Friday, October 23, 2015

The First Fed Money and Interest Rate Manipulators


Charles Hamlin was the first chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

Murray Rothbard noted that Hamlin was a "wealthy Boston lawyer and assistant secretary of the treasury, who had long been in the Morgan ambit, and whose wife was a member of the Pruyn family, longtime investors in two Morgan-dominated concerns: the New York Central Railroad and the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York."

W.G. McAdoo was a leader of the Progressive movement who played a major role in the two presidential administrations of Woodrow Wilson. He was Wilson's campaign manager in 1912; he married Wilson's daughter, and served as his secretary of the Treasury. He arranged for the closing of the New York Stock Exchange for an unprecedented four months in 1914 to prevent Europeans from selling American securities and exchanging the proceeds for dollars, and then gold.

Frederic Delano was president of the Wabash Railroad Company (Rockefeller-controlled) and the chairman of the influential National Capital Park and Planning Commission and helped approve and oversee the building of the Pentagon. He was also the uncle of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Paul M. Warburg was a partner in the banking firm Kuhn Loeb and a strong early advocate of the Federal Reserve.

John Skelton Williams organized the Seaboard Air Line Railway into a single company, and served as its president from 1900 to 1903.

He was Comptroller of the Currency throughout World War I. Under his leadership, the agency worked closely with the War Finance Corporation, which was established in 1918 to provide credit to businesses, including banks, to promote the war effort.

William P.G. Harding was the president of First National Bank of Birmingham and president of the Alabama State Banker's Association. He was appointed to the Federal Reserve Board in 1914 and was the second Chairman of the Federal Reserve, serving from 1916 to

Adolph C. Miller was appointed by President Wilson to the Board in 1914, and President Coolidge reappointed him in 1924. Under Miller’s influence, the Federal Reserve Board in early 1929 unleashed an evangelical crusade against stock market speculation. Miller was also strongly opposed to a 1932 inflationsit bill. Rothbard wrote that Miller "cogently charged that a reflation attempt could only aggravate the depression."

   -RW

3 comments:

  1. And they had the temerity to pose for a photograph and even sign it. Unfathomable sociopathy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. How to Punish Corporate Fraudsters

    EDWARD THURLOW, an English lord chancellor in the 18th century, reputedly said that it’s difficult to punish a corporation because there is “no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked.”

    But there is, in fact, a way to punish corporations for their misdeeds: Bar their officers from government work. So why don’t we?

    Few outside the legal community are familiar with the concept of “exclusion,” which permits many federal agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Department of Health and Human Services — to temporarily or permanently block corporations that violate their rules from doing business with them.

    Importantly, it can also be applied to individual corporate officers, such as chief executives and lower-level executives, and is especially effective in the finance and health care industries. Since most big banks are federally insured, and many large health care companies do business with Medicare or Medicaid, barring an executive from that work can be a professional death sentence.

    But instead of using these tools, most federal prosecutors focus solely on bringing criminal charges against corporate executives. And if those are unavailable, they look no further. Sally Q. Yates, the deputy attorney general, recently announced that the Justice Department would try to squeeze the names of bad actors out of corporate defendants as a condition of any settlement negotiation. But Justice Department lawyers concede that in many cases it’s practically impossible to secure criminal convictions.

    This single-minded focus on criminal convictions is misguided — too often, corporate fraud goes unpunished. JPMorgan Chase paid $13 billion in 2013 for its role in the mortgage crisis. But what happened to its executives that year? None were adequately punished, the stock price rose 28 percent and its C.E.O., Jamie Dimon, got a 74 percent raise.

    Similarly, fraud against Medicare and Medicaid has been building for over a decade. From 2000 to 2004, the Hospital Corporation of America paid $1.7 billion to settle charges of fraud against federal health programs. Pfizer paid $2.3 billion in 2009 and $491 million in 2013 for fraud and illegal drug marketing. DaVita HealthCare Partners was fined $389 million in 2014 to settle charges that it paid kickbacks to doctors to refer patients to its clinics. This year, it agreed to pay $450 million to settle claims that it charged the government for unused drugs.

    But what happened to the leaders of these companies, which paid some of the largest fines in history for defrauding taxpayers? The head of H.C.A. became the governor of Florida. Pfizer’s chief executive retired in 2010 with a “golden parachute” worth $23 million. And DaVita’s C.E.O. remains one of the highest-paid health care executives in the nation.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/opinion/how-to-punish-corporate-fraudsters.html?

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  3. Gerald Celente's "white shoe boy" front and centre!

    ReplyDelete