"Buzzfeed said some of the documents had been gathered as part of the congressional investigation into Russian interference, while-" /silenced gunshots
Gee, financial crime in an economy that is increasingly financialized is no longer criminal, merely a civil offense, making it nothing but a cost of doing business.
Just jail a couple of the big executives of these banks and put them in a cell with Bubba serving a long sentence, with the people who guarded Epstein's cell in charge, and put the live feed into all the big bank board rooms and see if compliance improves.
I have to laugh at the "woke" crowd who were weeping and applauding at the Jaime Dimon picture where he's kneeling in seeming allegiance to BLM. I chuckled reading about Obama era hero who shall not be criticized Eric Holder and his role in all of this buttressing the Big Banks.
The woke progressive hive mind never seems to understand that the wokesters at the top of the pyramid don't believe any of that bullsh!t. It's all a show.
Only Taibbi and a few other left leaning types call them out. It's like one big combination of circus and Kabuki theater.
Thank you for the update on this Matt. It brings to mind three things.
First, I am still interested to hear whatever happened to the NJ Judge Salas who's husband was shot and her son killed by Roy Den Hollander. Apparently, she was about to rule on an issue for Deutsche Bank - will some of the findings to be made public, I believe. I wish there was a listing of institutional infractions that was not written in legalese but appeared upon a lobster bib called Vampire Squid or something.
Second, the panoply of banking (private, corporate, and federal/sovereign) institutions need to be humiliated to such an extent (i.e. Wells Fargo or Merrill Lynch but much worse) that no one does business with them again without having a John Malkovich sized wormhole in their brains - reminding them daily - in the voice of Teddy KGB -- "they are goin to stichh it you, no?" Their brand must be rebranded by the popular public to the same level of Tylenol aspirin in the mid 80s or toxic shock mini pads. Its time to do some damage to the industry like Big Tabacco.
Third, at the same time, we need some smart-minded younger people with some ethics and bravery to fulfill the promise of public banking (as a utility), and not as a means to screw people over. You may say that I am a dreamer, but I am not the only one. Public banking's time has come --- build institutions that work and do not defenestrate the working class, and we could see them spread, ideally faster than the current cancer of metastatic money for the capital class.
«While credit card companies are able to detect fraud and banks are able to detect suspicious activity thanks to technological advances, the government lacks the same capability, in part perhaps because the reporting system is not automated.»
I think our author is rather naive here: the security services (NSA, FBI,CIA, etc.) know *everything* about who is doing what financially. an example:
“In all the controversy in June 2013 over the US security services accessing people’s social media interactions through the PRISM system, it’s often forgotten that they had since 9/11 been accessing details of most of our financial transactions through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication system (SWIFT). [ ... ] But it also raised uncomfortable issues around America’s potential access to the private finances and spending records of prominent politicians and businesspeople around the world. All that made this a difficult secret for Gordon and the Treasury to be sitting on, even more so when Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor, was informed. [ ... ] At that precise moment, Mervyn’s conscience told him that he had a duty to blow the gaff on the SWIFT deal, and tell the British people that the CIA had — with the Treasury’s connivance — been secretly accessing that financial data.”
Obviously the UK security services had always got a realtime copy of the London SWIFT flow, and I would be quite sure that the USA security services had the same for New York transactions (and in both countries obviously the security services have a realtime copy of their central bank's and every banks transaction flows). There is absolutely zero banking/financial secrecy in every modern country, the governments know everything.
I would suspect that the security services are very reluctant to share any information they have on illegal/smelly transactions because every one of them is an opportunity for blackmail, which is one of their main tools.
Next year will mark the 30 year anniversary of when I took a sociology class during my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh called "Deviance and Social Control." As the name implies, it was about deviant behavior, and one of the topics we covered was about drug abuse. My professor at the time, Donald Gibson, brought up the issue of money laundering and how the banks are the ones who really control the drug trade, and how they often get slapped on the wrist when they are caught. It saddens me to think that nothing has changed since that time.
For every major industry there is at least one correspondingly large regulatory agency full of employees whose jobs rely on their ability to impose fees for doing business and fines for doing business the wrong way.
The real-world functions of regulatory agencies are fourfold, in order: 1) fund themselves from fines and fees paid by the major players in the industry they regulate; 2) act on behalf of the bigger industry players to deter smaller, more innovative industry players; 3) fund the pet projects of corrupt local governments and 4) provide the illusion of democracy in action for an illusory free press to report.
