Al Hodges: "COTTRELL FINANCIAL REFORM PROPOSALS", part 1

E-mail from attorney Al Hodges:

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Your assistance is respectfully requested: PLEASE PROVIDE THE WIDEST POSSIBLE CIRCULATION OF THE FOLLOWING FROM MICHAEL C. COTTRELL:

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ALTHOUGH THIS WAS PUBLISHED ON 18 SEPTEMBER 2008, IT IS MY OPINION THAT THESE RULES-BASED PROPOSALS ARE STILL RELEVANT AND SHOULD BE REVIEWED/IMPLEMENTED WHEN THE NEW BANKING SYSTEM IS EXECUTED.

MICHAEL C. COTTRELL, B.A., M.S.
PRESIDENT
PENNSYLVANIA INVESTMENTS, INC.

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MICHAEL C. COTTRELL'S U.S. FINANCIAL REFORM PROPOSALS

MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER GIVEN BASEL-II COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS

Thursday 18 September 2008 02:00

U.S. FINANCIAL MARKET REVAMP LAST MARCH IS A FALSE PROSPECTUS BY TREASURY

ALTERNATIVE PLAN PRESENTED HEREWITH IS SIMPLER, TIMELY, CHEAPER AND EFFECTIVE

PRESIDENT'S WORKING GROUP 'REFORM PLAN' EXPOSED AS A SELF-SERVING RUSE

BETTER PLAN BY MICHAEL C. COTTRELL, B.A., M.S. CAN BE UP AND RUNNING IN MONTHS

CONVOLUTED 'PAULSON' FABRICATION WOULD COST IMMENSE $ SUMS TO IMPLEMENT

TREASURY'S PROPOSALS REQUIRE SEVEN NEW AGENCIES, MR COTTRELL'S JUST ONE

THREE-STAGE 'PAULSON' PROPOSALS CALCULATED TO UNDERMINE MARKET PSYCHOLOGY

ALTERNATIVE PLAN SUPPLEMENTED BY A COMPREHENSIVE SECURITIES MARKET GLOSSARY




•Economic Intelligence Review contains Michael C. Cottrell's Rules-Based Reform Plan and the extensive Glossary of Financial Market Definitions. Publication date: Friday 15th August 2008.

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SIMPLE RULES-BASED MARKET STABILISATION PLAN BY MICHAEL C. COTTRELL, B.A., M.S.

In the first quarter of 2008, Michael C. Cottrell, B.A., M.S., President of Pennsylvania Investments , Inc., contacted the Editor of this service to brief him in detail on the dubious stratagems behind the disparate proposals that were finally unveiled at the end of last March by the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, a.k.a. the ‘Paulson proposals’.

As a result of several conversations, Mr Cottrell, one of the foremost securities markets experts in the United States, prepared a critique of the US Treasury’s extraordinary ‘Plan’, which he was easily able to demonstrate is highly destablising, not least since its plainly confused recommendations undermine financial market confidence while demonstrably serving the interests of the criminalist kleptocracy at the expense of the genuine investment community. This analysis is presented here.

In short, the Working Group’s ‘blueprint’ is shown herewith to be a false prospectus.

Having discredited the Working Group’s proposals, which would call for the creation of no less than SEVEN expensive and mischievously overlapping new US regulatory bureaucracies and for the abolition of the essential rules-based securities market environment, which would be phased out over an imprecise but prolonged timeframe, Michael Cottrell presents his own effective and simple solution to the chaos brought about by years of officially condoned fraudulent finance.

This will require just ONE new US regulator, will call for the revalidation by Congress of the Glass-Steagall Act and for the decisive re-establishment of the essential rules-based system which the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has neglected to enforce in recent years, and can be implemented in full within the space of just a few months, at most. Additionally, Mr Cottrell’s simple Plan will be infinitely cheaper to implement than the top-heavy Working Group proposals.

The Editor has incorporated Mr Cottrell’s proposal into this analysis; and the extensive Glossary, built around Michael C. Cottrell’s original framework, has been expanded so that all concerned can readily understand what has to be done. Michael C. Cottrell, B.A., M.S., can be contacted direct on: 814-455 9218 (voicemail), and at: pii-mcc@msn.com.

Mr Cottrell’s reform framework has been elaborated by the Editor to incorporate ideas for which he alone is responsible but which Mr Cottrell has graciously approved.

•Important Note: We can only report US law as it stands. We cannot make exceptions and neither can we speculate as to the prospective actions of authorities given, for instance, the admission by UBS that it broke the law, and the consequences of that admission for some US investors who may consider that they are eligible for Settlement payouts. Nor can we enter into ANY correspondence concerning that matter. The only issues that we will discuss arising from this post are Mr Cottrell's practical and straightforward recommendations: and these issues should be raised with him direct.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This paper describes, exposes and then systematically demolishes the credibility and relevance of the so-called ‘Paulson’ proposals, a.k.a. the mish-mash of convoluted notions brought forth by the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets at the end of March 2008.

In passing, it questions the basis upon which expectations of repayment by some US participants in ‘humanitarian’, Omega and other often unregistered, and therefore usually (in the United States) illegal, Ponzi schemes are predicated, shows why these schemes are illegal by comparing them to what the US securities and other relevant US legislation requires, and presents inexpensive and constructive proposals to replace ‘Paulson’s’ dog’s dinner – which, incidentally, would call for the establishment of no less than SEVEN expensive new US bureaucratic agencies, whereas the Plan, devised by the securities expert Michael C. Cottrell, M.S., which is advanced here, would require just ONE new agency instead. Further, Mr Cottrell's scheme could be up and running within a few months, whereas the 'Paulson' dog's dinner is phased over an indeterminate timeframe.

OFFICIAL PROPOSALS ARE MISCHIEVOUS
On investigating this matter, we were quite surprised at the ease with which the Working Group’s spurious obfuscation operation could be shown to be a glaringly false prospectus that has been jumbled together in order to disguise what can only be described as its underlying mischievous intent. For these proposals dishonestly seek to convey an impression of regulatory reform (in response to the chaos in the financial markets which has been brought about exclusively by the serial criminality of holders of high office) – whereas their actual purpose is to mask the objective of precluding meaningful reform in favour of cosmetic adjustments consistent with an even more permissive and crime-friendly environment than exists today.

Indeed a pattern of nefarious US official behaviour has become clear since the deregulation of the Savings and Loan Associations in 1982. It can be summarised as follows. Far from entertaining any clear intention of curbing excesses and seeking to contain financial sector crises and instability brought about by organised financial fraud condoned at the highest levels of American power, the participating US authorities typically allow the prevailing crisis of confidence and its real economic consequences to escalate until, as happened at the end of the 1980s with the messy ‘responses’ developed by Congress to the ‘hollowing out’ (enronisation) of the thrifts, the problems become so huge that radical departures are agreed upon ‘under duress’ which, in turn, provide the intended basis for a proliferation of fraudulent financial operations ‘by other means’.

FOLDING THE CRIMINALISTS' CRISIS INTO A 'UNIVERSAL SOLUTION'
This is exactly what these cynical ‘Paulson’ proposals are predicated to achieve. The underlying motive here is to ‘fold’ the contemporary financial and economic crisis into a ‘ universal solution’ which will, if this Treasury has its way, give the arch-planners of fraudulent finance practices, carte blanche to proliferate their scams and aberrations for many years to come.

Accordingly, the fraudulent prospectus disgorged by the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets needs to be consigned forthwith to the trash can. This report will help to achieve that.

As indicated, we present a simple, straightforward, constructive, inexpensive and quickly and easily implemented alternative Plan to replace it. Its author, Michael C. Cottrell, M.S., one of the United States’ foremost securities markets experts, argues that no further attention should be paid to the dishonest and discredited ‘Paulson’ proposals, which have in any case more or less run into the sand; and that the straightforward measures advocated below should be adopted, instead.

