FROM WALL ST. TO PENNSYLVANIA AVE . . . AND BACK AGAIN (AKA, THE N.Y.-D.C. SHUTTLE)

As seen in this piece from Bloomberg, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz joins the growing ranks of mainstream voices criticizing Obama's handling of the economic crisis, along with a sharp attack on his economic team. (H/T Yves). What little I know about Stiglitz doesn't leave me among his supporters (and it's worth noting that he seems to have a personal grudge against Loathsome Larry Summers), but what he says sure has resonance. A highlight or two:

All the ingredients they have so far are weak, and there are several missing ingredients,” Stiglitz said in an interview yesterday. The people who designed the plans are “either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent."

* * *

The Public-Private Investment Program, PPIP, designed to buy bad assets from banks, “is a really bad program,” Stiglitz said. It won’t accomplish the administration’s goal of establishing a price for illiquid assets clogging banks’ balance sheets, and instead will enrich investors while sticking taxpayers with huge losses. “You’re really bailing out the shareholders and the bondholders,” he said. “Some of the people likely to be involved in this, like Pimco, are big bondholders.”

* * *

Stiglitz said taxpayer losses are likely to be much larger than bank profits from the PPIP program even though Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair has said the agency expects no losses. “The statement from Sheila Bair that there’s no risk is absurd,” he said, because losses from the PPIP will be borne by the FDIC, which is funded by member banks. “We’re going to be asking all the banks, including presumably some healthy banks, to pay for the losses of the bad banks,” Stiglitz said. “It’s a real redistribution and a tax on all American savers.”

Stiglitz was also concerned about the links between White House advisers and Wall Street. Hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. paid National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers, a managing director of the firm, more than $5 million in salary and other compensation in the 16 months before he joined the administration. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

“America has had a revolving door. People go from Wall Street to Treasury and back to Wall Street,” he said. “Even if there is no quid pro quo, that is not the issue. The issue is the mindset.”

Might as well read the rest of the article, though I repeat that I don't agree with at least half of what he says. Nonetheless, I wanted to note that yet another generally-respected voice weighs in against Obama's economic team & its policies, and still nothing changes.

No one likes or supports the current economic policies except the Wall St. Masters and their servants in D.C., yet they continue unabated. With the deeply-conflicted core of individuals making the same rotton decisions over-and-over again. It's exactly the same arrogant combination of “we know best, shut your mouth” and “yeah, well what are you gonna do about it” that we saw from the Bush Administration for 8 years.

The field of “battle” switched from Iraq to Wall St., but the game is the same. A constant reminder of who runs the show . . . and who doesn't. I only hope that with every day that passes, one more person joins the ranks of those who see what's happening. It's our only hope, and even that may not be enough.

IT'S NOT A LIE IF THOSE WHO DEFINE "TRUTH" ARE DOING THE LYING

I'm sure by now most of you know that yesterday Goldman Sachs reported the bestest, stupendousest, wonderfulest, profitingest 1st quarter results in the history of financial reporting.

(Of course, they conveniently decided to change from their usual December through February reporting period, instead implementing one that encompassed January through March.)

And what happened to December, a month where the bank decided to write-down lots of really big losses. Well . . . they just ignored it. And the financial press lapped up their overwhelmingly big, and dishonest, numbers.

Jesse has a solid take on this latest move from our Masters. Read the whole post -- which is very short -- but this paragraph sums it up nicely:

Goldman did nothing illegal in their management of their earnings, both in the way in which they parsed the losses into a 'stub month' which was ignored, or in their decision to time an early announcement of 'exceptional profits' with a stock offering. But the financial press handled this badly, and considering the huge debt and forebearance Goldman owes to the government and the public it was not befitting a major institution with strong ties to the Obama administration.

It's the Insiders' country. We only live in it. Unless a sea change comes.

YOUR MONEY IS NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS, PART II

Sorry if this post rambles a bit, but I've hit another of my anger overload thresholds. You'll remember that "stress tests" of banks' financial health is part of the Public-Private-Geithner-Throw-Money-Down-The-Shithole program, or whatever this crappy plan is called these days. Well, a couple days ago Reuters explained how Timmy & the Treasury plan to handle the results of these tests. (H/T Yves):

The U.S. Treasury Department is planning to keep the results of any completed bank stress test under wraps until after the first-quarter earnings season to avoid complicating stock market reaction.

Whataya know. Another version of the favorite catch phrase of Obama, Geithner, and Bernanke: "Your money is none of your fucking business. Just give it to us and let us give it the banks. We and they know what's the best use of your hard-earned money. Suckers." Wait, there's more!

The Treasury is still talking about how results of the regulatory stress tests on the 19 largest U.S. banks will be released, and may disclose them as summary results that are not institution-specific, the source said.

Banks could reveal their own results, but Treasury is hoping they will hold off until after the earnings season ends for most U.S. banks on April 24, said the source who sought anonymity because the Treasury has not made a final decision on what to disclose.

* * *

Officials realize it may be hard to keep the results under wraps, and are looking for ways the banks could disclose some details without unduly disturbing the markets. They are also looking at providing some summary information about how the banks fared.

* * *

The stress tests at the biggest banks are part of a wide-ranging effort to restore stability to a sector hit by huge mortgage-related losses.

The tests are designed to determine the depth of banks' capital shortfalls if conditions deteriorate further. After the tests are completed, the banks will have six months to either raise private capital or accept government funds.

But officials are worried about how the market will react to the stress test results if there is not a clear recovery path for a bank that is deemed to have a large capital need.

The last thing Treasury wants to do is set off a panic, the source said.

Make no mistake what all that Newspeak means. "Stability." Fear of "setting off a panic." Don't want to "disturb the markets." It means -- in no uncertain terms -- that our administration cares more about the huge institutions that dominate Wall St. than it does about its citizens. The Insiders in Washington who've already given the banks offensive amounts of money and will give them additional money in the future are hiding the true condition of the banks from the people who will continue to shell out this money.

"We can't tell you where your money will go . . . or why. Or even how it'll work," they're saying. "It's none of your business really. And we don't want to cause them to lose anymore or you'll just have to give us more to bail them out again."

And why this doesn't cause more outrage is completely beyond me.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Update -- And also a H/T to Yves on this one, but the NY Times reports that:

For the last eight weeks, nearly 200 federal examiners have labored inside some of the nation’s biggest banks to determine how those institutions would hold up if the recession deepened.

What they are discovering may come as a relief to both the financial industry and the public: the banking industry, broadly speaking, seems to be in better shape than many people think, officials involved in the examinations say.

That is the good news. The bad news is that many of the largest American lenders, despite all those bailouts, probably need to be bailed out again, either by private investors or, more likely, the federal government. After receiving many millions, and in some cases, many billions of taxpayer dollars, banks still need more capital, these officials say.

Let's translate the Reuters and NYT pieces into English and sum up what our own government is telling us, shall we?

Hey folks, how you doing? We've been conducting stress tests. Workin' real hard, baby! Hours and hours of work. Or, sometimes we just used the numbers the banks gave us. Anyway, the numbers are actually pretty good. Damn good, we tell ya. But we can't show you the numbers just yet. We mean, they're good, but . . . you know, someone could misinterpret them as bad . . . even though, trust us, they're real good. But that misinterpretation could cause a panic. Or something like that. Something that could threaten stability.

Or cause the banks to lose more. Even though they're actually in very good shape. Really, they are.

