Sept. 19, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:05
2488 True News: JP Morgan Pays a $920 Million Fine, and the Federal Reserve Keeps on Buying!
Stefan Molyneux reads and discusses the news of the day including the recent fine levied upon JP Morgan Chase and the latest shenanigans of the Federal Reserve. Whats the truth behind the stories?
So, this is a possible start to a possible intermittent feature called A Philosopher Reads the News.
I'm at TheNewYorkTimes.com, NYTimes.com.
Let's dig in, shall we?
First, top story.
J.P. Morgan to pay fines of $920 million in trading loss.
It's very interesting.
Let's hear what the old grey lady has to say about this.
The first thing, of course, is that people read the headlines and they think, oh, that's great!
Finally, a financial company is being held to account and people are being punished for wrongdoing.
This, of course, is not at all the case.
So let's have a look at the story.
More than a year, it's written, after a group of traders at JPMorgan Chase caused a multi-billion dollar loss government authorities on Thursday imposed a $920 million fine on the bank and shifted scrutiny to its senior management.
Extracting the fines and a rare admission of wrongdoing from JPMorgan Chase, the nation's largest bank, regulators in Washington and London took aim at a pervasive breakdown in controls and leadership at the bank.
The deal resolves investigations from four regulators, the SEC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, and the Financial Conduct Authority in London.
Let's just see if there is any more details about this.
The regulators who did settle with J.P. Morgan cited the bank for deficiencies in oversight of the risks, assessment of controls, and development of internal financial reporting.
The regulatory orders attributed significant blame to senior management, who failed to elevate concerns about the losses to the bank's board.
For example, after learning in April 2012 that traders were suspected of underestimating the size of their losses, J.P. Morgan's senior management commissioned reviews of the positions, but the senior manager required employees reviewing the trades to keep their work strictly confidential.
According to the SEC, effectively impeding the exchange of information.
That culture of secrecy spread through the bank in response to concerns from a senior executive about information leaking to the marketplace.
An executive in JPMorgan Chase's investment bank promised that the group investigating the trades speak to no one without my express approval first.
Despite the assault on senior management, not one executive was charged in the cases.
Ah.
Regulators were also kept in the dark, authorities said.
The bank failed to turn over significant information to regulatory examiners inspecting the trades.
JPMorgan failed to keep watch over its traders as they overvalued a very complex portfolio to hide massive losses.
Under the deal with the SEC, the bank acknowledged that it violated federal securities laws.
The SEC also cited JPMorgan Chase for misstating its financial results.
In July 2012, the bank restated its first quarter earnings lower by $459 million, conceding errors in the trader's valuation of losses.
The bank agreed to pay $300 million to the Comptroller's Office and about $200 million to the SEC and each of the other agencies.
The Comptroller's Office also cited the bank on Thursday for separate failings in the way it collected overdue bills from consumers and military members.
These fines, while collectively steep, fall in between what other banks have paid when settling with multiple regulators.
And the fines are reasonable trade-off for a bank seeking to move past the trading losses.
Okay, so there's a lot to say about this.
We'll try and keep it quiet.
So, first and foremost, J.P. Morgan hasn't paid a thing because J.P. Morgan doesn't exist.
You cannot charge a corporation Any money whatsoever, because the corporation does not exist.
It is a legal fiction created by the state, usually for the benefit of the ruling classes in what's left of the free market.
And so, JP Morgan isn't going to pay anything, because JP Morgan is a piece of paper.
And a piece of paper can no more pay a fine than it can impregnate your wife.
People are going to pay.
Now, who is going to pay these fines?
Well, the main people who are going to pay these fines are JPMorgan customers and JPMorgan employees.
Are the senior managers going to pay the fine?
Are their houses going to be seized?
Are their Lexuses going to be seized?
Are they going to end up wearing that little cartoon rain barrel?
And wandering around the streets saying, we'll work derivatives for food.
No, they're not going to pay a penny.
the ones who are deciding how the losses, how this fine is going to be paid, are not going to charge themselves.
They're going to take it out of the general funds for JP Morgan.
And what that means, of course, is that there will be fewer raises available for JP Morgan employees, fewer bonuses.
