Along with serving as the Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Stephen Friedman has held many other major roles in investment banking and government.  He is a former executive of the investment firm Goldman Sachs; he is the current Chairman of the United States President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; from 2002 to 2005 he was the United States Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and director of the National Economic Council; Friedman is also the Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Columbia University, Chairman Emeritus of the Executive Committee of the Brookings Institution, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  Friedman’s brother is Richard Friedman, a law professor at the University of Michigan.  Friedman’s son is screenwriter David Benioff.

Wow, now here is a Jew that is neck deep in notable Jewish activity.  Do you really think that one man can attain so many incredibly high-level positions without having major connections?  Major Jewish connections that is.  Also, what a typical Jewish family he has.  Friedman and his brother both got their law degrees and his son is a Hollywood screenwriter.

Friedman is now choosing to resign from the New York Fed due to his extremely questionable stock trading.  The quoted article below does a good job of outlining the events that took place.  As a Fed insider, he basically started buying up cheap Goldman Sachs stock when he had foreknowledge of the Fed’s future lending policies toward Goldman.  This means he obviously knew that the stock would be climbing higher in the months to come.  However, he made his purchases before and during the major bank bailouts, and therefore before the public knew the full extent of the lending relationship.  The Fed has granted Goldman Sachs lucrative loans in recent months spurring a rise in investor confidence. 

There are supposed to be strict rules that forbid this obvious unethical behavior, but it seems that no one at the top really cares.  Considering that the Fed makes its own rules and is not regulated by the federal government I doubt any punishment will ever be levied on Friedman, especially when the directors and owners of the Fed share his ethnicity and goals.

Stephen Friedman is yet another Jew entangled in a Wall Street scandal.  When you consider how many of them have actually been caught for such fraud, just think of how many have probably gotten away with it!  Our financial system is purported by the media to be  “free market capitalism,” but it is merely just a second cousin to communism.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090508/pl_nm/us_usa_fed_friedman

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Stephen Friedman, chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s board of directors, resigned on Thursday amid questions about his purchases of stock in his former firm, Goldman Sachs.

The U.S. central bank is comprised of a seven-member Board of Governors in Washington, and 12 regional Fed banks.

Some of the regional directors are appointed by the Washington-based board. Those directors are not allowed to own shares of bank holding companies, a status that Goldman Sachs won in September to secure access to Fed lending facilities.

Friedman bought Goldman shares in December 2008 and in January of this year, which became public with a Wall Street Journal report on Monday.

Friedman obtained a waiver of the bank stock ownership rules, which the Journal said was granted just before he bought stock in January, that allowed him to hold them until the end of this year.

While the Fed was deciding whether or not to grant Friedman a waiver, he bought 37,300 Goldman shares on December 17, for an average price of $80.78, according to regulatory filings.

On January 22, he bought 15,300 more shares for average prices of $66.19 and $67.12, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The January purchase brought his total holdings to 98,600 shares.

Goldman shares closed on Thursday at $133.73, meaning Friedman has profited handsomely, earning more than $3 million in total on the two purchases.

“Clearly he should not have done that (bought more Goldman shares), and probably even before he did that, he should have gotten off the board,” said Alfred Broaddus, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

John Dunbar, a senior fellow at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit watchdog group in Washington, said the stock purchases were a “complete conflict of interest.”

“It is almost comical. If you tried to do that in a more traditional Washington bureaucracy, there is no way on earth you would get away with that,” he said.

Fed insiders were also troubled over the situation, which they felt cast a question mark over ethical standards at the central bank.

“All the other banks are furious. No one else would have let this happen”

Filed under: Nation

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!

Possibly related posts