But just in case, we're probably gonna need a couple trillion more to bail them out again. Thanks.

What is the sum of Outrage + Absurd? For me it's more outrage. But I fear for many it's something else. What is it?

FOLLOW WHAT WORKS INSTEAD OF WHAT FAILS

So Bill Moyers keeps on fighting the good fight. He's too much of a gentleman to come right out and say something like "Obama, Summers, and Geithner are a bunch of shady crooks," but his guests lately have come pretty close to saying as much. The economic sitatuation and the administration's questionable reactions to it have been one of his biggest topics for discussion.

And last week he interviewed William Black, professor or economics and law at University of Missouri. Black also has a long history as an expert on fraud prevention and regulation. A few highlights from a devastating interview:

BILL MOYERS: Is it possible that these complex instruments were deliberately created so swindlers could exploit them?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, absolutely. This stuff, the exotic stuff that you're talking about was created out of things like liars' loans, that were known to be extraordinarily bad. And now it was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk. That's why it's toxic. And you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody looking, during the Bush years. So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a Congressional investigation of some of these rating agencies, and it's scandalous what came out. What we know now is that the rating agencies never looked at a single loan file. When they finally did look, after the markets had completely collapsed, they found, and I'm quoting Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, "the results were disconcerting, in that there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined."

BILL MOYERS: So if your assumption is correct, your evidence is sound, the bank, the lending company, created a fraud. And the ratings agency that is supposed to test the value of these assets knowingly entered into the fraud. Both parties are committing fraud by intention.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Right, and the investment banker that — we call it pooling — puts together these bad mortgages, these liars' loans, and creates the toxic waste of these derivatives. All of them do that. And then they sell it to the world and the world just thinks because it has a triple-A rating it must actually be safe. Well, instead, there are 60 and 80 percent losses on these things, because of course they, in reality, are toxic waste.

BILL MOYERS: You're describing what Bernie Madoff did to a limited number of people. But you're saying it's systemic, a systemic Ponzi scheme.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, Bernie was a piker. He doesn't even get into the front ranks of a Ponzi scheme...

BILL MOYERS: But you're saying our system became a Ponzi scheme.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Our system...

BILL MOYERS: Our financial system...

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Became a Ponzi scheme. Everybody was buying a pig in the poke. But they were buying a pig in the poke with a pretty pink ribbon, and the pink ribbon said, "Triple-A."

* * *

BILL MOYERS: Why is it so hard to prosecute? Why hasn't anyone been brought to justice over this?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because they didn't even begin to investigate the major lenders until the market had actually collapsed, which is completely contrary to what we did successfully in the Savings and Loan crisis, right? Even while the institutions were reporting they were the most profitable savings and loan in America, we knew they were frauds. And we were moving to close them down. Here, the Justice Department, even though it very appropriately warned, in 2004, that there was an epidemic...

BILL MOYERS: Who did?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: The FBI publicly warned, in September 2004 that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to continue it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle. And that they were going to make sure that they didn't let that happen. So what goes wrong? After 9/11, the attacks, the Justice Department transfers 500 white-collar specialists in the FBI to national terrorism. Well, we can all understand that. But then, the Bush administration refused to replace the missing 500 agents. So even today, again, as you say, this crisis is 1000 times worse, perhaps, certainly 100 times worse, than the Savings and Loan crisis. There are one-fifth as many FBI agents as worked the Savings and Loan crisis.

BILL MOYERS: You talk about the Bush administration. Of course, there's that famous photograph of some of the regulators in 2003, who come to a press conference with a chainsaw suggesting that they're going to slash, cut business loose from regulation, right?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, they succeeded. And in that picture, by the way, the other — three of the other guys with pruning shears are the...

BILL MOYERS: That's right.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: They're the trade representatives. They're the lobbyists for the bankers. And everybody's grinning. The government's working together with the industry to destroy regulation. Well, we now know what happens when you destroy regulation. You get the biggest financial calamity of anybody under the age of 80.

BILL MOYERS: But I can point you to statements by Larry Summers, who was then Bill Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury, or the other Clinton Secretary of the Treasury, Rubin. I can point you to suspects in both parties, right?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: There were two really big things, under the Clinton administration. One, they got rid of the law that came out of the real-world disasters of the Great Depression. We learned a lot of things in the Great Depression. And one is we had to separate what's called commercial banking from investment banking. That's the Glass-Steagall law. But we thought we were much smarter, supposedly. So we got rid of that law, and that was bipartisan. And the other thing is we passed a law, because there was a very good regulator, Brooksley Born, that everybody should know about and probably doesn't. She tried to do the right thing to regulate one of these exotic derivatives that you're talking about. We call them C.D.F.S. And Summers, Rubin, and Phil Gramm came together to say not only will we block this particular regulation. We will pass a law that says you can't regulate. And it's this type of derivative that is most involved in the AIG scandal. AIG all by itself, cost the same as the entire Savings and Loan debacle.

BILL MOYERS: What did AIG contribute? What did they do wrong?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: They made bad loans. Their type of loan was to sell a guarantee, right? And they charged a lot of fees up front. So, they booked a lot of income. Paid enormous bonuses. The bonuses we're thinking about now, they're much smaller than these bonuses that were also the product of accounting fraud. And they got very, very rich. But, of course, then they had guaranteed this toxic waste. These liars' loans. Well, we've just gone through why those toxic waste, those liars' loans, are going to have enormous losses. And so, you have to pay the guarantee on those enormous losses. And you go bankrupt. Except that you don't in the modern world, because you've come to the United States, and the taxpayers play the fool. Under Secretary Geithner and under Secretary Paulson before him... we took $5 billion dollars, for example, in U.S. taxpayer money. And sent it to a huge Swiss Bank called UBS. At the same time that that bank was defrauding the taxpayers of America. And we were bringing a criminal case against them. We eventually get them to pay a $780 million fine, but wait, we gave them $5 billion. So, the taxpayers of America paid the fine of a Swiss Bank.

* * *

BILL MOYERS: Why are they firing the president of G.M. and not firing the head of all these banks that are involved?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: There are two reasons. One, they're much closer to the bankers. These are people from the banking industry. And they have a lot more sympathy. In fact, they're outright hostile to autoworkers, as you can see. They want to bash all of their contracts. But when they get to banking, they say, 'contracts, sacred.' But the other element of your question is we don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover up.

BILL MOYERS: The cover up?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Sure. The cover up.

BILL MOYERS: That's a serious charge.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Of course.

BILL MOYERS: Who's covering up?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.

These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because...

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, Geithner has, was one of our nation's top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig in the poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he's a failed legacy regulator.

* * *

BILL MOYERS: To hear you say this is unusual because you supported Barack Obama, during the campaign. But you're seeming disillusioned now.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, certainly in the financial sphere, I am. I think, first, the policies are substantively bad. Second, I think they completely lack integrity. Third, they violate the rule of law. This is being done just like Secretary Paulson did it. In violation of the law. We adopted a law after the Savings and Loan crisis, called the Prompt Corrective Action Law. And it requires them to close these institutions. And they're refusing to obey the law.

BILL MOYERS: In other words, they could have closed these banks without nationalizing them?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, you do a receivership. No one -- Ronald Reagan did receiverships. Nobody called it nationalization.

BILL MOYERS: And that's a law?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: That's the law.

