Showing posts with label hot money. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hot money. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

UBScandal


As capitalism melts down the rich always find a way to hide their taxable income. In the best of times and the worst of times. If they don't get the tax cuts they demand c'est lavie. They can always hide their money in Swiss bank accounts courtesy of the Gnomes of Zurich.In this case courtesy UBS. As we found with Enron, capitalism breaks down because those who play in the market know that rules are made to be broken and so they break them.


UBS executive indicted in US

UBS executive charged with aiding tax evasion

The Swiss Banker and 'Toxic Waste'

Gee could that have anything to do with this;

Top Executives at UBS Will Not Get Bonuses

Or maybe its actually because of this;

UBS warns earnings will be squeezed for rest of year

After being Europe's first major credit crunch victim, writing down $37.0 billion in the first two quarters of the year, there has been a shift in focus in the concerns that investors have about UBS. Its balance sheet is looking decidedly less frightening, now that it has shifted $60.0 billion of illiquid mortgage-backed securities into a vehicle created by the Swiss national bank, while it managed a profit in the third quarter.

And before we get all warm and fuzzy about those poor bankers UBS will still pay em heaping amounts of gold, just not all at once....

UBS said its new compensation model would be "focused on the long-term" and "closely aligned with the value creation of the firm." Executive board members whose bonuses had depended on annual performance alone will now be paid according to the new system that tracks their performance and the bank's share price over a three-year period. The two variable parts of their compensation--in cash and equity--will both be performance linked and the chairman of the bank will no longer get so-called "variable compensation."

And like that other Republican Investment Banker; Dan Quayle, who works for Cerebeus, lookee here UBS has one in their pocket too.

Phil Gramm: A Deregulator Unswayed
RGE Monitor, NY - , he left Capitol Hill in 2002 to work as an investment banker and lobbyist for UBS, a Swiss bank that has been hard hit by the market downturn,

You remember Phil he advised the McCain campaign until last summer when he called Americans concerned about the meltdown appearing on the horizon a bunch of 'Whiners'.

Phil Gramm, a former Texas senator who is now vice chairman of UBS, the giant Swiss bank, said he expects Mr. McCain to inherit a sluggish economy if he wins the presidency, weighed down above all by the conviction of many Americans that economic conditions are the worst in two or three decades and that America is in decline.
"You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," he said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. "We may have a recession; we haven't had one yet."
"We have sort of become a nation of whiners," he said. "You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline" despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said. "

Now he says the push to deregulate the market had nothing to do with the current meltdown.

<'>The retired Texas senator claims that deregulation “played virtually no role” in the current economic turmoil engulfing the globe, nor the housing collapse or the credit crisis. The exempting of any regulation of derivatives, including state insurance supervision, reserve requirements or clearing information was not significant to the crisis. The nonfeasance of the Fed in supervising all of the non-bank lenders that lay at the heart of the housing boom and bust was not the cause either (it was “Predatory Borrowing”). And the payola scandals at the ratings agencies — Moodies, S&P, and Fitch — that slapped triple AAA ratings on paper that turned out to be junk would not have been prevented via better oversight.
Gramm said placing any blame on deregulation was simply “an emerging myth.”


The whole UBS scandal comes home to Canada where we specialize in White Collar Crime....Corporate Captialist criminals get away with murder in Canada. We have no single national regulator liie the SEC, and clearly our bank laws are not enforced effectively, if UBS can set up a secret offshore account for wealthy Americans called the 'Canada Desk' because the deals were done on Canadian soil.

Top Firm Accused Of Having Illegal 'Secret' Desk


This scandale has caused the Montreal Gazzette to pick up on the popular slogan of the Communist Party of Canada Marxist Lenninist in its latest editorial; Make The Rich Pay.

