Does Our Economy Really Have to Run on Fraud?
by ilene - September 3rd, 2010 5:04 pm
Does Our Economy Really Have to Run on Fraud?
Courtesy of MICHAEL HUDSON, writing at CounterPunch
What is the difference between today’s economy and Lehman Brothers just before it collapsed in September 2008? Should Lehman, the economy, Wall Street – or none of the above – be bailed out of bad mortgage debt? How did the Fed and Treasury decide which Wall Street firms to save – and how do they decide whether or not to save U.S. companies, personal mortgage debtors, states and cities from bankruptcy and insolvency today? Why did it start by saving the richest financial institutions, leaving the “real” economy locked in debt deflation?
Stated another way, why was Lehman the only Wall Street firm permitted to go under? How does the logic that Washington used in its case compare to how it is treating the economy at large? Why bail out Wall Street – whose managers are rich enough not to need to spend their gains – and not the quarter of U.S. homeowners unfortunate enough also to suffer “negative equity” but not qualify for the help that the officials they elect gave to Wall Street’s winners by enabling Bear Stearns, A.I.G., Countrywide Financial and other gamblers to pay their bad debts?
There was disagreement last Wednesday at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission now plodding along through its post mortem hearings on the causes of Wall Street’s autumn 2008 collapse and ensuing bailout. Federal Reserve economists argue that the economy – and Wall Street firms apart from Lehman – merely had a liquidity problem, a temporary failure to find buyers for its junk mortgages. By contrast, Lehman had a more deep-seated “balance sheet” problem: negative equity. A taxpayer bailout would have been an utter waste, not recoverable.
Lehman CEO Dick Fuld is bitter. He claims that Lehman was unfairly singled out. After all, the Fed lent $29 billion to help JPMorgan Chase buy out Bear Stearns the preceding spring. In the wake of Lehman’s failure it seemed to gain the courage to say, “Never again,” and avoided new collapses by bailing out A.I.G. – saving all its counterparties from having to take a loss.
Was this not a giveaway? Fuld implied. Why couldn’t the Fed and Treasury do for Lehman what they did with other Wall Street investment firms and stock brokers: let it reclassify itself as a bank so it could pawn off…
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DiggThe Horrific Derivatives Bubble That Could One Day Destroy The Entire World Financial System
by ilene - August 15th, 2010 2:12 pm
The Horrific Derivatives Bubble That Could One Day Destroy The Entire World Financial System
Courtesy of Michael Snyder at Economic Collapse
Today there is a horrific derivatives bubble that threatens to destroy not only the U.S. economy but the entire world financial system as well, but unfortunately the vast majority of people do not understand it. When you say the word "derivatives" to most Americans, they have no idea what you are talking about. In fact, even most members of the U.S. Congress don’t really seem to understand them. But you don’t have to get into all the technicalities to understand the bigger picture.
Basically, derivatives are financial instruments whose value depends upon or is derived from the price of something else. A derivative has no underlying value of its own. It is essentially a side bet. Originally, derivatives were mostly used to hedge risk and to offset the possibility of taking losses. But today it has gone way, way beyond that. Today the world financial system has become a gigantic casino where insanely large bets are made on anything and everything that you can possibly imagine.
The derivatives market is almost entirely unregulated and in recent years it has ballooned to such enormous proportions that it is almost hard to believe. Today, the worldwide derivatives market is approximately 20 times the size of the entire global economy.
Because derivatives are so unregulated, nobody knows for certain exactly what the total value of all the derivatives worldwide is, but low estimates put it around 600 trillion dollars and high estimates put it at around 1.5 quadrillion dollars.
Do you know how large one quadrillion is?
Counting at one dollar per second, it would take 32 million years to count to one quadrillion.…
Report: Bailout Money Ended Up in Foreign Hands
by ilene - August 12th, 2010 1:02 pm
Report: Bailout Money Ended Up in Foreign Hands
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
The Congressional Oversight Panel has found (!) some disturbing new information surrounding 2008′s most not excellent bailout programs, among them, details on where exactly AIG’s cash infusions went. Here’s a hint: it wasn’t back into the system.
WaPo:
Members of the Congressional Oversight Panel, in a report due out Thursday, note that America’s broad financial rescues had more impact internationally than the narrower bailout programs of other countries had on U.S. firms.
They cite as a case study the bailout of insurance giant American International Group. While the Treasury committed up to $70 billion to AIG through its Troubled Assets Relief Program, the report states, much of that money ended up in the coffers of foreign trading partners in France, Germany and other countries. The cash that the United States poured into AIG alone equaled twice what France spent on its total capital injection program, and half what Germany spent.
"The point we make forcefully in this report is that there were no data about where this money was going, no information about where this money was going," said panel chair Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor. "Without that information, no one could make a deliberate policy choice" about whether to ask foreign governments to contribute to the financial rescues.
