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The Epstein Chronicles
Mega Edition: Jeffrey Epstein And His Exploitation Of The 2008 Bank Bailout (4/5/26)
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Liquid Funding Ltd. didn’t survive the 2008 financial collapse by skill or luck—it survived because the system bent itself into a pretzel to protect elite balance sheets with public money. Chaired by Jeffrey Epstein, Liquid Funding sat on billions in...
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My name's Mackenzie and I started a GoFundMe for the adoptive mother of a non verbal autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to find adequate care for this autistic child. So she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills. So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them during this crisis. And we raised about 10, $10,000 within just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like really being very clear about what we needed, we had some really generous donations from people who were really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with.
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GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com that's gofundme.com go gofundme.com this podcast is supported by GoFundMe. What's up everyone? And welcome to another episode of the Epstein chronicles. Back in 2008, during the financial crisis, people like you and I, well, we're the ones who suffered. And while our retirement funds were being wiped out, people like Jeffrey Epstein and the rest of the villains on Wall street were collecting taxpayer dollars. So in this episode, that's what we're going to talk about. And to do that, we have a pretty extensive article from the National Memo headline, Epstein's really Big Short. How U. S. Taxpayers and Big Bankers Bailed him out. This article was authored by Craig Unger. If you paid federal income tax back during the 2008 fiscal crisis, you may not know it, but the sad truth is the that you are likely bailing out Jeffrey Epstein as well, to the tune of nearly 7 billion. Well, that's nice, huh? Always nice to give billionaires and millionaires our hard earned tax dollars so they can just turn around and continue to molest girls and traffic kids. But sure, nothing to see here. Nobody should be upset about this. Have you seen the new shiny object? It's a story that's remained hidden from the public even as the Department of Justice has released hundreds of thousands of documents and has withheld far, far more. That shine light on how Epstein orchestrated one of the most salacious scandals in American history. Put simply, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests, thanks to the Wall street bailout of 2008, American taxpayers paid off the liabilities of an obscure offshore company called Liquid Funding Limited that was chaired by Jeffrey Epstein. So in layman's terms, your tax dollars paid for Jeffrey Epstein and His buddies. But we'll just talk about Epstein here to get bailed out. Because you know, that's who needed the bailout, right? Not your cousin Joe or your Uncle Frank who lost every single dollar in their 401k. Those guys. Well, screw them. They can start over. But Jeffrey Epstein will make sure that he's made whole. Make sure that we take care of him and his buddies. Meanwhile, these same people that you bailed out are still charging you 35 APR on your credit card. They're still charging you 19 for a car. And they're still telling you to go get screwed when you try and get a loan. And people wonder why the taxpayer is pissed off, why people are fired up. The total amount of the bailout was 6.7 billion and the liabilities were incurred. But because Liquid Funding had issued the same kind of arcane financial securities that created the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. In other words, the 2008 financial crisis not only stripped millions of Americans of their jobs, their homes and their financial security, but it also led to American taxpayers paying for liabilities sustained by the principal figure in a conspiracy that involved sex trafficking, sexual abuse, extortion, money laundering, tax evasion, securities fraud, and much, much more. Now, chew on that for a minute and then tell me again how I should move on. I'm not moving on from if anyone's been extorted, it's been you and I as the taxpayer. And I've had my fill of being screwed by the financial sector and all of these worms that populate it. To be sure, we already know a lot about Epstein assembled his empire, the alleged $475 million Ponzi scheme that left co schemer Steve Hoffenberg holding the bag and serving 18 years in prison. Les Wexner's transfer of his massive Upper east side mansion and sweeping power of attorney Leon Black's 170 million in payments for tax advice. All told, it added up to a 578 million dollar estate when Epstein died in 2019. And if you think that's all there was, you are crazy. This man was moving money offshore, moving money like you wouldn't believe. And he never met an oligarchy didn't like, right? So God knows where else he had money stashed. So I've never bought into the narrative that his fortune, if you will, was only the 578 million or so. I believe it's a lot more. But Epstein was also the chairman of an offshore structured investment vehicle called Liquid funding Ltd from 2001 to 2007, a period at the height of the mortgage security boom, during which he was regularly committing sex crimes. The information first came to light thanks to a database created by the International Consortium of of Investigative Journalists, icij, containing files known as the Paradise Papers that were leaked in 2017 from the Applebee law firm. And we've talked about that leak before. And at the time it was largely ignored. Very few people dug into it, very few people cared. But we talked about it here because I've always been interested in following the money. Now obviously we can only go so far before, before we hit a wall. I don't have access to bank accounts, I don't have access to transfers or anything like that. Right. But when