Two members of the IRA are arrested in Cork. ibid.
March 2008: Three years after the robbery Ted Cunningham faced ten charges of money laundering. ibid.
January 2007: Two years after the robbery cases against two suspects collapse. ibid.
They couldn’t get any convictions: which is extraordinary when you think about this: the scale of it, the political significance of it, and the resources that the police put into this, and the huge vested interest they had in getting a conviction. ibid.
Skimming devices on cash machines … ATM skimming is on the rise in the UK. Oxford Street Revealed s2e2, BBC 2014
In 1986 Mrs Thatcher deregulated the City of London. The old division between banks and stockbrokers was removed ... Nick Leeson was working as a clerk for the giant American bank Morgan Stanley ... A boy from the suburbs who wanted to be a trader ... This time he chose a British bank. Barings was the oldest merchant bank in England ... Even the Queen held an account at Barings. Adam Curtis, Inside Story Special, BBC 1996
Leeson’s job was to buy and sell Futures: these are bets on the way a market will move in the future ... In the summer of 1992 the market fluctuated violently. In the chaos Leeson’s team began to make serious mistakes ... Leeson hid the loses. He didn’t want to go back to being a clerk. He put the loses into a computerised account called the 88888 account, and altered its software so London wouldn’t see what he was doing ... His loses were catastrophic. On one day alone he lost £50,000,000. But he kept going. ibid.
Through the summer of 1976 Arab oil money continued to leave London. The heads of Arab banks now became powerful figures ... Denis Healey began a series of savage cuts in public expenditure. It was the only way he believed for Britain to get a loan from the IMF and avoid bankruptcy. But it was clear to many in his party that he had given away control of the economy to the markets. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set I: Who Pays Wins ***** BBC 1999
The summer of 1976 was one of the hottest on record. Berkeley Square in Mayfair became infested by a plague of caterpillars. They got everywhere even inside the Clermont Club. One of the few Clermont members left in London that summer was James Goldsmith … Goldsmith was suing the satirical magazine Private Eye. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set III: Destroy the Technostructure
He [Goldsmith] would be used as a battering ram to break down the old system of power that had ruled America for fifty years. The conscious shaping of society by a corporate and political elite would be destroyed by people like him and replaced by the blind force of the markets. ibid.
Ronald Reagan had come to power at a moment of economic crisis. But he promised a dramatic regeneration of the country’s fortunes. But not by government which he blamed had led America into the chaos. His solution was to give power away to Wall Street and to the financial markets. He wanted them to find a way to regenerate America. ibid.
Investors were falling over themselves to invest in junk bonds. But to [Michael] Milken they were more than just a way of raising money. Junk bonds were a powerful weapon with which to challenge the established power of Wall Street. ibid.
The big corporation was at the heart of American life. It was far more than just a way of making money. The idea of the corporation had been born fifty years before out of pressure from politicians. They had wanted to find a way of protecting America from the growing chaos of the free market. ibid.
Goldsmith and Milken now set out to take over the technostructure. They would do it by borrowing billions of dollars with the promise that they would repay vast interest. They were confident they could do this because hidden away within the giant corporations was fantastic wealth which they could unlock and sell off. ibid.
It was the reconstruction of America by the power of the market. ibid.
A patrician elite who had run America for fifty years. ibid.
Downsizing became one of the most important factors fuelling a boom in the American stock market. Every time the raiders sacked managers and workers their share price soared, and in turn that pushed the bull market even higher. As the takeover boom grew, millions of workers were downsized. Whole towns were decimated. ibid.
But Goldsmith was beginning to suffer from delusions of grandeur: he forgot that he was no more than a creature of the banks. And having taken over control of industry from the state, he decided he now had the power and the money to take over foreign policy as well. And the first thing he decided he would do was undermine the Soviet Union. Goldsmith believed that the growing anti-nuclear movement in the West was completely controlled by the Soviet Union; so he and a number of right-wing tycoons set up a private organisation to undermine the peace movement. Goldsmith was going to privatise Western Intelligence. Goldsmith’s main target was the World Peace Council, an innocuous and ineffectual organisation. ibid.