They would immediately inject the necessary discipline into the marketplace, precluding scope for securities scamming models to which the notorious American kleptocracy has become accustomed.

This paper is supplemented by an extensive Glossary of securities environment terms, for the benefit of the lay reader. The Editor has incorporated several appropriate new terms in the list.

SELF-SERVING PLAN TO ‘CLEAN UP’ MESS THE CRIMINALISTS THEMSELVES CREATED
Among the most distasteful characteristics of the world-class financial criminals exposed through our reports is their habit of advising the Rest of Us how the distasteful consequences of their own glaring criminality are to be overcome. The flip-side of the accomplished US financial criminalist is typically an unimpressive ‘angel of light’, who preaches the virtues of sound finance, in order to mask the fact of his endless reprobate financial misbehaviour.

Thus, having presided over and orchestrated the stealing of colossal sums of other people’s money, the US intelligence operative calling himself Henry M. Paulson Jr. [but see Memorandum below], as advertised, promulgated, in March 2008, a set of goofy and confused proposals for the ostensible ‘reorganisation’ of the way the US financial markets are regulated, which amounts to a pre-planned ‘new regulatory order’ – but the purpose of which, on investigation, turns out NOT to be improved financial sector discipline, but rather the cynical and surreptitious institutionalisation of market conditions that will facilitate replication of the abuses and fraudulent finance that have so far been exposed, but on a far broader scale, in the years to come.

A prerequisite for understanding what follows, and the prevailing financial days of reckoning and their origination generally, is to recognise the subversive reality of the ‘angels of light’ deception model. The financial sector traditionally clothes itself in a mantle of assumed righteousness, which is reinforced by generational layers of perception yielding a belief that financial institutions are, generally speaking, models of rectitude which cannot deviate from the strict codes of conduct that are presumed to surround them, and therefore from the Rule of Law.

BELATED, GRUDGING REALISATION THAT WHAT HAS BEEN REPORTED IS ACCURATE
Because this general lazy presumption is rarely, even today, called into question, it took, to our certain knowledge, certain British and American circles over two years to reach the staggered conclusion that what we have been reporting was accurate, both in general terms and more often than not, in terms of specifics as well.

By the same token, the underlying assumption that the exotic Treasury proposals developed by the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, which will be demolished here, are of beneficial and enlightened intent, has no basis in reality, as will now be examined. On the contrary, as might have been expected, they represent ANOTHER pathetic scam, a deception, a diversion, a PLOY.

We will begin with a ‘straight’ summary of the 'Paulson' proposals, which will then be exposed as representing a false and deceitful prospectus.

THE FALSE PROSPECTUS AS ANNOUNCED
Following our exposures of financial fraud between June 2006 and the same month a year later, tensions rose to such a pitch behind the financial sector scenes that the US authorities felt the sudden need to be seen to be ‘doing something’ – an urge that resulted in the establishment of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets.

But by ‘doing something’, the criminalists actually meant leveraging the financial crisis which has developed as a direct consequence of their criminality through the advocating of false ‘reforms’ under cover of which they intended to institutionalise a permissive US environment which would guarantee that their addiction to manufacturing liquidity out of thin air through untaxed high yield investment programs (out of bounds to ordinary mortals because outside the officially protected corruption zone, they are lethally risk Ponzi scams: see below), would be OK'd without recourse.

The phrase ‘Working Group’ is a designation used by Israeli intelligence to describe an operation inside the Israeli Government structures (viz., intelligence), with a focus on developing a modus operandi to achieve an instructed objective, according to Robert Littell [‘Vicious Circle’, Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, New York, 2006].

After ‘labouring’ for eight months, the Working Group brought forth a convoluted, fragmented and opaque ‘THREE-STAGE plan’ to ‘reform’ US regulation of the very financial institutions with which the now disgraced ruling kleptocracy has been collaborating to scam ordinary American citizens, mortgage ‘holders’, the US Government itself, and foreigners who fail to do their ‘due diligence’.

The overall effect of the regulatory fragmentation plan put forward in bad faith (as we demonstrate below) by the Working Group would be to place the control of all financial markets wholly under the power of the President of the United States – which, given the criminality of the present and recent incumbents, would be a recipe for the institutionalisation of fraudulent finance, the elimination of all remaining checks and balances, and consequently for a corrosive financial market environment leading to a financial meltdown in a few years’ time which would make the present crisis look like a pleasant afternoon by the seaside.

Before we go any further, we must summarise the Working Group’s proposals without commenting in any detail immediately on their implications:

STAGE ONE, AS PROMULGATED BY THE PRESIDENT'S WORKING GROUP:

•The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets would be expanded to add banking sector regulators not hitherto participating in its deliberations, in order to broaden the Working Group‘s supposed focus to incorporate the whole of the US financial sector, rather than just the financial markets as such (begging the question: what was the problem? Why the delay?).

•Lending by the Federal Reserve: Because non-bank financial institutions have, since December 2007 (thanks to the chaos brought about by fraudulent finance operations over which this ‘Paulson’ himself presided) had access to the US Federal Reserve, the Fed would be able to conduct on-site examinations of such borrowers and impose conditions on their operations.

•Establish a Mortgage Origination Commission to consist of six Board Members, taken mainly from Federal structures. The new entity would proceed to establish minimum licensing standards and testing criteria, and would gauge and grade the adequacy of each State’s mortgage control system. This would be accompanied by clarification of which Federal body is to enforce mortgage lending legislation (which, for some unexplained reason, the Working Group could not manage to do).

STAGE TWO, AS PROMULGATED BY THE PRESIDENT'S WORKING GROUP:

•Federal Oversight of State-Chartered Banks: It was reported that the US Treasury recommended a study to determine whether the Federal Reserve or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) should have oversight of State-chartered banks. (Great! So we need a 'study'. Why didn't the Group perform that study, then? Why the 'need' for further delay while the 'study' is carried out?).

•Thrift Charter to be eliminated: The following banking sector regulator was categorised as ‘past its sell-by date’: The Office of Thrift Supervision. This entity, which oversees US Savings and Loan Associations (so-called ‘Thrift Institutions’) should be closed down and folded into the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which has oversight of National Banks. (No reason given).

•A new (optional) Federal Insurance Charter: The US Treasury proposed the creation of a Federal regulator to cover the insurance sector, which is extremely corrupt in the United States. The first step would be to ask Congress to create an Office of Insurance Oversight within the US Treasury, to focus on international issues and to advise the Treasury on insurance sector affairs. This would be the first step towards the creation of step two, namely the creation of a new Federal Insurance Charter. (Notice that everything is 'spaced out', laid-back, confused and overlapping).

•Revised payments and settlement arrangements: Under the eccentric proposals brought forward by ‘Paulson’, it was suggested that the Federal Reserve Board should be given oversight and rule-making authority over the payment and settlement systems for the processing of payments and the transfer of securities between financial institutions and their clients. (Hence, de facto regulation of the securities markets would devolve into the hands of the untrustworthy Federal Reserve).

•Futures and Securities markets: The US Treasury used this report to call for the merger of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (the CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC), neither of which has been doing its job properly, given the sheer scale of the bribery and corruption behind the scenes, plus reports that the SEC has itself been engaged in trading on own account (see below).

In particular, the Treasury proposed that the Securities and Exchange Commission, which operates (or should operate) on the basis of precise rules and regulations backed by rigorous enforcement, should ‘preserve’ the modus operandi of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is that business should instead be conducted in accordance with stated ‘principles’.

In other words, the Treasury wanted to scrap the rules-based system (required under the 1933 and 1934 Securities Acts) and to replace it by a vague ‘principles- based’ system’, which would mean that enforcement would be almost impossible – because a régime of relativism would prevail and key terms would remain undefined.

Securities professionals are taught and intensively trained to operate exclusively on the basis of the SEC’s ‘rules-based’ system, which precludes any deviation whatsoever from the established rules (provided the regulations are enforced, which has not been the case for years because of corruption within the Securities and Exchange Commission itself).

