Burghardt loves to dig up sleaze stories about bankers and industrial corporate players, and he is good at it. There is a lot of such material in this piece, especially connected with Jamie Dimon, CEO and Chairman of JP Morgan Chase bank. There are three sections of the article that I found of particular interest. First, the secret meeting of bank heads with Obama and what appeared to have resulted from it to the benefit of the banks.
...[Jamie Dimon] and Brian Moynihan, the CEO of the Bank of America, and other members of the Financial Services Forum, a benighted cabal chaired by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and comprised of serial financial predators such as Deutsche Bank, AIG, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, UBS, HSBC, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, met with Obama at the White House for April discussions, the press was barred.I think that this illustrates once again that Obama is really an employee of this financial section of the ruling class; and they went there to tell him what they wanted, and they got it: non-interference with their operations.
The second was that Congress earlier in March gave them added insurance against any risky bets they might make. This illustrates, once again, how the Congress also serves the master controllers of the One Percent.
One particularly filthy piece of legislative detritus which passed out on the House Agriculture and Financial Services Committees in March, HR 992, would allow banks to hold any kind of derivative in the same account as depositor funds, i.e., checking and savings accounts which enjoy FDIC insurance protection against bank losses.He explained that a possible result of this might be what happened in the Cyprus banking crisis:
...should one of these corrupt banks go belly up, since derivatives are senior in terms of bankruptcy pay-outs, hedge fund pirates sitting on the other side of trades with the bank would get paid back first with depositors potentially left holding the bag!And the third was the continued use of complex derivative financial instruments to screw the public by manipulating energy prices.