For my money, function #3 above represents the greatest present danger to American democracy because it pours hundreds of billions of dollars (approximately $250B of financial settlement money and $246B from the tobacco companies so far) of largely uneamarked cashflow, and creates budgetary dependencies that can only be replenished by the imposition of more regulation via an unspoken symbiotic alliance between lawmakers and lawbreakers.
Per the above, the entire state regulatory apparatus is rife with moral hazard. Mussolini, who knew a little something about fascism, once defined it as "...corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." That's why the biggest socialists/communists tend to be the biggest fascists: precisely because they regulate everything. The biggest single industry in any fascist/socialist state is the regulation industry.
There is another interesting detail that merits some review: some years ago there was a discovery that in many cases various big companies had backdated huge grants of share options, to make sure that the receiving executives got them at well below market price.
This was being investigated as a false accounting fraud, but it also involved massive tax fraud, because only genuine options involve a favourable "capital gains" tax rate, backdated ones count as ordinary income and have to be taxed at the income tax rate. Indeed the very purpose of backdating the stock option grants was to evade taxes.
The amounts of tax fraud were billions of dollars, well into criminal tax fraud territory, and the criminal cases were open-and-shut, because there was a clear documentary trail of who had granted and who had received the fraudulent options. Probably given how many were involved the racketeering laws could be invoked.
Criminals and rogues , in non-quarantine times, attend baseball games and Broadway shows, buy automobiles and life insurance. The libertarian argument here is that banks take deposits and make loans. Attempting to identify which customers are "bad guys" asks banks to do something they are no better equipped to do than are other business vendors. What makes a bank a reasonable proxy actor for a US government function ? That is, why does this entire argument matter ? If it's the depositors who are criminals, why not use the bank records to assist prosecutions of the criminals ? Why and how do the banks become accessories to the criminal acts of depositors? I'm not suggesting there are no good answers to these points -- but it's not prima facie, just something we can take for granted.
«Attempting to identify which customers are "bad guys" asks banks to do something they are no better equipped to do than are other business vendors.»
I did not answer previously that previously because it is an amazingly silly question: because the purpose of most crime is to make money, and money is needed to finance most crimes. Crimes are not funded with baseball games and automobiles, and the proceeds of crime are not broadway show tickets or life insurance. There is even a very common saying: "follow the money". Duh.
For similar reasons in most countries the trade in stuff that facilitates crime, from weapons to ammonia compounds to burglary tools to poisons, is tightly controlled.
«What makes a bank a reasonable proxy actor for a US government function ?»
Banks (like oil businesses or weapon manufacturers) are in general effectively arms-length state agents too: they are licensed by the state, they are backstopped by the state, they policies are shaped by the state. Car dealers or baseball stadiums aren't.
Also banks are not mere transaction processors: they are in the credit business, and to be in that business they have to know their customers very well: you don't walk into a bank and they sell you a $200,000 loan on the spot, as if it were a Broadway show ticket or an automobile. They do *a lot* of background checks, and they ask you *a lot* of documentation. Banks tend to have long term relationships with their customers, and knowing their customers is essential for their main business. Who are the people who know the most about somebody over time? Their bank, their doctor, their priest, their teacher.
So similarly in many countries (for example the UK) schools and universities (and priests) are also required to report to the government security agencies the names of students with "subversive" political positions, because like banks, schools and universities tend to get to get know their customers pretty well, unlike car salesmen or baseball game ticket sellers.
OK -- if I understand you, it is well-established that banks, doctors, priests, and teachers are legitimately considered government proxies in their law-enforcement-government-proxy roles. Maybe we should add lawyers, nannies and, say, cleaning professionals and gardeners -- should we ? If a government constituted as "of the people, by the people, and for the people" is dead-set on finding and punishing every possible potential criminal, what percentage of the "people" has a social responsibility to "know" their neighbors and all the rest of "the people" ? You see how this goes. If the person who knows you best -- say, wife, mother, sibling -- is honor-bound as a citizen to inform on anything"suspicious" about your speech or behavior, who exactly are we Including in the set of "being protected" and who do we Identify as "must be protected from" ? Without any special laws or FInCen red tape, if any of us know of criminal activity, we can at any time call it out. It doesn't take a whole new bureaucracy. And I should not have to mention this, but it is just a tad naive to think banks really, truly know their customers -- borrowers as well as depositors -- when we consider just how much they couldn't have predicted what would happen in the first 10 years after the repeal of Glass- Steagall. The evidence for banks' intimate knowledge of their customers may once have been true on Main Street America. But it ain't no-longer been so, for a long, long time.
