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Sacramento's Utilities Rates Advisory Commission approves water rate hikes Sacramento's Utilities Rates Advisory Commission voted 5-2 to raise water rates in the city by $19 a month over the next three years. The reason for the rate hike? It is to gain a loan from Goldman Sachs to renovate an aging water system. But that loan is going to raise water and sewer bills from $57 monthly to $350 a month in just 15 years.
The city council still must give its approval before the rate cuts are final. But officials seem more and more in support of this measure. City Council members must hear from their constituents that these rate hikes are unsustainable. In a city with near 11 percent unemployment, raising water and sewer bills will only put more financial strain upon the city's residents.
Also residents should be aware that this loan comes with a $10.8 million underwriting fee for Goldman Sachs. The loan itself would total $1.8 billion, and Goldman Sachs would also be making profit off that through interest. Sacramento is a city that is already struggling with painful budget cuts. Sacramento has had to lay off police and firefighters, as well as hundreds of teachers and other city employees. The city has closed libraries, and discontinued other public services. Can the city afford this loan? (Examiner)
Has Ex Goldman Sachs Staff turned Democrat Campaigner Infiltrated Occupy? Through the revolving door from Goldman Sachs to the Democrat Party, an experienced campaigner has maneuvered themselves into a position of influence with the Occupation Movement in the nations capitol. Connections with MoveOn.org, and Van Jones’ Rebuild the Dream, seem to be only the tip of the iceberg. For a movement that considers itself not only non-partisan, but anti-partisan, and entirely anathema to the corporate owned political institutions that exist, this should come as a serious blow.
Ali Savino was the initiator of Occupy DC’s Research and Policy Development Committee (RPD). This committee is responsible for not only policy development within the Occupy community, but, through the Occupy 2.0 committee, a sub group of RPD, plays a key role in establishing the future direction of the movement.
Ms. Savino works for NGP VAN in Washington, DC. Her Linkedin profile states that she works in ‘product design’ at the firm. NGP VAN’s product is political campaigns. Their web site boasts deep ties with the Democrat Party. Their Clients Page states:
NGP VAN is honored to power the fundraising, field, and new media activities for many of the leading Democratic and progressive organizations. Our software powers the Obama campaign’s voter contact, volunteer, fundraising and compliance operations in all 50 states. Clients include: ... (News Junkie Post)
Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Banks worldwide earned an estimated $13 billion by taking advantage of below-market rates on emergency U.S. Federal Reserve loans from August 2007 through April 2010. Roll over the bars below to explore details for each. To compare results with banks' net income or losses for the same timeframes, click the corresponding button. Worldwide total is the sum for 190 firms with available data; those banks lost a combined $21.6 billion.
The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue. (Bloomberg)
Reckless Endangerment: Totally Corrupt America Last March I reviewed Matt Taibbi’s important book Griftopia, an entertaining account of the through-going financial fraud that gave us the financial crisis. http://www.vdare.com/print/13156 Taibbi shows that the US “superpower” can match any third world backwater in the magnitude of greed and fraud that is endemic in business and government. I would not be surprised if Taibbi’s book motivated the more aware participants of Occupy Wall Street.
Taibbi’s Griftopia was published last year. This year Henry Holt publishers have provided us with Gretchen Morgenson and Joshur Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment.
Morgenson and Rosner tell the story again, but with less drama and provocation. Possibly, it might be more acceptable to those gullible Americans who wrap themselves in the flag and refuse to believe that their country could ever knowingly do anything that is wrong.
