The story of an Italian banker: for a while he had the Midas touch; he masterminded a financial empire. It enriched fascists and priests. Bankers and swindlers. When it all crashed, the scandal reached even to the inner sanctum of the Catholic church. Tonight: the story of the man called God’s Banker. BBC Panorama: God’s Banker & Frontline PBS ***** BBC 1983
Calvi’s Italian bank was in big trouble. ibid.
It’s a puzzle to which we have some of the pieces … Power, politics and the Catholic church … The investigation was triggered by the death of Roberto Calvi. ibid.
Calvi was inducted into an illegal cell of Italian Freemasons … ibid.
It was the Vatican’s cash assets Calvi helped to manage. ibid.
This is the headquarters of Calvi’s bank in Nassau. [Archbishop] Marcinkus was a director of the bank: very unusual for an Archbishop. ibid.
Gelli was also the Grandmaster of an illegal ultra-secret political society of Italian Freemasons. In the 1970s he inducted almost a thousand of Italy’s most powerful men in clandestine rituals here in Rome’s Excelsior Hotel. Gelli created an organisation of the radical right, a state within a state, taking in government ministers, generals, heads of corporations and major banks like Calvi. Even the head of the Italian secret service. They called themselves Propaganda Due, and when they were uncovered in March 1981 the scandal brought down the Italian government. ibid.
Gelli persuaded Calvi to to buy 40% of Italy’s largest and most prestigious newspaper the Corriere Della Sera. ibid.
Calvi invested heavily in extreme right-wing anti-communist newspapers in Uruguay and Argentina. Gelli’s closest contact in South America was the Argentinian dictator Juan Peron. ibid.
P2 and the ultimately respectable but also secretive Vatican were using Calvi’s bank to move money for political purposes. P2 was exposed in March 1981. ibid.
Italian authorities became suspicious of Calvi’s deals on the Milan stock exchange. ibid.
Too much was becoming public and Calvi began to fear for his life. ibid.
We don’t know why Calvi was taken to London. ibid.
David Cameron and the missing billions. The former prime minister promoted his friends’ controversial investment schemes. We reveal the truth about Lex Greensill’s dodgy deals. How UK tax-payers could lose hundreds of millions. And how David Cameron pocketed a fortune. Panorama: Cameron and the Missing Billions, BBC 2021
This is a story of a former British prime minister and a dodgy scheme that could cost investors billions. ibid.
This used to be the headquarters of Greensill Bank until it went bust earlier year. The bank’s offices and the homes of its former bosses have been raided by police. Billions of savers’ cash looks to be lost. ibid.
The bank was part of a British-based investment company – Greensill Capital. ibid.
There had already been allegations in the press about some of Greensill’s investment schemes … With David Cameron on board, Greensill Capital attracted billions from investors. Their money was supposed to be safe. ibid.
Greensill made loans to businesses that were waiting to be paid for goods and services they had supplied to customers. But it didn’t use its own cash; the money for the loans was raised from investors, and Lex Greensill brought in a famous friend to drum up business. ibid.
The invoices simply didn’t exist. ibid.
In 1792 Thomas Jefferson adopted the dollar as this country’s official monetary unit. Jefferson in particular spoke eloquently of the dangers of paper money. Frontline: Money, Banking & the Federal Reserve, PBS 2006
For more than twenty years the living standards of middle class Americans have steadily declined. ibid.
For most families one income no longer pays the bills. ibid.
The roots of our economic ills can be traced to central banking and our present monetary system. ibid.
There was no longer a one to one ratio of paper to gold. Now there could be three or four pieces of paper in circulation for every unit of gold in the vault. ibid.
This system became known as Fractional Reserve Banking. ibid.
Wall Street swiftly adopted the fear of bank failures to sell the idea of a central bank or lender of last resort. ibid.
In November of 1910 under the guise of a duck hunting trip six men took a secret train ride to an exclusive private club on Jekyll Island, Georgia, to write a central banking act. The classified gathering read like a Who’s Who of American banking. ibid.
When the Fed was established in 1913 it cut reserve requirements in half over the next four years doubling the money supply by the end of World War I. But the Fed’s real power lies in its monopoly to create money. ibid.
The Federal Reserve system adds another inflationary layer to an already unstable banking system. ibid.
Roosevelt confiscated the people’s gold. ibid.
There is not now nor has there ever been any direct control over the Fed by the president or Congress. The meetings of the Federal Reserve Board are held in secret. And nobody knows exactly what goes on. ibid.
A recent attempt to open the Fed to public scrutiny came in 1993 ... An independent audit of the Fed’s operations ... The proceedings of the open market committee video-taped with detailed minutes released within a week ... The President choose the twelve heads of the Fed’s regional banks instead of powerful bankers. Predictably, Fed’s Chairman Alan Greenspan resisted the changes. What was surprising was the president Bill Clinton’s position. He declared the reforms would ‘run the risk of undermining market confidence in the Fed’. ibid.
Despite the established view, Greenspan and the Fed and big commercial bankers are not the inflation fighters they pretend to be; the Fed and its allied banks are not part of the solution to inflation and the business cycle, they are the problem itself. ibid.
The recession had destroyed eleven trillion dollars of Americans’ net worth. A recovery seemed far off. Occupy Wall Street wanted bankers held responsible. Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street I, PBS 2012
Credit Default Swaps – a kind of derivative that ensues a loan against default. ibid.
And so they began selling derivatives that were simply bets on any and all portfolios whether the bank owned them or not. These products came to be known as Synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations – Synthetic CDOs. ibid.
A wave of lending abuses. ibid.
By the end of 2005 the total outstanding value of credit default swaps around the world was measured in trillions of dollars and was doubling every year. ibid.
AIG was on the hook for $440 billion of credit default swaps. ibid.
It was on a cold March day in 2008 that the fear of a meltdown would become a reality. After the real estate bubble burst it would only be a matter of time before investors would start to lose confident in Wall Street’s biggest banks. Bear Stearns was the first to crack. Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street II
Bear was party to complicated financial deals. Geithner learned that Bear had made credit default swap deals worth trillions of dollars all over Wall Street and around the world. Geithner saw what central bankers feared most: systemic risk. ibid.
A bail-out of Bear Stearns was not [Henry] Paulson’s style. But [Ben] Bernanke and Geithner believed it was too big to fail. And by that weekend options were dwindling. ibid.
One of the most basic moral tenets of the free market – Moral Hazard. ibid.
Paulson told President Bush what was needed now was to rebuild confidence in the economy ... It became known as the Summer of Assurances. ibid.
Then it hit: in the cross-hairs the world’s fourth largest investment bank – Lehman Brothers. ibid.
Paulson delivered the message: Lehman was in a death spiral and there would be no government bail-out. ibid.
Geithner realised that if AIG went down the consequences would be even worse than Lehman. He argued for another bail-out. ibid.
Conservative Republicans in the House were in full revolt. ibid.
The Congress finally passed Paulson’s Bill ... Paulson was about to hand out billions of dollars. ibid.
The Stock Market was down more than 6,000 points. Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street III
The mega-bank Citibank was failing. ibid.
Barack Obama had made the economy a key issue. ibid.
For months there had been public anger of Wall Street. ibid.
The anger was not just confined to the streets. On Capitol Hill Congress responded to the public anger – they summoned the heads of the nation’s biggest banks. ibid.
The banks were so large and inter-connected the government felt it had to bail them out. Because their failure could bring down the entire economy. They are Too Big To Fail. ibid.