Transcription
So, there's a theory out there floating around that Jeffrey Epstein may have helped cause the 2008 financial collapse. And that sounds crazy, but there's actually a fair bit of pretty surprising evidence that there might be some truth to it. And it's a story worth telling, not just because it's crazy and it sheds light on the financial crisis, but also because it slides us right into the middle of Epstein's banking networks, because not nearly enough people know just how complicit the biggest banks in America were with Epstein's operation.
A lot of people don't realize that the head of all of JP Morgan's private client division once emailed Jeffrey Epstein from the hot tub on the island while Jeffrey was still serving house arrest in Florida, and he wrote them this whole email about how good of friends they are, and how much he loves Jeff's island, and how profound their friendship is. And that's barely even scratching the surface.
So today, we're going to lay out everything we know so far about Epstein's bankers and the role that they played in funding the largest trafficking network in modern history.
American conspiracy theories are dangerous. Information is the oxygen of a democracy. It's so sacred we can't talk.
In the year 2000, the CEO of JP Morgan, Sandy Warner, told Jess Staley that he should meet this guy named Jeffrey Epstein, saying, quote, "He's one of the most connected people I know of in New York." In the next few years, Epstein would go on to allegedly refer several extremely high-profile clients to Staley, such as Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Mortimer Zuckerman, a real estate and media mogul, Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard, and Leon Black, the billionaire founder of Apollo Global Management, just to name a few. He would do more than that, though.
On November 1st, 2009, as Jeffrey Epstein was serving his sweetheart prison sentence for soliciting prostitution from a minor, Jess Staley was relaxing in the hot tub on Epstein's island without Epstein. And he emailed Epstein to say, quote, "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."
One thing that Jess Staley owed Jeffrey Epstein was the time that he got to spend with Snow White. When Staley emailed Epstein to say, quote, "That was fun. Say hi to Snow White." Epstein replied, "What character would you like next?" And Staley said, "Beauty and the Beast." In case you had any doubts about what they were talking about, Jeffrey Epstein sent Staley catalogs of photos of young girls posing in seductive positions on numerous occasions.
Staley was the CEO of JP Morgan Asset Management, which was responsible for maintaining accounts for wealthy private clients like Epstein and all of his friends. In total, we know of 55 accounts held by Epstein at JP Morgan, which amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars in assets with the bank. We also know of at least $9 million in suspicious transactions and withdrawals, including $4 million specifically going to women and girls, including over 20 identified sex trafficking victims. Epstein routinely withdrew $40 to $80,000 in cash, multiple times per month, totaling over $750,000 annually by 2006. These are all the types of things that banks monitor and report to regulators as suspicious activity indicative of criminal money movements. But in this case, none of it was reported for reasons that I assume are obvious.
You see, many people don't realize just how intimately involved in Epstein's operation JP Morgan was. Not to mention how intimately involved in JP Morgan's operations Jeffrey Epstein was. From evidence that Epstein played a role in precipitating the 2008 financial collapse, which saw JP Morgan swallow Epstein's old firm, Bear Stearns, all the way to Epstein's long list of billionaire clientele that he referred to JP Morgan. The two were integral to one another's success.
An operation as large as Epstein's isn't like a small business where you just have a bank account to put your money in. An operation this big makes a partner of the bank. The banking required for multi-million dollar trafficking operations and financial political dealmaking of the variety that we are talking about is a whole different animal. When the CEO of an entire division of your bank is sitting in Jeffrey Epstein's hot tub pontificating about how much he owes Epstein for their friendship and how much he misses the time he spent with Snow White, that's not a one-way relationship. That's a partnership. And it's a partnership that the mainstream media has largely avoided talking about because the banks run the world. They can't have the public knowing about how closely tied together their bank was to Epstein's trafficking operations. And despite all the evidence that's already in the public domain, JP Morgan and Jamie Dimon paid a lot of money to make reporting like this go away.