STAGE THREE, AS PROMULGATED BY THE PRESIDENT'S WORKING GROUP:

A new US regulatory structure would be imposed over the longer term, under which US financial institutions would be asked to choose between one of three Federal Charters:

•Federally Insured Depository Institution:
This would be applicable to all lenders with Federal deposit insurance.

•Federal Insurance Institution:
Applicable to all insurers offering retail ‘products’ which entail some degree of Federal guarantee.

•Federal Financial Services Provider:
This charter would cover all other categories of financial services firms.

Under this regime, the following SEVEN NEW FEDERAL AGENCIES, each with its own hyper-expensive self-serving bureaucracy would 'regulate' US financial institutions:

•The Market Stability Regulator: Under this vague proposal, the Federal Reserve was to ‘look out’ for threats to the stability of the United States’ diverse financial system, whether they originated with banks, insurance corporations, mortgage lenders, investment banks, hedge funds, or with any other type of financial institution.

The Federal Reserve could require corrective measures to be taken to address current risks or to curb future risk-taking, but these powers could only be exercised if overall financial stability was threatened. In other words, this entity would essentially achieve nothing at all, leaving the financial markets alone (until it was too late), thereby passively facilitating a progressive repetition of the near-catastrophe experienced since the mid-1980s, but on a far larger scale.

•Prudential Financial Regulatory Agency: This new entity would regulate US financial institutions buttressed by explicit Government guarantees associated with their operations, such as Federal deposit insurance. The new US agency would assume the rôles of the current Federal prudential regulators, including the Office of the US Comptroller of the Currency and the Treasury's Office of Thrift Supervision. Yet another (subsidiary) regulator would focus on the hitherto unrestrained and unregulated off-off-budget Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) which, though established by the Federal Government, were placed (on creation) into the ‘private’ sector and have implicit Government backing, such as the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) and the Federal Home Loan Bank System. See our report dated 26th December 2007 for insights into how Fannie Mae, for instance, has been used to perpetrate fraudulent financial transactions in the US mortgage sector [Archive].

•Conduct of Business Regulatory Agency: This new regulator would be charged with ‘consumer protection’ with respect to all categories of financial entities. The agency would watch disclosures and business practices, and would supervise the licensing of certain types of financial firm.

It would absorb many of the functions of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and would undertake some responsibilities that are currently handled by the Fed, state insurance regulators, and the Federal Trade Commission.

•Federal Insurance Guarantee Corporation: This new agency would replace the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, charging premia to guarantee bank deposits and insurance payouts.

•Corporate Finance Regulator: This new entity would take over other functions of the Securities and Exchange Commission, such as the oversight of corporate disclosures, governance issues, accounting, and other matters.

In other words, SEVEN NEW BUREAUCRACIES would regulate everything and achieve nothing.

THE PURPOSE OF THE FALSE PROSPECTUS: OBFUSCATION
Confused? That’s precisely what is intended. As can be seen, this curious pot-pourri of convoluted arrangements matches the intentions of those who framed it (and who will not see it implemented, we feel sure). Those intentions can be summed up in the single word: OBFUSCATION.

For these proposals were developed during the immediate aftermath of the emergence of overt financial sector strains arising from the ongoing exposures of the open-ended financial fraud; and their purpose, from the outset, was not to enhance regulation and to make it ‘more efficient’, but rather to bring forward a novel framework under cover of ‘overdue reforms necessitated by the credit crunch and the financial crisis generally’, which could be exploited and leveraged to cover up, rather than to further expose, the serial financial criminality that blew up in the faces of the US kleptocracy as a consequence of the exposures of its endless criminality.

In other words, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets appears to have been briefed in bad faith, its task being to develop a platform and framework of proposals which would serve the purpose of obfuscating financial criminality, while appearing to do the opposite. This was, in short, nothing less than a typical deception, intended to convey the dubious impression that ‘reform’ was (belatedly) being recommended, while in practice substituting the existing regulatory system which has not been properly enforced, with a vague, woolly régime framed so as to facilitate the very free-wheeling fraudulent finance and risk-taking that the proposals are supposed to deter.

Since, however, the proposals were brought forward by deception operatives whose speciality has all along been dialectical ying-yang behaviour, duplication and duplicity, the discovery that these proposals are a sham, comes as no surprise. Whether those who listened to ‘Paulson’ making this pitch on 2nd July 2008 at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London (the globalist UK think-tank which masquerades as a free-standing institution of the British nation state while constantly undermining it), understood this duplicity, seems improbable.

On that occasion, ‘Paulson’ presented a series of vague generalities for the consideration of the British ‘Great and the Good’ assembled to hear this pitch, such as that ‘the financial landscape has changed, and non-bank financial institutions play a significantly greater role’ than used to be the case. (When one of our special contacts attempted to make himself known to this ‘Paulson’ fellow, he vanished out of sight).

But the existing US regulatory régime has not ‘failed’ because it is no longer ‘fit for purpose’. It has ‘failed’ for three straightforward reasons:

(1) Some of the regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Reserve Board itself, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are/have been corrupt.

(2) The corrupt regulators have accordingly failed to regulate, let alone to enforce their regulations.

(3) The focus of the corrupt regulators is to prolong the obfuscation operation, to verbalise their dereliction of duty through spinning for the benefit of the likes of The Wall Street Journal, and to seek to draw a veil over such issues as the SEC's 'legitimisation' of naked shorts for a restricted group of participants, whereas a regulator should be completely impartial. The overall objective is self-preservation, protection of their own personal interests, and staying out of jail themselves.

•In respect of 'naked shorts', has the SEC conveniently forgotten the old securities market adage:
'He who sells what isn't his'n, Must put it back or go to prison'?

TERMS DELIBERATELY LEFT UNDEFINED UNDER THE INTENDED 'PRINCIPLES-BASED' REGIME
In place of the existing (albeit unenforced) regulatory régime, ‘Paulson’ proposed a system not of rules-based regulation, which could be enforced if the regulatory agencies themselves were not corrupt, but of ‘principles’-based regulation, which, by definition, would entail that there would be no rules to be enforced, terms are not defined, and that breaches of ‘principles’ are liable to be irrelevant because it would always be a nuanced matter of relatavist judgment whether principles were being flouted, or not. In otherwise, such a régime would not amount to a regulatory régime at all, but rather to a crooks’ charter and paradise. ALL OVER AGAIN.

If the existing US regulatory agencies were doing their jobs properly, they would be adequate for the purpose – and certainly far more adequate than the deliberately complexified, overlapping and obfuscatory framework suggested by the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets.

But while the Working Group may be redundant and has discredited itself, the financial market issues that it was supposed to have addressed, remain in existence and as intractable as before.

THE EXISTING U.S. REGULATORY FRAMEWORK
The existing US regulatory framework, for the record, consists of the following agencies:

•Federal Reserve System: Supposedly regulates the US monetary system and oversees bank holding companies. Historically lacked real assets apart from its contract to print the currency of the United States, which ought to be a function of the US Treasury,

•Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): Established by the Congress in 1934 to regulate the securities markets in accordance with stated rules and under the 1933 and 1934 Securities Acts, to maintain ‘fair’ markets and to protect investors. The SEC also, as a primary element of its oversight powers, reviews corporate financial statements, is supposed to enforce the securities regulations, and provides guidance for the framing of accounting rules.

•Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC): This regulator insures deposits lodged by bank customers against the failure of banks. The FDIC was created in 1933 to build and maintain public confidence and to encourage stability in the financial system by fostering sound banking practices.

•Office of the Comptroller of the Currency: This traditional arm of the US Treasury Department was established in 1863 to supervise and regulate National Banks and the Federal branches of foreign banks. Its purpose is to promote the safety and soundness of the banking system and to conduct on-site examinations of banks across the nation.

•Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC): Established as a US agency in 1974, this entity is supposed to ensure the open and efficient operation of the US futures markets, which started out trading agricultural futures, and now trade sophisticated synthetics (derivatives).

•Office of Thrift Supervision: This agency issues and enforces regulations governing the United States’ Savings and Loan sector (Thrift Institutions). It is responsible for ensuring the safety and soundness of deposits with Thrift Institutions.

SHORT HISTORY OF U.S. FINANCIAL TRANSPARENCY

(A) 1890 to the 1920s:

Leading American financiers of the late 19th century, such as John J. Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan (1), provided capital to finance the establishment of very large corporations and combines, also known as the trusts, which came to wield enormous power across entire industrial sectors. As a consequence, by the year 1890, the control of 5,000 corporations was held by about 300 such trusts operating all over the country. By 1900, the largest dozen of these combines were capitalised at over $1.0 billion (2) .

Accordingly, investment bankers became corporate directors – with Morgan, for instance, having board representation on 78 investment bank companies.

Therefore, when these large corporations needed injections of capital, the bankers who were sitting on their Boards claimed to represent the bondholders (3).

Disclosure of financial information was entirely voluntary, even though disclosure of predator practices could only be revealed via the balance sheet (4). The Sherman AntiTrust Act of 1890 was enacted in order to define and make the monopolistic activities of such trust companies illegal (5).

In 1914, the Clayton Anti-Trust Act sought to increase competition across the business sector by restricting predatory corporate activity such as acquiring other competing corporations and the practice of allowing interlocking corporate directorships (6).

And the Federal Trade Commission Act, passed in the same year, established a regulatory authority, acting as the ‘watchdog of competition’, to protect the American consumer from ‘unfair methods of competition’ (7). In other words, raw, unregulated capitalism was by now seen as being prone to abuse and in need, therefore, of official constraint.

(B) 1920s to 1941:

During this period, the number of investment companies that were formed in the United States steadily increased from six in the year 1921, to 46 in 1925 (8).

While most of these investment companies were subject in some measure to the ‘Blue-Sky’ [see Glossary] requirements, the State statutes and regulations appear not to have treated investment companies much differently from the general run of corporations and business trusts (9).

As previously, disclosure of financial information remained voluntary, even though the disclosure of predatory practices could only be conveniently disclosed through the balance sheet (10).

Between 1927 and 1929, these investment companies raised approximately $2,300,000,000 from the sale of new securities. Their assets increased from $550,000,000 in 1927 to almost $2,600,000,000 in 1929 (11). Distribution of the shares in these fixed trusts reached peak levels during 1930 and 1931, when $600,000,000 of their shares were sold, inducing the passage of various US statutes and the promulgation of regulations which brought the expansion of these fixed trusts to an end (12).

In 1933, North Carolina adopted a regulation (which in due course was adopted as Section 11 of the Investment Company Act of 1940) which prohibited the charging of any sales load on the switching of trust shares (13). As a consequence of the lessons learned the 1920s and early 1930s, including bitter experiences suffered by investors with ‘bucket shops’, the original and copycat Ponzi and Pyramid-selling schemes, and other forms of fraudulent finance that flourished in this free-for-all environment, the Congress passed the stringent Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934, followed by the Maloney Act of 1935; and in the banking sector, the Banking Act of 1933 and the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which restricted US banks to banking operations and precluded their participation in the securities markets. The Securities Acts were updated by the Securities Acts Amendments of 1970.

THE EXPENSIVE FALSE PROSPECTUS ANALYSED:

U.S. TREASURY’S 2008 REGULATORY ‘REFORM’ PROPOSALS (14), (15)

Astonishingly, in view of the obvious fact that these proposals would be bound to have an impact on fragile financial market confidence, the Working Group’s suggestions were phased, with short- medium- and long-term proposals set within an imprecise timeframe, interspersed with periods of reflection for ‘study’, and personnel being liable to be poached from old regulatory agencies that would remain alive in one phase, but not the next, and with every opportunity taken to ensure that the responsibilities of no less than SEVEN newly proposed, expensive agencies would overlap as much as possible, while existing agencies would languish in a state of limbo or uncertainty pending prospective abolition, or not, as might be decided in a later phase.

Self-evidently, this confused prospectus is a recipe for undermining confidence in the integrity of financial market regulation, and therefore in the integrity of the financial markets themselves, as well as maximising the potential for obfuscation, as will be seen:

(A) THE SHORT-TERM PROPOSALS:

The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets is/was intended, we read, to be composed of a Coordinator of Financial Regulatory Policy and to cover the entire American financial sector, as indicated above, not merely the financial markets.

It was thus to incorporate banking regulators not currently participating in the study group, and would need to broaden its financial focus to capture the whole of the financial sector.

Hence the Working Group was to facilitate inter-agency coordination and communication, with a view (ostensibly) to developing proposals to mitigate all systemic risks to the financial system, to enhance the integrity of the financial markets, to promote protection of consumers and investors, and to support the efficiency and competitiveness of the financial markets.

Since overall ‘competitiveness’ covers the stance of any given financial market environment by comparison with foreign counterparts, the Working Group would or will have had to consider the impact of any proposals it puts forward on the competitiveness of the market in question, with its equivalents abroad; and the moment that such considerations had to be considered, the knee-jerk response of the Working Group’s membership is liable to have been to opt for the most lenient and liberal ‘solution’ on the drawing board.

As for the proposed creation of a Federal Mortgage Origination Commission (MOC), this huge new bureaucracy would be headed by a Director appointed by the President of the United States for a four- or six-year term – which means that, in accordance with the standard corrupt US practice, the job would be likely to go to a presidential crony.

The six Board members would be supplied from the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), even though the last of these three agencies were to be abolished under the proposals, and the Federal Reserve itself remains vulnerable, under unpublished H.R. 2778 of the 110th Congress, to be abolished and merged within the US Treasury.

The other two Board Members would be supplied from the National Credit Union Association and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors.

The new Mortgage Origination Commission would develop minimum licensing standards, testing criteria and a system for grading the adequacy of each State’s financial regulatory arrangements. The drafting of regulations covering national mortgage lending legislation would, the Working Group apparently proposes, remain exclusively with the Federal Reserve, as provided for under the Truth in Lending Act.

Finally, the States should be given clear authority to enforce Federal mortgage legislation upon independent mortgage originators, that is to say, those mortgage originators considered to have been responsible for originating most of the so-called ‘sub-prime’ loans.

There was no reference to the practice of collectivising such mortgage loans, let alone with false documentation purporting to represent other mortgages but which lack any underlying asset at all, for the purpose of ‘securitisation’ and marketing to gullible investors at home and abroad who may not perform adequate (or any) due diligence.

For the short term, too, the Treasury’s blueprint put forward two considerations relating to the overall stability of the financial markets. Specifically:

(1) The prevailing temporary liquidity provisioning process, designed to alleviate threats to market stability (launched in December 2007 in the face of the crisis of confidence which overwhelmed the American authorities given the accumulated consequences of their incompetence, criminality and mismanagement of the US financial system), must ensure:

•That the process is calibrated and transparent (with no definition of terms here);

•That appropriate conditions are attached to the lending, (with no explanation of ‘appropriate’);

•That information flows to the Federal Reserve System via on-site examinations, and/or that other conditions or means can be imposed as determined by the Federal Reserve, with no recourse and without any indication here of what the Federal Reserve might have in mind.

(2) The President’s Working Group should consider broader regulatory issues related to discount window access for non-depository (i.e., investment banking) institutions. So, this Working Group has not yet undertaken such considerations? What, then, was it doing between August 2007 and March 2008, exactly?

(B) THE MEDIUM-TERM PROPOSALS:

Under this heading, the Treasury recommended, as summarised above:

•Elimination of ‘redundant’ banking regulators, without providing any rationale for such a drastic and reckless measure, and without having practical alternative proposals formulated or in place;

•Closing down the Office of Thrift Supervision, ditto;

•Folding the responsibilities of the Office of Thrift Supervision into the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, again with no rationale for such action being provided.

