Is Digital Currency Safe?


Armstrong economics Blog/Cryptocurrency Re-Posted Feb 3, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

It turns out that North Korea-backed hackers stole a record $1.7bn of cryptocurrency in 2022, according to blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. It also appears that they had a hand in the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX where the auditors have reported that around $415m of cryptocurrency has been stolen by hackers.  This is becoming a very interesting story with several facets from funding North Korea to laundering money for Zelensky to pay off the Democrats for the Midterm elections.

There is no way they will let this case go to trial. They will have to cut a deal or they are going to need to have some pumped-up loser kill him when on bail, or Judge Lewis Kaplan will have to revoke his bail and put him in MCC where they can kill him easily and blame another inmate and the guards fell asleep once again and, of course, the camera didn’t work.

At the end of the day, North Korea has been making a lot of money hacking into cryptocurrencies. Your crypto is going to a good cause – World War III to achieve Bill Gate’s dream – population reduction since the vaccines did not kill enough people off – yet.

The Madoff Cover-Up


Armstrong Economics Blog/Banking Crisis Re-Posted Jan 18, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

For those who just read the news and believe whatever they report, in the industry, everyone talks all the time. If Madoff was losing billions trading, everyone would have known. It is one thing to have a portfolio of assets that itself collapses in value which would NOT involve trading, then that presents a more private issue but everyone would suspect something for the news would be circulating around as to what he bought. There is just no way money vanishes. The likely prospect is that Bernie was aware of the dark side of Wall Street and perhaps facilitated that for a price.

Bernie’s case began on December 10th, 2008. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns both collapsed and the Fed took over Fannie & Freddie. The collapse of Lehman shocked the world and that unleashed real panic. That above all took down Madoff, but then came the bailout of AIG which was really to save Goldman Sachs. No doubt, Bernie was hit with withdrawals and on whatever investment he did have in place, he would have lost a fortune without a Ponzi scheme. With the practice of laundering money going on in NYC, no doubt the counterparty risks collapsed. That most likely pushed Bernie over the edge.

Understand one thing. Madoff did not collapse in isolation. His losses were curiously suddenly attributed to a Ponzi scheme. That was very convenient. Calling something a Ponzi scheme as a matter of law meant that EVERY transaction was a fraud. Therefore, that cuts off all investigations to understand what really happened. It is no longer needed because everything and every transaction need not be investigated because it was all Bernie as a fraud.

As long as they called it a “Ponzi Scheme” there was no investigation into money laundering.

The Majority MUST Always be Wrong


Armstrong Economics Blog/Training Tools Re-Posted Jan 17, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

Following the crowd of what is popular and supposed to be the cutting edge of investment, Robert Belfer, the oil Barron, lost billions with ENRON and then Bernie Madoff. Then he became a shareholder in FTX. With a track record like that, you certainly would be firing your financial adviser.  The inside joke about DAVOS is that whatever the theme forecast they put out and what they all talk about has NEVER been right. The joke is to do the opposite of the DAVOS forecast and you will make money. Andy Serwer, editor-in-chief of Yahoo Finance, asked Warren Buffett in a 2019 interview about the DAVOS forecasts. He responded: “Well, I pay none as a guideline to doing anything,” Buffett responded. I have said many times, the majority MUST be wrong for they provide the market energy to create the boom/bust cycle. Because the majority buy the high, when they sell, you get the crash. When everyone is short at the bottom, you get the rally.

Madoff – Hiding the Real Fraud


Armstrong Economics Blog/Conspiracy Re-Posted Jan 17, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

COMMENT: I know you saved Mercedes making back their $1 billion lost all because they listened to the fake news about how the pound and the dollar would crumble in the face of the euro. I read the 2011 Barron’s article on your forecast. It was OK to publish that when they thought you would be wrong. Where is the follow-up when you proved to be the only one who was correct? The same can be said of the New York Times and especially Bloomberg. It is obvious that they will not report on the success of your forecasts because they are leading society at the direction of the Deep State.

Keep up the good work. We need someone independent in this time of darkening clouds.

