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Obama is promoting Summers as his lead pick for a possible new Chairman to Fed Reserve.
if we had any control over that would we even be in this situation?
the inmates are running the prison, what else would we expect.
WTO. A small group of bankers looking to demolish regulations around the world in order to gamble everyone's money by deregulating the banks of all wto nations and introducing derivatives
After Obama took office in 2008, he enacted sweeping ethics rules that say that no presidential appointee can work on matters directly related to a former employer for two years after taking a government job. That means that unless Obama grants Summers an exemption from the rules—a move that could be politically controversial—the former Treasury secretary will have to recuse himself from a slew of Fed decisions involving Citi, which is the third-largest bank in America. Experts say those recusals could hamper Summers' ability to run the Fed effectively.
The Obama administration has granted dozens of ethics rules waivers since 2009, but they have mostly gone to lower-level appointees with limited conflicts of interest. Were Summers to be granted a waiver, according to Holman, it would be the most significant one yet.
If appointed, Summers might have to remove himself from consultations on penalties levied against Citi for things like sketchy foreclosure practices and inadequate anti-money-laundering protections. Nor would he be able to vote on post-financial crisis rules that Congress ordered the Fed to draft, including restrictions on CEO pay and guidelines for how much emergency capital Citi has to keep on its books. (The Fed board votes on all regulations, mergers, and applications to form new banks; it has voted 20 times so far in 2013. Penalty decisions are often delegated to staff or regional reserve banks, but the board consults on them.)
Holman says Summers' potential conflicts of interest should trouble the White House. "You'd expect that if he represents a behemoth and has to recuse himself so frequently, that should be a factor in considering not appointing him." But Sanford Weill, the architect of the merger that created Citigroup and its chairman until 2006, is not worried. On Tuesday, he noted that that he has "unbelievable confidence" in Summers' ability to do the job.
The “end-game” would require not just coercing support among WTO members but taking down those countries refusing to join. Some key countries remained holdouts from the WTO, including Iraq, Libya, Iran and Syria. In these Islamic countries, banks are largely state-owned; and “usury” – charging rent for the “use” of money – is viewed as a sin, if not a crime. That puts them at odds with the Western model of rent extraction by private middlemen. Publicly-owned banks are also a threat to the mushrooming derivatives business, since governments with their own banks don’t need interest rate swaps, credit default swaps, or investment-grade ratings by private rating agencies in order to finance their operations.
The game then in play was the deregulation of banks so that they could gamble in the lucrative new field of derivatives. To pull this off required, first, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the 1933 Act that imposed a firewall between investment banking and depository banking in order to protect depositors’ funds from bank gambling. But the plan required more than just deregulating US banks. Banking controls had to be eliminated globally so that money would not flee to nations with safer banking laws. The “endgame” was to achieve this global deregulation through an obscure addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organization, called the Financial Services Agreement. Palast wrote:
Until the bankers began their play, the WTO agreements dealt simply with trade in goods–that is, my cars for your bananas. The new rules ginned-up by Summers and the banks would force all nations to accept trade in "bads" – toxic assets like financial derivatives.