person:robert rubin

The Most Important WikiLeaks Revelation Isn’t About Hillary Clinton | New Republic
▻https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-revelation-isnt-hillary-clinton

J’ai rarement lu une déscription si précise du fonctionnement et de la raison d’être de la démocration dans les pays dit « industrialisés ». Quand c’est un parti/candidat qui gagne, il installe les représentants de ses commanditaires. Si c’est l’autre c’est pareil. Dans les deux cas c’est un choix de personnes plus ou moins identiques qui représentent les banques, les industriels et les grands groups économiques capitalistes.

By David Dayen, October 14, 2016

The most important revelation in the WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta’s emails has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. The messages go all the way back to 2008, when Podesta served as co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. And a month before the election, the key staffing for that future administration was almost entirely in place, revealing that some of the most crucial decisions an administration can make occur well before a vote has been cast.

Michael Froman, who is now U.S. trade representative but at the time was an executive at Citigroup, wrote an email to Podesta on October 6, 2008, with the subject “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup email address. He attached three documents: a list of women for top administration jobs, a list of non-white candidates, and a sample outline of 31 cabinet-level positions and who would fill them. “The lists will continue to grow,” Froman wrote to Podesta, “but these are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by various sources for senior level jobs.”

The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.

This was October 6. The election was November 4. And yet Froman, an executive at Citigroup, which would ultimately become the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis, had mapped out virtually the entire Obama cabinet, a month before votes were counted. And according to the Froman/Podesta emails, lists were floating around even before that.

#USA #élections #démocratie #corruption #capitalisme

Big Data Exposes How Politically Connected Traders Cashed In During the Financial Crisis
▻http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/big-data-exposes-how-politically-connected-traders-cashed-during-financial-

“Many defenders of finance in the recent crisis suggest that the giant institutions were really taken by surprise when the bubble popped,” said the researchers. “Our results suggest that insiders understood the heavy risk-taking in their banks; They were not simply over-optimistic, and hence they sold more of their own shares before the crisis.”

#criminels #banksters

Too-Big-to-Fail Banks Limit Prosecutor Options, Holder Says - Bloomberg
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-06/too-big-to-fail-banks-limit-prosecutor-options-holder-testifies.html

The size of the largest financial institutions has made it difficult for the U.S. Justice Department to bring criminal charges when there’s wrongdoing, Attorney General Eric Holder said.

Criminal charges against a bank — something that could threaten its existence — may also endanger the national or global economies in the case of the largest ones, because of their size and interconnectedness. That has “made it difficult for us to prosecute” some of those institutions, Holder said today at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

Dean Baker: Big Bank Immunity: When Do We Crack Down on Wall Street?
▻http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/big-bank-immunity-when-do-we-crack-down-on-wall-street

First off, we should not assume that just because the Justice Department says it is concerned about financial instability that this is the real reason that they are not prosecuting a big bank. There is precedent for being less than honest about such issues.

When Enron was about to collapse in 2002 as its illegal dealings became public, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who was at the time a top Citigroup executive, called a former aide at Treasury. He asked him to intervene with the bond rating agencies to get them to delay downgrading Enron’s debt. Citigroup owned several hundred million dollars in Enron debt at the time. If Rubin had gotten this delay Citigroup would have been able to dump much of this debt on suckers before the price collapsed.

The Treasury official refused. When the matter became public, Robert Rubin claimed that he was concerned about instability in financial markets.

It is entirely possible that the reluctance to prosecute big banks represents the same sort of fear of financial instability as motivated Robert Rubin. In other words, it is a pretext that the Justice Department is using to justify its failure to prosecute powerful friends on Wall Street. In Washington this possibility can never be ruled out.