tv [untitled] October 21, 2010 4:30pm-5:00pm EDT
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they finance conspiracies and work on the inside of a country by means of defamation fact distortion and misinformation thank you for the time. thank you very much it was a pleasure speaking with you. but. it's the secret incursion into the country. it's the invasion by means of. tradition the language. beat beat. and culture. the thing is that the have the dems are still unaware of what's going on in their land still asking why do you.
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good to have you with this is. in the russian capital. another from. raising the retirement age and as the country's grip on protests and pension reform the support for protesters is losing grown critics say that only making the situation worse. prosecutors investigate allegations of child abuse a lot of russians oldest. children there would be some kind of understood suit and from the profession. trying to time the family. as a country grapples with its largest public spending cuts since the second. one hour special report on a massive modern day fraud we get the real story on wall street where
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and even debated in classrooms can't we agree if capitalism is an economic system a system for the production and distribution of things we need one i want to agree to that then you think something about government too there have to be a legal basis for an economic system to operate. most of us recognize we live in an inherently volatile system problem free but so the conventional wisdom goes better than any alternative many still believe the free market is our salvation even as our economy has crashed brought down to not just by greed but calculated scams in schemes that flow out of the intent of our laws in ridged a few and devastated the economy leading to a massive loss of jobs homes and personal wealth.
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in two thousand and six my film in debt we trust warned of a coming economic collapse. the stock think the next great economic crisis mr bush will be brought about by the debt which it will create an economic crisis so deep that it threatens says i was called a dinner in the marines and a long list television. in the sixty's just written a little a book called plunder i followed up with a book that came out before lehman brothers went bankrupt speaking on wall street i called for a jail out not a bailout i used to think of wall street as a financial center i now think of it as a crime scene. nomi prins was a managing par. bear stearns and goldman sachs this is the most expensive take out the biggest crime in world history we're talking about
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a crime we can't even quantify we're talking double digit trillions of dollars in this film we'll explore the scale of money's missing written off lost ripped off in these various scams and in the case of the bailout funds unaccounted for. graydon carter editor of vanity fair may have summed it up best when he wrote it can fairly be said that the chain of catastrophic bets made over the past decade by a few hundred bankers me will turn out to be the greatest nonviolent crime against humanity in history they brought the world's economy to its knees lost tens of millions of people their jobs and homes and trashed the retirement plans of a generation and they could drive an estimated two hundred million people worldwide into dire poverty in other words never before have so few known so much to
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so many and when experts estimate the total money last may reach a hundred ninety six point seven trillion dollars and that could be low like millions of americans i've lost thousands of dollars in retirement funds and i haven't had it as bad as many it's not just about them it's about me too i have a stake in it and like millions of angry about the way our economy whistle records . to help with our investigation we spoke with convicted white collar criminal sam and talked to white collar criminal hospital because for his use documents we destroy documents to subpoena witnesses. so he grew at a disadvantage that accosted a white collar for in effect where economic predators. to an investigative reporter on the business beat wall street steals far more than the mafia says gary weiss a wall street. takes large much larger sums of money to involve the mafia stales
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the regulatory system is such that they can get away with it the lack of media scrutiny the absence of regulation the widespread illusion that markets and real estate could only go up created a casino mentality and environment for successful fraudsters and white collar criminals your honor for many years my arrest on december eleven two thousand and eight i operated a ponzi scheme i knew what i was doing was wrong and deed criminal. white collar crime on wall street has been under reported except for a very few high profile cases as when hundreds of reporters staked out a new york courthouse to report bernie made off submission of guilt in his ponzi scheme and millions and millions of dollars they are a source of data and many of them regularly angry i had an ira worth one point
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three million my other money it's was about one point eight million pieces and it's gone on that how do you think he got away with this for so long was how a person could run a stamp for so many years without that effect that was one of the things i thought of a hippie a scam nobody could successfully run a scam for that long. was not alone regulators are now investigating scores of similar crimes they say there is a ponzi ammonium under way there's four levels in every white collar crime is the got it gives the what is the people who take the what is the people that knew what was going on but didn't participate and the people that should have known what was going on like boards of directors or what it is but that participates what they try to do is they try to. get to the culpability of the guy at the top by working from the bottom the problem that you have in the bernie madoff cases they got the guy at the top first and he's protecting the other three layers underneath that wall
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street a lot of the extraction tends to be very borderline illegal because the people extracting tend to be the one setting up the legal framework route economics is what limited not only calls it in our new book but the reason why the line between what is criminal what is now criminals disappear is because a did it will exist but when you remove all that is fiction when you remove all the controls then of course what this legal and want this illegal so you're creating a crime scene and you're creating the crime and you are. effectively combining the police officers all at the same time only in the form of a regulatory body or. for the laws that work for wall street in june two thousand and nine the f.b.i. said it was investigating thirteen hundred securities fraud cases including many
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ponzi schemes his will is more than five hundred eighty corporate fraud cases most of these cases got little attention but the media loves arch criminals like financier bernard madoff he's a complicated white collar crimes of which the government does not have the resources to throw really prosecute and the white collar criminals know it so they set it up not as a single transaction that's a crime but a series of transaction. once that it's all put together makes it a crime but to do that you have to go beyond the prosecution of one wrongdoer and look at the way wall street itself became a ponzi scheme you have to examine a pattern a system of criminality which brought the investment and real estate worlds together in a multi trillion dollars. scam. to simplify there were three interconnected rings in this circus involving the biggest firms in the industry it started in the real
