dal Financial Times
WTO warns on barriers to trade
By Joshua Chaffin in Brussels
Published: July 2 2009 00:14 | Last updated: July 2 2009 00:14
Governments around the world have continued to push up trade barriers in spite of high-profile pledges at the G20 summit and other forums to resist protectionism, according to a World Trade Organisation report to be published on Thursday.
Over the past three months, the WTO recorded 83 trade-restricting measures undertaken by 24 countries and the European Union – more than double the number of trade-liberalising measures enacted during the same period. However, the report noted that the worst abuses had largely been contained.
The figures do not include restrictions on pork imports implemented by 39 countries in the wake of the swine flu outbreak.
The WTO warned that a surge of new anti-dumping investigations could materialise as the economic crisis dragged on. It also lowered its forecast for world trade; it is now predicting that the volume for goods and services will contract 10 per cent this year as opposed to the 9 per cent previously expected.
“In the past three months there has been further slippage towards more trade restricting and distorting policies,” the report concludes.
It offers the clearest barometer of the rise in protectionist pressures as governments try to shield domestic industries from the effects of the economic and financial crisis. It also confirms the myriad ways countries can raise trade barriers without violating WTO rules, such as launching anti-dumping investigations, granting export subsidies and raising tariffs within legal limits.
Comparative chart showing world trade volumes
The report is likely to be seized on by proponents of the Doha round of trade talks to restart negotiations on a broad treaty that would do away with many of these exceptions.
World leaders pledged to resist protectionism and support free trade in order to speed the economic recovery and avoid the mistakes of the 1930s as the centrepiece of the London G20 summit in April.
Yet trade tensions have repeatedly been on display since then, including a decision by the US and EU last week jointly to take WTO action against China for allegedly hoarding natural resources.
Many trade lawyers say they are braced for a surge in anti-dumping complaints in the coming months as crisis-stricken companies take action against foreign competitors they might have tolerated in better times. Anti-dumping investigations increased 28 per cent last year compared with 2007.
The WTO found that the goods most affected thus far have been agricultural products – particularly dairy – iron and steel, autos, chemicals and plastics, and textiles and clothing.
The report noted a slew of sector-specific programmes introduced by governments to support automakers, pulp and paper producers and others. A total of 19 governments reported moves to support financial institutions.
martedì 7 luglio 2009
“El desastre en España va a continuar”
UBS, contundente: “El desastre en España va a continuar”
Estima que el paro llegará al 20% a finales del próximo año
da Finanzas.com
Para UBS no hay debate sobre los brotes verdes de la economía pese a la mejora del empleo y la menor caída del consumo y la producción industrial. En un durísimo informe sobre España, el banco suizo asevera que el lo peor está por venir y que el desempleo llegará al 20% de la población.
La entidad asegura que las últimas cifras publicadas “han mostrado un acusado deterioro de la situación” Para el banco, el problema comenzó con una burbuja inmobiliaria sin precedentes, tanto en tamaño como en precio, que ahora ya se ha extendido a otros sectores, como demuestra que el hundimiento de la producción industrial –llegó a caer hasta casi el 30%- ha contribuido más que la construcción al descenso del Producto Interior Bruto (PIB).
“Vemos muy pocos razones para ser optimistas a corto plazo. El futuro no será mucho mejor”, sentencian los analistas de UBS que han realizado, ninguno de ellos español, y que se han apoyado en otro estudio sobre el sector bancario nacional. “El mercado laboral continuará deteriorándose rápidamente, con efectos devastadores sobre el resto de la economía!” afirman. Según sus cálculos, el desempleo superará el 20% a finales de 2010.
En opinión del grupo helvético, la construcción ha pasado de tener 2,7 millones de trabajadores en el segundo trimestre de 2007 a 1,97 en marzo de este año. Es decir, ya han desaparecido 760.000 puestos de trabajo, para reducir el peso en la economía al 10%. En Europa, esta cifra es del 7,5%, por lo que el ladrillo podría perder otros 500.000 empleos en el primer trimestre del próximo ejercicio.