Having shredded key existing regulatory institutions without replacing them (at this stage), the Treasury proposed that the next step should be that a leisurely ‘study’ should be undertaken, to establish whether the Federal Reserve or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the FDIC) should have oversight of the State-chartered banks.

This seems to us to be quite ridiculous, and asking for trouble. First, some existing regulators are abolished, without the Treasury at this stage having a clue what should take their place. Secondly, having abolished the regulators, the Treasury would then embark upon a ‘study’ to decide what to do next, as it says it is undecided (cannot make up its mind) whether the Fed or the FDIC should oversee the State-chartered banks – a confused recommendation akin to throwing all the furniture out of the window before deciding what, if anything, should replace it.

A moment’s reflection will convince even the most enthusiastic supporters of the corrupt US ‘Paulson’ Treasury that these proposals are, of put it mildly, mischievous.

Nobody who cares about US financial market stability can possibly take them seriously: indeed, the proposals , even as far as has so far been described here, are so mixed up and destabilising, that it is no exaggeration to ask whether they represent some kind of spoof.

Has some malevolent gremlin substituted this mischievous verbiage for what the Working Group actually submitted? Given the track record of ‘Paulson’s criminalist Treasury, that may not be as far-out a proposition as it may appear to be.

The third element of the intermediate recommendations brought forward by this muddled report departed from common sense by recommending that the Federal Reserve – which has achieved notoriety thanks to its two-tier policy of purporting to represent the Rule of Law while at the same time surreptitiously condoning and facilitating corrupt financial practices through exploitation of the unaudited and secretive Federal Inter Bank Settlement Fund – should acquire oversight and rule-making authority over payment and settlement systems that process payments and transfer securities between financial institutions and their clients.

This would be worse than placing the fox in charge of the chicken coop: it would ultimately lead to the liquidation of the chickens by guaranteeing the perpetuation of the fraudulent finance model that has been exposed by notorious recent developments. And again, no coherent rationale for this supposed ‘reform’ was presented with the recommendations.

Put another way, the report then recommended that the Federal Reserve should acquire oversight and, inconsistently, rule-making authority, over the payment and settlement systems that process payments and transfer securities between financial institutions and customers.

Since this all-embracing ‘reform’ would include ALL institutions, this would mean inter alia that the Federal Reserve would in practice acquire rule-making authority over securities broker-dealers. Hence, the rule-making authority to be abolished with the folding of the Securities and Exchange Commission (see below) would reappear under the aegis of the Federal Reserve, although we are not told what category of rules the Fed would promulgate. It can be taken as read that the rules to be promulgated by the Federal Reserve would bear no discernible relationship to the rules long since established (but lately, not enforced) by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

On top of this nonsense, the proposals recommended a further unresolved ‘solution’, calculated to maximise uncertainty – this time in the insurance sector. First, the Working Group floated the idea of creating a Federal regulator to oversee the insurance industry.

Then, after floating this suggestion, the Treasury wants to ‘ask Congress’ to create a new Office of Insurance Oversight (OIO) which would function from within the Treasury, meaning of course that the Treasury would control the insurance sector directly. Since the Treasury, like the US Federal Reserve, has demonstrated that it is thoroughly corrupt, this recommendation would simply enable the corrupt Treasury to capture and channel the well-known corruption that bedevils the insurance sector in the United States. The OIO would supposedly focus upon international insurance sector issues, while also providing the Treasury with ‘advice’ – a completely meaningless concept since the entity, resident within and therefore a part of the Treasury, would accordingly be advising itself.

[The probable hidden intention here would be to replicate the Federal Financing Bank (FFB), which is likewise an office (plus some filing cabinets) situated within the US Treasury but which for many years enjoyed off-budget status, thereby providing the Treasury with increased ‘wriggle-room’ for its usual ‘smoke-and-mirrors’ financial shenanigans. As matters stand today, the Federal Financing Bank is one of the basic mechanisms that enables the Secretary of the Treasury to manipulate the Government’s finances by exploiting the fact that is allowed by statute to have $15.0 billion of debt outstanding at any one time, so that by means of creative bookkeeping, up to $15.0 billion extra can be borrowed on those occasions when the Congress has deployed its residual ‘control’ over the spending of the Executive Branch by refusing to raise the Statutory Debt Limit, in exchange for some Federal Budget concession or other that it seeks to extract from the Executive Branch].

In short, and Office of Insurance Oversight inside the Treasury would simply be leveraged by the corrupt Treasury for its own purposes, and in furtherance of the dubious interests of the official perpetrators of fraudulent finance operations who have been cornered and are running for cover.

Even worse are the quite appalling proposals affecting the securities sector. The Working Group suggested, as mentioned above, that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) should be merged – again, providing no rationale for such a radical shake-up. The actual purpose here would be to end the settlement reached by the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934, which provided for the securities sector to be governed by the strict application of precisely defined rules – the settlement that ended the chaos arising out of the undisciplined free-for-all allowed in the 1920s, when bucket-shops ripped American investors off and investors enjoyed no protection from sharks other than that provided by the ‘Blue Sky’ above – in favour of standardising the so-called ‘principles-based’ approach employed by the ineffective Commodities Futures Trading Commission. Neither the SEC nor the CFTC have, in recent years, fulfilled their regulatory responsibilities, due to internal corruption; but scrapping the rules-based approach in favour of the CFTC’s permissive ‘principles-based’ approach would guarantee and perpetuate financial corruption perhaps for generations to come.

An indication of the deceptive nature of this recommendation can be gauged by the mealy-mouthed language employed to present this sorcery for public consumption. Specifically, the Working Group postulated that the Securities and Exchange Commission should seek to ‘preserve’ the CFTC’s principles-based approach, presupposing of course that the SEC should DROP its rules-based approach: but in order to mask this deception, THIS CENTRAL RUSE WAS LEFT UNSTATED.

‘Preserving’ the principles-based approach used by the ineffective CFTC would, self-evidently, be inconsistent with ‘preserving’ any rules-based approach – which is the point of this proposition.

What the Treasury is seeking to achieve here is to pass off a fraudulent reform as a key element of an improved regulatory system, when what would be perpetrated would be the de facto elimination of the existing framework which, if properly applied, would protect investors from fraud and make it impossible for fraudulent finance operations such as those that have been exposed, to exist, let alone to flourish. In other words, this recommendation represents a typically diversionary fraud by the ‘Paulson’ Treasury, consistent with the reputation it has earned for itself as an institution of the Federal Government in which no trust can currently be placed, not least because, on the basis of its recent behaviour, it cannot be relied upon to honour its obligations.

(C) THE LONG-TERM PROPOSALS:

Not content with the chaos that would be created as a consequence of this wrecking operation to date, the Working Group, true to its false prospectus, capped this truly shambolic mish-mash with a series of half-baked long-term proposals, the net effect of which would be to leave everything up in the air, thereby maximising scope for a 1920s-type free-for-all – and ensuring that the investment environment of future years would be consistent with the underlying intention of this dog's dinner of spurious proposals – namely to facilitate the perpetuation of fraudulent finance, following the shocks administered to the criminalist kleptocacy by recent developments.

By staging its fitful proposals over a prolonged and imprecise timeframe, the US Treasury has of course already compromised the prospects for global financial stability, since no-one now knows what is coming next. The fact that proposals have been put forward in such a vague, disjointed and dissonant manner has itself added to the febrile atmosphere of uncertainty, although the Treasury doubtless hopes that the deceptions encased within these proposals will have passed its targeted audiences by – an example being the attendees at the Chatham House event in London addressed by ‘Paulson’ at the beginning of July. These people will have been easily impressed by anything that the Secretary of the Treasury might have told them – the purpose of such presentations being to build an unthinking ‘consensus’ (in London, especially) for the treacherous ‘reforms’ that the corrupt ‘Paulson’ Treasury is putting forward.

