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Giving Chase: Egypt, OK - But What About America’s Oligarchs?
By Russ Baker
Created Feb 12 2011 - 1:43pm
Newly released documents show that high officials of the bank knew for a long time that Bernard Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, but did nothing to protect his investors—though they did protect their own investments tied to him. As reported in The New York Times in an article <2> that, unfortunately, was missed by many with all the other recent headlines:
Senior executives at JPMorgan Chase expressed serious doubts about the legitimacy of Bernard L. Madoff’s investment business more than 18 months before his Ponzi scheme collapsed but continued to do business with him, according to internal bank documents made public in a lawsuit on Thursday.
On June 15, 2007, an evidently high-level risk management officer for Chase’s investment bank sent a lunchtime e-mail to colleagues to report that another bank executive “just told me that there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a Ponzi scheme.”
Even before that, a top private banking executive had been consistently steering clients away from investments linked to Mr. Madoff because his “Oz-like signals” were “too difficult to ignore.” And the first Chase risk analyst to look at a Madoff feeder fund, in February 2006, reported to his superiors that its returns did not make sense because it did far better than the securities that were supposedly in its portfolio
Despite those suspicions and many more, the bank allowed Mr. Madoff to move billions of dollars of investors’ cash in and out of his Chase bank accounts right until the day of his arrest in December 2008 — although by then, the bank had withdrawn all but $35 million of the $276 million it had invested in Madoff-linked hedge funds, according to the litigation...
-snip-
So there we have President Obama expressing guarded support for the Egyptian people in their uprising against those corrupt, entrenched interests, while at home, he’s unable to do terribly much about interests like Morgan. For one thing, they’ve got the government pretty well sewn up. Not bad to have an executive from your bank (Bill Daley) recently appointed as the president’s Chief of Staff, and to have your bank’s CEO (Jamie Dimon) on particularly friendly terms with the Treasury Secretary.More at......
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print/34331/
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