Are Bankers Being Killed Because They Know Too Much?

2/14/14......

(KWN) - Today a brave and outspoken hedge fund manager out of Hong Kong told King World News that what the world has just witnessed is not the suicide of five bankers, but rather five bankers that were killed because of their knowledge, and therefore the threat that they would expose the criminal activity of major banks. William Kaye, who 25 years ago worked for Goldman Sachs in mergers and acquisitions, also spoke with KWN about why this tragic situation is unfolding in such a gruesome manner.

Eric King: “Bill, we have bankers dropping like flies. What is happening here?”

Kaye: “They are, and the question is: Are they being pushed to their deaths or do they delusionally think there is a swimming pool below? It’s very tragic, but it also ties into our earlier discussions about how the bullion banks have conspired to manipulate gold and silver, and also how banks are manipulating markets around the world....

“I’ll come back to the bankers dropping like flies in a minute, but, first, despite the manipulation, gold is looking even better today, and certainly 2014 is going to be much better than 2013. Because of the enormous record demand for physical gold by China, it does appear precarious for the cartel.

In order to maintain the suppression, the cartel needs to find the necessary physical gold to deliver to China, because as I said, Chinese demand is just enormous at the moment. This is getting more difficult for the cartel, so the clear strategy is for them to retreat.

Now returning to your question of what do I think about the suicidal bankers. I’m naturally very suspect whether all of these guys, many of whom were at the peak of their careers, had no history of mental illness, and no history of depression that’s been disclosed in any of these cases, all suddenly decided to kill themselves. This just doesn’t jibe.
It appears to be tied in with investigations that are going on with respect to the fixing of the gold price in London, and more importantly with manipulation and fixing of various FOREX spreads for the benefit and the profit of these same banks.

Full Read: KWN: Are Bankers Being Killed Because They Know Too Much?

Timeline....... Note the headlines......

1/16/14..... a reporter goes missing while taking a brief walk .....

Authorities Comb New Jersey Woodland in Hunt for Missing Reporter

By NATE SCHWEBER and MICHAEL SCHWIRTZJAN. 16, 2014

Searching for David Bird in Morris County, N.J., on Thursday. Mr. Bird, a Wall Street Journal reporter, disappeared on Saturday. Karsten Moran for The New York Times

LONG HILL TOWNSHIP, N.J. — Using all-terrain vehicles, rubber rafts and aluminum motorboats, hundreds of law enforcement officers and volunteers scoured a dense, swampy woodland in central New Jersey on Thursday in search of a Wall Street Journal reporter who went out for a walk last weekend and never returned.

The reporter, David Bird, 55, was last seen at about 4:30 p.m. on Saturday when he told his wife, Nancy, that he planned to go on a brief walk through the wooded trails near their home in this Morris County community, according to a friend who is acting as spokeswoman for the family. When he had not returned by 6 p.m., his wife called the police.

Chief Michael Mazzeo of the Long Hill police said on Thursday that at this point no criminality was suspected. Chief Mazzeo said the search initially focused on the trails and paths Mr. Bird was known to wander and has turned to a treacherous area of swamp along the Passaic River.

“We have searched every tract of land possible in our township,” he said. “Now we’re checking outlying areas off-road that he may have used as a cut through.”

Mr. Bird, who covers energy markets for The Journal, had a liver transplant nine years ago and is required to take antirejection drugs daily, the family spokeswoman said. He also had been suffering from a gastrointestinal virus, and there is some concern he might have been dehydrated.

The rural area where he disappeared includes the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, and people do get lost in and around the 7,768-acre preserve. Last week alone, he was among three people reported missing in town. He is the only one yet to be found, Chief Mazzeo said.

Last spring a woman was reported missing and three days later stumbled out of the Great Swamp, where she had become lost, the chief said.

He added that it was easy to do, even for those familiar with the area.

“It’s not uncommon for people to go into the Great Swamp, hunters, and all of the sudden it gets dark and their cellphone doesn’t work and the battery on the GPS they were using dies,” he said. Mr. Bird did not have a cellphone with him.

Chief Mazzeo described Thursday’s search area near Lord Sterling Road in neighboring Millington as “the middle of a swamp: cold, dark, wet, rural, woodsy.” Arctic temperatures last week made the Passaic River here freeze, he said. But by Saturday the air had warmed. Often, along the edge of the swamp, he said, thin layers of ice coat deep water.

Mr. Bird recently ran the New York City Marathon and trained by going for miles-long walks near his home. The police said that Mr. Bird’s wife told them her husband started walking Saturday on Long Hill Road, near a wooded path he liked called Hicks Trail.

Gerard Baker, the managing editor of The Journal, said in a statement that the company was working with the police.

“Mr. Bird is a longtime member of the Dow Jones newsroom,” the statement said. “Our thoughts are with his family.”

At Mr. Bird’s home on Thursday, six women, including his wife, sat around a kitchen table, typing at computers and juggling cellphones.

“This is a tense and difficult time for the Bird family,” the family spokeswoman said. “They are deeply moved by the outpouring of concern and prayers.

“We’re fixated on finding David and getting him home.”

Chief Mazzeo said searchers were keeping a “positive and optimistic outlook.”

“Mr. Bird was a scout leader, a father of two, and he has a loving wife,” he said. “There’s nothing in his background that shows any indiscretions. A gentleman just doesn’t say, ‘I’ll be back after a short walk,’ and then just not return.

1/16/14.....

Precious Metals Manipulation Worse Than Libor Scandal, German Regulator Says

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/16/2014 18:39 -0500

Central Banks

Commodity Futures Trading Commission

Deutsche Bank

Gold Bugs

LIBOR

New Normal

Precious Metals

Remember when banks were exposed manipulating virtually everything except precious metals, because obviously nobody ever manipulates the price of gold and silver? After all, the biggest "conspiracy theory" of all is that crazy gold bugs blame every move against them on some vile manipulator. It may be time to shift yet another conspiracy "theory" into the "fact" bin, thanks to Elke Koenig, the president of Germany's top financial regulator, Bafin, which apparently is not as corrupt, complicit and clueless as its US equivalent, and who said that in addition to currency rates, manipulation of precious metals "is worse than the Libor-rigging scandal." Hear that Bart Chilton and friends from the CFTC?

Setting Prices

In private meetings last year, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates derivatives, discussed reviewing how gold prices are set, a person with knowledge of the talks said. The U.K.’s FCA is scrutinizing the setting of gold prices, a person with knowledge of the review who asked not to be identified because the matter isn’t public, said last year.

The London Bullion Market Association said in November it’s reviewing its own benchmarks to see whether they conform to guidelines set by the International Organization of Securities Commissions in July. Those include making prices based on “observable” deals where possible. The LBMA oversees gold forward offered rates, which reflect bullion borrowing costs for different durations and are used in loan agreements.

Aelred Connelly, a spokesman for the association, said he couldn’t immediately comment.

“Deutsche Bank is withdrawing its participation in the gold and silver benchmark-setting process following the significant scaling back of our commodities business,” the bank said in an e-mailed statement today. “We remain fully committed to our precious metals business.”

Fixing Process

Deutsche Bank will continue in the fixings until a buyer for its seat is found, said the person familiar with the plan.

Barclays Plc, Bank of Nova Scotia, HSBC Holdings Plc and Societe Generale SA also take part in the gold fixing, published twice daily in a ritual that dates back to 1919. Douglas Beadle, who acts as a consultant to the London Gold Market Fixing Ltd., a company controlled by the five banks, said the fixing process will continue as usual.

During the fixing, conducted by phone, the designated chairman gives a figure close to the current spot price in dollars for an ounce of gold. The firms then declare how many bars they wish to buy or sell at that price, based on orders from clients as well as their own account. The talks continue until the buy and sell amounts are within 50 bars, or about 620 kilograms, of each other.

HSBC and Bank of Nova Scotia are the other two silver fixing members, a process that occurs once a day.

Fixing Members

Aurelie Leonard, a spokeswoman for Barclays, HSBC spokeswoman Shani Halstead and Saphia Gaouaoui, a spokeswoman at Societe Generale, declined to comment. Joe Konecny, a spokesman for Bank of Nova Scotia, didn’t immediately return a voice message left outside of normal Toronto business hours.

Deutsche Bank said last month it will exit dedicated energy, agriculture, dry bulk and base metals trading and transfer its financial derivatives and precious metals desks to the fixed income and currencies division. The decision to cut jobs will have “no material impact” on earnings, it said.

