Since Neil Barofsky began his job, he has always been a thorn in the side of the Treasury Department and the Fed, and the same can be said for the great Elizabeth Warren. Well, I say, too fucking bad. Good for them.
What did President Obama expect when he hired and rewarded the same 'status quo' Crooks and Liars, Summer, Rubin (as an adviser) and of course the ultimate Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner, to not understand that if you lay down with dogs, you will, indeed, get up with 'fleas'....
Now that Goldman Sachs has been shown 'on national television' in their repeated denials of 'I don't recall that memo,....I don't believe that we did anything unethical despite the absolute truth that defies their 'lies' and immoral behavior, there is now, without a doubt, a raging fire that may, if we are fortunate enough and brave enough to yell very loudly for 'real financial' reform..... Not the shit we are getting in the back room deals. To actually happen... You got that yet?
Barofsky says he’s battling an entrenched culture of secrecy in the Treasury and elsewhere.
"One of the important lessons that I hope will be learned from this entire financial crisis is that the reflexive reaction against transparency, that disclosure will bring terrible things, has not been proven true," he says. He offers the AIG bailout as an example. For more than a year, the New York Fed kept key aspects of the AIG bailout secret, including details of its own involvement and its decision to have AIG pay the insurer’s bank counter parties 100 cents on the dollar on the credit protection they’d bought against about $62 billion in CDOs.
In a November report, SIGTARP criticized Geithner’s failed efforts to obtain discounts from the banks. After the banks had been paid in late 2008, a lawyer from the New York Fed sought to have AIG keep the banks’ identities under wraps, as well as data about the CDOs that would have revealed which firms had underwritten the toxic bonds and which ones had managed them. "There’s a lot of things about AIG that were not disclosed, based on the assumption that the sky would fall," Barofsky says. "Transparency does a lot more good than bad." Barofsky says the question of whether the New York Fed engaged in a cover-up will result in some sort of action. "We’re either going to have criminal or civil charges against individuals or we’re going to have a report," Barofsky says. "This is too important for us not to share our findings." He won’t say whether the investigation is targeting Geithner personally. In a statement, the New York Fed said: "Allegations that the New York Fed engaged in a cover-up of its intervention in AIG are not true. The New York Fed has fully cooperated with the Special Inspector General."
Again, people, it is not the 'crime' it is the 'cover up' what part of Watergate didn't we get.....or more importantly what part of that doesn't President Obama get?
I realize the ramifications, but more than that, I understand how the Republicans will, come back to use this against us.
Do you view Barofsky or Elizabeth Warren, or William Black, or Senator Ted Kaufman.......................as the 'enemy'...........they are not...let's get real here..
The real question here is all about 'transparency' in our financial sectors, it is about having the right, in this new and continuing 'Emergency Open Window of the Federal Reserve' along with our Treasury for the first time in the history of our nation to hold a virtual 'Dictatorship' as a partnership with Wall Street/the Banks, that 'we the people' are not allowed to view. That is what Mr. Barofsky is talking about. Nothing more, nothing less.
Do you recall this completely outrageous ruling, that makes Watergate and Nixon's missing 18 minute missing tape seem like a joke?
In May, the SEC approved a request by AIG to keep secret an exhibit to a year-old regulatory filing that includes some of the details on the most controversial aspect of the AIG bailout: the funneling of tens of billions of dollars to big banks like Societe Generale, Goldman Sachs (GS.N), Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) and Merrill Lynch.
The SEC's Division of Corporation Finance, in granting AIG's request for confidential treatment, said the "excluded information" will not be made public until Nov. 25, 2018, according to a copy of the agency's May 22 order. The SEC said the insurer had demonstrated the information in the exhibit, called Schedule A, "qualifies as confidential commercial or financial information."
By then, Wall Street will have significantly recycled many people (and probably some more firms) and perhaps the American public just won't care about how Tim Geithner helped bail out a gigantic black hole of a firm, upon which so many ostensibly rock solid firms had their foundation.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/...
I guess it may be easy to forget about 'little details' like this, when we all think that 'Harry Reid' finally got a set of balls, now that he is 10 points behind....'take a chicken to your doctor to barter for your medical bill idiot woman' that is challenging him. I mean...OMG...is that all it took, if it did, I would have thought up that 'chicken to my Doctor' bullshit, just to get him moving.....
And yet, I can recall as many of us on Kos have over the past years, that we Harry Reid out for what he was, and now all of a sudden, we are are all supposed to believe that because he threatened the Republicans to have to 'stay overnight' in Washington DC...on their 'humble cots' in their offices, that this is what broke the back of the 'Camel' for the so called 'deal' for financial reform....or should I say..............FAKE FINANCIAL REFORM?
I mean, give me break here people..............give me an 'Amen' anyone on Kos....if you dare...
Breaking up big banks is not sufficient for financial stability – no one would suggest that. But it is necessary. Again, Senator Kaufman nails this:
"Given the consequences of failing to do enough to prevent another financial crisis, the safest thing to do today is for Congress to put an end to too big to fail. If you believe these mega-banks are too big, if you reject the choice of bankruptcy that will lead to a recession or depression, then breaking them up is the logical answer. That’s the only way that greatly diminishes the future probability of financial disaster. The Great Depression of the 1930s must be avoided at all costs. We’re all in favor of effective regulation, more capital, and greater controls on derivatives trading. And passing a resolution authority, as proposed in the Dodd bill, would be a step in the right direction for purely domestic financial entities.
But Senator Kaufman is exactly right to press for more. The resolution authority will not end "too big to fail" for large complex cross-border financial institutions. It simply will not – if you think differently, just go talk to our G20 counterparts, as I have done. There is no cross-border resolution mechanism, there is no international process to negotiate one, and there is no chance you will see such a process in the next 20 years. "
http://baselinescenario.com/...