you follow the money as well as you can, it's rather obvious that this dude was involved in a gigantic money laundering scheme. And that's on top of the other stuff he was doing. Right? But there's no doubt in my mind that Jeffrey Epstein scammed you and I, the American taxpayer, out of probably billions of dollars over the years. To understand what Epstein was doing at liquid funding, let's go back to 2008, an era when the amped up coke fueled big swinging dicks of Wall street feasted on tranches of risky credit default swabs, residential mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and all sorts of arcane securities that were sold to pension funds and conservative investors is safe when their chief attribute was that they were so insanely complex and deliberately so that no one understood what was inside them or the risks. And if you're familiar with the movie Big Short with Christian Bell, then you have a basic understanding of what he's talking about. To refresh your memory, think of the movie version of Michael Lewis book the Big Short in which Margot Roby sip champagne in a bubble bath. And as she delves into the arcana of toxic mortgage backed securities. By the way, Robey says whenever you hear subprime think and in the strippers who are living large with half a dozen properties financed by subprime mortgages and the highly leveraged casino like Wall street culture that makes Vegas pale by comparison. Well, you get the idea. So everybody was getting approved for home mortgages back in the day. They weren't checking your income, they weren't checking. So they were just giving out mortgages left and right. And then they were all being packaged in these tranches of these different kinds of mortgage backed securities and nobody had any idea what was in this stuff. And then finally when it was exposed, it led to what we saw in 2008, 2009, and the financial meltdown. The story of liquid funding takes place in the private and secretive land of offshore wealth. A gray zone hidden from all regulatory mechanisms that, according to James Henry of the Tax Network, may have had more than 30 trillion hidden in tax havens. 40 trillion if yachts, real estate and artwork are included. Yo, there is no doubt that there is a massive amount of money being hidden in dark markets. And obviously the favorite market used to be real estate, right? But now they're moving into art. When you buy this high end art, it very rarely depreciates, Right? And it's a good way to hide your money. A lot of these deals are secretive. A lot of the money is not reported, A lot of the artwork's not reported, so they're not paying taxes on it. And because of the secure nature of the high end art market, it's become a prime destination for people to launder money. And one of the people that really knew how to use the high end art market to stash money was none other than Jeffrey Epstein. And that makes that economy significantly bigger than the entire US Economy is operating in jurisdictions most notable for their impenetrable secrecy. The Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda and Panama in the Western Hemisphere. Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Channel Islands in Europe, Cyprus and Malta in the Mediterranean, and more in Asia and the Middle East. Look, the idea is for you to pay taxes. The idea is for you to get buried. That is was, and always will be the plan when it comes to these people. They don't care about you. They don't care about paying their fair share. And the sad truth is our elected officials let them get away with it. They write loopholes. They have all kinds of wiggle room for these people and nobody's ever held accountable how many people went to prison after the financial meltdown. That should tell you everything you need to know about accountability in the financial sector. It just does not exist. It's a world populated by Russian oligarchs, European royalty, Arab shakes, titans of Wall street and Silicon Valley, Brologarchs with their super yachts and bespoke private jets, living in an almost cartoonish James Bond like world of greed. Well, that's true too. And look, I'm not somebody that knocks people for their fortune, right? Go out and get yours, bro. But do you have to be a devious, disgusting son of a every step of the way? Do you have to treat people like. Do you have to get in bed with people like Epstein all to increase your Fortune. And unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, that's true. The more money you accrue, the more of a scumbag you become. And thanks to the complicity of banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche bank, ubs, Credit Suisse, HSBC and Citigroup, the offshore world provides the ultra wealthy on a means of moving assets through shell companies and nominee directors, creating layers that make beneficial ownership nearly impossible to trace. And that's the goal. That is the whole entire goal. They don't want to have to pay up. There's a lot of people that think these rich people just throw money around, but that's not the case. You know how you get rich and stay rich? You hold on to your money. You invest it. You don't pay a bunch of taxes. That's for the plebes. That's for you and me. For years, while Epstein ran a sex trafficking operation, he simultaneously chaired a 6.7 billion dollar offshore vehicle loaded with the same mortgage backed securities that would trigger the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. So when I tell you that Jeffrey Epstein was screwing all of us, this is what I mean. Now, of course, the people that were most wronged are the survivors and it's not even a debate, but we all got screwed by this dude. Him and his friends, they continue to screw us right now and I'm tired of it. I'm not going to sit here and make pretend that it's not happening, that the financial sector is not to blame. I'm not going to look for fake boogeymen and create villains. There's plenty of them right here. And if this shit doesn't launch you into orbit, I'm to going, I don't know what will. Especially for those of you that are about to write a gigantic