From The Press December 13, 2010
The secret club that rules the world
Maurizio Molinari
New York correspondent
Nine of the leading bankers of Wall Street financial institutions meet the third Wednesday of each month in Manhattan's Financial District to gain control of the market and the prosperity that most worries the White House: the derivatives. The administration has tried in vain to subject them to strict controls in the recent financial reform passed by Congress, and Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve Chairman advisor to the Oval Office, is The harshest critic, highlighting them as a market 'defies all the rules "and continues to undermine the stability of Wall Street do-while it has already contributed to the crisis of September 2008. But the pressures of the White House and Congress have a faint echo in the meeting that they see around a table bankers giants like JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley primarily interested in maintaining control of the trade-annual multi-trillion dollars that are beyond any oversight because derivatives are largely non-financial products listed on the Stock Exchange.
So are traded privately, and often recorded in the financial statements so ambiguous as to suggest suspicions of wrongdoing. And 'just for investigate the possible risk of fraud are capable of putting at risk the stability of major banks - and thus the savings of millions of citizens - that the Justice Department in Washington has created an investigative task force, whose owner Robert Litan has discovered the secret of "Wednesday's club" finished yesterday on the first page of the New York Times. To give substance to the survey were the testimonies collected between senior officials from Bank of New York Mellon, founded in 1784, which allowed to reconstruct their request to enter into the "club on Wednesday" - which is called Ice Trust - was rejected by nine bankers based on the belief that "the request was not supported by sufficient volume of trading of derivatives during the year. "
"This is an absurd answer because we are one of the longest active banks in the financial district," he pointed out Sanjay Kannambadi, CEO of the subsidiary created by New York Mellon Bank to enter In the Ice Trust, which provides that "the real why we have kept out is the desire to maintain high profit margins and not share with others the drafting of the rules that govern this type of exchange. "
Faced with this reconstruction Robert Livan has done nothing to find the possible creation of a group committed to managing the financial derivatives market with non-public methods, raising the scenario something that looks like a secret society of bankers in the heart of Wall Street to manage the products that continue to be those that guarantee more economic profits.
Hence the investigation, only the beginning, which threatened to mess Wall Street. Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in charge of regulating the exchange of the majority of derivatives, suggests the need for "greater oversight on the work of banks" in order to avoid the risk of non-public arrangements intended born to "increase the costs for all American citizens. "
But members of the 'club of Wednesday `reject such accusations, saying the exact opposite. "The system created allows you to reduce the risks existing in this market and so far the cooperation between us has been a success," he told the New York Times, a spokeswoman for Deutsche Bank, suggesting that the super-club carries out those tasks control the financial reform has failed to assign any institution.
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