Isn’t that why Warren has a job? To figure that out?
And yet for all her pristine carrying on over who got what, it appears as though someone forgot to turn off the spigot. But now instead of the banks and the auto companies, the bailouts are being pumped out to homedebtors, college students, whoever the hell is stupid enough to have a stake in Fannie and Freddie and of course broke ass state and local governments who can’t pay their bills.
The outrage over the bailouts of late 2008 and most of 2009 is obvious but where is the oversight committee to say enough is e-f*&king-nough already and cut it off?!
Reports. Meh.
Why The Bankers, The Fed, and Their Allies In Washington Are Afraid of Elizabeth Warren
by ilene - August 11th, 2010 4:15 am
Why The Bankers, The Fed, and Their Allies In Washington Are Afraid of Elizabeth Warren
Courtesy of JESSE’S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN
“Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders."
Dr. Lawrence Britt
The Nation
The AIG Bailout Scandal
William Greider
August 6, 2010
The government’s $182 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG should be seen as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the financial crisis and its costly aftermath. The story of American International Group explains the larger catastrophe not because this was the biggest corporate bailout in history but because AIG’s collapse and subsequent rescue involved nearly all the critical elements, including delusion and deception. These financial dealings are monstrously complicated, but this account focuses on something mere mortals can understand—moral confusion in high places, and the failure of governing institutions to fulfill their obligations to the public.
Three governmental investigative bodies have now pored through the AIG wreckage and turned up disturbing facts—the House Committee on Oversight and Reform; the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which will make its report at year’s end; and the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), which issued its report on AIG in June.
The five-member COP, chaired by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, has produced the most devastating and comprehensive account so far. Unanimously adopted by its bipartisan members, it provides alarming insights that should be fodder for the larger debate many citizens long to hear—why Washington rushed to forgive the very interests that produced this mess, while innocent others were made to suffer the consequences. The Congressional panel’s critique helps explain why bankers and their Washington allies do not want Elizabeth Warren to chair the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The report concludes that the Federal Reserve Board’s intimate relations with the leading powers of Wall Street—the same banks that benefited most from the government’s massive bailout—influenced its strategic decisions on AIG. The panel accuses the Fed and the Treasury Department of brushing aside alternative approaches that would have saved tens of billions in public funds by making these same banks “share the pain.”
Bailing out AIG effectively meant rescuing Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America…
Wall Street’s Big Win
by ilene - August 6th, 2010 11:46 pm
Excellent article. I recommend reading the whole thing… Matt tells the story behind the sabotage of real financial reform as reflected in the final bill. – Ilene
Wall Street’s Big Win
Finance reform won’t stop the high-risk gambling that wrecked the economy – and Republicans aren’t the only ones to blame
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By Excerpts:
But Dodd-Frank was neither an FDR-style, paradigm-shifting reform, nor a historic assault on free enterprise. What it was, ultimately, was a cop-out, a Band-Aid on a severed artery. If it marks the end of anything at all, it represents the end of the best opportunity we had to do something real about the criminal hijacking of America’s financial-services industry. During the yearlong legislative battle that forged this bill, Congress took a long, hard look at the shape of the modern American economy – and then decided that it didn’t have the stones to wipe out our country’s one dependably thriving profit center: theft.
[...]
All of this is great, but taken together, these reforms fail to address even a tenth of the real problem. Worse: They fail to even define what the real problem is. Over a long year of feverish lobbying and brutally intense backroom negotiations, a group of D.C. insiders fought over a single question: Just how much of the truth about the financial crisis should we share with the public? Do we admit that control over the economy in the past decade was ceded to a small group of rapacious criminals who to this day are engaged in a mind-numbing campaign of theft on a global scale? Or do we pretend that, minus a few bumps in the road that have mostly been smoothed out, the clean-hands capitalism of Adam Smith still rules the day in America? In other words, do people need to know the real version, in all its majestic whorebotchery, or can we get away with some bullshit cover story?
In passing Dodd-Frank, they went with the cover story.
[...]
Both of these takes were engineered to avoid an uncomfortable political truth: The huge profits that Wall Street earned in the past decade were driven in large part by a single, far-reaching scheme, one in which bankers, home lenders and other players exploited loopholes in the system to magically transform subprime home borrowers into AAA investments, sell them off to unsuspecting pension funds and foreign trade unions…
Deciphering Joe Cassno’s Lies Before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
by ilene - July 11th, 2010 8:13 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge
Submitted by David Fiderer
Deciphering Joe Cassno’s Lies Before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
Joe Cassano is a very good liar, which is why it would be so hard to prosecute him for perjury. When testifying before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the former head of AIG Financial Products kept blending in half-truths with his audaciously dishonest claims, so that the overall effect was nonsensical. For instance, to justify his outrageous claim that, "the books were generally considered fully hedged," he explained that "we were using it basically in actuarial basis …[so] it’s not hedged in the conventional sense." (Translation: The book was never hedged in any sense. Nor was there any actuarial analysis, only a reliance on triple-A credit ratings.) These rhetorical tricks were designed to throw sand in everyone’s face. But his tactics seem to have worked. The staunchly unregenerate Cassano framed a media narrative that deflected away from his dishonesty and gross incompetence.
