welcome to crash concepts where the economy energy and the environment are explored up next fresh ideas and insights into the factors that are driving the world it's shaping your future presenting information you can't afford to live without here's Chris Martenson welcome to this peak prosperity podcast it is marks 29 2017 and I'm Chris Martenson your host today we're going to be talking with Bradley birkenfeld author of Lucifer's banker the untold story of how I destroyed Swiss bank secrecy it's a story of intrigue that will both illuminate what's really going on and almost certainly fan the flames of injustice you may be carrying from his books description on Amazon we learned that as a private banker working for the largest bank in the world UBS Bradley was an expert in the shell game of offshore companies and secret accounts that dominate the world of the ultra-wealthy he wined and dined those clients whose millions of dollars were hidden away from business partners spouses and tax authorities as his client list grew birkenfeld lived a life of money fast cars and beautiful women but when he discovered that UBS was planning to betray him he blew the whistle to the US government now despite working with the government closely to expose a gigantic conspiracy between US based tax cheats and the giant Swiss bank UBS the so-called Justice Department went after mr. birkenfeld for abetting tax evasion by one of his clients after spending 30 months in federal prison he was released and three weeks later received a whistleblower check for a hundred and four million dollars the largest such check ever from the IRS whistleblower office welcome Bret it is a real pleasure having you on the program well thank you so much Chris for having me on here and I'm delighted to educate and inform your audience so that they get a better idea of exactly what went on and how the American people got screwed by the government well you put all of that in the past tense so let's go into the story and see if we can have confidence that's all in the past or not but what a story let's start at the beginning how long were you working at ubs and how did you get there in the first place well i left the united states where i work in boston for a large institutional investment management firm called state street global advisors i was a currency trader there for several years and actually i witnessed the illegal conduct there which I outline in my book Lucifer's banker and I went to the FBI in Boston at the time which was 1994 this was the same FBI office by the way Chris that was cuddling the mobster whitey bulger so you can imagine that FBI office was tainted and corrupt and really nothing happened so that's where the story starts so I went over to Switzerland to get my MBA in international finance and when I did that I then moved from Investment Banking into private banking which Switzerland known for and I was hired by Credit Suisse in Geneva and I started working there and then after a few years my boss left to go to Singapore and I went with my next loss to barclays bank in Geneva and worked there for about four years from 1998 to around so let's say 2001 and then I was recruited from Barclays to UBS by a headhunting firm in London and I started working as the head of business development for North America out of Geneva's would the UVs all right so you have a lot of experience in banking and finance and working in the depths of what we would call big banking so let's turn to the story itself that that's turned into what I think is is honestly this is a probably one of the best corporate crime books ever written it's just a fantastic story so let's get into this story itself as I put in the intro there was some concern on your part that maybe UBS was going to be seeking fall guys or gals for their activities to bring us into this case what was happening well really what happened here is and your audience it's a cop cated sort of web of information that's important to understand the background so you get a feel for it and just don't lash out make generalized comments great so first and foremost in Switzerland Swiss bank secrecy is part of the Constitution under article 47 in 1934 so that's that's a fact but why did it start it started because when the Third Reich came to power in Germany under adolf hitler in 1933 they said that if you move any money out of the country you will be shot that's a fact Switzerland countered and said we're going to put article 47 in place to counter that and say we will never disclose the identity of any client that puts money in our country ok so it made sense now that was nineteen thirty-four the world was a different place then after the war obviously cross-border business bloomed people were doing businesses and other currencies other countries and so on and so forth so what happened was Swiss bank secrecy Mike attorney-client privilege or medical privacy you understand that it made sense that you keep this kind of information confidential unfortunately it was abused and taken to such an extent where the political stability and economic stability of Switzerland was utilized for the fairies acts so you got in the drug dealers you had in the the terrorist financing insider-trading bribery extortion and so on and so forth as well as the intelligence agencies using Switzerland as a piggy bank to do their illegal business one story comes to mind for your audience once would be iran-contra Irene contract Switzerland was at the center of laundering money to the Contras and Iranians to do this illegal business so I worked in this industry in so much as in Switzerland it was illegal business it was a bit of a gray area when they told us you should go to the United States and see existing and potential clients because we weren't license to sell products our investments in the United States because we were in an offshore jurisdiction now this would be going on before I was born but also I was a part of it I was in the middle of this and it started to get a little bit strenuous because