So, now we have reports that The Obama transition team is participating in talks between Treasury and Congress over the 2nd $350 billion installment of baulout money.
More accurately, frack no.
Not only has he shown himself incapable of fixing things, he has, through his incompetence and cronyism, consistently made things worse.
Not one cent where Paulson has control.
So, Bush is wondering if the Big 3 (Big 2½) are a prudent taxpayer investment:
President Bush on Friday said he is worried about giving taxpayer money to car companies that “may not survive.”
After giving, what, 5 times that amount to an just one insurance insurance company, and engineering something on the order of 200 times that amount for wall street in exchange for stock that has already lost a third of its value.
Big finance is a political ally, so they must be saved.
The UAW is the enemy, and so must be crushed, even if it means that there will be a 6 month period where no cars at all are assembled in the US, by either surviving members of the Big 3 (Big 2½) or by the transplants like Toyota, Honda, etc. because of suppliers going into bankruptcy like dominoes.
Additionally, you would start seeing shortages on spare parts for the cars, adversely effecting the auto repair business.
Seriously, when you see this level of disregard of the basic well being of the country because of political expediency, there is only one thing to day, “The Hague, bitches.”
Please, just throw all of them, particularly Bob Rubin, in Jail, because enough is enough:
An investor lawsuit contends that Citigroup Inc insiders, including senior counselor and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, sold more than $150 million of their own shares at inflated prices while concealing the bank’s true financial health.
Rubin has to be front and center in all this, because he’s….well, he’s front and center in all this.
Every time you see a problem, his name crops up, either as a financial actor or a political one, and yes, criminalizing this sort of revolving door would be a very good thing.
In order to show real accountability, those who knew, or should have known, and with the stock dumping it is clearly the former, and were in a position to do something about this, need to be punished.
Senator David Vitter (R-LA) is running for reelection.
This is the man who contracted with the DC Madame to have himself put in diapers, and he’s running for reelection.
So, why the hell is Elliot Spitzer not governor of New York again?
Well, it appears that Nora R. Dannehy, the US Attorney assigned to investigate the politically motivated firings of US Attorneys, has been aggressively pursuing the case, “meeting with defense lawyers, dispatching subpoenas and seeking information about the events.”
What’s more, one of her investigators has formally contacted Alberto “Abu” Gonzalez, which means that any lies or omissions to that investigator are handled under obstruction of justice, which is much easier to prove than perjury.
It looks like Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions™ and his evil minions have are considering they need to steal the second half the $700 billion in bailout money:
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is debating whether to ask Congress for the second installment of the $700 billion bailout package, concerned about competing demands for the funds and a potentially hostile reaction from lawmakers.
This is an easy one for members of Congress.
Paulson is incompetent and corrupt, choosing to serve his friends over the nation, and doing even that incompetently.
Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions™ are completely clueless
The head of a new Congressional panel set up to monitor the gigantic federal bailout says the government still does not seem to have a coherent strategy for easing the financial crisis, despite the billions it has already spent in that effort.
Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of the oversight panel, said in an interview Monday that the government instead seemed to be lurching from one tactic to the next without clarifying how each step fits into an overall plan.
Hoocoodanode?
Hank Paulson is not trying to save anything but his friends and buddies back in Wall Street, and does not realize that much of that industry resembles a gangrenous limb, and requires amputation.
This is not just incompetence. It is incompetence and a complete unwillingness to do anything that might fix the problem, because that would make the high life style of the investment bankers largely obsolete.
Or more specifically, the man who ran the company into the ground, Hank Greenberg, who is demanding more information on the government bailout of his former firm, because he feels that it may have adversely effected his portfolio:
Greenberg wants the government to do more for AIG, suggesting it provide guarantees to cover counterparty collateral agreements, according to an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
(emphasis mine)
What was it that I just said about the WSJ Editorial Page again?
We really need to send the lot of them to prison.