There'll be fewer positions that can be hired, so people who potentially would have got a job won't get a job.
And there will be some form of paying it down to the customers, charging the customers for this.
There'll be an increase in brokerage fees.
There will be lower payouts wherever it's possible.
And so, these customers and these employees took already a hit when the money was lost, and now they're going to take another hit when nearly a billion dollars goes to the government.
Now, the other question is, why on earth should the government be the beneficiary of this?
Right?
I mean, let's say that I say to the police, someone stole my car, and then the police go and find the car, take it back, and keep it themselves.
What the hell has just happened?
How is the money that J.P. Morgan is paying going to get to the people whose illegal actions resulted in the loss of their portfolio, losses in their portfolio?
Lots of people lost lots of money when this stuff occurred.
They don't eat the losses.
They have to take it from their customer accounts.
And so how on earth are the regulators going after this fictional entity, extracting money from customers and employees who already paid for the last round of losses and get to keep that money themselves?
How on earth is that anything other than a second pillaging and raping of customers and employees of J.P. Morgan and basically a shakedown where J.P. Morgan pays off the regulators, none of that money of which goes back to...
Any of the customers or employees who lost money from their portfolios or lost opportunities for raises or bonuses as a result.
It's completely mad.
Now...
Okay, so that's...
This is nonsense.
No one has been hurt other than exactly the same people who were hurt last time.
And...
Of course, they want money.
They don't want to prosecute the senior managers.
Of course, the senior managers give lots of money to the government, and it's very clear that this stuff is politically motivated.
I mean, the only reason Obama got elected was he took huge amounts of money from Wall Street.
And as a result, the SEC, they don't want to go after the donors to the guy in charge.
Of course not.
That's not politically sensible, to say the least.
So, the other thing, too, is that if they go after financial stuff, like the levying of fines and so on, then they get hundreds of millions of dollars for their agency, which is time for great bonuses, the building of empires, cheers all around, Dom Perignon in the juice fridge.
Lots of good stuff goes on when you shake down a company to the tune of about a billion dollars.
If you go after criminal stuff, That doesn't pay.
I mean, let's say you go and get some convictions.
Well, those guys go to jail.
But how does that get you Dom Perignon in the juice fridge?
It doesn't.
I mean, they just go to jail.
There's no shakedown in that, right?
So this is why they always try to levy these massive fines, which is basically a mafia-style shakedown of the company.
Rather than go for the senior executives, which is simply not profitable.
Basic of economics, human beings respond to incentives, and going to get a couple of hundred million dollars is a lot more fun than sending someone to jail and spending money in order to do that and making no money in return.
It's a net financial loss to the SEC if somebody goes to jail.
It's a huge financial gain if they can shake down the employees and customers of J.P. Morgan fundamentally for This is what the government calls justice.
I'm not even going to talk much at all about the idea that...
That losses are understated and the government, you see, is so shocked and appalled, shocked and appalled, that any financial agency might understate its losses.
Isn't that just astounding?
Because the government, of course, never, never changes statistics to improve the outcome.
They never rejig the definitions of unemployment to change the unemployment rate.
They never jig estimates of inflation to artificially lower the inflation rate.
They never manipulate interest rates for their own benefit.
They never do any of this stuff.
And they never ever under-report losses.
Like for instance when they invest in all these green companies that then go tits up within a year or two with everyone making after the 100 million or 200 million dollars.
They never understate losses in these kinds of areas.
So when they invested billions of dollars in the Head Start program, and this turned out to be completely useless, they never really make that public and they never really talk a lot about how much money was wasted on this and just about everything else that the government touches.
They never talk about the net negative effect of, say, the war on drugs on the economy and on humanity in general.
And so the fact that they are going after these companies for stuff which is illegal, which the government does on a regular basis.
Anyway, I mean, it's like that woman who was the head of the IRS who said, well, we had no targeting of the Tea Party groups or anything like that.
Turns out the top brass of the IRS was heavily involved.
I mean, you lie to the cops, you go to jail.
But if you are high up in the government and you lie to Congress...