what was happen is they were telling us to do things that really didn't make us feel comfortable and what it was was taking cryptid laptops to the US which ever excused to do they were telling us to do other training methods to avoid detection in the US and lie on immigration forms which I refused to do and really what it came down to was I knew enough about the way in which the business was done and then one day a colleague brought to me a three-page document from our intranet well the UBS intranet is massive and you need to know everything on there technically as an officer of the bank and I had a ten-million-dollar signature power so I had significant responsibility and commitment to the firm and to the clients well what happened was the three-page document that was brought to my attention contradicted everything they were telling us to do meaning going to the US and same time that the detail code of us you can't sit through account opening forms you can't sell products you can't do any of these things so in essence what they were saying is one thing and in the background another thing and that document the three-page document which is in my book Lucifer's banker and clearly states that one this was sort of a setup so the bank was protected but the clients weren't protected the call me to unprotected and the shareholders were not protected so this was really a matter of greed for the bank and they weren't able to divorce itself from this business they just kept one and make the money from it so that was really what it came down to and I challenged management on it and ultimately I resigned from the bank when they wouldn't answer me so this was a heads they win tails you lose kind of a cya document I'm guessing absolutely correct spot on okay so so when you resigned you then but you had a lot of information a lot of knowledge about what was going on in and the substance of that was that there were a lot of people in the United States who were still using this Swiss banking system in order to evade taxes at this point and if I have the story right your information helped expose 19,000 American names are not with those are individuals or collected entities or how that how that stacks up that appeared to be hiding money from the IRS did did you tell us how it is that you came though to the decision to say wow I maybe I should go a term whistleblower in this case well I initially as i said i saw the three-page document which I went to the head of the department who actually blew me off and didn't want to ruffle any feathers so we almost got the fisticuffs over that and I said you're putting everybody at risk here this is not right so I'm eating the game it to some of my colleagues senior colleagues and then I sent an email to the head of legal and the head of compliance to different departments and I voiced my concern and attached a three-page document and then it printed this off and then sent it to both of them in interoffice mail so I was documenting and then putting the material out there so no one could deny it wasn't out there so I did that for one month no answer i did it a second month no answer i did in a third month there was no answer and at that point that's when i started taking documents out of the bank and storing them outside of switzerland in france so that i was protected if anyone to accuse me of saying hey you don't know what you're talking about I had the documents to prove it now then I resigned from the bank I resigned in October of 2005 now I started the whistle blowing in March about five now this was a year and a half before the whistle blowing law in America was passed by Congress so people say well you just did it to the money no I didn't because I started my whistle blowing long before the law was even passed so that's an important fact for your audience to understand the second thing is I then took the three internal UBS whistleblowing policies that they wrote and I attach my three-page document and the information i sent to UBS legal and UBS compliance and I sent into the board of directors of the bank and said now it's your problem I'm a whistleblower internally I'm telling you and you need to do something about it well that caused a huge problem for the bank because now they knew they were on a stick for this extensive legal illegal conduct then they called an investigation that investigation was just a sandbag job and they covered it up again so the board of directors of the bank covered up the largest and longest-running tax fraud in the world so at that point I had no choice but to then go to the United States government my own government and tell them about this but unfortunately the US government was a part of it they would need deep in it and i can tell you why this is so damning is because the Department of Justice doesn't like whistleblowers number one because it makes them look like the fools they are the second thing is if they were so good running day uncover it why would it take a single courageous with the blow to come forward and expose the largest and longest-running text caught in the world and they were they were oblivious to this no they were part of it as I said so this really was the problem and then I knew that the DL J was so hostile towards me and I had to go to the SEC the IRS and the US Senate and if you go onto my website Lucifer's banker calm you'll see under the UBS scandal there are countless documents of the Senate hearings and Gao reports and so on and so forth that proved what I was saying was correct and the government really didn't want to get involved in this because as I said a lot of these people were involved CEOs billionaires politicians celebrities sports stars and this is what happened it is ingrained in America 19,000 rich Americans were the minimum accounts I was a million dollars at this at ubs in Switzerland all right so Brad what I'm hearing your those you know whether the DOJ was they didn't want to either look like fools or inept or something like that but you also mentioned earlier that intelligence