Category Archives: Empire

The Financial-Academic-Media Complex

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“Harvard Watch, in case you don’t know, is [was] a group of academics who were formed ostensibly to be the conscience of the ultra secretive Harvard Corporation, whose 7 members have included the likes of Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin and Dyn Corp.’s Mr. Pug Winokur.
“>The Harvard Corporation administers the ‘not for profit’ [now] 28 billion dollar Harvard Endowment Fund.  The largest such pool of capital this side of the Roman Catholic Church. This fund has been intimately linked to such financial fiascos as Bush/Harken Energy and Enron/California energy debacle.”

“When the Harvard Watch did their own investigations back in 2003 / 2004, here are a few snippets of what they found.  In addition to giving guidance, such as choosing outside money managers, to Harvard’s 21 billion [at the time] dollar Endowment fund, Pug Winokur was the Chairman of Enron’s audit committee.

At the same time one of the Endowment Fund’s biggest outside money managers was Highfields Capital.  This is a hedge fund run by John Jacobson – a former member of the seven-man Harvard Corp.  He left the Corp. in 1996 with 500 million of Harvard money to start his own financial advisory/absolute return fund.

According to Harvard University 1999 tax returns Highfields topped the pay list of advisories at 30 million in management fees for the year. In fact Highfields did so well making money for Harvard, the Harvard Magazine was crowing about the job they did and they were reportedly awarded additional billions of Harvard money to manage.

Now, I’ll bet none of you will ever guess how Highfields made their astonishing returns for Harvard in 1999? This long/short fund only had 3 equity shorts (put options). Enron just happened to be the biggest – and the Enron short was 47 times the size of the next biggest short.

Of course, no guilt was ever found implicating Mr. Winokur or Highfields – because the SEC was on the job!!  Highfields’ 5000 foot grand salami of a homerun simply got chalked up to “pure brilliance”.

Now, for those of you who are not aware; Enron funded research centers at Harvard. This allegedly objective research – incubated at Harvard – was instrumental in legitimizing energy deregulation in California and defending energy industry monoliths against assertions of price manipulation. Nothing stinky here, eh?

Well, apparently something didn’t exactly smell quite right; because it was soon after these facts came to light that Mr. Winokur had sufficiently spread an aroma of his doings about Harvard that his presence was no longer required and he resigned his post to make room for none other than Mr. Robert Rubin. Here’s a snippet of the statement the Harvard Watch published at the time regarding the changing of the guard.

“Winokur’s departure from the Corporation, however, represents only a first step in cutting Harvard’s ties to Enron. There remain multiple Harvard research initiatives funded by and effectively functioning for Enron and its executives. Notable examples include the Harvard Electric Policy Group, the Belfer Center, and the Winokur Public Policy Fund. Moreover, the Harvard Corporation’s remaining members include several Enron insiders. D. Ronald Daniel, for instance, was Jeffrey Skilling’s boss at McKinsey during the 1980s, when Skilling consulted with Enron to design the energy giant’s unsustainable business model. Because of the work of Daniel and Skilling, McKinsey is now a defendant in the largest suit against Enron. Moreover, it is remarkably telling that just as the university prepares to bid farewell to one of the Enron club, it has already announced the entry of another one. Robert Rubin, the Corporation’s latest addition, is a director of Citigroup, Enron’s largest creditor. Rubin attempted to obtain a Federal bailout for Enron as it approached collapse-while its top executives cashed in on Enron’s falling stock and drained the pension funds of thousands of their employees”:
Admittedly, the Enron / Gibson’s Paradox Harvard guffaws occurred before Niall Ferguson’s tenure at Harvard [began in 2004]; but with him being such a sharp economic historian – he probably knew all this stuff anyway….”

—  Ronald Kirby

The Monopoly of Money and the Money of Monopolies

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The Fed’s monopoly of money has meant not only monopoly (i.e “play” money that lacks fixed value, in contrast to gold), but also actual monopolies in every industry across the board. The reason is that bigger organizations can and do borrow more, paying back only in “cheapened” money. That lets them outlast their smaller competitors and lets them grow bigger and bigger….

