Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

To all my critics who insisted I was a conspiracy theorist, here's a big $hit sandwich just for you. 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425?print=true

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

Matt Taibbi: Election Jamie Dimon To Be Treasury Secretary Would Be 'Revolution-Provoking Decision'

Thanks to Kitty for finding this one.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/29/matt-taibbi-jamie-dimon-treasury-secretary_n_2210871.html

Matt Taibbi on Goldman

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/;kw=[3351,136554]?RS_show_page=0

Many of us have read Taibbi's hard-hitting articles on Wall Street's fraudsters. But what intrigued me the most were his anecdotal comments on Wall Street's other crimes-in-progress.

http://www.gata.org/node/8591

"There is more fraud out there, and everyone knows it: front-running, manipulation of the commodities markets, trading ahead of interest-rate moves, hidden losses, Enron-esque accounting, Ponzi schemes in the precious-metals markets, you name it. We gave these people nearly a trillion bailout dollars, and no one knows what service they actually provide beyond fraud, gross self-indulgence and the occasional transparently insincere public apology."

[ed. bold emphasis is mine]

When and if the story on precious metals price suppression breaks, the emperor will be exposed as naked, in more ways than one.

Looting Main Street, by Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi wrote a scathing account in Rolling Stone of how Goldman Sachs fleeced clients--including sovereign governments like Greece, while at the same time, gerrymandering a bailout to save their bacon when their bets turned sour. See that article here. Taibbi now turns his attention to JPMorgan, and how they looted local governments here in the good ol' USA.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32906678/looting_main_street/1

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

Wall Street hustle

This is an excellent article by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi on how "banks too big to fail" and our government are raping and pillaging its tax-paying citizens. It's long, but it's a MUST READ.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32255149/wall_streets_bailout_hustle/1