John Titus focuses on Wall Street crime and corporate cronyism in the financial system.
For more info please visit John Titus's Substack publishing page: https://bestevidence.substack.com
Titus has a juris doctor and has litigated patents for 25 years. He also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and worked as an electrical engineer in the space industry. Since 2020 John has co-produced and co-hosted Money and Markets with Catherine Austin Fitts at Solari Inc.
John has written extensively, made films and videos about the financial and monetary events that undercut the rule of law in this country over the past 10 years.
By the way, this has been happening for longer than 10 years, but he's been writing about it for 10 years.
This is the way the banks are ripping us off, and they never get prosecuted, and that's what we're going to talk about.
But John has practiced mainly patent law over the past 25 years.
He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering, and he is licensed by the U.S. Supreme Court and many lower courts.
He temporarily left his legal practice in 2012 to write about and to create a documentary about the official response by the US government to this systemic fraud that drove the global financial crisis and ended up rewarding the perpetrators with bailouts while putting millions of Americans on the street by ripping them off on their mortgages.
John Titus currently produces a weekly video podcast for Solari.
Many of you know Catherine Austin Fitz, who is his partner.
His video is called Money and Markets, and you can find him on his YouTube channel, Best Evidence.
You know, I read a really devastating piece that you did on the HBC case.
I just wanted to talk to you about that.
And what you uncovered is that there's a secret agreement Between the United States government and a cartel of foreign banks that basically provides immunity to banks, no matter how egregious their criminal behavior, they can't get prosecuted in this country criminally.
Particularly with the HPC bank, HPC confessed to criminal conduct Worth billions of dollars of theft.
And that should have put the entire upper staff in prison and had some kind of criminal sanctions against the bank.
And in the middle of that prosecution, the DOJ, Department of Justice, was going forward full bore and said, we got these guys.
They've confessed everything.
We just have to basically tell the judge how long they need to go to prison for.
And in the middle of that, they began getting these very odd interventions that you were able to parse this kind of coded language that was being used between British and American officials and tell the story for the first time.
Yeah, well, to set the table, HSBC openly admitted and freely confessed to violating, criminally violating the Bank Secrecy Act and the Trading with the Enemy Act because they were facilitating money laundering by drug dealers and terrorists.
And they admitted to all this.
And so the DOJ had, the Department of Justice in the US had these guys dead to rights.
And there were people in the DOJ in Washington who were like, let's go get these guys.
And what happened is, that was in the summer of 2012, but by the end of 2012, in December, Eric Holder, who was the Attorney General at the time, gets up and says, now we're going to fine him $1.9 billion, but we're not going to put anybody in jail.
And the New York Times led with a piece that said, today is a dark day for the rule of law.
And nobody really knew what had happened.
As of that time, late 2012.
And then what happens if you flash forward about four years?
The House Financial Services Committee looks into the HSBC case.
Now, what they find is that, yes, the prosecutors in the DOJ were going to prosecute HSBC. They were going to put individual bankers in prison.
Let me interrupt you for a second, John, just to set the stage so people understand.
There were people in the Senate like Elizabeth Warren and others who were saying, why the hell did not HSBC go to jail?
And they were investigating our Justice Department and trying to figure out what happened.
Right.
They were asking...
Asking questions.
And finally, the House Financial Services Committee did this report, did this investigation of the DOJ. And the key document in that investigation was a letter sent from George Osborne, who was the head of the Exchequer in the UK. He was basically their Treasury Secretary.
And he sent a letter in the summer of 2012 as the prosecution is gearing up.
And he sent the letter to Tim Geithner, who is the Treasury Secretary of the U.S., And Ben Bernanke, who was the Fed Chairman.
And he said, hey, you can't prosecute HSBC. And he has this weird language in there saying, well, it's a systemically important financial institution.
And if you prosecute HSBC, we're going to face contagion and it's going to roil all these markets, so don't do it.
And lo and behold, from that moment forward, the DOJ begins to walk back its plans to prosecute HSBC to the point where by December of 2012, they basically gave HSBC a pass.
And not only that, but they implemented all these changes to the Deferred Prosecution Agreement with HSBC that HSBC suggested.
And so it was like, well, who is George Osborne?
Why are U.S. authorities listening to him?
And why is the Justice Department listening to Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner?
What's up here?
And that's really what that documentary I did was about.
It's called All the Planner He's Man.
The question is, how did a British official intervene in a U.S. criminal case?
How does he even know about it?
Let's start with how does he know about it?
What is the Treasury doing intervening in a criminal case?