The Fed’s monopoly of money also makes possible the rise of “pirate” states which can shift the tax inherent in rapidly cheapening money onto others:

1) internally, onto the backs of its savers

2) externally, onto the backs of other countries which have to use the monopoly currency. (e.g. emerging markets have to use the US$).

Here’s an excellent comment on that:

“Anyway, the appalling truth, which explains what’s happened in our own era, is that when Roosevelt managed to make the dollar the world’s currency, and the Federal Reserve began to be able to tax the rest of the world simply by expanding the money supply, what happened is that the whole American economy quietly started to shift from production-and-taxation mode, into “pirate” mode, “without anyone noticing!”

The global consequences have been enormous. It’s enabled American power (and the amount of military spending possible) to expand enormously, beyond what was sensible in the long term. It’s made foreign war seem cost-free to the American public, which in turn has caused a whole string of foreign lobbyists to try to buy American support and intervention in every corner of the world. It’s also made the American economic and political system very unstable in the long term, I suspect, because it’s now “addicted” to getting things cheap. Pirate economies (unlike the old boring taxation ones) tend to collapse, when they can no longer expand, or at least can no longer tap the outside world any more. It’s also gutted American industry and production, because once you could pay for things in paper dollars, it became cheaper to outsource everything possible and buy things from the third world. It’s had a very oligarchic effect on government and big business, since their access to easy credit enabled big organisations to buy up smaller ones on an unprecedented scale; and, finally, it’s been very corrupting, to get something for nothing in this way, for so long. It’s the true background reason for the predicament you’re in today.

And as I said, it’s created a world were “everything” is rigged against traditional conservatism. Currencies that are purely creations of government not only give unprecedented power “to” governments to interfere in all of our lives, but their inherently inflationary nature has created a world that rewards borrowers at the expense of savers. That is historically unprecedented, and an extraordinary thing to build a civilisation on. Should one be surprised that the culture associated with this civilisation should be one of personal self-indulgence, rather than one of self-restraint? That is the world that Roosevelt (and, later, Nixon) gave us…”

Comment by ‘Alexander’ on Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Con

Gold: Who’s Got It; Who Hasn’t

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The US has 8,135 tonnes….64.4% of reserves

Germany — 3,412… …64.4% of reserves
IMF — 3,217… … …(1)
France — 2,508… … …58.7%
Italy — 2,451… … …61.9%
Switzerland — 1,040… …23.8%
Japan — 765.2… …1.9% …(a potential gold-buyer)
China — 600.0… …0.9% …(should be a big buyer)
Russia — 495. 9… …2.2% …(is a buyer)
Taiwan — 422.2… …3.6% …(should be a buyer)
India — 357.7… …3.0% …(should be a buyer)
UK — 310.3… … …14.5% …(sold most of its gold at the low price)
Saudi Arabia — 143.0… …11.4% (should buy gold)
South Africa — 124.4… …9.0%
Australia — 79.8… … …6.3%

From Richard Russell, The Dow Theory Letters.

So there you have it. Among countries, Italy, France, Germany, and the US have the most gold. Switzerland has a third of what they have.

The UK, South Africa, Australia, and Saudi Arabia are next with about  1/5th – 1/10th as much.

Russia and Japan have only a small percent in gold.

China and India have even less.

What do  most Asians have?

Debt (treasuries and dollars) from the US.

Neo-colonialism anyone?

“Meltdown” by Thomas Woods

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“The media tells us that “deregulation” and “unfettered free markets” have wrecked our economy and will continue to make things worse without a heavy dose of federal regulation. But the real blame lies elsewhere. In Meltdown, bestselling author Thomas E. Woods Jr. unearths the real causes behind the collapse of housing values and the stock market – and it turns out the culprits reside more in Washington than on Wall Street.

And the trillions of dollars in federal bailouts? Our politicians’ ham-handed attempts to fix the problems they themselves created will only make things much worse. Woods, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and winner of the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Award, busts the media myths and government spin. He explains how government intervention in the economy – from the Democratic hobbyhorse called Fannie Mae to affirmative action programs like the Community Redevelopment Act – actually caused the housing bubble.