La entidad suiza añade como consecuencia colateral el empeoramiento de las cuentas del Estado, que ha subvencionado obras para rehabilitar la economía, amén de sufrir los menores ingresos por las menores aportaciones a la Hacienda pública. No obstante, UBS considera que el Gobierno tiene un amplio margen de maniobra porque el endeudamiento todavía es bajo y porque el nivel de impuestos es bajo respecto a otros países europeos. Sin embargo, matiza que el Ejecutivo tiene poca capacidad para nuevos estímulos millonarios debido al ingente déficit público.
El precio de las casas
Respecto al sector inmobiliario, UBS asegura que a finales de 2007, España era el país con el precio de la vivienda más sobrevalorado de Europa. Lo cifró en un 55%, seguido de Irlanda, con cerca del 30%. Para el banco, la situación no ha cambiado mucho puesto que los precios de las casas sólo han bajado un 6,5% desde los máximos.
El banco explica que el comportamiento del mercado es lógico porque los vendedores no quieren desprenderse de sus activos si no es a un precio atractivo. Esta actitud provoca un colapso en el número de transacciones, que no hacen más que aumentar la oferta, lo que se traducirá en una caída mucho más prolongada de la vivienda. Según sus estimaciones, será de al menos el 20%.
Estima que el paro llegará al 20% a finales del próximo año
da Finanzas.com
Para UBS no hay debate sobre los brotes verdes de la economía pese a la mejora del empleo y la menor caída del consumo y la producción industrial. En un durísimo informe sobre España, el banco suizo asevera que el lo peor está por venir y que el desempleo llegará al 20% de la población.
La entidad asegura que las últimas cifras publicadas “han mostrado un acusado deterioro de la situación” Para el banco, el problema comenzó con una burbuja inmobiliaria sin precedentes, tanto en tamaño como en precio, que ahora ya se ha extendido a otros sectores, como demuestra que el hundimiento de la producción industrial –llegó a caer hasta casi el 30%- ha contribuido más que la construcción al descenso del Producto Interior Bruto (PIB).
“Vemos muy pocos razones para ser optimistas a corto plazo. El futuro no será mucho mejor”, sentencian los analistas de UBS que han realizado, ninguno de ellos español, y que se han apoyado en otro estudio sobre el sector bancario nacional. “El mercado laboral continuará deteriorándose rápidamente, con efectos devastadores sobre el resto de la economía!” afirman. Según sus cálculos, el desempleo superará el 20% a finales de 2010.
En opinión del grupo helvético, la construcción ha pasado de tener 2,7 millones de trabajadores en el segundo trimestre de 2007 a 1,97 en marzo de este año. Es decir, ya han desaparecido 760.000 puestos de trabajo, para reducir el peso en la economía al 10%. En Europa, esta cifra es del 7,5%, por lo que el ladrillo podría perder otros 500.000 empleos en el primer trimestre del próximo ejercicio.
La entidad suiza añade como consecuencia colateral el empeoramiento de las cuentas del Estado, que ha subvencionado obras para rehabilitar la economía, amén de sufrir los menores ingresos por las menores aportaciones a la Hacienda pública. No obstante, UBS considera que el Gobierno tiene un amplio margen de maniobra porque el endeudamiento todavía es bajo y porque el nivel de impuestos es bajo respecto a otros países europeos. Sin embargo, matiza que el Ejecutivo tiene poca capacidad para nuevos estímulos millonarios debido al ingente déficit público.
El precio de las casas
Respecto al sector inmobiliario, UBS asegura que a finales de 2007, España era el país con el precio de la vivienda más sobrevalorado de Europa. Lo cifró en un 55%, seguido de Irlanda, con cerca del 30%. Para el banco, la situación no ha cambiado mucho puesto que los precios de las casas sólo han bajado un 6,5% desde los máximos.
