Bankers' Trillion-Dollar Crime Scene

Banks Already Finding Ways Around Obama Financial Reforms

January 22, 2010

Raw Story - On the same day that President Barack Obama announced an ambitious plan to reform the US financial system, bankers at the largest Wall Street institutions indicated that they are already finding ways around the proposed changes.

Sources at three Wall Street banks told BusinessInsider’s John Carney that “they are already finding ways to own, invest in and sponsor hedge funds and private equity funds” despite the proposed restrictions on those activities. One unnamed operative at a major bank said his firm expects the reforms to affect no more than one percent of its business.

President Obama announced two major reforms of the financial system on Thursday. The first would see the US in effect return to the separation of commercial and investment banking that was mandated by law until 1999, when that rule in the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act was abandoned.

Many economists say allowing banks to be both lenders to the public and investors in large hedge funds and other securities contributed to the economic collapse of 2008.

The other rule would limit the size of banks, ostensibly to ensure that no banks are “too big to fail” and require taxpayer bailouts to keep the economy from collapsing.

But Wall Street bankers are pointing to a phrase in the proposed reforms — that banks will be barred “from proprietary trading operations unrelated to serving customers” — as an easy loophole to get around. John Carney reports:

The key phrase is “operations unrelated to serving customers.” The banks plan to claim that much of the business in which it engages is related in one way or another to serving customers…

A still more devious way is to have a bank’s own employees be the customers who are invested in the internal hedge funds. That way trading operations can remain closed to outsiders while the regulatory requirement of relating the trading to customer service is met. Goldman Sachs is rumored to be considering this approach ...

Computers Down at All 168 California DMV Offices

January 21, 2010

AP - A systemwide computer failure at the California Department of Motor Vehicles caused several hours of delays at all 168 offices Thursday.

The offices remained open, but with computers unable to connect to the state's network, DMV workers were forced to do everything by hand, such as processing driver's licenses and registrations, DMV spokeswoman Jan Mendoza said.

"They're collecting paperwork and processing it later," Mendoza said while the computers were down.

DMV offices began experiencing problems connecting to the state's network around 11 a.m. Offices started to connect back around 2 p.m.

The failure comes a day before DMV offices will close for a mandatory furlough day, meaning customers could have to wait even longer for service.

The office of the state Chief Information Officer, which is in charge of state information technology, blamed the outage on equipment failure at the state's data center in Sacramento.

"It was a router switch that malfunctioned," said spokesman Bill Maile. "Network traffic was rerouted and the system is back up and running."

It wasn't clear how long customers were being delayed because of the failure.

Maile said no other state agencies were impacted, contrary to initial reports that other offices were affected by the outage.

Bank of Queensland Payment System Skips Ahead Six Years

January 4, 2010

Dow Jones - A large percentage of Bank of Queensland Ltd.'s (BOQ) electronic funds transfer at point of sale terminals (EFTPOS) have been hit by a glitch that saw dates on the system skip ahead six years on Jan. 1, a bank spokeswoman said Tuesday.

The bank has a found a temporary solution for its customers but has not been able to solve the problem that has caused terminals to stamp January 2016 instead of 2010 and reject EFTPOS users' cards for being out of date.

"There is an issue with the time and date stamp on a number of BOQ EFTPOS terminals and we are working with our service providers, Keycorp and First Data, to address this issue as a priority," the spokeswoman said.

She said the group is still working on a permanent solution.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on its website Tuesday that a small number of merchants using BankWest EFTPOS terminals were also experiencing the same problem. A spokesman for Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA.AU), which owns BankWest, was not immediately available to comment on the report.

Cuscal, best known for its RediATM network, has also been hit by the glitch in Australia, while banks Postbank and Commerzbank have also been impacted in Germany, the Sydney Morning Herald said.

According to Nick Sandberg ("Blueprint for Total Control," 2001) and Serge Monast ("NASA's Project Blue Beam," 1994):

By first removing cash and then by introducing problems into electronic money systems while simultaneously promoting microchip implants as a safe and acceptable alternative, the global elite will lead us slowly into accepting personal implant technology.

The phasing out of cash most likely will begin with some kind of worldwide economic disaster—not a complete crash, but enough to allow the New World Order to introduce some kind of in-between currency before they introduce their electronic cash to replace all paper money. The in-between currency will be used to force anyone with savings to spend or turn in their cash, because the global elite understand that people who have money are not dependent upon them and might be the very ones who will mount an insurrection against them. If everyone is broke, no one can fund a war of any kind: paper currency will cease to exist; this will be one of the first signs.

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