The PBS Frontline documentary above, “The Untouchables,” which initially aired in 2013, investigates the reason for the 2007-2009 monetary disaster,1 and why Wall Avenue crooks escaped fraud costs associated to the sale of dangerous mortgages. As defined by PBS:2
“Are Wall Avenue executives ‘too huge to jail’? In … ‘The Untouchables,’ producer and correspondent Martin Smith … investigates why the U.S. Division of Justice did not act on credible proof that Wall Avenue knowingly packaged and bought poisonous mortgage loans to buyers, loans that introduced the U.S. and world economies to the brink of collapse.
By interviews with high prosecutors, authorities officers and business whistleblowers, FRONTLINE experiences allegations that Wall Avenue bankers ignored pervasive fraud when shopping for swimming pools of mortgage loans.”
Historic Evaluation
You may surprise why I might submit a virtually 10-year-old documentary. It’s as a result of we are able to study highly effective classes from our historical past. It’s clear that each one the bankers that have been answerable for the monetary trauma have been by no means prosecuted. Nicely, you may wager your backside greenback that we are going to have the identical end result relating to prosecuting these answerable for killing hundreds of thousands within the COVID pandemic.
So let’s dive into the historical past so you may study. Beneath, I’ve additionally included a documentary known as “All of the Plenary’s Males,” which works deeper into the query of why the Justice division didn’t maintain anybody accountable or prosecute any of the large banks.
The monetary disaster that started in 2007 and got here to a head in 2008 wasn’t the results of short-term fraud. No, the scene was set years earlier with rock-bottom rates of interest and lax mortgage lending requirements and grew worse from there, as fraudsters began cashing in on what gave the impression to be free and straightforward cash.3
Initially, the lowered rate of interest was supposed to spice up the economic system after the dot.com bubble. The tip end result, nonetheless, was the exact opposite. A housing bubble fashioned, and as all bubbles do, it will definitely burst, leaving monetary establishments holding trillions of {dollars} of nugatory subprime mortgage investments — investments that had fraudulently been bought as top-notch low-risk devices.
Deepening the catastrophe was the truth that the Securities and Change Fee in 2004 relaxed the online capital necessities for funding banks reminiscent of Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Morgan Stanley, which allowed them to leverage their investments by as a lot as 40 occasions. As defined by Investopedia:4
“The Fed began elevating charges in June 2004, and two years later the Federal funds fee had reached 5.25%, the place it remained till August 2007. There have been early indicators of misery. By 2004, U.S. homeownership had peaked at 69.2%. Then, throughout early 2006, house costs began to fall.
This induced actual hardship to many Individuals. Their properties have been price lower than they paid for them. They could not promote their homes with out owing cash to their lenders. If that they had adjustable-rate mortgages, their prices have been going up as their properties’ values have been happening.
Probably the most susceptible subprime debtors have been caught with mortgages they could not afford within the first place. As 2007 bought underway, one subprime lender after one other filed for chapter.
Throughout February and March, greater than 25 subprime lenders went underneath. In April, New Century Monetary, which specialised in sub-prime lending, filed for chapter and laid off half of its workforce.
By June, Bear Stearns stopped redemptions in two of its hedge funds, prompting Merrill Lynch to grab $800 million in property from the funds. Even these have been small issues in comparison with what was to occur within the months forward.
It grew to become obvious by August 2007 that the monetary markets couldn’t clear up the subprime disaster and that the issues have been reverberating effectively past the U.S. borders.”
The interbank market froze as banks all over the world began reporting liquidity issues and main losses from dangerous subprime investments, central banks began pumping out billions of {dollars} in loans to prop up the credit score markets, recession hit, inventory markets crumbled, funding banks collapsed and have been bought for pennies on the greenback, and residential lenders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been seized by the U.S. authorities.
The “treatment” to this epic failure was the Wall Avenue bailout, the place many banks got billions of {dollars} to remain afloat. Authorities principally purchased the poisonous property (with taxpayer {dollars}, in fact) to avoid wasting banks deemed “too huge to fail,” whereas an estimated 3.8 million Individuals have been pressured into foreclosures5 and misplaced their life financial savings in addition.
Who’s to Blame?
There’s loads of blame to go round for the 2008 monetary collapse.6 Economists prefer to blame lax mortgage lending insurance policies that permitted individuals to borrow greater than they may afford.
Others have laid blame on the ft of predatory lenders, who charmed individuals into pondering they may afford greater mortgages than have been actually possible, and funding “consultants” who bundled the dangerous mortgages and resold them to buyers as low-risk devices. Bankers, on the time, admitted that they had miscalculated the dangers.
