Over half of US banking assets held by 5 banks

By Al Lewis
Dow Jones Newswires

We have finally reached the point in our financial history where even bankers hate bankers.

Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas issued its 2011 annual report with a 34-page essay, “Why We Must End Too Big To Fail—Now.” The report stops short of calling our nation’s largest banks terrorists, but it does dub them “a clear and present danger to the U.S. economy.”

Wash. Blog: Asleep at the Wheel

By Washington’s Blog

Excerpts: Americans have an illogical love affair with their vehicles. There are 209 million licensed drivers in the U.S. and 260 million vehicles. The U.S. has a higher number of motor vehicles per capita than every country in the world at 845 per 1,000 people. Germany has 540; Japan has 593; Britain has 525; and China has 37. The population of the United States has risen from 203 million in 1970 to 311 million today, an increase of 108 million in 42 years. Over this same time frame, the number of motor vehicles on our crumbling highways has grown by 150 million. This might explain why a country that has 4.5% of the world’s population consumes 22% of the world’s daily oil supply. This might also further explain the Iraq War, the Afghanistan occupation, the Libyan “intervention”, and the coming war with Iran.

Occupy the Treasury and support HR 2990

By Nikki Alexander

Here is a plea, hot off the press, to take the private owners and dispensers of credit out of our bizarre monetary system, and restore the constitutional function of money creation to the Federal Treasury.

Dennis Kucinich introduced a bill that would do this, only four days after the Wall Street Occupation began ~ HR 2990 The National Emergency Employment Defense Act of 2011. It’s stunning and you will love it.

It ends ‘fractional reserve’ lending (the credit casino), nationalizes the Federal Reserve, restores the federal government’s authority to originate money (without debt), pays off federal debt with the new US money as it comes due, until the debt is completely retired.

HOLY BAILOUT – Federal Reserve Now Backstopping $75 Trillion Of Bank Of America’s Derivatives Trades

By The Daily Bail

UPDATE – Chcek out regulator William Black’s blistering reaction to this story HERE.
—
This story from Bloomberg just hit the wires this morning.  Bank of America is shifting derivatives in its Merrill investment banking unit to its depository arm, which has access to the Fed discount window and is protected by the FDIC.

This means that the investment bank’s European derivatives exposure is now backstopped by U.S. taxpayers.  Bank of America didn’t get regulatory approval to do this, they just did it at the request of frightened counterparties.  Now the Fed and the FDIC are fighting as to whether this was sound.  The Fed wants to “give relief” to the bank holding company, which is under heavy pressure.

This is a direct transfer of risk to the taxpayer done by the bank without approval by regulators and without public input.

Your Primary Purpose

by Volaar

The Occupy Wall Street protesters and their partners, globally, have a lot of agendas that they would like to see activated towards the cause of economic justice.

We only need one agenda item activated and it is worth its weight in gold.

Federal Reserve Tries to Censor Infowars Video

By Prison Planet

Alex Jones addresses the latest intimidation tactic from the private Federal Reserve bank, whose San Antonio branch has filed a privacy violation with You Tube demanding the removal of a video filmed at the location during an “occupy” rally. Alex tells them cease and desist this action, which violates the First Amendment.

Federal Reserve branches across the country have a long history of trying to stifle free speech and press coverage, from fraudulently claiming that filming its buildings is illegal to threatening arrest and more.

The S&P Downgrade and the Bilderbergers: All Part of the Plan?

By Ellen Brown
Global Research

Why the suspicious downgrade on August 5, AFTER the government had made major concessions just to avoid default, and despite the embarrassing revelation that S&P’s figures were off by $2 trillion?  It seems the Bilderbergers are less interested in governing the world than in owning it, writes Ellen Brown.

9/11: Who Really Benefited? Fact and Not Fiction

By Captain America
Global Research

Global Research Editor’s Note:

We bring to the attention of our readers this provocative review of the strategic and corporate interests behind 9/11 including Wall Street, the Texas oil companies and the defense contractors.

The statements in this article are corroborated by numerous studies, books, news articles and research reports published since September 2001.

In the course of almost ten years, Global Research has conducted a detailed review and analysis of the 9/11 attacks, focusing on their broad implications as well as their historical significance. See our 9/11 and the War on Terrorism Dossier.

First Fed audit reveals $16 trillion in secret loans; conflicts of interest

By Sen. Bernie Sanders

The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study.

“As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world,” said Sanders. “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”

Debt Political Theater Diverts Attention While Americans’ Wealth Is Stolen

By Dennis Kucinich
Information Clearing House

The rancorous debate over the debt belies a fundamental truth of our economy — that it is run for the few at the expense of the many, that our entire government has been turned into a machine which takes the wealth of a mass of Americans and accelerates it into the hands of the few. Let me give you some examples.

Take war. War takes the money from the American people and puts it into the hands of arms manufacturers, war profiteers, and private armies. The war in Iraq, based on lies: $3 trillion will be the cost of that war. The war in Afghanistan; based on a misreading of history; half a trillion of dollars in expenses already. The war against Libya will be $1 billion by September.