Government has obligation to make the rich pay, too
Raoul Weil, a senior executive of the Swiss bank UBS, has been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on charges of helping his U.S. clients hide some $20 billion in assets from the taxman. Americans will be glad to see their government pursue this sort of case aggressively.
In Canada, however ....
The Globe and Mail reported last week that Weil was also in charge of a secretive team of senior bankers whose job was to help Canadians hide as much as $5.6 billion from the Canada Revenue Agency, this country's tax collector.
So what has that agency, and the rest of the Canadian government, been doing about these allegations, the outlines of which have long been known? Nobody knows. Maybe nothing. And that's not nearly good enough.
Nothing is more corrosive to the sense of fairness and transparency that society needs to function well than the idea that there are two standards - one for the wealthy and one for everyone else



And in light of this scandal this failure to collect what is due the people of Canada or to prosecute UBS for breaking our banking laws, what does the Government and Revenue Canada do? Wait for it....

Ottawa targets online merchants who pay no taxes

Canada Revenue Agency to focus on so-called 'power sellers' on eBay

Pound foolish, pennyt wise.



SEE:

Crime Pays If You Are Rich

Whining and Dining with the Irvings

Hedge Funds, Junk Bonds, Ponzi Schemes

Criminal Capitalism Business As Usual


Sunday, September 23, 2007

Crime Pays If You Are Rich

Capitalism originated in plunder, the primitive accumulation of wealth, its origin lay in the evolution of class of mercantile bankers who hired mercenaries to expand their markets. As Arrighi points out in the Long Twentieth Century, the transition from Catholic Feudalism to capitalism was the creation of free trade private navies with marines in the service of merchant capital who created the bourse; the modern stock exchange.

Today capitalism still engages in economic criminal activities which are socially sanctioned. It is called tax avoidance. Where the law or regulations are silent, or allow for a wide interpretation of what is allowed or not, the speculator, the CEO the venture capitalist, etc.etc. will take advantage to get around the law or regulation. Until they are caught or bankrupt the company. Then new laws are created by the state to level the playing field, and the whole process comes full circle.

The one thing criminal capitalists can count on is being welcomed back to the old boys club with open arms by their ruling class chums. Heck they are proud of their reputation as the black sheep. And their class applauds their valiant efforts.

Of the more than 1,200 wealthy individuals that have appeared on Forbes's annual list of the 400 richest Americans over the past quarter century at least 13 have been convicted of serious crimes or jailed.

They include some well-known names: Wall Street's, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milkin from the Gordon Gecko junk bond era, the silver-speculating Hunt brothers, media diva Martha Stewart and the late Leona Hemsley, the hotelier.






SEE


A Day in the Life of Corporate Criminals

It's the company you keep

Agribusiness Bad Boys

Criminal Capitalism-West-Jet

Money Laundering Canadian Style

India Is Now A Capitalist State

Too Greedy


White Collar Crime Reporter 1


Criminal Capitalism The Story of 2006

Hedge Funds, Junk Bonds, Ponzi Schemes

Bring Out Your Dead

Money Laundering Canadian Style

Criminal Capitalism Redux

Credit Card Fraud

Golden Parachutes

1666 The Creation Of The World

Dirty Laundry Business as Usual

Calgary Fraud Funds Dubai Boom

Casino Capitalism

Are Income Trusts Money Laundering

Unproductive Capital

More Criminal Capitalists

Income Trust Fraud


Criminal Capitalism: Office Romance


Yeltsin's Legacy

Contracting Out Is A Crime



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Saturday, May 05, 2007

Dirty Laundry Business as Usual

You could say Casino Capitalism is criminal capitalism or rather all capitalism is criminal......

The Financial Times has named Capitalism’s Achilles Heel (Wiley, 2005) by Raymond W. Baker as one of the best business books of the year.

“Books that deal with the darker side of business can disturb and entertain in equal measure. In Capitalism's Achilles Heel (Wiley Pounds 16.99), Raymond Baker reveals the methods by which corrupt governments and crooked executives - as well as terrorists - move money through the global financial system. The book even includes a ‘Dirty Money User Guide’ - alas more appealing to aspiring fraudsters than reforming policymakers.”

