Something fishy is happening

This story blew me away. Do I think they were suicides, NO. I do know however that  bank employees  being brought into depositions are suddenly  fired, so they cannot  be used against the banks and that they are given off the wall reasons as to why.
These three knew something bigger. Its time the Feds  digg deeper , to find out what is being hidden and  not wanting to be found.

Third prominent banker found dead in six days

Trey Garrison

January 31, 2014 11:33AM

278 Comments

Bankersuicide

Bloomberg is reporting this morning that former Federal Reserve economist Mike Dueker was found dead in an apparent suicide near Tacoma, Washington.
Dueker, 50, a chief economist at Russell Investments, had been missing since Jan. 29 and was reportedly having troubles at work.
Normally HousingWire wouldn’t cover deaths in the industry, but what’s strange is that Dueker is the third prominent banker found dead since Sunday.
On Sunday, William Broeksmit, 58, former senior manager for Deutsche Bank, was found hanging in his home, also an apparent suicide.
On Tuesday, Gabriel Magee, 39, vice president at JPMorgan Chase & Co’s (JPM) London headquarters, apparently jumped to his death from a building in the Canary Wharf area.

Fourth suicide for finance executive under investigation

Police say victim shot himself seven or eight times with a nail gun

 

A fourth financial services executive under or close to an investigation in less than two weeks was found dead in Colorado, where police said he committed suicide using a nail gun in his Centennial, Colo., home.
American Title Services founder and CEO Richard Talley, 57, was under investigation by state insurance regulators at the time of his death.
The death was reported by the Denver Post late Thursday.
This comes on the heels of three prominent bankers whose deaths have been ruled suicides since late January, and the disappearance of a Wall Street Journal oil markets reporter, as first reported by HousingWire.
From the Denver Post:

A coroner's spokeswoman Thursday said Talley was found in his garage by a family member who called authorities. They said Talley died from seven or eight self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head.

More details emerge about three bankers who died in six days

Some speculate missing WSJ reporter case shares circumstances

hen, details emerged about the work of the three that suggests at least a passing commonality – that is, the institutions they worked for were all connected to investigations in the United States or the United Kingdom for various types of fraud or misconduct.
Former Federal Reserve economist Mike Dueker, 50, was found dead in an apparent suicide near Tacoma, Washington on Jan. 31. Dueker was chief economist at Russell Investments.
On Jan. 26, William Broeksmit, 58, a former senior manager for Deutsche Bank, was found hanging in his home, also an apparent suicide.
On Jan. 28, Gabriel Magee, 39, vice president at JPMorgan Chase (JPM) London headquarters, apparently jumped to his death from a building in the Canary Wharf area.
New York state Department of Financial Services subpoenaed Russell Investment as well as other major firms in November 2013 as part of an investigation by Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky into how the firm’s handle investment proposals, compensation practices, relationships with money managers and investment tracking practices.
Lawsky is the same regulator who on Thursday put an indefinite hold on a $2.7 billion MSR deal between Ocwen Financial Corp. (OCN) and Wells Fargo (WFC). Lawsky has been described in press reports as "an enforcer with zeal."
The New York Times wrote on Nov. 5 that “regulators appeared to be trying to learn whether any consultants were being paid by the firms they recommended, including in-kind payments or job offers.”
Broeksmit, a top executive at Deutsche Bank who had retired in 2013, had been found hanged in his home in the South Kensington section of London, according to London newspapers.
Global regulators are currently investigating Deutsche Bank for allegedly rigging foreign exchange markets. It settled similar charges in 2013 over involvement in the manipulation of the Libor interest rate benchmark.
Two days after Broeksmit’s death, former Deutsche Bank risk analyst Eric Ben-Artzi spoke at Auburn University in Alabama, alleging that Deutsche hid $10 billion in losses during the financial crisis.  Other whistleblowers have come forward with similar allegations.
Magee’s employer, JPMorgan, is under investigation by U.S. legislators for misconduct in physical commodities markets in both the U.S. and U.K. JPMorgan is currently under investigation for the same kind of alleged involvement in manipulating foreign exchange rates as Deutsche Bank.
Magee’s parents have told the London Evening Standard that they don’t believe their son would commit suicide, and they have raised troubling questions about how their son was able to access the roof from which he is said to have jumped to his death.
Meanwhile, among those following developments in these deaths, there is chatter about the disappearance of another Wall Street regular, veteran Wall Street Journal oil commodities markets reporter David Bird.
The markets Bird covers are currently under investigation by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for physical commodities manipulation. His family tells the New York Daily News that they are concerned his disappearance may be connected to his investigative coverage of OPEC.
Bird has been missing since Jan. 11. Bird told family he was going for a hike and left his New Jersey home without critical daily medication he takes. Five days after he disappeared, a credit card in his name was used in Mexico.

