There has never been a corporate bloodbath like it. On July 2nd 2012 the man who had just resigned as chairman of Barclay’s was summoned to the Bank of England. They made him an offer he couldn't refuse. The establishment had had enough. In the firing line was Bob Diamond, the most successful banker in Britain. Now, they wanted his scalp. Bankers I: Fixing the System, BBC 2013
What do we want from our bankers? Can we ever trust them again? ibid.
After the crash of 2008 we spend £132 billion to bail the banks out. ibid.
Nothing highlights the issue of trust more than the scandal about Libor which came to light one morning at the end of June 2012. ibid.
Libor: The whole system depends on trust. ibid.
Cheating and lying at the heart of the banking system. ibid.
All the layers of control had failed to stop yet another City scandal. ibid.
The financial crash was meant to put an end to dangerous risk-taking by bankers. But it hasn’t. The risks bankers take in their pursuit of profits are double edged. Bankers II: Risking It All
Europe: eleven trillion euros of debt ... Driving up the cost of borrowing for countries in trouble. ibid.
New York 2010 Jon Corzine: M F Global. It’s business was brokerage ... Risk: M F Global would start taking risks itself in the market. ibid.
The story of how a London team of J P Morgan traders lost six billion dollars last year shows how even a well-run bank can take ever more complex and risky gambles. ibid.
From the late 1990s banks lent around a trillion dollars to Americans on low incomes to buy houses. ibid.
In 2008 the financial crash hit the world like a natural disaster. ibid.
Nothing on this scale had been predicted by Value at Risk. Nearly three trillion dollars was lost. ibid.
Synthetic derivatives: one of the biggest bets the world has ever seen. ibid.
One of the biggest financial bankruptcies since the crash: M F Global. ibid.
J P Morgan had little choice but to sell off the Whale Trades at a huge loss. ibid.
Over the decades banks had come to think of their customers as a commodity. Five years ago the banks brought the country to its knees. Now they are provoking more accusations that they’ve destroyed businesses and ruined lives. Bankers III: Payback Time
Tens of thousands of others have been persuaded by the banks to sign up for interest rate swaps. ibid.
Mis-selling has been going on for years. ibid.
They placed a ruthless pursuit of profit at the heart of their business model. ibid.
Banks became sales machines. ibid.
Payment Protection Insurance ... millions of PPI policies were mis-sold. ibid.
We see banks almost constantly mis-selling a range of products to customers: be it pensions, be it endowments, be it PPI, be it interest-rate swaps, all of those things are endemic of a culture of mis-selling, where that is rewarded in the bank. Peter Vicary-Smith, Chief Executive, Which?
Today, voters watch Brown give billions of public money to casino banks while demanding nothing in return, having once hailed their practices as an inspiration ‘for the whole economy’. At the recent meeting of G20 leaders in London, Brown distinguished himself by opposing, and killing, a modest Franco-German proposal for a limit on bonuses and penalties for companies that broke it. The gap between rich and poor in Britain is now the widest since 1968. John Pilger, article The New Statesman, ‘For Many Britons the Party Game is Over’
The problem is, in order to prevent us from printing our own currency, the central bankers, who basically can print money at will, have bought everybody and bought everything. They’ve bought the universities, they’ve bought the media, they’ve bought the corporations, so our whole society is run by these foreign private bankers who are trying to protect their golden goose, and trying to protect us from realising that we’re paying them money for nothing, for something we could be doing for ourselves. Dr Henry Makow
If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem; if you owe the bank $100m that’s the bank’s problem. John Paul Getty
Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I’m angry about bankers. About the government. Terry Pratchett
What Wall Street and credit card companies are doing is really not much different from what gangsters and loan sharks do who make predatory loans. While the bankers wear three-piece suits and don’t break the kneecaps of those who can’t pay back, they still are destroying people’s lives. Bernie Sanders
Two-thirds of the directors at the New York Fed are hand-picked by the same bankers that the Fed is in charge of regulating. Bernie Sanders
Government bailout hits $8.5 trillion. San Francisco Chronicle headline 26th November 2008
In a small Swiss city sits an international organization so obscure and secretive ... Control of the institution – the Bank for International Settlements – lies with some of the world’s most powerful and least visible men: the heads of 32 central banks, officials able to shift billions of dollars and alter the course of economies at the stroke of a pen. Keith Bradsher
A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks. John C Calhoun
Every dollar that is printed should not represent a debt to private bankers. It should represent an investment potential in the common good, in the common needs of our country. Cynthia McKinney
Bankers – pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted. John Ralston Saul
I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with. John le Carre
Because bankers measure their self-worth in money, and pay themselves a lot of it, they think they’re fine fellows and don’t need to explain themselves. James Buchan
Investment banking is not a business; it is a personal service where bankers work hand in hand with their clients. And it is a service that must not simply be about making bigger and bigger deals that reap rewards for only a small group of executives. Felix Rohatyn
The US obviously has all the evidence they need to prosecute bankers. They just need to search their own spy database and then there you go – 1,000 bankers in jail, a trillion dollars in fines. But it doesn’t happen. Instead, the spy network is being used to fight a copyright case. They used Prism to spy on me. Kim Dotcom
4Of course, bankers were always interested in making money. But when bankers had clients, they bore some responsibility for the clients’ welfare. Barry Schwartz
When they took a young man into Tellson’s London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
‘The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,’ said Levin, feeling that he was incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. ‘Like the profits made by banks,’ he went on. ‘This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just another way of making money without work.’ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The invisible Money Power is working to control and enslave mankind. It financed Communism, Fascism, Marxism, Zionism, Socialism. All of these are directed to making the United States a member of a World Government. American Mercury Magazine December 1957 p92
State of Minnesota, County of Scott, First National Bank of Montgomery vs Jerome Daley [1968]: A Minnesota Trial Court’s decision holding the Federal Reserve Act unconstitutional and VOID; holding the National Banking Act unconstitutional and VOID; declaring a mortgage acquired by the First National Bank of Montgomery, Minnesota in the regular course of its business, along with the foreclosure and the sheriff's sale, to be VOID ...
This decision, which is legally sound, has the effect of declaring all private mortgages on real and personal property, and all US and State bonds held by the Federal Reserve, National and State Banks to be null and VOID. This amounts to an emancipation of this nation from personal, national and State debt purportedly owed to this banking system. Every True American owes it to himself/herself, to his or her country, and to the people of the world for that matter, to study this decision very carefully and to understand it, for upon it hangs the question of freedom or slavery ...