tax check to the government. All of which means it's a parallel financial universe that hides the fortunes of a global elite from public scrutiny and tax authorities. Its most prominent beneficiaries include Vladimir Putin, with estimates of his hidden wealth going as high as 200 billion. And Donald Trump, whose use of Deutsche bank remains obscured by the same secrecy mechanisms that protect other billionaires. Well, what, you thought Trump was on the up and up? That dude's laundering money left and right. I'm sorry, I don't believe that he's not. With all of his fingers and all those pies, you mean to tell me that everything's on the up and up? Well, I can tell you this much. When he was building all those buildings in New York back in the day, he was in bed with mafia, the 100%. I've heard that from people that were in the mafia. Now of course, I don't mean explicitly in bed with them. He wasn't, you know, running a crew. But anybody that was in construction was buying material from the Mafia. If you were buying concrete, my friend, you were dealing with the Mafia. And of course Donald Trump was buying some concrete, right? And Lord knows what else he was up to when he was trying to get those buildings built. I mean, you got to talk to unions, you have to be in bed with the Mafia. Point blank period. For Epstein, the road to Liquid Funding Ltd. Began more than four decades ago after his 1981 departure from Bear Stearns where he had risen rapidly from a lowly floor trader to limited partner before leaving under circumstances involving regulatory violations and that were never fully disclosed. Well, they weren't disclosed because he was flipped. He was turned into an asset for the FBI. So why would they disclose that? That's the whole point, right? They're not, they're not going to disclose the fact that he's an asset for them. And that was one of the big tells. When he didn't get Nell for Baris Stearns and Hoffenberg got all that time, forget it. How can you not see the writing on the wall? And how can you not understand that Jeffrey Epstein was obviously an asset, was obviously being protected and was obviously somebody that the FBI thought could give them some information about whatever. And then from there, well, I think that he was farmed out to the CIA and we all know what happened after that, but it was because of not only his proclivities, but because of his contacts and because of who he knew and in the financial sector. And that all played a gigantic part in it. In 1996, Epstein became a resident of the US Virgin Islands. Two years later he set up a financial consulting firm called Financial Trust Co. A move that allowed him to reduce his federal income taxes while still maintaining access to U.S. banking. Then four years later, Epstein's new company, Liquid Funding, became a client of Applebee, a top of the line Bermuda headquartered law firm. That's part of what the Financial Times calls the offshore magic circle. And I know we focus on Epstein here, obviously, but this was something that was being utilized by a lot of people that moved in the same circles and it's something that's still being utilized. Maybe not through Applebee anymore because they were outed obviously with the paradise papers. But you think nobody moves moved in to fill that void? You think there's no other group that decided to step up and start, you know, maneuvering to get this money laundered to get their cut 1000%. And when that company gets caught, it'll just be a new one that pops up within that world. Applebee, with offices in the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Isle of man, the Channel Islands and and the Bahamas, was a law firm of choice for an elite clientele that included everyone from Queen Elizabeth to Russian oligarchs such as Roman Abramovich, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg and Oleg Deripaska and others. Appleby was particularly well versed in helping wealthy clients whose assets include offshore companies in low tax, high secrecy jurisdictions like Bermuda, which has no corporate tax rate whatsoever. Not a bad place to go in corporate, huh? No taxes. Sounds like my kind of party. Unfortunately, that's not for people like you and me. So make sure you have all those 1099s and those W2s ready. In 2016, however, Applebee was the subject of a data breach that Resulted in over 13.4 million confidential electronic documents, or relating to offshore investments, including liquid funding, being leaked to the ICIJ. Those documents became known as the Paradise Papers. In 2001, long before the Paradise Papers were released, Jeffrey Epstein became the chairman of Liquid Funding Ltd. A complex structured investment vehicle that was 40% owned by Bear Stearns and managed out of Dublin, Ireland. Although the remaining ownership has not been disclosed, it's likely that Epstein as chairman, had significant stake in the company. It would be unprecedented for Epstein to be chairman and a director of a company in which he didn't own a substantial amount of equity, says James Henry, a global justice fellow at Yale who spent years investigating corruption in the world of offshore finance. Nils Groeneveld, a Dutch security analyst who researched the Paradise Papers, reported that Epstein likely owned as much as 40% of liquid funding, the same stake held by Bear Stearns. Epstein's ties to Bear Stearns and JP Morgan allowed him to work in this world of impenetrable opacity with no accountability whatsoever. Epstein and Bear Stearns were both in the business of not being regulated, says Henry. Liquid funding was. Was a special purpose vehicle which had no majority owner, which meant it had no beneficial ownership requirements. It wasn't subject to all the rules that the U S was adopting on auditing such entities, and it was able to sell securities in the European market as well. So basically it had no taxes. And because it was managed out of Bear Stearns in Dublin, it had even more regulatory advantages. They set it up in Ireland specifically to a. To avoid any regulation. Well, yeah, that's what they do. And that's what I've been telling