from one of America’s seniors:

“Unlike many of the banks’ other schemes, this con is entirely avoidable if seniors and their families knew what to watch out for.

Here is how it works:

1. You are a conservative saver, and you have a large amount of money in the bank.  Since you are a “valued customer”, the bank gives you your own personal financial representative, with whom you build a relationship over time.  But this person is not on your side.  He will prod, coax, and sweet-talk you into moving your savings over to the bank’s investment arm.

2. If you do move your money over to the investment bank, your financial advisor will charge you high management fees (upwards of 1% of assets per year).  Moreover, you will pay big commissions on top of that.  But these won’t be disclosed as commissions – they will be incentives disguised in various ways that are buried deep within the fine print.  Since you don’t know about these, and since you trust the paid professional you’ve hired, you will be an easy victim.

3. Because of these incentives, your advisor will dump investments into your portfolio that may include: funds of funds (which charge layers upon layers of fees), IPO offerings that the bank can’t manage to sell off, complex structured products, variable annuities, and the like.  Anything the bank wants to get rid of, wishes to hawk, or gets a kickback to sell will be dumped into your account.  All the while, your advisor will be assuring you that these are excellent investments.

4. The result will be that you will almost certainly do worse than the market overall – at the very least, by the fees and commissions you pay (commissions that have been taken  –  stolen! – without your consent), and at worst, by scorching losses obtained via inappropriate investments.

5. If you figure out what has happened (and most people don’t, they will think that the market just did badly), you will have little recourse.  The bank will have forced you to sign a mandatory binding arbitration agreement that shuts you out of the court system.  Even if the bank has committed fraud, forgery, etc., it doesn’t matter.  The courts are closed to you.

6. If you manage to obtain a settlement or get a judgment from the arbitration forum, the results will almost certainly be kept confidential.  Therefore, the goings-on are kept quiet, and the banks can continue their practices unabated.

The victims of this fraud are not doing anything wrong or unreasonable.  They are working with large national banks.  They are hiring certified financial planners.  They are paying high management fees, so there is no expectation of anything “free”.  They are asking good questions and being reassured that their financial advisor is looking out for their best interest.  But they are being swindled nonetheless – because they don’t know about the hidden incentives, because they are unable to differentiate good investments from bad ones, and because they are being reassured by their advisor about how well they are doing compared to the market, even if the opposite is really true.

These are professional con men that are swindling millions of seniors, every day, all over the country -- decimating their life savings in their final years. 

I know, because I have seen it happen.  And I am mad.  Steaming mad.”

This writer is not the only one that is steaming mad. So are millions of people - retirees that don’t have the luxury of ‘making it back’ and workers that aren’t getting paid enough to leave unnecessary money ‘on the table’ of brokers and advisors whose best interests are institutionally and legislatively their own. Heeding the warning in here, and separating one’s bank deposits from the bank’s asset management arm that views them as fee-fodder, would be one way to protect against the damage that this regulatory fusion of bank practices causes.

The People vs. Federal Bank Settlements and Liquidity Rules

Last week, in an interview with Bloomberg News, former Countrywide CEO, Angelo Mozilo gave the nation the middle finger. He expressed zero remorse or culpability for his very personal (and personally lucrative) role in the subprime crisis that catalyzed a global economic recession. Apparently baffled by a potential lawsuit that could be levied by the Los Angeles US Attorney’s Office, he said, ““Countrywide didn’t change. I didn’t change. The world changed.” After blaming the world, he ended his segment by stating, “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

To him, the culprit was the real estate collapse itself.  The same excuse was used by Big Six bank CEOs before multiple Congressional hearings and business news hosts. “OMG, how could we have known prices could GO DOWN?” By placing the blame on the ‘market’, they spun their actions as reactive or ancillary to its apparently random whims, as opposed to proactive on practices leading to crisis events.

