QE Infinity: What Is It Really About?

Ellen Brown

QE3, the Federal Reserve’s third round of quantitative easing, is so open-ended that it is being called QE Infinity.  Doubts about its effectiveness are surfacing even on Wall Street.  The Financial Times reports:

Among the trading rooms and floors of Connecticut and Mayfair [in London], supposedly sophisticated money managers are raising big questions about QE3 — and whether, this time around, the Fed is not risking more than it can deliver.

Which raises the question, what is it intended to deliver?  As suggested in an earlier article here, QE3 is not likely to reduce unemployment, put money in the pockets of consumers, reflate the money supply, or significantly lower interest rates for homeowners, as alleged.  It will not achieve those things because it consists of no more than an asset swap on bank balance sheets.  It will not get dollars to businesses or consumers on Main Street.

So what is the real purpose of this exercise?  Catherine Austin Fitts recently posted a revealing article on that enigma.  She says the true goal of QE Infinity is to unwind the toxic mortgage debacle, in a way that won’t bankrupt pensioners or start another war:

The challenge for Ben Bernanke and the Fed governors since the 2008 bailouts has been how to deal with the backlog of fraud – not just fraudulent mortgages and fraudulent mortgage securities but the derivatives piled on top and the politics of who owns them, such as sovereign nations with nuclear arsenals, and how they feel about taking massive losses on AAA paper purchased in good faith.

On one hand, you could let them all default. The problem is the criminal liabilities would drive the global and national leadership into factionalism that could turn violent, not to mention what such defaults would do to liquidity in the financial system. Then there is the fact that a great deal of the fraudulent paper has been purchased by pension funds. So the mark down would hit the retirement savings of the people who have now also lost their homes or equity in their homes. The politics of this in an election year are terrifying for the Administration to contemplate.

How can the Fed make the investors whole without wreaking havoc on the economy?  Using its QE tool, it can quietly buy up toxic mortgage-backed securities (MBS) with money created on a computer screen.

Good for the Investors and Wall Street, But What about the Homeowners and Main Street?

 The investors will get their money back, the banks will reap their unearned profits, and Fannie and Freddie will get bailed out and wound down.  But what about the homeowners?  They too bought in good faith, and now they are either underwater or are losing or have lost their homes.  Will they too get a break?  Fitts says we’ll have to watch and see.  Perhaps there was a secret agreement to share in the spoils.  If so, we should see a wave of write-downs and write-offs aimed at relieving the beleaguered homeowners.

A nice idea, but somehow it seems unlikely.  The odds are that there was no secret deal.  The banks will make out like bandits as they have before.  The never-ending backdoor bailout will keep feeding their profit margins, and the banks will keep biting the hands of the taxpayers who feed them.

How can Wall Street be made to play well with others and share in their winnings?  In a July 2012 article in The New York Times titled “Wall Street Is Too Big to Regulate,” Gar Alperovitz observed:

With high-paid lobbyists contesting every proposed regulation, it is increasingly clear that big banks can never be effectively controlled as private businesses.  If an enterprise (or five of them) is so large and so concentrated that competition and regulation are impossible, the most market-friendly step is to nationalize its functions. . . .

Nationalization isn’t as difficult as it sounds.  We tend to forget that we did, in fact, nationalize General Motors in 2009; the government still owns a controlling share of its stock.  We also essentially nationalized the American International Group, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, and the government still owns roughly 60 percent of its stock.

Bailout or Receivership?

Nationalization also isn’t as radical as it sounds.  If nationalization is too loaded a word, try “bankruptcy and receivership.”  Bankruptcy, receivership and nationalization are what are SUPPOSED to happen when very large banks become insolvent; and if the toxic MBS had been allowed to default, some very large banks would have wound up insolvent.

Nationalization is one of three options the FDIC has when a bank fails.  The other two are closure and liquidation, or merger with a healthy bank.  Most failures are resolved using the merger option, but for very large banks, nationalization is sometimes considered the best choice for taxpayers.  The leading U.S. example was Continental Illinois, the seventh-largest bank in the country when it failed in 1984.  The FDIC wiped out existing shareholders, infused capital, took over bad assets, replaced senior management, and owned the bank for about a decade, running it as a commercial enterprise.  In 1994, it was sold to a bank that is now part of Bank of America.