Most important, Woods, author of the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, traces this most recent boom-and-bust – and all such booms and busts of the past century – back to one of the most revered government institutions of all: the Federal Reserve System, which allows busy-body bureaucrats and ambitious politicians to pull the strings of our financial sector and manipulate the value of the very money we use…”

Comment:

That’s the blurb to Thomas Woods’ new book, “Meltdown,” which gives a classic Austrian rebuttal of the notion that lack of regulation of the economy is the sole reason for the current economic crisis, rather than the corrupt nexus between government and business in a managed economy. According to his blurb, Wood correctly assesses the current problem as a problem of cheap money, induced by Federal Reserve policies.

I have Woods’ previous book on the US constitution on my desk since I intend to review it.  I thought it was both mostly right at one level and partly wrong at another.*  I wonder if that will be the case with this book too. Still, as a contrarian and critic of establishment propaganda, I have to pull for any book brave enough to fly in the face of  academic orthodoxy. (Judging by Woods’ popularity, though –  a Google search of his name turns up millions of hits – he has a legion in tow to keep up his courage: here’s a link to his  impassioned speech at the Ron Paul Rally for the Republic (September 2008) on The Stupid Party versus the Evil Party)

“IF YOU WANT TO STOP THE WAR MACHINE, YOU HAVE TO GO AFTER THE MONEY MACHINE.”

**********
*In that respect, let me link a piece by Cathy Young of Reason magazine. Young’s conclusions strike me as owing more to ad hominem than logic, but they aren’t without merit if you consider the moral issues at stake. On that, more at another time…

Paul Street On “Status Quo-Bama”

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“CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN” FROM STATUS QuOBAMA?

 Fiscal Czarism and Status Quo Appointments

Will the “deeply conservative” Obama break from deepening authoritarian  capitalism in regard to the current economic crisis? The signals he has sent so far are less than encouraging. Late last summer, candidate Obama joined John McCain in supporting the original George W. Bush-Hank Paulson bailout plan, replete with its dictatorial demand (explicitly laid out in a hastily constructed three-page bill) that Congress supply the banks with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars without any public oversight, hearings and investigation ever.  When public outrage forced Congress to reject rejected Bush and Paulson’s (and Obama and McCain’s) Czarist proposal, Obama gave his “progressive” imprimatur to a subsequently passed version that cloaked the authoritarian bailout deal in oversight measures loaded with loopholes leaving big banking capital free to do pretty much whatever it wished with its new taxpayer injections.

This move apparently came without remorse. As veteran liberal-progressive Washington- and Obama-watcher David Sirota recently noted, Obama’s “first exercise of presidential power was, right before he came into office, he threatened to veto any bill that Congress passed rejecting or limiting more bailout funds from going to Wall Street.”

Obama’s economic appointments do not bode well. His top economic advisor, former chief World Bank economist and Harvard University president Lawrence Summers and his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are both veteran implementers of the basic “neoliberal” tenet:  state protection and subsidy for the Few and market discipline for the Many. Working in the Clinton administration under Treasury Secretary (and Goldman Sachs CEO) Robert Rubin (Geithner’s mentor), Summers helped develop and advance the very financial -de-regulation that was a major contributor to the current crisis. Geithner shares with Summers a history of responding to economic crisis by bailing out large financial institutions with no serious questions asked, something that helps explain the popularity of his appointment on Wall

Obama’s Inaugural Address absurdly claimed that the economic crisis was partly the consequence of the “collective failure” of the American people “to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” This ignored the fact that, as Krugman notes, “this is first and foremost a crisis brought on by a runaway financial industry.  And if we failed to rein in that industry, it was wasn’t because Americans ‘collectively’ refused to make hard choices; the American public had no idea what was going on, and the people who did know what was going on mostly thought deregulation was a good idea.” 

Paul Street at Z Mag.

Wired And Watched In America

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“When asked the scope of the information collected on Americans by the NSA, he said “the parameters that were set for how to filter it … were things like … if a terrorist would normally only make a phone call for 1 or 2 minutes, then you look for communications that are only 1 or 2 minutes long. Now that could also be someone ordering a pizza, and asking their significant other what sort of toppings they wanted on their pizza.”