For over forty years in more than sixty countries, Raymond Baker has witnessed the free-market system operating illicitly and corruptly, with devastating consequences for scores of fragile nations. Now, in Capitalism’s Achilles Heel, Baker—the internationally respected authority on money laundering, corruption, and development issues—takes you on a fascinating journey that winds its way across the global free-market system and reveals how dirty money, poverty, and inequality are inextricably intertwined.

You’ll discover how little illicit transactions lead to massive illegalities used by drug kingpins, racketeers, terrorist masterminds, and multinational corporations. You’ll learn how staggering global income disparities are worsened by the illegalities that have come to permeate international capitalism. And you’ll see how distorted philosophical underpinnings appear to justify flaws in the practice of capitalism.


Selling the biggest lie of them all – Capitalism

Review: Gangster Capitalism – The United States and the Global rise of Organized Crime by Michael Woodiwiss

The spirit of graft and lawlessness is the American Spirit.
– Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities, 1902

‘Gangster Capitalism’ documents the lie in all its sordid details from the days of the ‘Robber Barons’ through to the ‘War on Terror’ and all the stops in-between, the ‘War on Communism’, the ‘War on Drugs’. Between them, they are responsible for an assault of unparalleled brutality that is global in scope and a lie that has been so successfully sold, it has dragged much of the planet into going along with it.

From the United Nations to so-called independent states, all have been bribed, blackmailed, threatened or finally invaded/occupied into participating in the various ‘wars’ the US is waging, ultimately to the benefit of capital. That all of it has been done in the name of ‘morality’, mostly of a Christian flavour, is perhaps what makes it all so sordid, so disgusting and hypocritical.

There is a direct relationship between the extermination of ‘inferior’ peoples and the crimes of the Gangster Capitalists, from the owners of the plantations, to those who built the railroads that opened up the interior of America, to those who built the stockyards of Chicago, the auto plants of Detroit that consumed the immigrants in their millions and co-opted them into swallowing the ‘American Dream’.

‘Gangster Capitalism’ does one heck of a job in documenting the process, indeed it is relentless in its exposure and all the while revealing the underlying motivations; power and control by the few over the many. Underpinning the process has been the use of a twisted Christian ‘morality’ that in reality justified a system of exploitation that is unparalleled in history. And, Woodiwiss emphasises the role that race plays in the process, something that cannot be stated too strongly if we are to understand why US capitalism has been so successful at persuading so many to go along with the lie.



Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Global Rise of Organized Crime
The title of Michael Woodiwiss's book plays on the term "gangster capitalism." It asks the question: Are there gangsters who are capitalists? Yes, indeed, is Woodiwiss's answer. But it also raises the more important question: Are capitalists gangsters? His answer is a resounding affirmative.

The Enron Stage of Capitalism

In much simplified terms, the thesis is that the pursuit of profit has gone too far. Specifically that we have now entered a new, and worse, stage of capitalism where elements of the public good (by which the book means healthcare, water, power and others) are being privatised and sold to corporations who care more about profit than the welfare of the population. The two really damming parts of the thesis are that (1) the privatisation is often occurring under coercion - threats from the US military machine, and (2) the rich nations set the rules to favour the rich (consider which organisations have international power, and which nations control them). The bottom line is that the rich corporations have found a new way to exploit the poor (even in the 'overdeveloped' world the poor are exploited - their standard of living is allowed to increase slowly, but the majority of the gains go to the few). The pursuit of profit has become so all encompassing that little else matters (particularly not morality).

We Can No Longer Afford Vulture Capitalism

Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain




See:

Casino Capitalism

Are Income Trusts Money Laundering

Calgary Fraud Funds Dubai Boom

The New Market States

Criminal Capitalism Redux

Unproductive Capital

CEO

Stock Options
Corporate Crime

White Collar Crime


Criminal Capitalism





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