you for years. This goes so much deeper than people even realize. And in the next episode, we're gonna pick up where we left off and continue to dig. All of the information that goes with this episode can be found in the description box. What's up, everyone? And welcome to another episode of the Epstein Chronicles. In this episode, we're going to pick up where we left off with a national memo article authored by Craig Unger. One benefit of these regulatory loopholes was that liquid funding was allowed to issue billions of dollars of securities, even though it had, relatively speaking, just a tiny amount of equity. Indeed, according to Wall street on Parade, an independent financial news site run by Pam and Russ Martins, liquid funding only had 100 million in equity. But the Fitch regulatory agency allowed it to issue up to 20 billion in securities, a ratio of 200 to 1. I mean, what, like all of these signs were there, all of this was happening, and everybody overlooked it. And now they want to cry that we want a real investigation, that we're demanding a robust investigation. Sorry, nobody's moving on. You need to answer some questions. And for all the people out there that want to be cynical and contrarian, talking about, well, how does this affect me? What does this have to do with me? Well, your tax dollars were used by Epstein and his friends to abuse people. I would think that that would be something that people would be very, very upset about and that people would be demanding answers about. However, even that figure significantly understates how highly leveraged Epstein's company was. Out of liquid funding's 100 million in equity, only 37 million was drawn equity. The other 63 million was not actually invested in liquid funding. And that meant for every dollar that was put into his operation, Epstein was allowed to sell around $540 worth of securities. So if his investments went up, Epstein would make a killing. On the other hand, if they went south, it could spell disaster. Now, let's look at exactly what securities liquid funding was selling to investors. This was a period during which the big ratings agencies, Fitch, Moody's and Standard and Poor's routinely handed out AAA ratings to investments consisting of of tranches of highly dubious assets, back securities, and repackaged adjustable subprime mortgages. And again, that's what we were talking about earlier. Just a hodgepodge of Frankenstein put together and then sold as AAA rated stock, when in reality it wasn't even Triple B. And of Course, that's what led to the whole entire collapse. If that sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo, that was precisely the point. During the fiscal crisis, no one really understood all the insanely complex tranches of subprime mortgages. Worse, it had become standard procedure for the credit agencies to help dress up these unfathomably toxic assets with AAA ratings. All the agencies went along with it because if they didn't, their competitors would. Once again, the real evil people here, the real enemy, if you will, is the financial sector. There is no single entity, no group of people that have made our lives worse on a regular basis than the financial sector. But investors didn't know that. Historically, the housing market always held. Homeowners always pay their mortgages. Conventional wisdom had it that nothing could be more secure than mortgage backed securities. As a result, everyone stuck to the same script. And thanks to stellar ratings, investors gobbled up the securities. And like most things that Epstein was involved in, it was fool's gold. Anything that this man touched was fugazi. Or it quickly became so. In the aftermath of him showing up in the mid-2000s, however, millions of low income homeowners who had been enticed into the housing market by low introductory rates could no longer afford their homes. Once adjustable rates started going through the roof, and once that happened, homeowners began to default. That meant that the securities based on those mortgages had been transformed into, into a time bomb that was about to explode and become utterly worthless. That's what subprime really meant. Notwithstanding these overhyped securities, Epstein did have something else going for him. The guy's a genius. Douglas Lease, an arms dealer friend of Epstein's, told a colleague, he's great at selling securities and he has no moral compass. Another man that we've talked about plenty of times, Douglas Lease, and the whole entire infrastructure that was built for the arms dealing and you know, Iran Contra especially, was basically adopted by Epstein and used as his template. And all of that's because of his relationship with people like Douglas Lease. Well, you think Epstein just showed up and he was the first guy doing this shit on Wall Street. That last attribute was especially desirable in the early 2000s. So on October 19, 2000, liquid funding was launched. According to the Miami Herald, Marcus King, a director of Liquid Funding, said there was neither a physical board meeting nor a call between board members. Yeah, that's not weird, right? That's not odd. No meetings, no board members getting together, figuring out what's going on. Just Jeffrey Epstein running a whole ass laundering operation in Plain sight. But sure, no more investigations needed here, right? We know everything. We know exactly what was going on. We know exactly who was involved. At least that's what the corrupted DOJ tells us. That meant that Liquid Funding was a shell company, nothing more. With Epstein at the helm, it had cloud afforded by powerful financial institutions such as Bear Stearns or JP Morgan. But it existed in an offshore world populated by Russian oligarchs and money launderers, arms dealers and drug czars. Given its Bermuda registration, its secretive shareholders and its nominal governance, it had immense transactional latitude. And that was always the point, right, to have as much secrecy and transactional latitude as possible. They don't want anybody digging into what they're up to. They want to be able to move that money. They want to be