El banco explica que el comportamiento del mercado es lógico porque los vendedores no quieren desprenderse de sus activos si no es a un precio atractivo. Esta actitud provoca un colapso en el número de transacciones, que no hacen más que aumentar la oferta, lo que se traducirá en una caída mucho más prolongada de la vivienda. Según sus estimaciones, será de al menos el 20%.
domenica 5 luglio 2009
Wall Street e la "crisi", l'uovo o la gallina? ragionevoli dubbi.
The Great American Bubble Machine
Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression
In Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83, Matt Taibbi takes on "the Wall Street Bubble Mafia" — investment bank Goldman Sachs. The piece has generated controversy, with Goldman Sachs firing back that Taibbi's piece is "an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories" and a spokesman adding, "We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good." Taibbi shot back: "Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it." Here, now, are excerpts from Matt Taibbi's piece and video of Taibbi exploring the key issues.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.
It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.
Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.
And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.
The history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman.
But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.
Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliché that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy — a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline the committee to save the world. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy — beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.
After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.
It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.
Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.
Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.
The collective message of all of this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."
Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.
Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression
In Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83, Matt Taibbi takes on "the Wall Street Bubble Mafia" — investment bank Goldman Sachs. The piece has generated controversy, with Goldman Sachs firing back that Taibbi's piece is "an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories" and a spokesman adding, "We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good." Taibbi shot back: "Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it." Here, now, are excerpts from Matt Taibbi's piece and video of Taibbi exploring the key issues.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.
It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.
Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.
And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.
The history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman.
But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.
Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliché that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy — a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline the committee to save the world. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy — beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.
After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.
It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.
Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.
Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.
The collective message of all of this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."
Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.
quando per leggere un articolo intelligente devi andare su Rolling Stone..
The Big Takeover
MATT TAIBBIPosted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).
So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."
Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.
Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.
ALTRO ARTICOLO INTERESSANTE:"The Dirty Dozen"- Ecco i banchieri e broker responsabili della crisi finanziaria- e gli uomini delle istituzioni che li hanno lasciati fare.
MATT TAIBBIPosted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).
So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."
Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.
Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.
ALTRO ARTICOLO INTERESSANTE:"The Dirty Dozen"- Ecco i banchieri e broker responsabili della crisi finanziaria- e gli uomini delle istituzioni che li hanno lasciati fare.
a un mese dal sequestro di Chiasso
Tutto fa pensare che siano autentici i titoli americani sequestrati a Chiasso
da asianews.it
Fonti ufficiali Usa continuano ad affermare che sono falsi, ma non si ha notizia che esperti americani li abbiano visionati di persona. Arrestato per un’altra vicenda il direttore di una radio statunitense secondo il quale si tratta di autentici bond, che il Giappone ha tentato di vendere in Svizzera, non fidandosi della capacità degli Stati Uniti di onorare il proprio debito pubblico.
Milano (AsiaNews) - Sono passate quattro settimane circa dalla confisca di titoli americani a due giapponesi che viaggiavano su un treno per pendolari diretto a Chiasso, in Svizzera, e mentre su alcuni punti, molto pochi, si è fatta un po’ di chiarezza, su tutto il resto continua il silenzio delle autorità italiane.
Per di più la strana coincidenza temporale dell’arresto del direttore di una radio via internet che aveva delle rivelazioni sulla vicenda aumenta le già forti stranezze del caso. Una nuova rivalutazione del fatto che tra i titoli sequestrati vi fossero dei “ Kennedy Bond “ fa propendere per l’autenticità di quanto sequestrato dalla Guardia di Finanza (GdF) all’inizio di giugno.