JWN

REPLY: Let me explain something. All the hype about Bernie Madoff is also FAKE NEWS. On December 10th, 2008, Madoff’s sons Mark and Andrew covered themselves most likely at their father’s direction, and told authorities that their father had confessed to them that the asset management unit of his firm was a massive Ponzi scheme. They even supposedly told them it was “one big lie”. The next day, agents from the FBI arrested Madoff and charged him with one count of securities fraud. There was no possible way the FBI would arrest someone like that without an independent investigation.

The Securities and Exchange Commission had previously conducted numerous investigations into his business practices. Vere did ANY audit uncover such a massive fraud. It was then on March 12th, 2009, when Bernie Madoff simply pleaded guilty to 11 federal felonies and admitted to turning his wealth management business into a massive Ponzi scheme. He was not even indicted. He pled simply to what is known as an “information” so nothing was even presented to a grand jury. That is UNPRECEDENTED!

The banks all claimed that they had “no idea.” Before he died, Madoff did an interview where the headline was that the Banks had to have known. There is ABSOLUTELY no way that the banks were NOT involved or had no idea.  That is legally impossible. As a client of a bank of that size especially, the bank must fill its files with KNOWN YOUR CLIENT rules.

In my case, we had companies set up for each note in Turks & Caicos. The bank actually sent someone down there to audit the legal structure behind every account. There is simply no way a bank can even claim it had no idea. That was a serious RED FLAG that the Madoff case was not what it appeared.

Everyone just skipped over the fact that the SEC conducted multiple audits and found nothing. That included looking at bank accounts and positions on hand. That did NOT add up to a PONZI scheme where you are taking money from one person to pay another which is the actual structure of Social Security. The current generation’s contributions are tasked to pay the previous generation.

Add to that, HSBC, which has been itself indicted for money laundering more than once, stood out as the largest “victim” of Madoff’s scheme – $1.5 billion. HSBC pays countless fines for every scandal they seem to be in the middle of.

In my case, the Bank said they had no idea where the money was after they stole it. How does $1 billion leave a bank without a withdrawal of some sort? Had it not been for my clients standing with me and doing what I told them to do and then sued HSBC, they would have gotten nothing, the government would have claimed I lost it all and the ban was not responsible. The government then put a gag order on me to stop me from helping my clients against the bank! If the bank was not trying to take my client’s money to cover their losses in Russia, then why put a gag order on me if the bank did not do anything wrong?

Then to hide my profits, the receiver handed the notes we issued to HSBC for them to redeem for $606 million pocketing $400 million profit stolen from my company. A former employee bumped into a former HSBC official and he asked what the hell went on. The bankers bluntly told him, the deal offered by the government was too good to pass up. When I asked a NY lawyer why no banker ever is charged or goes to jail, he laughed and said: “You don’t shit where you eat!”

Remember the 1995 collapse of the British Barings Bank because of a “rogue” trader? Nicholas William Leeson was an English former derivatives trader whose claimed fraudulent, “unauthorized and speculative trades” resulted in the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank, the United Kingdom’s oldest merchant bank. Leeson was convicted of financial crime in Singapore court and served over four years in Changi Prison. At the time, I owned a Brokerage House I was asked to bail out by the Japanese government. At our Hong Kong office, Barings wanted to open an account to trade with Leeson in charge.

I knew the corruption of the banks and if the trade went wrong, they would claim he was not authorized. That was the standard operational procedure. Knowing the inside of the industry out, I insisted on a letter from the Board of Directions expressly laying out the credit line for Leeson they requested from my company. I got the letter. So when Leeson supposedly went belly up, guess what. I was quietly paid when everyone else it was said Leeson was a rogue trader.

The New York Post journalist Isabel Vincent who wrote Gilded Lilly, the wife of Edmond Safra, had called me and asked that since I had said that Republic National Bank, Edmond Safra’s, had been illegally trading in my accounts, did I think they were laundering money for the Russian mafia “as they were doing in Madoff’s?” I said I did not know. All I could tell was there were countless errors constantly being put into my accounts and then backed out. At first, I assumed they were “parking trades” in my accounts to use my cash for their margin. Of course, if the “error” was backed out to a different account, they indeed, they were engaging in money laundering.