Are banks too big to indict?

January 26, 2014 By PhatzNewsRoom Leave a Comment

File Photo / PhatzNewsRoom Media

(PhatzNewsRoom / Reuters-Opinion) — The great 19th century English jurist, Sir James Fitzjames Stephens, once wrote that murderers were hung not for reasons of revenge or deterrence — but to underscore what a serious breach of the social compact had been committed.
Federal District Judge Jed S. Rakoff was making a similar point when he recently called attention to the lack of criminal prosecutions in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Consider the 1980s Savings and Loan crisis. The losses were minuscule compared to this recent paroxysm, but they still led to hundreds of criminal convictions.
That looks highly unlikely here. The federal statute of limitations for fraud, generally five years, is rapidly running down. There are reportedly a few cases in process. But the odds are that if there are any indictments, they will be in the pattern of the indictment of Goldman Sachs banker Fabrice Tourre, who has been left holding the bag for a complex scheme to load up clients with worthless securities. Email trails leave little doubt that far more senior figures were aware of the purpose of the deal. The firm also executed other similar deals that haven’t been prosecuted.
The big banks have compiled an amazing record of dishonest, and outright criminal, behavior — suggesting that there is no ethical or legal standard that can stand in the way of a chance to fatten the bottom line. Here are some samples, all drawn from the cases settled in the 2000s:
Chase Bank (now part of JPMorgan Chase), Citibank, Merrill Lynch and a number of other financial institutions actively conspired with Enron executives to falsify company financial records. Chase also paid bribes to county officials, and to other banks, for the right to entangle an Alabama county in a byzantine transaction that led to the county’s bankruptcy. Virtually every major bank in the country sold billions in “auction-rate-securities,” without disclosing they carried the risk of becoming nearly worthless — which quickly came to pass. Bank of America has now disgorged $22 billion in fines on these instruments alone.
HSBC, UBS and a number of other European banks, meanwhile, created a lucrative business expressly aimed at facilitating U.S. tax evasion. HSBC and Bank of America enabled billions in drug money laundering. HSBC, Credit Suisse, Barclays and Lloyds created units with the express purpose of violating U.S. laws — which they had sworn to uphold — against facilitating money transfers for named terrorist regimes.
Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo) had, over the years, transferred at least $378 billion from Latin America, a money flow clearly associated with the drug trade. Bank of America and Wachovia also assisted in the purchase of commercial jets for drug lords. Chase Bank, again, most glaringly, but other banks as well, violated their internal control standards to enable Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
In the run-up to the 2008 credit crash, Bear Stearns (now part of JPMorgan Chase), Morgan Stanley, and other banks undertook frantic last-minute campaigns to unload worthless mortgage securities [paywall] on unsuspecting customers. When the mortgages failed, Bear Stearns extracted lucrative settlements from the original mortgage lenders, without telling the customers that Bear had sold the worthless mortgages to. So they got paid coming and going, while their customers bore all the losses. (The emails apparently leave a clear trail suggesting that senior management was fully informed.)
More recently, a cabal of bankers was caught manipulating the most widely-used short-term money market base rate (LIBOR, or the London Interbank Offering Rate) to improve their trading profits — at the expense of borrowers throughout the world.
Rakoff is a former chief of the securities fraud unit in the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, so he is sensitive to the problems of enforcement. He notes that the Securities and Exchange Commission, in the wake of its Madoff embarrassment, was obsessed with Ponzi schemes and also committed to several big insider trading cases. Federal investigative resources, meanwhile, were heavily weighted toward terrorism.
On top of that, the new Obama administration, having seen the collapse of one large financial institution after the other, quite reasonably feared that an aggressive prosecutorial program might derail their efforts to put the banks back on a stable financial footing. President Barack Obama had little experience in finance, and his closest economic advisers — men like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (former Goldman Sachs co-chairman), former Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, former Commerce Secretary William Daley (former JPMorgan Chase executive) and Timothy Geithner, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York whom Obama named Treasury secretary — would all have made that argument.
The most telling example of a scare for the administration was the 2002 collapse of the accounting firm Arthur Anderson, after it had been indicted for its contributions to the Enron scandal.
But, as Rakoff points out, there is a big difference between indicting a company, and indicting a handful of executives. A proper response would have been to continue with the rescue operations — and separately empower a crack team of prosecutors and investigators working in secret to build a half-dozen exemplary cases.
Rakoff is clearly right in principle. But he may be understating the difficulty of nailing senior executives beyond a reasonable doubt in cases like this. Most of the indictments in the savings-and-loan cases, for example, were based on well-documented embezzlements of depositor money. The blockbuster insider trading convictions usually turn on wire taps that capture the actual passing of the illegal information. In the crash-related cases, however, email trails are often the best evidence against senior executives. A skilled defense lawyer can readily exploit ambiguities and self-contradictions to undermine the certainty required in criminal prosecutions. Though the government won its case against Goldman’s Tourre, it had sued under a civil fraud statute that has a lower standard of proof.
There may be a better approach. Indicting a bank is actually a more fearsome, and more appropriate, weapon to deal with an institution that has a record of pervasive wrongdoing — because a criminal indictment effectively puts a company out of business. Just the credible threat of such an action would heighten the sensitivity of stakeholders and executives to criminal behavior on the part of underlings.
The obstacle is that the current banks, especially the largest ones spawned from forced mergers and shotgun marriages during the worst of the crisis, are so big that shutting them down could cause seismic economic tremors. But there is a substantial lobby of senior regulators, former bankers and federal legislators enamored of the idea of breaking up the banks.
They are far short of carrying the issue, but the obvious lack of effective sanctions against behemoth institutions strengthens their case. Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, has proposed that no bank should control assets in excess of 4 percent of gross domestic product. That’s now about $700 billion. Consider that JPMorgan’s current balance sheet is roughly 3-1/2 times that much.
Among the virtues of smaller banks is that it is easier to enforce stricter capital standards; their operations are typically more visible to regulators — and they’re not too big to fail.
Or to be criminally indicted and put out of business.
Charles R. Morris, a former banker and lawyer, is the author of “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash” (2008) and “The Coming Global Boom” (1990). His new book, “Comeback: America’s New Economic Boom,” is now available as an e-book and as a paperback in June. He is a fellow at The Century Foundation.