The more temporal distance from those events and airtime given to the bankers that inflated the market before crashing it, and Treasury Secretaries that did ‘what they had to do’ in an emergency, the more the Mozillian narrative is cemented in the main annals of history and the plight of the public is rendered a footnote.  Yet, it was not just the loans themselves, but more so, the immense and profitable re-packaging and global re-distribution of those loans in a pyramid of toxic assets wrapped with credit derivatives that blew up in the face of the nation and the world, The economic implosion that followed ignited by the weight of such epic fraud and CEO directed salesmanship, impacted initial borrowers with conditions beyond their control, on top of initial fraud and voracious pushing of those loans to begin with. Thus, banks concocted $14 trillion worth of assets using $1.5 trillion of high-interest loans, compounding and adding to each bit of fraud, instability and risk along the way.

Forbes ranked Mozillo one of the top ten highest paid CEOs in 2006. By 2009, the SEC charged him with fraud for lying about the quality of the loans he sold to Bank of America and insider trading for pocketing $140 million from selling his stock when he knew those loans, and his company, were crumbling. He wound up paying a $22.5 million fine to settle the charge of misleading investors and $45 million for the insider trading charge – leaving him a cool $72.5 million.

But that’s in the past, and his recent denials merely reinforced the stances of Big Six bank leaders such as JPM Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein, who expressed a modicum of media-trained contrition only after their settlements were done and dusted.

Much of the mainstream media finally got it right though, characterizing the Bank of America’s “record” $16.65 billion settlement for the bogus deal it is. Only $7 billion of the settlement is even remotely slated for borrowers, and even that is absent any binding rules on aid reaching them. The reality is, the borrowers that should get the most assistance - not because they embellished applications as the blame-the-victim folks say - but because they were duped by bankers and then crushed by an economy turned on its head due to fraudulent bank practices that were federally subsidized - are the ones that lost their homes years ago. Absent a settlement that makes banks buy them new homes, they remain screwed.

The overall tenor of the settlements is worse than their feeble size and structure. Department of Justice Attorney General, Eric Holder’s John Wayne we-got-em attitude belies the most broken of systems – one that leaves fraud, embezzlement and grand larceny unpunished, and stokes rampant wealth inequality in the process.

So far, the Big Six banks - JPM Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs (and nominally Morgan Stanley) - and their expensive (and largely tax deductible) legal teams have successfully negotiated about $106 billion in mortgage (fraud) related settlements with federal or state governments. Of this, given the language of their settlements (not the benevolent press release versions), at the most $32 billion may get to some borrowers one day. Even that depends on banks upholding promises to do things like reduce existing principal balances that would only help people who haven’t already lost their homes. Banks might also provide minimal funds for people with the stomach for endless phone calls with "customer-service" representatives to access them. These, however, have proven relatively fruitless over the past six years since Obama unveiled his HAMP program - which was supposed to require from banks what these settlements do.

In addition, the Big Six settlements are negligible compared to the damage their practices (and the practices of the investment banks they bought at the onset of the crisis rendering them bigger) considering that since 2006, there have been foreclosure actions brought against nearly 15 million homes. With an average value of about $191,000 per home, the total value represented by those foreclosure actions is approximately $2.8 trillion - a far cry from $106 billion.

Let this sink in. Our government and bankers settled on $32 billion in maybe-aid to borrowers relative to $2.8 trillion of foreclosed properties many of which are being scooped up by hedge and private equity funds financed by the same big banks. Not only that. These banks have been able to access money at close to 0 percent interest courtesy of the Federal Reserve for nearly six years. Yet, rather than reducing mortgage principals with that extra cheap money, they stockpiled a record volume of $2.5 trillion in excess reserves at the Federal Reserve for which they are reaping 0.25% interest – higher interest than they give their mere mortal customers.  

The Big Three banks bagged some major headlines for their settlement figures. But the devil is in the details of who gets the money. Bank of America’s largest $16.65 billion settlement is part of $61.6 billion in government-negotiated mortgage-related penalties. Of these, only $15.6 billion is vaguely slated for borrowers.  