How do they know about it?
How does George Osborne know about it?
So what's going on during the prosecution or during the plan to prosecute HSBC in the DOJ is there's a group from Britain called the Financial Services Authority that's sitting inside of internal DOJ meetings.
It's like, well, what's going on there?
And it turns out that there's a group in the Bank for International Settlements called the Financial Stability Board, the FSB. And the FSB was created in the wake of the global financial crisis.
What is the Bank for International Settlements?
Some people know.
Just very quickly, high-level Bank for International Settlements is sort of the umbrella organizing bank that organizes central banks around the world.
So the Fed is...
Each country has its own Fed, essentially.
Yes, yes.
And this is the umbrella trade association, essentially, for all the Feds.
Yes, that's exactly what the BIS is.
And it's headquartered in Basel, Switzerland.
And about four to eight times a year, the local feds from the US, from UK, everywhere, they all get together in Basel and they talk about financial issues and monetary issues in the BIS. But after the global financial crisis, the BIS sets up a group, kind of a working group called the Financial Stability Board, and tasks it with monitoring financial stability and systemic risk.
And what they really did there was they created a list of 25 systemically important financial institutions that basically put those institutions, they were special rules for these institutions.
They published this list, suddenly, of systemically important financial institutions, and they're some of the top banks in the world.
Nobody really knew when they published them, what's the implications of that?
It was almost like just an honor roll that they published.
Nobody really understood that this was a term of art.
That was intended.
If you were on that list, it means you cannot be criminally prosecuted for anything anywhere in the world, essentially.
It meant you were a made man.
Yeah, that's what it meant.
But practically what it meant is the FSB had all these working groups and one was like the Organization for Cooperation.
They had all these sort of Orwellian sounding names.
And what they did under the umbrella of financial stability is they said, you know, to monitor financial stability, we need to dispatch these different committees and working groups around the world to these different central banks and different jurisdictions like the U.S. to monitor what's going on With our 25 SIFIs, the Systemically Important Financial Institutions.
And because HSBC is on that list, this group, the Financial Services Authority from the UK, which is in charge of monitoring UK banks like HSBC, That FSA group from the UK gets inside of Department of Justice meetings and is monitoring actively those meetings and reporting back to Basel,
Switzerland and reporting back to the Financial Stability Board so people can keep tabs of what's going on.
And that's how George Osborne knew that prosecutors in the DOJ were teeing up HSBC for prosecutions and they were serious.
And that's with George Osborne.
Another thing to understand about the FSB is membership in the FSB went to basically three members of the government, of each government.
So in the US it was the head of the Fed, it was the Treasury Secretary, and it was the head of the SEC. In the UK it was the head of the Bank of England.
The head of, I think, the Financial Services Authority, and the head of the exchequer, which is George Osborne.
So those people are automatically members.
And that's how George Osborne caught wind of what was going on in the U.S. And he said to these guys, Geithner and Bernanke, basically, hey, that's a U.K. bank.
Back off.
Don't prosecute them.
And they listened.
One of the things that you point out is that there was another UK bank, the Standard Chartered Bank, that is, I think it's almost as big as SBC, but they had been involved in a lot of the same kind of shenanigans, and they did get prosecuted because they're not on the SIFI list, the made man list.
It was the Standard Charter at that time.
Now, today, Standard Charter is on the list.
But as of this time, which is 2011-2012, Standard Charter was on that list.
And consequently, there was nobody from Standard...
DOJ meetings from the UK. It was only HSBC and that's a direct consequence of the fact that HSBC was at that time a SIFI and Standard Chartered wasn't.
So Standard Chartered was they had no monitor in their meetings and nobody knew what was going on.
Now, as it turned out, they didn't get prosecuted anyway because they later became a SIFI. And one of the things that the dots that you didn't connect in this piece, but I'm assuming And correct me if I'm wrong, that these banks that get on the SIFI list are the banks that probably received bailouts in 2008, the Western governments, right?
So the Western governments are protecting their investments in these crooks.
Yep, basically.
That's correct.
The biggest banks got the biggest bailouts, and that's just how it went.
However, there were banks in the U.S. that did receive bailouts that are not considered SIFIs or were not at that time.
The leading example that I could think of was probably Wells Fargo.
But the ones that are the international banks and the ones that really have the international monetary power, which is really, you know, the Goldman Sachs, the JP Morgans, the Citigroups, they're on that list.
And that list grew from 25 in 2011.
But you're exactly right, they all got bailed out.
But the bailout just expanded.