Jeffrey Epstein first became a client of JP Morgan in 1998. At that time, he had already visited the Clinton White House 27 times and was developing his trafficking network into the global enterprise that it would eventually become. The CEO of the bank at the time was a man named Douglas "Sandy" Warner. Sandy being a nickname. And presumably Sandy knew that they had taken Epstein on as a client because it was he who reportedly introduced Epstein and Jess Staley in the year 2000. It's unclear if he made the physical introduction, but he reportedly told Jess Staley that quote, "He's one of the most connected people I know of in New York."
Warner does tell a story of a dinner that he had at Epstein's New York mansion in or around the year 2000, allegedly where he said that Epstein felt odd to him and said that he was also weirded out by the parade of young girls moving about the house. Apparently, one tried to rub his shoulders. According to Warner, he then told his team, including Jess Staley, that quote, "You guys in the private bank can deal with him if you want, but I don't want to." This is of course in stark contrast to him allegedly telling Staley that he should meet him because he's one of the most connected guys in New York. You can't really have it both ways. And this story that Warner tells about being weirded out sounds an awful lot like the rest of Epstein's friends' fake versions of events where they didn't know anything and didn't really like the guy and really had nothing to do with him and they really regret ever hearing his name and all of that, right?
And though there is ample reporting, though not widely circulated, on Jess Staley's extensive relationship with Epstein, there's really no reporting or investigation done into Sandy Warner, who presumably set this whole train in motion in the first place. Sandy Warner is a bit of a loose thread in this whole investigation that we all might want to look a little more closely at, but has so far really just avoided scrutiny.
Because if Epstein became a client of JP Morgan in 1998, what was he doing in the two years between then and the year 2000 when Warner allegedly told Staley that he was one of the most connected guys in New York? Did Epstein refer wealthy clients to the bank during those two years? Right? Like what evidence did Warner have to go off of? Because the single weird dinner party story doesn't really pass the sniff test.
And we know that Epstein referred a bunch of very high-profile, wealthy clients to JP Morgan, but all the publicized names on the list that he referred were referrals made mostly between 2000 and 2003. Once again, that list included Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google; Larry Page, co-founder of Google; Nick Riis, former head of Donald Trump's casino empire; Katherine Rumler, former Obama White House counsel. That referral was made in February of 2019, by the way, right before he got caught and died. Ghislaine Maxwell was referred. Glenn Dubin, a billionaire hedge fund manager, was very close to Epstein and was referred to JP Morgan. Leon Black, founder of Apollo Global Management. Mort Zuckerman, a real estate billionaire. Thomas Pritzker of Hyatt Hotels. Boris Nikolic, the Gates Foundation science adviser. Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary. Prince Andrew. Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister. Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Israeli prime minister. Lord Peter Mandelson. David Geffen. The Sultan of Dubai. Howard Rubenstein. Right.
According to the Daily Beast, by 2011, Epstein was considered the quote "biggest producer for JP Morgan's private banking division." And they also referred to him as the "adviser to the Google founders." That's not lone wolf pedophile behavior, and that's also not regular bank client relationships. Brin's relationship with JP Morgan alone brought in over $4 billion, according to court documents. This starts to make JP Morgan look more like a co-conspirator than an unwitting bystander. And I can only assume that the reason why JP Morgan isn't treated as such is because they're one of the most powerful banking institutions in the world, and the government works for them. The corporations work for them. We all work for them.
And it turns out that JP Morgan only terminated its official relationship with Epstein because of unfortunate circumstances and bad timing. Enter the London Whale scandal of 2012. Bruno Iksil, who in 2012 was placing such big trading positions in the UK that it was disrupting the entire market, journalists started noticing the entire credit market was acting irrationally. And it turned out to be because this dumbass was playing with massive positions of credit default swaps, a type of derivative made famous in 2008. Once this whole scandal was resolved, JP Morgan had lost an estimated $6.2 billion, and regulators were furious. They slapped JP Morgan with a whole bunch of sanctions, brought criminal charges against the traders that had been involved and working for JP Morgan, and opened a comprehensive investigation into JP Morgan's risk management and self-regulatory policies because all the banks regulate themselves for the most part. Who ever thought of that genius?