agencies had been known through the iran-contra example we can assume that's not a one-off but but that there was a there's possibly go involvement here at some level so I want to circle back around to that but before we get there let's talk now about how this case really started to come out what you're describing was that because it's encoded in the Swiss Constitution this banking secrecy you're taking extraordinary riskier both with the Swiss government authorities and now you're making it sound like also at least the US Department of Justice authorities as well that really sounds rock in a hard place again why why do I have that right and if so why did you do this well you're absolutely correct but the main thing was the DOJ I asked them for immunity they declined I asked him for a subpoena a simple subpoena which takes a matter of minutes to issue and they refused because they thought you know we're not going to work with this guy they were being very hostile so I said okay you're not going to do that now i can't give you names unless you give me a subpoena because i would go to jail in switzerland where it's a crime to expose your clients which i did not do the only crime I exposed was a client that was making illegal oil salesmen Saddam Hussein who had 420 million dollars in six numbered accounts who lived in a fifty-million-dollar condo in new york city now his name was Abdul Aziz Abbas and he's in my book and you can see the account numbers there and you see the entire information on this gentleman the DOJ did nothing about this person nothing because he was best friends with Ray Kelly commission of the police department and he was friends with Rudy Giuliani in New York so you can see that there was political ties to this person and most likely he was clean volved with the CIA because he was doing illegal oil sales with Saddam Hussein so this in of itself was so damning but then I went to the US Senate and they were happy to give me a subpoena so by getting the subpoena from the US Senate I was insulated from prosecution in Switzerland but I wasn't insulated from prosecution by the DOJ who were furious that I left them and then involved other agencies like the Senate the SEC and the IRS now let's let's talk about this because there's just so much smoke here I know there's fire down here somewhere your information ended up exposing those 19,000 American names we talked about let's unpack this how many of those names were actually turned over to the IRS well this is the problem what we had and what we learned later as a result of WikiLeaks and it's on my website again Lucifer spenco com there is ironically aftenposten is a Norwegian newspaper that exposed a one-page CIA cable in that cable show that Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State had secret meetings with the Swiss to settle the uvf case for political reasons now that's very dangerous yes exactly so what we have here is a secretary of state who claims to be so aboveboard but yet was having secret meetings and negotiating only 4500 names out of 19,000 Chris Chris that's a 75-percent failure rate if you fail 75% of time at your job or any of your listeners fail seventy-five percent of the time jp-5 well well it goes beyond the failure who picked those names and left the other ones off well then you get into the more deep questions exactly correct how would they selected did hilary picked up did you BS picked them who was cooler selected and why and why wouldn't you get all 19 thousand names chris you know five people robbed a bank you only get one person no you get all five and this was going on for decades so the very fact that she made a deal and negotiated twenty five percent of the names and how they were selected as you rightly point out is really troubling and you actually in in effect you've treated 300 million Americans yeah Brad I want to get to I mean this is just a here's where the sausage is being made I'm I have this part that you wrote here is just this is just astonishing to me and that this didn't really come out more fully in the last election cycle but it's that prior to Clinton's Hillary Clinton's deal with a Swiss that secret deal UBS had only seen fit to contribute sixty thousand dollars to the Clinton Foundation you wrote an amount that wouldn't even cover the banks annual parking tickets but that afterwards the Clinton Foundation's cash registers rang up six hundred thousand dollars in ubs gifts and the bank also then decided to partner with the foundation on inner city development programs issuing a 32 million dollar loan it very reasonable rate and Oh suddenly the UBS also thought bill clinton would make a very fine paid speaker about global affairs so they paid him 1.5 2 million for a series of fireside chats with the bank's wealth management chief executive Bob McCann it was Bill Clinton's biggest payday since leaving the office of the presidency read I got to tell you that that doesn't smell real good over here from where I'm sitting well let me tell you something not only does it stink to high heaven but it shows the ingrained corruption of the collecting family in the foundation into inextricably linked you can't divorce yourself from both their the alter ego of one another and they use it as a piggy bank to curry favor with foreign governments and get these sons now ironically we found out just recently a few months ago after the election that geez the Swiss government gave five hundred thousand dollars to the Clinton Foundation while they were negotiating the settlement with UBS oh come on it's all my website you can go check the article go on to my website you'll see that this is what was going on so how is it possible that you would be involved in such a nefarious Act and a conflict and you violated your oath to the US Constitution that's an impeachable offense yeah it's just it's astonishing to me and so you know the the subtext of all of this which is really is that you know it's kind of crime pays but but it actually it's that we have we entered a period of what