I am not suggesting that Morgenson and Rosner pull their punches. To the contrary, the authors deliver enough knockouts to be contenders with Taibbi as world champions in exposing the reckless fraud that the US financial sector and its regulators now epitomize. (Paul Craig Roberts)
Revealed: the capitalist network that runs the world AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs). (New Scientist)
keywords: Affiliated Managers Group, Allianz Se, Aviva, Axa, Bank Of America, Bank Of New York Mellon, Barclays, Bnp Paribas, Brandes Investment Partners, California, Capital Group Companies, Capital Group International, China Petrochemical Group Company, Cnce, Credit Suisse, Deposit Insurance Corporation Of Japan, Deutsche Bank, Dodge & Cox, Fmr Corporation, Franklin Resources Inc, George Sugihara, Goldman Sachs, Ing Groep NV, Invesco, James Glattfelder, John Driffill, Jpmorgan Chase, LA Jolla, Legal & General Group, Legg Mason, Lehman Brothers, Lloyds Tsb Group, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance, Merrill Lynch, Mitsubishi Ufj Financial Group, Morgan Stanley, Natixis, New England Complex Systems Institute, New Scientist, Nomura Holdings, Northern Trust Corporation, Occupy Wall Street, Old Mutual Public Limited Company, Plos One, Resona Holdings, Schroders, Scripps Institution Of Oceanography, Société Générale, Standard Life, State Street Corporation, Sun Life Financial, Swiss Federal Institute Of Technology, Switzerland, T Rowe Price Group, The Depository Trust Company, Tiaa, Ubs, Unicredito Italiano Spa, United States, University Of London, Vanguard Group, Vereniging Aegon, Walton Enterprises, Wellington Management CO, Yaneer Bar-yam, Zurich
10/17/2011
Why Occupy Wall Street Is Bigger Than Left vs. Right (Matt Taibbi) I was surprised, amused and annoyed all at once when I found out yesterday that some moron-provocateur linked to notorious right-wing cybergoon Andrew Breitbart had infiltrated
a series of private e-mail lists – including one that I have been participating in – and was using them to run an exposé on the supposed behind-the-scenes marionetting of the OWS movement by the liberal media.
According to various web reports, what happened was that a private "cyber-security researcher" named Thomas Ryan somehow accessed a series of email threads between various individuals and dumped them all on BigGovernment.com, Breitbart's site. Gawker is also reporting that Ryan forwarded some of these emails to the FBI and the NYPD.
I have no idea whether those email exchanges are the same as the ones I was involved with. But what is clear is that some private email exchanges between myself and a number of other people – mostly financial journalists and activists who know each other from having covered the crisis from the same angle in the last three years, people like Barry Ritholz, Dylan Ratigan, former regulator William Black, Glenn Greenwald and myself – ended up being made public. (Rolling Stone)
Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes? Matt Taibbi: A whistle blower says the agency has illegally destroyed thousands of documents, letting financial crooks off the hook.
Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.
That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.
Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency's records – "including case files relating to preliminary investigations" – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term "Orwellian," devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or "Matters Under Inquiry" – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission's internal website. "After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation," the site advised staffers, "you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI." (Rolling Stone)
Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? Financial crooks brought down the world's economy -- but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them By Matt Taibbi. Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.
"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."
I put down my notebook. "Just that?"
"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."
Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.
This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.
The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.
"You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once." (Rolling Stone)
All-Time Record: Wall Street Compensation Hits $135 Billion Wall Street was on the ropes just 25 months ago. Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Bros., Bank of America, Wachovia, maybe Morgan Stanley; Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase were wounded. GE could not role over its commercial paper. European banks required cash infusions from our central bank.
Just in the wake of a report highlighting Wall Street’s narrow, selfish imbecilities, we are treated to the stunning realization that the captains of the sinking liner are today enjoying the all-time record payoff for surviving with massive transfusions. The payout of $135 billion to employees of Wall Street firms in 2010 is equivalent to the total market value of both Bank of America and Citigroup. Imagine– in two years. (Forbes)
Barack Obama (D) Top Contributors 2008
This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2008 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organization's PAC, its individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.
Because of contribution limits, organizations that bundle together many individual contributions are often among the top donors to presidential candidates. These contributions can come from the organization's members or employees (and their families). The organization may support one candidate, or hedge its bets by supporting multiple candidates. Groups with national networks of donors
like EMILY's List and Club for Growth
make for particularly big bundlers.