Link:
Last month’s federal backstop of Citi attracted some catcalls for letting the struggling bank’s management and shareholders off easy. But to former AIG chief Hank Greenberg — a persistent critic of the tougher terms the government has enforced in its rescue of the teetering insurer — the Citi deal is a paragon.
(emphasis mine)
Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions™ are looking at bailing out private student loan issuers with TARP money:
Student advocacy groups are urging the Treasury Department to prevent a new $200 billion consumer-lending program from benefiting private student lenders, which they say are largely unregulated and prey on students with risky, high-interest loans.
The program, announced this week and developed by the Treasury and Federal Reserve, is not aimed specifically at the student loan market. Its much broader goal is to encourage lending to consumers — including car loans, credit card debt and student loans — as well as help the financial system by increasing liquidity in the credit markets.
But groups including Consumers Union, the nonprofit group that publishes Consumer Reports magazine, and the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers say the money will also help prop up private student-loan providers, which often offer high and variable interest rates but not the consumer protections guaranteed under the federal government’s loan programs.
These people are sleaze merchants, and they victimize the students in question and the taxpayers, in addition to having been caught bribing school financial aid officials.
Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest lending company, has offered private loans with an average interest rate of 11 to 13 percent, nearly twice as much as federal loans, according to Student Lending Analytics, a California-based firm that advises financial aid offices. It said Sallie Mae, which is based in Reston and controlled 42.5 percent of the private student loan market last year, has offered some private loan variable rates that are more than 17 percent.
Tom Joyce, a spokesman for Sallie Mae, said the average rate now is between 10 and 11 percent, around what most banks are charging for private student loans, which are not subsidized and government-guaranteed like federal loans. “The comparison to federal student loan rates is unfair and artificial,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The comparison should be to borrowing on a credit card or other unsecured loans.”
Only, of course, these loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, and they are guaranteed by taxpayers, so they are completely different from credit card loans.
Can you imagine an industry so f$#%ed up that it compares itself to the credit card industry in regards to how ethically it treats its customers?
Well, you don’t have to, because reality has met you, and smacked you in the face with a rancid halibut.
This time on the effect that zero down, negative equity and other risky mortgages might have if allowed to continue:
The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.
“Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories,” California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.
Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.
They soft pedaled Saudi involvement in terrorism both before and after 911 because the House of Saud is an FOB (Friend of Bush), and they soft pedaled sleazy mortgage agents because they gave money to Republithugs.
That’s what it’s all about for them.
Well it now appears that the merger of Bank of America and Countrywide Financial so aggressively pushed by Bank of America CEO and President Kenneth D. Lewis is finally bearing some fruit.
Unfortunately, it appears to be fruit of the toxic variety, as investors who hold mortgage backed securities of the former subprime lender are suing to demand their repurchase at full face value:
On Monday, a hedge fund sued the Countrywide Financial Corporation, the giant mortgage lender, demanding that Countrywide compensate holders of some securities backed by mortgages if the lender changes the terms of the loans.
The fund, Greenwich Financial Services, said it and other investors stood to lose money if Countrywide, now part of Bank of America, modified loans under a settlement that it reached with 11 state attorneys general in October.
Seriously, what were you thinking when you turned over the rock that was Countrywide Financial, saw the slime that lay beneath, and started to eat that, Mr. Lewis?
The problem with superstar multimillion dollar CEOs is that they don’t think that the basic rules of reality apply to them.
They claim to have dropped bonuses, but they made “retention payments” to top level executives, including, “$3 million to retirement services chief Jay Wintrob.”
Who is Jay Wintrob?
Wintrob is CEO of AIG Retirement Services Inc., the division that sells annuities. He was chief operating officer of SunAmerica when AIG bought the firm for $19.7 billion in 1998. The business he now heads may sell for about $12 billion, according to Gary Ransom, analyst at Fox-Pitt Kelton Cochran Caronia Waller. Wintrob didn’t return a call seeking comment.