BILL MOYERS: So, Paulson could have done this? Geithner could do this?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Not could. Was mandated--

BILL MOYERS: By the law.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: By the law.

BILL MOYERS: This law, you're talking about.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: What the reason they give for not doing it?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: They ignore it. And nobody calls them on it.

* * *

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: You are.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. All right? They're scared to death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we'll run screaming to the exits. And we won't rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it's foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, "We just can't let the big banks fail." That's wrong.

BILL MOYERS: But what might happen, at this point, if in fact they keep from us the true health of the banks?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, then the banks will, as they did in Japan, either stay enormously weak, or Treasury will be forced to increasingly absurd giveaways of taxpayer money. We've seen how horrific AIG -- and remember, they kept secrets from everyone.

BILL MOYERS: A.I.G. did?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: What we're doing with -- no, Treasury and both administrations. The Bush administration and now the Obama administration kept secret from us what was being done with AIG. AIG was being used secretly to bail out favored banks like UBS and like Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson's firm, that he had come from being CEO. It got the largest amount of money. $12.9 billion. And they didn't want us to know that. And it was only Congressional pressure, and not Congressional pressure, by the way, on Geithner, but Congressional pressure on AIG.

Where Congress said, "We will not give you a single penny more unless we know who received the money." And, you know, when he was Treasury Secretary, Paulson created a recommendation group to tell Treasury what they ought to do with AIG. And he put Goldman Sachs on it.

BILL MOYERS: Even though Goldman Sachs had a big vested stake.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Massive stake. And even though he had just been CEO of Goldman Sachs before becoming Treasury Secretary. Now, in most stages in American history, that would be a scandal of such proportions that he wouldn't be allowed in civilized society.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, like a conflict of interest, it seems.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Massive conflict of interests.

BILL MOYERS: So, how did he get away with it?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: I don't know whether we've lost our capability of outrage. Or whether the cover up has been so successful that people just don't have the facts to react to it.

* * *

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, and this week in New York, at this conference, you described this as more than a financial crisis. You called it a moral crisis.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because it is a fundamental lack of integrity. But also because, if you look back at crises, an economist who is also a presidential appointee, as a regulator in the Savings and Loan industry, right here in New York, Larry White, wrote a book about the Savings and Loan crisis. And he said, you know, one of the most interesting questions is why so few people engaged in fraud? Because objectively, you could have gotten away with it. But only about ten percent of the CEOs, engaged in fraud. So, 90 percent of them were restrained by ethics and integrity. So, far more than law or by F.B.I. agents, it's our integrity that often prevents the greatest abuses. And what we had in this crisis, instead of the Savings and Loan, is the most elite institutions in America engaging or facilitating fraud.

BILL MOYERS: This wound that you say has been inflicted on American life. The loss of worker's income. And security and pensions and future happened, because of the misconduct of a relatively few, very well-heeled people, in very well-decorated corporate suites, right?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Right.

BILL MOYERS: It was relatively a handful of people.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: And their ideologies, which swept away regulation. So, in the example, regulation means that cheaters don't prosper. So, instead of being bad for capitalism, it's what saves capitalism. "Honest purveyors prosper" is what we want. And you need regulation and law enforcement to be able to do this. The tragedy of this crisis is it didn't need to happen at all.

BILL MOYERS: When you wake in the middle of the night, thinking about your work, what do you make of that? What do you tell yourself?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: There's a saying that we took great comfort in. It's actually by the Dutch, who were fighting this impossible war for independence against what was then the most powerful nation in the world, Spain. And their motto was, "It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere."

Now, going forward, get rid of the people that have caused the problems. That's a pretty straightforward thing, as well. Why would we keep CEOs and CFOs and other senior officers, that caused the problems? That's facially nuts. That's our current system.

So stop that current system. We're hiding the losses, instead of trying to find out the real losses. Stop that, because you need good information to make good decisions, right? Follow what works instead of what's failed. Start appointing people who have records of success, instead of records of failure. That would be another nice place to start. There are lots of things we can do. Even today, as late as it is. Even though they've had a terrible start to the administration. They could change, and they could change within weeks. And by the way, the folks who are the better regulators, they paid their taxes. So, you can get them through the vetting process a lot quicker.

"Follow what works instead of what fails. Start appointing people who have records of success, instead of records of failure." The fact that such a suggestion seems profound in our world says a lot, doesn't it? Read the whole interview. Or follow the link back and watch the interview, and see for yourselves how bluntly Black puts this stuff.

Make no mistake about it. From top to bottom, criminals are among us. And most of them are still walking, still doing what they do. And if we don't reign them in, they'll do it again. There's still more loot for the looting.

MONOPOLIZING DEMOCRACY

Bill Moyers sat down and talked with William Greider on Sunday night. Interesting chat. Moyers has really given voice to media and academic semi-outsiders on the economy, politics, and philosophy as to what's been going on in the financial/governmental world since last fall. I don't agree with everything Greider said -- notably he misunderstands the Federal Reserve's role since it was established through banking industry pressure in 1913 -- but he made lots of sense in other areas. Here's the transcript of the entirety of Sunday night's show. The interview with Greider starts a bit past the midway point. A few highlights:

BILL MOYERS: Government will be lazy, and everybody else will...

WILLIAM GREIDER: Will fair badly.

BILL MOYERS: Right. Right.

WILLIAM GREIDER: Well, yeah, and Democrats, not all of them, but in many ways-

BILL MOYERS: Not all Republicans, either.

WILLIAM GREIDER: Nor all Republicans, but both parties, on the whole, bought into this. And we- no need to question their sincerity. They bought into it. You might observe, in passing, that it also matched the desires of their patrons.

BILL MOYERS: Well-

WILLIAM GREIDER: Who were the big financial contributors to their campaigns. But even leaving that aside, this logic was, you know, compelling to lots of people. Some of us are, were sort of bag ladies on the street corner, waving our placards, "No, no, no, don't do this."

BILL MOYERS: As I listen to Secretary Geithner, I heard him say, well, Treasury's going be a tough cop on the beat. We're not just turning to the Fed. We're going to make this Treasury Department a champion of the people's interest, of the public interest. And we're going be a really tough cop on the beat. Do you believe him?

WILLIAM GREIDER: Unfortunately, Secretary Geithner, has a record- which we know about. When he was President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. And he was at the table, in many of the bailout transactions. First Bear Stearns then A.I.G. and others. And this is, again, not my opinion, but people on Wall Street talk about it all the time. He got spun around again and again by the big Wall Street players. The bailout of Bear Stearns was really about protecting J.P. Morgan Chase.

The story was told backwards in the press, basically, because it's a story the government told that J.P. Morgan came in to buy Bear Stearns at the behest of the government. But in fact, if Bear Stearns had gone down, J.P. Morgan Chase was vulnerable itself to a wave of derivative crashing crisis. When they bailed out A.I.G., the chief executive of Goldman Sachs was in the room. Why was he in the room? Well, because he had big exposure to- through derivatives, to A.I.G. So, when they pump money into A.I.G., it sends the same dollars out and buys back these derivative contracts at par value, not even discounted, to the banks and others who hold them. Goldman Sachs gets $12 billion out of that transaction. This is another scandal waiting to surface. And I trust good, smart reporters are already on the case. And following the dollars that moved around among the leading financial institutions in ways that politicians could not have not known about it. It defies reason to think that Washington didn't know this was happening.

* * *

BILL MOYERS: What do ordinary citizens do about this? How do they break this grip that money has- the patrons have on the politicians?