The court-appointed forensic accountant even wrote to the court about the unprecedented errors in the accounts. The government refused to provide account information to allow them to audit what was going on. The court-appointed counsel, David Cooper, I believe was doing everything he could to help the government cover everything up. The forensic accountant then sent letters to the Judge, and he took no action.

You now have the FTX scandal. You will see that there will NEVER be a trial that would expose all the money laundering where the Democrats had Zelensky, which supposedly needed money to defend his country and fee starving Ukrainians, hand the money to FTX who then happened to be the #2 donor to the Democrats for the midterms. Guess what! Sam Bankman-Fried was charged in the most corrupt court in the nation – the Southern District of New York. The Court of Appeals admitted on page 97 of US v Ziccehtello, that judges are altering transcripts and changing the very words spoken in court.  That is 20 years in prison if you or I alter court documents. They do it all the time. When I confronted Judge Richard Owen about this practice, so many people showed up in court to see what would happen. The lawyers said you can’t accuse a federal judge of committing a crime. I said you all say they do it. They responded. Yes, but you cannot accuse them of doing it. The judge got scared and admitted it in public but claim it wasn’t material.

All the press was there AP, New York Times, Bloomberg, NT Post, you name it. NOT a single member of the press reported what took place that day. OMG! Exposing the federal courts corruption? Impossible!

If a case is a high profile, you will NEVER see the truth in the media.

Manhattan Judge Sets $250 Million Bond and House Arrest for FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried


Posted originally on the CTH on December 22, 2022 | Sundance

FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried waived an extradition fight and U.S. Marshals flew him from the Bahamas to New York late Wednesday night.  Appearing in a Manhattan court today, the judge set bail at $250 million and permits SBF to remain under house arrest at his parent’s California home until trial begins.

Additionally, it was revealed that Carolyn Ellison, 28, the former chief executive of Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Research, and Gary Wang, 29, who co-founded FTX, pleaded guilty to charges including wire fraud, securities fraud and commodities fraud.  Both are cooperating witnesses with the prosecution against the FTX founder.

New York – The cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried can post $250 million bond and live in his parents’ home in California while he awaits trial on charges that he swindled investors and looted customer deposits on his FTX trading platform, a judge said Thursday.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos said in U.S. District Court in Manhattan that Bankman-Fried, 30, “perpetrated a fraud of epic proportions.” Roos proposed strict bail terms, including a $250 million bond and house arrest at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California.

An important reason for allowing bail was that Bankman-Fried agreed to waive extradition, Roos said.

Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein agreed to the bond and also approved the house arrest proposal. He also said Bankman-Fried would be required to get an electronic monitoring bracelet before leaving the Manhattan courthouse.

[…] Prosecutors and regulators contend that Bankman-Fried was at the center of several illegal schemes to use customer and investor money for personal gain. He faces the possibility of decades in prison if convicted on all counts.

In a series of interviews before his arrest, Bankman-Fried said he never intended to defraud anyone.

Bankman-Fried is charged with using money, illicitly taken from FTX customers, to enable trades at Alameda, spend lavishly on real estate, and make millions of dollars in campaign contributions to U.S. politicians. (read more)

Exclusive Interview with Sam Bankman-Fried!


Awaken With JP Published originally on Rumble on December 17, 2022 

WOW, JP has done it again

Sam Bankman-Fried Charged in New York & Arrested in the Bahamas


Armstrong Economics Blog/Rule of Law Re-Posted Dec 12, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

Sam Bankman-Fried of cryptocurrency giant FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, has been arrested in the Bahamas on criminal charges, the Bahamas Attorney General’s Office announced Monday. The arrest “followed receipt of formal notification from the United States that it has filed criminal charges against SBF and is likely to request his extradition,” the office said.

In a statement, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: “Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”

He will be held at MCC, the same dungeon in which Jeffrey Epstein supposedly committed suicide. WIth his connections with all the Democrats, this is going to be interesting to see if he too suddenly commits suicide.