When asked how the NSA would handle questions asked by congressional committees, Tice claimed: “the NSA would tailor some of their briefings to try to be deceptive, for whether it be a congressional committee or someone they really didn’t want to know exactly what was going on. There would be a lot of bells and whistles in a briefing and quite often the meat of the briefing was deceptive.”

When asked in a second interview by MSNBC if the information collected stopped at phone and email info, Tice responded: “as far as the wiretap information that made it to NSA, there was also data mining involved. At some point information from credit card records and financial records was married in with that information.”

As a result of the NSA program, uncounted thousands of Americans may have had their privacy compromised and are thus victims of an illegal spying regime. Says Tice: “the lucky U.S. citizens, tens of thousands of whom, that are now on digital databases at NSA that have no idea of this, also have that information included on those digital files that have been warehoused.”

More at Wired.

 Comment:

The US Government spied on everyone

Barack Obama Bombs Pakistan

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“The CIA’s bombing campaign against al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan continued with two more attacks today, an indication, senior officials say, that President Barack Obama has approved the U.S. strategy that has killed at least eight of al Qaeda’s top 20 leaders since July 2008.

The two attacks today in Pakistan’s were the first since President Obama took office on Tuesday….”

More at the ABC blotter

Comment:

Hooray for change! 

Note that Bush actually objected to bombing Pakistan without asking Musharraf’s permission, something Obama criticized. As this Huffington Post piece from last year points out, in this respect, Obama’s action today is worse than Bush’s and more in line with the CIA’s stated preference. (This is not an endorsement of Bush –  at least, Obama got the country right).

Asia-Europe Shipping Rates Plunge to Zero

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“Idle ships are now stretched in rows outside Singapore’s harbour, creating an eerie silhouette like a vast naval fleet at anchor. Shipping experts note the number of vessels moving around seem unusually high in the water, indicating low cargoes.

It became difficult for the shippers to obtain routine letters of credit at the height of financial crisis over the autumn, causing goods to pile up at ports even though there was a willing buyer at the other end. Analysts say this problem has been resolved, but the shipping industry has since been swamped by the global trade contraction.

The World Bank caused shockwaves with a warning last month that global trade may decline this year for the first time since the Second World War. This appears increasingly certain with each new batch of data.

Mr de Trenck predicts Asian trade to the US will fall 7pc this year. To Europe he estimates a drop of 9pc – possibly 12pc. Trade flows grow 8pc in an average year. ”

Says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at The Daily Telegraph, in a piece on the drop of Asia-Europe shipping rates to zero.

IOUSA’s Cheerleader-In-Chief Is Former NY Fed Chair

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“In 1969, Peterson was invited by philanthropist John D. Rockefeller 3rd, Council of Foreign Relations Chairman John J. McCloy, and former Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon to chair a Commission on Foundations and Private Philanthropy, which became known as the Peterson Commission. Among its recommendations adopted by the government were that foundations be required annually to disburse a minimum proportion of their funds.

In 1971, Peterson was named Assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs by U.S. President Richard Nixon. In 1972, he became the Secretary of Commerce, a position he held for one year. At that time he also assumed the Chairmanship of President Nixon’s National Commission on Productivity and was appointed U.S. Chairman of the U.S.–Soviet Commercial Commission.

Peterson was Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers (1973–1977) and Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb Inc. (1977–1984).

In 1985, he co-founded the prominent private equity and investment management firm, the Blackstone Group, for which his current position is Senior Chairman.

In 1992, Peterson was one of the co-founders of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan citizens’ group that advocates reduction of the federal budget deficit. Following record deficits under President George W. Bush, Peterson commented in 2004: “I remain a Republican, but the Republicans have become a far more theological, faith-directed party, not troubling with evidence.”[2]

In February 1994, President Bill Clinton named Peterson as a member of the Bi-Partisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform co-chaired by Senators Bob Kerrey and John Danforth.Peterson also serves as Co-Chair of The Conference Board Commission on Public Trust and Private Enterprises (Co-Chaired by John Snow).

Peterson has been Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1985, when he took over from David Rockefeller. He also serves as Trustee of the Rockefeller family‘s Japan Society and the Museum of Modern Art, and was previously on the board of Rockefeller Center Properties, Inc..

