New Deutsche Bank Revelations, and the Lessons in There for Every Citizen

Deutsche Bank revealed to be up to its neck in Dei Paschi scandals as doubts grow about the DoJ ‘deal’. The Slog ties this news to the urgent need for all of us to learn from it….and act accordingly to protect our rights and liberties from the Corporate State.

Following today’s earlier Slogpost doubting the veracity of rumours that Deutsche Bank had struck a deal with the US Justice Department, two hours ago Zero Hedge updated its coverage of the crisis by adding its own doubts, and further damning the culture at the bank with news of rigging charges it will now face in Italy.

Tyler Durden Mark IX writes of what

‘…….appears to have been a fabricated report sourced by AFP which relied on Twitter as a source that the DOJ would reduce its RMBS settlement amount with Deutsche Bank from $14 billion to below $6 billion (and which neither the DOJ nor Deutsche Bank have confirmed for obvious reasons)….’

But the accounts falsification ties Deutsche to Monte del Paschi in a move that parallels Hitler’s paratroopers rescuing Mussolini from Italian captivity in 1944. In a nutshell, it is alleged, following a 3-year police inquiry, that DB knowingly did derivatives trades with Monte del Paschi – which then used the transactions to hide losses in its business over the years 2008-2012. The deals came to light in January 2013 when Bloomberg News broke the story; Boombust is also the source of this latest confirmation of sociopathic and serial criminality at Germany’s biggest bank. In a bulletin tonight, Big BB opined that “the charges deal another blow to Deutsche Bank, which is seeking to reassure investors and clients that it will be able to withstand pending U.S. penalties over the bank’s sale of mortgage-backed securities and its dealings with some Russian clients.”

I wrote five years ago, “These days, you do not have to be a socialist or indeed any kind of radical to believe that the social, economic, financial and fiscal policies of the West are devised and run by deranged crooks”.

Harsh but fair, I think. I would not change a word of it, although I might substitute ‘world’ for ‘West’. But what has become increasingly clear is that – in a world where corporate greed has replaced constitutional guarantees – every last one of these vandals exists on a rarified plane miles above the law that prosecutes you and me.

Consider these selected highlights of banking in the European Union.

• Goldman Sachs ran a seminar for Greek bureaucrats and politicians designed to teach them how to cheat Brussels, and hide unmanageable debt. Nick Cohn, who ran it, appears regularly on Bloomberg TV, where he is treated like royalty.
• Bob Diamond conspired with the Bank of England and other involved institutions, during the 2008 unpleasantness, to rig the Libor rate to the obvious advantage of the banking system.
• Once Syriza had been elected in Greece, ECB boss Mario Draghi conspired with Greek bank boss (and ECB board member, no conflict there then) Yannis Stournaras to exacerbate the Hellenic liquidity problem. I’ll just restate that in words even Labour Remaindeers could grasp: two unelected EU bureaucrats plotted to minimise the chances of success for a Leftist Government elected by an overwhelmingly popular vote of the Greek citizenry.
• From an earlier era, Draghi himself is hugely implicated in the cover-up of Italian banking’s shortcomings. So much so, in fact, that if the full story of del Paschi and one other bank were ever to come to light, he would go to prison leave quietly stage Right and become an elder Statesman.
• The Spanish Caja banking system was so riddled with non-performing property loans between 2009 and 2012, only an under-the-table effort by bigger (whingeing) banks – along with nefarious ‘write offs’ and bad-bank creations – could stop a complete meltdown. The fact that Spanish banks are now either empty or dangerously exposed to emerging nations is ‘overcome’ by our man Draghi yet again, whose musical-monies Ponzi parlour game moves deposits around in a manner designed to fool the stress testers.
• British bank RBS committed so many accounting crimes under Fred Badloss, an SFO officer once confided to me that “it would literally take a hundred people working for a decade to audit them”. Under its later helmsman Stephen Hester, in January 2011, the bank was fined £28.58 million for anti-competitive practices that were enacted with Barclays in relation to the pricing of loan products for large professional services firms. It still faces over 2,500 civil suits relating to conspiracy to defraud SME customers by seizing their properties.

Call me optimistic, but it does seem to me now that a combination of citizen revolt, fiscal disaster, bank failure and sovereign squabbling is at last going to do for the European Union.

As to the ability of We The People to extricate our liberties and government processes from the blood-sucking tentacles of globalised business and banking, I confess to being sanguine on good days, and deeply pessimistic on bad ones. The last three days have been marked down in my life-diary as unutterably bad: bad ideas, bad guys, bad practice and at the end of it all, the laughingly termed ‘bad banks’** that result…a range of dead Chernobyls around the globe of which we then hear little or nothing. In that particular instance, no news is fairly certain to be bad news.

From the perspective of dear old Blighty’s Septic Isles, I stick to the opinion I gave about Jeremy Corbyn earlier this week – a link to the column appears below. He is an honest politician tarred with an injudicious mixture of economic and fiscal innocence plus tired ideology.

The Conservatives are a waste of space in that, while they grasp commercial imperatives, they too are incapable of shaking off the ever-present desire to do a grubby deal, collect donations, and admire Adam Smith.

All the Party groupings at Westminster (with perhaps the exception of the SNP and a few loners here and there) have lost the plot about who they work for in general, and the fact that we don’t work for them. But above all, it is sclerotic ideology that holds them (and us) back. That the Tories cleave to the ideas of a bloke who died before steamships, while Labour activists increasingly spout the stilted syntax of Marx and 1960s student IS, is a hard fact that would be legs-in-the-air funny if it wasn’t so obscenely tragic.

A research survey from America yesterday suggested that fully 57% of Americans would like to see the formation of a mass Third Party. For me, in Britain that would be putting the cart before the horse: the two things to get before anything like that occurs in the UK would be a proportional representation system, and all the munneeee out of politics.

My advice to US citizens would be to tackle that second one too. Money in politics can only lead, ultimately, to The Corporate State: it corrodes ethics, weakens political resolve, blinds legislators to the needs of those who have none of it, and turns what should be a universal “No” into “Oh alright then, just this once”.

British history has gone through three constitutional changes: the separation of Royalty and sovereign power, the separation of Church and State, and mass extension of the voting franchise.

Four further changes are now urgently required : the separation of Mammon and its media from sovereign power, the introduction of fully democratic voting, the restoration of educational values designed to help voters think for themselves, and the radical devolution of power down to local levels.

Nothing less will do if we are to preserve liberty and personal responsibility. But blinkered ideologists are never going to do it.

Recently at The Slog: Corbyn is a fine man, but he is not the answer

** There is something about the term ‘bad bank’ that puts me in mind of dog ownership and training. I imagine a truculent and somewhat bonkers puppy called Bank who really isn’t paying attention, and to whom one must constantly say – in a sharp tone of voice – ‘Down Bank! No Bank! Bad Bank! Bad Bank!” But it’s probably just me.

Filed under: New revelations tie Deutsche Bank into Italian graft, Uncategorized Tagged: Corporate Dictatorship, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, LIBOR scandal, Mario Draghi, Monti dei Paschi