The so-called long-term proposals (with no timeframe mentioned) would involve, to begin with, a revolution in the status of all US financial institutions. All lenders equipped with Federal deposit insurance would be granted a brand new charter certifying them as a Federally insured depository institution. All insurers offering retail products involving some degree of Federal guarantee, would be chartered as a Federal insurance institution, under the direct regulatory control (see above) of the Treasury. Finally, all other types of financial institution would receive a charter signifying their status as a Federal services provider. Note the crucial use of the adjective ‘Federal’ here: what is intended is the usurpation or duplication by the Federal Government (it is not yet clear which) of ALL the regulatory functions currently exercised by the State Governments. Whether usurpation or duplication is intended, this proposition must have gone down like a lead balloon in State capitals.

Under the first of this final batch of dubious proposals, a so-called Market Stability Regulator, namely the Federal Reserve itself, or else an entity that is subservient to it (unclear), would be established, which, however, would hardly undertake any regulating of the financial markets at all. Instead, it would ‘look out for’ threats to the stability of the US financial system, whether they might originate with mortgage lenders, banks, insurance companies, investment banks, hedge funds or any other category of institution. The only environment in which the so-called new Market Stability Regulator would intervene would be when it had formed the subjective judgment that corrective action needed to be taken to address current risks, or that it is necessary to constrain further risk-taking. This proposal appears to have nothing to recommend it at all.

Establishing further expensive bureaucracies without any teeth is a pernicious practice equivalent to a fudge, and the impression given here is that the Working Group needed somehow to convey the impression that the permissive environment that it was subversively recommending would be watched closely for aberrations, whereas the underlying and thoroughly dishonest intention and consequences of these proposals will be to maximise potential for market abuses across the board.

The next piece of gross mischief would entail the establishment of a so-called Prudential Financial Regulatory Agency, with a brief to regulate financial institutions which have explicit Government guarantees associated with their business operations. Hence this new agency would regulate all institutions equipped with Federal deposit insurance. This agency would also take over the roles of the current Federal prudential regulators (for no discernible reason), such as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision.

The agency should, the report argued, focus on the protection of consumers and ‘help’ to maintain confidence in the financial system (by unspecified means). The agency would operate on the basis currently applied to the regulation of the insured depository institutions – in which case, since this new agency would replicate existing practice, why do the existing regulatory arrangements need to be changed? – using the standard capital adequacy requirement techniques, imposing investment limits, circumscribing the scope of an institution’s activities, and directing on-site risk management supervision. The agency would be focused on institutions, rather than operating generically.

On top of all this, a separate new regulator was proposed, to focus on the powerful and wayward Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) which have been surreptitiously exploited to facilitate fraudulent finance operations, such as the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) and the Federal Home Loan Bank System. As we discussed in our report dated 26th December 2007, corrupt mortgage lenders have been transferring the full risk and ownership of mortgages to these off-off-budget entities which were established by the Government but positioned immediately upon their foundation, into the private sector, so that they could be excluded from the scrutiny of the Federal Budget process.

The crisis surrounding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that blew up during the week ending 11th July 2008 – over seven months after we posted our report on the abuse of the foreclosure process on 26th December 2007 – illustrated the mischievous and destabilising nature of the Working Group’s proposals, because this dimension of the crisis ‘suddenly‘ ran out of control in July 2008, despite the fact that the President's Working Group had intended to ‘deal with’ the Government-Sponsored Enterprises problem under its ‘long-term’ category, rather than as an immediate, burning issue of the greatest significance, as flagged by our report dated 26th December last year.

This miscalculation alone showed the Working Group to be extremely incompetent, in dereliction of its self-appointed duties, and quite incapable of handling the huge mess for which its own largely corrupt membership has been specifically responsible. Fancy treating the US GSEs as a long-term problem when several of the key GSEs have all along been at the very centre of the machinery of fraudulent finance that is in the process of being widely exposed, and which the Working Group was meant to be addressing! This was surely taking OBFUSCATION too far.

No rationalisation was presented for the proposal that a separate regulator should be established to ‘regulate’ these off-budget entities, other than the spurious one that implicit Federal backing is qualitatively differentiated from explicit Government backing. Presumably the woolly thinking here is that the legal status conferred by Federal Statute on the GSEs would be violated if the proposed Prudential Financial Regulatory Agency were to assume regulatory responsibility for the GSEs – which have hitherto, by the way, escaped all regulation and have thus provided fruitful ongoing scope for organised criminal and financial fraud operations.

The other agencies proposed by the Working Group simply would compound the confusion and the seemingly deliberate dispersion of responsibilities which this dog’s dinner of recommendations perpetrates. Specifically:

•A so-called Conduct of Business Regulatory Agency would cut across the ‘responsibilities’ of the mish-mash of other agencies, establishing the basis for endlessly unresolvable turf wars that lead nowhere. This bureaucracy would ‘observe’ disclosure information and business practices (with no indication of what it would do with these observations), and would also engage in the licensing of certain categories of business firms (so that its personnel would be tin gods).

It would supposedly absorb ‘many of’ the functions of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve System, of the State insurance regulators and even the Federal Trade Commission. The rationale of all this is left unclear.

However it would do so, according to the Working Group’s blueprint, after an undefined period of uncertainty and therefore turmoil – during which hiatus the usual pork-barrel lobbying operations would have been deployed at full throttle, with no-one knowing which way any of the cats would be liable to jump, and a state of officially contrived chaos having long since been generated.

By this stage, the divisions of regulatory responsibilities will have multiplied to such an extent that every agency would have burgeoning responsibilities overlapping with some or all of the others, so that nothing at all could ever be resolved – a remarkably classical Leninist formula for ensuring the definitive perpetuation of the collective will of a small clique at the centre. Lenin established two orders for his Party-State, under which all the institutions of the State were replicated by Party entities. This meant that a complainant making representations to the State structures would find that his case would be frustrated by the parallel Party structures, and vice versa. This is exactly the state of affairs, albeit a much more fragmented and complicated one, that the President’s Working Group has put forward. This blueprint would have the following overall consequences:

•It would complete the process of discrediting capitalism which the free-wheeling fraudulent finance operations perpetrated by the exposed criminalist operatives and institutions have successfully initiated to date; and:

•By ensuring the perpetual overlapping of responsibilities with their concomitant bureaucratic turf warfare, it would institutionalise and confirm absolute power and freedom of corrupt action for the central controlling élite, namely for a successor group of organised financial criminals who would build upon this new foundation of institutionalised US regulatory confusion, to create the conditions for the next global financial showdown, which would certainly be terminal.

Since, whether ideologues like it or not, the ultimate objective is the destruction of free enterprise and the abolition of all private property except for the privileged criminalised élite, that showdown would be terminal. It is not going to happen, but that is the long-range objective.

Two other expensive US agencies would, under the convoluted blueprint, be tacked on to the contrived ramshackle mess so far recommended. The proposed Federal Insurance Guarantee Corporation, which is to replace (for no apparent reason) the existing Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), would charge premiums to ‘guarantee’ bank deposits and insurance payouts.

No terms are defined here (as is the case throughout this false prospectus), so it is not clear why the FDIC cannot, if really necessary, have its existing statute amended so as to expand or modify its responsibilities in accordance with this proposal. What is wrong with the existing structure?
This unanswered question is applicable throughout.

Finally, the Working Group floated the batty idea of a Corporate Finance Regulator which would supersede the functions of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and would focus on corporate disclosures, corporate governance, accounting matters, and other issues. Presumably the idea here is that there should be a special agency which sticks its nose into the affairs of US corporations generally – a suggestion that may mask a cynical political objective to subject all US corporations to an officially sponsored espionage system which would be abused, if information gathered by this agency fell into the ‘wrong’ hands. If we assume, as we must, given recent past experience, that the underlying intentions here are malevolent and mischievous, the creation of such an agency would signal to anyone who is not sitting on his or her brains that an ever more socialist United States had essentially finished with capitalism altogether.