you're calling no-fault corporate crime enforcement I think it began a long time ago but under holder it became a real art form so in this case where you vs was eventually fine 780 million for helping those US citizens evade the taxes uh what kind of a in terms of the what sort of a penalty was that was that several hundred percent of their ill-gotten gains or you know tell me what kind of a what kind of a slap was that well for your audience it's very simple the math they the Department of Justice took an eight year window if you will from 2002 2008 2007 part of me that's an eight year window at eight year window we made about two hundred million dollars a year in profits those numbers came from me would give it to the Justice Department and that was in the deferred prosecution by the way the bank wasn't prosecuted they got a deferred prosecution and paid 780 million dollars but really if you run the numbers 200 million of the 780 what's the SEC so they really find them 580 million dollars and they were making 200 million a year for an eight year period so the quick map does it that's 1.6 billion Chris weird the billion dollars go just to make the US taxpayer whole forget about fines penalties and interest then you me has claimed they couldn't afford to pay because they had hard times they accepted five billion dollars from AIG which was taxpayer money so we were laundering money to AIG to pay ubs and they claim they couldn't pay the fine the political forces at bay at the time fixing the Barack Obama presidency is tainted and corrupt and furthermore eric holder in private practice represented UBS at Covington and Burling Hillary Clinton had secret meetings of Swiss and sent to Chinese Boogaard Guantanamo detainees to Switzerland to settle the case Barack Obama who was Senator Obama was on the Senate committee investigating UBS but never attended one meeting not one they were investigating UBS but at the same time he accepted millions of dollars from UBS for his presidential campaign that is an impeachable offense he violated his oath to the Constitution he betrayed the American people and you don't see any media outlet talking about this not one indeed we don't and so I want to turn to what is I'm sure that the darkest portion of this story for you was was you being prosecuted and I'm not aware of anybody else in this entire story be prosecuted or even losing their job maybe I have that wrong but what happened to you what was the what was the specifics of the case well they they gave all of my bosses above me he put non prosecution agreements each one of them got a secret non-prosecution agreement and even when the head of the private bank raul vial was indicted and then called a fugitive three months later a few years later after 2009 when that happened he went to Italy and he was arrested on an Interpol arrest warrant where he was a fugitive well now the US with in big trouble because they had put on this sham case in Florida now when he was arrested and extradited to Florida this is the head of the private bank for UBS I gave that me into them that's how they indicted him but it was just a show maneuver so when the trial came up they never called me to testify not once they called all of my bosses who got secret non prosecution agreements and he was acquitted in about 30 minutes because the whistleblower wasn't able to testify in that case wasn't able to yeah no they didn't call me they didn't want me to didn't want me at the trial yeah and they screwed up the case so once again 300 million Americans plus that's screwed by the corrupt Department of Justice they not about justice there about protecting themselves trying to take credit and making everyone else listen to what they say the story is but unfortunately now I've told my story in the book and it's so compelling and if you think of it this way your audience's is quite intelligent we remember that financial crisis of 2008 it was devastating and so many people lost their jobs lost their homes and so forth in the entire financial crisis there was not one banker to go to jail the only banker to go to jail was the UBS whistle blower who exposed the largest and longest-running tax fraud in the world and in the substance of the case against you was that they said if I have this right that you had failed to be forthcoming about your clients specifically one of them and and I believe a key kevin was Kevin downing who was prosecuting this said quote with regard to whistleblowers those who seek to be treated as true whistleblowers need to know they must come in early and give complete and truthful disclosures mr. birkenfeld did not come in and give complete and truthful disclosures therefore he is not entitled to whistleblowers status how do you respond well he's a fraud and that's a lie he lied to the Senate and he lied to and his colleagues lied to the Senate and he lied to a federal judge in Florida who is as corrupt as the Department of Justice the fact of the matter is they knew I could not give names until I had a subpoena you be I said the same thing we cannot give names I said the same thing the moment i went to the Senate i gave testimony to the Senate after the subpoena gave all the names and Igor let o'clock boys in there and the Senate share the information with the DOJ and they use that information to indict me so they're they're lying it's a flat-out lie and it's even worse to this day twist to this very day the testimony I gave almost a decade ago to the Senate under oath they won't give me my own testimony really won't give it to me because you know why because the information I gave about a lot of copies india i gave the league or atlantic off to them and they had that information and they even sent me an email saying oh we forgot about kevin costner but we know it's got about ego a leather cuff but we remember kevin costner oh oh that's nice how did that work out hmm so you see that they were all in bed together to bury this because they all look like idiots and I exposed the whole scandal which they were a part