I maggiori quotidiani anglosassoni avevano ignorato la vicenda per un paio di settimane. Ne hanno iniziato a dare notizia dopo il lancio dell’agenzia Bloomberg del 18/6: un portavoce del Tesoro, Meyerhardt, aveva dichiarato che i titoli, sulla base dalle foto disponibili via internet, sono “chiaramente falsi”. Lo stesso giorno il Financial Times (FT) pubblicava un articolo il cui titolo attribuiva alla mafia italiana la responsabilità della (presunta) contraffazione, senza che nel testo stesso dell’articolo vi fosse alcuna possibile connessione alla vicenda di Chiasso. Nonostante ciò, la versione del FT è stata ripresa anche da altri perché “appropriata” (secondo un ben comune cliché sull’Italia e trattandosi di un sequestro avvenuto in Italia) ed in fondo “colorita”. Peccato solo che andasse a scapito della logica: che la mafia cercasse di passare inosservata cercando di piazzare titoli falsi per 134,5 miliardi di dollari e per di più si facesse “pizzicare” ad un passo da casa è non molto credibile.
La scorsa settimana, il 25/6, da ultimo anche il New York Times ha dato notizia della vicenda riportando le affermazioni di un portavoce della CIA, Darrin Blackford: i servizi segreti statunitensi avevano svolto delle verifiche, come richiesto dalla magistratura italiana, ed avevano appurato che si trattava di strumenti finanziari fittizi, mai emessi dal “governo USA”. Non è chiaro però come siano state svolte le verifiche di cui parla Blackford e se anch’esse siano state eseguite via internet. Dalle fonti ufficiali italiane non risulta, infatti, che la commissione di esperti americani, attesa in Italia, vi sia ancora giunta. Inoltre i titoli erano accompagnati da una documentazione bancaria recente ed in originale. Non è chiaro perciò come possano le autorità americane definire falsa anche tale documentazione non originata dalla Fed o dal Ministero del tesoro statunitense.
Ad affermare viceversa l’autenticità dei titoli, il 20/6 spuntava la Turner Radio Network (TRN), una stazione radio indipendente diffusa via internet. Con una clamorosa rivelazione la TRN in tale data affermava che i due giapponesi fermati a Ponte Chiasso dalla Guardia di Finanza (GdF) e poi rilasciati erano dipendenti del Ministero del tesoro giapponese. Anche ad AsiaNews erano giunte segnalazioni simili: uno dei due giapponesi fermati a Chiasso e poi rilasciati sarebbe Tuneo Yamauchi, cognato di Toshiro Muto, fino a poco fa vice governatore della Banca del Giappone. Sul suo sito l’ideatore e conduttore della radio, Hal Turner, aveva anche asserito che le sue fonti gli avevano rivelato che le autorità italiane riterrebbero autentici titoli e che i due giapponesi sarebbero funzionari del ministero delle Finanze giapponese. Avrebbero dovuto portare i titoli in Svizzera perché il governo nipponico avrebbe perso la fiducia nella capacità statunitense di ripagare il debito pubblico. Le autorità finanziarie giapponesi avrebbero perciò cercato, prima di un’imminente catastrofe finanziaria, di vendere una quota dei titoli in proprio possesso attraverso canali paralleli, grazie all’anonimità che, a dire di Turner, sarebbe garantita dalle leggi svizzere.
AsiaNews non sa che credibilità attribuire alle rivelazioni di Turner, visto che anche in questa ipotesi è difficile supporre che $134,5 miliardi passino inosservati ovunque nel mondo. Sembrerebbe più logico supporre che i titoli, se autentici, fossero diretti alla Banca dei regolamenti internazionali di Basilea, BRI, la banca centrale delle banche centrali in vista dell’emissione di titoli in una nuova valuta sovranazionale. Turner aveva ad ogni buon conto soggiunto che come prova delle sue rivelazioni avrebbe fornito i numeri di serie dei titoli sequestrati. Prima che potesse farlo è stato però incarcerato.