WILLIAM GREIDER: They trust themselves. I read a wonderful book about the Civil Rights Movement and SNCC and others in the South, in Mississippi, the most treacherous, backward place you could go, bring the issue of racial equality.* And they said the organizers first goal was to learn to listen to these people, that they were poor blacks in Mississippi. The second goal was to convince themselves and these poor people to act like citizens even if- even though they knew they weren't citizens. And you think about that. That's kind of the mystery of democracy. People get power if they believe they're entitled to power.

* * *

BILL MOYERS: I hear that. But I also read your piece on "The Washington Post" last Sunday, in which you wrote, "Obama told us to speak out. But is he listening?" You ask. Well, is he?

WILLIAM GREIDER: I think he's... And I've been very enthusiastic about his opening as President. He did the stimulus package and a number of other things that's fulfilling his promise. On this, he does seem absolutely committed to restoration of the old order. There's no other way to say it. And this- these things Secretary Geithner is saying this week and others have been putting out, all confirm that.

I think that's A) a huge mistake, financially. I don't- because I think these things are not going to work. And will, in fact, blow up in his face. Maybe a month from now. Or maybe six months, I don't know. But the handing out of government guarantees and capital to hedge funds and private equity funds. Financial institutions founded on secrecy, by the way. They're don't even pretend to be transparent. They're closed shops. Hands out that money, and then somewhere down the road people are going to learn that the investors, so called, are reaping 20 double digit returns on this money with almost no risk at all to themselves. And whether that works or not, people will be outraged. Again, as the returns come in. And I think should be. And outrage right now might just get the Congress to slow down a bit, calm down, we want reform, but we want it done right. And we want it done for the public interest, not for the old order.

BILL MOYERS: So, Obama, this week, has opened the hotline, one might say, the online hotline, to the White House. And said, give me your questions and we'll answer them. As of now over 100 thousand people have responded. Do you take that as an indication of what?

WILLIAM GREIDER: Popular anger.

BILL MOYERS: Popular anger?

WILLIAM GREIDER: Yeah. People get confused about this. Americans overwhelmingly want our President to succeed. And so do I. But that's not- the nature, is not, of democracy, authentically, is not simply supporting from the bleachers, and saying, gee, we hope you win the game. It's being on the field, engaged in whatever small or large way is possible. And expecting those elected representatives, including the President, to at least hear what you're saying, and if, and rightly, responding to it in some ways. That's the dynamic of a democratic society. And we know everybody knows in this country that this has now been, for some years not exclusively, but mainly a top down society. And you go into workplaces and hear the same things said as you hear about politics. Well, I know what's wrong here, but they won't listen to me. I don't have any voice in the matter. Or investors, small investors, putting their money in mutual funds. Well, they're not listening to me. Look who they're giving this money to. You know, you can go on and on. And that's what democracy is- would break.

BILL MOYERS: And I know that one of your deep concerns about the Fed, turning so much power over to the Fed, is that it is cozy with the big institutions. And that the smaller, entrepreneurial organizations and businesses that do not have access to the inner circle are excluded.

WILLIAM GREIDER: President Obama and if the Democratic leaders in Congress follow along, he'll put the Democratic Party on the wrong side of history. At this critical moment. What we ought to be seeking, the goal of reform, and government aid, is creating a new financial and banking system, of many more, thousands more, smaller, more diverse, regionally dispersed banks and investment firms. That's first obligation is to serve the economy and serve society. Not the other way around. What the administration's approach may be doing is consecrating too big to fail, for starters. Which, of course, everybody in government denied was the policy until the moment arrived. And secondly, and this will sound extreme to some people, but I came to it reluctantly. I fear what they're doing, not intentionally, but in their design is setting the crown for a corporate state.

BILL MOYERS: A corporate state?

WILLIAM GREIDER: A corporate state. And by that I mean a rather small but very powerful circle of financial institutions the old Wall Street banks, famous names. But also some industrial corporations that bought banks. Or General Electric, which is already half of big financial capital, GE Capital. And that circle will be our new Wall Street club. Too big to fail. Yes, watched closely by the Federal Reserve and others in government, but also protected by them. And that's a really insidious departure. To admit that and put it into law. And then think of all those thousands of smaller banks. How are they going to perform against these behemoths that have an inside track to the government spigot? And for just ordinary enterprise in general? Before you even get to the citizens. How are citizens supposed to feel about that? And I-- my point is, in this situation, with if the leading banks and corporations are sort of at the trough, ahead of everybody else in Washington, they will have the means to monopolize democracy. And I mean that literally. Some of my friends would say, hey, that already happened.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, the corporate state is here.

WILLIAM GREIDER: The corporate state is here. And I'd say, let's not argue over that. The fact is, if the Congress goes down the road I see them going down, they will institutionalize the corporate state in a way that will be severely damaging to any possibility of restoring democracy. And I want people to grab their pitch forks, yes, and be unruly. Get in the streets. Be as noisy and as nonviolently provocative as you can be. And stop the politicians from going down that road. And let me add a lot of politicians need that to be able to stand up. Our President needs that to be able to stand up.

As I suggested at the top, I'm not really sure that Greider gets it at a fundamental level. He really sees the Fed as a potential regulatory body, able to step in to form balance between banking and the rest of us. That's not true, unfortunately. The Fed is a private organization with quasi-governmental privileges. Whether regulation is a good idea or not, the Fed will "regulate" the only way it ever has -- by inflating and shifting the benefits of that largesse only to those first in line. And by that I mean the 20-or-so-odd banks that have access to the discount window and other Fed perks.

But I come to praise, not to criticize, so I'll end by saying that Greider really nails the whole concept of the corporate state, of the Oligarchy forming. Of the role and power of the Insiders. Every voice in the mainstream or semi-mainstream that talks about this stuff is a good thing.

THE CORPORATE STATE, AKA CORPORATE FASCISM, AKA FASCISM

Tough talk from Obama about America's failing auto industry. Fix yourself or die! No more easy bailout money! We're making the rules now! Day-um.

Now let me be real clear: I'm not in favor of bailing them out with one more penny, and frankly I'm not even looking for any form of "nationalization," or government-sponsored unwinding, or any of that jazz. They wanna declare Chapter 11, let 'em. They wanna go out of business, that's fine by me. Nevertheless, something strikes me as juuuuuuuust a tad inconsistent about Fauxbama's tough talk here. I can't quite put my finger on it, but this doesn't jibe with some of his other public statements lately.

Very briefly, let's review:

1. Detroit better get its shit together or we're gonna let it fail. Wall St. and the banking industry, on the other hand, are "too big to fail."

2. If the Big Three can't fix themselves, we're forcing them into Chapter 11! On the other hand, we will never "nationalize" Wall St. and the banking industry.

3. Extending on that theme, Detroit's creditors can basically go fuck themselves. Wall St.'s creditors, on the other hand, will be protected. Since many of them are banks themselves, they too are too big to fail.

4. Rick Wagoner, you're gone! The CEOs and other executives of Wall St. institutions, on the other hand, can't be fired because we need their "expertise." This expertise, apparently, focuses primarily on making risky investments and using tax dollars to make themselves richer.