University of California $1,642,735
Goldman Sachs $1,012,841
Harvard University $862,604
Microsoft Corp $852,167
Google Inc $814,540
JPMorgan Chase & Co $807,799
Citigroup Inc $736,771
Time Warner $623,118
Sidley Austin LLP $600,298
Stanford University $595,716
National Amusements Inc $563,548
WilmerHale Llp $549,918
Skadden, Arps et al $543,539
Columbia University $536,202
UBS AG $532,674
IBM Corp $532,372
General Electric $528,180
US Government $517,908
Morgan Stanley $512,232
Latham & Watkins $502,045 (Center for Responsive Politics)
What is Julian Assange Up To? Aaron Bady won the internet last week with his explication of a pair of essays Julian Assange wrote in 2006. Paddling against a vomit-tide of epithets and empty speculations that threatened to bury Assange under a flood of banalities, Bady proposed and executed a fairly shocking procedure: he sat down and read ten pages of what Assange had actually written about the motivations and strategy behind Wikileaks.
The central insight of Bady’s analysis was the recognition that Assange’s strategy stands at significant remove from a philosophy it might easily be confused for: the blend of technological triumphalism and anarcho-libertarian utopianism that takes “information wants to be free” as its gospel and Silicon Valley as its spiritual homeland. Noting the “certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing,” Bady argued that Assange's philosophy is crucially different:
The question for an ethical human being -- and Assange always emphasizes his ethics -- has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets.
As Assange told Time: “It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society.” (3 Quarks Daily)
The paranoia was riding high amongst the conference organisers. A pair of them talked about the 2006 Bilderberg conference in Ottawa, where the radio host Alex Jones led the protests with his megaphone. "They were very close to the hotel," said one. Another looked shocked and asked: "Did they ever try to attack?" A shake of the head and the answer: "No, but it was very scary." A third leaned in: "This is the negative side of the welfare state. People have enough income, so they can do this – it's like a permanent threat." (London Guardian)
Police are already stretching their red stripy tape around the hotel, and zipping up and around the local roads in their squad cars, sniffing for trouble. I'm really hoping there's none to find. The Spanish are promising a beach party and an "awareness camp", with political discussion forums and meditation zones. (London Guardian)
Justice Elena Kagan, and President Larry Summers Kagan's connections to Summers are interesting. She was a professor there when Summers arrived from his work at Treasury, under Bill Clinton, to deregulate banks and derivatives to get the gambling moving...guaranteed by the taxpayer. As President Summers of Harvard from 2001 to 2006, Kagan thrived. She was made a full professor, then Summers tapped her to be the Dean of Harvard Law. Her pet peeve there was to keep the American military and ROTC off campus because she disputes the "don't ask, don't tell" provisions put in place by Clinton. (NJ.com)
Elena Kagan's Goldman Sachs Ties Brought Up Again The Justice Department, likewise, downplayed the findings in statements issued to inquiring reporters. "This advisory group was comprised of leaders from various sectors including academia, the media, business, and other industry," said spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler. "They met once a year for a daylong conference organized around public policy matters. The group was not involved in making any investment decisions for the company." (Huffington Post)
BP's Worsening Spill Crisis Undermines CEO's Reforms When Mr. Hayward took over BP's leadership from John Browne three years ago this week, the company was at one of the lowest points in its history: badly run, accident-prone and accused in the aftermath of a deadly explosion at its Texas City refinery of putting profits before safety. Mr. Hayward turned BP around, boosting production, cutting costs and significantly reducing on-the-job injuries. Last month, he was confident enough to talk of an irreversible "change of culture" at BP. (Wall Street Journal)
Goldman shares plunge as feds open criminal probe The SEC brought civil fraud charges against Goldman and a trader in connection with the transactions in 2006 and 2007. The agency alleged the firm misled investors by failing to tell them the subprime mortgage securities had been chosen with help from a Goldman hedge fund client, Paulson & Co., that was betting the investments would fail. Goldman and the trader, Fabrice Tourre, have denied wrongdoing and said they will contest the allegations in court. (Associated Press)
A List of Goldman Sachs People in the Obama Government: Names Attached to the Giant Squid’s Tentacles Here you will find, I believe, the most comprehensive list of people-groups yet available to show how Obama’s administration has really become the Goldman Sachs administration. The Obama administration is not the first administration that Goldman has infiltrated, although it is perhaps the one that has been most completely co-opted from top to bottom. (Fire Dog Lake)
