Sun 2010-07-25 16:55 EDT

Carbon trading a front for money-laundering: experts - Hindustan Times

Agence France-Presse

Organised crime gangs are using carbon emissions trading schemes as fronts for money-laundering,experts warned on Friday. The experts who attended a meeting of the Asia Pacific Money Laundering Group (APG) said crime syndicates are resorting to new methods to hide their illegal proceeds. One "issue that we've looked at closely is money laundering associated with carbon emissions trading schemes", APG executive secretary Gordon Hook told a news conference after the five-day meeting. Hook did not elaborate on how crime syndicates were using carbon emissions trading schemes to launder money...

Carbon Trading; experts; front; Hindustan Times; money laundering.

naked capitalism Sat 2010-07-24 16:34 EDT

Summer Rerun: ``Unwinding the Fraud for Bubbles''

Tanta at Calculated Risk

This post first appeared on March 27, 2007. ...Telling the difference between the victims and the victimizers, the predators and the prey, and the fraudulent and the defrauded, is getting a lot harder when you have borrowers not required to make down payments able to lie about their incomes in order to buy a home the seller is overpricing in order to take an illegal kickback. The lender is getting defrauded, but the lender is the one who offered the zero-down stated-income program, delegated the drawing up of the legal documents and the final disbursement of funds to a fee-for-service settlement agent, and didn't do enough due diligence on the appraisal to see the inflation of the value. Legally, of course, there's a difference between lender as co-conspirator and lender as mark, utterly failing to exercise reasonable caution, but it's small comfort when the losses rack up. With tongue only partially in cheek, I'm about to suggest a third category of fraud: Fraud for Bubbles...My theory of the Fraud for Bubbles is, in a nutshell, that it isn't that lenders forgot that there are risks. It is that the miserable dynamic of unsound lending puffing up unsustainable real estate prices, which in turn kept supporting even more unsound lending, simply masked fraud problems sufficiently, and delayed the eventual ``feedback'' mechanisms sufficiently, that rampant fraud came to seem ``affordable.'' So many of the business practices that help fraud succeed--thinning backoffice staff, hiring untrained temps to replace retiring (and pricey) veterans, speeding up review processes, cutting back on due diligence sampling, accepting more and more copies, faxes, and phone calls instead of original ink-signed documents--threw off so much money that no one wanted to believe that the eventual cost of the fraud would eat it all up, and possibly more...

bubble; fraud; naked capitalism; summer reruns; unwinds.

zero hedge Fri 2010-04-23 20:02 EDT

How Lehman, With The Fed's Complicity, Created Another Illegal Precedent In Abusing The Primary Dealer Credit Facility

Five months ago, Zero Hedge observed the nuances of the Federal Reserve's Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) and concluded that this artificial liquidity boosting construct was nothing more than yet another scam to allow banks to extract ever more money from taxpayers, with the complicit blessing of the Federal Reserve Board Of New York (as the original piece also provided an in-depth discussion of the triparty repo market which is now a parallel to the buzzword of the day in the form of Lehman's "Repo 105" off balance sheet contraption, it should serve as a useful refresher course to anyone who wishes to understand why while Repo 105 with its $50 billion in liability contingency may have been an issue, the true Repo market, with over $3 trillion of likely just as toxic assets, is where the real pain in the future will come from). The PDCF would allow assets of declining and even inexistent value to be pledged as collateral, thus making sure that taxpayer cash was funneled into sham institutions holding predominantly toxic assets, and whose viability was and is limited, yet still is backed by the Fed, which to this day continues to pour our money into them. Today, with a tip from the NYT's Eric Dash, we demonstrate just how grossly negligent the Federal Reserve was when it came to Lehman's abuse of the PDCF, and how the trail of slime of Lehman's increasingly obvious manipulation of its books goes to the very top of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and its then governor - a very much complicit Tim Geithner...

abuse; created; Fed's Complicity; Illegal Precedent; Lehman; Primary Dealers Credit Facility; Zero Hedge.

THE PRAGMATIC CAPITALIST Wed 2010-04-07 18:22 EDT

THE ENRON BANKING SYSTEM

TPC

``Panics do not destroy capital -- they merely reveal the extent to which it has previously been destroyed by its betrayal in hopelessly unproductive works'' -- John Mills ...We should draw a distinct line in the sand between banks and diverse risk taking firms. There are always going to be Enron's in the economy, but why should we allow our entire banking sector to mirror Enron? Taking a 30,000 foot risk management view I say something must be done to ensure these banks can never do this again. Turn banks into true banks. Hedging and exotic business models are fine. Just don't commingle them under the same umbrella as a deposit taking ``bank''. With that, a few ideas come to mind: * Our banking system should be aligned with the goals of the nation to help ``grease'' the wheels of the economic growth engine of the United States. Banks should be more like utilities and less like hedge funds. Otherwise, banking becomes counter-productive and potentially destructive. * Banks should not be allowed to exact onerous fees on the public or enact a business model which is inherently dependent on driving their customers deeper and deeper into debt. This undermines the entire goal of productive economic growth. * ``Banks'' should be true lending institutions. Non-traditional banking operations and products such as CDS, ``off balance sheet'' finance, derivatives as collateral and such would be deemed illegal unless performed only by non banking/lending institutions (such as hedge funds) so as to insulate the public and true lending institutions from the risk taking, ``hedging'', and ``financial innovation'' of firms such as Lehman Brothers.

ENRON BANKING SYSTEM; pragmatic capitalists.

Tue 2009-06-16 00:00 EDT

Is Geithner's Hedge-Fund Bailout Illegal? | Mother Jones

Is Geithner's Hedge-Fund Bailout Illegal? by Zach Carter | Mother Jones; ``yet another windfall for the rascals who got us here''

Geithner's Hedge-Fund Bailout Illegal; Mother Jones.

Tue 2009-02-24 00:00 EST

Financial Coup d'Etat at The Catherine Austin Fitts Blog

Financial Coup d'Etat at The Catherine Austin Fitts Blog; Washington-Wall Street partnership engineered fraudulent housing and debt bubble, illegally shifted vast amounts of capital out of the U.S., and used privitization as a form of piracy

Catherine Austin Fitts Blog; financial coup d'etat.