#WikiLeaks- PAULSON DISCUSSES FINANCIAL MARKETS, IRAN WITH SARKOZY, LAGARDE

Alexander Higgins-

In 2007 top US and France officials knew rampant fraud being committed by regulators, rating agencies and Wall Street Banks would soon cause a global financial collapse.

While investors and nations around the world were happily giving trillions of dollars away to crooked Wall Street bankers top officials in the United States and France knew the market would soon collapse and people would be robbed of millions.

While raising the issue that the role of government regulators and rating agencies needed to be reviewed in the wake of the upcoming crisis, US officials ignored calls from the French government to enact necessary regulation to stop the rampant fraud that would soon result in investors losing tens of trillions of dollars they had invested into the markets.

The cable reveals that while discussing the ability of the French banks to survive the crisis, French President Sarkozy was pushing the US to enact regulations to forestall the crisis. Instead, Henry Paulson responded by telling Sarkozy not to overreacted because the” it would take months, not weeks, for credit to be re-priced” telling France this is “not a major crisis.”

Paulson went on to warn that the major problem was with the German banks and which would require a bailout from the taxpayer while warning that the assets held by banks but covered up from investors by being held off-balance sheet presented systematic risk to banks and to sovereign wealth.

The cable clearly reveals that taxpayer bailouts would be needed.  Paulson further up sticks up for the Wall Street hedge fund saying they were not to blame for the crisis while acknowledging there were major Wall Street transparency issues.

To summarize, the cable reveals that top government officials in France and the US knew Wall street banks were committing fraud in the origination and packaging of sub-prime mortgage and lying to investors about the resulting securities they were creating and selling. Officials knew banks were also lying about their own liabilities and hiding them from investors by keeping the assets off their balance sheets.  The government also knew that both regulators and ratings agencies were participating in the scheme.

Remember as you read this cable, these conversations all took place over a year before the 2008 financial collapse when taxpayers around the world were forced into giving up trillions of dollars for banker bailouts. Also keep in mind that while the cable discusses “systemic risk”, “bailouts” and “market turbulence”, none of these had happened yet. They were discussing what would soon happen in the future.

The discussion of “systemic risk”, “market turbulence” and “taxpayer bailouts” over a year before the markets actually collapsed and those events actually occurred, show they knew a global financial collapse. Not only did they know it would occur but knew what the consequences would be for the investors and the governments who were fleeced by Wall Street. As the cable reveals, Paulson chose to deal with the crisis by letting it continue and urging France to keep the issue underwaps  by  urging Sarkozy not  to “over react”, hence allowing the scandal to the continue which just postponed the inevitable.

Also remember when we were forced into these bailouts, it was  under the guise that our governments had no idea the banks were doing this and this was a sudden and unforeseeable crisis. Finally, remember that – while there have been plenty of accusations from “conspiracy theorists”,  “fringe economists” and “wing nut” politicians such as Ron Paul – there still has been no admission from our government that financial regulators or the ratings agencies played a role in the crisis.

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[ALEXANDER HIGGINS]

The Fed told us explicitly – many times – that it was taking “good collateral” to back up these loans and that it was quite confident it would not lose any money.

That, it turns out, was true.

What we were not told is that the “collateral” they took was so bad that it was in some cases valued at TEN CENTS on the dollar or less, and in each of these cases it leaves open the question as to where is that collateral now, having been returned to the bank, what is it actually worth, and how is it being carried on the books – because what we do know from the bank’s financial reporting is that it most-certainly was NOT written off.

There’s more than enough here in these tables to call for a massive forensic investigation into the accounting practices of each and every one of these institutions as the fact that FRBNY valued this “collateral” at such a tiny fraction of it’s claimed value by the submitting institution leads to an immediate question as to how one squares that valuation with the values reported by the banks in their quarterly and annual reports, and whether they were at the time, or are today, in point of fact, at anything approaching actual valuations, insolvent.

We the people deserve both answers AND HONEST ACCOUNTING.

-Karl Denninger

Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof. °oO°

[Source: gamefreak1398]

via GAWKER‘s  Adrian Chen:

A member of the activist collective Anonymous is claiming to be have emails and documents which prove “fraud” was committed by Bank of America employees, and the group says it’ll release them on Monday. The member, who goes by the Twitter handle OperationLeakS, has already posted an internal email from the formerly Bank of America-owned Balboa Insurance Company.

For full details go to Gawker.com

Email is between Balboa Insurance vice president Peggy Johnson and other Balboa employees

[Image OperationLeakS via Twitter]

By Ben Berkowitz

NEW YORK | Fri Mar 11, 2011 1:32am EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. officials believe China’s insurance regulator passed on proprietary information about AIG to its Chinese rivals during the American firm’s collapse in 2008, according to unpublished diplomatic cables.

The U.S. government bailout of American International Group Inc in 2008 sent shock waves around the world, and China seemed especially rattled.

The Chinese Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) forced AIG’s local operations to open their books on a daily basis after the company’s September 2008 rescue, according to a series of U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and provided to Reuters by a third party. The regulator then shared the confidential information with local competitors, in part to convince at least one of them to buy the troubled assets.

Continue reading … REUTERS

via: tigerone1970

excerpt:

Millions of people go without basic services – running water and other utilities, healthcare, education, policing, because their governments do not have the money to pay for them.

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LONDON (Reuters) – A former Swiss private banker handed over data on hundreds of offshore bank account holders to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a news conference on Monday.

Rudolf Elmer once headed the office of Julius Baer in the Cayman Islands until he was fired by the bank in 2002. He is scheduled to go on trial in Switzerland on Wednesday for breaching bank secrecy.

Elmer handed Assange the data at a news conference at a media club in London. The two yellow and blue discs contain information on 2,000 banking clients who have parked money offshore.

“He (Elmer) is clearly a bona fide whistleblower… We have some kind of duty to support him in that matter,” said Assange, who is on bail in Britain and fighting extradition to Sweden where he faces questioning over alleged sex crimes.

WikiLeaks plans to release a U.S. bank’s documents