Insolvent banks should be put through receivership and bankruptcy before the government takes them over.  That would mean making the creditors bear the losses, standing in line and taking whatever money was available, according to seniority.  But that would put the losses on the pension funds, the Chinese, and other investors who bought supposedly-triple-A securities in good faith—the result the Fed is evidently trying to avoid.

How to resolve this dilemma?  How about combining these two solutions?  The money supply is still SHORT by $3.9 trillion from where it was in 2008 before the banking crisis hit, so the Fed has plenty of room to expand the money supply.  (The shortfall is in the shadow banking system, which used to be reflected in M3, the part of the money supply the Fed no longer reports.  The shadow banking system is composed of non-bank financial institutions that do not accept deposits, including money market funds, repo markets, hedge funds, and structured investment vehicles.)

Rather than a never-ending windfall for the banks, however, these maneuvers need to be made contingent on some serious quid pro quo for the taxpayers.  If either the Fed or the banks won’t comply, Congress could nationalize either or both.  The Fed is composed of twelve branches, all of which are 100% owned by the banks in their districts; and its programs have consistently been designed to benefit the banks—particularly the large Wall Street banks—rather than Main Street.  The Federal Reserve Act that gives the Fed its powers is an act of Congress; and what Congress hath wrought, it can undo.

Only if the banking system is under the control of the people can it be expected to serve the people.  As Seumas Milne observed in a July 2012 article in the UK Guardian:

Only if the largest banks are broken up, the part-nationalised outfits turned into genuine public investment banks, and new socially owned and regional banks encouraged can finance be made to work for society, rather than the other way round.  Private sector banking has spectacularly failed – and we need a democratic public solution.

_______________________

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute.  In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are http://WebofDebt.com, http://EllenBrown.com, andhttp://PublicBankingInstitute.org.

The Libor Scandal In Full Perspective

Global Research
Paul Craig Roberts

The article about the Libor scandal, coauthored with Nomi Prins, received much attention, with Internet repostings, foreign translation, and video interviews. To further clarify the situation, this article brings to the forefront implications that might not be obvious to those
without insider experience and knowledge.

The price of Treasury bonds is supported by the Federal Reserve’s large purchases. The Federal Reserve’s purchases are often misread as demand arising from a “flight to quality” due to concern about the EU sovereign debt problem and possible failure of the euro.
Another rationale used to explain the demand for Treasuries despite their negative yield is the “flight to safety.” A 2% yield on a Treasury bond is less of a negative interest rate than the yield of a few basis points on a bank CD, and the US government, unlike banks, can use
its central bank to print the money to pay off its debts.

It is possible that some investors purchase Treasuries for these reasons. However, the “safety” and “flight to quality” explanations could not exist if interest rates were rising or were expected to rise. The Federal Reserve prevents the rise in interest rates and decline in bond prices, which normally result from continually issuing new debt in enormous quantities at negative interest rates, by announcing that it has a low interest rate policy and will purchase bonds to keep bond prices high. Without this Fed policy, there could be no flight to safety or quality.

It is the prospect of ever lower interest rates that causes investors to purchase bonds that do not pay a real rate of interest. Bond purchasers make up for the negative interest rate by the rise in price in the bonds caused by the next round of low interest rates. As the Federal Reserve and the banks drive down the interest rate, the issued bonds rise in value, and their purchasers enjoy capital gains.

As the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England are themselves fixing interest rates at historic lows in order to mask the insolvency of their respective banking systems, they naturally do not object that the banks themselves contribute to the success of this policy by fixing the LIbor rate and by selling massive amounts of interest rate swaps, a way of shorting interest rates and driving them down or preventing them from rising.

The lower is Libor, the higher is the price or evaluations of floating-rate debt instruments, such as CDOs, and thus the stronger the banks’ balance sheets appear.

Does this mean that the US and UK financial systems can only be kept afloat by fraud that harms purchasers of interest rate swaps, which include municipalities advised by sellers of interest rate swaps, and those with saving accounts?

The answer is yes, but the Libor scandal is only a small part of the interest rate rigging scandal. The Federal Reserve itself has been rigging interest rates. How else could debt issued in profusion be bearing negative interest rates?