Its investment banking and trading unit, which includes commodities, employed 25,062 people at the end of September, company filings show. The bank generated $881 million in raw materials revenue in 2012, according to a JPMorgan report on April 11.

Commodities revenue at the world’s 10 largest investment banks probably dropped 14 percent to $4.7 billion in 2013, London-based analytics company Coalition said in November. The biggest banks have cut commodities staff to the lowest since at least 2009, according to Coalition.

Commodities Trading

JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, said in July it plans to get out of the business of owning and trading physical commodities ranging from metals to oil. Morgan Stanley cut 10 percent of its workforce in the commodity division last year and agreed to sell its global oil business to OAO Rosneft, Russia’s largest petroleum producer.

Citigroup Inc. said last year that the “super cycle” of commodities gains has ended because supply caught up with demand. The Standard & Poor’s GSCI Spot Index of 24 raw materials fell 2.2 percent in 2013, the first annual decline in five years. Silver slumped 36 percent last year and gold tumbled 28 percent, the biggest declines since 1981. The metals were the second- and third-worst performers in the S&P gauge, after corn.

1/23/14......

This Is The Greatest Financial Market And Currency Manipulation Of All Times

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/23/2014 18:57 -0500

Submitted by GoldSilverWorlds.com,

In a week that has been marked by astonishing mainstream headlines, BFI Capital’s CEO Frank Suess happened to give an outstanding interview about the outlook for global currencies, gold and manipulation in the markets.

Consider the following headlines. They may have come at an unexpected timing, in the light of the economic recovery story, but they were for sure unavoidable:

Federal Reserve Said to Probe Banks Over Forex Fixing (Bloomberg)

Deutsche, Citi feel the heat of widening FX investigation (Reuters)

HSBC, Citi suspend traders as FX probe deepens (Reuters)

Metals, Currency Rigging Is Worse Than Libor, Bafin Says (Bloomberg)

The most remarkable event of the past week was the Federal Reserve investigating whether traders at the world’s biggest banks have been rigging currency rates. According to Bloomberg, the Fed is probing whether traders shared information that may have let them manipulate prices in the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market for profit maximization (source).

Also during the past week, US Regulators have been examining traders at Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, and HSBC. On top of that, Germany’s top financial regulator Bafin made a public statement, warning the manipulation of currency rates and precious metals prices could be worse than the Libor-rigging scandal. Bafin confirmed its firm is investigating currency trading, joining regulators in the UK, US and Switzerland (source).

These developments are significant and could mark a tipping point. Up until now, the currency and precious metals manipulation has been a topic associated with conspiracy theorists in the corners of the blogosphere. With regard to the signs of manipulation, Bafin’s president Elke Koenig said that “It is understandable that the issue is causing such a public reaction. The financial sector is dependent on the common trust that it is efficient and at the same time, honest. The central benchmark rates seemed to be beyond any doubt, and now there is the allegation they may have been manipulated.”

The interesting fact is that this news breaks out exactly at the time when most people are being trapped into the “economic recovery” news. With the markets hanging at the lips of the central bankers, it is fair to say that “the central banks are the markets.” Frank Suess points out that, for several decades now, central banks around the world, with the US Federal Reserve in the lead, haven’t allowed business and credit cycles to happen anymore. In fact, they have been fighting consistently every sign of recession with more money, resulting in a race to the bottom of world currencies.

The effect of this on world currencies is that they are shuffling each other down in a see-saw pattern, a phenomenon that has become visible in the US dollar, the euro, the yen and the British Pound. With the US dollar in the lead, all other currencies can only follow the same path. The yen, as a text book example, has lost more than 20% against the dollar over the past year, and this is putting a lot of pressure on currencies across Asia. “We are now seeing huge capital outflows due to that from many countries in Asia. That creates investment opportunities, you can invest in the Japanese stock markets going up nicely right now as long as you hedge against the yen on the downside.”

But, in reality, we are really witnessing the greatest financial market and currency manipulation of all times, observes Frank Suess. “Central banks are just suppressing interest rates across the yield curve with the seemingly endless money supply. If you ask me which currencies are going to be devalued most considerably, I guess it is hard to find currencies that are not being devalued considerably. If you want to take advantage of currencies, you must protect yourself or benefit in that “see-saw” pattern.”

Even the Swiss franc or the Norwegian krone are pulled into this, even though fundamentally those economies are still quite strong (both economies have budget surpluses and Switzerland was again voted number one in terms of economic competitiveness by the World Economic Forum, facing only 3% unemployment). There is clearly a delinkage between fundamental and fiscal strength, even in the fundamentally strongest currencies. Therefore the large currencies with their debt problems and monetary expansion are pulling everyone down.

More specifically in Europe, where Frank Suess’ BFI Capital is based, the struggle over the euro could well reignite into a “fragmentation Europe.” At some point, it will not take that much for the debt crisis in Europe to kick back in. Investors around the world are hoping that the recovery story, which is being repeated like a mantra by central bankers, politicians, mainstream media, is going to hold. However,fundamentally, in terms of fiscal health, Europe and most other Western nations are not really in better shape than they were a few years back. “The future of the Euro could maybe be destroyed to some degree by the political tensions that you can expect to rise. Once that recovery story ends and reality kicks back in, I think the euro is anything but a blessing for the European Union.”

In that respect, it is interesting to observe the peg of the Swiss franc against the euro. In reality, the peg is actually a floor, set at 1.20. At this point the Swiss franc to Euro is about a 1.23. Policy makers have been successfully defending that floor. “I think what they will do is exactly what we just discussed. While everyone keeps on depreciating their currency, the Swiss central bank will go along with that, except if the Euro really went into a steep fall (crisis). At a certain point, the floor will break and the Swiss franc, together with some other currencies, will rapidly appreciate.”

Speaking of financial crises, shouldn’t the new regulations by the Bank for International Settlements in their Basel III initiative prevent another crisis? Frank Suess considers the new regulations more as a farce, explaining that some of the accounting rules that have been put in place really do not add too much value in that respect. For example, looking at the risk-adjusted valuation of assets on the balance sheets of banks, it appears that some of the banks today say they have a 10% capital ratio where, in fact, they are still very similar to what they had back in 2008. “The more you look into the details, the more you really see that it is a fake leaf. I wouldn’t depend on Basel III for being able to prevent a crisis”

The outlook of the ongoing currency devaluations and the signs of a failing financial system bring up the question how people can protect themselves. There is one currency that is not expected to go down, just by the mere fact that it is limited in supply. It is obviously gold. “You need to protect yourself with real assets. If you are going into gold or silver, you must be doing that with the allocated or segregated approach, not with the paper money approach. You don’t have to follow the mainstream too much, and have a hedge in place. That is where gold can play a role.”

Then more odd things start to happen , apart from the missing reporter ....

1/28/14.....

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2547343/Former-executive-Deutsche-Bank-hanged-Kensington-home.html

A former Deutsche Bank executive has been found dead at a house in London, it emerged today.

The body of William ‘Bill’ Broeksmit, 58, was discovered at his home in South Kensington on Sunday shortly after midday by police, who had been called to reports of a man found hanging at a house.

Mr Broeksmit - who retired last February - was a former senior manager with close ties to co-chief executive Anshu Jain. Metropolitan Police officers said his death was non-suspicious.

****

Mr Broeksmit worked in investment banking - specifically risk and securities - and lived on exclusive Evelyn Gardens in South Kensington, which has an average property value of £1.9million.

He worked at Deutsche Bank from 1996 to 2001, then from 2008 until he retired. Mr Broeksmit was also employed by Merrill Lynch for a period.

Mr Broeksmit was one of around 100 bankers who left Merrill Lynch for Deutsche when its investment banking arm was founded in the 1990s.

He was involved in the process of rescuing the bank in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when many investment banks found their debts were 'toxic', and unlikely ever to be repaid.

Mr Broeksmit, a renowned risk expert, assisted the bank's efforts to shift the worst of the debt, and reduce its total amount of lending.

Chiefs at Deutsche Bank had planned to promote Mr Broeksmit to its management board in 2012, but stopped when the German financial regulator expressed doubts about his experience as a leader.

Scotland Yard confirmed only that a 58-year-old man was found hanged. A spokesman said: ‘Police were called at 12.35pm on Sunday to a man found hanging at Evelyn Gardens, SW7.

‘Kensington and Chelsea police, ambulance and air ambulance all attended. A 58-year-old man was declared dead at the scene. The death is being treated as non-suspicious.’

1/28/14.......