He is founding Chairman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (formerly the Institute for International Economics, renamed in his honour in 2006), and a Trustee of the Committee for Economic Development. He was also Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York between 2000 and 2004….”

So says wiki about Pete Peterson.

Comment:

And why am I interested in Pete Peterson? Because he’s the chief backer of the film IOUSA (directed by Patrick Creadon).  IOUSA is a spin-off of “Empire of Debt,” a book written in 2005 by my former boss/co-author, Bill Bonner (owner and President of the newsletter holding company, Agora Inc.), with Addison Wiggin, the financial director of Agora Financial, a partner and/or affiliate and/or subsidiary (?) of Agora Inc.

[Note: in some places the film is described as a spin-off of “Demise of the Dollar”(2005) by Addison Wiggin].

IOUSA was aired on CNN this weekend on Saturday and Sunday, hence this post. Now, I’m not comfortable, obviously, commenting on the work of former colleagues. It’s not appropriate… and I would not ordinarily.

But we live in extraordinary times. Then too, having written a book with Bonner, I now have a stake in clarifying that my own work and credibility isn’t compromised by this particular spin on his writing.

First, to do a documentary on US finances that gets a lot of people to discuss things they would otherwise consider insufferably arcane and dry is a good thing.  Second, it’s also a good thing to get people to consider the future, limit their consumption, and behave more soberly. I hope a lot of people watch the film and I hope it wins an Oscar, if for nothing more then its pioneering effort to bring a mass audience to the usually deadly dull topic of budgets.

Now for my caveat.

The book, as Lew Rockwell blog has noted, is quite different from the film. I did one of the edits of the book, so I know it well. It’s a convincing account of why empires are a bad idea. The analysis of  debt and deficits is  placed in a meaningful context that makes it genuinely libertarian.  That means the book has a point of view. A point of view is not partisanship. Both “Empire” (broader in scope and more entertaining) and “Demise” (narrower and less literary) are spot-on in their analysis and I would recommend them heartily to anyone interested in Austrian economics.

The film is a different creature. It features a road tour by David Walker ( Comptroller-General and Head of the General Accounting Office from 1998-2008, Walker left to chair the Peterson Commission – see above –  at Peterson’s request) and interviews with, among others, former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan; former US Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin; former head of the Office of Management and Budget and former governor of the Federal Reserve, Alice Rivlin; Arthur Laffer of Laffer Curve fame; legendary investor and fund manager Warren Buffett; former Chairman of the Federal Reserve and current Obama economic advisor, Paul Volker; and former Treasury Secretary and current chairman of the Rand Corporation, Paul O’Neill.

Assembling this bipartisan group of  prominent enablers/theorists of  empire over the last twenty years lets IOUSA claim it goes beyond partisanship. In reality it does no such thing. Omitting a context for its arguments, the film actually lends itself to being interpreted in ways quite contradictory to the tenor of the original work. At times it even subverts the book thoroughly.

IOUSA lends itself to a very anti-libertarian, statist moralizing of the debt issue: thus, spendthrift population needs to be forced to save by government.  Now that really alarms me. Watch out – forced savings accounts ahead!

Dean Baker (co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research) makes a similar critique at Huffington Post,  only from a different angle.  He’s afraid the film  amounts to propaganda against Social Security and Medicare.

Well, as a libertarian, I am not a fan of any entitlements. Also, Baker’s Keynesianism is wrong-headed. (Correction – January 27, 2009: I shouldn’t say that. I dislike the vulgar version of Keynes that passes for Keynesianism, but to give him his due, Keynes never said you should spend money you don’t have, which is what we’re doing. He said you should spend the money you’d saved from the good times to reinvest in the bad times – to put it very roughly. Now, that’s quite a different kettle of fish… 

But that said, taking apart entitlements without considering everything else that is leeching from the body politic is unjust in my view.

And taking it apart without mentioning empire or war or the financialization of the economy or the activity of the Federal Reserve is dishonest.

Selective libertarianism is not libertarianism any more. It’s reactionary statism in the service of big business, big banks, and big financiers.

But once you see that you also begin to see why the Chairman of Blackstone Inc. and former Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve might have gotten interested in adopting a stray documentary…..

