Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis

by Thinker
This article is a collaboration between The Times and ProPublica, the independent nonprofit investigative organization. On the evening of Jan. 27, Kareem Serageldin walked out of his Times Square apartment with his brother and an old Yale roommate and took off on the four-hour drive to Philipsburg, a small town smack in the middle of Pennsylvania. Despite once earning nearly $7 million a year as an executive at Credit Suisse, Serageldin, who is 41, had always lived fairly modestly. A previous apartment, overlooking Victoria Station in London, struck his friends as a grown-up dorm room; Serageldin lived with bachelor-pad furniture and little of it — his central piece was a night stand overflowing with economics books, prospectuses and earnings reports. In the years since, his apartments served as places where he would log five or six hours of sleep before going back to work, creating and trading complex financial instruments. One friend called him an “investment-banking monk.” Serageldin’s life was about to become more ascetic.
Two months earlier, he sat in a Lower Manhattan courtroom adjusting and readjusting his tie as he waited for a judge to deliver his prison sentence. During the worst of the financial crisis, according to prosecutors, Serageldin had approved the concealment of hundreds of millions in losses in Credit Suisse’s mortgage-backed securities portfolio. But on that November morning, the judge seemed almost torn. Serageldin lied about the value of his bank’s securities — that was a crime, of course — but other bankers behaved far worse. Serageldin’s former employer, for one, had revised its past financial statements to account for $2.7 billion that should have been reported. Lehman Brothers, AIG, Citigroup, Countrywide and many others had also admitted that they were in much worse shape than they initially allowed. Merrill Lynch, in particular, announced a loss of nearly $8 billion three weeks after claiming it was $4.5 billion. Serageldin’s conduct was, in the judge’s words, “a small piece of an overall evil climate within the bank and with many other banks.” Nevertheless, after a brief pause, he eased down his gavel and sentenced Serageldin, an Egyptian-born trader who grew up in the barren pinelands of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to 30 months in jail.
Serageldin would begin serving his time at Moshannon Valley Correctional Center, in Philipsburg, where he would earn the distinction of being the only Wall Street executive sent to jail for his part in the financial crisis. American financial history has generally unfolded as a series of booms followed by busts followed by crackdowns. After the crash of 1929, the Pecora Hearings seized upon public outrage, and the head of the New York Stock Exchange landed in prison. After the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s, 1,100 people were prosecuted, including top executives at many of the largest failed banks. In the ’90s and early aughts, when the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble revealed widespread corporate accounting scandals, top executives from WorldCom, Enron, Qwest and Tyco, among others, went to prison.
The banksters own the government. Every empire in history has failed when the currency was debased and the government was bought. The credit crisis of 2008 dwarfed those busts, and it was only to be expected that a similar round of crackdowns would ensue. In 2009, the Obama administration:
www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magaz…risis.html
2013 – The Biggest, Most Corrupt Bank Scheme That’s Not Being Stopped
“Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.”* The Libor bank scandal has nothing on the newest interest rate swap manipulation scheme where bankers are going completely unchecked. This is a $379 trillion market– why are bankers allowed to manipulate it without restraint?
Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

 
Federal Reserve Finalizes Rules (Protect?) to Help Unwind Only “8” Big Banks?
Only eight banks? The same banks that got bailed out by the enslaved Americans by the privately owned Federal Reserve? Enslaved Americans who will never stop paying to live on one of the biggest plantations in the world – history says so! Protect your masters at all cost and change the rules so that they can never lose.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Federal Reserve on Friday finalized a new rule that should make it easier to wind down systematically important U.S. banks by creating a safe harbor for financial contracts after a firm defaults. The decision, unanimously approved by Fed board members, forms part of global post-crisis efforts to end ‘too big to fail’ institutions that are so large and complex they could endanger the entire financial system if they fall into bankruptcy. The rule requires global systematically important banks (GSIBs) to amend the language in common financial contracts so they cannot be immediately canceled if the firm enters bankruptcy.
By imposing new legal protections, regulators aim to prevent a run on a GSIB’s subsidiaries that could be triggered if a large number of counterparties rush to terminate their contracts, as occurred in the case of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
The new rules would apply to eight GSIBs, including JPMorgan Chase <JPM.N>, Goldman Sachs <GS.N>, and Citigroup <C.N>.
As GSIBs sign a huge number of such deals, typically worth hundreds of billions of dollars, a market panic to terminate them could potentially drag down other institutions. “The financial crisis showed that when a large financial institution gets into trouble, its failure can destabilize other firms and the broader financial system,” Fed Chair Janet Yellen said in prepared remarks at an open hearing on Friday.
“This requirement will help manage the risk to the financial system when a GSIB fails.” (BAILOUT PROTECTION?)
The rule applies to:
www.oann.com/federal-reserve-fina…big-banks/
The creators of the Federal Reserve have set up a system so they can never fail and keeping people stupid has allowed billions to go into pockets of many who love to boast their wealth.

Discover the truth about the men behind the curtain who own and run the U.S. Government. These men are totally evil, ruthless, greedy and vicious individuals who will stop at nothing to gain control of the world and the enslavement of us all. They are now taking steps to control and shut down the internet because it is the last means for people to come together, and voice their opinions freely.