Possible Supreme Court pick had ties with Goldman Sachs Solicitor General Elena Kagan was a member of the Research Advisory Council of the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute, according to the financial disclosures she filed when President Obama appointed her last year to her current post. Kagan served on the Goldman panel from 2005 through 2008, when she was dean of Harvard Law School, and received a $10,000 stipend for her service in 2008, her disclosure forms show. (USA Today)
Goldman Donations to Obama Campaign Totaled Nearly $1 Million Obama received the money from employees and their family members, making Goldman Sachs second only to the University of California as his biggest single source for donors in 2007 and 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Wall Street provided three of Obama’s seven biggest sources of contributors for his presidential bid. In 2007 and 2008, Goldman Sachs employees and family members gave him $994,795, Citigroup Inc. $701,290, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. $695,132. (Bloomberg)
Goldman Sachs: Master of the Universe The status applies to all Wall Street giants, none, however, the equal of Goldman, the Grand Master. Like the fabled comic book Superman hero, it's: * faster than its competitors, thanks to its proprietary software ability to front run markets (illegal, but no matter); * more powerful than the government it controls; and * able to leap past competitors, given its special status. (Baltimore Chronicle)
Goldman Sachs set to pay £3.5bn in bonuses Royal Bank of Scotland, which is 84% owned by the UK taxpayer, appears to have been one of the biggest losers from the alleged fraud. The bank is this weekend considering legal action against Goldman. The charges relate to a mortgage bond issued by the bank. The American regulators claim Goldman designed the bond so it would drop in value. Goldman Sachs last year paid £10 billion in bonuses. (London Times)
Secret AIG Document Shows Goldman Sachs Minted Most Toxic CDOs When a congressional panel convened a hearing on the government rescue of American International Group Inc. in January, the public scolding of Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner got the most attention. Lawmakers said the former head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank had presided over a backdoor bailout of Wall Street firms and a coverup. Geithner countered that he had acted properly to avert the collapse of the financial system.
A potentially more important development slipped by with less notice, Bloomberg Markets reports in its April issue. Representative Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, placed into the hearing record a five-page document itemizing the mortgage securities on which banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA had bought $62.1 billion in credit-default swaps from AIG.
These were the deals that pushed the insurer to the brink of insolvency -- and were eventually paid in full at taxpayer expense. The New York Fed, which secretly engineered the bailout, prevented the full publication of the document for more than a year, even when AIG wanted it released.
That lack of disclosure shows how the government has obstructed a proper accounting of what went wrong in the financial crisis, author and former investment banker William Cohan says. “This secrecy is one more example of how the whole bailout has been done in such a slithering manner,” says Cohan, who wrote “House of Cards” (Doubleday, 2009), about the unraveling of Bear Stearns Cos. “There’s been no accountability.”
E-mails between Fed and AIG officials that Issa released in January show that the efforts to keep Schedule A under wraps came from the New York Fed. Revelation of the messages contributed to the heated atmosphere at the House hearing.
“What date did you know there was a coverup?” Republican Congressman Brian Bilbray of California demanded of Geithner. Lawmakers used the word coverup more than a dozen times as they peppered Geithner with questions. (Bloomberg)
Citigroup Stock Proving Irresistible to Hedge Funds “The sum of the parts is worth less than each individual part,” said Garnick. “It is easier for investors to assign value to a company if it is broken up into its many component parts. In this market environment people are starting to reward single business unit companies.” (Bloomberg)
Darrell Issa's Special Report On AIG Could Be The End Of Geithner GEITHNER’S ROLE IN THE AIG COVER UP REMAINS UNCLEAR
When asked directly if he was involved in the efforts by the FRBNY to prevent disclosure of the AIG counterparty payments, Secretary Geithner responded, “I wasn’t involved in that decision.” On January 8, 2010, FRBNY General Counsel Thomas Baxter wrote Ranking Member Issa to clarify the role of then-President Geithner:
[M]atters relating to AIG securities law disclosures were not brought to the attention of Mr. Geithner …. In my judgment as the New York Fed’s chief legal officer, disclosure matters of this nature did not warrant the attention of the president.
Mr. Baxter reiterated this claim in an interview with Committee staff. Questions of securities disclosure, Baxter said, were “legal stuff,” and Baxter did not bring legal stuff to the attention of then-President Geithner. However, Baxter said that “on significant policy issues, of course I would go” to Geithner.