Hal Turner è colui che tempo fa per primo aveva dato notizia di un piano segreto per sostituire il dollaro, dopo una grave crisi finanziaria, con una moneta comune nordamericana, l’Amero. In una drammatica telefonata dall’interno del penitenziario in cui è rinchiuso in attesa del processo, diffusa via internet, Hal Turner afferma chiaramente che il suo arresto è di natura politica ed è in relazione ai titoli sequestrati a Chiasso, perché le autorità sarebbero terrorizzate dalle sue rivelazioni sull’autenticità dei titoli. Le accuse rivoltegli niente hanno a che vedere, è ovvio, con la vicenda e così, ad un quadro già molto intricato, si aggiunge perciò ulteriore complessità. Turner afferma di non essere stato lui personalmente ad aver formulato le minacce per le quali è stato incarcerato. Sebbene fosse evidentemente sua responsabilità vigilare, è anche vero che i blog di tutto il mondo e degli USA stessi sono pieni di minacce e provocazioni. La coincidenza temporale, l’insolita solerzia ed i particolari del suo arresto procurano quindi non pochi sospetti sulle reali motivazioni della polizia federale americana. Anzi, proprio questo arresto induce a pensare che i titoli confiscati dalla GdF siano davvero autentici.
Un ulteriore elemento a favore dell’autenticità dei titoli è dato da quelli che la GdF nel comunicato del 4 giugno aveva definito “ Bond Kennedy “ e di cui aveva fornito delle foto. Da esse è evidente che non si tratti di obbligazioni – cioè Bond - ma di Biglietti di Stato, Treasury Notes, perché si tratta di titoli immediatamente spendibili per un controvalore in merci o servizi e perché sono privi di cedola per gli interessi. Sul verso è riprodotta l’immagine del presidente americano e sul retro una navicella spaziale. Da fonti confidenziali, solitamente ben informate, AsiaNews aveva avuto notizia che tale tipo di cartamoneta era stata emessa meno di dieci anni fa (nel 1998), anche se non si poteva sapere se quelli sequestrati a Chiasso erano biglietti autentici. Il fatto però che l’emissione di tale Biglietto di Stato non fosse assolutamente di dominio pubblico tende a far escludere le ipotesi di contraffazione. È poco ragionevole supporre che un falsario riproduca un biglietto non comunemente in circolazione e di cui non vi sia pubblica conoscenza. Per tale ragione si può pertanto ritenere che anche i 124,5 miliardi di dollari suddivisi in 249 titoli da 500 milioni ciascuno siano autentici. Questi ultimi titoli, pur essendo denominati “Federal Reserve Notes” in realtà sono obbligazioni – bond – perché maturano interessi e sono redimibili a scadenza. In merito ad essi, rimane però un quesito insoluto. Non si capisce infatti per quale ragione, i titoli, da subito apparsi alla GdF indistinguibili dagli originali, abbiano tutte le cedole. Qualsiasi normale investitore, anche uno Stato, avrebbe incassato annualmente le cedole degli interessi, per non perdere potere d’acquisto.
giovedì 18 giugno 2009
2 giapponesi in gita, e 180 mila miliardi di lire
..forse solo mettere la cifra nelle vecchie lire può rendere immediatamente il rilevo di questa notizia, uscita ormai una decina di giorni fa.
Cioè, in breve: due giapponesi, con bond americani, al confine svizzero, titoli del tesoro per 134 miliardi di dollari.
sulle prime, mi pare una bufala: il sacro Corriere, né la libera Repubblica, dicono nulla.
La notizia però appare sul sito del Messaggero, su Radio 24 del Sole 24 ore, e pure sul sito della Guardia di Finanza.
Un sequestro di titoli per una somma simile è una notizia da prima pagina: anche se fossero falsi, comunque si tratterebbe di un tentativo di truffa spropositato e degno in sè di attenzione mediatica e magari delle analisi di qualche giornalista democratico "d'assalto". Sui pochi blog in cui si discute la faccenda, si fanno le ipotesi più varie, ma l'entità della cifra fa intravedere possibili coinvolgimenti di governi, o organizzazioni criminali di eguale livello.
Ma sul fronte della stampa italica, nulla. Nessun giornalista, nessun politico che se ne occupi; anche i pochi media che hanno pur dato (sebbene nell'angolo "curiosità"), non manifestano alcun ulteriore interesse, troppo presi dalle ragazze di silvio, la mosca uccisa al volo da obama, le vacanze di borriello, seguite assiduamente passo passo.