In general, this is so fucked up I can't even explain it without breaking into a smirk. The government can just step into a private company on one hand, nationalize it, fire its CEO, and dictate its business policy . . . while simultaneously giving away our money to the world's wealthiest bankers with no conditions or requirements attached. None of this takes place through any sort of public debate, none of it has a contingency plan more than two steps down the road, none of it makes a shred of economic sense, none of it even passes the smell test of constitutionalism or American political traditions.

What's the goddamn difference between Obama and Hugo Chavez on one hand? Or Mussolini on the other?

I'd say the biggest problem here is how arbitrary the decision-making is, except it's not arbitrary. There's one set of rules for the biggest bankers . . . and another set of rules for everyone else. It's clear who runs this country, and it ain't the auto industry, it ain't Congress, it ain't the press, and it sure as hell ain't you & me.

Bow down to Wall St., people. They're your bosses. You work for them. You pay your taxes to them. They make the rules. Just hope they're kind enough to let you live where you want and raise your children under your own rules. Because if they decide not to, there doesn't seem to be a damn thing we can do about it.

COCKTAILS (OF THE TOXIC VARIETY) ON THE HOUSE

Well, well, well. Look who's taking advantage of the "Geithner Plan." Ritholtz has a short piece about Citi and BOA buying toxic assets lately:

As Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner orchestrated a plan to help the nation’s largest banks purge themselves of toxic mortgage assets, Citigroup and Bank of America have been aggressively scooping up those same securities in the secondary market

* * *
both banks have been [aggressive] in their buying, sometimes paying higher prices than competing bidders are willing to pay.

This is the logical outcome of Timmy's "Plan." If you know the government is gonna broker a bunch of deals to buy garbage at above-market prices (through outright purchase, leveraging, guarantees, etc), why the hell wouldn't you buy up as much of that garbage as possible at the current market prices? That's good business, right?

Especially when you consider that the money they'll spend to make these market-rate purchases came directly from the taxpayers in the form of "bailouts."

I believe this is called playing with house money. And we're the house. But unlike Vegas (and Wall St.), in this example the house always loses.

FAUXBAMA'S MONEY MAN UNVEILS HIS "PLAN" TODAY

So at some point today, Timmy "The Bagman" Geithner will roll out the "details" of the latest plan to shift trillions of dollars to the world's wealthiest and most powerful. You and I and our descendants are so generous.

By the end of the day, all the "specifics" will be available to make fun of, and folks who know a lot more than I do will have opined. Most of them -- and likely all of them who aren't beholden to The Insiders -- will rip the plan to shreds. Nevertheless, it won't surprise me if the market goes up. After all, this plan is for the benefit of the largest institutions; I suspect they'll be very pleased.

Anyhow, it looks like the basics of the plan will be a combination of Treasury and FDIC donations, low-interest loans, and guarantees for any private actor reckless/greedy/connected enough to step in and buy the worthless garbage that our government brokers the sale of. The key flaw is that the banks that own the garbage assets stay in business and receive money in exchange for their balance sheet bullshit. The other flaw is that if the garbage assets ever end up being worth anything, they'll be in private hands to a significant degree.

Our money. Our loans. Our guarantees. The bank's benefit: cleaned up balance sheets. The private "purchaser's" benefit: no-risk investments, whereby they at a steep discount for assets that they will own if the value goes up. Our benefit: not sure that's part of the plan.

And, of course, two other things to remember:

One, if no private buyer opts to buy this garbage, the government will end up buying all of it. That's another bailout. Explain to me the difference between giving money to a cancer victim, and buying the cancer and putting it inside of your own body.

Two, the Federal Reserve ultimately backs up the maneuverings of the Treasury and the FDIC, so this is another step in the direction of the complete destruction of the dollar through currency debasement. The end game is becoming clear: unless Fauxbama hears the mob coming with pitchforks and turns into the Obama that the American people and the world want, the Insiders will loot every penny they can get their hands on, and it won't stop until there's nothing left. When either the Treasury is completely insolvent and/or the dollar is so debased, so essentially valueless, that it ceases to be the world's reserve currency.

Whatever specifics Timmy gives us today, remember this: unless his "plan" involves the U.S. government taking complete control of the banks -- kicking their officers, directors, shareholders, and 99% of their creditors to the curb in the process -- it's yet another step in The Looting. So long as the banks remain in private hands, every dollar we give them is just another bailout.

Don't let Timmy's fancy alphabet soup program titles and disembling semantics get in the way of the facts. Ownership is ownership and bailouts are bailouts. Today's plan will be one but not the other.

J'ACCUSE REVISITED

I'm sure many of you have heard the buzz about Matt Tiabbi's article in Rolling Stone about the AIG bailout & the roots of the financial mess. Well, it's a damn strong article, and it really sums up some of the things we've spoken about here. The Insiderism, the Oligarchy, the complicity of Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke. It's absolutely required reading. Read the whole thing -- some of it is frankly devastating -- but I especially like his takedown of the Federal Reserve on pp. 6-7:

In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills, U.S. securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, who would then "repurchase" them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up.

If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than usual — $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion — "out of control now," according to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into the economy — until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero.

The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.

* * *

None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself — or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything." According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.

* * *

In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine,'" says Dan Fuss, an analyst with the investment firm Loomis Sayles. "The salesman says, 'Don't worry about it. Trust me.' It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much farther? None of us knows."

When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary — a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke.

Finally, as he closes the piece he gets to an essential understanding of how all this outrageous shit went down:

The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner — himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm — picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets — the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.

* * *

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; values-wise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Analyses of the roots of this disaster have bounced around the blogosphere for months now. Over the last month or so it's begun to hit the mainstream press. Anyone who sits quietly watching the business-as-usual "solutions" that Bernanke & Geithner (and yes, Obama too) are proposing without instantly seething in outrage is either an Insider himself, or a complete idiot. This shit has got to stop and the only way that'll happen is if we all make an effort to understand it, and then make so much noise they fear not only election day doom but the mob with torches and pitchforks.

This has to stop.

SLEIGHT OF HAND (LEAVING SLIGHTLY LESS IN ALL OUR HANDS)

Today's WSJ reports that in the face of recent populist anger over bonuses paid from governmental bail-out money, Wall St. firms are examining the possibility of increasing base salaries for executives and "top-producing employees." (H/T Yves)

(For the moment let's just behave ourselves and ignore the fact that rewarding Wall St.'s "top level employees" for 2008-09 is tantamount to giving Kevin Smith a raise because he led the 2008 Detroit Lions in rushing.)

A few highlights if I may:

In response to expected bonus restrictions, officials atCitigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley and other financial institutions that got government aid are discussing increasing base salaries for some executives and other top-producing employees, people familiar with the situation said. The crackdown, part of the economic-stimulus package passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last month, limits bonus pay for the top five executives of any recipient of taxpayer capital through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, plus the 20 next-highest-compensated employees.

* * *

As banks and securities firms wrestle with growing regulation of compensation practices, substantially increasing the base salaries of top employees could become a popular response, some industry officials say. A larger salary would reduce the relative importance of bonuses but also help financial companies increase those payments, since they usually are calculated as a percentage of total annual compensation.

"The trend is to increase the base pay in light of the reduced bonuses," said Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable. "Without the revenue" that top performers provide, he adds, "these companies can't survive."

Let's again behave ourselves and ignore the fact that they aren't surviving but-for governmental largesse. Back to the sordid tale:

Under the forthcoming rules, bonuses could come to no more than one-third of the total annual compensation paid to employees covered by the restrictions. Some compensation experts view the bonus limits as a mistake that turns the notion of pay for performance on its head, despite Wall Street's culpability for the recession and credit crisis.