Here’s a reality check on some of his more ridiculous claims, in order of appearance:
1. Cassanos’s Claim: AIGFP never compromised its high underwriting standards.
The Truth: AIGFP had no underwriting standards pertaining to the most important risk, which affected AIG’s liquidity.
Commission Chairman Phil Angelides asked Cassano if he understood the subprime risks he insured. Cassano stonewalled with a lot of doubletalk:
Angelides: I want to talk to you about this, that these were represented as multisector CDOs. But if you look at — we did a sample of some of these in 2004, 2005, 2006, they were almost overwhelmingly residential-backed and very substantially subprime. For example, in the survey we did of some of these CDOs that you issued protection on, 84 percent were backed by RMBS residential mortgages in ’05, 89 percent in ’06. And just as an example, while you indicated you decided to stop writing on subprime instruments in January of ’06, for example, you backed an instrument called RFC III where that CDO was 93 percent subprime and seven percent HELOC home equity loans.
My question for you, Mr. Cassano, is was there — you said you did thorough due diligence. Were you aware of the quality of the mortgages? Do you do direct analysis of the loan data? Were you confident that you had a full understanding of the nature of what you were backing?
…
Mike Konczal Talks FinReg on GRITtv: Taxpayers Still on the Hook for Wall Street’s Recklessness
by ilene - July 10th, 2010 5:59 pm
Mike Konczal Talks FinReg on GRITtv: Taxpayers Still on the Hook for Wall Street’s Recklessness
Courtesy of Tim Price writing at New Deal 2.0
Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal joined Demos’s Nomi Prins and GRITtv host Laura Flanders last week to discuss the state of financial reform, whether the current bill does enough to change the culture of risk on Wall Street, and whether taxpayers are going to be stuck holding the bag — again.
Check out the full interview:
Mike notes that one of the key questions of reform is “who’s going to pay for this, and ideally we want the people who caused the trouble to pay for it, not regular citizens.” Instead, he says Republicans like Scott Brown have transferred the cost from banks to the FDIC and the savings accounts of average Americans.
On the subject of possible criminal charges for Goldman Sachs, Mike says that the lack of major arrests compared to previous crises “shows how much people haven’t internalized the disaster they’ve caused. The culture is still very much the same.” The problem, he explains, is that firms like AIG “thought they were being very clever when they were actually getting gamed.” The fact that we still aren’t sure how much of this was illegal “shows how disturbed the regulation is.”
Mike pushes back on AIG’s attempts to shift the blame for its reckless bets, noting that “when we talk about what AIG was doing, that’s millions of Americans who are actually in those bonds, that were given loans that they shouldn’t have so that AIG could juke some statistics.” Unfortunately, he offers a grim prognosis for AIG’s victims: “The foreclosure crisis is ongoing, it will be ongoing next year, and the President’s plan there, HAMP, has been a total failure that most credible people have walked away from at this point. We have a quarter of homeowners underwater and they have no relief, and they’re paying into a system that is pretty much insolvent.”
Finally, responding to deficit hawks’ calls for cuts to programs like Social Security, Mike argues that “if they were very concerned about protecting anyone, they would go much harder into financial reform. Because this is really where the deficit’s coming from right now, the fact that we have a major financial crisis. There’s two things that…
The Con of the Decade Part I
by ilene - July 8th, 2010 5:06 pm
The Con of the Decade Part I
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds
The con of the decade (Part I) involves the transfer of private debt to the public (the marks), who then pays interest forever to the con artists.
I’ve laid out the Con of the Decade (Part I) in outline form:
1. Enable trillions of dollars in mortgages guaranteed to default by packaging unlimited quantities of them into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), creating umlimited demand for fraudulently originated loans.
2. Sell these MBS as "safe" to credulous investors, institutions, town councils in Norway, etc., i.e. "the bezzle" on a global scale.
3. Make huge "side bets" against these doomed mortgages so when they default then the short-side bets generate billions in profits.
4. Leverage each $1 of actual capital into $100 of high-risk bets.
5. Hide the utterly fraudulent bets offshore and/or off-balance sheet (not that the regulators you had muzzled would have noticed anyway).
6. When the longside bets go bad, transfer hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal guarantees, bailouts and backstops into the private hands which made the risky bets, either via direct payments or via proxies like AIG. Enable these private Power Elites to borrow hundreds of billions more from the Treasury/Fed at zero interest.