of because now they were scrambling for a scapegoat and that was me right and just to just so people get the complete picture the prosecutor at the time out of the DOJ was a Kevin downing who is now hold on to your seats people an attorney for Miller in chevalier washington DC white-shoe firm specializing in tax law white-collar crime in advising global businesses on government enforcement and compliance what evolving door I mean it just between Eric Holder and on and on I mean this is a really hard impression for me to shake and for my listeners which is that there is just this revolving door they all protect each other they commit massive crimes and the laws don't seem to apply to them in some respects to get you know this isn't a political statement but an observation this was the odor that hillary was carrying with her saying trust me i'm electable i'll take care of you but we all know that the Clinton Foundation what we saw that it was just a paper pasted play scheme that there's just massive institutionalized fraud and corruption ongoing is this is this a fair characterization when did it start and where do we what's our what's our hope in this story well the good thing is is that I'm out and I publish my book news Chris bhangra I put a website together losers banker calm publishing my book in multiple foreign languages in lecturing around the world to educate the people to show how corrupt the Department of Justice is to show that there's this revolving door where Kevin downing leads the Department of Justice goes to Miller and Chavo yay and it defended the people he should have prosecuted this is outrageous why isn't there a Senate hearing on this why aren't I called in to testify in public and expose of it because then you're going to have a lot of rich contributors and CEOs and politicians themselves say we can't have him speak in public under oath because it'll expose us for what we are fraud well absolutely so so let me just build you know took me about a minute to assemble a list of crimes of UBS so you're it was 2009 as a consequence of your actions UBS was fine that 780 million then in 2012 UBS's find 1.5 billion this time for the LIBOR scandal 2015 fine 545 million for foreign exchange manipulations listen I take two things from this bread from that list first is that UBS has learned nothing except that crime does pay and the second is that the big banks are busy manipulating pretty much F remarket no matter how large at this point in time again are those fair sort of assessments at this point it's an undersea Chris because you know I've only put the top ten you be as fines on my website under the UBS scandal and the very fact that you just write a check and I coin the phrase aptly named its political prostitution the politicians just have these wonderful press conferences at the DOJ and say we got all this money we have all this but nobody goes to jail so number one here's the problem with this so when you find ubx what your audience must realize is very simple UBS is a Swiss bank so that means they write it off on their taxes so then that means the Swiss taxpayers carry the burden that's the first thing the second thing is go look at the millions and millions of dollars in legal fees to defend this for conduct then the UVs shareholders pick up that tab oh that's nice so you have you beer shareholders swiss citizens picking up the tab for bankers who just keep doing their business and they walk away how is this possible they're in the US government oh they get a happy face for the day meaning what they've done is they sent incredibly bad precedent and zero deterrence because what they're saying is oh if you get caught again you just write a check oh you might have to add five or ten million to that check and you just keep doing the business you're doing and the pathetic prosecutors at the Department of Justice say oh she we got a check and we could put it on our resume saying we got two hundred billions on this Bank for doing illegal conduct yeah but you've screwed the American people it's outrageous it is outrageous in it and it continues on and so uh to round this out I'm really glad to have you on because maybe you can shed light on this we we tracked and we were pretty carefully looking at what happened with the Panama papers when they came out that giant dump that came out from that we'll take a file dump and I was a little surprised well maybe not but just a little surprised at how quickly that story disappeared from the news cycle and in searching afterwards there are independent analysts who dug through that trove and uncovered what appears to be a massive evasion and laundering scheme you talk about you know it's the DOJ worried about appearing foolish or complicit or incompetent I mean that to me look like again giant silver platter here's a here's a web of shell companies that are clearly designed to hide wealth from authorities and partner spouses were from from legal any sort of legal oversight that went away pretty quickly is that an unfair observation of mine no it is a very good observation it's very add to the point and the point we have with the Panama papers is very simple why is it that they said there was an anonymous whistleblower which it could be but 11.4 million documents you have to understand how many documents that is to fill a room its massive now know some guys going to hold that amount on them so this was clearly an intelligence breach some intelligence agency hacked this and did it for a purpose to expose some of the enemies let's say of the US whether it's Putin or Pakistan or Venezuela and that's what happened and and there was Cameron who was collateral damage because this was so massive and in my opinion I gave an interview in Munich Germany on this and I said you know was the CIA that pulled this off because what they did was they try to get in there to use this information to threaten other people for instance if I get information and I destroy somebody let's say yourself in politics I go to the next person say see what I