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2547275/BREAKING-NEWS-Man-30s-dies-plunge-JP-Morgan-headquarters-Canary-Wharf.html

Employees at JP Morgan have held a minute's silence today for a bank executive who died after jumping 500ft from the top of the bank's European headquarters in London yesterday.

Gabriel Magee, an American senior manager, 39, fell from the 33-storey skyscraper at around 8am and was found on the ninth floor roof, which surrounds the Canary Wharf skyscraper.

His body was left in full view of City workers in surrounding buildings for up to four hours as police investigated the death.

He was a vice president in the corporate and investment bank technology department having joined in 2004, moving to Britain from the United States in 2007.

Employees gathered to remember their colleague in a minute's silence this morning, according to Twitter reports.

Mr Magee, who lived in North London, was an expert in highly specialist software which reaps huge profits for the US company by predicting market patterns.

It is understood that Mr Magee’s girlfriend had reported him missing the previous evening.

A company spokesman said: 'We are deeply saddened to have lost a member of the J.P. Morgan family at 25 Bank Street today. Our thoughts and sympathy are with his family and his friends'.

For confidential support call the Samaritans in the UK on 08457 90 90 90, visit a local Samaritans branch or click here for details

A source close to Mr Magee said he was in 'good standing with his bosses and colleagues. He was well liked.'

Scotland Yard said they were called to 25 Bank Street at 8.02am and detectives are not treating the death as suspicious.

'No arrests have been made and the incident is being treated as non-suspicious at this early stage', a Met spokesman said.

Senior colleagues were last night investigating Mr Magee’s recent workload as rumours swirled around the City over what may have prompted his death.

Last night a colleague said: ‘They’re going to be going through his stuff to try to find out if he’d made some kind of terrible error. It’s possible he had been in the office all night trying to put it right before the fall.’

Canary Wharf workers were in shock after the death, with one trader telling MailOnline that his body lay on the flat roof until around midday.

1/31/14......

Third Banker, Former Fed Member, "Found Dead" Inside A Week

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/31/2014 22:05 -0500

If the stock market were already crashing then it would be simple to blame the dismally sad rash of dead bankers in the last week on that - certainly that was reflected in 1929. However, for the third time in the last week, a senior financial executive has died in what appears to be a suicide. As Bloomberg reports, following the deaths of a JPMorgan senior manager (Tuesday) and a Deutsche Bank executive (Sunday), Russell Investments' Chief Economist (and former Fed economist) Mike Dueker was found dead at the side of a highway in Washington State. Police said the death appeared to be a suicide.

Via Bloomberg,

Mike Dueker, the chief economist at Russell Investments, was found dead at the side of a highway that leads to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state, according to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. He was 50.

He may have jumped over a 4-foot (1.2-meter) fence before falling down a 40- to 50-foot embankment, Pierce County Detective Ed Troyer said yesterday. He said the death appeared to be a suicide.

Dueker was reported missing on Jan. 29, and a group of friends had been searching for him along with law enforcement. Troyer said Dueker was having problems at work, without elaborating.

Dueker was in good standing at Russell, said Jennifer Tice, a company spokeswoman. She declined to comment on Troyer’s statement about Dueker’s work issues.

But as Michael Snyder noted recently, if the stock market was already crashing, it would be easy to blame the suicides on that. The world certainly remembers what happened during the crash of 1929...

Historically, bankers have been stereotyped as the most likely to commit suicide. This has a lot to do with the famous 1929 stock market crash, which resulted in 1,616 banks failing and more than 20,000 businesses going bankrupt.

The number of bankers committing suicide directly after the crash is thought to have been only around 20, with another 100 people connected to the financial industry dying at their own hand within the year.

Dueker had also been a research economist at the St. Louis Fed:

He published dozens of research papers over the past two decades, many on monetary policy, according to the St. Louis Fed’s website, which ranks him among the top 5 percent of economists by number of works published. His most-cited work was a 1997 paper titled “Strengthening the case for the yield curve as a predictor of U.S. recessions,” published by the reserve bank while he was a researcher there.

So, with stocks a mere 4% off their highs, are so many high ranking and well respected bankers committing suicide ?

2/3/14.......

A Rash of Deaths and a Missing Reporter – With Ties to Wall Street Investigations

By Pam Martens: February 3, 2014

Senator Carl Levin's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Is Probing Global Banks' Involvement in the U.S. Commodities Markets

In a span of four days last week, two current executives and one recently retired top ranking executive of major financial firms were found dead. Both media and police have been quick to label the deaths as likely suicides. Missing from the reports is the salient fact that all three of the financial firms the executives worked for are under investigation for potentially serious financial fraud.

The deaths began on Sunday, January 26. London police reported that William Broeksmit, a top executive at Deutsche Bank who had retired in 2013, had been found hanged in his home in the South Kensington section of London. The day after Broeksmit was pronounced dead, Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst turned whistleblower at Deutsche Bank, was scheduled to speak at Auburn University in Alabama on his allegations that Deutsche had hid $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis with the knowledge of senior executives. Two other whistleblowers have brought similar charges against Deutsche Bank.

Deutsche Bank is also under investigation by global regulators for potentially rigging the foreign exchange markets – an action similar to the charges it settled in 2013 over its traders’ involvement in the rigging of the interest rate benchmark, Libor.

Just two days after Broeksmit’s death, on Tuesday, January 28, a 39-year old American, Gabriel Magee, a Vice President at JPMorgan in London, plunged to his death from the roof of the 33-story European headquarters of JPMorgan in Canary Wharf. According to Magee’s LinkedIn profile, he was involved in “Technical architecture oversight for planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives.”

Magee’s parents, Bill and Nell Magee, are not buying the official story according to press reports and are planning to travel from the United States to London to get at the truth. One of their key issues, which should also trouble the police, is how an employee obtains access to the rooftop of one of the mostly highly secure buildings in London.

Nell Magee was quoted in the London Evening Standard saying her son was “a happy person who was happy with his life.” His friends are equally mystified, stating he was in a happy, long-term relationship with a girlfriend.

JPMorgan is under the same global investigation for potential involvement in rigging foreign exchange rates as is Deutsche Bank. The firm is also said to be under an investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for its involvement in potential misconduct in physical commodities markets in the U.S. and London.

One day after Magee’s death, on Wednesday, January 29, 2014, 50-year old Michael (Mike) Dueker, the Chief Economist at Russell Investments, is said to have died from a 50-foot fall from a highway ramp down an embankment in Washington state. Again, suicide is being presented by media as the likely cause. (Do people holding Ph.D.s really attempt suicide by jumping 50 feet?)

According to Dueker’s official bio, prior to joining Russell Investments, he was an assistant vice president and research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis from 1991 to 2008. His duties there included serving as an associate editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. He also was editor of Monetary Trends, a monthly publication of the St. Louis Fed.

Bloomberg News quotes William Poole, former President of the St. Louis Fed from 1998 to 2008, saying “Everyone respected his professional skills and good sense.”

According to a report in the New York Times in November of last year, Russell Investments was one of a number of firms that received subpoenas from New York State regulators who are probing the potential for pay-to-play schemes involving pension funds based in New York. No allegations of wrongdoing have been made against Russell Investments in the matter.

The case of David Bird, the oil markets reporter who had worked at the Wall Street Journal for 20 years and vanished without a trace on the afternoon of January 11, has this in common with the other three tragedies: his work involves a commodities market – oil – which is under investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for possible manipulation. The FBI is involved in the Bird investigation.

Bird left his Long Hill, New Jersey home on that Saturday, telling his wife he was going for a walk. An intentional disappearance is incompatible with the fact that he left the house wearing a bright red jacket and without his life-sustaining medicine he was required to take daily as a result of a liver transplant. Despite a continuous search since his disappearance by hundreds of volunteers, local law enforcement and the FBI, Bird has not been located.

When a series of tragic events involving one industry occur within an 18-day timeframe, the statistical probability of these events being random is remote. According to a number of media reports, JPMorgan is conducting an internal investigation of the death of Gabriel Magee. Given that JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Russell Investments are subjects themselves of investigations, a more serious, independent look at these deaths is called for.

2/4/14...... body actually discovered three days before the story ran on 2/7/14 ......

4th Financial Services Executive Found Dead; "From Self-Inflicted Nail-Gun Wounds"

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/07/2014 17:02 -0500

Real estate

SWIFT

Tribune

The ugly rash of financial services executive suicides appears to have spread once again. Following the jumping deaths of 2 London bankers and a former-Fed economist in the US,The Denver Post reports Richard Talley, founder and CEO of American Title, was found dead in his home from self-inflicted wounds - from a nail-gun. Talley's company was under investigation from insurance regulators.