The companies that signed off on the poisonous mortgage bundles, giving them high funding scores, additionally clearly performed a job, as did particular person buyers, who both did not do their due diligence or just resold what they knew was dangerous debt to others.
After which there’s Wall Avenue. Frontline interviews make it clear that on the coronary heart of this bubble have been grasping Wall Avenue executives with the willingness to defraud clients to pad their very own backside line.
Was Fraud Dedicated?
The query requested by Frontline is whether or not precise fraud was dedicated. Not one Wall Avenue govt was held accountable for this large disaster. Is it actually doable that not a single considered one of them dedicated provable fraud? And in the event that they did, why weren’t they held to account?
David Boies, founding father of the New York Metropolis legislation agency Boies, Schiller & Flexner, informed Frontline correspondent Martin Smith that substantial prosecutions have been certainly anticipated on the time. Throughout the halls of Washington D.C., requires prosecution have been additionally loud and clear.
Former Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., was amongst these insisting that these answerable for defrauding hardworking Individuals needed to be recognized, prosecuted and thrown in jail.
As famous by Kaufman, the monetary system of the world, not simply the U.S., was practically destroyed, and “that does not occur if there is not one thing dangerous happening.” Finally, nonetheless, no culprits have been recognized. Nobody was held accountable. Nobody went to jail. And one of many causes for this, based on the U.S. Justice Division, was as a result of “greed will not be essentially a felony offense.”
As famous by Frontline, so as to go after Wall Avenue, buyers wanted a) proof of what the bankers knew, and b) that that they had felony intent. Frontline goes on to interview a number of due diligence underwriters, individuals who do the precise quantity crunching to evaluate the chance of shopping for a given mortgage portfolio, and decide if the underwritings — the loans — are respectable.
So, if a Wall Avenue firm desires to purchase a portfolio of loans, they are going to rent due diligence underwriters to inform them whether or not or not a selected portfolio is a protected funding by manually reviewing a sampling of loans inside that pool.
Within the years main as much as the housing crash, due diligence underwriters have been instructed, allegedly by their supervisors, to not scrutinize loans too deeply or query what must have been questioned, reminiscent of whether or not a waitress might actually be making the $12,000 a month wanted to afford the mortgage. Even in instances the place outright fraud was suspected on a mortgage software, the due diligence underwriters weren’t allowed to name it that.
Fraudulent Exercise Ignored/Accepted on the Highest Ranges
Some higher-ups have been additionally noticing issues. Richard Bowen, former vp and a chief underwriter at Citigroup between 2002 and 2009, grew to become involved when he found that 60% of the mortgage loans bought by Citigroup failed to satisfy its lending coverage. By the top, the speed of faulty mortgages at Citigroup exceeded 80%.
Bowen tried to alert senior management inside Citigroup to the truth that the corporate was at nice threat, however nobody appeared to care. He was later demoted and ended up resigning. Citigroup finally pleaded responsible in a civil fraud go well with for failing to carry out fundamental due diligence from 2004 till 2010.
Frontline goes on to evaluate a few of the many Congressional hearings held, and what was found by investigators. Importantly, one Monetary Disaster Inquiry Report revealed findings from an investigation right into a due diligence firm known as Clayton Holdings, which had carried out due diligence for some two dozen banks that have been shopping for mortgages, packaging them and promoting them to buyers.
Although Clayton Holdings was discovering {that a} substantial portion of every financial institution’s holdings failed to satisfy the financial institution’s requirements for purchasing these loans, in every case, the banks accepted the loans and bought them to buyers. What’s worse, they informed buyers these have been prime, low-risk investments, after which wager in opposition to them with brief positions. How is that not felony conduct?
The findings have been referred to the Justice Division, however except for a couple of fines, no costs have been introduced. Little doubt, felony intent might be very troublesome to show, however many nonetheless really feel the Justice Division merely did not strive exhausting sufficient.
Bear Stearns Lawsuit Sums Up Credit score Disaster Fraud Scheme
That does not imply we can not work out what truly occurred. Nick Verbitsky, a documentary filmmaker, had carried out a number of interviews with Bear Stearns’ EMC Mortgage workers, who in nice element defined how the corporate was defrauding its purchasers.
After reviewing a number of hours of those tapes, investigative journalist Teri Buhl wrote an article about it. Shortly thereafter, she was contacted by legal professionals with Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, who represented a gaggle of mortgage insurers known as Monolines. They have been already engaged on a fraud case in opposition to Bear Stearns and JP Morgan Chase, and needed the whistleblowers to assist them construct their case.