able to pay people off, and they want to continue to do what it is that they do. All the while, they want you to pay for it. And to add insult to injury, while they're doing all of that, they're also trafficking little girls and abusing them. Even though Liquid Funding existed in that gray zone, it was able to issue billions of dollars of securities because Epstein was wired into some of the most powerful financial institutions in the world. JP Morgan was Liquid Funding security trustee, which meant that the bank held all of its securities and had the authority, if necessary, to liquidate all assets if Liquid Funding defaulted. So they were in bed with Epstein. They were involved in this grift, they were involved in this thievery, and nobody was held accountable. Nobody went to prison. Jamie Dimon, still running around with his billions of dollars. Jess Daily's ass might be called under the microscope, but did he go to prison? Was he ever really investigated? They were all obviously involved in money laundering. If you don't believe anything else, it's rather obvious that they were all committing financial crimes basically every time they made a transaction. And they should go to prison for that alone. Two Bear Stearns board members, Jeffrey Lippman and Paul Novelli, also served on Liquid Funding's board. And another member of Liquid funding's board, Liam McNamara, was on the board of JP Morgan, Dublin. Epstein also had considerable clout at JP Morgan because he had brought in billionaire clients such as Bill Gates, Leon Black, co founder of Apollo Global, Glenn Dubin of Highbridge Capital Management, and Google co founder Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Brin later deposited 4 billion in assets in the bank. Altogether, they made Epstein the highest revenue generator for the biggest bank in the richest country in the world. Full stop. What more needs to be said we don't need to talk about all this salaciousness. Just this alone should tell you everything that's wrong with our whole entire world. Not just the country, but the whole world. These are the people that are making every decision that affects your life. Hope you enjoy yourself as such. He was a member of an elite group that was referred to as J.P. morgan's wall of cash. At J.P. morgan, Epstein had a champion. Jess Staley, the bank's private chief and later head of the investment bank, whom the New York Times would call Epstein's chief defender. Despite mounting red flags. Cash withdrawals, suspicious payments, a 2006 indictment for for soliciting minors, Staley kept Epstein as a client until 2013. Until his hand was forced. What, you think he woke up one morning and was like, you know what? It's time to get rid of Epstein. No, his hand was forced and Staley's another one. He really needs to be called on the carpet. He's admitted to having relations consensual with one of Epstein's assistants. Well, how old was that assistant? When was this? Where was it at? Who was she? Just basic questions that we should have answers to, right? Nevertheless, as reported in 2024 by Ali McDevitt in Compliance Week, an online publication that covers corporate governance, JP Morgan noted suspicious behavior in Epstein's accounts even before his prosecution. And by 2003, the bank had begun regularly writing up suspicious activity reports and currency transaction reports for transactions that exceeded $10,000 in a 24 hour period. So they were doing their job. God forbid. God forbid there's regulation against somebody like Epstein. But unfortunately they weren't filed. But banks were required by law to file SARS Defensen within 30 days. The suspicious transactions to assist law enforcement, and JP Morgan failed to do so. There is no chance that JP Morgan didn't know that these SARs had to be filed within 30 days. Says James Henry. They literally file millions of these things. But in this case, they were just sitting there. And I can tell you for a fact that there's no doubt that these SARs should have been filed. When I was managing a sports book, as I've told you before, I had to do it all the time. And once you file it, then it's out of your hands, right? It moves on to the enforcement agency. But it's your job as somebody dealing with money to make sure that you're filling out the proper paperwork. According to court filings by the Attorney General of the U. S. Virgin Islands in a lawsuit against the bank, the reason J.P. morgan continued to indulge Epstein was quite simple. J.P. morgan turned a blind eye to evidence of human trafficking or over more than a decade because of Epstein's own financial footprint and because of the deals and clients that Epstein brought and promised to bring to the bank. The USVI lawsuit asserted. And that's all it came down to. Epstein could bring them more money. And if that meant that, you know, they had to look the other way when kids were getting abused, when there was money laundering, when Epstein was up to no good, then so be it. More specifically, at the time, Epstein had cultivated it extremely close ties to Staley, the CEO of JP Morgan Asset Management, who was the presumptive heir apparent to JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. According to the USVI lawsuit, Staley and Epstein were so close that they exchanged approximately 1,200 emails between 2008 and 2012. In the email, Staley, who visited Epstein's Caribbean island multiple times, described their friendship as profound. Epstein responded to Staley that he was family. But yeah, no investigation into Staley. Nothing to see here. Not a co conspirator. What are we even doing here, folks? What the hell is even going on? By March of 2005, the Palm Beach Police Department had started an investigation of Epstein. And In July of 2006, police arrested him for procuring a minor for prostitution. The next day, Staley met with Epstein at his New York office. Afterwards, Staley wrote a colleague at jpmc, I've never seen him so shaken. He also adamantly denies the ages. Oh yeah, of course. Imagine believing that. Imagine being Staley with kids of your own, daughters of your own, and believing that