So this was the end of 2012, and it set off alarm bells all the way across the ocean in the private client branch where Jess Staley had been quietly facilitating the laundering of money for the world's largest sex trafficking ring. This is what led to Staley being asked to resign. Though Jeffrey Epstein immediately hooked him up with a new job at Blue Mountain Capital by introducing him to the founder, Andrew Feldstein, who was a friend of Epstein's. But once Staley was out of the picture, Mary Erdoes put on a show of asking Epstein to find another bank. Though she continued to run cover for him and his relationship to JP Morgan as they carried on receiving referrals from Epstein right up until 2019 when he was finally arrested and terminated. Remember how I said that the counsel for the Obama White House was referred in 2019 by Epstein?
So Epstein transfers his money to Deutsche Bank, who was more than happy to do exactly what JP Morgan had been doing and presumably would have happily continued doing had they not been forced into the spotlight. Jamie Dimon has referred to the London Whale scandal as the "stupidest and most embarrassing situation I have ever been a part of." But in hindsight, it may be the most important coincidence to ever save him and his bank from disaster. Because if it weren't for the London Whale shining a light on JP Morgan's not-so-legal business practices, it's quite likely that they would have gone on managing Epstein's accounts right up until his arrest, and then their true proximity to his operation would have been far more apparent to the public and far harder to cover up in the way that they did.
But make no mistake, the evidence describes a partnership. It describes a bank fully complicit in Epstein's crimes and bankers utilizing the illegal services that he offered and billions of dollars of profits for the bank because of this relationship and way more than enough red flags to know exactly what it was that they were facilitating. This was a primary relationship for both JP Morgan and for Epstein.
The day after Epstein was arrested in July of 2006, Jess Staley met with him, presumably to discuss how to handle the situation and what to do about his accounts at JP Morgan. Staley later told UK regulators that he learned directly from Epstein in this meeting the day after Epstein was arrested that Epstein was engaging in sex for money with young women. As if Jess Staley didn't know that already. But Staley continued the relationship. In fact, their relationship appears to have grown closer after that. Staley visited Epstein while he was serving his cartoon prison sentence. This is when he sent many of the most damning emails that have been revealed to the public with romantic quips like, "Just thinking about you and I will miss stopping by your office for advice." He'll probably miss other things, too, don't you think?
So it was in November of 2009 while Epstein was on house arrest that Staley wrote his infamous hot tub email saying, "I deeply appreciate our friendship. I have few so profound." In July 2010, it would appear Staley and Epstein were back to their old games when Staley wrote to Epstein, "That was fun. Say hi to Snow White." Now, let's remember Snow White is a cartoon about a 14-year-old girl. Epstein responded by asking, "What character would you like next?" To which Staley responded, "Beauty and the Beast," which is a cartoon about a 17-year-old. And I know that those are just the ages of the characters in the films, but you get what I mean. We all know what they're talking about. We all know what Staley meant when he said he has few friendships so profound.
JP Morgan eventually submitted financial records in 2019 after Epstein's death that showed over $1 billion with a B of suspicious transactions. The Virgin Islands, who were in court against JP Morgan, called this a CYA reporting after 16 years of cover up. During their official relationship, court filings documented at least $9 million in transfers to women and suspicious withdrawals, with $4 million of that specifically going to women and girls, including over 20 identified sex trafficking victims who were paid through JP Morgan accounts. And it's not like JP Morgan didn't know this. It's not like they didn't know what was happening. Obviously, the corrupt bankers in on the scheme knew, but everyone else did, too. Internal JP Morgan communications showed widespread awareness of the countless red flags that Epstein's accounts were setting off. An October 2006 rapid response team memo recommended that his account be classified as high-risk due to his $32 million account balances and routine large cash withdrawals. The earliest internal communications raising concerns about Epstein's accounts at the bank date all the way back to 2002 as far as I can tell. And in 2011, an internal email explicitly stated that the bank would keep Epstein as a client, quote, "due to Jess's personal relationship."