Via The Denver Post,

Richard Talley, 57, and the company he founded in 2001 were under investigation by state insurance regulators at the time of his death late Tuesday, an agency spokesman confirmed Thursday.

It was unclear how long the investigation had been ongoing or its primary focus.

A coroner's spokeswoman Thursday said Talley was found in his garage by a family member who called authorities. They said Talley died from seven or eight self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head.

Also unclear is whether Talley's suicide was related to the investigation by the Colorado Division of Insurance, which regulates title companies.

...

A checkered past?

Before coming to Colorado, Talley was a former regional financial officer at Drexel Burnham Lambert in Chicago, where he met his wife, Cheryl, a vice president at the company. The two married in 1989.

Talley had formed a number of companies, some now defunct, according to the Colorado secretary of state's office. Among them: American Escrow, Clear Title, Clear Creek Financial Holdings, Swift Basin, Sumar, American Real Estate Services, and the American Alliance of Real Estate Professionals.

It would appear, unfortunately, that Mr. Talley was not an entirely honest man...

Talley's 1989 wedding announcement in the Chicago Tribune noted he was "a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic swimming team."

A spokeswoman for USA Swimming on Thursday said Talley was not on the team.

2/9/14 - Magee alleged suicidal death by leaping from a high rise under official investigation ............. and the initial facts reported are not quite accurate ......

Suspicious Death of JPMorgan Vice President, Gabriel Magee, Under Investigation in London

By Pam Martens: February 9, 2014

(Left) JPMorgan's European Headquarters at 25 Bank Street, in the Canary Wharf Section of London

London Police have confirmed that an official investigation is underway into the death of a 39-year old JPMorgan Vice President whose body was found on the 9^th floor rooftop of a JPMorgan building in Canary Wharf two weeks ago.

The news reports at the time of the incident of Gabriel (Gabe) Magee’s “non suspicious” death by “suicide” resulting from his reported leap from the 33^rd level rooftop of JPMorgan’s European headquarters building in London have turned out to be every bit as reliable as CEO Jamie Dimon’s initial response to press reports on the London Whale trading scandal in 2012 as a “tempest in a teapot.”

An intense investigation is now underway into the details of exactly how Magee died and why his death was so quickly labeled “non suspicious.” An upcoming Coroner’s inquest will reveal the details of that investigation.

It’s becoming clear that when JPMorgan tells us “nothing to see here, move along,” that’s the precise time we need to bring in the blood hounds and law enforcement with the guts to get past this global behemoth’s army of lawyers who have a penchant for taking over investigations and producing their own milquetoast reports of what happened.

Jamie Dimon’s so-called “tempest in a teapot” in the London Whale matter morphed into $6.2 billion in bank depositor losses, $1 billion in fines to JPMorgan, 300 pages of scandalous details by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that called into question JPMorgan’s risk controls and the integrity of upper management, and, finally, resulted in criminal charges against two of the men involved. The criminal cases have yet to go to trial.

According to numerous sources close to the investigation of Gabriel Magee’s death, almost nothing thus far reported about his death has been accurate. This appears to stem from an initial poorly worded press release issued by the Metropolitan Police in London which may have been a result of bad communications between it and JPMorgan or something more deliberate on someone’s part.

The Metropolitan Police have provided me with their original press release. It reads:

“Police were called at approximately 08.02 hrs on Tuesday 28 January to reports of a man having fallen from a building at 25 Bank Street, E14 and landing on a ninth floor roof. London Ambulance Service and London Air Ambulance attended. The man was pronounced dead at the scene a short while later. The deceased is believed to be aged 39. We believe we know the identity of the deceased but await formal identification. Next of kin have been informed. No arrests have been made and the death is being treated as non-suspicious.”

That press release resulted in CNBC running with this headline: “Death Plunge at JP Morgan Tower Not Suspicious, Police Say.” Dozens of other media followed with similar reporting.

The Independent newspaper in London flatly stated that Magee “died after falling from the roof.” The London Evening Standard tweeted: “Bankers watch JP Morgan IT exec fall to his death from roof of London HQ,” which linked to their article which declared in its opening sentence that “A man plunged to his death from a Canary Wharf tower in front of thousands of horrified commuters today.”

At this moment in time, police have yet to produce a single witness who saw Magee jump from the rooftop of this building, let alone “thousands of horrified commuters.” (Exactly why would thousands of horrified commuters be standing in front of 25 Bank Street at 8:02 a.m. with their necks tilted up toward the roof? Magee did not land on the sidewalk; his body was found on a rooftop 9 floors above street level.) Both the Independent and London Evening Standard newspapers are majority owned by Alexander Lebedev, a Russian and former KGB agent.

No one in the media seemed to notice that Iain Dey, Deputy Business Editor of the Sunday Times in London, flatly disputed the notion that a plunge from the rooftop had been observed by anyone when he reported that: “Gabriel Magee’s body lay for several hours before it was found at 8am last Tuesday.”

The only facts in this case which are currently reliable are that fellow workers looking from their windows in the building noticed a body lying on the 9^th level rooftop, which juts out from the main 33-story building, at around 8:02 a.m. on Tuesday, January 28, and called the police. There is no concrete proof at this moment in time that Magee fell, jumped or was ever on the 33-story rooftop, which is a highly secured area of the building unobtainable by employees other than top security and maintenance personnel. According to design documents that have been publicly filed, the rooftop functions as a highly sophisticated cooling plant with large, bulky machinery taking up the majority of the space on the side of the building from which Magee would have had to jump in order to land on the 9^th level rooftop.

No solid evidence exists currently to suggest that the death was a suicide. In fact, there is a strong piece of evidence pointing in the opposite direction. Magee had emailed his girlfriend, Veronica, on the evening of January 27 to say that he was about to leave the office and would see her shortly. She received no further emails from him, suggesting that whatever happened to Magee happened shortly thereafter, not the next morning. According to multiple sources, Magee’s girlfriend reported his disappearance on the evening of January 27. The Metropolitan Police would provide me with no details on that investigation.

The JPMorgan building at 25 Bank Street is located in the borough of Tower Hamlets. According to drawings and plans submitted by JPMorgan to the borough after it purchased the building for £495 million in 2010, the 9^th floor roof is accessible “via the stair from level 8 within the existing Level 9 plant enclosure…” In other words, it would be just as reasonable to entertain the possibility that Magee suffered his physical injuries inside the building and his body was placed on the 9^th level rooftop via an internal staircase access sometime during the night of January 27.

The LinkedIn profile that Magee set up for himself online indicates that he was involved with “Technical architecture oversight for planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives.” As a key part of the computer technology group in London, Magee may have been involved in providing subpoenaed material for the London Whale investigation and the myriad other investigations that JPMorgan has been sanctioned and fined for over the last year. There are two serious open investigations into foreign exchange rigging and potential manipulation of commodities markets.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) lists the man known as the London Whale, Bruno Iksil, who is cooperating with criminal prosecutors, and the two traders who have been criminally charged with hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, Javier Martin-Artajo and Julien Grout, as having the same JPMorgan address, 25 Bank Street, as did Gabriel Magee.

Documents produced by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, however, show a 2012 address for JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office in London, supposedly where the London Whale trades were originating, as 100 Wood Street, 6^thFloor, London. If the London Whale traders were located at an address other than the European Headquarters for JPMorgan, it could have been to evade detection by regulators that the firm was using bank deposits in the United States, that carried FDIC insurance, to place high risk gambles in London in the derivatives market.

The Senate’s 300-page report noted that key traders involved in the London Whale matter, including Iksil, Martin-Artajo, and Grout, refused to submit to interviews by the Senate investigators. The Senate report notes that “their refusal to provide information to the Subcommittee meant that this Report had to be prepared without their direct input. The Subcommittee relied instead on their internal emails, recorded telephone conversations and instant messages, internal memoranda and presentations, and interview summaries prepared by the bank’s internal investigation, to reconstruct what happened.”

If Magee became aware that incriminating emails, instant messages, or video teleconferences were not turned over in their entirety to Senate investigators or Justice Department prosecutors, that might be reason enough for his untimely death. Yes, this is speculation. But it is along the lines that smart thinking investigators need to intensely explore to bring peace of mind and answers to Gabriel Magee’s loved ones and coworkers.

2/12/14...... death at such a young age - no cause of death disclosed , no known problems at work .........