the only way you do that or believe it is if you're a fellow traveler. And in my opinion, well, Jess Staley, you're a fellow traveler. Staley visited Epstein while the latter was on work release in Florida in 2008, according to the UK Financial Conduct Authorities case against Daly. He also visited Epstein's ranch in New Mexico during that period, as he recounted in the an email to Epstein that was cited in the USVI lawsuit. So when all hell breaks loose and the world is crumbling, I will come here and be at peace. Presently I'm in the hot tub with a glass of white wine. This is an amazing place. Truly amazing. Next time we're here together. I owe you much and I deeply appreciate our friendship. I have few so profound. Now how do you try and walk that back? Well, he did. Thankfully it didn't work out so well for him, but it should be more than just public disgrace. This man should be investigated, he should be indicted, and if he's guilty, he should be convicted. A Jando lawsuit brought against the bank eschews the warm and fuzzy nature of the friendship between the two men and instead characterizes it as a symbiotic relationship in which Epstein agreed to bring many ultra high wealth clients to JP Morgan, and in exchange, Staley would use his cloud within JP Morgan to make Epstein untouchable. This meant that JP Morgan would keep Epstein on as a client at all costs, including failing to act on any red flags and ultimately allowing him the ability to run and grow what to the bank was obviously an operation designed to sexually abuse and and traffic countless young women. And I don't know how you don't know that, especially as the bank, if my dumb ass can figure it out. You mean to tell me that people at JP Morgan had no clue? According to Reuters, however, Staley said he did not know Epstein would coerce young women and girls into having sex or that anyone under 18 would be pressured into sex. He also called the allegation that he sexually assaulted Jane Doe 1 baseless. The relationship between the two men continued even after Epstein's 2008 guilty plea to two state charges involving sex, one of which was with an underage girl. In March 2025 court testimony, Staley admitted he had sex with one of Epstein's assistants, though he claimed he didn't know Epstein's involvement with underage girls. Some of Staley's emails to Epstein appeared to contain sexual references using apparent code words for young women. In one exchange, Staley wrote, that was fun. Say hi to Snow White. Epstein replied, what character would you like? Next to which Staley responded, beauty and the Beast. And I'll leave that up to you to decide. I know if I was on a jury and I knew everything else about Staley that I know. And when you brought those emails in, I want to know who Snow White is. I want to know who Beauty and the Beast are. Unfortunately, unless we get this idiot under oath, we're never going to know. Staley cannot be reached for comment. However, in a letter to the Financial Times, Kathleen Harris, a lawyer at Arnold and Porter who's representing Staley, said, we wish to make it expressly clear that our client had no involvement in any of the alleged crimes committed by Mr. Epstein, and code words were never used by Mr. Staley and in any communication with Epstein ever. Okay, explain what you meant and do it real slow so us stupid people can understand what you mean. Staley remained the manager of the Bank's relationship with Epstein until his tenure at the institution ended in 2013. Until then, whenever JP Morgan executives recommend cutting ties with Epstein, Staley went to bat for him and at times went to him for advice. Indeed, in October of 2008, while Wall street was being engulfed by the fiscal crisis, Scaly reached out to Epstein for help and said he needed a smart friend to help him think through this stuff. Can I get you out for a weekend to help me? Imagine that. Talk about letting the fox into the hen house, asking Epstein for help when he's one of the guys that caused the whole entire thing. Meanwhile, JP Morgan had delayed filing of its SARS concerning Epstein year after year. Indeed, it was not until shortly after Epstein's death in 2019 that JP Morgan filed a massive suspicious activity report in the U.S. treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, flagging over 4,700 suspicious transactions in Epstein's account involving more than $1 billion going back as far as October of 2003. Some of the SARs were not filed until nearly 17 years after the transaction had taken place. How do you reconcile that? How do you explain that? You can't. There's no explanation for it, and I'm sick and tired of the financial sector getting away with whatever they want. In November, Senator Ron Wyden, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, called for JP Morgan to be fully investigated to determine whether this underreporting of suspicious activity reports was deliberate. But Wyden's bill to make public the sars, the Produce Epstein Treasury Records act, failed to pass the Senate thanks to Republican opposition. Of course we care about the kids. We. We care about the Second Amendment. We care about whatever Trump tells us to care about. Pathetic, as Wyden's colleague Jeff Merkley put it. 51 senators in this body, I am ashamed to say, said, hell no. We want to keep them secret. We want to protect the perpetrators. Why? Because the man in The Oval Office, Mr. Trump, told us he wants to protect those files, does not want them to go public. Meanwhile, notwithstanding his disgraceful departure from Bear Stearns In 81, Epstein continued to maintain close friendships with its CEO, Jimmy Kane, and its chairman, Alan Ace Greenberg. He also remained a client of the firm until its 2008 collapse, and his relationship with them appears to have figured prominently in the rise and fall of liquid funding. But the camaraderie Epstein had with K and Greenberg did not extend to the whole of Bear Stearns, which Epstein prepared to sue after the investment bank collapsed in March of 2008. Bloomberg reported that the draft complaint further betrayed Epstein as an innocent