"These are not bureaucratic positions where you're paying individuals high salaries," said Michael Karp, chief executive of Options Group. "How can you pay a banker a really high salary without knowing what kind of revenue that person generates?"

Uhhhh, we know they did not generate any revenue. In fact, we know they generated historic, unprecedented, hard-to-fathom losses. Which is why they probably don't deserve anything. Especially since the American taxpayers are paying it! I know I'm but one lone voice in the vast wilderness, but I'm gonna take a wild stab and say I'm a decent proxy for the other citizens. And my decision on their compensation is: Nada. Want a raise? Don't wanna answer to populist demands for a haircut? A got a swell idea: don't accept public money. Otherwise, I'm your boss, I think you suck, and I'll pay you accordingly. Back to the article:

Raising base salaries would play into "a long and dishonorable tradition of responding to any attempt to curb pay excess by just putting it in a different pocket and calling it something else," said Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library, a research firm focusing on corporate-governance issues.

Well-put.

Citigroup has received $45 billion in taxpayer-funded capital do far, while Morgan Stanley has received $10 billion. The latest U.S. rescue of Citigroup will leave the federal government holding as much as 36% of the company's common stock.

These firms still stand only because we've propped them up. The money they'll pay to the 25 highest-ranking parasites comes directly from us.

Inside banks and Wall Street firms, some executives are hopeful that the Treasury Department will water down the curbs on bonuses, inserted into the stimulus bill by Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), during the department's rule-making process.

With bagman Timmy in charge, who could blame them for their optimism.

The Dodd provision sent shockwaves across Wall Street. Some bankers and compensation experts contend that top revenue-producers could bolt to non-U.S. banks or hedge funds that aren't subject to TARP-related restrictions. "It's possible we will lose some people," J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Chairman and Chief. "I'll be very sorry if that happens."

He'll be very sorry. I'm sure he will. Anyhow, note the subjunctive tense of those statements. Top-revenue producers could bolt. But franky, at this point, so what if the morons who caused the mess lose their job? Lots of American have lost their job due to nothing more than bad luck. No one bailed them out.

Enough is enough. We have to keep making noise about this.

YOUR MONEY IS NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS

Barry Ritholtz continues his uncharacteristic rage over what's happening right under our collective noses:

[W]hat was misleadingly described as systemic risk turned out to be in large part little more than a counter-party bailout — money for the very same people who helped cause the problem. Only the $25 billion figure I mentioned was off by 100% — the WSJ is reporting this morning it was $50 billion dollars, almost a third of $173 billion total AIG loot.

* * *

Now you know why the Fed was so reluctant to reveal who the counterparties were.

This is a giant FUCK YOU to the American taxpayer. Isn’t there some Congressmen (besides Ron Paul) who are morally offended by the Paulson plan, which is slowly becoming the Geithner plan? Isn’t there anything that can be done?

* * *

This is simply unconscionable . . .

This isn't some sort of marginal tinfoil hat thing. The smartest, best-informed (and honest) Wall St. experts are expressing nothing short of screaming, ranting, sputtering outrage over this.

Those who refuse to acknowledge what's happening in the clear light of day are insane. Truly insane, in that they deny reality in favor of their wishes.

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Update - Yves at Naked Capitalism also posts on this same topic. Good one, as usual. A highlight or two:

Bottom line: covert subsidies were given to bank via AIG. Remember, Henry Paulson, who had perilously few inhibitions about shoveling money at banks, even when the pretexts were often dubious and the checks non-existent, nevertheless was afraid to overpay openly for dud assets, which is why he retreated from his original conception of the TARP as as way to hoover up bad debt.

* * *
Wake up and smell the coffee. The public purse is being looted and we the great unwashed are being fed pablum. Just because the perps work for once esteemed institutions and are typically treated with deference does not change the nature of the undertaking.

THE FED TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: YOUR MONEY IS NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS

This issue relates somewhat to what I've talked about recently: the seeming paradox of the Federal Reserve, its constituent banks, its board of governors, and the 22 or so-odd institutions first in line for its money. As mentioned, the Fed is private (though it has quasi-governmental features), and the NY Fed, responsible for much of the various bailout money over the last six months, is completely private.

The paradox, of course, comes from the fact that the President appoints the chairman of this private institution. And that the private institution has a monopoly over the right to issue the currency all American citizens are bound to use as legal tender. A monopoly despite the fact that it isn't required to own anything of value backing that legal tender. Which means it can inflate, and thereby devalue, that currency. And has inflated it at a 95% rate in the 96 years of its existence.

So what's the issue I'm talking about today? Well, as you may know, Bloomberg News sued the Federal Reserve last fall under the Federal Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA"), seeking an injunction forcing the Fed to disclose the identity and amounts of TARP money it "lent" to various banks and institutions. And without wading into all the details, one of the Fed's defenses asserts that the NY Fed (which "lent" the money and houses most of the documentation) is not a federal agency, and therefore doesn't fall under the reach of FOIA.

They put forth other defenses, all of them equally nauseating, but that's the one that really gets me boiling. Anyhow, do a search for Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and prepare to wretch if not rave.

Have a nice weekend . . . until you remember that most Treasury/Federal Reserve shenanigans have gone down over weekends. When you wake up Monday morning, don't be surprised to learn that we've bailed out Citibank to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

And don't be surprised if that private bank that destroys your currency tells you it's none of your goddamn business what it's done with your money in an effort to dole it out to its friends. Nah, don't do any of that Monday morning.

Just Wake Up.

WHEN IT'S TIME TO ASK "WHY?"

Wow. The normally calm, measured, and rational-to-the-point-of-being-unemotional Barry Ritholtz lets loose on the AIG bailout. Damn, check some of this out:

When AIG first faltered, there were two companies jammed under one roof. One was a highly regulated, state supervised, life insurance company. In fact, the biggest such firm in the world. The other firm was an unregulated structured finance firm, specializing in credit default swaps and other derivatives. The first firm was Triple AAA rated. They had a long history of steady growth, profitability, excellent management. They made money (as the commercial goes) the old fashioned way: They earned it. This half of the company held the most important insurance in many families’ financial lives: Their life insurance.

* * *

The other part of the firm was none of the above. It was neither regulated nor transparent. It existed only in the shadow banking world, a nether region of speculation, and of big derivative bets. This part of the company engaged in the most speculative of trading with hedge funds, banks, rank speculators, gamblers from around the world. Huge derivative bets were placed, with billions of dollars riding on the outcome. It served a far more limited societal function than the Life insurance portion, other than a legal pursuit of profit. This part of AIG was nothing more than a giant structured finance hedge fund.

* * *

It was exempt from any form of regulation or supervision, thanks to the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. This ruinous piece of legislation was sponsored by former Senator Phil Gramm (R), supported by Alan Greenspan (R), former Treasury Secretary (and Citibank board member) Robert Rubin (D), and current presidential advisor Larry Summers (D). It was signed into law by President Clinton (D). It was the single most disastrous piece of bipartisan legislation ever signed into law.

* * *

Here is the question that every single taxpayer should be asking themselves: WHY AM I PAYING $1000 TO BAIL OUT THIS GIANT HEDGE FUND? Of all the many horrific decisions that Hank Paulson made, this may be his very worst. That is a very special description, given his track record of incompetence and cluelessness. What should have been done?