As villainous as they might be, Barclays bank chief executive Bob Diamond, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs are not the main villains. The main villains are former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs chairman Robert Rubin, who pushed Congress for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and the sponsors of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. Glass-Steagall was put in place in 1933 in order to prevent the kind of financial excesses that produced the current ongoing financial crisis.

President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, presented the removal of all constraints on financial chicanery as “financial modernization.” Taking restraints off of banks was part of the hubristic response to “the end of history.” Capitalism had won the struggle with socialism and communism. Vindicated capitalism no longer needed its concessions to social welfare and regulation that capitalism used in order to compete with socialism.

The constraints on capitalism could now be thrown off, because markets were self-regulating as Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, among many, declared. It was financial deregulation–the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the removal of limits on debt leverage, the absence of regulation of OTC derivatives, the removal of limits on speculative positions in future markets–that caused the ongoing financial crisis. No doubt but that JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and others were after maximum profits by hook or crook, but their opportunity came from the neoconservative triumphalism of “democratic capitalism’s” historical victory over alternative socio-politico-economic systems.

US Fed as Credit Card and Consumer Watch Dog - When Did this Happen?

The Daily Bell

Credit Card Tips from the Federal Reserve Board: To learn more about factors to consider when applying for or using a credit card, visit the website of the Federal Reserve Board at http://www.federalreserve.gov/creditcard. – DB Reader submission via a Marriot Rewards Card invitation

Dominant Social Theme: The Fed cares for you!

Free-Market Analysis: A close friend of ours just received a promo advertising a "Marriot Rewards Cards." She was surprised to find, upon reading the "terms and conditions," a note suggesting a visit to a US Federal Reserve website that would educate her about credit cards generally.

She found the involvement of the Federal Reserve puzzling. We did, too. It wasn't an involvement that we were conscious of – though the Fed "consumer help" website claims to have been in business since 2007. (Should we been? Perhaps so, but we can't keep track of everything!) Here's the "About" statement at the Fed site:

Federal Reserve Consumer Help, launched in 2007, is a centralized operation of the Federal Reserve System that assists consumers in filing complaints involving financial institutions. Our mission is to promptly and courteously guide consumers with complaints about financial institutions to the appropriate agency for help (see how we move a complaint through the process). We also respond to consumer questions about federal consumer protection laws and regulations. You can trust us to value the privacy and confidentiality of any information you give us. Our web privacy policy is posted.

While we were caught by surprise by the ambition of such Fed "help," we were not surprised by the larger ambition. We figure it's part of an obvious elite dominant social theme – an attempt to make the Federal Reserve increasingly seem like part of the US government.

In fact, this has been the brief of those who run the Fed from the beginning. The Fed is a mercantilist entity, deriving its power and authority from a virtual monopoly granted to it by Congress. To maintain that the Fed is a purely private enterprise is just as false as to argue it is a purely public one.

The impulse of those running the Fed is to combine it rhetorically with the federal government whenever possible. That's why this website is a discouraging one.

We believe the Fed should be shut down as soon as possible. Those running the Fed have different ideas. They want to pretend that there is NO space between this entity and the federal government. They want to retain their private status while investing themselves with the absolute authority of the modern state.

The Fed's top honchos are not alone in this effort. Visiting Kenya recently, we saw signs posted at banks that were attributed directly to the Bank for International Settlements warning people against certain kinds of fraud. To see memos directly from the BIS to casual consumers of bank products was startling, to say the least.

The impulse is the same because the same people run both facilities. The Federal Reserve is the most powerful central bank in the world due to the dollar reserve currency it prints – and that others must hold if they wish to purchase oil.

The BIS is perhaps even more powerful than the Fed as it is an aggregator of central banks – the facility that is in charge of the policies and practices of these tremendously powerful entities.
Both the BIS and the Fed – and about 100 or more other central banks – are basically controlled by the Anglosphere power elite, based out of the City of London with various arms in Tel Aviv, the US, the Vatican and Brussels.

It is this power elite that wants to create world government and is funding this extraordinary push via the trillions that central banks throw off.

The Fed has no brief that we know about when it comes to being a consumer watchdog. It is run as a private entity and is basically a bank supervisor, though its brief is constantly expanding. We checked with several sources to see if the Fed had some sort of consumer protection brief of which we were unaware. But it doesn't, so far as we can tell.

