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Internet Payment Processor Liberty Reserve Accused of Laundering $6 Billion
pdclarry writes with a followup to this weekend's story that Liberty Reserve, a huge international payment processor, had been shut down and its founder had been arrested.
"Liberty Reserve, apparently the Internet bank of choice for criminals, as reported by the NY Times, Wired and Business Week, has been accused of laundering over $6 billion dollars. Incorporated in Costa Rica in 2006, Liberty Reserve allegedly 'facilitated global criminal conduct' and was created and structured 'as a criminal business venture, one designed to help criminals conduct illegal transactions and launder the proceeds of their crimes,' Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in an indictment (PDF) unsealed today. Chatter on criminal web sites show a rising sense of panic as fortunes have disappeared in an instant."
that HSBC may have laundered..
"a rising sense of panic as fortunes have disappeared in an instant"
So now they know how their victims feel?
There's a financial agency that's not a money-laundering operation? We live in interesting times.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
the federal reserve corporation pumped out trillions of dollars to mask banker fraud
No they didn't. The Federal Reserve pumped out trillions of dollars because that's what the Federal Reserve is supposed to do in a recession. They pumped out a lot of cash after the S&L collapse in the 1980's too, when the bankers weren't protected and many went to jail.
And I'm not saying the Fed shouldn't be questioned or examined, but that's not in the category of things they've done that's actually wrong or fraudulent in some way.
I am officially gone from
Liberty Reserve may have laundered 6 Billion, HSBC may have laundered 300 trillion, but all in all, what does that all mean ?
How come governments can "create" new money out of thin air, trillions at a time, and it's all legal, but when Joe-on-the-street did some side jobs and made some money out of it and does not want it to be taxed, they call it "money laundering" ?
It's all about control, it's all about TPTB exerting their control over us
It's a case of the Great Leader can do everything they want to (even to the point of supplying weapons to some groups of seedy people to fight/kill/murder other groups of seedy people) but you, the Joe-on-the-street, don't get to do anything you want because you just ain't nobody
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I like that they laundered "$6 billion dollars". So one guy, Mr. Six Dollars had his billion dollars laundered? Or was it a billion and six dollars? A billion dollars worth of six dollar bills? Or is it that the dollar sign or the word 'dollars' was redundant? Hmmmmm.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Three thousand hours, three thousand hours clicking on that mouse, collecting weapons and gold. It's almost as if it was a huge waste of time.
--Sheldon Cooper
The mistake they did was, they did not launder enough money. If they have done may be 300 billion or more and insinuated themselves deep into many national economies, then they would have become too big to fail, too big to jail.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We all know that this is the first salvo being fired at digital currencies.
The "powers that be" running the world's major banks in concert, can't have any currency run outside of their control and manipulation, because then they would lose their grip on the world's economies (and in turn, their people) to do their bidding.
If they can't latch control onto Bitcoin or other currencies, they will attempt to stifle it's ascendancy, or drive it far underground.
Remember that they only manage to control the world because we have to use the major currencies under their control, which gives them their license to print credit at the cost of everyone's freedom who actually has to do the work for it's creation.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
That's what illiterate people always say.
"Do you understand that banker are creditors, who benefit from a strong currency?"
They don't care, they lend in dollars and receive dollars, not lend in dollars and receive euros. They don't benefit from a strong dollar, they benefit from receiving more dollars.
"Except that inflation is near record lows, despite trillions in new money."
Implosion + Explosion = zero
Without the money printing, the economy is contracting. People who made successful things should be getting richer as the dollar increases, but instead the banks are, by money printing.
"Could you please explain how a creditor diluting the currency can be considered "greedy"?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation
GP post was 100% correct, a clear understanding of what happens. You create things of value, the banks print the money corresponding to it, and spend that. When the USA is contracting, the money supply contracts, they print more dollars and spend those to balance it out. It's a unfair system that hands wealth to bankers.
The bankers put the money largely into fake Wallstreet assets (CDS's CDR's Derivatives etc. are simply betting slips where the bookies both accept the bank bets and borrow money from the banks to pay out). The great thing about these assets is the Chinese can't make them cheaper, because they cost nothing to make! So you create money, stuff it into fantasy assets less solid than Bitcoins, and that money dilutes the dollars to stop deflation.
" In the past the conspiracy nuts were accusing the bankers of suppressing the "common man" by doing the exact opposite of what they are doing today."
In the past present and future, people without arguments use the 'conspiracy nuts' claim as a weak ad hominen attack.
That's not a valid use of the word "Except". You're not contradicting anything the GP said. You are superficially adding information, but nothing that wasn't already implied - the GP was very obviously providing a contrast when he gave an example of the Fed injecting money during the S&L scandal.
The GP is entirely right. Whether you're Keynes or Friedman, in fact whether you're anything other than the nutty Austrian kooks that seem to dominate today's economic agenda despite hundreds of years of evidence they're 100% wrong, the right thing for the Fed to do during a recession or depression is inject money into the system. That's what they do. It doesn't matter whether the cause was irrational exuberance or the Countrywide Mortgage Company, that's what the Fed is supposed to do. That's its mandate, for crying out loud.
If the Fed wasn't injecting money into the economy, that would be a reason to indict it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Austrians are finally getting a little attention precisely because the last 100 years have actually proven them 100% correct.
[citation needed]
In order for an economic theory to be 100% correct, you will need to:
1. List out all predictions made by the Austrian school of economics regarding the last 100 years. To qualify, the prediction has to be made before the events in question occurred, and the events in question must have happened before now. For example, if Hayak predicted in 1930 that something would happen in 1932, that's in, but if Hayak only described the events of 1932 in 1934, or if Hayak described in 1990 the events of 2015, that's out.
2. Demonstrate that every single one of those predictions accurately described reality. Precision greater than the degree made by the prediction is not required - if the prediction was that X-> Y +- 10%, then X -> 0.9 Y would be acceptable.
Arguing correctly that competing economic theories are wrong is not sufficient to prove that your preferred economic theory is right, because it's quite possible that both your preferred theory and its competitors are all wrong.
I am officially gone from