Ellen Brown: Big Banks Will Take Depositors Money In Next Crash

Greg Hunter: The G-20 met recently in Australia to make new banking rules for the next financial calamity.  Financial reform advocate Ellen Brown says these new rules will allow banks to take money from depositors and pensioners globally. 
Brown explains, “It became rules we agreed to actually implement.  There was no treaty, and Congress didn’t agree to all this.  They use words so that it’s not obvious to tell what they have done, but what they did was say, basically, that we, the governments, are no longer going to be responsible for bailing out the big banks.”
“These are about 30 international banks.  So, you are going to have to save yourselves, and the way you are going to have to do it is by bailing in the money of your creditors.  The largest class of creditors of any bank is the depositors.”

It gets worse, as Brown goes on to say, “Theoretically, we are protected by deposit insurance up to $250,000 in the U.S. and 100,000 euros in Europe.  The FDIC fund has $46 billion, the last time I looked, to cover $4.5 trillion worth of deposits. ”
“There is also $280 trillion worth of derivatives that the five biggest banks in the U.S. are exposed to, and under the bankruptcy reform act of 2005, derivatives go first.  So, they are basically exempt from these new rules.  They just snatch the collateral.”
“So, if you had a big derivatives bust that brought down JP Morgan or Bank of America, there is no way there is going to be collateral left for the FDIC or for the secured depositors.  This would include state and local governments.”
“They all put their money in these big banks.  So, even though we are protected by the FDIC, the FDIC is not going to have the money. This makes it legal for these big 30 banks to take our money when they become insolvent.  They are too-big-to-fail.”
“This was supposed to avoid too-big-to-fail, but what it does is institutionalizes too-big-to-fail.  They are not going to go down.  They are going to take our money instead.”
Part of the coming financial calamity will involve hundreds of trillions of dollars in un-backed derivatives.
Brown contends, “If the derivative bubble pops, nobody knows what is going to happen, and it’s obvious it has to pop.  It can’t just keep growing.  Depending on who you read, some people say it is up to two quadrillion dollars.  It’s virtual money, and it cannot keep going on.”
When a financial crash does happen, you can forget about getting immediate access to your money.
Brown says, “The banks will say, well, we don’t have it.  All the money goes into one big pool since Glass Steagall was repealed.  They are allowed to gamble with that money and that’s what they do.  I think maybe Bank of America is the most vulnerable because of Merrill Lynch.”

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