«If a government constituted as "of the people, by the people, and for the people" is dead-set on finding and punishing every possible potential criminal»
The government does that because a lot of voters want that. Lots of voters are oldies, and especially if they are affluent, they already got theirs, they see no other opportunities in their life, and are simply afraid, very afraid, of losing what they got. Any change is a threat. Any potential is to lose something. They want absolute security at any cost to someone else, they want everyone who looks bad to be locked up, just in case, they want "better safe than sorry" to be all there is to law and order, and actually they don't care much about the law, they just want order. Why do you think the police are allowed to shoot first and ask questions later? Because many affluent older voters want that.
In the UK the government have just voted for immunity from war crime prosecutions (including torture and murder) and from prosecutions for crimes committed by the security services and their moles (including torture and murder) and they had already voted to give themselves the ability to strip citizenship from anybody (within a very large category) who they deem unsuitable. With many applauses by many voters.
Thus various "liberal democracy" elites have taken advantage of this climate to pander to "better safe than sorry" voters and at the same time vote themselves brutally authoritarian laws and
«If the person who knows you best -- say, wife, mother, sibling -- is honor-bound as a citizen to inform on anything"suspicious" about your speech or behavior»
There is a difference between informing about "suspicions" and reporting "crimes": in most countries people who fail to report crimes of which are aware are committing themselves a crime.
In most countries only specific categories of people are required to inform about "suspicions" of a crime, and usually in limited ways. I guess this is because otherwise the security services would be deluged with too many irrelevant suspicions.
«it is just a tad naive to think banks really, truly know their customers -- borrowers as well as depositors -- when we consider just how much they couldn't have predicted what would happen in the first 10 years after the repeal of Glass- Steagall.»
The idea they did not predict it is amazingly naive, indeed several people did predict it, and they were shutup or marginalized.
«The evidence for banks' intimate knowledge of their customers may once have been true on Main Street America. But it ain't no-longer been so, for a long, long time.»
But if you have banked with some bank for 10 years, they pretty well have all the information to know you rather intimately "follow the money"; that is why there is professional secret for banks, doctors, priests, lawyers (and professional secret has large exceptions when the state asks questions).
Anyhow we are not talking about banks reporting "suspicions" about factory workers or barber shop owners and their small obvious transactions, we are are talking about a small number of people who make big "weird" transactions. Banks surely do care about knowing a lot about those.
Or. they should. Thanks for the thoughtful and excellent points here. Some of the story in "Dark Towers" is really terrific about this stuff -- I had to ignore the author's effort to make it more about Trump, presumably in order to sell the book, but it's got an interesting dynamic all its own.
«Why and how do the banks become accessories to the criminal acts of depositors? I'm not suggesting there are no good answers to these points -- but it's not prima facie, just something we can take for granted.»
Try to make the same arguments for bank transactions of "terrorists" and "paedophiles" and "communist spies": banks should close their eyes and not report those, and give them loans too, because money has no smell.
OK, it's the same. Terrorists and Paedophiles and spies buy coffee at Starbucks, attend baseball games and Broadway shows, and yet Starbucks, ball clubs and theaters are not expected -- as proxies for government agencies -- to nose into whether customers buying coffee or tickets have certain personal characteristics. What is it that makes banks supposedly so intimately familiar with criminals, terrorists, paedophiles and spies ? What exactly is taken for granted -- law enforcers can always subpoena receipts and records, even for coffees -- that makes banks so special ?
More than 20 years ago, a brother in law of mine, who worked in the loan office of a big bank, told me much of the money coming to them was obviously drug money they were laundering, and they took it because they knew if they didn't, someone else would, and it didn't bother him one bit.
If large sums are coming to you on a regular basis, and the source is known, which it must be, then it shouldn't be too hard to do a background check on the business and go from there. It's kind of ironic that we live in a digital age where there are no secrets, unless it involves those who have lots of money to invest, and then suddenly, we're clueless.
Obviously, not every crook/terrorist/drug dealer/ whatever can be known, but a serial lack of interest into the sources of large sums of money coming into an institution whose sole interest is making more money, has a less than innocent explanation.