For Citigroup, the total value of federally settled penalties of $13.35 billion includes just $4.29 billion for borrowers. For JPM Chase, total federally-settled penalties tally $21. 76 billion. Of this, $8.2 billion might wind up with borrowers one day.

Of the $106 billion in Big Six bank settlements, just $1.68 billion are with the SEC whose job it is to protect the public from securities violations (which over-valued toxic assets comprised of fraudulent loans are in my book, but I don’t run the SEC.) 

Compare that with a litany of items of power and wealth inequality in motion. First, at the height of the government-sponsored bailout and subsidization period of late 2008 through early 2009, more than $23 trillion of loan facilities, subsidies and other aid were offered to mostly the Big Six Banks. Second, Wall Street bonuses for the time from the settlements and through their negotiation periods (2006-2013) were $221.6 billion. 

Third, the Fed has compiled a $4.4 trillion book of Treasury and mortgage securities to keep rates down and securities prices up, providing banks a metric with which to mark similar mortgage securities on their books at artificially high prices, without having to alter mortgage principals for borrowers, as part of the bargain. The Fed claims this strategy is to create jobs, not to reinvigorate banks and bank bonuses.

Finally, the total assets of the Big Six banks are valued at $9.6 trillion. On September 4^th, US regulators, including the Federal Reserve, presented their idea for protecting us from future big bank risk– something called a new liquidity rule. Under this rule, each big bank would need to stash away $100 billion in cash or 'cash-like' assets in case of emergencies, a big bank piggy bank if you will.  But, all the new rule does is require big banks to hold a whopping 1% more cash then they did before the crisis.

Banks lobbied regulators the same way they settled with the justice department, ultimately getting off the hook for potentially having to hold $200 billion instead of $100 billion, less they not be able to speculate with the extra $100 billon (they argued that extra $100 billion was for extending credit to customers).  To put this new ‘safety’ rule into perspective, consider that in 2007, before the financial crisis, JPM Chase held $40 billion in cash vs. $1.5 trillion of assets, or 2.7% of them. Under the new rule, it would need to keep $100 billion in cash vs. the $2.4 trillion assets it now holds courtesy of the government triarch of former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, former NY Federal Reserve President-cum-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and former Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, or 4%. This excercise is not about fashioning a broad financial safety net - it's just another regulatory mirage presented as reform by the powers that be.

Absent convictions, or at least a public trial where at least arguments over what consituties felony fraud and exortion can be exposed, these settlements reflect just 1% of the Big Six bank assets, all of which grew since the crisis began, on the back of government and Fed policy and support. Rather than being a determinant of justice, they represent a reinforcement of the power oligarchy that aligns government and banking elites on one side of the economy and the broader population on the other. None of this bodes well for the next crisis.

All the Presidents' Bankers Excerpt: World Bank, IMF, Globalizing Wall Street

(This excerpt first appeared on Zerohedge courtesy of Nation Books. A fascinating, relevant piece of Cold War, Financial Globalization history.)

The World Bank and the IMF: Expanding Wall Street’s Reach Worldwide

Just after the United States entered World War II, two simultaneous initiatives unfolded that would dictate elements of financing after the war, through the joint initiatives of foreign policy measures and private banking whims. Plans were already being formulated to navigate the postwar peace, especially its international power implications for finance and politics, in the background. American political leaders and scholars began considering the concept of “one world” from an economic perspective, void of divisions and imbalances. Or so the theory went.

The original plans to create a set of multinational entities that would finance one-world reconstruction and development (and ostensibly balance the world’s various economies) were conceived by two academics: John Maynard Keynes, an adviser for the British Treasury, and Harry Dexter White, an economist in the Division of Monetary Research of the US Treasury under Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau.

By the spring of 1942, White had drafted plans for a “stabilization fund” and a “Bank for Reconstruction and Development.” His concept for the fund became the seed for the International Monetary Fund. The other idea became the World Bank. But before those entities would come to life through the Bretton Woods conferences, many arguments about their makeup would take place, and millions of lives would be lost.