did to Chris so you better play ball with me or I'm going to expose you and it's more of a bout a leverage game of extortion and I'm convinced that's what this is because it's just it doesn't make sense there's an anonymous whistleblower 11.4 million documents and everybody who was announced in the initial leak was an enemy of you how is that possible yeah it didn't make sense to me either I was one of our observations like this really stinks to high heaven but it didn't seem to have a huge impact I guess it except unless it was a chilling sort of a you know as you say a message sent a shot across the bow and on that front it's pretty clear to me that your particular case as a whistleblower was really designed by the Department of Justice to send a chilling message to other whistleblowers so under Obama who I know a lot of people think was this progressive suave personally that they really admire his uh he was probably the most hostile president I'm aware of to whistleblowers and it seems to me like your case was if anything the equivalent of the panama paper dump it's like a shot across about don't don't be a whistleblower we're going to make your life very miserable if you do again unfair or fair well you're absolutely correct and it goes even deeper than that and barack obama has defrauded the american people i would debate this gentleman at any city at any time on this issue but obviously he wouldn't do that because i would expose him for what he is the fraud i say he is that's the nut first thing the second thing is he violated his oath to the Constitution when he never attended those hearings at the US Senate in which we is an active member at the time third his cabinet was so flawed between eric holder who represented UBS Hillary Clinton who did a secret deal with the swiss tim geithner who didn't pay his own taxes the treasury secretary in his own taxes and admitted it ok this is this is the cast of clowns you had in your bomber circus and i can tell you you know everybody wants to say he was such a great present in this and that and look i'm not going to say one way or another I'm just stayed in fact and I think if at any time you treat the American people you should be removed from office immediately period end of story mm-hmm alright well just to I agree totally and you have an interesting peace in the book which is about how in august two thousand nine on that first Sunday after you were sentenced in prison at the farm neck golf club in Martha's Vineyard President Obama was playing golf that day and his partner was Robert wolf chairman of UBS Americas and you wrote I'm sure it was a fine day of pattern and play guarded by a throng of Secret Service agents and I wondered if Obama and wolf had high fived over my downfall or maybe sent a good job text to the sentencing judge I'll never know because much like Swiss bankers Secret Service agents don't talk it that does seem like a little wink from from them from the matrix as it were like hey you know this is how we play this is how the game is played well that's exactly right and and and Barack Obama was actually more hostile towards whistleblowers than any other president combined and in my case in particular with this UBS case how how interesting that the fact of the matter is is that you were in bed with the big bank period and this is something that was so dangerous because Robert wolf was then appointed by the President to two of his committees and he was a frequent visitor of the White House why would you do such a thing why wouldn't something that was never disclosed clearly and the president was never grilled on this by the by the media in the White House I mean this was just left to the wayside so it just goes to show you all the way from the president down you can't trust these people and it's like anything if you have a spousal relationship and you treat once your treat a thousand times that's the same with President Obama you treated the American people once god only knows how many other times he cheated us and think of it this way take a more current event with President Obama when he paid 1.4 billion dollars in cash to the state of Iran write up the money wasn't wired it was sent in cash on a private jet from where else Geneva Switzerland so I guess President Obama has access to bank account in Geneva where he told the money from is that where the money came from I mean this is how religious you and this is incredible and what i did i said my book Lucifer's anchor by fedex to every member of Congress before the election as well as to the president and the Attorney General and the Secretary of State John Kerry I didn't get one response from one Democrat not one but I got three letters from three Republican Congressmen and that that's very talented the fact that I had written a letter to the president in the book which is on my website and he didn't respond so he's a busy guy but I said what are you going to do to fix this why is it that you cheated the American people why did you bring something about it and the very fact that senators and Congress people who represent us the people don't act on this this is this just shows how ridiculous the whole system is absolutely absolutely and while I have you I have to ask a question this is a very narrow question you may not have any insight into this but one of the markets that my followers look at pretty closely are the precious metals markets excuse me I mean us can get edited out are the precious metals markets and do you have any insights that any any idea that maybe those would be free from from the sort of manipulation and corruption that seems to be discovered everywhere else in the financial landscape the problem with the US government is there so clueless about investigating those types of crimes and I was working with several clients not my clients but several other clients and we looked at the gold manipulation by UBS bold is traded around the world through certain time zones Hong Kong Dubai London and New York and you can see the amount of money that they