{"id":192116,"date":"2009-05-09T19:30:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-10T00:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/05\/09\/are-you-wondering-just-how-corrupt-the-stress-tests-were\/"},"modified":"2009-05-09T19:30:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-10T00:30:00","slug":"are-you-wondering-just-how-corrupt-the-stress-tests-were","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/05\/09\/are-you-wondering-just-how-corrupt-the-stress-tests-were\/","title":{"rendered":"Are You Wondering Just How Corrupt the Stress Tests Were"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, wonder no more.  Treasury <a href=\"http:\/\/mobile2.wsj.com\/device\/article.php?CALL_URL=http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB124182311010302297.html\">negotiated the results of the tests with the banks<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Of course if you were a student, and attempted to browbeat your teacher into improving your grade, they would just laugh in your face or demand a bribe, but if you are Ben Bernanke and Timothy &#8220;Eddie Haskell&#8221; Geithner, they can do it for you for free, or as Joe Btfsplk wrote in the comments section of this story, &#8220;<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Maybe next time, they could give the banksters multiple choice tests<\/span>,&#8221; because they certainly failed the true-false test:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>The Federal Reserve significantly scaled back the size of the capital hole facing some of the nation&#8217;s biggest banks shortly before concluding its stress tests, following two weeks of intense bargaining.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Bargaining?<\/p>\n<p>This is supposed to be a test <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">administered by the Treasury and Federal Reserve<\/span>, not a negotiation.<\/p>\n<p>The banks are in hock to the Treasury and FDIC for hundreds of billions of dollars, and to the Federal Reserve for <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Trillions<\/span>, and they negotiated with the banks?<\/p>\n<p>Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>In addition, according to bank and government officials, the Fed used a different measurement of bank-capital levels than analysts and investors had been expecting, resulting in much smaller capital deficits.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Again, this is not grading on a curve, this is is everyone getting a gold star.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, Wells threatened a lawsuit, but that was an empty threat, because of the response of the market to their suing the FDIC, Treasury, and Federal reserve would have turned their shares into penny stocks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, wonder no more. Treasury negotiated the results of the tests with the banks. Of course if you were a student, and attempted to browbeat your teacher into improving your grade, they would just laugh in your face or demand a bribe, but if you are Ben Bernanke and Timothy &#8220;Eddie Haskell&#8221; Geithner, they can &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1004,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-finance","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192116"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}