Bank CEOs Are The New Drug Lords

 

Bank CEOs are the New Drug Lords. Here is a list of some of the banks managed by Bank CEOs, aka the new Drug Lords, that were fined billions of dollars for fixing LIBOR rates and stealing money from clients: Lloyds Bank, RP Martin, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Société Générale, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Barclays, United Bank of Switzerland and Rabobank. Here is a list of some of the banks in which the Bank Lords fixed FX rates and are currently negotiating fine amounts with the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA): Citigroup, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, JP Morgan and United Bank of Switzerland. HSBC had to pay nearly $2B in fines after its Bank CEO was allegedly caught overseeing the laundering of $7B in drug money for the notoriously violent and ruthless Sinaloa drug cartel among other Mexican drug cartels and committing a wide array of other crimes like laundering $290MM from Russian mobsters that told HSBC bankers that their vast profits came from a “used car business”. I say “allegedly caught”, because every time this happens, the bank CEO, in this case, HSBC CEO Stuart Gulliver, inevitably denies ever knowing that the cartel he was overseeing was laundering dirty blood money. The Bank Lords issue these ridiculous denials despite the fact that every independent investigator not on a Bank’s payroll that investigates banks’ money laundering schemes arrive at the same conclusion as Jose Luis Marmolejo, the former head of the Mexican attorney general’s financial crimes unit: “[The money laundering] went on too long and [the bank CEOS] made too much money not to have known.” And what about HSBC’s $2B assessed fine for laundering this blood money? In response to meaningless fines like this that never change banker behavior, Martin Woods, former senior anti-money laundering officer at Wachovia bank, implored, “What does the settlement do to fight the cartels? Nothing – it doesn’t make the job of law enforcement easier and it encourages the cartels and anyone who wants to make money by laundering their blood dollars. Where’s the risk? There is none.“ That is why HSBC is not the only cartel that houses bankers who have been caught laundering blood money in recent years. Wachovia Bank, Citigroup, Banco Santander, and Bank of America bankers have all been caught leading their banks in participation of this dirty deed as well. According to Paul Campo, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s financial crimes unit, drug traffickers used Bank of America to finance their drug smuggling operations for 10 tons of cocaine and laundered drug money through Bank of America accounts in Atlanta, GA, Chicago, IL, and Brownsville, TX from 2002 to 2009.

So how do Bank Lords get away with their dirty deeds scot-free? This month,  explosive evidence contained in 47.5 hours of secret recordings from Goldman Sachs whistleblower and former New York Federal Reserve employee Carmen Segarra provides the answers we already knew. Bank Lords have been buying off judges and regulators after already buying off cops (JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon “Gifts” Largest Donation Ever to NYPD of $4.6M). When Fed regulators asked Segarra to alter minutes of meetings in which Goldman Sachs bankers’ immoral behavior was discussed in order to cover up the truth and to lie about the content of these meetings, Segarra decided to secretly record her meetings with her bosses. Below are some of the revelations contained in the transcripts of those secret recordings:

 

In one meeting Segarra attended, a Goldman employee expressed the view that “once clients are wealthy enough, certain consumer laws don’t apply to them.”

After that meeting, Segarra turned to a fellow Fed regulator and expressed how surprised she was by that statement — to which the regulator replied, “You didn’t hear that.”

When Segarra discovered multiple conflicts of interest in Goldman Sachs deals between Goldman Sachs bankers and their clients that led to deals being struck that would be the equivalent of  insider trading in the stock market and consequently discovered Goldman Sachs had no “conflict of interest” policy, her boss harassed her and demanded of Segarra, “Why do you have to say there’s no policy?”

When Segarra complained to her legal and compliance manager, Jonathon Kim, of how her discoveries were being handled and told Kim that “even when I explain to [my superiors at the New York Federal Reserve] what my evidence is, they won’t even listen”, Kim reacted in an equally morally bankrupt manner as Segarra’s superiors, advising Segarra “to be patient” and to “bite her tongue.”