The case in opposition to Bear Stearns and JP Morgan principally summed up the core of your complete 2008 credit score disaster, monetary analyst Mark Palmer informed Frontline. He believes the monetary disaster was, at its core, the results of banking establishments deliberately promoting dangerous mortgages. Palmer can be satisfied there was sufficing proof to, at naked minimal, indict most of the key gamers.
Lastly, in 2012, the New York legal professional normal filed a civil case in opposition to Bear Stearns and JP Morgan, alleging fraud. His case was largely primarily based on the work of different personal legislation corporations, together with Patterson Belknap. The query is, why could not the Justice Division get the job executed?
The Identical Crooks Are Sinking the Financial system Once more
Nobody within the high echelon was punished for his or her egregious malfeasance that led to the 2008 monetary disaster. And now, they’re manifesting one more disaster, even bigger than the final. That is what occurs once you enable criminals to proceed of their schemes with out repercussions. They get emboldened, and the crimes get bigger and bigger.
We’re now on the level the place banksters have self-selected themselves to rule the entire world, tossing notions of democracy, freedom and human dignity within the waste bin alongside the best way. As famous by Dr. Robert Malone in a current Substack article:7
“… the US taxpayers bailed out the massive banks after they crashed the worldwide economic system throughout 2007-2008 … I didn’t get a bail out. You in all probability additionally simply needed to suck it up.
However the huge banks labored with the (privately owned) Federal Reserve financial institution, US Authorities, and Blackrock and destroyed their competitors (the financial savings and mortgage business), small companies all throughout the nation, and decimated the funds of house owners who had been enticed into a number of cycles of refinancing.
In the meantime, these similar huge banks who have been largely answerable for the financial disaster basically bought free cash (paper fiat foreign money printed by the Federal Reserve and injected into the economic system through the large banks, which is de facto simply one other type of taxation — by the privately owned Federal Reserve!)
And these are the identical banks, managers and hedge funds who suppose that they’ve the knowledge, data, and expertise to handle your complete world.
They usually apparently imagine that they only want to have the ability to digitally monitor everybody’s conduct, purchases, political actions, financial institution accounts, and all different features of our lives in order that they will correctly handle us through social credit score scores, ESG scores, and so on.
These giant banks and funding funds (Larry Fink/Blackrock, State Avenue, Vanguard and so on.) appear to imagine that if they’ve all of this particular person degree information and monitoring capabilities on all of us, along with a centralized world digital foreign money, then they are going to be capable of correctly handle all of us.
So, the query. Who put the bankers in command of the world? That is loopy. It should cease. They’ve repeatedly demonstrated their incompetence, hubris, conceitedness and greed. By some means, the ability of the Billionaires, Privately Owned Central Banks, Huge ‘Funding/Hedge funds,’ and all of their cute little golf equipment and personal societies must be curtailed or (ideally, for my part) destroyed.
We have to confront the reality which has been hidden behind all of this … The world has empowered monopolists (reminiscent of Invoice Gates) and monopolies to seize far an excessive amount of energy and management. They must be dropped at heel. For the sake of all of us. For the sake of humanity. For the sake of our kids, if nothing else.”
Polycrisis of Doom Forward
The COVID pandemic has introduced into clear view the technique utilized by the globalist cabal. Bankers are key gamers on this cabal, however they are not the one ones. They create crises to feed their very own greed. The pandemic was simply the final of many such crises.
However the monetary disaster of 2008 additionally exhibits us simply how incompetent they’re. They did not have the state of affairs underneath management then, and so they haven’t got it underneath management now. So why on this planet would we settle for the “new and improved” monetary system they intend to roll out as quickly as the present monetary system is in full shambles?
It will be far worse than the final. There might be little question about that, as a result of it won’t solely grant them full management over your private funds, it will additionally give them full management over each different space of your life. This may happen after the Nice Reset within the subsequent two to 3 years as soon as the central banks implement their CBDCs (central financial institution digital currencies).
Proper now, we’re going through an unprecedented sequence of crises, as outlined in “Economy Expert Explains the Impending Polycrisis of Doom.” All of those crises — inflation, meals shortages, power shortages, impending struggle escalation — have been created for the aim of hiding the best wealth switch the world has ever seen.
As soon as that wealth switch is full, you’ll “personal nothing,” as predicted by the World Financial Discussion board, and be underneath the entire management of the greediest and fiscally most incompetent people on planet earth. There’s merely no situation through which these people will be capable of create the utopia they declare to advertise, and the earlier everybody realizes that, the earlier we are able to exchange them with individuals who even have the abilities essential to rebuild what they’ve destroyed.