There is also an obvious sense that these convoluted ‘regulatory’ proposals have been brought forward in bad faith for yet another reason: their purpose includes the need to deflect criticism that ‘nothing is being done to stop this happening again'. Meanwhile, the socialist European Union has predictably responded with various trial balloons suggesting that the unprecedented display of financial scandal that has been partially exposed, can at long last be exploited as a rationale for the imposition of European-style socialist (Communist) regulation which, by its nature and intent, would smother risk-taking and close off innovation.

For example, Tony Robinson, chief spokesman for the Socialist Group in the Soviet-style European Parliament, said on 3rd July 2008, quite correctly, that the capitalist system had disgraced itself and must now face much stricter regulation. Since we must agree that the capitalist system has indeed disgraced itself as a consequence of the hijacking of the American official structures by organised criminal cadres, it is hard to argue against what Mr Robinson had to say:

‘There is a groundswell of opinion building up for action at a European level. Our group wants a ban on all investment funds speculating on food. We support a proper functioning market, but what we have seen in this crisis is a most distasteful morality where decisions are driven by greed. Hedge funds have used debt to take over companies and strip out their assets. This must stop’.

Leaving aside the ideological hang-ups and ignorance of the market system embedded in these comments, it is a fact that although proposals for a pan-European regulator have not yet been crystallised into a draft EU Directive, the European Parliament has been ‘debating’ three separate proposals to crack down on private equity, hedge funds, and banking sector bonuses.

(Actually, no debate ever takes place inside the European Parliament: rather, the Members (MEPs) address the podium just as they do in the covert Soviet system. Indeed, the European Parliament chamber precisely replicates the Soviet model. In order to complete the transformation, all that would be necessary would be to replace the esoteric European flag above the podium with the familiar bust of Lenin and a nice red star plus a hammer and sickle, and we would all be back to square one. The Editor witnessed this reality in Brussels with his own eyes several weeks ago).

Should such an outcome materialise over time, as intended, the process would have been given decisive added momentum by the pillaging and fraudulent finance that have been exposed since June 2006. This would be a supposedly 'unintended consequence' of the organised criminality.

RESULT: EXTREME LACK OF REGULATION ENFORCEMENT
That the proposals put forward by the President’s Working Group are damaging and would have grim consequences has been well attested by people who know what they are talking about.

For instance no less than THREE former Chairmen of the Securities and Exchange Commission, David Ruder, Arthur Levitt and William Donaldson, have condemned these proposals outright, although the language they have used to date has been inappropriately circumspect.

Their general view is that a Treasury initiative to adopt the ‘principles-based’ regulatory approach applied by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission would be 'a mistake' (16) . David Ruder, an SEC Chairman under President Reagan, has commented that:

‘It’s not at all useful for the Securities and Exchange Commission to function on the basis of ‘a prudential-based attitude’ in which regulators solve problems by discussing them informally with market participants and asking them to change… we have an enforcement approach’ (17).

For his part, the former SEC Chairman, Arthur Levitt, a Bloomberg Board Member, has commented:

‘That proposal does more violence to protecting America’s investors from the standpoint of transparency as anything in the Paulson proposal’ (18) – referring specifically to substitution of a ‘principles-based’ approach for the tried and tested (until wantonly unenforced) rules-based approach which the existing securities market legislation requires of the SEC.

As matters stand the SEC is, however, considering the easing of its rules to allow foreign stock exchanges and brokerages to sell securities direct to US investors, under supposed surveillance by overseas regulators (such as the British Financial Services Agency) ‘who have rules that are similar to those in the United States’ (19).

In other words, even as we speak, the Securities and Exchange Commission is thinking of watering down its currently poorly enforced rules-based system to allow various foreign stock exchanges and brokerages to deal directly with US investors, rather than going through US intermediaries – so that there would be no control over the volume of dodgy financial ‘products’ that could soon be sold back into the United States, given that non-institution US investors would not necessarily be subjected to any surveillance at all. This might very well be hazardous in the future.

As for the immense problems surrounding derivatives – leveraged, securitised, hypothecated products yielding accruals that are not denominated in real US dollars, but rather exclusively as digitised entries generated electronically in just nanoseconds on bank statements – the Working Group’s proposals sidestepped them altogether: a sure indication that the real purpose of these proposals has never been to ‘solve’ any of the intractable problems created by the invasion of the capitalised system by organised crime, but rather that their purpose is precisely to obfuscate what has been happening so as to draw a veil over the criminal activities that have led to this crisis.

The irresponsible securitisation of ‘sub-prime’ loans and the hoodlum practice of mixing them up with fraudulent paper backed by no assets at all, were not even addressed.

THE ‘PROGRAMS’, OMEGA PONZI SCAMS, ETC.
Exotic investment schemes marketed by scamsters promising sky-high returns into which many Americans entered and ploughed their savings a number of years ago, and which have not paid out, may have purported to be exempt from registration under the Securities Acts of 1933 et seq. [see Glossary below] and in terms of State securities registration requirements.

Such unregistered schemes, unless narrowly they are exempt from registration in conformity with relevant stringent statutory restrictions (such as being confined, for instance, to no more than 35 subscribers nationwide), are all illegal and violate the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) and SEC regulations, and were/are also further illegal as they may not have been registered with the relevant State Securities Commission.

When considering such participations, such US investors, in conformity with the Prudent Man Rule under the 1933 Act [see Glossary] should, in performing their Due Diligence, have been in receipt, and should have reviewed, the necessary registration and prospectus documents meeting the requirements of the NASD, the SEC and State Regulators.

In cases where the issuer was a bank, the participants have undoubtedly been victimised. In all other instances, they will have acted on the basis of fraudulent documents which made them co-conspirators. The issuers were and remain engaged in Ponzi schemes, as we have several times reported [see Glossary and Appendix] and are all co-conspirators and open to prosecution under R.I.C.O. and other relevant US legislation, including multiple anti-money-laundering legislation.

Furthermore, it is likely that some American participants will have signed Non-Disclosure forms or agreements, a fatal error which will have meant that they can have no recourse to US authorities for relief from being scammed, not least because in having participated in any of these schemes and signing such forms, they became co-conspirators themselves, as indicated.

They cannot therefore seek protection from the relevant regulators, and neither can they disclose their participations, especially where money-laundering will likely have been intended, since this presupposes tax evasion: and under the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) of 1982, US taxpayers are required to report all sources of income, wherever it was earned anywhere in the world. It follows that all receipts by US taxpayers since the passage of this Act which have not been reported to the Internal Revenue Service are taxable, which means that all US taxpayer holdings in offshore accounts that are not declared for tax are vulnerable to payment of the tax and penalties. Imprisonment is also dished out to tax evaders in the United States with abandon.

But the participants in these programs have received nothing and have so far forfeited 100% of their investments. Having signed Non-Disclosure documents purporting to protect the program organisers or distributors from the consequences in the United States of their criminality, and the participants from the consequences inter alia of prospective tax evasion and of co-conspiring in a felonious transaction, some participants have been left dangling and are at the mercy of ruthless MK-ULTRA-style perception manipulators who have been managing their expectations for years.

Under the regular securities laws of the United States, investors and participants have to show source of funds. How can they take receipt of the proceeds of these ‘program’ and Omega-type Ponzi schemes without exposing themselves to US authorities, in many cases with prospectively grievous consequences?

These participants need to ask themselves: are the websites that may have been managing their expectations for years disclosing both sides of the equation, or have they simply been expressing justified anger and frustration at the brazen evil of the high-level, well-connected perpetrators of these scamming programs, thus deceiving their intended readerships by failing to look at the other side of the issue, namely the possibility that the scamsters may have compromised the investors?