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estate business where our desire for homes the in hurricane dream was turned into a scheme first predatory subprime lending over the years got people into mortgages they couldn't afford and that the lenders knew they couldn't sustain it was enabled by artificially low interest rates with financing provided by twenty five of the top banks in the country the second component of the crime involves what happened next when the biggest banks and investment houses on wall street bought and then securitized loans as structured financial products these mortgage bundles would be sold worldwide without full disclosure of their lack of underlying assets or the risks the banks that bought these derivative products failed to do due diligence on rating agencies that overvalued their worth and accounting firms that did not do their job the whole process was corrupt to the core. finally the
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third level of this interconnected but decentralized criminal enterprise involved ensuring these often fraudulent practices in some cases betting against them by the very people who sold them to guarantee that they would be protected when borrowers who couldn't afford the loans defaulted they used insurance companies like ai g. . put these three criminal components together and a pattern emerges a pattern of financial crime. the financial crisis started because people could no longer afford to make payments on their subprime mortgage loan this is just it it goes strict. all of this is being foreclosed all of it you can see anyone under strict nobody moves in
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nobody wants to rent the housing crisis hit america like a tsunami destroying neighborhoods and costing millions of families their homes just in a well. run company. with no threat to the us. how did it happen why did so many top banks lend to some of the poorest members of society in a practice known as sub prime lending featuring loans like the one called the need jobs no income no jobs no assets apparently no problem the reason higher fees up front and billions more when mortgages were turned into securities resold by wall street. sixty percent of the subprime borrowers could have qualified the less costly prime rates but most were told their homes would go up in value many accepted onerous terms to give their families
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a piece of the american dream. many old into believing they could afford houses with no money down and low introductory interest rates watch the cost of the just the bill rate mortgages or arms shoot up when i first got it i got a one percent introduction in law and my mortgage came down the second month it went up to seven point nine zero and now it's up to nine point nine and it just keeps on going up if i'm paying twenty eight hundred dollars a month for my home and one of the living next to j. lo and marc anthony. now where i live they have. we should not have to leave homes dream i mean even us because you know. the rates are going up so high and we don't even understand why it's going to it's going in somebody's pocket but not out of it should have been no surprise to anyone fraudulent lending practices resulted in
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a steep rise in foreclosures beginning in late two thousand and six some of the biggest subprime lenders themselves later declared bankruptcy in the news media homeowners took most of the blame it was said they had exercised a failure of personal responsibility they're responsible borrowing was stigmatised irresponsible lending was not. into the fifth vest a geisha the f.b.i. describes its responsibility for investigating financial fraud on its website it is called mortgage fraud and epidemic they're calling it operation malicious mortgage the f.b.i. unveiled the results of a three and a half month probe it's in mortgage related fraud f.b.i. director robert muller for this operation more than four hundred defendants have
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been charged and we have a paid one hundred seventy three conviction same crimes that accounted for more than eleven billion dollars and estimated losses the f.b.i. first warned of this fraud epidemic in two thousand and four reporting also though that their corporate crime units had been downsized to join the fight against terrorism some criminal cases are reported in the press but not all are prosecuted with companies often paying fines rather than facing a judge or a jury goldman sachs paid sixty million dollars to settle a so brian complain the massachusetts authorities said they had this time and mortgages to fail and they paid sixty million dollars but they did not meet any of that standard standard when wall street firms to go. what are in effect plea bargains with regulators for them not to admit guilt according to an investigation by the center for public integrity twenty five of the sleaziest
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subprime lenders were backed by the biggest banks in the united states citi group wells fargo j.p. morgan chase and bank of america together the financial times reported they originated one hundred billion dollars in sub prime mortgages between two thousand and five and two thousand and seven almost three quarters of the total. what i did in the mortgage industry i first got involved in about one thousand nine hundred eighty i was a loner originator. and during that time what i had seen was nothing short of amazing in terms it was very predatory the techniques that were being used the salesmanship that was being used the gimmicks on the loans and how they were structured it really disturbed me catchall to this and how they could get away with that is people hear full disclosure depending on the lending institution you went
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to in other words a bank a broker or lending institution or three different all three have different sets of regulations that govern them and so full disclosure it wasn't necessarily important to the loan itself just get them to sign on the dotted line if they were happy with the numbers you have a loan. my name is moby dart i'm with you and say basically what we do is you know someone's have organizations and several other issues but what i want to do is show the signature of it and. what we're finding out is eighty percent of the people don't even know they have violations of. this is a signature on her. basically which is right here and then have this signature here which is your actual signature which shows a completely different signature it doesn't take to me an expert to figure out that there's something terribly wrong here someone gets to set a set alone docs and they're usually probably two to three inches thick and there might be fifteen or twenty really pertinent disclosures that clarity to worry about
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ok and they're very good in there and i don't know what they're signing and usually they'll send out a notary to sign the loan with them and loan sign and a notary usually has no clue of what is in that loan and it's all part of the scheme we like to call it and then we go here we start looking at wideout and then we have a consultant fee. we see a consultant fee on the mortgage that should set off red flags that there's not really any consultancy on a mortgage or sale that should have been one fee to rise mortgage this mark murphy is apparently someone we need to investigate and find out exactly who he is why he got seventy eight hundred dollars on this long these people basically project we took this woman's home that she's been living in for over fifteen years and thinking that it's hers where it was actually never was her since ninety nine the fraud and deception that was built into these transactions was a necessary part of the transaction in order to generate the profits.