But even after JP Morgan terminated their client relationship with Epstein in 2013, JP Morgan continued to process over $1.1 million of payments to girls, many with Eastern European surnames. And more than $320,000 of the payments were made to numerous individuals for whom JP Morgan had no previously identified payments. An attorney for the Virgin Islands wrote in a letter to the court. The letter accuses JP Morgan of failing to disclose the payments until after the end of discovery, the period during which the bank and the Virgin Islands exchanged evidence as part of the ongoing lawsuit. That's insane. That means that JP Morgan was paying Epstein's victims all on their own. They were doing it on his behalf when he wasn't even a client with them anymore. Presumably, he didn't even have accounts with them anymore. So, I'm really not actually sure where the money was coming from or who was in charge of it. Do you see what I'm? Do you see what I'm trying to say here? They weren't just complicit. They were partners. This was a partnership. And once they were in it together, they had to get out of it and cover it all up together. So that's what JP Morgan did.
Do you think that if you closed out your JP Morgan bank account today, but then asked them to pay some people off for you over the next year or two, do you think that they would do that for you? No. Of course not, because you are a lowly peasant, not an international child sex trafficker who services the satanic vices of the ruling class. But of course, JP Morgan was going to get off with just a slap on the wrist and a small fine. They actually sued Jess Staley for having the audacity to get caught. The case was settled confidentially. So in the end, Jess Staley resigned from his position at the time as the head of Barclays and was barred from ever holding any senior position in the UK financial services industry ever again. His net worth as of 2024 was estimated between around $120 and $150 million, but it is hard to say how much of that remains liquid between his legal costs, regulatory fines, and the $80 million of salary that JP Morgan is trying to claw back from him to this day. But he owns a mansion in the Hamptons and one on Park Avenue in New York City. So suffice to say, he's probably doing all right. I'm sure that he misses his vacation time with Snow White, though. If only he could escape to his buddy's private island hot tub when the world ended and it all came crashing down around him.
After JP Morgan kicked Epstein out to save their own skin under heightened regulatory scrutiny, he set up shop with Deutsche Bank in August of 2013. And it wasn't a coincidence. The move was orchestrated by a man named Paul Morris, who had been at JP Morgan until 2012 and had been what's called a relationship manager for Epstein and his accounts while he was there. So in 2013, the whole financial world is watching JP Morgan deal with the fallout of the London Whale scandal. And presumably Paul catches wind that Epstein is getting jettisoned. So he goes to his superiors at Deutsche Bank and he suggests to them that they should swoop Epstein up and reap all the benefits previously bestowed upon JP Morgan.
Soon after joining Deutsche Bank, Moore suggested to senior management that Epstein was a potential client who could generate millions of dollars of revenue as well as leads for other lucrative clients to Deutsche Bank. It came out in court documents that in April of 2013, relationship manager 1, Paul Morris, wrote up a detailed report for Deutsche about Epstein and his past criminal history, as well as the potential benefits of taking him on as a client. Quote, "Among other things, the memorandum contained information concerning Mr. Epstein's previous plea deal and prison sentence. In particular, the memorandum stated that Epstein was charged with soliciting an underage prostitution in 2007, that he served 13 months out of his 18-month sentence, and that he was accused of paying young women for massages in his Florida home." It also highlights that Mr. Epstein was involved in 17 out of court civil settlements related to his conduct in the 2007 conviction. In the email to executive one and executive two attaching the memorandum, relationship manager one noted how lucrative the relationship could be stating estimated flows of $100 to $300 million over time, possibly more with revenue of $2 to $4 million annually over time. In the same email, relationship manager 1 proposed that all Epstein related accounts be for entities affiliated with Mr. Epstein, not personal accounts.
Now, note how relationship manager one, who is Paul Morris, suggests a strategy of mitigating the possible reputational risks by setting up all of Jeffrey Epstein's accounts in connection to entities associated with Epstein as opposed to personal accounts like with his name on it. As in, we can cover our tracks by not putting his name on any of the accounts and it'll just be all groovy, bro.