However, documents received by the Committee suggest that Secretary Geithner was, at a minimum, engaged personally in reviewing what information about the AIG bailout would be revealed to Congress and the public. On November 6, 2008, SarahDahlgren, the FRBNY’s lead staff member in AIG’s operations, e-mailed Geithner with a proposed statement regarding AIG’s upcoming equity capital raise for Geithner’s approval:
[I]n terms of saying something publicly about our intentions, we … think that saying something that conveys the following … makes sense:
It is our (Federal Reserve/Treasury) continued intention to put the company in a sound capital position and exit the facility/preferred securities/common stock ownership as soon as practicable…
[I]f you are good with this, …we would also make sure that the company sticks to this line (echo)…. [emphasis added]
On November 13, 2008, Geithner received a report on AIG’s restructuring that would be sent to Congress, which Geithner had asked to personally review. Sophia Allison, a staff member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, e-mailed the draft congressional report to several Federal Reserve staff:
Attached is a draft Congressional report for the restructuring package for AIG announced on Monday, November 10. …I tried to take everything in the report from publicly available documents, such as press releases, the prior AIG Congressional Report, and AIG’s most recent 10-Q. If there is anything in the report that you believe should not be publicly disclosed, please specifically point that out. [emphasis added]
Michael Nelson, a staff member of the FRBNY, forwarded Allison’s email to Geithner with the following message:
Tim – this is the draft EESA-required filing on AIG that the Board owes the Hill, as you requested. [emphasis added]
In addition, Secretary Geithner’s meeting logs from his tenure as President of the FRBNY show that he was regularly engaged with top AIG officials and the FRBNY officials directly responsible for AIG’s disclosures to the SEC. Geithner’s schedule shows that he had at least six formal meetings with top FRBNY staff members about AIG-related issues between November 4, 2008, and November 21, 2008. It is unclear whether AIG’s disclosure obligations were discussed in these meetings.
At a minimum, the cover-up of the details about AIG’s counterparty payments began on Secretary Geithner’s watch, and the culture of the FRBNY in which this behavior occurred reflected his leadership. Secretary Geithner needs to explain his role in the cover-up, and if he thinks the behavior of his staff at the FRBNY was appropriate.
GEITHNER’S CLAIMS RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT PURPOSE OF AIG BAILOUT
Secretary Geithner’s claim to SIGTARP that the backdoor bailout of AIG’s counterparties had nothing to do with the health of AIG’s counterparties also raises questions about why AIG was bailed out in the first place. As the Wall Street Journal notes:
[I]f Mr. Geithner now says the AIG bailout wasn’t driven by a need to rescue CDS counterparties, then what was the point? Why pay Goldman [Sachs] and even foreign banks like Societe Generale billions of tax dollars to make them whole?
Secretary Geithner now claims that the point of AIG’s bailout was to protect AIG’s insurance policy holders:
AIG was providing a range of insurance products to households across the country. And if AIG had defaulted, you would have seen a downgrade leading to the liquidation and failure of a set of insurance contracts that touched Americans across this country and, of course, savers around the world.
However, as the Wall Street Journal further explains:
Yet, if there is one thing that all observers seemed to agree on last year, it was that AIG’s money to pay policyholders was segregated and safe inside the regulated insurance subsidiaries. If the real systemic danger was the condition of these highly regulated subsidiaries – where there was no CDS trading – then the Beltway narrative implodes.
Secretary Geithner’s inconsistent statements and apparent contradictions raise important questions about the decision to not only funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to AIG’s counterparties, but also the decision to bail out AIG itself.
The FRBNY and its attorneys at Davis Polk interfered with AIG’s securities disclosures in several ways. They edited AIG’s SEC filings in ways that made it more difficult for investors and the public to understand the ML3 transactions. They contacted the SEC directly and pressured it to treat AIG’s filings differently from other companies’ filings. In addition, they appear to have forced AIG to cancel a compensation-related filing that it was required to make. The FRBNY’s edits of AIG’s filings and the FRBNY’s pressure on the SEC were intended to serve the Fed’s interests by obscuring embarrassing details about the FRBNY’s backdoor bailout of AIG’s counterparties. Investors cannot be protected by a disclosure system that only requires full transparency when the Federal Reserve’s embarrassment is not at stake. The special SEC procedures established via FRBNY pressure also demonstrate that bailouts lead to enforced favoritism.