Another JPMorgan Banker Dies, 37 Year Old Executive Director Of Program Trading

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/12/2014 11:09 -0500

Ordinarily we would ignore the news of another banker's death - after all these sad events happen all the time - if it wasn't for several contextual aspects of this most recent passage. First, the death in question, as reported by the Stamford Daily Voice is that of Ryan Henry Crane, a Harvard graduate, who is survived by his wife, son and parents at the very young age of 37. Second, Ryan Henry Crane was formerly employed by JPMorgan - a bank which was featured prominently in the news as recently as two weeks ago when another of its London-based employees committed suicide by jumping from the top floor of its Canary Wharf building. Third: Crane was an Executive Director in JPM's Global Program Trading desk, founded in 1999 by an ex-DE Shaw'er, a function of the firm which is instrumental to preserving JPM's impeccable and (so far in 2013) flawless trading record of zero trading losses.

There was little detail surrounding the death:

Ryan Henry Crane of Stamford died Monday, Feb. 3. He was 37.

Crane was born Jan. 8, 1977, and grew up in Long Valley, N.J. He graduated from The Delbarton School in Morristown in 1995. He graduated from Harvard University in 1999, after which he spent the next 14 years at J.P. Morgan in New York. He was an executive director in the Global Equities Group.

Crane is survived by his wife, Lauren (nee Pizzotti); son, Harry; parents Mary Jo and Lex of Long Valley, N.J.; brother, Lex of Denver, Colo.; sister, Allison; brother-in-law, John Archard of Arvada, Colo.; parents-in-law, Steve and Carol Pizzotti of Reading, Mass.; brothers- and sisters-in-law, David and Heather Pizzotti of Upper Arlington, Ohio, Stephen and Kristin Pizzotti and Chris and Felicia Pizzotti of Reading, Mass.; five nephews, three nieces; aunts, uncles; and cousins.

Calling hours are Sunday, Feb. 9 from 3 to 7 p.m. at the Leo P. Gallagher Funeral Home, 31 Arch St., Greenwich. A Mass of Christian Burial will be held at 11 a.m. Monday, Feb. 10 at St. Catherine of Siena Church, Riverside. Interment will be held at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 11 at Puritan Lawn Memorial Park in Peabody, Mass.

Crane's LinkedIn profile confirming his senior position at one of JPM's most important market-facing verticals:

Below is his Finra BrokerCheck profile. Aside from having a license to trade virtually anything and anywhere as someone with his skillset would be expected to, his history was spotless:

The circumstances surrounding his death are scarce, but what is most notable is that not only is Crane the second very young JPMorgan banker to pass in recent days, but is also thefourth banker death in under a month. We can only hope this disturbing chain of deaths within the financial industry - one of which involved a nail-gun induced suicide - is purely accidental.

h/t SGT Report

2/12/14.....

JPMorgan Vice President’s Death in London Shines a Light on the Bank’s Close Ties to the CIA

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 12, 2014

The nonstop crime news swirling around JPMorgan Chase for a solid 18 months has started to feel a little spooky – they do lots of crime but never any time; and with each closed case, a trail of unanswered questions remains in the public’s mind.

Just last month, JPMorgan Chase acknowledged that it facilitated the largest Ponzi scheme in history, looking the other way as Bernie Madoff brazenly turned his business bank account at JPMorgan Chase into an unprecedented money laundering operation that would have set off bells, whistles and sirens at any other bank.

The U.S. Justice Department allowed JPMorgan to pay $1.7 billion and sign a deferred prosecution agreement, meaning no one goes to jail at JPMorgan — again. The largest question that no one can or will answer is how the compliance, legal and anti-money laundering personnel at JPMorgan ignored for years hundreds of transfers and billions of dollars in round trip maneuvers between Madoff and the account of Norman Levy. Even one such maneuver should set off an investigation. (Levy is now deceased and the Trustee for Madoff’s victims has settled with his estate.)

Then there was the report done by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the London Whale episode which left the public in the dark about just what JPMorgan was doing with stock trading in its Chief Investment Office in London, redacting all information in the 300-page report that related to that topic.

Wall Street On Parade has been filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Federal government in these matters, and despite the pledge from our President to set a new era of transparency, thus far we have had few answers coming our way.

One reason that JPMorgan may have such a spooky feel is that it has aligned itself in no small way with real-life spooks, the CIA kind.

Just when the public was numbing itself to the endless stream of financial malfeasance which cost JPMorgan over $30 billion in fines and settlements in just the past 13 months, we learned on January 28 of this year that a happy, healthy 39-year old technology Vice President, Gabriel Magee, was found dead on a 9^th level rooftop of the bank’s 33-story European headquarters building in the Canary Wharf section of London.

The way the news of this tragic and sudden death was stage-managed by highly skilled but invisible hands, turning a demonstrably suspicious incident into a cut-and-dried suicide leap from the rooftop (devoid of eyewitnesses or motivation) had all the hallmarks of a sophisticated covert operation or coverup.

The London Evening Standard newspaper reported the same day that “A man plunged to his death from a Canary Wharf tower in front of thousands of horrified commuters today.” Who gave that completely fabricated story to the press? Commuters on the street had no view of the body because it was 9 floors up on a rooftop – a rooftop that is accessible from a stairwell inside the building, not just via a fall from the roof. Adding to the suspicions, Magee had emailed his girlfriend the evening before telling her he was finishing up and would be home shortly.

If JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, needed a little crisis management help from operatives, he has no shortage of people to call upon. Thomas Higgins was, until a few months ago, a Managing Director and Global Head of Operational Control for JPMorgan. (A BusinessWeek profile shows Higgins still employed at JPMorgan while the New York Post reported that he left late last year.) What is not in question is that Higgins was previously the Senior Officer and Station Chief in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, a component of which is the National Resources Division. (Higgins’ bio is printed in past brochures of the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation, where Higgins is listed with his JPMorgan job title, former CIA job title, and as a member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors for 2013.)

According to Jeff Stein, writing in Newsweek on November 14, the National Resources Division (NR) is the “biggest little CIA shop you’ve never heard of.” One good reason you’ve never heard of it until now is that the New York Times was asked not to name it in 2001. James Risen writes in a New York Times piece: [the CIA’s] “New York station was behind the false front of another federal organization, which intelligence officials requested that The Times not identify. The station was, among other things, a base of operations to spy on and recruit foreign diplomats stationed at the United Nations, while debriefing selected American business executives and others willing to talk to the C.I.A. after returning from overseas.”

Stein gets much of that out in the open in his piece for Newsweek, citing sources who say that “its intimate relations with top U.S. corporate executives willing to have their companies fronting for the CIA invites trouble at home and abroad.” Stein goes on to say that NR operatives “cultivate their own sources on Wall Street, especially looking for help keeping track of foreign money sloshing around in the global financial system, while recruiting companies to provide cover for CIA operations abroad. And once they’ve seen how the other 1 percent lives, CIA operatives, some say, are tempted to go over to the other side.”

We now know that it was not only the Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. Treasury Department’s FinCEN, and bank examiners from the Comptroller of the Currency who missed the Madoff fraud, it was top snoops at the CIA in the very city where Madoff was headquartered.

Stein gives us even less reason to feel confident about this situation, writing that the NR “knows some titans of finance are not above being romanced. Most love hanging out with the agency’s top spies — James Bond and all that — and being solicited for their views on everything from the street’s latest tricks to their meetings with, say, China’s finance minister. JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein, one former CIA executive recalls, loved to get visitors from Langley. And the CIA loves them back, not just for their patriotic cooperation with the spy agency, sources say, but for the influence they have on Capitol Hill, where the intelligence budgets are hashed out.”

Higgins is not the only former CIA operative to work at JPMorgan. According to aLinkedIn profile, Bud Cato, a Regional Security Manager for JPMorgan Chase, worked for the CIA in foreign clandestine operations from 1982 to 1995; then went to work for The Coca-Cola Company until 2001; then back to the CIA as an Operations Officer in Afghanistan, Iraq and other Middle East countries until he joined JPMorgan in 2011.

In addition to Higgins and Cato, JPMorgan has a large roster of former Secret Service, former FBI and former law enforcement personnel employed in security jobs. And, as we have reported repeatedly, it still shares a space with the NYPD in a massive surveillance operation in lower Manhattan which has been dubbed the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center.

JPMorgan and Jamie Dimon have received a great deal of press attention for the whopping $4.6 million that JPMorgan donated to the New York City Police Foundation. Leonard Levitt, of NYPD Confidential, wrote in 2011 that New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly “has amended his financial disclosure forms after this column revealed last October that the Police Foundation had paid his dues and meals at the Harvard Club for the past eight years. Kelly now acknowledges he spent $30,000 at the Harvard Club between 2006 and 2009, according to the Daily News.”