This is a lot closer to a clear answer to my question. Unlike Starbucks or baseball games, banks sometimes are asked to facilitate transactions in gigantic volumes of money without much provenance. Just filling in a few blanks about who is sending, who is receiving, banks can provide leads no other vendor or intermediary can provide -- leads law enforcement can follow up.
And a quote from the "Financial Times" of March 10th 2006:
«But is clear leaders of both parties lack the confidence to challenge the mood of xenophobia that exists outside Washington. Instead they are fuelling it. In some respects the Democrats are now as guilty of stoking fears on national security as the Republicans. Their logic is impeccable. A majority of Americans believe there will be another large terrorist attack on American soil.
Such is the depth of anxiety that one-fifth or more of Americans believe they will personally be victims of a future terrorist attack. This number has not budged in the last four and a half years. [...] Mr Bush has consistently received a much higher public trust rating on the war on terror than the Democrats.
Without this -- and without the constant manipulation of yellow and orange terror alert warnings at key moments in the political narrative -- Mr Bush would almost certainly have lost the presidential race to John Kerry in 2004. [...]
In other words, the Democrats have found an effective way of neutralising their most persistent electoral liability: they are out-Bushing Mr Bush. It is easy to see why key Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, have adopted this strategy. It is easy also to see why their Republican counterparts are following suit.
As Peter King, the Republican representative for New York, said last week: "We are not going to allow the Democrats get to the right of us on this issue."
This left Mr Bush holding the candle for the left, as it were.»
No, the first posting contained paragraphs I didn't intend to publish. The second version is correct. Again, my apologies, I'm still getting used to the program.
BTW I guess that you are aware that you did not edit the first post, so now there are two posts with a very similar URL and content that visually look almost identical. Ideally the second post would have had a title with something like "ver2" or "corrected" appended.
"Buzzfeed said some of the documents had been gathered as part of the congressional investigation into Russian interference, while-" /silenced gunshots
Gee, financial crime in an economy that is increasingly financialized is no longer criminal, merely a civil offense, making it nothing but a cost of doing business.
Just jail a couple of the big executives of these banks and put them in a cell with Bubba serving a long sentence, with the people who guarded Epstein's cell in charge, and put the live feed into all the big bank board rooms and see if compliance improves.
I have to laugh at the "woke" crowd who were weeping and applauding at the Jaime Dimon picture where he's kneeling in seeming allegiance to BLM. I chuckled reading about Obama era hero who shall not be criticized Eric Holder and his role in all of this buttressing the Big Banks.
The woke progressive hive mind never seems to understand that the wokesters at the top of the pyramid don't believe any of that bullsh!t. It's all a show.
Only Taibbi and a few other left leaning types call them out. It's like one big combination of circus and Kabuki theater.
Thank you for the update on this Matt. It brings to mind three things.
First, I am still interested to hear whatever happened to the NJ Judge Salas who's husband was shot and her son killed by Roy Den Hollander. Apparently, she was about to rule on an issue for Deutsche Bank - will some of the findings to be made public, I believe. I wish there was a listing of institutional infractions that was not written in legalese but appeared upon a lobster bib called Vampire Squid or something.
Second, the panoply of banking (private, corporate, and federal/sovereign) institutions need to be humiliated to such an extent (i.e. Wells Fargo or Merrill Lynch but much worse) that no one does business with them again without having a John Malkovich sized wormhole in their brains - reminding them daily - in the voice of Teddy KGB -- "they are goin to stichh it you, no?" Their brand must be rebranded by the popular public to the same level of Tylenol aspirin in the mid 80s or toxic shock mini pads. Its time to do some damage to the industry like Big Tabacco.
Third, at the same time, we need some smart-minded younger people with some ethics and bravery to fulfill the promise of public banking (as a utility), and not as a means to screw people over. You may say that I am a dreamer, but I am not the only one. Public banking's time has come --- build institutions that work and do not defenestrate the working class, and we could see them spread, ideally faster than the current cancer of metastatic money for the capital class.
Cheers Matt.
John M
«While credit card companies are able to detect fraud and banks are able to detect suspicious activity thanks to technological advances, the government lacks the same capability, in part perhaps because the reporting system is not automated.»