7. Deposit these funds at the Federal Reserve, where they earn 3-4%. Reap billions in guaranteed income by borrowing Federal money for free and getting paid interest by the Fed.
8. As profits pile up, start buying boatloads of short-term U.S. Treasuries. Now the taxpayers who absorbed the trillions in private losses and who transferred trillions in subsidies, backstops, guarantees, bailouts and loans to private banks and corporations, are now paying interest on the Treasuries their own money purchased for the banks/corporations.
9. Slowly acquire trillions of dollars in Treasuries--not difficult to do as the Federal government is borrowing $1.5 trillion a year.
10. Stop buying Treasuries and dump a boatload onto the market, forcing interest rates to rise as supply of new T-Bills exceeds demand (at least temporarily). Repeat as necessary to double and then triple interest rates paid on Treasuries.
11. Buy hundreds of billions in long-term Treasuries at high rates of interest. As interest rates rise, interest payments dwarf all other Federal spending, forcing extreme cuts in all other government spending.
12. Enjoy the hundreds of billions of…
Outrageous But Legal: AIG Scam Mastermind Joseph Cassano Avoids DOJ Charges
by ilene - May 25th, 2010 4:14 am
Outrageous But Legal: AIG Scam Mastermind Joseph Cassano Avoids DOJ Charges
Courtesy of Damien Hoffman
Although we are getting closer to the handcuff phase of the economic crisis, the US Department of Justice does not have the authority to bring charges against AIG (NYSE: AIG) or uncollateralized credit default swap mastermind Joseph Cassano. This is another classic case of the criminals being 10 steps ahead of the police.
Also, this raises a much more important issue: when extremely harmful or completely unethical behavior is exceptionally creative or cutting edge, it may not yet be deemed illegal.
So, in this case, there were $1,000 an hour lawyers toiling more than 24 hours a day to abet destructive behavior. This is completely identical to the nifty off balance sheet scams engineered by Enron. As we speak, armies of the brightest legal minds are pouring over the new Financial Regulation Bills in order to help another savvy client do the same.
When will we preempt this game of smart cat and slow mouse? When we establish a set of core principals in finance which establish an ethical playing field. I discussed this in depth on Fox Business on Friday night, and I will be publishing my full proposal in the weeks to come.
Unfortunately, until we transform the Wild West of Wall Street into a productive gridiron, the next financially engineered scam is inevitable. And until we arrest and punish CEOs like Lehman Brother’s Dick Fuld, corporate executives will continue using the ridiculous excuse that they somehow deserve all the credit when their strategy is successful yet somehow had no idea what was happening when their strategy screwed others. Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) and Citigroup (NYSE: C) are also particularly adept at this PR game.
Yesterday, Joseph Cassano’s attorney, F. Joseph Warin, said ”[T]he results are wholly appropriate in light of our client’s factual innocence.” This is public relations speak for: “Since you suckers did not have a law prohibiting my client’s destructive behavior, he was appropriately allowed to escape punishment by your incompetent law makers and executives.”
Outrageous, but legal.
****
If you are interested in more detailed trading and investing ideas, try a free trial Wall St. Cheat Sheet Premium newsletter written by Wall St. Cheat Sheet founders Derek and Damien Hoffman.
The Silver Curtain
by ilene - May 14th, 2010 11:25 am
The Silver Curtain
Courtesy of Marla Singer, Zero Hedge
On the 5th of March in 1946, in Fulton Missouri, at Westminster College, Winston Churchill delivered an address (since christened the "Sinews of Peace") lamenting the burgeoning power and influence being slowly but surely gathered up by the Soviet Union. Perhaps the address will be familiar to some of you owing to its most famous passage:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone — Greece with its immortal glories — is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation.
Ironic, as I will address, that he should mention Greece.
Much less well known perhaps is this later passage:
Our difficulties and dangers will not be removed by closing our eyes to them. They will not be removed by mere waiting to see what happens; nor will they be removed by a policy of appeasement. What is needed is a settlement, and the longer this is delayed, the more difficult it will be and the greater our dangers will become.1
The "Iron Curtain" came, of course, to signify the cavernous ideological, and eventually concretely physical, divide between East and West. It took some 43 years before it was lifted once more, first and haltingly, in the form of the removal of Hungary’s border fence in mid-1989 and then, of course, finally via the fall of the Berlin Wall in November that same year.
Not to be compared with a production of Italian Opera, the Iron Curtain did not describe a sudden, smooth, abrupt descent over the stages of Eastern Europe. Quite the contrary, its drop was in stutters of discrete, fractional lowerings, such that it was a full fifteen years after Churchill used the term before its ultimate expression, the Berlin Wall, was finally…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
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