by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade:
The indefatigable Dennis Kelleher, Co-Founder and CEO of the Wall Street watchdog, Better Markets, has just released his organization’s monthly newsletter for January 2025 and it’s a humdinger.
Kelleher warns that the financial deregulators that incoming President Donald Trump has packed into his administration means “that the clock is ticking on a coming catastrophic financial crash that will likely be much worse than 2008.”
Kelleher adds that this “is not hyperbole.” He cites evidence from past financial crashes, writing:
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
“…there is always a lag after deregulation and the creation of artificial liquidity. That was true for ‘roaring ‘20s’ followed by the crash and Great Depression; the ‘great moderation’ of the early 2000s followed by the crash and Great Recession; the deregulation of the first Trump administration in 2017-2020 that led to the 2023 banking crisis when 3 of the 4 largest bank failures in US history happened. Much worse is likely to happen next time.”
The potential for another great crash might explain why the Vice President for Supervision at the Federal Reserve, Michael Barr, is abandoning the ship and lowering the life raft.
Kelleher has a way with coining a phrase, writing that “Banks don’t neglect their duties, act recklessly, engage in high-risk behavior, or break the law – bankers do” – and he warns that this is going to persist “until individual bankers are meaningfully and personally punished.”
Unfortunately, as Wall Street On Parade has documented time and again, regardless of which political party holds the reins in Washington, Wall Street has been able to draw a no-law zone around its activities with a wink and a nod from the U.S. Department of Justice.
In 2016 we reported on what the PBS Program, Frontline, had revealed about the Obama administration’s Department of Justice and its handling of the investigations after Wall Street had crashed the U.S. economy and left millions of Americans out of work with foreclosure notices nailed to their front doors:
NARRATOR: Frontline spoke to two former high-level Justice Department prosecutors who served in the Criminal Division under Lanny Breuer. In their opinion, Breuer was overly fearful of losing.
FRONTLINE’S MARTIN SMITH: We spoke to a couple of sources from within the Criminal Division, and they reported that when it came to Wall Street, there were no investigations going on. There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps.
LANNY BREUER: Well, I don’t know who you spoke with because we have looked hard at the very types of matters that you’re talking about.
MARTIN SMITH: These sources said that at the weekly indictment approval meetings that there was no case ever mentioned that was even close to indicting Wall Street for financial crimes.
Following the 2008 crash, Congress passed legislation that created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) to investigate and report on the causes of the crash. In 2016, previously withheld documents from the FCIC’s investigation were publicly released. Senator Elizabeth Warren was aghast at what they showed.
In a 20-page letter to the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice, Senator Warren asked for an investigation into why the DOJ had failed to indict any of the Wall Street executives that had been referred to it by the FCIC for potential criminal prosecution. In a separate letter, Warren asked then FBI Director James Comey for his related files.
The FCIC documents showed that it had made multiple criminal referrals of Wall Street executives to the DOJ in 2010. Warren explained the referrals as follows in her letter:
“A review of these documents conducted by my staff has identified 11 separate FCIC referrals of individuals or corporations to DOJ in cases where the FCIC found ‘serious indications of violations[s]’ of federal securities or other laws. Nine individuals were implicated in these referrals (two were implicated twice). The DOJ has not filed any criminal prosecutions against any of the nine individuals. Not one of the nine has gone to prison or been convicted of a criminal offense. Not a single one has even been indicted or brought to trial. Only one individual was fined, in the amount of $100,000, and that was to settle a civil case brought by the SEC.”
The two individuals Warren refers to who were “implicated twice” in the FCIC’s criminal referrals are Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary in the administration of Bill Clinton, who in the lead up to the crash of Citigroup in 2008 served as Executive Committee Chair of Citigroup’s Board of Directors. (After advocating for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed Citigroup to own both an insured depository bank, an investment bank and brokerage firm, Rubin went straight from his post as Treasury Secretary to the Board of Citigroup, where he collected $126 million in compensation over the next decade.)
The other individual whose name appears twice is Chuck Prince, the Citigroup CEO during its implosion. A third Citigroup executive’s name appears as well on the list: Gary Crittenden, the Chief Financial Officer of Citigroup at the time of its crash. Crittenden was the individual that was fined $100,000 by the SEC.
Read More @ WallStOnParade.com