Deutsche Bank eagerly moved ahead with welcoming Jeffrey Epstein into the fold and proceeded to set up an elaborate financial infrastructure for Epstein that included more than 40 accounts across multiple entities. They immediately classified him as high-risk and honorary PEP, meaning politically exposed person, which afforded him extra privileges, but they decided to forego the extra scrutiny that ought to go along with the classifications. But it gets even better. Epstein's attorney made 97 cash withdrawals totaling over $800,000 between 2013 and 2017, and each one was for exactly $7,500, which just so happened to be the limit for third-party withdrawals before triggering reporting requirements. Court documents reveal that the attorney actually asked the bank staff on two separate occasions how to withdraw cash without creating some sort of alert. That's a crime. It's called structuring, as in you are structuring your withdrawals to specifically avoid regulatory scrutiny. It's not good. The bank is supposed to report when someone does that.
When the bank did finally have a review of Epstein's account in 2015 due to increased media attention on the pedophile, rather than carry out a standard review with the reputational risk committee, as is typical, executives Charles Packard and Paul Morris, the two men who had played central roles in approving Epstein as a client in the first place, they visited his mansion for a private meeting that was not documented or recorded. Instead, I wonder if there was any Disney princesses at their little meeting. Hmm. Who knows what happened at the meeting, but whatever it was, it satisfied Charlie and Paul that Epstein was an a-okay guy, and the bank was all good, continuing to do business with him. Deutsche Bank wound up flagging approximately $400 million in suspicious transactions, but did nothing about it and continued processing them. Payments to victims, to co-conspirators, to lawyers, and to Lord knows who else. Even when Deutsche finally terminated the relationship with Epstein in 2018, Epstein's relationship manager wrote glowing reference letters to help him find another bank and claimed to be unaware of any problems.
The most enlightening aspect of the case remains how routine it all appears in the documents. Epstein wasn't hidden or handled through back channels. He was a mainstream private wealth client whose criminal history was openly discussed in bank memos. His suspicious transactions weren't subtle. They involve structured cash withdrawals, payments to co-conspirators, and millions in legal settlements. The red flags were not missed. They were noted, escalated, and then dismissed because Epstein generated tons of revenue and had very powerful connections.
And that is almost the end of the story of mainstream mega banks conspiring with Epstein and aiding him in setting up and running one of the most prolific trafficking rings known in modern history. But there's one more scandal that we skipped over. Did Jeffrey Epstein cause the 2008 financial crisis?
So, the year is 2006, and in July, federal investigators launch a sex trafficking investigation into Epstein, focused around his Palm Beach property and the police work of Joseph Carrey. One month later in August, Jeffrey Epstein invests $57 million into Bear Stearns's high-grade structured credit strategies enhanced leveraged hedge fund. Yes, that is a mouthful. And you might ask, what is a high-grade structured credit strategies enhanced leverage hedge fund? The simple answer is it's a giant pile of mortgage-backed CDOs. The toxic trash that in about two years is going to cause the entire global financial system to collapse in 2008. If you want to understand it better, watch The Big Short. But this hedge fund isn't just a way to invest in mortgage-backed CDOs. Keyword being enhanced leverage because the fund is leveraged 17 to 1.
Now, we don't know why Epstein did this. We don't know exactly how much he knew about the state of the markets or the Bear Stearns balance sheets. We don't know if he had any inside baseball on the CDO markets or the ticking time bomb that they represented, at least mostly. But what we do know is that in 2007, coincidentally, as Jeffrey Epstein is negotiating his sweetheart plea deal with the state of Florida, he requested redemption of his entire $57 million investment. Now, $57 million times 17 to 1 leverage equals $969 million. So this was like pulling a billion dollars out of the global CDO market overnight in 2007.