Bank of America Derivatives Dumped on U.S. Taxpayers

Bloomberg
Bob Ivry, Hugh Son and Christine Harper

Bank of America, which
got a $45 billion bailout
during the financial
crisis, had $1.04 trillion
in deposits as of midyear,
ranking it second
among U.S. firms.

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by counterparties, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.

Three years after taxpayers rescued some of the biggest U.S. lenders, regulators are grappling with how to protect FDIC- insured bank accounts from risks generated by investment-banking operations. Bank of America, which got a $45 billion bailout during the financial crisis, had $1.04 trillion in deposits as of midyear, ranking it second among U.S. firms.

“The concern is that there is always an enormous temptation to dump the losers on the insured institution,” said William Black, professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former bank regulator. “We should have fairly tight restrictions on that.”

Accommodating Clients

Jerry Dubrowski, a spokesman for Charlotte, North Carolina- based Bank of America, declined to comment on the transfers or the firm’s discussions with regulators. The company “continues to accommodate the needs of our clients through each of our multiple trading entities, including Bank of America NA,” he said in an e-mailed statement, referring to the company’s deposit-taking unit.
Barbara Hagenbaugh, a Fed spokeswoman, said she couldn’t discuss supervision of specific institutions. Greg Hernandez, an FDIC spokesman, declined to comment.

Bank of America posted a $6.2 billion third-quarter profit today, compared with a loss of $7.3 billion a year earlier, as credit quality improved and the firm booked one-time accounting gains. The lender rose 7.3 percent to $6.47 at 1:54 p.m. in New York trading, making it the day’s best performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Credit-default swaps on Bank of America eased 10 basis points to a mid-price of 380 as of 11:49 a.m. in New York, according to broker Phoenix Partners Group.

NYT: Tim Geithner Convinced NY AG Andrew Cuomo To Back Off Wall Street Prosecutions

It's long past time for jail sentences and orange jumpsuits.

Source - New York Times

It is a question asked repeatedly across America: why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?

Answering such a question — the equivalent of determining why a dog did not bark — is anything but simple. But a private meeting in mid-October 2008 between Timothy F. Geithner, then-president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s attorney general at the time, illustrates the complexities of pursuing legal cases in a time of panic.

At the Fed, which oversees the nation’s largest banks, Mr. Geithner worked with the Treasury Department on a large bailout fund for the banks and led efforts to shore up the American International Group, the giant insurer. His focus: stabilizing world financial markets.

Mr. Cuomo, as a Wall Street enforcer, had been questioning banks and rating agencies aggressively for more than a year about their roles in the growing debacle, and also looking into bonuses at A.I.G.

Friendly since their days in the Clinton administration, the two met in Mr. Cuomo’s office in Lower Manhattan, steps from Wall Street and the New York Fed. According to three people briefed at the time about the meeting, Mr. Geithner expressed concern about the fragility of the financial system.

His worry, according to these people, sprang from a desire to calm markets, a goal that could be complicated by a hard-charging attorney general.

Asked whether the unusual meeting had altered his approach, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, now New York’s governor, said Wednesday evening that “Mr. Geithner never suggested that there be any lack of diligence or any slowdown.” Mr. Geithner, now the Treasury secretary, said through a spokesman that he had been focused on A.I.G. “to protect taxpayers.”

Whether prosecutors and regulators have been aggressive enough in pursuing wrongdoing is likely to long be a subject of debate. All say they have done the best they could under difficult circumstances.

But several years after the financial crisis, which was caused in large part by reckless lending and excessive risk taking by major financial institutions, no senior executives have been charged or imprisoned, and a collective government effort has not emerged. This stands in stark contrast to the failure of many savings and loan institutions in the late 1980s. In the wake of that debacle, special government task forces referred 1,100 cases to prosecutors, resulting in more than 800 bank officials going to jail. Among the best-known: Charles H. Keating Jr., of Lincoln Savings and Loan in Arizona, and David Paul, of Centrust Bank in Florida.

Former prosecutors, lawyers, bankers and mortgage employees say that investigators and regulators ignored past lessons about how to crack financial fraud.