They'll finger wag for the cameras, but that's about all that happens.
So that's JPMorgan Chase.
All right, so let's turn to the next juicy little tidbit.
After Fed's announcement, confusion and relief on Wall Street.
Ben Bernanke and the markets are having a hard time understanding each other.
Despite a near uniform consensus on Wall Street that the Federal Reserve would start to withdraw its economic stimulus this month, the central bank surprised strategists by announcing Wednesday afternoon that it would indefinitely maintain its bond-buying program at full strength.
So over the last couple of years, the Federal Reserve has been buying U.S. bonds.
To the tune of about $85 billion a month.
And there's two reasons for this.
One is to maintain the price of bonds in the international market.
And the other is to inject lots of money to inflate the money supply within the U.S. economy.
Now, of course, the Fed doesn't have $85 billion.
It just makes up the money, and so the money is just magically being created.
You know what for you and I would pretty much be called counterfeiting?
For the government, it's called sound fiscal policy.
So, why is this important?
Well, the Federal Reserve over the summer has been saying to everyone, don't sweat it, brothers and sisters.
The U.S. economy is rebounding strongly.
It is doing well.
It's healthy.
It's just wonderful.
It can do, you know, 200 one-arm push-ups and take on Jack Palance with one hand tied behind its back.
And people have been listening to this.
Now, since the Federal Reserve stimulus program, sort of called quantitative easing, I think we're up to 666 now.
The Federal Reserve buyback program was in place because the US economy was weak.
And so, as the Federal Reserve says that the US economy is getting stronger and stronger, then it should stop doing that, right?
If the pain is going away, you really should lower the morphine drip, right?
If the Federal Reserve says that the US economy is improving but continues its bond stimulus money inflating buyback scheme, then these two statements are at odds with each other.
And since people generally judge people by what they do rather than what they say, if the Federal Reserve continues, To buy U.S. bonds, then what it's saying is that it needs to continue to provide this Krugman slash Keynesian slash cocaine up the eyeball kind of stimulus to the U.S. economy, which means it's not growing.
It's not strong.
You know those little tomato plants, you put these little sticks and you have them grow up the side of the sticks?
Well, you know, if you do that with a little sampling and then you say, well, it's now become a mighty oak, but I still really need to keep that little stick tied to the side of it so it doesn't fall over, that doesn't make any sense, right?
If it's a mighty oak, it doesn't need the stick, and therefore take the stick away.
If you really feel the stick needs to be there, but you say it's a mighty oak, then you're clearly insane.
And this is, of course, what people are trying to avoid, is the actual insanity of the people in charge of the system.
It announced it would indefinitely maintain its bond-buying program at full strength.
And what it's saying is that, as I've been saying for years, there is no economic recovery.
It's all lies, adjectives, and delusions designed to fool the gullible and the ill-informed into placing more of their money into this monstrous machine.
While the continuation of the stimulus program helps, Stock investors, the Fed's apparent change of heart, sowed confusion that is likely to last for Beyond Wednesday in markets around the world.
Many on Wall Street were left wondering how they got it so wrong, with several pointing the accusing finger at Mr.
Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and the central bank's communication strategy.
For his part, Mr.
Bernanke appeared to put some of the blame on Wall Street.
Quote, the Fed and the market have not been on the same page, and that's very apparent in what happened at 2.01pm, said Michael Hansen, senior United States economist at Bank of America, and one of the few strategists who have predicted that the Fed would stand pat on its bond buying.
Since May, when Mr.
Bernanke first signaled that the Fed could start to wind down its efforts to stimulate borrowing and the economic growth, Wall Street has been preoccupied with predicting when and by what degree that would happen.
You see, this is one of the marks of slaves, is that they are always obsessed with reading the tea leaves of the master's predictions.
At its June meeting, Fed policymakers said that the economy was nearly strong enough to begin doing without the full force of the stimulus program.
As a result, investors around the world spent much of the summer adjusting to the idea that the Fed would begin a retreat from its monthly buying of $85 billion in treasuries and mortgage bank securities.
And you do understand that the only reason that they're buying them is that nobody else would buy them at that price, which means that they're worth much less than what the Federal Reserve is buying them at.