JPMorgan is also listed as one of the largest donors to a nonprofit Foundation that provides college tuition assistance to the children of fallen CIA operatives, the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation. The Foundation also notes in a November 2013 publication, the Compass, that it has enjoyed the fundraising support of Maurice (Hank) Greenberg. According to the publication, Greenberg “sponsored a fundraiser on our behalf. His guest list included the who’s who of the financial services industry in New York, and they gave generously.”

Hank Greenberg is the former Chairman and CEO of AIG which collapsed into the arms of the U.S. taxpayer, requiring a $182 billion bailout. In 2006, AIG paid $1.64 billion to settle federal and state probes into fraudulent activities. In 2010, the company settled a shareholders’ lawsuit for $725 million that accused it of accounting fraud and stock price manipulation. In 2009, Greenberg settled SEC fraud charges against him related to AIG for $15 million.

Before the death of Gabriel Magee, the public had lost trust in the Justice Department and Wall Street regulators to bring these financial firms to justice for an unending spree of fleecing the public. Now there is a young man’s unexplained death at JPMorgan. This is no longer about money. This is about a heartbroken family that will never be the same again; who can never find peace or closure until credible and documented facts are put before them by independent, credible law enforcement.

The London Coroner’s office will hold a formal inquest into the death of Gabriel Magee on May 15. Wall Street On Parade has asked that the inquest be available on a live webcast as well as an archived webcast so that the American public can observe for itself if this matter has been given the kind of serious investigation it deserves. We ask other media outlets who were initially misled about the facts in this case to do the same.

Deputy governor Andrew Bailey told MPs on the Treasury Select Committee that the review was being carried out by in-house lawyers “supported by outside counsel”.

He said: “The governors have taken these claims extremely seriously. We have released a minute (of the meeting) but obviously there are now allegations of different versions.”

He said that the governors had “immediately” acted in the wake of the publication of the claims, holding that a senior trader’s note of the meeting differed sharply from the Bank’s own minute. This said blandly that “there was a brief discussion on extra levels of compliance that many bank trading desks were subject to when managing client risks”.

The alternative is believed to be in the hands of the Financial Conduct Authority. It has yet to be seen by the Bank and Mr Bailey appealed for the writer to allow him to view it.

Questions over the mounting foreign-exchange trading scandal that involves regulators in Switzerland and the US as well as Britain, were tabled by MPs before what was the final session of the committee’s inquiry into the near collapse of Co-operative Bank.

And while all of these events are swirling around , we keep seeing this popping up .....

Europe Considers Wholesale Savings Confiscation, Enforced Redistribution

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/12/2014 21:28 -0500

European Central Bank

At first we thought Reuters had been punk'd in its article titled "EU executive sees personal savings used to plug long-term financing gap" which disclosed the latest leaked proposal by the European Commission, but after several hours without a retraction, we realized that the story is sadly true. Sadly, because everything that we warned about in "There May Be Only Painful Ways Out Of The Crisis" back in September of 2011, and everything that the depositors and citizens of Cyprus had to live through, seems on the verge of going continental. In a nutshell, and in Reuters' own words, "the savings of the European Union's 500 million citizens could be used to fund long-term investments to boost the economy and help plug the gap left by banks since the financial crisis, an EU document says." What is left unsaid is that the "usage" will be on a purely involuntary basis, at the discretion of the "union", and can thus best be described as confiscation.

The source of this stunner is a document seen be Reuters, which describes how the EU is looking for ways to "wean" the 28-country bloc from its heavy reliance on bank financing and find other means of funding small companies, infrastructure projects and other investment. So as Europe finally admits that the ECB has failed to unclog its broken monetary pipelines for the past five years - something we highlight every month (most recently in No Waking From Draghi's Monetary Nightmare: Eurozone Credit Creation Tumbles To New All Time Low), the commissions report finally admits that "the economic and financial crisis has impaired the ability of the financial sector to channel funds to the real economy, in particular long-term investment."

The solution? "The Commission will ask the bloc's insurance watchdog in the second half of this year for advice on a possible draft law "to mobilize more personal pension savings for long-term financing", the document said."

Mobilize, once again, is a more palatable word than, say, confiscate.

And yet this is precisely what Europe is contemplating:

Banks have complained they are hindered from lending to the economy by post-crisis rules forcing them to hold much larger safety cushions of capital and liquidity.

The document said the "appropriateness" of the EU capital and liquidity rules for long-term financing will be reviewed over the next two years, a process likely to be scrutinized in the United States and elsewhere to head off any risk of EU banks gaining an unfair advantage.

But wait: there's more!

Inspired by the recently introduced "no risk, guaranteed return" collectivized savings instrument in the US better known as MyRA, Europe will also complete a study by the end of this year on the feasibility of introducing an EU savings account, open to individuals whose funds could be pooled and invested in small companies.

Because when corporations refuse to invest money in Capex, who will invest? Why you, dear Europeans. Whether you like it or not.

But wait, there is still more!

Additionally, Europe is seeking to restore the primary reason why Europe's banks are as insolvent as they are: securitizations, which the persuasive salesmen and sexy saleswomen of Goldman et al sold to idiot European bankers, who in turn invested the money or widows and orphans only to see all of it disappear.

It is also seeking to revive the securitization market, which pools loans like mortgages into bonds that banks can sell to raise funding for themselves or companies. The market was tarnished by the financial crisis when bonds linked to U.S. home loans began defaulting in 2007, sparking the broader global markets meltdown over the ensuing two years.

The document says the Commission will "take into account possible future increases in the liquidity of a number of securitization products" when it comes to finalizing a new rule on what assets banks can place in their new liquidity buffers. This signals a possible loosening of the definition of eligible assets from the bloc's banking watchdog.

Because there is nothing quite like securitizing feta cheese-backed securities and selling it to a whole new batch of widows and orphans.

And topping it all off is a proposal to address a global change in accounting principles that will make sure that an accurate representation of any bank's balance sheet becomes a distant memory:

More controversially, the Commission will consider whether the use of fair value or pricing assets at the going rate in a new globally agreed accounting rule "is appropriate, in particular regarding long-term investing business models".

To summarize: forced savings "mobilization", the introduction of a collective and involuntary CapEx funding "savings" account, the return and expansion of securitization, and finally, tying it all together, is a change to accounting rules that will make the entire inevitable catastrophe smells like roses until it all comes crashing down.

So, aside from all this, Europe is "fixed."

The only remaining question is: why leak this now? Perhaps it's simply because the reallocation of "cash on the savings account sidelines" in the aftermath of the Cyprus deposit confiscation, into risk assets was not forceful enough? What better way to give it a much needed boost than to leak that everyone's cash savings are suddenly fair game in Europe's next great wealth redistribution strategy.

A similar timeline analysis .......

Exposing what lies beneath the bodies of dead bankers and what lies ahead for us

Please discuss this article at Canada Free Press – Click here to make your thoughts known

By Douglas J. Hagmann

15 February 2014: I feel that this is one of the most important investigations I’ve ever done. If my findings are correct, each of us might soon experience a severe, if not crippling blow to our personal finances, the confiscation of any wealth some of us have been able to accumulate over our lifetimes, and the end of the financial world as we once knew it. The evidence to support my findings exists in the trail of dead bodies of financial executives across the globe and a missing Wall Street Journal Reporter who was working at the Dow Jones news room at the time of his disappearance.

If the bodies were dots on a piece of paper, connecting them results in a sinister picture being drawn that involves global criminal activity in the financial world the likes of which is almost without precedent. It should serve as a warning that we are at the precipice of something so big, it will shake the financial world as we know it to its core. It seems to illustrate the complicity of big banks and governments, the intelligence community, and the media.

Although the trail of mysterious and bizarre deaths detailed below begin in late January, 2014, there are others. Not only that, there will be more, according to sources within the financial world. Based on my findings, these are not mere random, tragic cases of suicide, but of the methodical silencing of individuals who had the ability to expose financial fraud at the highest levels, and the complicity of certain governmental agencies and individuals who are engaged in the greatest theft of wealth the world has ever seen.

It is often said that life imitates art. In the case of the dead financial executives, perhaps death imitates theater, or more specifically, the movie The International, which was coincidentally released in U.S. theaters exactly five years ago today.