So now that we know that Bank Lords buy out morally-challenged regulators, cops and judges in return for carte-blanche to continue committing crimes, rig markets to collect undeserved and unearned kickbacks, and launder drug cartel money from violent cartels that murder 10,000 people a year (the Sinaloa drug cartel), is there really even a line in the sand that separates Bank Lords and Drug Lords, or have Bank Lords become the new Drug Lords?

Let’s take a closer look into the increasingly similar worlds of drug cartel and bank cartels. The last market bubble will not be the Chinese or Thai real estate bubble, the U.S. stock market, the U.S. student loan bubble or the Social Media bubble. If we take a look at the political cartoon to the left, drawn more than a century ago in 1907, we find that Bank CEOs have been engaging in the same nefarious deeds ever since they were able to put the global banking system on the fractional reserve banking platform. Banker immorality, having multiplied and grown for over a century, will be the last bubble to pop. To illustrate what I am talking about, let me pose this singular question: “Is it possible to prove that a notoriously violent Drug Lord provided more positive value to society during his reign of terror than criminal Bank Lords like Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein & Stuart Gulliver are providing during theirs?”  If we can make a strong case for a Drug Lord providing more social value and benefits than the largest Bank CEOs in the world, all else being equal, then this is the point when we know our future is dire, especially if we refuse to collectively revolt right now against the very banking system that enslaves us.

At first you may think that my aforementioned question is a ludicrous question. After all, how can the positive social benefits provided by a violent, murderous Drug Lord possibly exceed the social benefits, as non-existent as they may be, provided by the heads of the largest bank crime syndicates? Before we dismiss this question, let’s seriously explore it and see what conclusions we may draw from this exercise.

Every large drug cartel in the world, whether it was Pablo Escobar’s infamous Colombian Medellín cartel in the 1980s or El Chapo Guzman’s notorious Mexican Sinaloa cartel of today, has required the logistical support of a sophisticated banking division not just to survive, but to truly thrive. In fact, without the support of a large global Bank CEO, the largest drug cartels in the world would quickly crash and burn and the Drug Lords would disappear. As we explain in the next section, it is simple to conclude that without the consent and help of global Bank CEOs, the world’s largest drug cartels would not be viable. In the 1980s through the early 1990s, Pablo Escobar chose the Italian Banco Ambrosiano and allegedly the Vatican Bank as well to launder billions of his dirty money, while in more contemporary times, El Chapo Guzman handpicked HSBC Bank USA as his preferred bank to launder his billions.

 

Murder and Crime: Drug Cartels v. Global Banks

During his reign of terror, Pablo Escobar ordered the murder of an estimated 4,000 people, including hundreds of police officers, judges, lawyers, journalists and anyone that dared to oppose his violent drug cartel. Escobar even allegedly tortured his own associates that proved to be disloyal to him. However, of the thousands of murders committed by Pablo’s cartel, it was likely that he did not commit the murders himself. Drug Lords are notoriously careful about committing homicidal acts that would provide the evidence prosecuting attorneys need to put them behind bars for a very long time. It is more than likely that a man like Pablo Escobar paid others to carry out his murders for him. However, Banco Ambrosiano and Vatican Bank executives, if they did indeed knowingly launder Pablo’s billions as has been alleged, share a significant measure of complicity in Pablo’s murders. Without having a bank to launder his money, there would have been no reason for Escobar to continue operating his cocaine cartel and murdering the people that opposed him. Likewise, one can successfully argue that HSBC CEO Stuart Gulliver and top HSBC bankers enabled many more murders than even Escobar. The Mexican drug cartels, whose money HSBC laundered, have murdered an estimated 80,000 people since 2006 (10,000 murders between 2008 and 2012 by the Sinaloa drug cartel alone), far more murders than Escobar’s empire ever carried out. Even though Banco Ambrosiano and HSBC Bank CEOs were not directly giving the orders to murder people, you must connect the dots between the Bank CEOs that launder drug cartel money and the crimes committed by these drug cartels because the dots can NOT be separated. Both actions are inextricably linked to one another, and without the services of money laundering willingly provided by the bank CEOs, the 80,000 murders committed by the Mexican drug cartel criminals would not occur.