Drag your friends to see IOUSA, but keep the resume of the backer-in-chief in mind.

From the Baker-Rosnick critique:

” For example, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan allowed for the unchecked growth of a $10 trillion stock bubble in the 90s and an $8 trillion housing bubble in the current decade…..Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was an active proponent of the high dollar policy in the late nineties that led to the record trade deficits that are highlighted as a serious danger in the film…..

Peter Peterson is a wealthy investment banker who made millions of dollars from the “fund managers’ tax break,” a clause in the tax code that allows some of the wealthiest people in the country to pay a lower tax rate than school teachers and fire fighters. He even lobbied Congress to
protect this tax break. If every person in the country benefited from government largess [sic] to the same extent as Mr. Peterson, the problem of the debt would be hundreds of times larger than that indicated in IOUSA.”

Here’s  what libertarian writer Doug French, a fan of the original book,  says:

“After I.O.U.S.A. concluded, CNBC’s Squawk Box honey Becky Quick moderated a panel of wise ones live from Omaha, led by Tout TV’s favorite guru, Buffett. The panel assured everyone that government Ponzi-scheme Social Security would be there when they retire. The Cato Institutes’ freedom-loving chairman William Niskanen even thinks people should be forced to save for retirement. Bill Novelli, CEO of AARP, believes the five guys on the panel could solve all of the country’s problems. And more than one panelist blamed everything on partisanship in Washington. If our representatives in this great republic could just learn to get along, everything will work out fine, was the claim. After all, America has faced greater challenges and triumphed.”

And here’s what Lew Rockwell had to say:

“The notion that government is the source of this problem and unlikely to be the solution was never raised. The book made this point clear, the movie carefully ignored it. The movie focussed exclusively on the problems of paying this government debt; the book explored other, more realistic options, such as repudiation and inflation. The book explored the enormous malinvestments, misallocation of resources, folly, and harm caused by the same policies that allow such a monstrous pyramid of debt and credit to be created in the first place. The movie studiously ignored any mention of the harm these policies have caused to civil society.”

Sentier 2 – Franco-Israeli Bank Money Laundering Ring

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“One hundred and fifty-two people were on trial alongside Societe Generale, the French units of Barclays and of the National Bank of Pakistan, and Societe Marseillaise de Credit, owned by HSBC Holdings PLC (HSBA.LN). Daniel Bouton, the chairman of Societe Generale – which was hit by a massive rogue trading scandal at the start of this year – was acquitted along with his bank and three other senior managers at the lender. They were accused of handling the equivalent of EUR32 million in ill-gotten funds.

Investigators told the court that Societe Generale knew of the fraudulent origin of this money but the judge accepted defense arguments that there was no “intentional element” on the part of the bank.

Bouton’s lawyer welcomed what he said was a “coherent” decision. Bouton had been charged with aggravated money laundering and faced 10 years in jail.

Barclays-France and four of its former or current executives were also cleared of wrongdoing.

The court fined the National Bank of Pakistan EUR200,000 and gave two-year suspended jail sentences to two of its bosses for failing to spot EUR1.8 million in illegal transfers.

The pair were also fined EUR20,000 each. Two other executives from the NBP, one of the largest commercial banks in Pakistan, were acquitted.

Societe Marseillaise de Credit was also convicted of failing to spot EUR1.8 million in illegal transfers and fined EUR100,000. One of its executives was given an eight-month suspended sentence.

A former French prosecutor was convicted of for corruption and influence peddling and given a three-year jail sentence with 16 months of it suspended. He was fined EUR30,000….”

And this:

“Judges heard how the four banks handled money from merchants in Paris‘ Sentier garment district – the proceeds of tax evasion, embezzlement or stolen checks laundered through banks or money exchange offices in Israel. The banks had all denied any wrongdoing in the case, dubbed “Sentier 2.

A previous “Sentier” trial saw dozens of clothing merchants from the district convicted of defrauding banks, and investigators looked at whether the firms had made proper checks before handling the merchants’ payments.”

That’s the crux of a Dow Jones Newswire report (Dec 11, 2008) that I came across while following up on the Madoff case. Seems to fit in with my hunch about money laundering.