That's just a fact.
Figuring out what would come next involved navigating in uncharted territory.
The breadth and scale of the steps taken by the central bank to get the economy back on its feet in the wake of the financial crisis have been without precedent.
The bond-buying programs have helped push up stock prices and kept interest rates low.
Making it easier for borrowers to take out home and auto loans.
Oh yes, that worked out so well last time, didn't it?
Keeping interest rates artificially low just worked out wonderfully.
Now, why does the government want interest rates to be low?
Well, of course, it does stimulate a certain amount of artificial economic activity, which then collapses as all bubbles do when interest rates rise up again, which is what happened in the housing market in 2007-2008.
The interest rates, which have been kept artificially low, ended up popping up and wiped out a lot of people who had home and auto loans.
And the other reason it wants to keep interest rates low, of course, is that the government has $17 trillion worth of debt now, and if interest rates move by even a point, it will do huge amounts to wipe out any kind of We're good to go.
And now they're down at like 1% and 2% in England because all the central banks are working like crazy to keep the interest rates low.
What happens when you keep the interest rates low, of course, is that nobody wants to save.
You put your money in the bank, and what happens is they're keeping the interest rates low partly by pumping all this money into the economy, which means that there's more money looking for people to borrow it, which means that the price of borrowing money goes down.
So they push all this money, which means that inflation goes up at the same time as Whatever you're getting paid for putting your money in some kind of savings bond goes down, which means that it stimulates consumption in the here and now at the expense of the seed capital for capital improvements down the road.
So the more people save, the more money gets invested in improving worker productivity, building new plants, research and development, and so on.
When the government pushes the interest rates low, people stop saving and they start spending.
That looks really good on paper.
For the current copper politicians who aren't really worried about the economic productivity of the American worker 10 or 15 years from now, but this is what it depends on these savings, maybe even five years from now, they just want to get through the next election.
And so they love stimulating consumption in the here and now and damn the consequences, right?
As Keene said, in the long run, we're all dead.
Well, they may be, but my child won't be, so it's kind of important.
The expectation that these programs would soon start to ease has caused interest rates to rise, which has hurt many emerging market economies that had come to rely on lower rates.
The recent preparations paved the way for the mixture of confusion and euphoria that broke out on Wednesday afternoon.
In one line, delay is good policy.
The communication strategy is in pieces.
These are the people who are in charge of your life.
The economy is your life.
If you don't have access to money or if inflation hits really hard and wipes out your savings, then your life is kind of ruined.
If all the misallocation of capital that comes from the government constantly playing whack-a-mole with all its financial problems and overspending, if that causes no jobs to be created, you can't get a job or you lose your job, your life is in tatters.
So what it means is that the people in charge, the people in charge of the Federal Reserve, who said throughout the summer that they were going to stop this program pretty much and that the economy was doing better.
And now it turns out that they say, well, actually we're not going to stop this program.
We're going to keep it going indefinitely.
Over the summer, they were either completely wrong about the state of the U.S. economy or they were lying.
Either way, isn't it kind of terrifying that basically you're strapped into the back of a nice dusty, creaky, yellow New York taxi, you can't get out, everything's sealed, and The guy in the front has got his feet jammed on the accelerator, is ripping his way through traffic at Mach 12, and he's blindfolded.
And this is the people who are in charge.
They're either complete fools who have no idea how the economy works.
I mean, I'm just some amateur idiot in Canada.
And, I mean, I put out the information years ago that there was going to be no economic recovery.
I mean, this was obvious to anyone with any eye for numbers and reasonable Capacities at amateur economics.
So either they had no idea that the US economy was not improving, or they did know it wasn't improving, but they were lying to everyone about their intentions.
So they're either idiots or they're complete frauds.
And this, of course, is something that you can't really talk about.
It's just too terrifying.
Of course, great for those of us who own gold.
The Fed continues its stimulus purchase.
Gold rose more than 4% yesterday.
Yay!
That's some good stuff.
So, this, I think, is a really important thing to understand.
And nobody's talking about this.
I mean, they're all just like, oh, that's really bad, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
All right, let's touch on one more briefly.