So, he lost about 7.7 billion for AIG, and they feel the need to pay him money to keep him.
We need to start sending these guys to jail.
Well, I haven’t checked my blog email for a while, but we did get a note from a representative of American Apparrel regarding my previous blog post, which I am publishing unedited (except for ####ing out some identifying information).
I will follow with a response.
from Ryan #### <####@americanapparel.net>
to msaroff2007@gmail.com
date Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 11:05 PM
subject Dov Charney
mailed-by americanapparel.netMatthew,
The reason the arbitration hearing’s outcome was predetermined was because the plaintiff gave an unsolicited confession that the accusations were fault and her attorney admitted that the charges were ‘bogus.’ American Apparel agreed to a proposed settlement only to avoid further legal fees which the case would have occurred had it went to trial. The settlement hinged on press release not because American Apparel attempted to mislead the public but because we refused a settlement that did not include public vindication.
Regardless of your opinion on the arbitration process, the company was a victim of malicious and false prosecution. I would be happy to show you the court documents in Mary Nelson V American Apparel where she was fined $7,500 by the court for falsifying evidence. It is your right to publish as you wish, but in this case, your facts are mistaken and defamatory.
Ryan ######
Truth be told, I don’t care about Dov Charney, Mary Nelson, or the legion of sexual harassment charges that have dogged the former.
I thought that I made that clear in my first post, but perhaps I did not.
My issue was about the arbitration system and it’s gleeful and knowing participation of that arbitration system in an abuse of the legal process.
If someone went into a court of law under these circumstances, where the court case was merely to confirm an existing agreement, there would likely be very well deserved judicial sanctions all around.
There are a number of potential ways to handle this which do not involve a judicial process, a sworn affidavit, a joint news conference, some combination of the two, etc.
However, to use arbitration solely for the purpose of creating a press release is an indication that the arbitration process is hopelessly corrupt.
The supporters of arbitration suggest that it is like the courts, only, “streamlined”. This case shows that it is not.
It shows that arbitration is an ethical vacuum.
After driving their bank into the ground, senior Wachovia executives in line for almost $100 million in severance packages.
So far US Pledges to the financial industry exceed $7.7 trillion.
Current money actually laid out? $4.2845 trillion. To put that in perspective:
That’s $4,284,500,000,000 and more than what was spent on WW II, if adjusted for inflation, based on our computations from a variety of estimates and sources.
Yep, that’s what you get when finance industry guys manage the finance industry for 35 years.
We now have reports that Hank Paulson is considering asking for the 2nd $350 billion installment of TARP.
Great googley moogley.
I’m just saying.
He’s lied every step of the way. He’s been wrong every step of the way.
He has studiously cushioned his friends from consequences, creating moral hazard, every step of the way.
Give him nothing….Except perhaps Robert Rubin as a cell mate.
Now it appears that the US Attorney for the district, who was married to a Republican operative, and allegedly recused herself….Well, not so much:
It was those connections that led Ms. Canary, under pressure, to publicly withdraw from the Siegelman case in May 2002 — she “completely recused herself,” said the acting United States attorney, Louis Franklin — as proof that the prosecution of Mr. Siegelman would be free of partisan bias.
Yet in her complaint, the Justice Department employee, Tamarah T. Grimes, cited several instances suggesting Ms. Canary maintained a close watch on the case. Ms. Grimes said a legal aide in the office reported on Mr. Siegelman’s trial to Ms. Canary or her top deputy “every day, sometimes several times per day by telephone.” Once, she observed Ms. Canary “frantically pacing in the executive suite” after a courtroom blowup, “pleading with someone” to get on the phone to “tell Louis he has to control his temper.”
