How To Run Drug Money: Be A (Large) Bank
by ilene - June 30th, 2010 3:32 pm
How To Run Drug Money: Be A (Large) Bank
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Courtesy of Karl Denninger of The Market Ticker
Oh, so the banks don’t just bilk investors and rip off municipalities, they also help Mexican Gangs run drugs?
This was no isolated incident. Wachovia, it turns out, had made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers. Wells Fargo & Co., which bought Wachovia in 2008, has admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report suspected money laundering by narcotics traffickers — including the cash used to buy four planes that shipped a total of 22 tons of cocaine.
The admission came in an agreement that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia struck with federal prosecutors in March, and it sheds light on the largely undocumented role of U.S. banks in contributing to the violent drug trade that has convulsed Mexico for the past four years.
That’s nice. Guns and ammunition cost money – lots of it. Getting that money requires some means of transporting it and "laundering" it. For that, we turn to the largest financial institutions in the world, who, it turns out, have never been prosecuted for these felonious acts.
“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” says Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case.
Blatant disregard? Sounds like something you’d say at a sentencing hearing, right? Well, no….
No big U.S. bank — Wells Fargo included — has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Instead, the Justice Department settles criminal charges by using deferred-prosecution agreements, in which a bank pays a fine and promises not to break the law again.
‘No Capacity to Regulate’
Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory.
Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets, says Jack Blum, a U.S. Senate investigator for 14 years and a consultant to international banks and brokerage firms on money laundering.
The theory is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for big banks, Blum says.
“There’s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they’re too big to be threatened with failure,” Blum says. “They seem to be willing to do anything that improves their bottom line,
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Big Bank Usury: Warren on Whitehouse Amendment
by ilene - May 17th, 2010 3:39 pm
Big Bank Usury: Warren on Whitehouse Amendment
Courtesy of Lynn Parramore at New Deal 2.0
Aristotle called usury the “most hated form” of wealth-accumulation. Dante sent practitioners to the seventh circle of hell. The Qur’an proposes that usurers are controlled by the devil’s influence, and we’ve all heard how Jesus, that avatar non-violence, was stirred to a round of ass-kicking when he found the money lenders in Herod’s temple.
Screwing the poor through usury has been considered an abomination throughout human civilization – a disease of the body politic that sickens people morally and economically.
For two centuries, American states had the power to enforce usury laws against any lender doing business with its citizens. But in 1978, a Supreme Court case transformed the world of lending. In Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp., the Supreme Court changed the interpretation of the National Bank Act of 1863 so that states could no longer regulate interest rates on nationally-chartered banks. BINGO! Big banks quickly saw a Big Opportunity. They would now be able to dodge interest rate restrictions by reinventing themselves as “national banks” and hightailing it to states with weak consumer protections. A small number of states chucked interest rate caps in order to lure credit card business and related tax revenue.
Thanks to that unfortunate 1978 decision, credit card divisions of major banks are based in just a few states, while local banks struggle with unfair out-of-state competition fight to stay afloat. Meanwhile, consumers across the country are gouged by stratospheric interest rates and fees.
An amendment submitted by Senator Whitehouse and cosponsored by Senators Cochran, Merkley, Durbin, Sanders, Levin, Burris, Franken, Brown (OH), Menendez, Leahy, Webb, Casey, Wyden, Reed, Udall (CO), and Begich aims to change all this by restoring state powers to protect their citizens with interest rate limits on lending done within the state.
Here’s a breakdown of what the amendment would accomplish:
- Restore to the states the ability to enforce interest rate caps against out-of-state lenders.
- By Amending the Truth in Lending Act, cover all consumer lenders, no matter what their legal form, minimizing the opportunity for gaming by changing charter type.
- Become effective twelve months after enactment – giving state legislatures time to evaluate and update usury statutes.
- Level the playing field so that intrastate lenders like community banks, local retailers, and credit unions are no
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.