I think our author is rather naive here: the security services (NSA, FBI,CIA, etc.) know *everything* about who is doing what financially. an example:
(from Damian McBride "Power Trip", 2013, page 124):
“In all the controversy in June 2013 over the US security services accessing people’s social media interactions through the PRISM system, it’s often forgotten that they had since 9/11 been accessing details of most of our financial transactions through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication system (SWIFT). [ ... ] But it also raised uncomfortable issues around America’s potential access to the private finances and spending records of prominent politicians and businesspeople around the world. All that made this a difficult secret for Gordon and the Treasury to be sitting on, even more so when Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor, was informed. [ ... ] At that precise moment, Mervyn’s conscience told him that he had a duty to blow the gaff on the SWIFT deal, and tell the British people that the CIA had — with the Treasury’s connivance — been secretly accessing that financial data.”
Obviously the UK security services had always got a realtime copy of the London SWIFT flow, and I would be quite sure that the USA security services had the same for New York transactions (and in both countries obviously the security services have a realtime copy of their central bank's and every banks transaction flows). There is absolutely zero banking/financial secrecy in every modern country, the governments know everything.
I would suspect that the security services are very reluctant to share any information they have on illegal/smelly transactions because every one of them is an opportunity for blackmail, which is one of their main tools.
Next year will mark the 30 year anniversary of when I took a sociology class during my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh called "Deviance and Social Control." As the name implies, it was about deviant behavior, and one of the topics we covered was about drug abuse. My professor at the time, Donald Gibson, brought up the issue of money laundering and how the banks are the ones who really control the drug trade, and how they often get slapped on the wrist when they are caught. It saddens me to think that nothing has changed since that time.
Earth to Matt! Earth to Matt! Too soon for a celebratory nap. Finish the piece.
Great article. Just one note, Sinaloa and Mexico are in North America not Central America.
For every major industry there is at least one correspondingly large regulatory agency full of employees whose jobs rely on their ability to impose fees for doing business and fines for doing business the wrong way.
The real-world functions of regulatory agencies are fourfold, in order: 1) fund themselves from fines and fees paid by the major players in the industry they regulate; 2) act on behalf of the bigger industry players to deter smaller, more innovative industry players; 3) fund the pet projects of corrupt local governments and 4) provide the illusion of democracy in action for an illusory free press to report.
For my money, function #3 above represents the greatest present danger to American democracy because it pours hundreds of billions of dollars (approximately $250B of financial settlement money and $246B from the tobacco companies so far) of largely uneamarked cashflow, and creates budgetary dependencies that can only be replenished by the imposition of more regulation via an unspoken symbiotic alliance between lawmakers and lawbreakers.
Per the above, the entire state regulatory apparatus is rife with moral hazard. Mussolini, who knew a little something about fascism, once defined it as "...corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." That's why the biggest socialists/communists tend to be the biggest fascists: precisely because they regulate everything. The biggest single industry in any fascist/socialist state is the regulation industry.
There is another interesting detail that merits some review: some years ago there was a discovery that in many cases various big companies had backdated huge grants of share options, to make sure that the receiving executives got them at well below market price.
This was being investigated as a false accounting fraud, but it also involved massive tax fraud, because only genuine options involve a favourable "capital gains" tax rate, backdated ones count as ordinary income and have to be taxed at the income tax rate. Indeed the very purpose of backdating the stock option grants was to evade taxes.
The amounts of tax fraud were billions of dollars, well into criminal tax fraud territory, and the criminal cases were open-and-shut, because there was a clear documentary trail of who had granted and who had received the fraudulent options. Probably given how many were involved the racketeering laws could be invoked.
How many of those executives went to prison?
Is it not past time to plainly state the nature and intent of banking behemoths is the globalization of serfdom for all of mankind?
Criminals and rogues , in non-quarantine times, attend baseball games and Broadway shows, buy automobiles and life insurance. The libertarian argument here is that banks take deposits and make loans. Attempting to identify which customers are "bad guys" asks banks to do something they are no better equipped to do than are other business vendors. What makes a bank a reasonable proxy actor for a US government function ? That is, why does this entire argument matter ? If it's the depositors who are criminals, why not use the bank records to assist prosecutions of the criminals ? Why and how do the banks become accessories to the criminal acts of depositors? I'm not suggesting there are no good answers to these points -- but it's not prima facie, just something we can take for granted.
«Attempting to identify which customers are "bad guys" asks banks to do something they are no better equipped to do than are other business vendors.»
I did not answer previously that previously because it is an amazingly silly question: because the purpose of most crime is to make money, and money is needed to finance most crimes. Crimes are not funded with baseball games and automobiles, and the proceeds of crime are not broadway show tickets or life insurance. There is even a very common saying: "follow the money". Duh.
