As No One Watched, Trump Pardoned 5 Corrupt Banks... Which He Owes Millions To

American presidents have a disturbing habit of reneging on their important promises. Trump has a cozy relationship with the megabanks. Notably, he has obvious conflicts of interest, seeing as he owes at least one of them a great deal of money.

Last Christmas, he gave the gift that keeps on giving - to him anyway: according to an announcement by the Federal Register, a 5 to 3-year exemption has been given for the financial crimes that, including charges of fraud and corruption, were committed by Citigroup, JPMorgan, Barclays, UBS and Deutsche Bank.

Deutsche Bank, which he currently owes at least $130 million and probably closer to $300 million to, was also one of the only banks willing to lend him money after the numerous bankruptcies he'd faced over the years. Over the last 2 decades, Trump has borrowed at least $2.5 billion from Deutsche Bank. You can't say he doesn't repay his favors, and chances are that his credit rating with the other banks has improved markedly.

All 5 banks mentioned above colluded in 2007 to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) right before the 2008 financial crisis; call logs and emails show that they had openly communicated with one another to set rates at a certain level in order to ensure that their open positions would be profitable.

Many borrowing rates are set based on LIBOR and the downstream effects on consumers and institutions are incalculable. It is also unlikely that their superiors were unaware of their activities. Market rigging is far more common than the ordinary person would imagine.

In 2013, Goldman Sachs rigged the aluminum market by driving truckloads of the stuff around their warehouses, increasing waiting time, and artificially reducing supply. The higher costs were offloaded onto the manufacturers and consumers in the US.

In June 2017, Deutsche Bank trader David Liew pleaded guilty to conspiring to manipulate the gold, silver, platinum and palladium futures market.

In September 2017, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a fraud - but in the ensuing bloodbath, it was found that JP Morgan purchased a large quantity of the cryptocurrency for its clients, though not much has come of the allegations. This year, he recanted his claims of bitcoin being a fraud; it's only a fraud as long as JP Morgan does not have a position in it.

These are but the tip of the iceberg of the few obvious cases of market manipulation that have been detected. They show that the major banks continued to manipulate markets despite having been already caught red-handed. And it isn't just Trump who believes that Banker Lives Matter... With Obama, that was symbolized by the bailout of the too big to fail and the 1-year exemption from prosecution he granted them.

Without any high-level prosecutions, and with the protection of the highest law of the land, banks have no incentive to behave legally. Expect markets to continue to turn on the average person as bankers enrich themselves with the blood of the elderly, the gullible and the poor.