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Greece is being pressured to give all control of the Greek budget to the European Union, which it says threatens its national sovereignty.
A private news group interviewed Max Keiser, economic expert from Paris in a discussion that explains how Greece got into the financial mess that it's in and talks about the lack of enforcement of banking regulation and accountability of bankers and why that is. What follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.
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| Goldman Sachs and J.P Morgan- International Economic Terrorists |
Correspondent: Max, How did Greece get here?
Keiser: Well, this is an example of what you could call 'piniada' capitalism. Before the crisis the Greek economy was roughly 400 billion dollars, but there are many hedge funds in the world that have access to instruments and leverage of 600 to 800 billion dollars - much bigger than the country itself and they decided to attack it, using these leveraged instruments in a piniada capitalistic way, to try to grab assets on the cheap.
It's a high-stakes game, there is a lot of risk involved, but bankers are making more money than ever in the history of banking and they will continue to do so as long as nobody gets in their way like a regulator or a politician.
Correspondent: You talked about regulations, that there need to be more regulations. Can you expand on that? What needs to happen, exactly?
Keiser: There needs to be enforcement of regulations. There are regulations in place, but none of the banks obey the rules; they don't obey the regulations and there's nobody really enforcing the regulations.
So, this is a problem, it's called 'moral hazard'. If you can get away with, as Goldman Sachs did, by cooking the books of Greece to join the Euro and taking 300 million dollars in fees to commit that fraud and there is no penalty then there is no reason not to continue to commit these frauds as they're doing today along with those other banks like JP Morgan.
So, we need some enforcement of those regulations that are on the books, but unfortunately the regulators are in the pockets of the politicians. In the US, Barak Obama is supported by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. In the UK, David Cameron is supported by HSBC, Barclays and the City of London and the speculators. And in the European Zone we have the same thing happening in European banks who are controlling the bankers as well.
I would like to add that as bad as the situation in Greece looks, I would still like to point out that the US dollar is in a lot worse shape and is really going to suffer catastrophically before the Euro does. The Euro is still, relative to the dollar, in pretty good shape.
The capitalist system is the best system we could have?
Well, I would differ with the thought that the banks are not the root of the problem. Yes, it's true it is a global problem. Greece is not a one-off, we are seeing the problem in every country in the world because the globe's central banks now are in possession of 15 trillion dollars of toxic debts according to the Wall Street Journal as a result of the inability to perform as viable legitimate banking institutions that should have gotten a handle on this many years ago.
But because they are essentially corrupt and unregulated and committing acts of larceny, we have this global problem, which is created by global banks, perpetrated by global banks for the profit of the bankers. And this is not in question - everyone understands this from the Financial Times to the economist William Black of the US who put 1,500 bankers in jail in the 1980s. Nobody disputes this. Anyone who still thinks bankers are not the problem are on the payroll of the bank or are just completely uninformed.
Correspondent: You touched a little bit on the US dollar and the American economy. There is a lot of finger pointing going on by the US pointing towards the Europeans and saying that that's the problem. And of course, the Japanese prime minister saying it's the most serious problem affecting us globally now. Your take on these comments and exactly what is going on?
Keiser: The epicenter of the global financial fraud is, first of all, the City of London. Because of the revelations of the recent hypothecation and the re-hypothecation of the scandal of MF Global, which incidentally had JP Morgan, a banker, steal customer accounts directly from customers in segregated accounts - that's a crime. They don't say that we didn't commit a crime, they simply said that we're too big to fail and you can't prosecute us.
AIG… The Bernie Madoff scandal… all went through the City of London because there is virtually no regulation in the City of London. This is the epicenter of the global banking fraud market.
Second to that would be the US with Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke working with JP Morgan that has a balance sheet of 60-70 trillion dollars in derivatives. JP Morgan - one bank - has four times the entire GDP of America as off-balance sheet derivatives contracts that they park at the Fed (Federal Reserve Bank) and they do a little swap back every quarter to massage and manipulate their earnings - highly fraudulent and illegal by all the standard accounting rules committing acts of fraud.
And they pay penalties - JP Morgan has paid billions of dollars in penalties for accounting fraud and they say we won't do it again; we promise we won't commit fraud again, but you can't attack us because we are too big to fail and then they commit the same fraud the next quarter.
So, unless somebody stands up and regulates Jamie Dimon who is a financial criminal, in a court… and he's causing things like Greece to collapse, him and his cadre, and people are suffering, so he's a human rights abuser. I would take him to The Hague, put him on trial for human rights violations and hang him because he's a terrorist in the banking world. As Warren Buffet calls them, weapons of mass financial destruction - that's not just a rhetorical financial statement, that's a statement of fact.
Correspondent: Max, you are reacting strongly, laughing etc to our other guests comments, why?
Keiser: Because this is just clap trap coming out of Washington, trying to defend the actions of an obvious banking scandal and it doesn't play well outside of the US. Unfortunately, people live in a bubble, i.e. the US, and they buy into this nonsense and the bankers on Wall Street are still walking around without being incarcerated for a few more weeks, but their day will come and we're seeing social unrest all over the world and it's coming to the US so I wouldn't want to be Jamie Dimon and walking around without a full security detail, based on his criminal behavior.
Correspondent: Our other guest from Washington says we only see rallies in other countries and asks where are the full democracies rallying? Your response to that?
Keiser: In America. You have massive rallies. You had almost a coup in Wisconsin. You've got rallies all over the US because they're being disenfranchised; the poverty rates are skyrocketing; incarceration rates are the highest in the world.
America excels at the prison industry business - that's about the best thing that they're involved with. The banks are involved in outright criminality. There are solutions, but you're never going to accept them because you have intellectual pygmies over there without the spine to put criminals in jail.
(Press TV)
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