Erin Burnett, former employee of Goldman Sachs and Citibank, used her current job as a CNN employee to spread propaganda about how the "Bailouts" made the tax payers money. And then she quickly admits that she is only talking about the TARP money and that the GM bailouts didn't make money. What she doesn't mention are the real bailouts. The ones that were handouts to the very rich. If someone says that "The bailouts made money", we need to have quick hard hitting responses. Most of which can be pulled from Matt Taibbi's pieces in Rollingstone. But that is just a start. The reality is that there have been bailouts on such a large scale that have cost taxpayers. End of story. Where to begin?
As Taibbi states
The technical name of the program that Mack and Karches took advantage of is TALF, short for Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. But the federal aid they received actually falls under a broader category of bailout initiatives, designed and perfected by Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, called "giving already stinking rich people gobs of money for no fucking reason at all." If you want to learn how the shadow budget works, follow along. This is what welfare for the rich looks like.
Did Erin Burnett mention TALF? No. She is talking about TARP. We need to get out the word that there was a broader category of bailouts and send Burnett back to her corporate masters to dream up some different lies.
What about the bailout of AIG? Did taxpayers make money on that? Of course not. Especially because Goldman Sachs and many other big banks were paid in full for bets they made on AIG despite those bets having gone bad. Take it from the Wall Street Journal.
Wall Street may not be getting rich from the $8.7 billion stock sale of AIG, but it has already collected billions from the bailout of the insurer. Back during the peak of the financial crisis, the New York Fed gave into demands from the banks that traded with AIG, and paid them in full for complex securities they had insured with the company.
The biggest beneficiary of this decision? Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, which now are helping AIG sell off the U.S. Treasury’s 92% stake in the company. Below is a chart of the total payments to AIG CDS counterparties from a 2009 report by the special inspector general for TARP. The highlighted banks are underwriting this week’s AIG stock sale.
Ask Erin Burnett about that if you get a chance.
Or perhaps ask her to explain why Bank of America "sold" $73 billion of loans to Fannie Mae
Bank of America Corp. has agreed to sell part of its home-loan portfolio to government-controlled housing giant Fannie Mae, as the bank looks to shed assets and pare its exposure to an array of mortgage woes.
The deal, finalized last Friday, will deliver the rights to process and collect payments on a pool of 400,000 loans with an unpaid principal balance of $73 billion, people familiar with the deal said.
Bank of American is wants to "pare its exposure" to these loans. Guess who took on that exposure? Here's looking at you, kid.
Or maybe you could ask Erin Burnett if the people of Jefferson County "made a profit" on the bailouts.
And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves
Or maybe ask Erin Burnett why her former employer would sell stuff to people when they knew it was a "shitty deal".
Chairman Carl Levin, to the delight of the crowd, continually repeated a descriptive, colorful word typically left out of family newspapers that was used by a top Goldman executive to describe a deal it made for clients.
The security, named Timberwolf I, a collateralized debt obligation of other collateralized debt obligations that were based not on actual home mortgage bonds but instead on those bonds' movements, was referenced in a June 22, 2007, email from a Goldman senior executive, Tom Montag, to another, Dan Sparks. Sparks is testifying today before Levin's panel.
In his email, Montag remarked of the Timberwolf I deal, "[B]oy, that timeberwof [sic] was one shitty deal."
Levin used the word "shitty" 11 times -- eliciting multiple rounds of quiet giggles -- in questioning Dan Sparks, the former head of Goldman's mortgage department, about why Montag would describe it as "shitty," how long they had known it was "shitty," and whether they knew the deal was "shitty" when they peddled it to clients.
"Our clients' interests always come first," Goldman says on its website.
That security was rated less than three months prior to Montag's email. It lost 80 percent of its value within five months of issuance. Sparks and Montag have since left the firm.
Levin grew exasperated with Sparks' non-answers: "I don't think you want to answer."
Ask her why no one was prosecuted for Timberwolf I.
The facts are on our side. We're tired of being sold a "shitty deal" and being told we made a profit. Wall Street is run by criminals. Erin Burnett is no different than a lawyer working for the mob. Hit them with the facts. There are a 100 other facts like this proving the bailouts did not make money. Bernie Sanders helped to uncover the trillions ininterest free loans to the banks. Seriously? Yup.