It went from too big to fail, so we're going to give you a bailout, to too big to jail.
And that's really what this is all about.
And one of the things that you talk about in your piece is this very kind of obscure Orwellian language that which, you know, what's the guy's name again?
George?
George Osborne, the head of the Exchequer.
One of the things that you point out that's very interesting in your piece is this very sort of obscure and Orwellian language that George Osborne, who's the British FSA chief, he's sending to his counterparts in the Justice Department telling them to back off.
If you're a layman reading it, he's saying, oh, of course, I don't mean to interfere with the Justice Department, but he's using these coded languages, which they all understand, but the average layman wouldn't, which says, you're welcome to To enforce the rules, but he's talking about a different set of rules within your own jurisdiction.
And he's talking about a different meaning of the word jurisdiction.
And it's very clear to all of them what he's saying.
And then at the end, he does this kind of pose, this posturing that I don't mean to interfere, but that's exactly what he's doing.
He's telling the Justice Department what it cannot do.
Yeah, it's totally coded language.
The big tell for me that there was something way off in a couple of those paragraphs was he says, you know, it's my job to enforce global rules and standards.
It's like, wait a minute.
You're writing on British letterhead.
You're writing on letterhead that says HMS on it.
You know, Her Majesty's Service.
You're writing on Crown letterhead that's paid for by British taxpayers.
Your job is not to enforce global rules, Guy.
Your job is to enforce British rules.
What are you talking about, global rules?
What do you mean?
And that red flag is sort of a giveaway that he's telling them something very important.
Basically to enforce global rules.
And then he goes on with this whole spiel about jurisdiction.
And it's like, well, wait a minute.
Why wouldn't you just say, you know, your job is to enforce law in the U.S. and my job is to enforce law in the U.K.? He doesn't say that.
He says it's your job is to enforce global rules within your jurisdiction.
And it's like, well, why would you use a longer phrase within your jurisdiction rather than the shorter phrase?
Obviously, the longer phrase means something other than within the U.S., or you just sort of said within the U.S. I mean, that jurisdiction, you know, as a lawyer, it's a term of art, and it can mean a lot of different things.
And what he means there is, you know, he sort of defines it later on, where he's saying jurisdiction means I'm from the U.K. I oversee U.K. banks.
You're from the U.S., you are a C.U.S. banks.
HSBC ain't a U.S. bank.
Back off.
This is up to us.
And what I'm telling you, I, George Osborne, am telling you, is you need to enforce global rules.
And they know exactly what he means because he says you need to enforce global rules with respect to systemically important financial institutions.
And then it's like, ding, the only organization in the world at that point that's using that language is the Financial Stability Board in the Bank for International Settlements.
In other words, George Osborne is writing on British letterhead, but he's using language that's coming not from any sort of UK authorities.
He's using language that's originating We're good to go.
George Osborne is a cabinet-level official in the UK. The guy he's in parity with and should be concerned with isn't Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner.
It really should be Eric Holder, but he doesn't even write to Holder.
He goes straight to these guys.
Why is that?
Because Eric Holder is not a member of the Financial Stability Board.
Bernanke and Geithner are.
That's why he's writing to them.
Yeah, so what we have is a cartel of federal banks who has declared that they are above the law and that they can commit criminal acts, including money laundering for terrorists, money laundering for drug dealers, and that they cannot be criminally prosecuted for that.
And as you point out, Way back at the beginning, they put aside kind of a penalty fund, which is really just a licensing fee.
They told the Justice Department how much the Justice Department could fine them.
Yeah, they did.
It was money they had put aside even before they got caught.
And it's just a de facto licensing fee to launder money for terrorists and drug dealers.
And if you do get caught, you pay your licensing fee.
That's it.
You got it.
There was actually a guy in Brooklyn who worked for HSBC named John Cruz, who was watching all this as a bank vice president go on in real time.
And he was raising cane about it, but getting nowhere.
And he did an interview and he said, these guys, they put that $1.9 billion?
They had that sitting in account ready to go before that fine was ever levied.
But you're exactly right.
That fine was dictated from HSBC to the DOJ, period.
Let me ask you this, because this is something that you don't touch on, but it's a very disturbing thought.
What would have happened if Eric Holder had said to the Treasury Department to Bernicke and Geithner, I don't care.
These guys committed criminal acts in our country.
They are facilitating terrorism.
They're facilitating drugs in our country, dangerous drugs.
We're trying to put an end to that.
We're going to criminally prosecute them.
What is the sanction?
What is the power that this international cartel has at that point?
You know, what happens?
