Lyndon LaRouche today demanded that the Wall Street and City of London bankers who are preparing to ring in the New Year with outright thievery of billions of dollars of citizens’ bank accounts and savings—all under the rubric of “bail-in” procedures to salvage their bankrupt banks—should be promptly arrested and jailed before they are able to commit their pre-announced crimes.
It used to be called fraud. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, JP Morgan and other banks knowingly defrauded their clients by pushing them to buy shares in their banks, which shortly went belly-up. Some bankers went to jail for the crime back then— courtesy of FDR.
A few years ago, Spain’s major banks, including Banco Santander, pulled the same operation by selling their own clients so-called “preferentes” shares in the failing banks, saddling their customers with enormous losses.
Earlier this year, in the case of Puerto Rico, some of the world’s largest banks, again including Santander and UBS, were caught red-handed similarly off-loading bad Puerto Rican municipal bonds from their own books, while at the same time suckering their clients into buying them. They received a minor fine when they were caught in the fraud.
And in Italy, four banks were just bailed-in by expropriating the holdings in the banks of 10,000 of their clients.
But now this fraudulent practice is about to be codified as not only fully legal under the new bail-in regulations that will be implemented by the European Union as of Jan. 1, 2016; but it is furthermore being required of Europe’s banks, to the tune of 8% of their total assets, which are to be sold as “bail-in bonds.” This is paper that is the financial equivalent of rat’s poison: it is guaranteed to fail at the point of a bail-in of the bank in question.
As for the United States, the bad news is that the Wall Street banks also intend to steal people’s savings in this country. The good news is that most Americans are so poor that they don’t have any savings left to steal. A CNBC MarketWatch article noted today that a recent Google Consumer Survey showed that about 62% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings to deal with any emergencies. A similar survey by Bankrate.com also found that 62% had no savings, adding that, among those who had savings prior to the 2008 blowout, 57% said they had used some or all of their savings to deal with the crisis.
LaRouche commented that most countries in Asia are in good shape; China is doing a good job; Russian-Indian cooperation is very good; but the U.S. is in terrible shape, induced by Obama and his Wall Street-dictated policies.