victim who had been fraudulently induced by manipulative bankers to buy and hold stakes in funds that were riskier than advertised. And indeed, as the housing bubble inflated towards its breaking point, the subprime market began collapsing. In June of 2007, JP Morgan abandoned the market. Deutsche bank held on, but barely. Goldman Sachs actually got out of the subprime market and bet against it. That, of course, accelerated its descent. All of which left Bear Stearns and with it liquid funding in an increasingly untenable position. In June, after receiving margin calls, Bears Bear Stearns attempted to bail out two of its hedge funds with 3.2 billion. But that wasn't nearly enough. The funds held 17 billion in highly leveraged CDOs backed by subprime mortgages, and by July had lost nearly all of their value, forcing them into bankruptcy. As for liquid funding, according to Wall street on Parade, Bayer stated in a regulatory filing that company's maximum exposure to to loss as a result of its investment in this entity is approximately 5 million. At the same time all this was going on, Epstein continued to nurture his relationship with JPMorgan Chase by sending them more billionaires and cultivating his friendship with Jess Staley. Under Staley's aegis at the bank, client assets expanded from 605 billion to nearly 1.3 trillion, as a result of which Stale he was widely regarded as Diamond's heir apparent. Well, that didn't work out, did it now? Jeff Staley sitting around on the couch, farting into his expensive sweatpants, all because he had to be a degenerate scumbag. Meanwhile, as Epstein's sex trafficking empire continued to grow, the bank turned a blind eye to his activity. According to court documents in the Virgin islands lawsuit, between 2003 and 2013, Epstein and or his associates used Epstein's accounts to make numerous payments to individual women and related companies. Among the recipients of these payments were numerous women with Eastern European surnames who were publicly and internally identified as Epstein recruiters and or victims. For example, Epstein paid more than 600,000 to Jang Do Won, a woman who, according to news reports contained in JP Morgan's due diligence reports, Epstein purchased as a sex slave at the age of 14. Well, we know who that is then. That's Nadia Marcinkova. And the truth is, everybody knew it. Jess Daly, the banks, they all knew. They just didn't care. In addition, according to the New York Times, huge cash withdrawals in 2004 and 2005 from Epstein's personal account at Chase went to procure young girls and young women. At Epstein's request, the bank even agreed to open accounts for two young women without ever speaking to them. According to an expert report filed in the Virgin Islands lawsuit. It's well known that Epstein paid his victims in cash. According to Wall street on Parade, the report documented that Epstein withdrew $840,000 in cash and in 2004. In 2005, he withdrew 904,337. In 2006, he withdrew 938,625. In 2007, he withdrew 526,000. When JPMC confronted Epstein about the cash withdrawals in 2007, Epstein claimed it was for fuel payments in foreign countries which JPMC knew was not normal business practice. And finally, according to Compliance Week, there were reports that Epstein transferred approximately $31 million to Glenn Maxwell through his JP Morgan accounts between 99 and 2007. Funds that were believed to be payment for her role in Epstein sex trafficking venture. In 2007, as the mortgage backed securities bubble began to burst, Epstein resigned his chairmanship of Liquid Funding under circumstances that remain unclear. The timing coincided with federal prosecutor Marie Vilafana drafting a 53 page 60 count indictment against Epstein suggesting that he may have been cleaning up his affairs in advance of plea negotiations. Meanwhile, Liquid Funding, thanks to his proximity to Bear Stearns, was in trouble. On March 13, 2008, Bear Stearns delivered a startling ultimatum to the Federal Reserve. If it did not provide billions of dollars of funds within 24 hours, the firm would file for bankruptcy. And if that happened, its collapse could trigger a systemic failure across global financial markets. Astoundingly, the very next day, on March 14, a Friday, a Fed invoked emergency lending authority for the first time in its history and provided a 12.9 billion dollar emergency loan to keep Bear Stearns alive. Your money, your money burned. Thrown into the wind. It did exactly that, but only through the weekend. By this time, Timothy Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve of New York knew how desperately the government needed a reputable institution to to take over Bear Stearns and quell the panic. Over that March weekend, he negotiated with JPMC CEO Jamie Dimon, who held a much stronger hand. Jamie Dimon basically dictated terms to the Federal Reserve, says financial investigator James Henry, who has studied the bailout extensively. He said if you want JP Morgan involved in the deal, you're going to have to do the following. And they bent over backwards to to accommodate JP Morgan. To that end, Geithner and Diamond signed an agreement by which the Federal Reserve created a special purpose vehicle called Maiden Lane LLC solely to facilitate the purchase of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan by absorbing Bear Stearns most toxic assets, Mortgage backed securities, commercial mortgages and derivatives that no one else would touch. It was necessary because JP Morgan received refused to close the deal unless the Fed took the toxic assets off Bears book first. In the end The Fed contributed 29 billion and JP Morgan added 1 billion thereby creating a $30 billion fund to buy Bear Stearns most toxic securities. But the Fed has never released detailed accounting of exactly what assets Maiden Lane purchased with its taxpayer back loans. How crazy is that? We don't even know what our money was used for and everybody's out here going crazy about this. That the other thing when everybody should be going crazy about this. Among the exceedingly generous terms granted by the Fed, J.P. morgan