From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/economy/156352/wall_street%27s_biggest_heist_yet_how_the_high_wizards_of_finance_gutted_our_schools_and_cities/
The complex machinations that pitted county treasurers against the deceptive wizards of Wall Street.
By Pam Martens
July 17, 2012
July 17, 2012
Wall
Street banks have hollowed out our communities with fraudulently sold
mortgages and illegal foreclosures and settled the crimes for pennies on
the dollar. They’ve set back property records to the early 1900s,
skipping the recording of deeds in county registry offices and using
their own front called MERS. They lobbied to kill fixed pension plans
and then shaved a decade of growth off our 401(K)s with exorbitant fees,
rigged research and trading for the house.
When much
of Wall Street collapsed in 2008 as a direct result of their corrupt
business model, their pals in Washington used the public purse to
resuscitate the same corrupt financial model – allowing even greater
depositor concentration at JPMorgan and Bank of America through
acquisitions of crippled firms.
And now, Wall Street
may get away with the biggest heist of the public purse in the history
of the world. You know it’s an unprecedented crime when the
conservative Economist magazine sums up the situation with a one word headline: “Banksters.”
It
has been widely reported that Libor, the interest rate benchmark that
was rigged by a banking cartel, impacted $10 trillion in consumer
loans. Libor stands for London Interbank Offered Rate and is supposed
to be a reliable reflection of the rate at which banks are lending to
each other. Based on the average of that rate, after highs and lows are
discarded, the Libor index is used as a key index for setting loan
rates around the world, including adjustable rate mortgages, credit card
payments and student loans here in the U.S.
But
what’s missing from the debate are the most diabolical parts of the
scam: how a rigged Libor rate was used to defraud municipalities across
America, inflate bank stock prices, and potentially rig futures markets
around the world. All while the top U.S. bank regulator dealt with the
problem by fiddling with a memo to the Bank of England.
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