And let me know if you find this stuff interesting.
I read this stuff anyway, so I thought I might not do a chat with you while I'm doing it.
And if you find it useful, let me know.
You can email my director of operations, Magic Mike, at operations at freedomainradio.com.
Just let us know or put it in the comments section below on the YouTube video.
So this is mental health again an issue in gun debate.
Why is it again an issue?
1963, America passed laws to forbid the selling of arms to people with mental health problems.
1963, that's 40 years ago.
This problem was solved 40 years ago, according to the government, because they passed a law, you see, and therefore there should be no further issues.
Despite deep divisions that have kept Congress from passing new gun safety laws for almost two decades, there is one aspect of gun control on which many Democrats, Republicans and even the NRA agree, the need to give mental health providers better resources to treat dangerous people and prevent them from buying weapons.
Yet efforts to improve the country's fraying mental health system to help prevent mass shootings have stalled.
On Capitol Hill tied up in the broader fight over expanded background checks and limits on weapons sales.
Now the shooting at the Washington Navy Yard by a man who authorities say showed telltale signs of psychosis is spurring a push to move ahead with bipartisan mental health policy changes.
The new debate over gun control is beginning to turn not on weapons or ammunition but on the question of whether to spend more money on treating and preventing mental illness.
Now, I mean, this again is all complete nonsense and ignores the actual history of this shooter.
The shooter had displayed mental health problems for almost 10 years.
He was arrested in 2004 for a shooting out The tires at a construction company site, a construction site outside his home because he was upset about parking, and he said to police he blacked out and didn't even remember shooting.
Anyone a year later, I think in 2010 or 2009, he was arrested for shooting a bullet through the floor of his upstairs neighbor's house, apartment, then through the ceiling again where he claimed that he accidentally discharged his weapon because he was both cooking and cleaning a loaded weapon at the same time.
And he told police in a business trip in 2010, I think, that people were using special microwave rays to keep him awake, and he heard voices in his head, and he had been assessed by the Veterans Administration and was under the care, custody and control of their crack team of helpful psychiatrists to deal with his issues.
He complained about insomnia, and I believe that they had assessed him.
He was in the Navy, and the Navy saw, and the Navy has resources to provide help to these kinds of people.
The Navy basically discharged him honorably.
And so the idea that we just needed, we need a little bit more government money and layer and control and laws to deal with this is completely mad.
I mean, this guy went insane under the care, custody and control of the US government with all of the resources of the US Navy and the US government available to him and able to be inflicted upon him should they so choose.
They could have institutionalized him.
They could have put him three days in a psychiatric hospital for full assessment.
I mean, this guy was in the government the whole time, pretty much, and he was arrested several times, and so the idea that we need a little more government is just completely mad.
I mean, it's completely mad.
I mean, it's like there are a hundred guys in a maximum security prison, none of them are getting out, and the solution is to build another prison right next to it.
Well, the solution to what?
Government already has full control over these people.
They're not getting out, so why would you build another prison?
So, quote.
Oh yeah, I'm sorry, sorry, let's get back here.
So, proponents again face a steep uphill push, but they see an opening, even if it remains unclear whether any changes under consideration could have headed off the latest attack, in which the authorities say Aaron Alexis, a former Navy reservist, bought the shotgun he used in Virginia.
So nobody in the government who had clear exposure to his mental illness or his madness or his evil or whatever you want to call it, his dysfunction, none of the people in the government ever let anybody know.
Well, the police, who noticed that he was saying that microwaves were keeping him awake and he heard voices in his head and so on, they told the Navy and the Navy did precisely nothing, to my knowledge.
They're still reviewing the incident and so on.
Um...
So the quote is, given the clear connection between recent mass shootings and mental illness, the Senate should not delay bipartisan legislation that would help address this issue.
Says, you know, gas bag, talking ahead, number 12.
The legislation they are pushing, which was held up when a more sweeping gun measure was defeated earlier this year, would establish programs to train teachers to recognize the signs of mental illness and how to defuse potentially violent situations.
I don't think you need a lot of training to see signs of mental illness.