They also need to consider whether it is likely that the hitherto ‘protected’ perpetrators of these scams have, all along, also been relying upon their knowledge that their victims may be impotent because they may be engaged in prospective tax evasion, as a rationale for the integrity of the Greenspan-Bush Sr. ‘Never-Pay’ model. In this connection, it is axiomatic that crooks always seek to compromise their victims, thereby ensuring, for instance, that they cannot testify against them.

In the case of the Swiss banks that marketed such participations, their first priority is understood to have been to obtain the targeted investor’s signature on the coveted Non-Disclosure document. Then the participant was typically asked to prove his or her funds. Thirdly, the participant may have been requested to travel to Europe, or to courier funds to the bank’s European address, where their account would have been be opened. In cases where very large amounts were put up, the bank’s aircraft was actually dispatched to collect the participant and his funds..

Participants in these schemes may be caught, if any of these unfortunate conditions apply to their circumstances. Co-conspiracy is a function of motive. If the motive was to receive inordinately high yields and/or to evade taxes in breach of the Prudent Man Rule, TEFRA and/or Internal Revenue Service regulations, it is not at all clear on what basis expectations of repayment of principal with interest may be predicated. The fact that the perpetrators (‘principals’) of these scams are indeed despicable, ruthless snakes is no comfort for the participants because the perpetrators may have taken care to ensure that those whom they have scammed are co-conspirators as well as victims.

Even more disconcertingly, the professional perpetrators of these fraudulent finance operations were fully aware of what they were doing from the outset, and may have deliberately ensured, in these cases, that their participants became co-conspirators and would therefore become impotent to recover their funds, which the perpetrators always intended to steal.

Their evil intentions will have been based upon extensive experience of the psychological reality that victims of financial Ponzi and Pyramid scams often collapse into a state of permanent denial, unable to move beyond the mental barrier that they have lost everything. This attitude is typically associated with embarrassment at the fact that the victim has been scammed, a state of mind akin to the humiliation of being mugged or the victim of common theft.

What has been achieved to date as a direct consequence of these exposures, though, is that life has been made extremely uncomfortable for the professional and official sector perpetrators of all categories of fraudulent finance, and will most certainly become more uncomfortable day by day – as official enforcement procedures, which grind slowly but surely, bring more and more decisive pressure to bear on these snakes. Despite everything that has had to be said above, this may still provide some minimal degree of comfort, no doubt, for the victimised participants; but it may not alleviate their problems or their suffering.

What we can say with confidence is that the prevailing sense of pessimism in the United States is misplaced. Perceptions are often slow to catch up with reality. We are being bombarded with data which has almost no bearing on the current environment, which can be summed up as follows: the crooks are on the run, are being hounded day and night, have nowhere to turn, did not anticipate what was about to hit them, and have been caught completely unprepared for the onslaught.

S.E.C. ‘CORRUPTLY ENGAGED IN OWN ACCOUNT TRADING’
And here is another exposure: the Securities and Exchange Commission – still the chief securities market regulator, no less – is itself apparently corrupt. For instance, it has failed to enforce its own regulations, and has only (it appears) been galvanised into action very recently, in response to the cacophony generated inter alia by our reports. No-one has been impressed by Mr Cox's statements recently, because the failure of the SEC to do its job properly has become widely known.

The SEC irresponsibly dismantled their own enforcement division, and to make matters very much worse, have been engaged in trading, or allowing insiders to trade, for their own account.

For what purpose? The likelihood must be that SEC personnel have been trading for their own personal enrichment, taking their cue from the Black House: the nefarious principle being that if the President of the United States and his most senior colleagues are content to exploit public office for self-enrichment purposes, then what is to stop lesser officials doing the same?

The fact that the Securities and Exchange Commission, which exists for the purpose of regulation only, has reportedly branched out into participating in exotic money-making programmes instead of concentrating on its job of regulating the securities sector, provides us with a further indication of the extreme decadence of the US financial system which can hardly hope to recover unless such grotesque abuses are eliminated.

COUNTER-PROPOSALS FOR CLEANING UP THE MESS
It is perfectly clear to anyone who is not sitting on their brains that the so-called ‘Paulson’ Treasury proposals, a.k.a. the mish-mash of half-baked notions served up by the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, is not fit for purpose and should be relegated to the dustbin of history with immediate effect. It is further clear that these messy proposals have actually exacerbated the crisis by introducing new dimensions of uncertainty surrounding future US Government policies, thereby further undermining confidence in an environment so febrile that the entire edifice of fiat money cards has been teetering on the verge of collapse anyway.

Given the perverse effects of these proposals on financial market confidence, we can legitimately go further, and accuse the Working Group of irresponsible behaviour which is tantamount to the financial criminality which the proposals are intended to obfuscate.

To place consideration of the problems surrounding the Government-Sponsored Enterprises in the ‘long-term reform category’ when, within months of our report on the subject last December, this central dimension of the overall crisis blew up in the Working Group’s faces, surely provides all who 'need to know' with sufficient evidence of the Working Group’s incompetence, let alone its clearly mischievous intent, to warrant the Working Group being closed down forthwith – before it does any more damage, like the proverbial elephant in the china shop.

Michael C. Cottrell, M.S., the securities markets expert, has therefore prepared the following basic recommendations, which should be substituted for the cack-handed and extremely damaging false prospectus promulgated last March by the disreputable President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, fronted by this ‘Paulson’ fellow.

MR COTTRELL'S COUNTER-PROPOSALS ARE AS FOLLOWS:

(A) Comprehensive funding of the necessary enforcement structures, which must remain intact. The organisations most suited for this function remain the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Before summarising Mr Cottrell’s proposals, here are some examples of what has happened when these regulators fail to do their jobs properly, or at all:

(1) The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): This entity must enforce its regulations with vigour, in the context of the further reforms that Mr Cottrell recommends, below:

The Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Christopher Dodd, and Senator Jack Reed, have asked the Government Accountability Office (formerly the Government Accounting Office, GAO) to investigate why sanctions imposed by the SEC plunged by 51%, to $1.6 billion, in the regulator’s most recent fiscal year. According to the SEC’s Annual Reports, it opened 15% fewer probes during the same period, than in the preceding fiscal year (20).

For instance, the Securities and Exchange Commission failed to enforce its regulations in the case of American Business Financial Services, Inc. (ABFS), located in Philadelphia, PA, which operated from 1988 until it declared bankruptcy in January 2005.

This case is revealing in the context being considered here.

ABFS financed its operations by selling its notes to the general public, by means of newspaper advertisements and mass mailings, which promised high interest yields. The notes it sold carried no collateral and were not insured, so that they were worthless when ABFS declared bankruptcy (21). More than 22,000 individual investors lost a total of approximately $750 million. The bankruptcy trustee has filed suit against Bear Stearns & Co., J. P. MorganChase & Co., Morgan Stanley and Crédit Suisse, to recover monies lost when these investment banks allegedly allowed or enabled ABFS to overstate the value of assets on its books (22).

ABFS extended loans to borrowers burdened with poor credit, worth more than $6.0 billion in the aggregate, which were then packaged for marketing purposes, but which essentially represented securitised pools of sub-prime loans. ABFS also secured cash from individual investors by selling the investors uncollateralised notes via public offerings (23).

The investment banks converted the sub-prime loans and uncollateralised notes into ‘interest only strips’, or ‘residuals’ which represented ‘the right to receive future cash flows from securitised loans’ (24). ABFS assigned to these securities a value much higher than their actual worth because the falsification of these values made ABFS look more financially sound than was in fact the case.

Specifically, ABFS booked more than $500 million in ‘fictitious assets’ when the investment banks allowed ABFS to underestimate early repayments of the 'sub-prime' loans. ABFS assumed its had a 23% prepayment rate when, in reality, Crédit Suisse had questioned the percentage as being too low. In fact, repayment rates were running at between 30% and 35% of total such ‘assets’ (25) .

[end of part 1, part 2 continues in a reply post]

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