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Evergrande Misses Debt Payments Due Monday As World's Richest Banker Says China's "Lehman Moment" Has Arrived | ZeroHedge zerohedge.com/markets/evergr…

By 1858, the center of cotton trading had shifted from the South to New York City, where factors and commission houses were based. Lehman opened its first branch office at 119 Liberty Street, and 32-year-old Emanuel relocated there to run the office. Following the war the

company helped finance Alabama's reconstruction. The firm's headquarters were eventually moved to New York City, where it helped found the New York Cotton Exchange in 1870, commodifying the crop; Emanuel sat on the board of governors until 1884. The firm also dealt in the

emerging market for railroad bonds and entered the financial-advisory business.
Lehman became a member of the Coffee Exchange as early as 1883 and finally the New York Stock Exchange in 1887. In 1899, it underwrote its first public offering, the preferred and common stock of the

International Steam Pump Company.

Benjamin Guggenheim was a member of a family that had made a fortune in the smelting business in the United States, largely through his efforts, and that controlled the American Smelting and Refining Company. Guggenheim founded the International

Steam Pump Company (ISPC). The ISPC was organized by the Seward legal firm in 1899. The discovery of high-grade silver-lead ore in the Guggenheim mines in Leadville, Colorado, in 1881 became the foundation for the Guggenheim fortune in mining. In 1891 his father, Meyer,

consolidated about a dozen of the family’s mining operations into the Colorado Smelting and Refining Company. The Guggenheim family then entered a lengthy struggle with the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), backed by the Rockefeller family. Following his father's

death in 1905, Daniel assumed control of the Guggenheim family enterprises. Through ASARCO, Kennecott Copper and other family-owned companies, the Guggenheims mined tin in Bolivia, gold in the Yukon, diamonds and rubber in the Belgian Congo, diamonds in Angola, and copper in

Alaska, Utah, and Chile. Guggenheim and his brother formed a gentlemen's agreement with Birch to form the Alaska Syndicate, which purchased just under half of the stock in Birch's company and all of the stock in the Copper River and Northwestern Railway. This gave rise to the

notion that Alaska was "First a Colony of Russia, then a colony of Guggenmorgan". Forester and conservationist Gifford Pinchot led the charge against the Alaska Syndicate and the so-called "Morganheims" and their supporter in Washington, Secretary of the Interior Richard

Ballinger. The firing of Pinchot, a close friend of Teddy Roosevelt, alienated many progressives within the Republican party and drove a wedge between Taft and Roosevelt himself, leading to the split of the Republican Party in the 1912 presidential election. The affair was

officially investigated over two decades later by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. The Saudi Aramco oil corporation, with Ickes' assistance, got Roosevelt to agree to Lend-Lease aid to Saudi Arabia, which would involve the U.S. government in protecting American

interests there and create a shield for ARAMCO. As an official delegate to the founding United Nations conference in San Francisco, presided over by Acting Secretary General Alger Hiss, Ickes advocated for stronger language promoting self-rule and eventual independence for the

world's colonies. Although Ickes stayed on in President Harry S. Truman's cabinet after Roosevelt died in April 1945, he resigned from office within a year. In February 1946, Truman nominated Edwin W. Pauley to be Secretary of the Navy. Pauley was the former Democratic Party

national treasurer. Ickes had bought a working farm, Headwaters Farm, near Olney, Maryland, in 1937. His wife Jane managed the farm and Ickes grew flowers as a hobby. President Roosevelt spent occasional weekends there before the establishment of "Shangri-La", the presidential

retreat now known as Camp David.

Children resulting from this marriage were daughter Elizabeth Jane and son Harold McEwen Ickes, who became Deputy Chief of Staff under Bill Clinton. In the Clinton administration, Ickes served as Deputy Chief of Staff under Leon Panetta. In a

lengthy New York Times profile of Ickes in 1997, Michael Lewis nicknamed Ickes "the Garbage Man" and noted that 'Ickes has been caught up in so many of Clinton's scandals and crises that he came to describe his function in the White House as 'director of the sanitation

department'.'Pauley made his fortune running oil companies from the mid-1920s onward. He founded The Petrol Corp. in 1923. Pauley was president of Fortuna Petroleum by 1933. In 1947 he bought Coconut Island in Hawaii, as a private retreat. Several of his deals involved Zapata

Corporation, run by George H. W. Bush, including a joint-venture with Pemargo in 1960. In 1958 he founded Pauley Petroleum which, with Howard Hughes, expanded oil production in the Gulf of Mexico.
Later Pauley also became a founding part-owner of television station KTVU in

Oakland, a part-owner of the Los Angeles Rams football team and a director of Western Airlines. The initial $1 million investment for Zapata was provided by the Liedtke brothers and their circle of investors, by Bush's father Prescott Bush and his maternal grandfather

George Herbert Walker, and their family's circle of friends. Zapata Petroleum began in 1953 through Bush's joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business, but who continued to work for the CIA

under commercial cover. In 1954, Zapata Off-Shore Company was formed as a subsidiary of Zapata Oil, with Bush as president of the new company. He raised some startup money from Eugene Meyer, publisher of the Washington Post, and his son-in-law, Philip Graham.