Qualcheduno però traduce il lancio d'agenzia in inglese, e in poco tempo all'estero ne parlano France 24, il Time, l'Indipendent, diversi giornali giapponesi, che si pongono alcune domande.
una spy story da intrigo internazionale, che però ci è quasi sconosciuta. al contrario di una marea di corbellerie che vengono invece sviscerate nei minimi dettagli. perché ciò?
quale il valore della stampa, se è essa stessa la causa della censura delle notizie?
Due giapponesi fermati alla dogana di Chiasso con titoli Usa pari a 7 volte l’ultima finanziaria
di Luca Fazzo (da ilgiornale.it)
Il Grande Colpo finisce su un marciapiede della stazione di Chiasso, alle due e mezza di un pomeriggio di sole. Ai due businessman con gli occhi a mandorla si affiancano due finanzieri in divisa grigia. È una specie di duello silenzioso, quello che si combatte accanto ai binari. Da una parte i due giapponesi che mettono in campo tutta la loro arte di passare inosservati, scivolare via, rendersi invisibili. Dall’altra l’eterno alleato di ogni sbirro: il fiuto, il senso che ti fa sentire nell’aria che qualcosa non va, che un dettaglio non è come dovrebbe essere, che una narice freme invece di stare ferma. A volte vincono i cattivi. A volte no. Mercoledì pomeriggio, alla stazione di Chiasso, vincono i finanzieri. Le valigie dei due vengono aperte. E insieme alle valigie i due militari spalancano lo scenario di un giallo internazionale. Traffico di titoli, falso, truffa, chissà di cosa diamine stiamo parlando. L’unica certezza è che il colpo era colossale. E ricorda quanto tumultuoso sia il fiume degli affari sporchi che giorno per giorno incrocia il corso dell’economia pulita, mischiandosi ad essa e producendo utili fantasmagorici.
La notizia viene diramata la sera di giovedì. Ed è così enorme - nelle sue cifre - che i giornali di ieri quasi non se ne accorgono. Perché il comunicato congiunto delle Dogane e delle Fiamme gialle parla di un sequestro da 134 miliardi di dollari. A tanto ammontano i titoli di Stato americani che saltano fuori dalle valigie dei due giapponesi, quando la Finanza le apre e ne smaschera - sotto le camicie ed i pedalini - il doppio fondo. 134 miliardi di dollari sono 96 miliardi di euro. L’equivalente di sette volte l’ultima legge finanziaria. Se i bond americani fossero buoni, solo a titolo di sanzione per l’esportazione clandestina lo Stato italiano potrebbe intascarsene il 40 per cento. 38 miliardi, euro più o meno. Roba da ricostruirci cinque volte l’Abruzzo.
Ma sono buoni, o sono fasulli i bond sequestrati ai due giapponesi in giacca e cravatta? A lasciare esterrefatti è, insieme al valore complessivo del malloppo, il valore facciale dei titoli nascosti sotto le mutande. In una valigia, quella del giapponese più giovane, ci sono 249 obbligazioni della Federal Reserve americana da 500 milioni di dollari ciascuna. Nell’altra, solo dieci pezzi: «Kennedy Bond», altri titoli di Stato a stelle e strisce. Ma ognuno ha il valore nominale di un miliardo di dollari. I finanzieri non credono ai loro occhi. «One billion dollars». Possibile?
No. Probabilmente non è possibile. Il giorno dopo, a Como, i finanzieri non si sbilanciano. Ma in cuor loro sono convinti che alla fine si scoprirà che i titoli sono falsi. Ma l’inchiesta non finisce qui. Anzi. Perché se i bond americani sono buoni, allora siamo davanti ad un clamoroso caso di esportazione di valuta. Ma se invece sono dei falsi, allora bisogna dire che sono dei falsi fatti dannatamente bene. Soprattutto i 249 pezzi da 500 milioni sono roba da professionisti: filigrana di alta qualità, nessuna sbavatura. Un lavoro che solo una band internazionale è in grado di mettere in piedi, come primo passo di una stangata memorabile.
