Engdahl: System Jammed Up By Only 5 Big Banks; Should Be Put Into Receivership Immediately

F Wiliam Engdahl, economist, author, and risk consultant speaks to Paul Jay about Geithner's plan to rescue the financial institutions in the United States. Engdahl says the plan doesn't address the concentration of financial power in the United States, that is based in five major financial institutions. He says his plan is like a "band aid for a bad hemorrhage".

As Engdahl points out, the top five big banks hold 95% of the assets considered "at risk" and needing to be "saved" by the Geithner plan. Think about that for a minute, and then think about Geithner's claim that this is about the whole financial system, and the welfare of Main Street.

But there's a deeper problem here that Engdahl doesn't go into: the five big banks that are remaining are precisely the ones most infiltrated and captured by corrupt intelligence-linked, fraudulent finance interests. More important than anything else to these interests (and their friends and stooges in government, like Geithner), is that their activities and fraudulent securities remain buried and not exposed to the light of day. That is why all "solutions" involve propping them up and keeping the assets pooled, rather than breaking them up, and inspecting them and valuing them on an open market. It is also explains why "non-insider" institutions, like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia, or Washington Mutual could be allowed to fail (if not get pushed off the ledge). How often did you hear about these latter institutions being involved in drug money laundering? Never. How about using insider information to kill counterparties? Never. How about manipulating futures markets, leading to dramatic mispricing of commodities? Never.

The same cannot be said for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Bank of America, or HSBC (which I believe is the fifth bank in the list). Strangely, those are the ones that have "miraculously" survived the tumult, to date.