In 1960,

Jorge Díaz Serrano of Mexico was put in touch with Bush by Dresser Industries. Dresser was owned by Prescott Bush's Yale friends Roland and W. Averell Harriman, and had been George H.W. Bush's first employer upon his graduation from Yale, giving him his start in both the oil

business and the defense contractor business Serrano and Bush created a new company, Perforaciones Marinas del Golfo, aka Permargo, in conjunction with Edwin Pauley of Pan American Petroleum, with whom Zapata had a previous offshore contract. The deal with Permargo is not

mentioned in Zapata's annual reports, and SEC records are missing. In 1922 a couple of oil men Edward L. Doheny and Harry Sinclair bribed Albert Fall, the secretary of the interior in the Harding administration, for secret leases to drill on two of the fields, the Teapot Dome

field just outside of Casper, Wyo., and the Elk Hills field in Bakersfield, Calif. Doheny and his Pan American Petroleum and Transport Co. (later Atlantic Richfield Co, or ARCO), paid $300,000 to Fall in exchange for the rights. When the bribes were uncovered, the ensuing Teapot

Dome scandal forced the resignations of Fall (who later went to prison), and Edward Denby, the secretary of the Navy.

IN 1973, DURING THE ARAB oil embargo, the Nixon administration tried to lease Elk Hills to boost domestic oil production. In 1984, 1986 and 1987, the Reagan

administration proposed selling Elk Hills for a lump-sum payment of $1.5 billion that would go toward reducing the federal budget deficit. Each time, Congress wisely blocked the sale of Elk Hills.
But where Fall, Nixon and Reagan had failed, Gore succeeded. Oil companies bid on

the field and, finally, on Oct. 6, 1997, the Energy Department announced that the government would sell its interest in the 47,000-acre Elk Hills reserve to Occidental Petroleum Corp. for $3.65 billion. It was the largest privatization of federal property in U.S. history, one

that tripled Occidental’s U.S. oil reserves overnight. During the months after the sale, Occidental tripled the amount of natural gas extracted from the field. Although the Energy Department was required to assess the likely environmental consequences of the proposed sale, it

didn’t. Instead it hired a private company, ICF Kaiser International, Inc., to complete the assessment. The general chairman of Gore’s presidential campaign, Tony Coelho, sat on the board of directors.
Just hours after the announcement of the Elk Hills sale, Gore stood across

town on the campus of Georgetown University and delivered a speech to the White House Conference on Climate Change on the “terrifying prospect” of global warming, a problem he attributed to the unchecked use of fossil fuels such as oil. Uranium Deal Helps Benefactors, but

Costs Taxpayers $2.1 Billion
IN 1993, Vice President Gore boarded Air Force Two and flew to Moscow for meetings with Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin about the vitally important task of protecting nuclear weapons and nuclear material in the newly decentralized former

Soviet Union. It was a natural mission for Gore; during his tenure in the Senate, he had become something of an expert in arms control agreements and, thanks to the patronage from Hammer, had already met with Anatoly Dobrynin, Moscow’s longtime ambassador to Washington. Gore and

Chernomyrdin signed a 20-year, $12 billion deal under which Russia would ship its weapons-grade uranium to the United States. The U.S. Enrichment Corp. (then government-owned) would buy the highly enriched uranium, process it into lower grade, reactor-friendly uranium and sell

it to nuclear power plants in the United States. The cash-starved Russian government would get much-needed dollars to pay its nuclear scientists, those scientists would not be tempted to offer their services around the world, and nuclear material would be under the protection of

the United States. AS NEFF AND OTHER EXPERTS had predicted, however, the deal soon began to unravel. Later in 1998 USEC announced that it had received shipments of uranium from the U.S. Department of Energy. The sudden glut caused the worldwide price of uranium to plummet,

and the Russians suddenly stood to receive less money than they had been promised. Yeltsin’s government cried foul and threatened to sell its nuclear material to other countries, including Iran. The White House scrambled to come up with the money the Russians demanded, and

managed to quietly slip an extra $325 million for the Russians a taxpayer-financed bailout into an omnibus appropriations bill before Congress.
Neff, the architect of the plan to ship Russia’s weapons-grade uranium to USEC for reprocessing, estimates that it will cost taxpayers

$140 million a year for 15 years to continue purchasing the Russian nuclear material, for a total cost of $2.1 billion or $200 million more than the sale of USEC brought in. Gore’s “reinvention” of USEC made a lot of money for some of his most reliable political patrons. It also

endangered nuclear arms control and left in private hands the management of facilities that are contaminated with deadly substances.