Simple: When we nationalized AIG, we should have immediately spun out the good, solvent life insurance company. It is a highly viable standalone entity. The hedge fund should have been wound down in an orderly fashion. Match up the offsetting trades, the rest go to zero. End of story.

* * *

Right now, we are into this clusterfuck for $166 billion — every last penny of which is a needless waste. Taxpayers should not be bailing out hedge fund trades. This insanity must cease immediately.

Again, wow. Not much to add, since Ritholtz says it better than I ever could. At the core of my opinion (since I have different thoughts from him about what "deregulation" is, what it means) is the belief that if you get governmental protection, if you're first in line for cheap loans, if your industry is subject to loopholes and access the rest of us schmucks don't get, then we damn well have the right to make the rules that you play under.

But from what I understand about what Clinton and Gramm and Greenspan and Rubin and Summers did, huge banks and other companies got to have it both ways: all the perks with none of the rules.

And the acolytes of these enablers (Geithner learned his craft at the lap of Rubin, Bernanke served on the Fed Board of Governors under Greenspan), if not the active perpetrators (the utterly loathsome Larry Summers), are continuing to roll out the gravy train.

At our expense.

And as Ritholtz says, "every single taxpayer should be asking themselves: Why am I paying $1000 to bail out this giant hedge fund? ... Taxpayers should not be bailing out hedge fund trades. This insanity must cease immediately."

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Update (Of sorts): This post by Steve Randy Waldman at Interfluidity (H/T Naked Capitalism) is somewhat on-point with the concept I tried (clumsily) to explain at the tail end of this post. I haven't thought enough about what he's actually advocating, and the post is a bit arcane for non-financial types like me. That said, he makes the larger point that:

Private-sector banking has not existed in the United States since first the Fed and then the FDIC undertook to insure bank risks. There is no use getting all ideological about keeping banks private, because they never have been.

* * *

I don't think we should give much deference to traditional banking, on the theory that we know it works. On the contrary, we know that it does not work. Banking crises are not aberrations. They are infrequent but regular occurrences almost everywhere there are banks. I challenge readers to make the case that banking, in its long centuries, has ever been a profitable industry, net of the costs it extracts from governments, counterparties, and investors during its low frequency, high amplitude breakdowns. Banking is lucrative for bankers, and during quiescent periods it has served a useful role in financial intermediation. But in aggregate, has banking has ever been a successful industry for capital providers? A "healthy" banking system is arguably just a bubble, worth investing in only if you're smart enough or lucky enough to get out before the crash, or if you expect to be bailed out after the fall.

Again, I haven't thought about this enough to say I agree with whatever it is that Waldman favors (assuming he has something in mind). I'm just throwing some kindling on the fire I'm trying to stoke: that our collective understanding of "free markets" and "laissez faire" and "deregulation" will forever be skewed unless we come to grips with the fact that, in America, because of the Federal Reserve system and the financial industry's leverage on Capital Hill, the banking system is subsidized, guaranteed, favored, and ultimately rigged.

And if it wants continued largesse, we need to extract some real concessions.

WELCOME TO THE U.S. OF AIG

In the latest report from the "Not Even Remotely Surprising Unless You Haven't Been Paying Attention, Or Haven't Wanted To" Files, we learn that the U.S. government (uhhh, that'd be "You & I") will bailout AIG for the 4th time in less than six months. A few "highlights":

The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve announced jointly early Monday that they will supply another $30 billion on an "as needed" basis to facilitate "the orderly completion of the company's global divestiture program" and "help stabilize the company and in doing so help stabilize the financial system," in light of the "significant challenges" due to the rapid deterioration in certain financial markets in the last two months of the year.

Where to begin? Before even getting into the substance of what a mistake this is, let's examine the actors, shall we? The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve.

One a division of the executive branch and the other a quasi-governmental, privately-owned bank headed by an unelected chairman. And, since we're doing this lil' Q&A thing, let's ask who heads that division of the executive branch? Only the former head of the completely private NY facility of that quasi-governmental, privately-owned bank. This isn't Democracy. Now let's ask why these unelected thieves are doing what they're doing:

AIG has been unable to find buyers for pieces of its company that it hoped to sell to repay the government on its existing aid package, which totals some $150 billion.

Read that carefully. AIG is Looking for buyers to raise capital to repay the government that already "lent" it over a hundred billion dollars because it couldn't find any buyers the first time around. Before it added an additional $150 billion to its balance sheet.

And why can't AIG can't "find buyers"? Because it had nothing to sell except a rancid mound of rotting garbage. Who the hell buys rotting garbage? The answer is, of course, "no one." Which is why the enablers in D.C. are fostering this deal, laying the bill onto citizens and taxpayers who have no recourse to remove these gentlemen from their positions because they neither hired nor elected them.

And why would these unelected gents do this? I mean, they must have a good reason to engage in such a shameless expropriation of the nation's wealth, no? For whom would they do such a thing? Who benefits from the survival of AIG as a private institution? Why not nationalize it, wipe out its debt, clean out its worthless "assets" and start over, right?

perhaps the biggest concern about AIG is the dizzying array of complex financial instruments it structured for commercial banks, investment banks and hedge funds around the globe.

"The biggest concern." Yet, the question we need to ask is whose biggest concern? I'm not concerned, are you? Any of your neighbors staying up at night worrying about this? Know anyone who knows anyone that shares this concern that "commercial banks, investment banks and hedge funds around the globe" are gonna lose their shirts due to idiotic investments they made in a "dizzying array of complex financial instruments"?

This article from Bloomberg last fall explains why this is really going on. If AIG went into bankrupcy, it's biggest creditors would get the shaft, receiving (literally) pennies on the dollar for what the insurance company owed them. If they were that lucky; they might get zero. And among those creditors: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch (recently acquired by Bank of America).

As I said at the start of the post, none of this is even remotely surprising unless you haven't been paying attention, or haven't wanted to.

Wake up.

I'LL ADMIT I WAS WRONG

You see, last November 10, after AIG went to Congress for the second time begging for taxpayer money to fund their profligacy and incompetence, I predicted that they'd get it, no problem.

And I was correct. They got it later that same day. But I also predicted that they'd be back to Congress in early 2009 asking for yet even more. But I was wrong in the timing, saying it'd be after April 15. I can't believe how wrong I was.

Because they waited only until yesterday. Seems they wanna "restructure" the deal yet again. And ya know what? Their slaves (that means you & me, though our representatives) will give 'em what they want.

Just remember people: when we finally come around to "nationalize" all these rancid institutions, you'll be sickened to think how much free money we threw at them (read: gave to the Insiders) to no avail as we watched them sink lower & lower. We're paying them to suck as we pretend not to be preparing to do what we're going to have to do in the end: nationalize them.

We're all suckers. How do you feel being bamboozled? I feel like shit.

THE INSIDERS

You'll recall that just a few days ago I referred to Tim Geithner as "The Insider." And I've also used the term to describe the cadre of governmental hacks that do the bidding of Wall St. in the name of the American economy. Of the American people.