Bank Propaganda- Don't believe what your hearing or seeing

If you look at the media, you could easily believe that the foreclosure crisis is all but over. It is true that the number of new Foreclosures has dropped. That drop is meaningless for two reasons, to wit: many banks are regrouping because of new legislation that they thought would be to their benefit (like in Florida) but turns out to cause more problems than solutions for Banks. And the Banks, who have been controlling market conditions and public sentiment through planted news articles, want to give the impression that market conditions are improving. This gives them both a higher price when they sell property to investors and the extra benefit of creating the illusion that the crisis is over.
Don’t believe it. There are at least as many Foreclosures in the pipeline as we have already seen. Another 15 million people are in the process of being displaced — many as a result of “modclosure.” That’s a new term out in the blogosphere. My compliments to whoever thought it up. It is the practice of using the illusory promise of modification leading inexorably towards foreclosure. It starts with instructions from the bank to stop paying, thus creating the appearance of a default while the Servicer continues making payments to the creditor. Then as the bank asks for documents and says it lost the,more destroyed them because they were not in proper order, the homeowner gets in deeper and deeper as each month goes by. Then on the eve of modification the bank forecloses — process known as dual-tracking which is prohibited as of January 1, but there is no indication that the banks will comply.
As stated by once recent decision by a Federal Judge — this is systemic, not a mistake. The
Policy of the banks is that sanctions are less expensive than compIiance with law. Given the small number of litigants challenging the Foreclosures the risk of losses where the Foreclosures are challenged is acceptable.