The confidential memo at the heart of the global financial crisis

[impalero]

The Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis | VICE United Kingdom

The year was 1997. US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard to de-regulate banks. That required, first, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to dismantle the barrier between commercial banks and investment banks. It was like replacing bank vaults with roulette wheels.

Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new high-risk game: “derivatives trading”. JP Morgan alone would soon carry $88 trillion of these pseudo-securities on its books as “assets”.

Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers (soon to replace Rubin as Secretary) body-blocked any attempt to control derivatives.

But what was the use of turning US banks into derivatives casinos if money would flee to nations with safer banking laws?

The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five: eliminate controls on banks in every nation on the planet -- in one single move. It was as brilliant as it was insanely dangerous.

How could they pull off this mad caper? The bankers' and Summers' game was to use the Financial Services Agreement (or FSA), an abstruse and benign addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organisation.

Until the bankers’ re-draft of the FSA, each nation controlled and chartered the banks within their own borders. The new rules of the game would force every nation to open their markets to Citibank, JP Morgan and their derivatives “products”.

And all 156 nations in the WTO would have to smash down their own Glass-Steagall divisions between commercial savings banks and the investment banks that gamble with derivatives.

The job of turning the FSA into the bankers’ battering ram was given to Geithner, who was named Ambassador to the World Trade Organization.

Canada, Brazil and Australia were largely unaffected by the Financial Crsis because they told the Banksters where they can stick it.

Brazil which was threatened with an all out trade embargo by the EU. They stood their ground and, as a result, were one of the nations in the world to ride out the financial mess of 2007-09 with minimal damage and, by some accounts, even thrived while the rest of the world imploded.

They destroyed the regulations governing banking and made it so that no nation could protect itself from their irresponsible practices. In no time, they turned the banking and financial industries into a huge casino operation where the house (the banksters) always wins and the rest of us are always left shouldering the burdens of any losses.

Which also makes sense why tax payer money was stolen from us to also Bail Out Foreign Banks.

Inside Job - Watch Online Free
Inside Job (2010) | Watch Documentary Free Online

The Warning - Watch Online Free
Watch The Full Program Online | The Warning | FRONTLINE | PBS

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room - Watch Online - Rent
Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more

Money, Power and Wall Street - Watch Online Free
Money, Power and Wall Street | FRONTLINE | PBS[/QUOTE]