As the crisis was starting to deepen in the spring of 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation scaled back a plan to assign more field agents to investigate mortgage fraud. That summer, the Justice Department also rejected calls to create a task force devoted to mortgage-related investigations, leaving these complex cases understaffed and poorly funded, and only much later established a more general financial crimes task force.

Leading up to the financial crisis, many officials said in interviews, regulators failed in their crucial duty to compile the information that traditionally has helped build criminal cases. In effect, the same dynamic that helped enable the crisis — weak regulation — also made it harder to pursue fraud in its aftermath.

A more aggressive mind-set could have spurred far more prosecutions this time, officials involved in the S.&L. cleanup said.

“This is not some evil conspiracy of two guys sitting in a room saying we should let people create crony capitalism and steal with impunity,” said William K. Black, a professor of law at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and the federal government’s director of litigation during the savings and loan crisis. “But their policies have created an exceptional criminogenic environment. There were no criminal referrals from the regulators. No fraud working groups. No national task force. There has been no effective punishment of the elites here.”

Even civil actions by the government have been limited. The Securities and Exchange Commission adopted a broad guideline in 2009 — distributed within the agency but never made public — to be cautious about pushing for hefty penalties from banks that had received bailout money. The agency was concerned about taxpayer money in effect being used to pay for settlements, according to four people briefed on the policy but who were not authorized to speak publicly about it.

To be sure, Wall Street’s role in the crisis is complex, and cases related to mortgage securities are immensely technical. Criminal intent in particular is difficult to prove, and banks defend their actions with documents they say show they operated properly.

But legal experts point to numerous questionable activities where criminal probes might have borne fruit and possibly still could.

Investigators, they argue, could look more deeply at the failure of executives to fully disclose the scope of the risks on their books during the mortgage mania, or the amounts of questionable loans they bundled into securities sold to investors that soured.

Prosecutors also could pursue evidence that executives knowingly awarded bonuses to themselves and colleagues based on overly optimistic valuations of mortgage assets — in effect, creating illusory profits that were wiped out by subsequent losses on the same assets. And they might also investigate whether executives cashed in shares based on inside information, or misled regulators and their own boards about looming problems.

Merrill Lynch, for example, understated its risky mortgage holdings by hundreds of billions of dollars. And public comments made by Angelo R. Mozilo, the chief executive of Countrywide Financial, praising his mortgage company’s practices were at odds with derisive statements he made privately in e-mails as he sold shares; the stock subsequently fell sharply as the company’s losses became known.

Executives at Lehman Brothers assured investors in the summer of 2008 that the company’s financial position was sound, even though they appeared to have counted as assets certain holdings pledged by Lehman to other companies, according to a person briefed on that case. At Bear Stearns, the first major Wall Street player to collapse, a private litigant says evidence shows that the firm’s executives may have pocketed revenues that should have gone to investors to offset losses when complex mortgage securities soured.

But the Justice Department has decided not to pursue some of these matters — including possible criminal cases against Mr. Mozilo of Countrywide and Joseph J. Cassano, head of Financial Products at A.I.G., the business at the epicenter of that company’s collapse. Mr. Cassano’s lawyers said that documents they had given to prosecutors refuted accusations that he had misled investors or the company’s board. Mr. Mozilo’s lawyers have said he denies any wrongdoing.

Among the few exceptions so far in civil action against senior bankers is a lawsuit filed last month against top executives of Washington Mutual, the failed bank now owned byJPMorgan Chase. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation sued Kerry K. Killinger, the company’s former chief executive, and two other officials, accusing them of piling on risky loans to grow faster and increase their compensation. The S.E.C. also extracted a $550 million settlement from Goldman Sachs for a mortgage security the bank built, though the S.E.C. did not name executives in that case.

Representatives at the Justice Department and the S.E.C. say they are still pursuing financial crisis cases, but legal experts warn that they become more difficult as time passes.

“If you look at the last couple of years and say, ‘This is the big-ticket prosecution that came out of the crisis,’ you realize we haven’t gotten very much,” said David A. Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s consistent with what many people were worried about during the crisis, that different rules would be applied to different players. It goes to the whole perception that Wall Street was taken care of, and Main Street was not.”

Continue reading at the New York Times...

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At issue is Tim Geithner's criminal behavior in orchestrating the AIG bailout to favor Goldman Sachs through counterparty payouts at par, and then the massive cover-up