Keynes, White, and Power Transfer to the United States

By early 1944, nearly two-thirds of the European GNP had been devoted to war; millions of people had been slaughtered. But six months after the complete liberation of Leningrad, it was the international financial aspects of the coming peace that exercised the imagination of the policy elites. In July 1944, 730 delegates representing the forty-four Allied nations convened at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Amid picturesque mountains, hiking trails, and oppressive heat, they sat to determine the postwar economic system.

For three weeks, they debated the charter for the International Monetary Fund and discussed how the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or the “World Bank,” would operate.

White and Keynes had competed for influence over this final result for the past two years. To a large extent, the personal vehemence of each man aside, they did so as an extension of the jockeying for position between the United States and Britain as the incoming and outgoing financial superpowers. At first, virtually every American banker and politician opposed the main aspects of Keynes’s plans, particularly his idea about creating a new global currency—the unitas—that would supersede gold and the dollar.

Many subsequent histories of the Bretton Woods Conference consider the final doctrines for the IMF and World Bank as representing a clear compromise between White and Keynes. But they leaned far more toward White’s model and vision.

From the bankers’ standpoint, White’s model was more tolerable because it preserved the supremacy of the dollar. Former President James A. Garfield once said, “He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation.” But in the negotiations surrounding those Bretton Woods meetings, the mantra was more “Those who control the banks backed by the currency that dominates the world control world finance.”

While final drafts snaked through Congress after the July 1944 meetings, one key US banker maintained his public opposition to Bretton Woods. Even after it became clear that the multinational entities would be dollar-based, Chase chairman Winthrop Aldrich remained opposed to the idea. Mostly, he feared the slightest amount of competition from any uncontrollable source. Though Aldrich favored removing trade barriers, which would provide the US banks a wider field for cross-border financing, he didn’t want some supranational entity getting in the way of private lending to facilitate that trade.

In his “Proposed Currency Plan” of September 16, 1944, Aldrich slammed the accords, which he saw as a distinct challenge to the power of private banks. “The IMF,” he said, “would become a mechanism for instability rather than stability since it would encourage exchange-rate alterations.”

Like most bankers, Aldrich was fine with the World Bank taking responsibility for exchange-stabilization lending. That element would aid bankers; a supranational entity providing monies to struggling countries would bolster them sufficiently to be able to borrow more through private banks. But bankers didn’t want a fund constructed as a competing lending mechanism that could possibly take business away from them, operating in the guise of economic security.

Aldrich warned, “We shall have the shadow of stability without the substance. . . . Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the Bretton Woods proposals is that they serve as an obstacle to the immediate consideration and solution of these basic problems.”

Aldrich’s public outcry was unsettling to President Roosevelt and Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau, who knew that it was politically important to get all the main bankers’ support. Not only did they hold a solid proportion of US Treasury debt; they had become the distribution mechanisms of that debt to more and more citizens and countries. There couldn’t be an IMF without the support of private lenders, and if the US was going to be in command of such an entity from a global perspective, US bankers had to be on board. Concession to the bankers wasn’t a matter of empty appeasement but of economic supremacy.

The American Bankers Association, on which Aldrich was a board member, also wanted to restrict the IMF’s powers. Burgess, who served as chairman of the American Bankers Association and National City Bank vice chairman, was unwilling to back the Bretton Woods proposals unless White made more concessions to reinforce the supremacy of the US banks and the dollar. He would play hardball and get Morgenthau involved if he had to.

Though White refused to bow to Burgess’s requests, Congress incorporated them into the final documents. To make the bankers happy, a compromise was fashioned that restricted the IMF funds to loans offsetting short-term exchange rate fluctuations, such as when one country has a sharp and sudden shift in the value of its currency relative to another. That loophole left plenty of room for banks to supply aggressive financing to developing nations over the loosely defined longer-term. It also meant that all nations receiving short- term assistance from the IMF would likely be on the hook for more expensive debt at the hands of the bankers in tandem, or later. But in the scheme of White’s plan, this alteration was more cosmetic than substantial.

