JPMorgan Madoff?

Seen on Jesse's Cafe Americain, a disquieting article from the Daily Mail in London titled Customer probe: Blair bank targeted in 8.5 bn pound FSA probe:

The bank where Tony Blair is an adviser is the target of an unprecedented probe involving billions of pounds of customers' funds, the Daily Mail can disclose.

JP Morgan Chase, whose chief executive Jamie Dimon last year recruited the former prime minister as an adviser, is being investigated by the City's watchdog, the Financial Services Authority for allegedly failing to keep track of £8.5billion of clients' money.

The FSA has called in a top firm of accountants to examine the bank's London activities after evidence emerged that JP Morgan had mixed customers' funds with its own. . .

AIG Financial Products operated out of London. It would appear that after Sarbanes-Oxley passed, the Anglo-American financial industry moved much of the truly bad stuff to London.

Bernard Madoff was a founder of NASDAQ. NASDAQ was the epicenter of at least as great a concerted stock fraud - the stock craziness of the late 1990s and beyond-- as was ever created.

No serious effort at financial reform is emanating from the Obama administration. TARP I, passed by the Senate, was ignored and instead we saw TARP II. The Public-Private Investment Partnership (PPIP), announced with much fanfare several months ago, is not in evidence.

The Bank of England finds matters so dangerous that last week it continued "quantitative easing", i.e. printing money to finance deficit spending.

Big Finance as currently configured thrives on volatility. Whether prices go up or down is immaterial to it. In fact, under current rules for options grants in the U. S., optionees want the stock price to temporarily drop, because they are limited in how many option shares can be granted.

Meanwhile, stocks of Big Finance companies have gone wild on the upside without the traditional dividend support, and with 100% opaque financial disclosure. No "investor" in these stocks has the faintest idea of the nature or quality of the assets on their balance sheets, and none is forthcoming. Yet, a new era of prosperity is tipped by the financiers to be on the way now that the hurricane has allegedly past.

We shall see, but anyone who truly trusts these companies to act in the interests of anything except themselves and the individuals running them is making quite a leap of faith.

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