Cantankerous Buddha: IMF

Showing posts with label IMF. Show all posts

20161221

IMF Board Response to Lagarde Conviction Reaffirms Institutional Indifference

20161002

IMF chief Lagarde to face trial after French court rejects her appeal regarding $440mn payout

France’s highest appeals court has rejected an appeal from International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde, meaning she will stand trial for her role in a €400 million ($440 million) payout case while she was French finance minister back in 2008.

The ruling means that Lagarde will stand trial at the Cour de Justice de la Republique in Paris, which is a special court that tries ministers for crimes committed while in office.

“She will attend,” Lagarde's lawyer Patrick Maisonneuve told Reuters.

Lagarde faces up to a year in prison and a fine of €15,000 ($16,850) if found guilty. A panel of three judges and 12 MPs selected from the upper and lower houses of parliament will look into her case.

Trials at the Cour de Justice are extremely rare, with Lagarde’s hearing set to be just the fifth in the tribunal’s history. The trial is expected to run until December 20.

In July, the Cour de Cassation, one of France’s courts of last resort, accused Lagarde of “negligence” which “resulted in a misuse of public funds by a third party.”

The party in question was French businessman Bernard Tapie who received a €400 million payout in compensation following a lawsuit against French bank Credit Lyonnais, which he accused of undervaluing his stake in multinational sportswear company Adidas.

In search of funds in 1993, Tapie began to look for buyers of his stake in the German sportswear company, which he eventually sold to Credit Lyonnais for two billion francs...

https://www.rt.com/news/359157-lagarde-trial-imf-court/

20160417

Icelandic Justice and Criminal Bankers

On September 15, 2008, a former Goldman Sachs chairman, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen, deliberately triggered a predictable global financial meltdown when he decided to break precedent and let Lehman Bros, the fourth-largest Wall Street investment bank, go bankrupt. The reasons for his decision are for another time. The fallout from that traumatic financial crisis remains very much with the world financial system to this day, more than seven years later. One of the little-noticed casualties of that Lehman Bros. debacle was the worst banking crisis in the history of one of the world’s smallest countries, Iceland. How that country of 323,000 citizens chose to deal with the crisis is a model for the rest of the world. Instead of beatifying the criminal bankers responsible for worst world financial crisis in history, the people of Iceland did something quite different.

Iceland, a beautiful Nordic island in the far North Atlantic between Greenland and Norway, with active volcanoes, streams with some of the most delicious non-industrial and non-GMO wild salmon, self-sufficient in energy from thermal springs and hydroelectric power, got lured into the mad, greed-driven frenzy of the US sub-prime real estate crisis in a big way. In October 2008, amid the global financial Tsunami triggered by Paulsen’s Lehman act, the Iceland government nationalized the three largest private banks, Glitnir, Landsbanki and Kaupthing, following depositor panic withdrawals. The three banks, in a few short years after they were privatized had managed to amass debts ten times Iceland’s annual DGP.

When a group of sensible US economists proposed Paulsen nationalize the top Wall Street banks behind the crisis–JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs– to restore order and keep credit flowing to the real economy, he replied that would be “socialism. We don’t do that in America.” Instead, Paulsen’s US Treasury used hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars to buy non-voting shares of the Wall Street banks, meaning the Government didn’t demand any say in the banks’ policies in return. That might be called bankers’ socialism–privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

By November 2008 the UK and Dutch investors in a now-defunct savings scheme of Landsbanki, Icesave, found their hundreds of millions of Pounds of investments were, indeed, frozen like ice—their savings were frozen ice. When the British government demanded of the Iceland government the repayment of the deposits in the UK branches of the formerly private Landsbanki bank, an international dispute, known as the Icesave dispute, erupted. The British government invoked anti-terrorism legislation against Iceland in order to freeze the UK-based assets of Kaupthing, Iceland’s biggest bank, bankrupting the bank. Iceland’s government turned to the IMF for a $5 billion bailout, the first European country since Italy in 1976 to do so...

http://journal-neo.org/2016/04/17/icelandic-justice-and-criminal-bankers/

20131202

The Money Changers Serenade: A New Plot Hatches

Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, a protege of Treasury Secretaries Rubin and Summers, has received his reward for continuing the Rubin-Summers-Paulson policy of supporting the “banks too big to fail” at the expense of the economy and American people. For his service to the handful of gigantic banks, whose existence attests to the fact that the Anti-Trust Act is a dead-letter law, Geithner has been appointed president and managing director of the private equity firm, Warburg Pincus and is on his way to his fortune.

A Warburg in-law financed Woodrow Wilson’s presidential campaign. Part of the reward was Wilson’s appointment of Paul Warburg to the first Federal Reserve Board. The symbiotic relationship between presidents and bankers has continued ever since. The same small clique continues to wield financial power.

Geithner’s career is illustrative. In the 1980s, Geithner worked for Kissinger Associates. In the mid to late 1990s, Geithner served as a deputy assistant Treasury secretary. Under Rubin and Summers he moved up to undersecretary of the Treasury...

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/11/29/money-changers-serenade-new-plot-hatches-paul-craig-roberts/