Revolution Is a Legitimate Option

By Timothy Gatto
The Peoples Voice

The current state of affairs in America is untenable. The government that the American people put into power has turned its back on the majority of Americans. Both major political parties are sustained by corporate dollars for their political campaigns and by out-and-out bribery. There are fundamental ills that are destroying the United States that must be addressed. These are:

‘Inside Job’ obscures ongoing regulator collusion in Wall Street fraud

By Jeff Gates
Arab News.com

Part 4 of 4

A popular documentary, Inside Job, captured kudos at the 2010 Academy Awards. Its hard-hitting analysis marked a milestone among filmmakers for shining light in the dark corners of Wall Street. Writer, producer and director Charles Ferguson provided a public service by exposing key perpetrators.

Laudable yet incomplete, Ferguson’s popular film left unaddressed the all-important “how.” The storyline left moviegoers with the impression that the film’s featured insiders operated virtually alone in perpetrating history’s greatest heist. In truth, the real “inside job” is far more sinister and remains ongoing.

The Federal Reserve Cartel: The Eight Families

By Dean Henderson
Global Research

(Part one of a four-part series)

The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch.

According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation.[1]

So who then are the stockholders in these money center banks?

This information is guarded much more closely. My queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding companies were given Freedom of Information Act status, before being denied on “national security” grounds. This is rather ironic, since many of the bank’s stockholders reside in Europe.

9/11, WTC7 and the Black Eagle Trust: How Bank of New York may have laundered $240 billion

By E.P. Heidner

Summary and Intro by Fred Burks
WantToKnow.info

“On that fateful day, the Securities and Exchange Commission declared a national emergency, and for the first time in U.S. history, invoked its emergency powers under Securities Exchange Act Section 12(k) easing regulatory restrictions for clearing and settling security trades for the next 15 days. These changes would allow an estimated $240 billion in covert government securities to be cleared upon maturity without the standard regulatory controls around identification of ownership.” ~E.P. Heidner

Dear friends,

Few people are aware of the huge Black Eagle Trust fund, let alone its critical relation to the 9/11 attacks. A brilliant summary of excellent information regarding this covert fund compiled by meticulous researcher E.P. Heidner ties together many previously unexplained threads in the 9/11 mystery in ways that are most compelling. Heidner presents volumes of solid evidence to support his thesis that one of the main reasons for the attacks was to cover up the laundering of over $200 billion in bonds from this secretive fund that were to come due the day after 9/11.

Watch ‘Inside Job’

Intro by Top Documentary Films

As he did with the occupation of Iraq in No End in Sight, Charles Ferguson shines a light on the global financial crisis in Inside Job. Accompanied by narration from Matt Damon, Ferguson begins and ends in Iceland, a flourishing country that gave American-style banking a try – and paid the price.

[This is probably one of those times when you have to watch it now, before it gets yanked. Be sure to read FAQ 10 so that you can watch the entire film.~Ed.]

Then he looks at the spectacular rise and cataclysmic fall of deregulation in the United States. Unlike Alex Gibney’s fiscal films, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Casino Jack, Ferguson builds his narrative around dozens of players, interviewing authors, bank managers, government ministers, and even a psychotherapist, who speaks to a culture that encourages Gordon Gekko-like behavior, but the number of those who declined to comment, like Alan Greenspan, is even larger.

What Libertarians and Progressives have in common

PressTV interview with Journalist and Blogger David DeGraw

Libertarians know and hate the Federal Reserve. They hate Goldman Sachs and J.P Morgan. But they are not willing to go to the poor people who are being forced to pay for the crimes of those people that they hate because it’s a union or because there may be some Democrats involved in it.  Libertarians and progressives can find common ground, but at this point still they are refusing to step back and concede a little bit to find it. They have to come together on campaign finance and lobbying and most importantly they can come together on breaking up the banks.

Wall Street’s Meltdown Increased Wealth Concentration

Average Americans today aren’t hurting because the economy has stopped generating wealth. Average Americans are hurting because the wealth the economy is generating continues to cascade disproportionately to the top.

Wall Street’s Meltdown and Wealth’s Maldistribution

By Sam Pizzigati April 27, 2010

The Great Recession, new research shows, has left wealth in the United States even more concentrated at America’s economic summit.

Average American households have been riding an economic roller coaster over the last quarter century. The stock market has boomed and collapsed. Housing has boomed and collapsed. The entire economy has boomed and collapsed.

Where has this wild ride left the typical American family? Back to square one. And then back some more. The typical American household, as of mid 2009, held less in real net worth — that’s assets minus debts, adjusted for inflation — than the typical U.S. household held back in 1983.

But the even bigger story may be the reason why. New York University economist Edward Wolff tells that story in a new analysis of the Federal Reserve’s latest household wealth data research just published by the Bard College Levy Economics Institute.

The Trillion-Dollar Shadow (audit the Fed!)

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

March 30, 2010            OurFuture.org

What secrets are hidden in the Federal Reserve’s trillion-dollar shadow? Economic recovery depends on confidence, and confidence requires knowledge. But Senators like Chris Dodd and Judd Gregg don’t want us to have that knowledge. They don’t even want it themselves.

In Sen. Dodd’s case, he’s trying to give the Fed more authority (over consumer protection) even as he fights to keep its activities hidden. Fortunately, the final decision may not be up to him.

Secret Banking Cabal Emerges from AIG Shadows

By David Reilly
Bloomberg

The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.

Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.

We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,

Wall Street’s 10 Greatest Lies of 2009

By Nomi Prins,      AlterNet December 28, 2009.

Lies that justify screwing over Main Street.

On December 13, President Obama declared that he was not elected to help the “fat cats.” But the cats got another version of that memo.