"How America's biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy - until they were caught on tape" by Matt Taibbi
"The defendants in the case Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes from "virtually every state, district and territory in the United States," according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime." Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620#ixzz1ygR5rf8x No one talks about competition anymore. Even Libertarians who believe in "free" markets no longer argue that competition results in lower prices. Deep down in their greedy little hearts they know that unregulated capitalism crushes competition and results in a monopoly. Since Libertarians can't defend unregulated markets, and it makes no sense to defend a monopoly, they simply tell us that a regulated market is socialism and the sheeple watching FOX LIES 24/7 believe it.