trade in gold is staggering this means an investigation immediately into the trading practices of gold but here's the problem if you indict UBS that's like in guiding the Swiss government because the Swiss government and UBS are one in the same and I'll give you an even better example back in 2004 UBS the largest bank in the world at the time was sending illegal wire transfers of millions of dollars to Cuba Libya and I ran this is 2004 so Cuba Libya and Iran the US government comes in and finds some one hundred million dollars and no one goes to jail now how do you pull that number out of thin air 100 million sounds nice sounds sexy but how do you calculate that how'd you come up with that number that's the first thing the second more troubling thing is Hubert Libyan Iran in 2004 who represented the US interest in those countries Switzerland so the Swift government had to know what UBS was up to but yet they're violating our own sanctions that we set up just that you can't deal with these three countries but you represent us in those three countries this is absolutely madness hmm why is no one talking about this why isn't anyone doing anything about this and the continued as you rightly point out to break the law in various businesses in various countries around the world and it's business as usual well it sounds you know this isn't bankers acting badly this is a banker's in bed with the government and of course this is something that's been going on ever since the federal reserve was chartered in 1913 and it's been growing and building but what I'm getting a sense of here is you know I track the Federal Reserve very closely as a proxy for all of the central banks but they're all in the same game which is their cereal bubble blowers they've been financial izing everything creating massive massive amounts of money out of thin air everybody sort of been feasting around that it really feels like a party gone bad and and in some respects it almost feels like everybody's grabbing as much as they can where nothing matters anymore country loyalty doesn't exist Honor doesn't exist doing right from wrong people don't seem to remember what that is anymore you know laws are for little people and all of this is starting to boil over and that sense of injustice is being felt in the voters and the voting populace and of course bringing these stories to light is really important I really Brad what you've done it's just absolutely fantastic it's amazing it needed to be done and I'll do everything I can to help get that message out because the first thing that needs to happen is we have to understand what the game is and how it's being played there's no justice here there's no from wrong there's just corruption at this point well where you are absolutely correct and your audience understand that I hope your audience can spread the word and and look at my website and if they'd like to buy the book certainly that's nice because it'll tell a story that's so riveting and it's factual because it's backed up all the documents on my website so i challenge anyone in politics anyone if you'd like to debate this issue i will show up but I've got no takers why because nobody wants to go down this path because it's you know therefore what you wish for these people are part of the problem not part of the solution and they keep telling us that they're going to pass laws and regulations it doesn't work because you have a political justice department that does nothing except they hold press conferences and tell you how great they are ask yourself this all the fines that the DOJ has has levied where does that money go do we have a full accounting of that money and where does it go I think that we don't write what was it go to the DOJ bingo parlor fund I mean you know we need a third party accounting of this and call them into Senate hearings call me in I hope your audience goes to your Senators and say look you need hearings on this issue and mr. birkenfeld should be called in to testify under oath I'd show up there tomorrow if I was called and now we'll get to the truth we'll get to the bottom of this so the American people can stop stealing again in screwed and they don't get the truth this is a real problem and just this matter I said about the dr j with all the times where is that money going I mean how do we know they're not spending it how do we know they're just fine whatever they feel where is the oversight where's the accountability and that's the key word for me is accountability obviously without accountability you get nothing nothing changes and we've got moral hazard baked into the system but also this crime does pay mentality clearly it pays and it won't change without accountability finds do nothing so we have to get back to accountability or we have to just accept that we live in an increasingly rapacious system that is going to lie cheat steal thieve from the everybody for the benefit of the few that's that's the system it needs changing we've been talking with Brad birkenfeld author of Lucifer's banker the untold story of how I destroyed Swiss bank secrecy Brad one more time your website so people can find you it's ww Lucifer's banker calm and there's some fantastic documents in there under the UBS scandal I think your audience will really enjoy it and I really just want to educate the American people and show them how they're getting ripped off by their own government well thank you for that and also for writing what is probably the best corporate crime book written that I've read so far it's just fantastic it's a really riveting tale and maddening to if I can put that in there because it's just so blatantly obvious what's going on we need these stories to get out Brad thank you so much for your time today and mostly for doing what you've done and for writing this book well Chris thank you for having me on and I hope your audience enjoys the book and look forward to coming back on the show at some point thank you I'd love to have you back
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