Well, lest you think this is nothing more than the mad prattlings of an internet nobody looking for a few rich and famous folks to tee off on, think again. Please read what Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist and current professor of global economics and management at MIT said on Bill Moyers this week when he discussed his grave concerns about the unchecked power and influence of "America's Oligarchs" (H/T Jesse):

SIMON JOHNSON: I think I'm signaling something a little bit shocking to Americans, and to myself, actually. Which is the situation we find ourselves in at this moment, this week, is very strongly reminiscent of the situations we've seen many times in other places . . . [we] somehow find ourselves in the grip of the same sort of crisis and the same sort of oligarchs . . . it's a small group with a lot of power. A lot of wealth. They don't necessarily - they're not necessarily always the names, the household names that spring to mind, in this kind of context. But they are the people who could pull the strings. Who have the influence. Who call the shots.

BILL MOYERS: Are you saying that the banking industry trumps the president, the Congress and the American government when it comes to this issue so crucial to the survival of American democracy?

SIMON JOHNSON: I don't know. I hope they don't trump it. But the signs that I see this week, the body language, the words, the op-eds, the testimony, the way they're treated by certain Congressional committees, it makes me feel very worried. I have this feeling in my stomach that I felt in other countries, much poorer countries, countries that were headed into really difficult economic situation. When there's a small group of people who got you into a disaster, and who were still powerful. Disaster even made them more powerful. And you know you need to come in and break that power. And you can't. You're stuck.

BILL MOYERS: . . . Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod [] have pushed for tougher action against the banks. But they didn't prevail. Obama apparently sided with Geithner and the Treasury Department in using a velvet glove.

SIMON JOHNSON: What I read from that is that there is an unnecessary and excessive deference to the experts, or the supposed experts. And I think the view that a lot of people have in Washington -- I live in Washington, I follow this very closely -- the view is that you need to rely on the technocrats. And the technocrats are saying, "This is the way to go, and you mustn't be too tough on because banks, because that will have adverse consequences for credits, and for the economy, and for unemployment," and so on and so forth. Those technocrats, if that's what they're saying, are wrong. That is not the right way to deal with this crisis.

* * *

[B]eing nice to the banks, is a mistake. The powerful people are the insiders. They're the CEOs of these banks. They're the people who run these banks. They're the people who pay themselves the massive bonuses at the end of the last year. Now, those bonuses are not the essence of the problem, but they are a symptom of an arrogance, and a feeling of invincibility, that tells you a lot about the culture of those organizations, and the attitudes of the people who lead them.

BILL MOYERS: Geithner has hired as his chief-of-staff, the lobbyist from Goldman Sachs. The new deputy secretary of state was, until last year, a CEO of Citigroup. Another CFO from Citigroup is now assistant to the president, and deputy national security advisor for International Economic Affairs. And one of his deputies also came from Citigroup. One new member of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board comes from UBS, which is being investigated for helping rich clients evade taxes. You're probably too young to remember that old song, "Sounds like the Mack the Knife is back in town." I mean, is that what you're talking about with this web of relationships?

SIMON JOHNSON: . . . it's exactly a web of interest, I think, is what you said. And that's exactly the right way to think about it. That web of interest is not my interest, or your interest, or the interest of the taxpayer. It's the interest, first and foremost, of the financial industry in this country.

* * *

BILL MOYERS: When Tim Geithner said, earlier in the week, that the American people have lost faith in some financial institutions and the government, did it occur to you that this was the same man who was president of the New York Fed through much of this debacle?

SIMON JOHNSON: I have no problem with poachers turning gamekeeper, right? So if you know where the bodies are buried maybe you can help us sort out the problem. And I did think the first three or four minutes of what Mr. Geithner said were very good. As a definition of a problem, and pointing the finger clearly at the bankers, and saying that the government had been slow to react, and, of course, that included himself. I liked that. And then he started to talk about the specifics. And he said, "The compensation caps we've put in place, for the executives of these banks, are strong." And at that point I just fell out of my chair. That is not true. That is factually inaccurate, in my opinion.

BILL MOYERS: That?

SIMON JOHNSON: That this $500,000 limit, and deferred stock, is some kind of restriction on what they do? It's deferred stock, Bill. It's not restricted. You can get as much stock as you want, as soon as you pay back the government, you can cash out of that. That's one. Second, you can, sorry to get technical, but reset the strike price. This is something you and your and your viewers, you need to hear this one out. Just look for these words, okay, follow them through the press. When you get into trouble, when your company goes down, and you have massive amounts of stock options that aren't worth much anymore, because the stock price has gone down, you say, "Oh, well, we're going to reset our option prices."

And, basically, it means that, at the end of the day, these people are going to walk away with tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars paid for by basically, insurance policy that you and I are providing. Think of it like this, our taxpayer money is ensuring their bonuses. We're making sure that companies, that banks survive. And eventually, of course, the economy will turn around. Things will get better. The banks will be worth a lot of money. And they will cash out. And we will be paying higher taxes, we and our children, will be paying higher taxes so those people could have those bonuses. That's not fair. It's not acceptable. It's not even good economics.

BILL MOYERS: Are we chumps?

SIMON JOHNSON: We'll find out. Yes, we may be. Okay. It depends on how we play this politically. It depends on what our political system does. It depends, I think, on the level of reaction. The financial system is playing us for chumps, okay? The bankers think we're chumps. We'll find out. We have leadership that can handle this. We'll find out what they do.

* * *

BILL MOYERS: Geithner says . . . the board of Goldman Sachs, will have to decide [whether to fire Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs]. But aren't we all ipso facto stock holders now?

SIMON JOHNSON: We should certainly have a big say over critical matters like this. Like the CEO. Because, two things. First of all, it's our money that kept these banks in business. Not just the treasury recapitalization money, that's relatively small. It's the financial support provided by the Federal Reserve. Make no mistake about it, if the Federal Reserve hadn't stepped in late September, in dramatic fashion, to prop up organizations like Goldman Sachs, they would be out of business, okay?

It was our money that did that. The Federal Reserve acting on behalf of the American taxpayer. And secondly, Senator Sanders is exactly right. That a CEO, like Lloyd Blankfein, made mistakes, and led his company into deep trouble. Now, other companies are in deeper trouble. His company was in deep trouble and had to be rescued at that moment. It's absolutely the right way to pose the question. And the answer to Senator Sanders' question is, in my opinion, yes. We should change the leadership of these major banks.

BILL MOYERS: And, yet, Secretary Geithner's chief-of-staff is the former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs. How -- serious question -- how do they make a dispassionate judgment about how to deal with Goldman Sachs when they're so intertwined with Goldman Sachs' mindset?

SIMON JOHNSON: I have no idea. Of course, the administration, the new administration, has a lot of rules about lobbying. And they have rules that basically say, I think, as understood the rules, when they were first presented, I was very impressed. They basically said, "We're not going to hire lobbyists into the administration. There has to be some sort of cooling off period."

BILL MOYERS: And the next day Obama exempted a number of people from that very rule that he had just proclaimed.

SIMON JOHNSON: Yes. It's a problem. It's a huge problem.

As always, I urge you to read the entire transcript. And, more importantly, I urge you to come to grips -- intellectually, emotionally, politically -- with the facts that are sitting right in front of you, staring you in the face. Namely, that a small cadre of Washington Insiders is enabling an even smaller Oligarchy of Wall St. Insiders to accomplish one thing, and one thing only: the naked looting of the United States Treasury.

It started last fall with Paulson, Bush, Cheney, Bernanke, and Barney Frank, and it's continuing with Geithner, Bernanke, Larry Sommers, Barney Frank and yes, even Obama.

The Insiders are robbing us blind. And they're laughing at us for letting them do it so brazenly.

Wake up.