We are told by the media that the untimely deaths of these young men and men in their prime are either suicides or tragic accidents. We are told what to believe by the captured and controlled media, regardless of how unusual or unlikely the circumstances, or how implausible the explanation. Such are the hallmarks of high level criminality and the involvement of a certain U.S. intelligence agency intent on keeping the lid on money laundering on a global scale.

Obviously, it is important that this topic is approached with the utmost respect for the families of those who died, that they be allowed to grieve for the loss of their loved ones in private. However, it is extremely important that the truth about what is happening in the global financial arena is not kept from us, as we will also be victims of a different nature.

The missing and the dead: a timeline

The following is provided as a chronological list of those who have gone missing or been found dead under mysterious circumstances. It is important to note that this list consists of names of the most recent incidents. There are more that extend back through 2012 and beyond.

January 11, 2014

MISSING: David Bird, 55, long-time reporter for the Wall Street Journal working at the Dow Jones news room, went for a walk on Saturday, January 11, 2014 near his New Jersey home and disappeared without a trace. Mr. Bird was a reporter of the oil and commodity markets which happened to be under investigation by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for price manipulation.

January 26, 2014

DECEASED: Tim Dickenson, a U.K.-based communications director at Swiss Re AG, was reportedly found dead under undisclosed circumstances.

DECEASED: William Broeksmit, 58, former senior manager for Deutsche Bank, was found hanging in his home from an apparent suicide. It is important to note that Deutsche Bank is under investigation for reportedly hiding $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis and for potentially rigging the foreign exchange markets. The allegations are similar to the claims the institution settled in 2013 over involvement in rigging the Libor interest rates.

January 27, 2014

DECEASED: Karl Slym, 51, Managing director of Tata Motors was found dead on the fourth floor of the Shangri-La hotel in Bangkok. Police said he “could” have committed suicide. He was staying on the 22nd floor with his wife, and was attending a board meeting in the Thai capital.

January 28, 2014

DECEASED: Gabriel Magee, 39, a JP Morgan employee, died after reportedly “falling” from the roof of its European headquarters in London in the Canary Wharf area. Magee was vice president at JPMorgan Chase & Co’s (JPM) London headquarters.

Gabriel Magee, a Vice President at JPMorgan in London, plunged to his death from the roof of the 33-story European headquarters of JPMorgan in Canary Wharf. Magee was involved in “Technical architecture oversight for planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives” based on his online Linkedin profile.

It’s important to note that JPMorgan, like Deutsche Bank, is under investigation for its potential involvement in rigging foreign exchange rates. JPMorgan is also reportedly under investigation by the same U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for its alleged involvement in rigging the physical commodities markets in the U.S. and London.

Regarding the initial reports of his death, journalist Pam Martens of Wall Street on Paradeastutely exposed the controlled, scripted details of the media accounts surrounding Magee’s death in an article written on February 9, 2014. Ms. Martens writes:

“According to numerous sources close to the investigation of Gabriel Magee’s death, almost nothing thus far reported about his death has been accurate. This appears to stem from an initial poorly worded press release issued by the Metropolitan Police in London which may have been a result of bad communications between it and JPMorgan or something more deliberate on someone’s part.” [Emphasis added].

Ms. Martens also notes:

No solid evidence exists currently to suggest that the death was a suicide. In fact, there is a strong piece of evidence pointing in the opposite direction. Magee had emailed his girlfriend, Veronica, on the evening of January 27 to say that he was about to leave the office and would see her shortly. [Emphasis added].

Based on information she developed, it appears likely that Magee did not meet his fate on the morning his body was discovered, but hours earlier. Considering the possibility that Magee might now have died in the manner publicized, Ms. Martens offers speculation, and notes it as such:

Looking at the death of Magee in the context of a larger conspiracy, it is difficult not to suspect foul play and media manipulation.

January 29, 2014

DECEASED: Mike Dueker, 50, who had worked for Russell Investment for five years, was found dead close to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State. Dueker was reported missing on January 29, 2014. Police stated that he “could have” jumped over a fence and fallen 15 meters to his death, and are treating the case as a suicide.

Before joining Russell Investments, Dueker was an assistant vice president and research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis from 1991 to 2008. There he served as an associate editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics and was editor ofMonetary Trends, a monthly publication of the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

In November 2013, the New York Times reported that Russell Investments was one of several investment companies that were under subpoena from New York State regulators investigating potential “pay-to-play” schemes involving New York pension funds.

February 3, 2014

DECEASED: Ryan Henry Crane, 37, was the Executive Director in JPMorgan’s Global Equities Group. Of particular relevance is that Crane oversaw all of the trade platforms and had close working ties with the now deceased Gabriel Magee of JPMorgan’s London desk. The ties between Mr. Crane and Mr. Magee are undeniable and outright troublesome. The cause of death has not yet been determined, pending the results of a toxicology report.

February 6, 2014

DECEASED: Richard Talley, 57, was the founder and CEO of American Title, a company he founded in 2001. Talley and his company were under investigation by state insurance regulators at the time of his death. He was found in the garage of his Colorado home by a family member who called authorities. Talley reportedly died from seven or eight “self-inflicted” wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head.

The enormity of the lie

One must look back far enough to understand the enormity of the lie and the criminality of bankers and governments alike. We must understand the legal restraints that were severed during the Clinton years and the congress that changed the rules regarding financial institutions. We must understand that the criminal acts were bold and bipartisan, and were designed to consolidate wealth through the destruction of the middle class. All of this is part of a much larger plan to establish a one world economy by “killing” the U.S. dollar and consequently, eradicating the middle class by a cabal of globalists that existed and continue to exist within all sectors of our government. The results will be crippling to not just the United States, but the entire Western world.

What began decades ago is now becoming more transparent under the Obama regime. Perhaps that’s the transparency Obama promised, for we’ve seen little else in terms of transparency with regard to the man known as Barack Hussein Obama. For those not locked into the captured corporate media, we’re starting to see the truth emerging. The truth is that we’ve been living under a giant Ponzi scheme and we, the American citizens, are the suckers. As illustrated by the list of dead bankers above, however, the power elite need a bit more time before the extent of their criminality is revealed. The need a bit more time to transfer the remaining wealth from middle-class America to their private coffers. Timing is everything, and a magic act only works when all props are in place before the illusion is performed. Only when their timing is right will the slumbering Americans realize the extent of the illusion by which they’ve been entranced, at which time they will be forced into submission to accept a financial reset that will ultimately subjugate them to a global economy. I contend that this is the reason for the recent spate of deaths, for those who met their tragic and untimely end had the ability to expose this nefarious agenda by what they knew or discovered, or what they would reveal under subpoena and the damage they could cause to the globalist financial agenda.

It is an insult to the public intellect that the media so readily pushes the official line that the deaths were all suicides given the unusual circumstances surrounding nearly all of those listed. This itself should be ringing alarm bells with anyone of reasonable sensibilities, or at last those who are paying the slightest bit of attention to the larger picture. The media is either complicit or completely inept. While incompetence is evident in many areas, even the most inept journalist or media company cannot possible deny what exists directly in front of them. They can only withhold the truth.

Connecting the dots

To understand what is taking place, I contacted a financial source who has accurately predicted many events that we are now seeing taking place, including the deaths of certain financial people for an explanation. In fact, he actually predicted that we would see a “clean-up” of individuals who posed a serious threat to certain too-big-to-fail-or-jail banks and “banksters” a full week before the events began to unfold. Truth be told, I initially greeted his prediction with some skepticism, for such things don’t really happen in the real world, or so the obedient and well-managed media tells me.

“V, The Guerrilla Economist” as he is known in the alternative media, has provided numerous insider alerts for Steve Quayle‘s website and has appeared as a regular guest on The Hagmann & Hagmann Report. He has an undeniable track record for accuracy, which has earned my respect. However, I thought that he had taken temporary leave of his senses when he twice suggested that there will be some house cleaning done of anyone posing a threat to the agenda of certain banks and the globalist agenda on our broadcasts of November 20, 2013 and again on January 10, 2014. In a separate venue, he described what was about to take place by using the analogy of the movie The International. Several dead bodies and a missing journalist later, that analogy has been proven accurate.

The fact is that we are seeing a clean-up where JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank seems to appear at the epicenter of it all. In January, JPMorgan admitted facilitating the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme by turning its head to his activities. Despite this admission, the U.S. Department of Justice under Eric Holder declined to send anyone to jail under a deferred prosecution agreement. Yet this is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

In March, 2013, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a heavily redacted 307-page report detailing the financial irregularities surrounding the actions of JPMorgan and the deliberate withholding of critical financial information by JPMorgan. Prominent in the mix are the actions of Bruno Iksil, who earned the nickname the “London Whale,” for his “casino bets” of others money that caused billions of dollars in losses. Yet, no cooperation was provided by Dimon’s foot soldiers as they failed to testify or otherwise cooperate with Senate investigators.

