{"id":184184,"date":"2012-07-11T20:33:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-12T01:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/07\/11\/its-the-banksters-world-we-just-live-in-it\/"},"modified":"2012-07-11T20:33:00","modified_gmt":"2012-07-12T01:33:00","slug":"its-the-banksters-world-we-just-live-in-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/07\/11\/its-the-banksters-world-we-just-live-in-it\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s the Bankster’s World, We Just Live in It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Case in point, Moberly Missouri, where the New York Times<\/i> scolds them for not paying debts incurred through fraud and the corruption and\/or incompetence of banks and regulators<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Residents of Moberly, Mo., got a shock last year when they discovered that their city had guaranteed $39 million in bonds, sold by an independent authority, to help a Chinese company build a plant to make sucralose, an artificial sweetener.<\/p>\n

The project fell apart in a matter of months, and residents learned that they had been misled about the company\u2019s track record in China \u2014 and that they were now expected to make the bond payments.<\/p>\n

But municipal bond market participants say they were shocked, too, by how quickly the city of about 14,000 would walk away from a solemn promise to guarantee the debt payments through 2025, the life of the bonds.<\/p>\n

Cities like Moberly that guarantee debts for entities that borrow for projects like parking garages and hockey arenas often \u201cdon\u2019t understand that they are responsible for making these payments,\u201d said Matt Fabian, managing director of Municipal Market Advisors, a research and consulting firm. However, he said, \u201cIt\u2019s as if your kid runs up a $400 cellphone bill. You can\u2019t get out of paying it by saying you didn\u2019t authorize that.\u201d <\/p>\n

Moberly, where the biggest employer is a state prison, had responded eagerly to a pitch by the Missouri Department of Economic Development to host the project, hoping for hundreds of jobs. The company, Mamtek International, was said to have a sucralose plant in Fujian Province producing a sweetener called SweetO, for use in drinks, candy and pharmaceuticals. Most of the authority debt, to go toward building and equipping the plant, was issued under a federal stimulus program allowing private investors to use tax-exempt municipal financing. <\/p>\n

But when a bond payment came due last August, with the building still unfinished, Mamtek officials said they didn\u2019t have the money. Construction stopped; the handful of employees in Moberly were laid off. Weeks of confusion followed, with subpoenas from the Securities and Exchange Commission, rumors of a split between the Chinese company and its United States subsidiary, reports that the plant would be liquidated and fears that the bond proceeds were gone forever. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Investigators also learned that state development officials had learned \u2014 before the bonds were sold \u2014 that Mamtek\u2019s sucralose plant in China had never opened, because of environmental concerns. But that information was not relayed to Moberly, according to a report by the Missouri House Interim Committee on Government Oversight and Accountability.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s be clear here:  the good citizens of Moberly were swindled by Mamtek, state development officials, and likely whoever issued the bonds.<\/p>\n

There were serious material discrepancies.<\/p>\n

This is the very definition of odious debt<\/a>, and it should be repudiated without penalty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Case in point, Moberly Missouri, where the New York Times scolds them for not paying debts incurred through fraud and the corruption and\/or incompetence of banks and regulators: Residents of Moberly, Mo., got a shock last year when they discovered that their city had guaranteed $39 million in bonds, sold by an independent authority, to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,969,1004,1016],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-evil","category-finance","category-international-commerce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}