For similar reasons in most countries the trade in stuff that facilitates crime, from weapons to ammonia compounds to burglary tools to poisons, is tightly controlled.
«What makes a bank a reasonable proxy actor for a US government function ?»
Banks (like oil businesses or weapon manufacturers) are in general effectively arms-length state agents too: they are licensed by the state, they are backstopped by the state, they policies are shaped by the state. Car dealers or baseball stadiums aren't.
Also banks are not mere transaction processors: they are in the credit business, and to be in that business they have to know their customers very well: you don't walk into a bank and they sell you a $200,000 loan on the spot, as if it were a Broadway show ticket or an automobile. They do *a lot* of background checks, and they ask you *a lot* of documentation. Banks tend to have long term relationships with their customers, and knowing their customers is essential for their main business. Who are the people who know the most about somebody over time? Their bank, their doctor, their priest, their teacher.
So similarly in many countries (for example the UK) schools and universities (and priests) are also required to report to the government security agencies the names of students with "subversive" political positions, because like banks, schools and universities tend to get to get know their customers pretty well, unlike car salesmen or baseball game ticket sellers.
OK -- if I understand you, it is well-established that banks, doctors, priests, and teachers are legitimately considered government proxies in their law-enforcement-government-proxy roles. Maybe we should add lawyers, nannies and, say, cleaning professionals and gardeners -- should we ? If a government constituted as "of the people, by the people, and for the people" is dead-set on finding and punishing every possible potential criminal, what percentage of the "people" has a social responsibility to "know" their neighbors and all the rest of "the people" ? You see how this goes. If the person who knows you best -- say, wife, mother, sibling -- is honor-bound as a citizen to inform on anything"suspicious" about your speech or behavior, who exactly are we Including in the set of "being protected" and who do we Identify as "must be protected from" ? Without any special laws or FInCen red tape, if any of us know of criminal activity, we can at any time call it out. It doesn't take a whole new bureaucracy. And I should not have to mention this, but it is just a tad naive to think banks really, truly know their customers -- borrowers as well as depositors -- when we consider just how much they couldn't have predicted what would happen in the first 10 years after the repeal of Glass- Steagall. The evidence for banks' intimate knowledge of their customers may once have been true on Main Street America. But it ain't no-longer been so, for a long, long time.
«If a government constituted as "of the people, by the people, and for the people" is dead-set on finding and punishing every possible potential criminal»
The government does that because a lot of voters want that. Lots of voters are oldies, and especially if they are affluent, they already got theirs, they see no other opportunities in their life, and are simply afraid, very afraid, of losing what they got. Any change is a threat. Any potential is to lose something. They want absolute security at any cost to someone else, they want everyone who looks bad to be locked up, just in case, they want "better safe than sorry" to be all there is to law and order, and actually they don't care much about the law, they just want order. Why do you think the police are allowed to shoot first and ask questions later? Because many affluent older voters want that.
In the UK the government have just voted for immunity from war crime prosecutions (including torture and murder) and from prosecutions for crimes committed by the security services and their moles (including torture and murder) and they had already voted to give themselves the ability to strip citizenship from anybody (within a very large category) who they deem unsuitable. With many applauses by many voters.
Thus various "liberal democracy" elites have taken advantage of this climate to pander to "better safe than sorry" voters and at the same time vote themselves brutally authoritarian laws and
«If the person who knows you best -- say, wife, mother, sibling -- is honor-bound as a citizen to inform on anything"suspicious" about your speech or behavior»
There is a difference between informing about "suspicions" and reporting "crimes": in most countries people who fail to report crimes of which are aware are committing themselves a crime.
In most countries only specific categories of people are required to inform about "suspicions" of a crime, and usually in limited ways. I guess this is because otherwise the security services would be deluged with too many irrelevant suspicions.
«it is just a tad naive to think banks really, truly know their customers -- borrowers as well as depositors -- when we consider just how much they couldn't have predicted what would happen in the first 10 years after the repeal of Glass- Steagall.»
The idea they did not predict it is amazingly naive, indeed several people did predict it, and they were shutup or marginalized.
«The evidence for banks' intimate knowledge of their customers may once have been true on Main Street America. But it ain't no-longer been so, for a long, long time.»
