In descending order of the magnitude of the theft:
The Federal Reserve Board tops the list, having robbed pensioners and small savers of untold billions in earning power by setting interest rates at zero. In the Fed’s defense it can be said that it didn’t keep the money, but redistributed it to relatively wealthy owners of assets such as shares and houses by driving up the value of those assets. But claiming to be a Robin-Hood-in-reverse is unlikely to sway a jury of other then hedge fund managers, themselves guilty of forcing ordinary taxpayers to part with money to make up the loss to the Treasury from its treatment of hedge fund operators’ income as if it were capital gains, taxed at a preferentially low rate.
Then there are the cyber-thieves of … well, parts as yet unknown. All central banks keep funds on deposit with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, an imposing building with a fifth sub-basement resting on the solid rock of Manhattan – real, not metaphorical solid rock. That basement houses a vault containing some 6,000 tons of gold in 122 compartments, one each for each of the depositors, who pay the Fed a fee for handling the stuff – no free shipping, even for Amazon Prime members. If that was all the Fed did for over 250 central banks, governments and international official institutions, it could consider itself impregnable. But it also holds on deposit U.S. Treasury bonds and other paper, and transfers dollars hither and yon at the direction of central banks based on instructions to computers not located in a fifth basement or protectable by steel vaults set in the bedrock of Manhattan. It seems that some cyber-crooks figured out how to direct the N.Y. Fed to pay some $100 million from the Bangladesh account to numerous private accounts, from which the cash was laundered through casinos in the Philippines. The increased activity aroused suspicions of banks around the world, but it took a spelling error on one of the gang’s instructions to awaken the Fed to the fact that someone was siphoning off cash from the Bangladesh stash. The government of that unrich country was miffed, both with the Fed for not spotting the ongoing theft, and with the head of its central bank, one Atiur Rahman, who learned of the theft at one point but thought it unnecessary to notify Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The cyber-thieves did not reach their goal of $1 billion in loot, but proved, if more proof were necessary, that in the modern globalized economy those in a profession that once relied on hacksaws, occasionally on dynamite to open a recalcitrant safe, and fast getaway cars, must learn new skills to maintain, or better still improve, the standard of living to which they had grown accustomed.
Finally, we have Jérôme Cahuzac, a doctor who The Week reports made a fortune in France as the nation’s leading hair transplant specialist – he was a well-regarded cosmetic surgeon — but apparently felt a need to what is called these days “give back”, in his case by serving the public rather than adapting the philanthropic practices of America’s rich. So he accepted the offer of the Republic’s president, François Holland, to lead the crackdown on tax evasion, a problem in a country in which taxes must be high enough to fund a government which claims 50+% of the nation’s GDP. Unfortunately for the former hair transplant expert, he proved to be a bald-faced fibber who had hidden some €600,000 over a 20-year period in a secret account in Switzerland. Those flight funds would have been subject to a tax of a bit more than 50% on average, making Dr. Cahuzac’s illegal take some €300,000, or €15,000 per year, about in line with the after-tax per capita GDP in France. A pittance compared to the sums the members of the Fed’s monetary policy committee have looted from poor pensioners, and the $100,000,000 to which the raiders of Bangladesh’s account helped themselves, but enough to have him bounced out of the Socialist Party and earn him seven years in jail and a €2 million fine if he is convicted. Poor Hollande’s claim to head an honest government, reports The Week, has been “fatally undermined.”
There is worse. The Telegraph reports that a local official in Mali presented Cahuzac with the gift of a camel in appreciation of France’s role in liberating Mali from Islamic terrorists. But the beast could not be transported to France, and so was left in the care of a family in Timbuktu. Even if not in jail, the former minister will never see his camel again: It was killed and turned into a stew. Ah, when sorrows come, the come not single spies, but in battalions.