Now maybe this is just coincidental timing. Maybe Jeffrey just needed money to cover his legal fees or was worried that he wouldn't be able to pull out of this risky investment once he went to prison, despite the fact that he was given work release privileges and allowed to walk free for 12 hours a day, six days a week. But aside from that, maybe he just wanted his money back. But on the other hand, Epstein had worked at Bear Stearns back in the 80s. He was longtime close friends with much of its top management like Jimmy Cayne and Ace Greenberg. And he had been a high-profile client of the bank for nearly 30 years. Simultaneously, as we have learned today, he was an extremely high-profile and protected client of JP Morgan, who would eventually go on to buy Bear Stearns for pennies on the dollar using a bunch of taxpayer bailout money. And so Epstein's positioning right smack in the middle of these two lynchpins of the precipitating collapse, Bear Stearns and JP Morgan, is awfully coincidental.
Epstein requested redemption of his $57 million in April of 2007, and by June, the Bear Stearns hedge fund was collapsing. It seems likely that Epstein's withdrawal played a significant role in making the firm insolvent. But it's also very likely that the writing was on the wall. Whether Epstein could read it or not, or if he just got lucky, is like, it's probably just a coincidence, right?
Well, as it turns out, Epstein was particularly qualified to read the writing on the wall because he was the chair of a little Bermuda-based business venture called Liquid Funding Limited, which was 40% owned by none other than Bear Stearns. Kind of weird. Liquid Funding Limited was essentially a CDO factory. It was another of these funds leveraged to the absolute tits on mortgage-backed securities that formed the bubble that was 2008. According to filings, Liquid Funding could issue up to $20 billion in instruments, meaning it could sell $20 billion worth of like made-up financial products of these packaged mortgages and stuff. But the company was only backed up by about $100 million of actual equity. $20 billion of products. $20 billion with the B backed up by $100 million with an M of actual equity. And Jeffrey Epstein was the chair of this secret little firm. He was overseeing and managing a CDO farm that was largely owned by Bear Stearns. So actually there would have been few people in the world better positioned than Epstein to have foreknowledge of both Bear Stearns's troubles and the impending financial collapse because of CDOs. And then conveniently, he resigned as chairman of Liquid Funding on March 19th of 2007, just weeks before his April withdrawal of $57 million from the other hedge fund with the really long name.
And then boom. By the time the dust settled after the bailouts and Bear Stearns had been gobbled up by JP Morgan, Liquid Funding had just disappeared into the smoke. It apparently was made whole during the bailout process and wound down quietly in the background and ceased to exist. JP Morgan made out like bandits. In January 2007, Bear Stearns had been trading for $172 a share. JP Morgan acquired them in '08 for $10 per share, and they didn't even have to pay for it all themselves because the Federal Reserve gave them $30 billion of our money to help out. This amounted to JP Morgan acquiring $77 billion of assets in Bear Stearns for a total cost of approximately $9 billion, which is over a 98% discount. Granted that $77 billion was the book value, not the actual market value at the time of the collapse, but you get the idea. JP Morgan became the biggest bank in America after also acquiring Washington Mutual, and they were the only major bank in America to post a net positive quarter in Q4 of 2008.
Jeffrey served his sweetheart deal and went on to spend many more years as JP Morgan's most important private client, and everyone lived happily ever after. Just kidding. Because we're talking about the world's most notorious child sex trafficker that raped hundreds of girls using the financial networks facilitated by JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank under the protection of our government institutions, now being covered up by the literal president of the United States of America. To this day, none of the bankers who were complicit in Epstein's operations have been charged with a crime. None have done prison time for their role in facilitating his trafficking network despite being integral to its success because the world works for them. It's a banker's world. You're just here to pay the interest. That will be enough to collapse the current paradigm and change the whole planet.
That's all for our show today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Please, if you learned something today, hit the subscribe button, like the video, and share it with all of your normie friends. I'm going to be traveling for most of September, so videos will kind of just drop when they drop. And then, as we move into the fall, we are going to get down to business. If you want to support the channel, the best way to do that is to go to iancarroll.com and buy some merch. For now, drink your water, touch some grass, and do something nice for someone. And we'll see you next time.
Conspiracy theories are dangerous. Information is the oxygen of a democracy with Republicans, with progressives, with libertarians. Because this is not about right and left. This is about right and wrong. [Music] Security is at stake.