The Bretton Woods Agreement

Congress approved the Bretton Woods agreement on July 20, 1945. Twenty- seven other countries joined as well. The Soviet Union did not. It was a portent of how rapidly the world was falling into the Cold War and how rapidly the United States was forging its own foreign alliances in the postwar economy.

By the time the Bretton Woods delegates reconvened to settle the final details of the agreement at Savannah, Georgia, in March 1946, Churchill had already coined the term “the Iron Curtain” to describe the line between Communist Soviet Union and the West in his famous “Sinews of Peace” speech at Westminster College.

In addition to the growing Cold War mentality, or perhaps because of it, expectations that White would lead the IMF were squashed when the FBI alerted President Truman that White and other senior civil servants had passed secret intelligence to the Soviet Union. It’s doubtful that Truman believed the allegations; though he took White out of the bidding for the head position, White remained an executive director.

The incident served as a precedent for how the top positions at the World Bank and the IMF would be allocated along political-geographical lines. The post was offered instead to Belgian economist Camille Gutt, establishing the protocol whereby the IMF would be headed by a Western European and the World Bank by an American.

But while politics dictated the initial leadership choices, private bankers’ behavior would soon overshadow the functions of both bodies. Despite their “international” monikers, the World Bank and the IMF disproportionately served the interests of the Western European nations that were most important to the United States from the get-go. The bankers could exert their influence over both entities to expand their own enterprises.

Later, another element that reinforced this dynamic was added. Thanks to a minor technicality introduced by Truman’s Treasury secretary, John Snyder, “aid monies” to “friendly” (or large and friendly) countries would be considered “grants,” which would not show up as national debt, thereby providing the illusion of better economic health. Money granted for military operations or the friendly countries would not show up as debt either. This presented a foreign business opportunity whereby banks could provide loans at better terms to larger countries and make more money off higher interest loans to developing ones because of the disparity in their perceived debt loads.

In addition, as Martin Mayer observed in his classic book The Bankers, “the growing and unregulated Eurodollar market would become a cauldron of out-of-control debt and heady profits for US banks.” Through this market, many of the major midcentury postwar loans would be made.

Making the World Bank Work for Wall Street

Congress had established the National Advisory Council to be the “coordinating agency for United States international financial policy” and as a mechanism to direct that policy through the international financial organizations. In particular, the council dealt with the settlement of lend-lease and other wartime arrangements, including the terms of foreign loans, details of assistance programs, and the evolving policies of the IMF and World Bank. As chairman of the National Advisory Council, U.S Treasury secretary John Snyder carried a vast amount of influence over those entities, as many major decisions were discussed privately at the council meetings and decided upon there.

There was one ambitious lawyer who understood the significance of Snyder’s role. That was John McCloy, an outspoken Republican whose career would traverse many public service and private roles (including the chairmanship of Chase in the 1950s), and who had just served as assistant secretary of war under FDR’s war secretary, Henry Stimson. McCloy and Snyder would form an alliance that would alter the way the World Bank operated, and the influence that private bankers would have over it.

It was Snyder who made the final decision to appoint McCloy as head of the World Bank. McCloy, a stocky Irishman with steely eyes, had been raised by his mother in Philadelphia. He went on to become the most influential banker of the mid-twentieth century. He had been a partner at Cravath, Henderson, and de Gersdorff, a powerful Wall Street law firm, for a decade before he was tapped to enter FDR’s advisory circle.

After the war, McCloy returned to his old law firm, but his public service didn’t translate into the career trajectory that he had hoped for. Letting his impatience be known, he received many offers elsewhere, including an ambassadorship to Moscow; the presidency of his alma mater, Amherst College; and the presidency of Standard Oil. At that point, none other than Nelson Rockefeller swooped in with an enticing proposition that would allow McCloy to stay in New York and get paid well—as a partner at the family’s law firm, Milbank, Tweed, Hope, and Hadley.

