HSBC – money laundering, past and present – and access to Fed ‘secret liquidity lifelines’

HSBC Holdings Plc, a British bank and financial services company, is reputed to be the world’s largest bank, operating in 80 countries around the globe. It was founded in 1991 as the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC).

HSBC came under investigation in 2012 for allegedly laundering billions of dollars for drug lords and terrorists. A Senate subcommittee indicated that much of the $7 billion transferred by HSBC from Mexico to its U.S. subsidiary had been related to “drug dealing.”

HSBC was accused of “actively circumventing U.S. safeguards to block transactions involving terrorists, drug lords and rogue regimes, including hiding $19.4 billion in transactions with Iran.”

HSBC admitted wrongdoing and paid a record $1.92 billion in fines to resolve the charges of laundering billions of dollars for Latin American drug cartels (Bloomberg, Jul 3, 2013).

“HSBC was accused of failing to monitor more than $670 billion in wire transfers and more than $9.4 billion in purchases of U.S. currency from HSBC Mexico, allowing for money laundering, prosecutors said. The bank also violated U.S. economic sanctions against Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba, according to a criminal information filed in the case.
…. Lack of proper controls allowed the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico and the Norte del Valle cartel in Colombia to move more than $881 million through HSBC’s U.S. unit from 2006 to 2010, the government alleged in the case.”
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During this same “2006 to 2010” period that HSBC was laundering money for drug cartels and violating sanctions on behalf of various state terror sponsors, HSBC was also caught up in the subprime debt crisis – and began receiving emergency funding from the U.S. Federal Reserve (and ultimately, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers).

According to Bloomberg (Nov 22, 2011), HSBC accessed several billions of dollars from Fed emergency funding facilities throughout the fall of 2008 and into the summer of 2009. These included the Term Auction Facility (TAF), Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF), Temporary Security Lending Facility, Single-Tranche Open Market Operations (STOMO) and the Fed’s Discount Window (DW).

Peak Amount of Debt on 3/12/2009: $3.7B
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And here is the latest, hot off the presses – HSBC is at it again:                                             (Bloomberg (Feb 9, 2015) – The private-banking unit of HSBC Holdings Plc made significant profits for years handling secret accounts whose holders included drug cartels, arms dealers, tax evaders and fugitive diamond merchants, according to a report released Sunday by an international news organization. 

These latest charges include laundering money for Russian billion oligarchs with close ties to Putin.

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And now for our question of the month:
If large multi-national banks, including foreign banks like HSBC, can conspire against the security interests of the United States and at the same time be granted direct access to billions of dollars through Fed liquidity lines, then what could possibly be the rationale for U.S. citizens NOT being granted equal access…?

Answer:  There isn’t any.

And here we have one of the biggest U.S. taxpayer ‘screw-overs’ of the past 20 years.  And U.S. citizens cannot get the same direct liquidity access that our government provided for HSBC.

It is a travesty of the highest order.

The answer: The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 – $70,000 per U.S. citizen                             :                     The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 (773)