Banking Law

A few readers have asked for my thoughts about the call last week of tin horn Venezuelan socialist dictator and Tony Soprano wanna-be Hugo Chavez, a man whose face appears once to have been set on fire and beaten out with a rake,  for South American nations to pull their reserves out of U.S. banks.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez urged his Latin American allies on Saturday to begin withdrawing billions of dollars in international reserves from U.S. banks, warning of a looming U.S. economic crisis.

Chavez made the suggestion as he hosted a summit aimed at boosting Latin American integration and countering U.S. influence.

"We should start to bring our reserves here," Chavez said. "Why does that money have to be in the north? ... You can't put all your eggs in one basket."

To help pool resources within the region, Chavez and other leaders launched a new development bank at the summit of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Nations of Our America, or ALBA.

Currently, ALBA is being funded with a grub stake of a gross of fried plantains and a lame burro donated by Juan Valdez. Yet, just as soon as the billions and billions of dollars that South American governments have on deposit in the U.S. can be wired out of an industrial bank located in Miami by a guy known only as "Pepe," ALBA is expected to be looking hotter than its namesake, Jessica Alba. And the bank ALBA won't be pregnant, either. On the down side, you won't get a kick out of fantasizing about carnal knowledge of the bank ALBA, as you might with the feminine Alba, since in South America, only a bank's depositors get screwed, and we at Bank Lawyer's Blog, even when we fantasize, always practice safe fake sex.

The fact that there's been virtually no follow up to this story in the trade press, and that the American government, including the Treasury Department and the State Department, have treated it like a non-event, lead me to the obvious conclusion that Hugo's been up to his old tricks. Sure enough, after scouring the world's press for confirmation, I found it in the dank environs of gloomy Scotland.

At the summit, Mr Chavez accepted some coca leaves from Bolivian leader Evo Morales, insisting "coca isn't cocaine".

"You know the strength that coca gives," Mr Chavez said. "I've really grown used to it every day in the morning."

The  two men defend the leaf, which has been chewed by Andean Indians for centuries,  but condemn its use in making cocaine. 

US officials have long tried to stamp out coca cultivation. But Mr Chavez accused Washington of trying to use the issue of drug trafficking to discredit his government for political reasons, noting that John Walters, the White House drug tsar, had accused him of facilitating the flow of Colombian cocaine through Venezuela.

Mr Chavez called that "a serious thing," but smiled as he thanked Mr Morales for recently sending coca to him and asked for more.

Standing up from a table, Mr Morales walked to Mr Chavez and opened a drawstring bag. "Oh, friend, I knew you wouldn't fail me," Mr Chavez said, as he put some in his mouth.

Chavez then used a 32-inch Louisville Slugger baseball bat to tamp a fistful of coca leaves up his left nostril and completely filled his sinus cavity, at which point he leaped upon a conference table, dropped to his side, and began circling wildly in a "Curly Shoulder Spin" while screaming "woo, woo, woo" and "Baseball been bery, bery good to me."

Sorry, I just can't take a man seriously who doesn't understand that before you can drop and do the shoulder spin, you have to splay your fingers under your chin, palm downward, wiggle the fingers, and give a "nyuk-nyuk-nyuk." It's this lack of knowledge of proper diplomatic protocol that makes that man a master of disaster of international relations.