Australian Politics thread [merged]

[Judge Roughneck]

An unprecedented look inside one of the most powerful, secretive institutions in the country. The NY Federal Reserve is supposed to monitor big banks and prevent another financial crisis. But when Carmen Segarra was hired, what she witnessed inside the Fed was so alarming that she bought a tiny recorder, and started secretly taping


http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-26/the-secret-goldman-sachs-tapes

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/536/the-secret-recordings-of-carmen-segarra?act=1#play

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/default/files/TAL_536_transcript.pdf

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-07-07/deeb-the-conquerer-bares-his-soul-before-mama

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-24/occupational-hazards-of-working-on-wall-street

http://www.propublica.org/article/ny-fed-fired-examiner-who-took-on-goldman

The job right from the start seems to have been different from what she had imagined: In meetings, Fed employees would defer to the Goldman people; if one of the Goldman people said something revealing or even alarming, the other Fed employees in the meeting would either ignore or downplay it. For instance, in one meeting a Goldman employee expressed the view that "once clients are wealthy enough certain consumer laws don't apply to them." After that meeting, Segarra turned to a fellow Fed regulator and said how surprised she was by that statement -- to which the regulator replied, "You didn't hear that."

I don't want to spoil the revelations of "This American Life": It's far better to hear the actual sounds on the radio, as so much of the meaning of the piece is in the tones of the voices -- and, especially, in the breathtaking wussiness of the people at the Fed charged with regulating Goldman Sachs. But once you have listened to it -- as when you were faced with the newly unignorable truth of what actually happened to that NFL running back's fiancee in that elevator -- consider the following:

1. You sort of knew that the regulators were more or less controlled by the banks. Now you know.

2. The only reason you know is that one woman, Carmen Segarra, has been brave enough to fight the system. She has paid a great price to inform us all of the obvious. She has lost her job, undermined her career, and will no doubt also endure a lifetime of lawsuits and slander.

http://nypost.com/2014/09/26/tapes-showing-meek-oversight-of-goldman-are-about-to-rock-wall-street/

[Judge Roughneck]

Press conference from pentagon, currently live

Pretty much day saying troops going into Syria and Assad gawn


...says something odd about isil will release videos in future "alleging" civilian deaths

[Penelope]

Jeffrey Dahmer.

Raped, murdered, disemboweled and ate his victims 

Even kept body parts as ornaments.

Yet, at worst, he is regarded as a serial killer.

Oh, yes...that's right....he's an American Christian.

Peter  Knight, went to an abortion with the intent of massacring everyone there. shot and murdered an unarmed security guard before being overpowered by a bloke when knight pointed the rifle at his girlfriend.

Psychiatrist Don Sendipathy said Knight interpreted the Bible in his own unique way and believed in his own brand of Christianity.

"You have what are at least strong beliefs to the point of obsession, indeed fanaticism, about certain matters," said Justice Teague. "You are not of weak faith. You know that nobody can do anything to you which has not been permitted by God, for your own eventual good."

yet you have to wade through many reports without one mention of his religious beliefs, while that description above which could apply to any terrorist, is at the crux of his actions.

[Francois Jackson]

i didnt like the piece in todays paper "death stare", page 4 or something . Who knows who that guy is.

Cheap journalism.

Al they are all scum bags and terrorists in my eyes. They are all treated the same in a court of law and shouldnt be given the time of the day, especially ones that attempt to kill our authorities.

In my eyes there is no difference to pedo's and terrorists, however pedo's are allowed to roam free in our society.

[Francois Jackson]

your deep judge, bloody hell. You sure your not my mrs uncle mate in disguise.

[dwaino]

Been a bit slack on my youtube subs lately, just browsing through and found this one and thought it might be relevant. It is a brief and very elementary background on what is happening in the middle east with ISIL and where they came from. This is a quality, objective educational channel on many different topics and worth the sub to increase your IQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQPlREDW-Ro

[Judge Roughneck]

May I respectfully ask why the ww2 doco was deleted

[Judge Roughneck]

[i]An unprecedented look inside one of the most powerful, secretive institutions in the country. The NY Federal Reserve is supposed to monitor big banks and prevent another financial crisis. But when Carmen Segarra was hired, what she witnessed inside the Fed was so alarming that she bought a tiny recorder, and started secretly taping[/i]


http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-26/the-secret-goldman-sachs-tapes

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/536/the-secret-recordings-of-carmen-segarra?act=1#play

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/default/files/TAL_536_transcript.pdf

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-07-07/deeb-the-conquerer-bares-his-soul-before-mama

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-24/occupational-hazards-of-working-on-wall-street

http://www.propublica.org/article/ny-fed-fired-examiner-who-took-on-goldman

The job right from the start seems to have been different from what she had imagined: In meetings, Fed employees would defer to the Goldman people; if one of the Goldman people said something revealing or even alarming, the other Fed employees in the meeting would either ignore or downplay it. For instance, in one meeting a Goldman employee expressed the view that "once clients are wealthy enough certain consumer laws don't apply to them." After that meeting, Segarra turned to a fellow Fed regulator and said how surprised she was by that statement -- to which the regulator replied, "You didn't hear that."