Goldsmith’s belief that he was powerful was a fantasy. The men who really had the power were the bankers. The men who really had the power were the bankers. They were using Goldsmith’s bullying nature as a weapon to break down the corporations. But the banks themselves were about to fall from grace. And Goldsmith would be left helpless and exposed. ibid.
The New York attorney [Giuliani] revealed that the takeover movement was riddled with corruption. ibid.
But the revelations of corruption started by Boesky kept growing. They now spread to Britain. As in America, the Guinness scandal exposed a network of illegal share-dealing, but unlike America, only four men were convicted. Evidence of a much wider system of corruption was quietly buried. ibid.
He was Tiny Rowland and he too had been marginalised by the on-rush of the economy. Rowland believed that the Conservative Party had been corrupted by the boom. Both these men [Rowland and Goldsmith] wanted vengeance for their loss of power. And both now set out to destroy the Conservative Party. And they would be joined by a third vengeful tycoon who had been cast aside: Mohamed al-Fayed. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set IV: Twilight of the Dogs
The Conservatives’ boom had turned sour. It had led to inflation and industrial violence. And in November the Arab oil price rise pushed the market over the edge. It fell further than in the crash of 1929. The politicians now turned on the tycoons. When Rowland’s corrupt methods were revealed, Edward Heath publicly called him ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. And Goldsmith was now seen as a greedy spiv who had torn British industry apart to make himself a fortune. ibid.
The bankers not the politicians would change Britain. ibid.
Rowland knew that he had been stopped because of his corrupt past. He was furious because to him it was the height of hypocrisy. Rowland knew that underneath the new shiny enterprise culture there was a growing mass of corruption on a far grander scale than anything he had indulged. ibid.
Fayed paid MPs to defend him in Parliament … The lobbyists found it easy to buy MPs, not just because politicians were greedy but because increasingly they were disillusioned. They knew that power had shifted from parliament to the City of London. ibid.
Currency markets decided to take on the British government. They deliberately set out to force John Major to devalue and to leave the Exchange Rate Mechanism. It was to be a defining battle over who now really controlled Britain’s economy – the markets of the government. ibid.
‘There’s a divorce between the interests of major corporations and of society,’ ibid. James Goldsmith, television interview
1997: The Labour government gave away its power and the markets rewarded them. Money did not flee from London as it had done when previous Labour governments had been elected, and the boom continued. ibid.
A vast pool of wealth known as petro-dollars that could be lent and traded anywhere around the world without political control … Their bankers were building a new global financial system based on recycling the Saudi millions. And the banks began to become rich and powerful again. Adam Curtis, Bitter Lake, BBC 2015
The politicians had to face a crisis at home: they had given power to the banks because the bankers and financial technocrats had promised they could hold the economy stable. But in 2008 the whole intricate system of credit and loans that the banks had created collapsed. And there was growing panic and giant financial institutions faced bankruptcy. The politicians in America and Britain stepped in and rescued the banks. As they did so they began to discover that most of the major financial institutions were also riddles with corruption. But unlike President Roosevelt in the 1930s they didn’t then transform the system. Instead, the simply propped it up. ibid.
Faced with the bankers’ argument Clinton agreed, and on taking office began to cut back on his reforms. During his first term, he dismantled much of the welfare structure that had been put in place in the 1930s; he abandoned all his healthcare reforms and cut government regulation of business. It was what the markets wanted. Adam Curtis, The Trap II: The Lonely Robot, BBC 2007
Out of eight members, nine of them were bankers … The financial institutions took power away from the politicians and started to run society themselves. The city had no other option. The bankers enforced what was called austerity on the city … To them there was no alternative to this system: it should run society. Adam Curtis, HyperNormalisation, BBC 2016
No-one opposed the bankers. ibid.