But if you have banked with some bank for 10 years, they pretty well have all the information to know you rather intimately "follow the money"; that is why there is professional secret for banks, doctors, priests, lawyers (and professional secret has large exceptions when the state asks questions).
Anyhow we are not talking about banks reporting "suspicions" about factory workers or barber shop owners and their small obvious transactions, we are are talking about a small number of people who make big "weird" transactions. Banks surely do care about knowing a lot about those.
Or. they should. Thanks for the thoughtful and excellent points here. Some of the story in "Dark Towers" is really terrific about this stuff -- I had to ignore the author's effort to make it more about Trump, presumably in order to sell the book, but it's got an interesting dynamic all its own.
«Why and how do the banks become accessories to the criminal acts of depositors? I'm not suggesting there are no good answers to these points -- but it's not prima facie, just something we can take for granted.»
Try to make the same arguments for bank transactions of "terrorists" and "paedophiles" and "communist spies": banks should close their eyes and not report those, and give them loans too, because money has no smell.
OK, it's the same. Terrorists and Paedophiles and spies buy coffee at Starbucks, attend baseball games and Broadway shows, and yet Starbucks, ball clubs and theaters are not expected -- as proxies for government agencies -- to nose into whether customers buying coffee or tickets have certain personal characteristics. What is it that makes banks supposedly so intimately familiar with criminals, terrorists, paedophiles and spies ? What exactly is taken for granted -- law enforcers can always subpoena receipts and records, even for coffees -- that makes banks so special ?
More than 20 years ago, a brother in law of mine, who worked in the loan office of a big bank, told me much of the money coming to them was obviously drug money they were laundering, and they took it because they knew if they didn't, someone else would, and it didn't bother him one bit.
If large sums are coming to you on a regular basis, and the source is known, which it must be, then it shouldn't be too hard to do a background check on the business and go from there. It's kind of ironic that we live in a digital age where there are no secrets, unless it involves those who have lots of money to invest, and then suddenly, we're clueless.
Obviously, not every crook/terrorist/drug dealer/ whatever can be known, but a serial lack of interest into the sources of large sums of money coming into an institution whose sole interest is making more money, has a less than innocent explanation.
This is a lot closer to a clear answer to my question. Unlike Starbucks or baseball games, banks sometimes are asked to facilitate transactions in gigantic volumes of money without much provenance. Just filling in a few blanks about who is sending, who is receiving, banks can provide leads no other vendor or intermediary can provide -- leads law enforcement can follow up.
Thanks for you kind words. As additional material a pointer to a post-WW2 movie when authoritarianism was still considered something bad: https://www.britannica.com/video/213840/Encyclopaedia-Britannica-Films-Despotism-1946
and a more recent take on a similar theme: https://www.theauthoritarians.org/
And a quote from the "Financial Times" of March 10th 2006:
«But is clear leaders of both parties lack the confidence to challenge the mood of xenophobia that exists outside Washington. Instead they are fuelling it. In some respects the Democrats are now as guilty of stoking fears on national security as the Republicans. Their logic is impeccable. A majority of Americans believe there will be another large terrorist attack on American soil.
Such is the depth of anxiety that one-fifth or more of Americans believe they will personally be victims of a future terrorist attack. This number has not budged in the last four and a half years. [...] Mr Bush has consistently received a much higher public trust rating on the war on terror than the Democrats.
Without this -- and without the constant manipulation of yellow and orange terror alert warnings at key moments in the political narrative -- Mr Bush would almost certainly have lost the presidential race to John Kerry in 2004. [...]
In other words, the Democrats have found an effective way of neutralising their most persistent electoral liability: they are out-Bushing Mr Bush. It is easy to see why key Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, have adopted this strategy. It is easy also to see why their Republican counterparts are following suit.
As Peter King, the Republican representative for New York, said last week: "We are not going to allow the Democrats get to the right of us on this issue."
This left Mr Bush holding the candle for the left, as it were.»
The bankers and their bought/paid for politicians continue to play the American people for suckers...what’s new?
Thank you
article cuts off. this happens a lot. please re send complete piece
Article cuts off at the end?
Sorry about that. I re-sent the article.
No, the first posting contained paragraphs I didn't intend to publish. The second version is correct. Again, my apologies, I'm still getting used to the program.
BTW I guess that you are aware that you did not edit the first post, so now there are two posts with a very similar URL and content that visually look almost identical. Ideally the second post would have had a title with something like "ver2" or "corrected" appended.