I don't want to spoil the revelations of "This American Life": It's far better to hear the actual sounds on the radio, as so much of the meaning of the piece is in the tones of the voices -- and, especially, in the breathtaking wussiness of the people at the Fed charged with regulating Goldman Sachs. But once you have listened to it -- as when you were faced with the newly unignorable truth of what actually happened to that NFL running back's fiancee in that elevator -- consider the following:

1. You sort of knew that the regulators were more or less controlled by the banks. Now you know.

2. The only reason you know is that one woman, Carmen Segarra, has been brave enough to fight the system. She has paid a great price to inform us all of the obvious. She has lost her job, undermined her career, and will no doubt also endure a lifetime of lawsuits and slander.

http://nypost.com/2014/09/26/tapes-showing-meek-oversight-of-goldman-are-about-to-rock-wall-street/

 [/size]

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N0R51TS20140904?irpc=932

OP NEWS
UPDATE 3-Big banks must face U.S. swaps price-fixing lawsuit
Thu, Sep 04 16:23 PM EDT
(Adds ISDA and Markit comments, paragraph 9)

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK, Sept 4 (Reuters) - A Manhattan federal judge said on Thursday that investors may pursue a lawsuit accusing 12 major banks of violating antitrust law by fixing prices and restraining competition in the roughly $21 trillion     market for credit default swaps.

While dismissing part of the case, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote said investors may press claims that the defendants' Sherman Act violations caused them to pay unfair prices on CDS trades from the autumn of 2008 through the end of 2013, even as improved liquidity should have driven costs down.

"The complaint provides a chronology of behavior that would probably not result from chance, coincidence, independent responses to common stimuli, or mere interdependence," Cote said.

The defendants include Bank of America Corp, Barclays Plc, BNP Paribas SA, Citigroup Inc , Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG , Goldman Sachs Group Inc, HSBC Holdings Plc , JPMorgan Chase & Co, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and UBS AG.

Other defendants are the International Swaps and Derivatives Association and Markit Ltd, which provides credit derivative pricing services.

Credit default swaps are contracts that let investors buy protection to hedge against the risk that corporate or sovereign debt issuers will not meet their payment obligations.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/09/27/goldman-sachs-new-york-fed-carmen-segarra-this-american-life/16338577/

a culture in which regulators were cozy with the banks they worked with and where managers were loath to say or do anything that might upset them.

The tapes, released Friday as part of a joint report by National Public Radio's "This American Life" show and the non-profit investigative journalism organization ProPublica, could lead to Congressional oversight hearings.

"When regulators care more about protecting big banks from accountability than they do about protecting the American people from risky and illegal behavior on Wall Street, it threatens our whole economy," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in a statement posted Saturday on her Facebook page. "We learned this the hard way in 2008. Congress must hold oversight hearings on the disturbing issues raised by (the report) when it returns in November -- because it's our job to make sure our financial regulators are doing their jobs."

Another member of the Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has also called for hearings into the allegations, according to Bloomberg.

In one example, the New York Fed team was concerned about a deal Goldman Sachs was doing with a Spanish bank called Banco Santander. Her boss, Michael Silva, termed it "legal but shady."

But before the team met with Goldman Sachs staff, the Fed's staff did not press on the deal. In a discussion afterward, one of the other examiners says on the tape that they didn't want to push the bank too hard. Instead, they could say something like "Don't mistake our inquisitiveness, and our desire to understand more about the marketplace in general, as a criticism of you as a firm necessarily."

Goldman Sachs has denied Segarra's allegations. But on Saturday, the firm changed its policy addressing conflicts of interest to bar investment bankers from trading individual stocks and bonds, Bloomberg reported based on a knowledgeable source.

In a statement released Saturday, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said it "categorically rejects the allegations being made about the integrity of its supervision of financial institutions."

It went on to say "examiners are encouraged to speak up and escalate any concerns they may have regarding the New York Fed or the institutions that we supervise."