Remember the damage control and the deliberate downplaying by Jamie Dimon, who maintained that there was nothing to see here with regard to the “London Whale” criminal activities? What was originally described as a loss of perhaps $2 billion ultimately turned into many more times that, yet the actual numbers are still hidden from the public. Such events occurred under the noses of numerous financial executives who had knowledge that went undisclosed.

As we fast forward to today and the current spate of mysterious deaths, we begin to see that many of those who died existed on the periphery of events in the criminal actions of the financial industry. Moreover, it is reasonable to conclude that they possessed knowledge that if disclosed, could have interrupted the magic act taking place for the awestruck audience, captivated by the carefully crafted words of Yellen, her predecessors and the operatives within government who’s duty it is to regulate whatever is left of our current financial system.

That regulation is now a thing of the past. What we have today is a system of facilitation and co-operation between the largest corporations and financial institutions and the U.S. and our intelligence agencies. We now have the “too-big-to-fails” operating with impunity as a result of an incestuous, if not outright unconstitutional relationship where the banks are acting as operational assets for the CIA, the NYPD, and other intelligence and police agencies.

The JPMorgan-CIA-NYPD connection

Perhaps one of the best kept secrets, at least from the majority of the American public, is the integration and overlap between the “too-big-to-fail-and-jail” banks and the most advanced system of surveillance in the U.S. Would it surprise you to learn that the very banks that brought the United States to the brink of financial collapse in 2008, who looted the American public and continue to engage in what most perceive as criminal behavior in the financial venue not only have ties to the CIA, but are actually partnered with the CIA and NYPD surveillance of all of lower Manhattan? That’s right, the big banks such as JPMorgan, Citigroup and others have their own desks and surveillance monitorsat a facility known as the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, located at 55 Broadway, deep in the center of New York’s financial district.

The big banks—the very banks that have been the focus of fraud and corruption investigations have their own system of cameras, more than 2,000 in number, and operate them in tandem with NYPD surveillance cameras at a center that was funded with taxpayer money. Every square inch of lower Manhattan is under surveillance 24/7, not just by NYPD, but by JP Morgan and other members of the so-called “one percent.” Carefully consider the implications of this pact.

JPMorgan Chase and others have had long and quite intimate ties with the CIA. Today, however, the line between the banks that control our financial present and future and police and intelligence agencies no longer exist. This relationship of mutual benefit permits the CIA to use the financial institutions to “handle the money” for their various global initiatives, while it provides the banks a stable of “professional assistants” to handle their “security,” whether such security issues arise in the U.S., London, or elsewhere. Highly trained and skilled CIA operatives now work within the system of interlocked financial institutions that have been at the epicenter of the most egregious crimes involving the theft from our bank accounts and retirement savings.

Please stop and consider this for a moment. The very banks and their top executives who have not only brought the U.S. to the brink of financial collapse and Martial Law, engaged or facilitated in various criminal actions that resulted in fines (but no jail time) for the perpetrators, are working hand-in-hand with the CIA. Not only that, they are working in tandem with the NYPD at their surveillance centers, watching and videotaping every move made by anyone—including potential whistleblowers within their vast purview. By the way, this is no ordinary surveillance or surveillance cameras. You won’t find these cameras on the shelves of your local spy shop. These cameras can focus on the footnotes of a book you might be reading, or the words written on a piece of paper being held by an unwitting person. They employ facial recognition and other advanced visual and data aggregation capabilities, and the extent of their technological abilities is increasing every day.

Additionally, the data is collected and maintained, and files are created of people and groups who are merely going about their daily lives. Equally important, files are created and maintained of problem children and groups, like the Occupy movement and others who lawfully exercise their constitutional rights to protest the actions of the one-percent. Consider this in the context of the Occupy Wall Street protests. where the protesters were not only under police surveillance, but surveillance by the banks and their corporate officers against whom they were protesting. And it was all done with the approval and assistance of the police, in this case the NYPD, and U.S. intelligence agencies.

Now consider the plight of a whistleblower who wants to expose criminality within the ranks of a too-big-to-fail. The institution who is engaged in purported criminality based on the findings of the whistleblower can observe the whistleblower’s every move. Where they go, who they meet and what they are carrying to such a meeting. They can be tracked to a residence, a business, or even to their psychiatrist’s office, place of ill repute, or the residence of some significant other outside of their marriage, all of which would be invaluable for blackmail.

Perhaps the potential whistleblower is clean and free from anything that might dissuade them from revealing what they know, their case could be turned over to the in-house security of former CIA agents for proper disposition. It makes the movie The Firm look like child’s play by comparison.

This is not some fanciful delusion. There is proof of this that exists. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has documented the increasingly extensive surveillance being conducted in lower Manhattan and throughout the city. They have verified that not only are our constitutional rights being violated every minute of every day, but the fruits of surveillance by police and corporate entities are shared between the police, the intelligence agencies and private financial institutions, without restraint on the distribution on such findings.

Are you engaged in a protesting against the criminality of the one-percent? Well, they one-percent are watching you, and they are literally seated right next to the police. Are you a journalist following up on possible “bankster” corruption by meeting a potential whistleblower? You better understand that the bankster target of your investigation is watching you, in real-time, with the complete approval and cooperation of the police. As documented by the NYCLU, you are likely now “on file,” and all data compiled is maintained and accessible not just to law enforcement, but to the very target of your investigation—in real time.

Such surveillance and integration between big banks, law enforcement and spy agencies is not just limited to lower Manhattan or even the United States. It is also most prevalent in London and other cities where international banking is conducted.

Real-time surveillance and the close working relationship between the “one-percenters,” police and the intelligence agencies gives the targets of criminal probes the ability to be pro-active when necessary. It’s all being done under the pretext of national security when it would appear that the real objective is to insulate the banksters from potential problems that exposure of their criminal actions might cause.

Oh, and don’t forget that it is us who are paying for this.

Perhaps we would be well advised to not only consider the capabilities of the surveillance apparatus that exists where the big banks and police are working at adjacent surveillance terminals at 55 Broadway and other locations, but the incestuous working relationship between the banks and the CIA when we read about banker suicides.

Do not expect to see any exclusive report on this in the corporate media, for they, as requested have dutifully maintained their code of silence by not showing pictures of the brass name plates that identify the bankster terminals situated adjacent to the police terminals during photo shoots of this super-secret surveillance complex a few years ago. As detailed by the tenacious and indefatigable Pam Martens, journalist for Wall Street on Parade in this article, the captured media took a pass on revealing the whole truth about what’s really going on at 55 Broadway.

What has been revealed here is merely the tip of the iceberg. The tentacles of the corporate elite, facilitated and empowered by the CIA, the NYPD top brass, and other agencies have now covertly and effectively succeeded in invading everything you do. The fruits of this operation are being used to advance their global financial agenda and silence the opposition.

Knowing this, is it possible that the dead bodies that are increasing in number are the results of this joint surveillance operation? You will not find any answers in the mainstream media. The big banks have chosen to remain silent, even in the face of subpoenas, and have yet to face any legal consequences for their contempt. It’s not, however, merely contempt of congress or pseudo-investigative bodies. It’s their contempt of humanity, of you and me, and the victims that lie dead, leaving their families broken and wanting for the truth.

2 comments:

Kev2/13/2014
The "Trend" doesn't appear to be a friend of the bankers, but I'm not a banker. Does that make the "Trend" my friend. :)

Deposit "mobilizations" would really bring home the reality that your money is safer under the mattress or even in bitcoin than in a bank. I would be very unhappy if mobilizations come over here.

I'm not sure how much snow we have here at the Roanoke airport, my closest landmark. I've heard 12" and 14" thrown out on the news and it's still coming down, though looks like a dry slot on the way.
Unknown2/13/2014
Just did my first round of shoveling and walked the dog ! He loves snow so he had a ball !

To the EU , just try that in Italy or Spain ! Those countries are primed to revolt as it is !

Europe falling apart once again ..... what's old is new , right ?

If te banks aren't safe , a home safe makes sense ... just don't tell the neighbors !

Bitcoin isn't safe - not as this time.....the events of the past week have demonstrated that in spades !

Catharsis Ours

Wednesday, February 12, 2014