Finally, the secrecy, concealment, and lack of transparency in the conduct of the Federal Reserve have serious implications for the continued health of democracy and free markets. The Federal Reserve’s payment of par to AIG’s counterparties and the subsequent cover-up of information about these payments raise concerns about the accountability of the unelected bureaucrats within the Federal Reserve System. The fact that a quasi-government agency, unaccountable to the American people, likely wasted billions of taxpayer dollars and went to great lengths to prevent Congress and the American people from learning about these actions demonstrates the threat that the Federal Reserve poses to basic principles of American democracy. (quotes selected by Zero Hedge) (US House of Representatives)
Hedge Funds Hold Investors ‘Hostage’ After Rebound "We don’t object to the illiquidity," Papastavrou said in an interview. "We object to how some managers are abusing the situation and holding investors’ money hostage to generate fees." (Bloomberg)
keywords: Angeles Investment Advisors, Aris Capital Management, Bernheim Dreyfus & CO, Cadogan Management, Chicago, Credit Suisse, D E Shaw & CO, Financial Crisis, Goldman Sachs, Harbinger Capital Partners, Hedge Funds, Highland Capital Management, Jason Papastavrou, John Trammell, Michael Huttman, Millennium Global Investments, Polygon Investment Partners, Tremont Capital Management, United States
9/23/2009
Even the Part-Time Jobs are Disappearing -- The Economy is a Lie, Too Americans cannot get any truth out of their government about anything, the economy included. Americans are being driven into the ground economically, with one million school children now homeless, while Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announces that the recession is over.
The spin that masquerades as news is becoming more delusional. Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. It is the driving force, and it has been shut down. Except for the super rich, there has been no growth in consumer incomes in the 21st century. Statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com reports that real household income has never recovered its pre-2001 peak.
The unemployment rate, as reported, is a fiction and has been since the Clinton administration. The unemployment rate does not include jobless Americans who have been unemployed for more than a year and have given up on finding work. The reported 10% unemployment rate is understated by the millions of Americans who are suffering long-term unemployment and are no longer counted as unemployed. As each month passes, unemployed Americans drop off the unemployment role due to nothing except the passing of time.
The inflation rate, especially “core inflation,” is another fiction. “Core inflation” does not include food and energy, two of Americans’ biggest budget items. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) assumes, ever since the Boskin Commission during the Clinton administration, that if prices of items go up consumers substitute cheaper items. This is certainly the case, but this way of measuring inflation means that the CPI is no longer comparable to past years, because the basket of goods in the index is variable.
The Boskin Commission’s CPI, by lowering the measured rate of inflation, raises the real GDP growth rate. The result of the statistical manipulation is an understated inflation rate, thus eroding the real value of Social Security income, and an overstated growth rate. Statistical manipulation cloaks a declining standard of living. (Counter Punch)
Geithner: Auditing the Fed is a "line that we don't want to cross" In an interview released today by Digg and the Wall Street Journal, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was pressured about the growing popular movement to Audit the Fed spearheaded by Texas Congressman Ron Paul. A visibly uncomfortable Geithner attempts to dismiss the question by stating "I'm sure people understand that you want to keep politics out of monetary policy." (The Corbett Report)
The Great American Bubble Machine From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression — and they're about to do it again
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. (Rolling Stone)
RPT-COLUMN-A Goldman trading scandal? Matthew Goldstein The charges, if proven, are significant because the codes that the accused, Sergey Aleynikov, tried to steal are the secret sauce to Goldman's automated stock and commodities trading business (Reuters)
Obama’s Insurance Proposal May Grab Power From States Obama called for the creation of a federal Office of National Insurance within the Treasury Department to monitor the industry, represent U.S. interests in international insurance agreements, and look for gaps in state oversight (Bloomberg)
Citigroup Stuck With Bernanke Offer Rival Banks Plan to Refuse When financial stocks slumped in February to the lowest level in at least 17 years, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told Congress the government might end up owning "substantial" stakes in the country’s biggest banks (Bloomberg)
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