Big fucking deal....Harry Reid finally stood up for once and 'pretended' that everyone in Congress who lives in jillion dollar mansions might have to stay overnight......
I mean, does anyone believe this was anything other than a 'total grandstanding publicity stunt' to fool the voter's once again?
If you don't....................sorry, color yourself the color of FOOL.
Just, in the future if you want to actually discuss what we are getting and not getting from this 'Fake Financial Reform Bill'...........consider this, I mean.....................if you want to really debate the subject on it's merits, and not on the 'smoke and mirrors' game of ....................omgz...............they have to sleep on cots in the Senate............bullshit...
Banks Still Rule -- Ten Ways Dems and Dodd Are Failing on Financial Reform
AlterNet / By Nomi Prins
April 14, 2010
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd's financial "reform" proposal (Barney Frank's wasn't much better) won't change the nature of anything Wall Street does. Dodd's needless watering down of a proposal to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency has been well-documented, so here is a list of 10 other problems Dodd's bill will not fix:
1. It won't make the biggest most "systemically important" banks (read: systemically destructive) any smaller...
2. It won't reduce the economic danger from rampant, over leveraged trading activities...
3) It won't change the nature, transparency, size, complexity or usage of the most heinous derivatives...
4. It won't prevent the creation of new toxic assets...
5. It won't contain the risk to the shadow banking system from hedge funds, private equity firms and venture capital funds...
6. It won't remove the conflicts of interest between banks that issue securities and rating agencies that rate them, and get paid a fee for doing so...
7. It won't contain systemic risk...
8. It won't wrest control of our economic future from the banks the Fed couldn't regulate over the past decade...
9. It won't constrain the Fed's future bailout operations...
10. It won't prevent bank failures by separating speculative banking from deposit-insured commercial banking a la Glass Steagall, but instead contains plans for resolving them, after the fact...
In other words, the next time you ever..............and I mean ever get out of your 'home' that has probably lost 30 to 50 percent of it's equity, and the Banks are still not 'Lending' so if you can actually take a job, that you were finally offered in another state..........that you can't move to, because you are 'underwater' and cannot sell your home to get that 'new job' you are shit out of luck...That is a direct result of the 'Greenspan/Bernanke/Wall Street/Banking Paid Off Regulators/Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Robert Rubin/Citi-Group FUCK THE AMERICAN PEOPLE UP THE ASS, to come in and 'shit where they eat' to sell their own country men/women crap-0-la aramma....that led us here....so they could all cash in on their 'Ann Rand' immoral, yet 'technically legal' activities, that sank and continues to sink our entire world economy that caused a domino effect that they are all now pretending that 'they didn't know would happen' as the run off with billions in their pockets....
So how's THAT WORKING FOR YOU?......and...
remember this.....
The 'Bill' that we are supposedly 'getting' now..........as we all weep in our sleep because the Senate...........may have had to stay overnight on 'cots'......
is nothing more than a bunch of shit. It changes nothing.
You might as well, bring a 'Chicken to the Bank' to pay off your worthless home, thanks to the fact that there are only a few great American 'truth tellers' who speak up to the outright FRAUD, THAT permeates every inch of our government from the TOP...........TO THE BOTTOM.
You go...........Mr. Barofsky........and God speed to people like you, and Elizabeth Warren, and William K. Black, and any one else, in our government that is at least telling it like it is.
Sometimes, when the truth comes to all of us, it hits us in the 'gut' it is an intuitive feeling that we know is the truth, and as much as I tried so hard to deny it for so long...........I cannot:
The TARP watchdog has also criticized Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner in reports and in congressional testimony for his handling of the process by which insurance giant American International Group Inc. was saved from insolvency in 2008, when Geithner was head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The secrecy that enveloped the deal was unwarranted, Barofsky says, adding that his probe of an alleged New York Fed coverup in the AIG case could result in criminal or civil charges. In Senate Finance Committee testimony on April 20, Barofsky said SIGTARP would investigate seven AIG-linked mortgage-related securities similar to Abacus 2007-AC1, the instrument underwritten by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that is at the center of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit filed against the investment bank on April 16.
...Barofsky and Geithner’s offices have gone toe-to-toe over AIG, alleged lax oversight of TARP funds and even over the question of whom Barofsky reports to. Barofsky, a former federal prosecutor who was once the target of a kidnapping plot by Colombian drug traffickers, says he’s also looking into possible insider trading connected to TARP. He says his agency would want to know if bankers bought stock in their companies before it was made public that their institutions would get TARP
money, for example. "There was a time when, if you got that word the stock price would go up, and if you were to trade on that information prior to the public announcement, that would be classic insider trading," Barofsky says. A Democrat named by a Republican president, Barofsky says missteps by both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations are to blame for TARP’s failures.
"There’s a reason there are Tea Partiers out there, and when you look at it, anger at the bailout is one of the first things they talk about," says Barofsky, referring to the anti- Obama political movement. "This Treasury Department and the previous Treasury Department bear some of the responsibility for not being straightforward with the American people."
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot...
Just, I would please ask everyone on Daily Kos to remember this: Harry Reid, and Cris Dodd and Richard Shelby are as thick as thieves, and if you actually think that anyone in the Senate............were actually going to stay 'overnight' on 'cots' to work a deal out.....for the American people...
Think again.
The deal was a done deal a long time ago. And guess who is going to pay for it, and guess, who's leadership this is under:
That would be President Barack Obama.
It's Never the Crime, it is the 'cover up' and all that I can hope for as just another American citizen is this:
That the truth comes out, that we return to a 'sane' set of priorities in our financial markets, that someone...........somewhere, in our government has the courage to stand up to.
Thanks.