How Bankers Plan to Pressure Us Into The Nice Reset
A number of international locations have deliberately crippled and/or solely dismantled their power sectors, together with Germany, France and the U.S., within the title of the Inexperienced Agenda. Because of this, Deutsche Financial institution now warns Germans might want to burn firewood to outlive the approaching winter,8 and France is popping off road lights to scale back power consumption.9
At this level, it is necessary to comprehend that the Inexperienced Agenda is simply one other software to drive us into The Nice Reset, similar to the pandemic was used to weaponize Massive Pharma in preparation for a world biosecurity community.
As defined by City Corridor, one of many methods huge banks are plotting to drive this transition is by implementing Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores to companies and particular person funding accounts alike:10
“If banks are allowed to collectively determine to cease financing any group of individuals they need, primarily based not on monetary considerations however ideological concerns, then banks and their Nice Reset allies can have, in impact, near-total management over society — particularly if they start to tie lending selections to an unlimited ESG system …
The time has come for an enormous populist revolt in opposition to the Nice Reset, one that may hopefully have the identical success because the grassroots motion in opposition to Widespread Core did underneath the Obama administration. The destiny of the free world might very effectively rely upon it.”
Perceive the Recreation in Britain
In the meantime, management within the U.Okay. is crumbling, and the World Financial Discussion board is preventing to get considered one of its members to take former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s place. As famous by Maajid Nawaz,11 the British management contest is all about securing a frontrunner who will usher in The Nice Reset:
“Division has been sown after Brexit. Civil norms has [sic] been crushed after COVID. The ‘technique of manufacturing’ have been disrupted after struggle in Ukraine. What comes subsequent is the aim all of them served: The Nice Reset.
Mixed, these cumulative crises of monumental fiscal suicide, unprecedented provide chain disruption and meals and power shortages are at risk of inflicting the collapse of the worldwide monetary system, sparking actually unprecedented international uprisings. In reality, we’re already witnessing this.
The collapse of the worldwide monetary system now seems inevitable. It truly collapsed in 2008. What has proceeded since then is merely the execution of a rigorously deliberate, if not vicious, managed demolition.
The demolition is orchestrated by World Financial Discussion board (WEF) institution globalists in order that their very own managed opposition might steer this international reset in the direction of additional centralized tyranny, versus permitting it to allow decentralized democracy.
Common resistance will now be used as a pretext to clamp down and droop liberty by rolling out militarized forces to subjugate the very conveniently rebelling residents.
That is how the worldwide monetary institution seeks to journey the present international revolution so as to retain their energy. We’re on the finish of a pure generational cycle: a historic turning. We’re witnessing the ‘reset’ a part of Klaus Schwab’s Nice Reset. They’ve informed us what they plan to do. After the reset they are going to search to ‘Construct Again Higher’ so as to create their New World Order …
The above is the correct context for why the globalist British institution turned in opposition to their very own frontman and PM Boris Johnson.
This permits for the impression that these answerable for any previous injustices through the Brexit, COVID and Ukraine struggle chapters look like sufficiently scapegoated within the eyes of the hapless public, whereas the following chapter of their desired international transition to technocracy is ushered in underneath our very noses by a brand new, fresh-faced acolyte …
The globalists’ subsequent chapter requires an unscathed PM — alive within the public creativeness for handing out free money to the general public — who is ready to steer the collapse of the monetary system and usher in international banking’s deliberate technocracy: social credit score scores and Central Banking Digital Coupons (CBDCs).”
The central banking cabal and its many allies have infiltrated governments and establishments the world over for a lot of a long time, slowly turning the programs in opposition to us. We are actually within the ultimate chapter of their technocratic takeover. All the pieces factors to them succeeding.
What You Can Do
Nonetheless, there’s a wild card: The human spirit and its inherent love of freedom. If sufficient of us refuse to simply accept the “new world” these crooks are proposing, we should have an opportunity to show this catastrophe round and actually rebuild one thing higher.
It is crucial that you just proceed to organize for the inevitable monetary disaster and develop into as impartial and resilient as doable. This yr I’ve supplied many articles on how one can put together, and you’ll look them up on my Substack site.
It’ll even be important to develop into as wholesome as doable. A recent study confirmed that 93% of U.S. adults are metabolically unhealthy, and people stats have been 4 years previous. It’s probably that quantity is now over 95%. You wish to be the 1 individual in 20 that’s wholesome. Make it your purpose to be in that group.
That is so necessary that I’m within the strategy of devising a ballot to seek out out what that proportion is for our subscribers. It will be a bit extra correct as I would come with metrics like vitamin D ranges, solar publicity and train. So, begin getting metabolically match now in the event you aren’t so you may take part within the upcoming ballot.
