"Let me get this straight, the only people who have recovered from the financial meltdown... are the people who caused this financial meltdown," Jon Stewart.
ClusterF**K to the Poor House Video
The solutions?
Total Restructuring and regulatory reform?
Break up the too big to fail?
Tax bonuses of employees at 50%?
At least as a start "Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act?"
September 2008 and we are still waiting......
Why all the secrets still, after all this time? Wall St has not only recovered but making record profits.
What firms received the 2+ trillons from the Fed? Why now is it still a secret? And who exactly received the funds from AIG's bailout?
While inquiring minds want to know, government is not talking.
Hopefully as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearings proceed, public outrage will once again embolden congress to enact necessary laws to protect this country from these abuses. In the words of my grandfather, "There ought to be a law."
I watched the hearings last night on C-Span and the arrogance of the CEO's just is astounding, so outrageous. They are so out of touch with the reality of the horrors they have wrought in this country.
I was reading about the Pecora Investigation. The below is a short account from wiki:
Pecora uncovered a variety of conflicts of interest such as the underwriting of unsound securities in order to pay off bad bank loans as well as "pool operations" to support the price of bank stocks. The hearings galvanized broad public support for new banking and securities laws. As a result of the Pecora Commission's findings, the United States Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933 to separate commercial and investment banking, the Securities Act of 1933 to set penalties for filing false information about stock offerings, and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which formed the SEC, to regulate the stock exchanges.
Pecora published a memoir that recounted details of the investigations, Wall Street Under Oath. Pecora wrote: "Bitterly hostile was Wall Street to the enactment of the regulatory legislation." As to disclosure rules, he stated that "Had there been full disclosure of what was being done in furtherance of these schemes, they could not long have survived the fierce light of publicity and criticism. Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker's stoutest allies."
The Gift of Taxpayer Money to Goldman Sachs
Geithner is alleged to have pressured AIG to give Goldman Sachs $12.9 billion dollars to settle bets whose market value was about $2 billion. This was clearly a gift of taxpayer money that has directly fattened the bottom line of Goldman Sachs and their bonus pool.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Subpoena for Geithner But Will He Show Up?
Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., said he will subpoena the New York Fed for documents related to the bailout of failed insurer American International Group Inc. Towns chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The committee is investigating deals that diverted billions of AIG bailout dollars to banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/...
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What is truly remarkable is what Congress and the administration have shown no interest in doing. Large numbers of Americans have lost their homes to bank foreclosures or are in danger of doing so. Yet American bankruptcy law does not allow homeowners to declare bankruptcy and have their mortgages reorganized. If it did, homeowners would have more bargaining power to renegotiate with banks. But neither Congress nor the administration has pushed to change the bankruptcy laws. Wall Street opposes such change and was instrumental in narrowing the scope of personal bankruptcy in the first place.
Nor have lawmakers shown any enthusiasm for resurrecting the wall that used to exist between commercial and investment banking. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929, separated the two after it became obvious that commercial deposits needed to be insured by government and kept distinct from the betting parlor of investment banking. But Wall Street forced Congress to take down the wall in 1999, enabling financial supermarkets such as Citigroup to use its deposits to make all sorts of bets. Even Obama adviser and former Fed chief Paul Volcker has argued that the two functions should be separated again.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
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Money is Power, Talk is Cheap.
Few Americans know what the denizens of Wall Street do all day. Even fewer know or care about collateralized debt obligations or credit default swaps. To the extent Americans have been paying attention to the details of any public policy, it has been the health care reform bill. But that only begs the question of why financial reform has not been higher on the agenda of the president and Democratic leaders.
A larger explanation, I am afraid, is the grip Wall Street has over the American political process. The Street is where the money is and money buys campaign commercials on television. Wall Street firms and executives have been uniquely generous to both parties, emerging as one of the largest benefactors of the Democrats. Between November 2008 and November 2009, Wall Street doled out $42m to lawmakers, mostly to members of the House and Senate banking committees and House and Senate leaders. In the first three quarters of 2009, the industry spent $344m on lobbying - making the Street one of the major powerhouses in the nation's capital.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
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Since 2000 Banks spent $170 Million-Plus greasing the wheels:
And the 4 below spent:
Goldman Sachs
Campaign contributions: $24.3 million, Lobbying expenditures: $17.2 million
Morgan Stanley
Campaign contributions: $14.1 million, Lobbying expenditures: $20.8 million
Bank of America
Campaign contributions: $10.8 million, Lobbying expenditures: $20.4 million
JP Morgan Chase
Campaign contributions: $14.1 million, Lobbying expenditures: $51.3 million
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/13/bank-ceos-in-the-hot-seat_n_421821.html
The Obama team can't stop financial crises from happening any more than it can wipe out terrorism or solve global warming. But it can attack the root causes of how Wall Street gets itself in trouble every few years. The blueprint is in the history books from the Great Depression. Some of the bank chiefs, secure in their belief that they're back to business as usual, couldn't even resist hinting at it themselves on Wednesday.
Structural and regulatory reform is the only answer. Wall Street has proven in dramatic and economy-crippling fashion that it cannot police itself, and no arguments from bank leaders about hampering global growth should be allowed to obscure that fact. The biggest banks should be broken up, divided back into trading and investment.
http://www.marketwatch.com/...
Fed balance sheet still stands at $2.2 trillion.
Bernanke: The Fed's solution was three-fold. It lent funds to companies and investors, bought up Treasury bonds, and purchased Wall Street's unwanted assets. In all, the Fed more than doubled the size of its balance sheet, to $2.3 trillion. As the recovery begins to take hold, many of those programs are phasing out, but the balance sheet still stands at $2.2 trillion.
http://money.cnn.com/...
Alan Grayson: "Which Foreigners Got the Fed's $500,000,000,000?" Bernanke: "I Don't Know."