When those signs include things like shooting at cars because you're having trouble finding parking, or shooting to an upstairs neighbor's apartment because you have problems with the noise, Or hearing voices or claiming that microwaves from people next door are keeping you awake, extreme paranoia.
This is not subtle.
This is not subtle at all.
It's like saying, well, you know, we really need to train doctors on how to recognize a beheading.
Well, a beheading is not actually that hard to miss in that you have a body With no head.
And so the idea that we're going to have a three-day seminar to explain to doctors exactly how to spot the subtle signs of a person, say, without a head would be kind of ridiculous.
And just by the by, you know, even the phrase gun control is It's one of these phrases that is designed to frame the debate.
I mean, of course we all want guns to be controlled.
It sort of reminds me, years ago, when I was doing business in the south of America, I went to a meeting at a corporate headquarters, I was doing a presentation, and there was a sign beside the entranceway.
It says, no guns allowed in the building.
And underneath it was that same sign in Braille.
I just let that sink in for a moment, that they felt it was really important to let blind people know they weren't allowed to carry guns.
I don't think blind people would find much use for guns as a whole.
And in fact, if I had designed the sign, I would have really put the braille stuff on top just to make sure that the people who were blind who were coming into the building with weapons would actually notice that sign and not do it.
But everybody wants guns to be controlled.
Of course, guns are very dangerous.
So, yes, you don't want your surgeon to come at you blindfolded with a chainsaw.
That is going to lead you back to being a cadaver demonstration for the He Has No Head three-day training seminar for ER doctors.
So, of course, we want guns to be controlled.
What's the opposite of gun control?
Gun uncontrolled guns.
I mean, that's just dangerous.
So it's just a way of psychologically planting, well, don't you want the control of guns?
That's not what's really being talked about.
Of course, the great paradox of gun control is you say, well, guns are bad, so we need to give the police more guns to take away the people who have guns.
Also, the guns for the police are really good, and the guns for the private citizens Oh, those are really bad.
And that is something that just doesn't...
It's just logical.
If guns are bad, then we have to take away from the police.
If guns are good, then the police can have them, but then so can everyone else.
So, it's sort of like the abortion debate, where the people who believe that abortion is fine, they say they're pro-choice.
You know, because choice is...
You know, the fact that, say, the fetus, who's scrambling away from the invasive needle and trying to survive, the fact that the fetus gets killed does not actually grant a lot of choice to the fetus.
So it's not really pro-choice.
It is pro-killing a potential human being.
And the idea that it's somehow pro-woman To be pro-abortion is kind of silly because, of course, half the fetuses that are killed are female.
Therefore, it's not really pro-female at all.
And let's look at gun control.
Now, I'm not saying that this would be imminent in any country that establishes gun control in the West.
Times have changed.
But from the perspective of those who believe that guns should be available to private citizens, let's just look at some of the facts.
In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control.
From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
In 1911, Turkey established gun control.
From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
Germany established gun control in 1938.
From 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and, drumroll, exterminated.
China established gun control in 1935.
From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
Guatemala established gun control in 1964.
From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
Uganda established gun control in 1970.
From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
Cambodia established gun control in 1956.
From 1975 to 1977, 1 million, quote, educated people unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
So, you could go on and on, but defenseless people rounded up and exterminated in the 20th century because of gun control.
56 million people.
That's almost a Second World War and a half.
40 million souls died in the Second World War.
So there is a pattern.
Of course you want to disarm your citizens if you are looking to increase government power and control over them, for sure.
And without a doubt, in the West, there's no possibility for the economic trajectory that exists to possibly continue.
The unfunded liabilities in America alone are close to $100 trillion, by some estimates.
So there's no possibility that the welfare state is going to continue.
There's no possibility Social Security is going to continue.
And what happens when These checks stop coming, or the money gets so inflated that the checks are functionally worthless.
Well, there'll be rioting, there'll be rebellion.
So naturally, there's a strong push at the moment in the government for gun control, because they know that they're going to be unable to feed the tigers, and therefore the tigers are going to come looking for food on their own, which is not what they want.
So, I wanted to point that out.
Thank you so much for watching and listening.
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