Segarra was fired after seven months on the job, she claims because she wouldn't go along with the status quo -- and because she wouldn't back down from her assertion that Goldman Sachs didn't have a policy for dealing with conflicts of interest.

She then sued, saying she was being retaliated against for her negative findings against Goldman Sachs. The case was thrown out of court last year when the judge said the facts didn't fit the statute Segarra had sued under.

Her hiring came about in part because of a report written by a David Beim, a former Wall Street banker himself, who was hired as an independent investigator by the New York Fed to look at whether the regulatory agency was neutral and objective.

His 2009 report found exactly the same failings the Segarra tapes show.

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/26/6849287/federal-reserve-fed-goldman-sachs-this-american-life-carmen-segarra

The scandal is less about Goldman's behavior and more about the Fed's inability or unwillingness to uphold the rule of law. Reasonable people can debate whether specific regulations are necessary, but even the best set of rules is totally insufficient if paired with an enforcement system that applies them inconsistently or not at all. Fair and consistent application of regulations is a prerequisite for having a regulatory regime of any kind. When regulators act the way the TAL/ProPublica report show New York Fed regulators acting, it suggests that we need to reform or revamp regulatory institutions before we can expect any new rules they're charged with enforcing to do much of anything.

http://www.propublica.org/article/carmen-segarras-secret-recordings-from-inside-new-york-fed

So is the tension. Segarra is in Silva's small office at Goldman Sachs with his deputy. The two are trying to persuade her to change her view about Goldman's conflicts policy.

"You have to come off the view that Goldman doesn't have any kind of conflict-of- interest policy," are the first words Silva says to her. Fed officials didn't believe her conclusion — that Goldman lacked a policy — was "credible."

Segarra tells him she has been writing bank compliance policies for a living since she graduated from law school in 1998. She has asked Goldman for the bank's policies, and what they provided did not comply with Fed guidance.

"I'm going to lose this entire case," Silva says, "because of your fixation on whether they do or don't have a policy. Why can't we just say they have basic pieces of a policy but they have to dramatically improve it?"

It's not like Goldman doesn't know what an adequate policy contains, she says. They have proper policies in other areas.

"But can't we say they have a policy?" Silva says, a question he asks repeatedly in various forms during the meeting.

Segarra offers to meet with anyone to go over the evidence collected from dozens of meetings and hundreds of documents. She says it's OK if higher-ups want to change her conclusions after she submits them.

But Silva says the lawyers at the Fed have determined Goldman has a policy. As a comparison, he brings up the Santander deal. He had thought the deal was improper, but the general counsel reined him in.

"I lost the Santander transaction in large part because I insisted that it was fraudulent, which they insisted is patently absurd," Silva said, "and as a result of that, I didn't get taken seriously."

Now, the same thing was happening with conflicts, he said.

A week later, Silva called Segarra into a conference room and fired her. The New York Fed, he told Segarra, who was recording the conversation, had "lost confidence in [her] ability to not substitute [her] own judgment for everyone else's."

[1965]

Judge

Do you ever wonder how many people see these posts and just don't read them.

You could try to be a little brief in future.

 

[Francois Jackson]

An 8 month investigation helped find this latest bloke from seabrook.

This would be an investigation led by the FBI.

Well done lads but hey who needs the americans right in our local community.

[tony_montana]

Nah Angus, no such thing as extremists in australia, all just Abbott propaganda according to our very own conspiracy theorist JR

[Francois Jackson]

im tipping they are frantically trying to find some more links or videos

[WilliamPowell]

An 8 month investigation helped find this latest bloke from seabrook.

This would be an investigation led by the FBI.

Well done lads but hey who needs the americans right in our local community.

Understand your point Angus, but please don't disregard our Fed Police and intelligent agency, they do a fantastic job and they would have lead this investigation and worked with the FBI

As I said FBI would be involved but they work with our groups just want to acknowledge that 

[Judge Roughneck]

Nah Angus, no such thing as extremists in australia, all just Abbott propaganda according to our very own conspiracy theorist JR

did i say that ?

if you re-read you will find i said something along the lines of

 - people shoot / stab cops in australia  [why is a police life worth more than a non police life? personally i respectfully disagree with this law]
 - people get raped in australia
 - people go missing regularly in australia
 - people walk infront of trains a hell of alot than what the MSM reports


when it happens to be an arab. the media makes sure we know - end of the world / be alert not alarm

i cant remember the media saying

"Adrian Ernest Bayley, protestant, white, British background, killer of Jill Meagher, " today unsuccessfully appealed his 35-year minimum ...

[Chuck17]

May I respectfully ask why the ww2 doco was deleted

Just a wild stab in the dark, but did you include a link?