The job brought McCloy the status he sought. He began a new stage of his private career at Milbank, Tweed on January 1, 1946. The firm’s most import- ant client was Chase, the Rockefeller’s family bank. But McCloy would soon return to Washington.

Truman had appointed Eugene Meyer, the seventy-year-old veteran banker and publisher of the Washington Post, to be the first head of the World Bank. But after just six months, Meyer abruptly announced his resignation on December 4, 1946. Officially, he explained he had only intended to be there for the kick-off. But privately, he admitted that his disagreements with the other directors’ more liberal views about lending had made things untenable for him. His position remained vacant for three months.

When Snyder first approached McCloy for the role in January 1947, he rejected it. But Snyder was adamant. After inviting McCloy to Washington for several meetings and traveling to New York to discuss how to accommodate his stipulations about the job—conditions that included more control over the direction of the World Bank and the right to appoint two of his friends— Snyder agreed to his terms.

Not only did Snyder approve of McCloy’s colleagues, but he also approved McCloy’s condition that World Bank bonds would be sold through Wall Street banks. This seemingly minor acquiescence would forever transform the World Bank into a securities vending machine for private banks that would profit from distributing these bonds globally and augment World Bank loans with their private ones. McCloy had effectively privatized the World Bank. The bankers would decide which bonds they could sell, which meant they would have control over which countries the World Bank would support, and for what amounts.

With that deal made, McCloy officially became president of the World Bank on March 17, 1947. His Wall Street supporters, who wanted the World Bank to lean away from the liberal views of the New Dealers, were a powerful lot. They included Harold Stanley of Morgan Stanley; Baxter Johnson of Chemical Bank; W. Randolph Burgess, vice chairman of National City Bank; and George Whitney, president of J. P. Morgan. McCloy delivered for all of them.

A compelling but overlooked aspect of McCloy’s appointment reflected the postwar elitism of the body itself. The bank’s lending program was based on a supply of funds from the countries enjoying surpluses, particularly those holding dollars. It so happened that “the only countries [with] dollars to spare [were] the United States and Canada.” As a result, all loans made would largely stem from money raised by selling the World Bank’s securities in the United States.

This gave the United States the ultimate power by providing the most initial capital, and thus obtaining control over the future direction of World Bank financial initiatives—all directives for which would, in turn, be predicated on how bankers could distribute the bonds backing those loans to investors. The World Bank would do more to expand US banking globally than any other treaty, agreement, or entity that came before it.

To solidify private banking control, McCloy continued to emphasize that “a large part of the Bank capital be raised by the sale of securities to the investment public.” McCloy’s like-minded colleagues at the World Bank—vice president Robert Garner, vice president of General Foods and former treasurer of Guaranty Trust; and Chase vice president Eugene Black, who replaced the “liberal” US director Emilio Collado—concurred with the plan that would make the World Bank an extension of Wall Street. McCloy stressed Garner and Black’s wide experience in the “distribution of securities.” In other words, they were skilled in the art of the sale, which meant getting private investors to back the whole enterprise.

The World Bank triumvirate was supported by other powerful men as well. After expressing his delight over their appointments to Snyder on March 1, 1947, Nelson Rockefeller offered the three American directors his Georgetown mansion, plus drinks, food, and servants, for a three-month period while they hammered out strategies. No wives were allowed. Neither were the other directors. This was to be an exclusive rendezvous.

It is important to note here that the original plan as agreed upon at Bretton Woods did not include handing the management and organization of the World Bank over to Wall Street. But the new World Bankers seemed almost contemptuous of the more idealistic aspects of the original intent behind Bretton Woods, that quaint old notion of balancing economic benefits across nations for the betterment of the world. Armed with a flourish of media fanfare from the main newspapers, they set about constructing a bond-manufacturing machine.

With the Cold War hanging heavily in the political atmosphere, the World Bank also became a political mechanism to thwart Communism, with funding provided only to non-Communist countries. Politics drove loan decisions: Western allies got the most money and on the best terms.