Ms. Grimes also disclosed an e-mail message written by Ms. Canary commenting on legal strategy in the case and suggesting to aides that Mr. Siegelman not be allowed to “comment on court activities in the media.” Ms. Grimes, who is also in a dispute with the department related to her accusations that the Siegelman prosecution team had harassed her, cited the affidavit of a former legal aide in the Montgomery office, Elizabeth Jane Crooks, who wrote that “the morning that the trial started, the U.S. attorney herself carried food and beverage over to the courthouse to support the ‘Trial Team.’ ”
Some more people who need to go to jail to show what’s wrong.
To quote Pat Boone, they “should be displayed publicly and have all of his fingers and toes broken, and then publicly executed so they who think [that] those like the
imprisoned Manson and Sirhan are glamorous — will think differently.”
Though to be fair to Mr. Boone, he was talking about a neo-Nazi murderer who went after children in a day care center, but the offense against society here is at least as corrosive.
So the US government is putting in $20 billion for non-voting preferred stock and guaranteeing over $300 billion in securities.
They are getting only 8% on this, and remember that Citi’s market cap was $22 billion. That $20B should have given the Feds 90% control of the company.
They should have taken it over, and fired (no golden parachute) upper management…Particularly Robert Rubin.
Instead, it’s a suspension of dividends, and some cosmetic restrictions in executive pay.
Mark Thoma has the rundown of informed reactions. A bailout was necessary — but this bailout is an outrage: a lousy deal for the taxpayers, no accountability for management, and just to make things perfect, quite possibly inadequate, so that Citi will be back for more.
Amazing how much damage the lame ducks can do in the time remaining
Paul Kedrosky goes into a bit more detail in Good Bank, Bad Bank, and F$#ked Bank ($# mine):
Here is the gist:
- Citi will carve out $300-billion in troubled assets, which will remain on its balance sheet
- The first $37-$40-billion in losses on those assets will go to Citi
- The next $5-billion in losses will hit Treasury
- The next $10-billion in losses will go to the FDIC
- Any more losses will go to the Fed
- There will be no management changes at Citi, because, you know, they are all fine and upstanding people who have done nothing wrong
- There will be some compensation limitations, but those have not yet been made clear
To be clear, this is not a “bad bank” model. Assets are not, apparently, being taken off the Citi balance sheet and put into another entity walled off from the Citi biological host. Instead, they are being left on the Citi balance sheet, but tagged and bagged for eventual disposal via taxpayers. In other words, we are, given the size and nature of the maneuver, creating a new variant on the good/bad bank model that I hereby christen “f$#ked” bank. You do that, of course, when removing all the toxic assets from a “good” bank’s balance sheet would leave no bank behind at all.
(emphasis mine)
You know, I was wrong when I said that Robert Rubin should be fired. He should be pursued by criminal authorities with the same Javertian intensity that that corrupt prosecutor did in the Julie Amero case (previous post).
Robert Rubin needs to go to jail for a very long time.
You may remember the story.
She was substitute teaching, and because the sysop at her school turned off the spyware protections, her computer was innundated with sexually oriented popups.
They charged her with providing pornography to minors, and she faced up to 40 years in jail.
She lost a baby, and after a judge threw out the conviction:
In June of 2007, Judge Hillary B. Strackbein tossed out Amero’s conviction on charges that she intentionally caused a stream of “pop-up” pornography on the computer in her classroom and allowed students to view it. Confronted with evidence compiled by forensic computer experts, Strackbein ordered a new trial, saying the conviction was based on “erroneous” and “false information.”
The “false information” was the prosecution presenting a detective with a few hours of computer training as a forensic expert.
But the prosecutors have continued to pursue her, and finally, they managed to Well, coerce a guilty plea for disturbing the peace, and force her to give up her teaching license.
I’m not sure as to whether this is just hubris, or fear of a lawsuit, but it should be against the law….In fact, it may be, depending on how you read the law.
They took her baby, her career, and her health, she has been in and out of hospital since this all started, and they kept going after her, because they were unwilling to do the right thing.
If only she played Lacrosse, perhaps the DA’s license to practice law would be pulled.