What's the consequence if you don't play ball?
Presumably, you're going to get ruined one way or the other.
And you have to remember, if you're dealing with powers that have criminal immunity, all bets are off.
Anything can happen to you, because regardless of what the penalty is, they can just take you out.
They can murder you.
They can kill you.
And you can't be prosecuted because you're above the law.
I mean, that's the ugly truth of it.
I mean, I hesitate to speculate about that because that didn't happen.
And the fact is, these guys are smart and they hedge their bets.
Eric Holder being at the head of the DOJ, along with Lanny Brewer, that was no accident.
Those guys came from a law firm in Washington, D.C. called Covington& Burling.
Covington& Burling represents all of the two paid-to-fail banks, all of them.
And so by putting those white-collar criminal defense guys at the head of the Dutch Department, I mean, everybody knew in advance what the outcome of those cases was going to be.
There was going to be no prosecution.
So that deal was sort of done before Obama even set foot in the White House in 2009.
That deal was sealed because it was Citigroup that circulated the memo to everybody saying, hey, here's who Obama's cabinet appointees are going to be, and Eric Holder's name is in that list.
So those things are sort of arranged in advance.
And to see a reversal later, that's a real big breach, and you're going to face the stiffest of penalties, whatever it takes to make sure it never happens again, and probably quite publicly.
At the end of the day, it's speculation about what would have happened.
Do you think that there's an economic consequence?
Can that cartel, that cartel of feds, the Fed of feds, essentially, Yes.
The guy named John Perkins has a book called Confessions of an Economic Hitman where he talks about exactly that, where basically because money is created as debt, there's no way to get any money without there being a lot of debt.
Then what happens is The debt grows and grows and grows and grows and you can't pay it back.
And then the collateral that's backing that debt gets repossessed.
And that's the ultimate sanction.
But it's a great question because it gets to something that's true of the Fed that is not true of commercial banks.
Remember, the Fed can create money out of thin air, and commercial banks can create money out of thin air, too.
But the Fed can create money.
When it creates money out of thin air, it can do so and never be called on it.
Whereas a bank lends you a million dollars, you can turn right around.
They create that money out of thin air.
Commercial bank does.
You can turn right around, though, as soon as they lend you that money and say, you know what?
I thought about it.
I want my million dollars in cash right now.
And if they can't cough up that cash, you know, you can undertake resolution proceedings and put that bank out of business.
There's no corresponding constraint on the Fed.
So the Fed ultimately, aside from the fact that it's a regulator of these banks, the Fed has the ultimate monetary power of these banks because it can create money without limitation and nobody else can.
And that's a key thing.
Yeah, I understand the power of the Fed and that kind of You know, the illusion of all that, you know, that it's creating, spinning illusions.
But what I'm wondering is, can the international cartel and basel Is there any way for them to impose pain on the United States or U.S. banks or U.S. regulators if Eric Holder had decided to go rogue and prosecute HSBC anyway to violate their little rules, their secret rules?
That's a great question.
And as far as I can tell, right now there is not.
Because, again, as far as I can tell, the Bank for International Settlements doesn't have the power to create money out of thin air.
It's an organizing organization, and I have arguments with Catherine Austin Fitz about this all the time.
I don't think that they can create money.
That may change, and that probably will change, because there's big backers, there's central bank digital currencies, that's a whole other ball of wax.
But I don't think the Fed, because the U.S. is the world reserve currency, because the Fed can issue money completely without restraint, it's kind of, right now, the ultimate power in the world.
Yeah, you could put sanctions on the Fed, you could do this and that, But until you have a global issue or money, which right now the closest thing we have is the IMF, and that's done, you know, through the special drawing rights, and that's all done by agreement, there's really no constraint on the Fed that's visible through statutes and through agreements that I can see.
I haven't been able to find one.
Not to beat a dead horse on this, but the sanction that they're threatening is contagion.
And that's the word that they keep using, that this will cause a contagion and it will cause a destabilization of the global financial markets.
What do you think that means?
Contagion means back off.
It doesn't mean what you think it means.
Tim, a guy named Neil Borofsky, who was the head of SIGSTAR, wrote a book called Bailout.
Is it will cause a contagion of criminal prosecutions in other countries?
Or is it a sort of a cascading financial issue?
It's really nothing.
It's a chicken little, a scare tactic.
You're supposed to think, hey, if this bank falls down, we get tumbling dominoes.
That's the notion you're supposed to get in the head.
Once you take down Citigroup, you're going to take down Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, and then the whole wide world is going to implode.