won the right to examine Bear Stearns entire portfolio and select which assets they would keep and which assets the Federal Reserve would buy. Among those assets was Bear Stearns 40% stake in Epstein's Liquid Funding which by this time had 6.7 billion in liabilities from the same mortgage backed securities and collateralized debt obligations that had precipitated the massive global financial crisis. Then on April 18th, 2008 something remarkable happened. As first reported by Wall street on parade, Moody's announced that all outstanding rated liabilities of of Liquid Funding limited had been paid in full. But that was it. There was no explanation whatsoever regarding who paid the bills or how. So far as I can tell there is no documentation in public records about how it was paid off. Bear Stearns no longer exists. JPMorgan Chase acquired what was left in May of 2008. Whether liquid funding was consolidated on Behr's balance sheet at the time is unclear. And when I asked Trish Wexler in corporate communications at JPMC about what happened to Epstein's offshore venture, she replied via email. I do not have anything to share with you on liquid funding. Of course not. How dare anyone even ask. How dare you want to know where the money went? Are you folks catching on yet? Multiple queries to the Federal Reserve also went unanswered. And at this writing the Federal Reserve bank of New York has not responded to a Freedom of Information act request regarding this matter. As James Henry, an authority on the bailout noted, the Fed doesn't really tell you who got what in the bailout. But in the end, even though the Federal Reserve never released detailed asset schedules for Maiden Lane llc, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that American taxpayers paid for liquid funding's 6.7 billion in liabilities, the money had to come from somewhere. And other than the Fed, no entity could have provided that kind of liquidity. It makes me sick. It honestly makes me seriously ill. So when I say that we all have skin in the game, this is what I'm talking about, folks. Liquid Funding's liabilities had been paid off. It was like Sherlock Holmes, case of the dog who Didn't Bark. A circumstantial case, but one that I believe is compelling. The Federal Reserve has never released detailed asset schedules for Maiden Lane llc. But the evidence is overwhelming, and it indicates that American taxpayers paid for liquid funding's 6.7 billion in liabilities. No other explanation is economically or legally plausible. First, let's remember that Bear Stearns owned 40% of liquid funding and managed the vehicle through its Dubin Office Dublin office. Excuse me. When JP Morgan acquired Bear Stearns with 30 billion of federal support, it acquired this stake. The remaining 60 ownership remains undocumented, including how much was owned by Epstein. I'm gonna say probably that whole 60% seems to make sense to me. But at the time, J.P. morgan served dual roles. It acted as liquid funding security trustee, an entity certifying that all debts had been paid while simultaneously acquiring Bear Stearns with bailout funds and having the extraordinary power to select which Bear Stearns assets to include in the federal rescue. Which is unheard of. I mean, this is all unheard of. But of course, like everything, when it comes to Epstein, I guess it was a coincidence. So it's hard to believe that it was mere coincidence that in the spring of 2008, at the exact moment when the Fed and JP Morgan were negotiating the $30 billion bailout, Moody's announced that all liquid funding's liabilities had been paid in full. After all, this was only period of time during which that kind of money was available. Moreover, the winding down of liquid funding occurring through a process called members voluntary liquidation, a procedure that is available only when a company can pay all its debts in full. To be clear, that meant Liquid Funding's creditors had to have been made whole. It was documentary proof that creditors were made whole. So look, it's obvious that we paid for it. And now I want answers. I want goddamn answers about why my tax dollars were used for this. We know that Bear Stearns couldn't have paid for those liabilities because it was essentially bankrupt and at that moment was surviving only on Federal Reserve emergency loans. We also know that JP Morgan wouldn't rationally spend 6.7 billion bailout of an offshore subsidiary of Bear Stearns when it was buying all that was left of the collapsing company for just 1 billion. Either way, whether the payoff came directly through Maiden Lane or indirectly through funds freed up by the bailout, the inescapable conclusion is that the Feds had rescued an offshore vehicle that had been chaired by Jeffrey Epstein just one year earlier. After all, if creditors had lost nearly 7 billion, don't you think someone would have said something? There would have been massive lawsuits, negative news coverage, investigations. But there wasn't. Nothing happened. It was extraordinary. Meanwhile, the Great Recession got underway. The Dow fell 53% between October 2007 and March of 2009. Nearly 9 million jobs were lost. The business sector was devastated, with more than 1.4 million bankruptcies filed in 2009. More than 6 million households lost lost their homes. The foreclosure, over $2 trillion in wealth just disappeared, and it took years to recover. And in the end, the feds had bailed out Epstein's secret offshore company with 6.7 billion to cover liabilities created during the same years he was trafficking underage girls. Well, folks, if you weren't disgusted before, which I have no idea how that could even occur, but if you weren't disgusted before, I don't know how you're not disgusted now. And if you didn't think you had any skin in the game, well, I hate to break the news to you, but you most certainly did, and you most certainly do. And if you really want to dismantle Jeffrey Epstein's operation and the people that helped him out, well, there's one way to do that. Follow the money. All of the information that goes with this episode can be found in the description box.