E poi ci sono loro. I giapponesi. Di truffatori - di «zanza», come li chiamava il gergo della malavita milanese - sulla frontiera italosvizzera ne sono circolati di tutte le razze e di tutti gli accenti. Da sempre. Ma invano si frugherebbero gli annali della cronaca nera alla ricerca di due «zanza» venuti dal Giappone. Una connection internazionale dai contorni inediti prende forma in queste ore nel fascicolo aperto dalla Procura di Como.
I due giapponesi - questa è finora la ricostruzione possibile - incontrano il loro «carico» a Milano nel pomeriggio di martedì, o forse mercoledì mattina. Di sicuro, martedì sera i due dormono in un albergo del centro. La mattina successiva, con le due valigie truccate, si imbarcano alla volta della Svizzera. Potrebbero salire su un Intercity in partenza dalla Stazione Centrale che li sbarcherebbe direttamente a Lugano. Invece vanno a Porta Garibaldi, una stazione da pendolari, e prendono un treno da pendolari che si ferma a cavallo della frontiera. Il regionale 10854 delle 13,38, una specie di diligenza elettrica che ferma in tutte le stazioni - Lentate, Carimate, Cermenate, Cucciago eccetera - e impiega un’ora e sei minuti per arrivare al confine. Ai due giapponesi, evidentemente, importa più passare inosservati che fare in fretta.
E invece, arrivati a Chiasso, inosservati non riescono a passare. La frontiera, ormai, ufficialmente non è più presidiata, da quando la Svizzera ha aderito agli accordi di Schengen. Ma i finanzieri e i doganieri ci sono ancora, e soldi di provenienza oscura viaggiano ancora di qua e di là dal confine. L’altr’anno avevano beccato cento milioni di titoli americani. Pochi giorni fa, ottocentomila euro di titoli del Lussemburgo. Meno che spiccioli, di fronte all’incredibile malloppo che salta fuori dalle due valigie. «Di bond da un miliardo di dollari - racconta al Giornale uno specialista del ramo - io non ho mai sentito neanche parlare. Se esistono, credo che circolino solo nei rapporti tra Stati». Per capire che diavolo siano questi titoli, intervengono ieri gli 007 Usa, il Secret Service dell’ambasciata di Roma. L’intrigo internazionale è solo agli inizi.
Cioè, in breve: due giapponesi, con bond americani, al confine svizzero, titoli del tesoro per 134 miliardi di dollari.
sulle prime, mi pare una bufala: il sacro Corriere, né la libera Repubblica, dicono nulla.
La notizia però appare sul sito del Messaggero, su Radio 24 del Sole 24 ore, e pure sul sito della Guardia di Finanza.
Un sequestro di titoli per una somma simile è una notizia da prima pagina: anche se fossero falsi, comunque si tratterebbe di un tentativo di truffa spropositato e degno in sè di attenzione mediatica e magari delle analisi di qualche giornalista democratico "d'assalto". Sui pochi blog in cui si discute la faccenda, si fanno le ipotesi più varie, ma l'entità della cifra fa intravedere possibili coinvolgimenti di governi, o organizzazioni criminali di eguale livello.
Ma sul fronte della stampa italica, nulla. Nessun giornalista, nessun politico che se ne occupi; anche i pochi media che hanno pur dato (sebbene nell'angolo "curiosità"), non manifestano alcun ulteriore interesse, troppo presi dalle ragazze di silvio, la mosca uccisa al volo da obama, le vacanze di borriello, seguite assiduamente passo passo.
Qualcheduno però traduce il lancio d'agenzia in inglese, e in poco tempo all'estero ne parlano France 24, il Time, l'Indipendent, diversi giornali giapponesi, che si pongono alcune domande.
una spy story da intrigo internazionale, che però ci è quasi sconosciuta. al contrario di una marea di corbellerie che vengono invece sviscerate nei minimi dettagli. perché ciò?
quale il valore della stampa, se è essa stessa la causa della censura delle notizie?
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