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wall street doesn't do mortgage lending what wall street did was package sell repackage and resell mortgages making what was a small housing bubble a gigantic housing bubble and making what became an american financial problem very much a global financial problem will come to wall street today o'connell missed max wolfe who works in the financial industry he's our tour guide here looking at people who've gone through ten unthinkable low probability events in a four month period when every time you think you can catch a breather there's another leg down atmospheres on trading floors and in a lot of these firms are few new aerial friends are gone bonuses are gone futures are unsure. it's been very difficult to. treat people wanted to get into a conversation i mean the regular comes out of the bank examiner for ten years ok
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and i wonder where the regulators are the city called on them they got offices it was good when you're around you know there was yes you see where all the guys are supposed to be watching you know what's going to. be what i was about it's never been years ago you know we had surprises in the eighty's early ninety's you know but we got to homes around nobody got her arms around this i just wonder if you think the average person in america really graphs that to get across the room i hope they do and i think it's an excellent busted my personal guess is no my personal guess is they'd be much more angry and much more interested if they understand how much is on at play here. and the destruction there is a relic like it's red tape hirsch's trade deals all the money has been made at this point all the take out happened a couple years ago now you're just sort of looking at the remains of a very profitable time which will be followed by another very profitable time because the same people will still be involved in stretching the same types of
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things just biggest crime in all of this is the thing that's the least able to be understood and examined by the f.b.i. by the department just by anyone in washington the trading tiny lowest layer of the crisis that started with some prime defaulting at the homeowner borrower level that money wasn't made there the money was made because several layers of the pyramid wall street investment firms and commercial bank investment groups decided to repackage those mortgages and create layers of them that they then result to investors here's what happens there are three defaults on mortgages. the bank that holds the. sells those ten cents on the dollar to a second bank that bank puts those together with three other defaults and three other defaults it makes a second package and sells to
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a third bank the third bank sells six of these things for which is a bundles them and sells them to some investor no idea what he has. they borrowed against those layers which is the real crime they would take a little piece of a layer of a security underneath the which somewhere there was a bunch of home buyers and they would take it and they would borrow thirty times the amount of money that it represented five big investment banks dominated wall street it is really who took the subprime loans purchased from banks packaged them as bundled investments to be sold worldwide there were reports that there was what was called sanction from wall street other words wall street investment houses as they began to make billions on these securitized loans and c.d.o. those in derivatives were pressuring the mortgage people at the local level give us more give us more give us well the reason why wall street was putting the pressure or the sucking sound that you referred to or the lower the originators because the
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profits that they were generated with this whole concept first opened up and people realize the money that was to be paid on the back and treating the paper they were essentially creating liquid cash from nothing but talking fourteen trillion dollars worth of assets back with sub prime and other types of mortgages and c.e.o.'s created between two thousand and three and two thousand and seven fourteen trillion were created on that. investment houses had funds and private equity funds could leverage thirty forty times banks could leverage fifteen to twenty times on average they could only leverage thirteen times on certain security more than the value of the whole country of the whole gross domestic product if you want and this. a very conservative estimate assume that the average for the fourteen trillion dollars worth of c.d.'s was ten times which to me is a conservative estimate that's one hundred forty trillion dollars worth of nothing
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. if you lose the fourteen trillion the other hundred forty minus the fourteen trillion doesn't exist you have nothing you have no collateral left to pay to the people you borrowed money from it off the practice to sell a mortgage is. clearly can't afford to target people in order to give them mortgages and then to take mortgages to sell it back to the banks or to create mortgage backed security is a criminal. for sure and i think the bank. does. some cases criminal but that's why build your rises when they sell their portfolio of mortgages to investors who believe. mortgages and there were very injured victims that change their end of the distribution chain because i can
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direct you to school boards around the country that have. done this and lost their pension funds. they have the. right. stuff. now i have to wait. hoping they. take such a large. you know what i guess you can be ok. with and i would even say that this is racketeering because it took place between. real estate agencies and back. together a lot of people made a lot of money but when these homeowners. record numbers. the whole system became infected.
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