ON THE BIGGEST FINANCIAL HEIST IN HISTORY,
CURRENTLY UNDER WAY

Not just from the US public, but from the world public.

"If you look at the history of the Republic, from the Revolutionary War until about a year or two ago, it took us our entire history to accumulate $12 trillion in debt, and now, literally in a year and a half, we've bestowed the equivalent amount of money on the banks; it's literally like rounding up all the net equity left in the entire country and just transferring it to a small banking sector. That's why I call it a financial coup d'etat." --Catherine Austin Fitts

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

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THE GREAT AMERICAN BUBBLE MACHINE

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Lewis contends that there may be more upheavals to come. He is also shocked that the Treasury, the SEC and other agencies haven’t really begun to investigate what happened in the subprime mess. He says that when he has interviewed numerous executives from financial institutions, such as AIG’s Financial Products division, they tell him that no one from a regulator has come to try to find out exactly what happened. That fact alone, is simply astonishing.

BRADY DECIDES TO GIVE HIMSELF A BONUS

Cracking me up at the moment is the the sight of the American public and its elected officials - who in accordance with the new trickle-up theory have been giving away their descendants' economy - getting rabid over the fact that on the way out of the public bank with their arms full of billions of taxpayer dollars, one of the thieves bent down and picked up a penny off the floor as a bonus. What an outrage! ($165 million / $1.1 trillion = .015%)

So after a long spell of reading all the mind-numbing economic news from the USA, and following deep and responsible consideration - one doesn't approach such issues lightly - I've decided to give myself a bonus, like the guys at the Big Trough in Washington.

I haven't decided yet how big my bonus will be; it's tricky in my case because, unlike the Wall Streeters, I deserve a bonus more than they do, since I'm not rewarding myself for losing other people's money and haven't committed possible malfeasance, plus I care about appearing too greedy. Integrity can hold you back in this kind of situation.

On the other hand, I don't want my bonus to be too small, because once the job withers and after the foreclosure my pension dries up just as medical care blows away in the economic duststorm that's coming - thanks to the unceasing hand-over-fist work of all those folks at the top of the pyramid - I'm gonna need some long-term partytime backup, so I figure a modest 10 million rapidly shrinking dollars should cover the tab till the next bubble.

First, though, I have to incorporate myself as a failing but needy financial entity that has avoided paying taxes for decades. How does CitiBrady, Morgan, Lynch, Gold, Merrill and Sachsman sound? Mind you, this is not a bailout, it's just humble greed. But at least I'm being honest.

*******

The Real AIG Scandal

AIG ... and the Politics of Deflection

The Big Takeover

"People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — 'our partners in the government,' as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers."

***********

One Small Problem...

"When a bank says an asset is worth 60 cents and the market says it's worth 30 cents, someone has to cover that spread. The genius of Geithner's plan is that it pawns most of the cost (and most of the risk) off on the taxpayer without the taxpayer noticing.

But unless the taxpayer gets stuck with the entire spread, which is probably what Geithner is hoping, banks that sell assets will have to take massive writedowns. This will start the whole cycle of violence again."

THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING...

Whatever do they have to hide?
It's not their money...

I notice that the word
"TRUST"
isn't on there anywhere...

The Creature from Jekyll Island...
What's Dead (Short Answer: All of It)...
Fed payouts to OTC derivative winners via their brokers

THE PERFECT HEIST

"We denounce the international and national economists as complete frauds, crooks and liars who have only their own interests at heart and screw you out of your money any way they can.

We denounce the private bankers as a bunch of crooks, liars, scumbags and frauds.

We denounce the international economic institutions to be the instigators of this whole fraud scheme, and we think they should ALL go to jail."

Interesting opinion from The Guatemala News...

PAULSON SAYS "LET THEM EAT CAKE."

"The swindle of American taxpayers is proceeding more or less in broad daylight, as the unwitting voters are preoccupied with the national election. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson agreed to invest $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for Goldman Sachs, his old firm. But, if you look more closely at Paulson's transaction, the taxpayers were taken for a ride--a very expensive ride. They paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5 billion. That means half of the public's money was a straight-out gift to Wall Street, for which taxpayers got nothing in return."

***

"How else to make sense of the bizarre decisions that have governed the allocation of the bail-out money? When the Bush administration announced it would be injecting $250bn into US banks in exchange for equity, the plan was widely referred to as 'partial nationalisation' - a radical measure required to get banks lending again. Henry Paulson, the treasury secretary, had seen the light, we were told, and was following the lead of Gordon Brown.

In fact, there has been no nationalisation, partial or otherwise. American taxpayers have gained no meaningful control over the banks, which is why the banks are free to spend the new money as they wish. At Morgan Stanley, it looks as if much of the windfall will cover this year's bonuses. Citigroup has been hinting it will use its $25bn buying other banks, while John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told analysts: 'At least for the next quarter, it's just going to be a cushion.'"

***

"Goldman Sachs is on course to pay its top City bankers multimillion-pound bonuses - despite asking the U.S. government for an emergency bail-out.

The struggling Wall Street bank has set aside £7billion for salaries and 2008 year-end bonuses, it emerged yesterday.

Each of the firm's 443 partners is on course to pocket an average Christmas bonus of more than £3million.

The size of the pay pool comfortably dwarfs the £6.1billion lifeline which the U.S. government is throwing to Goldman as part of its £430billion bail-out.

As Washington pours money into the bank, the cash will immediately be channelled to Goldman's already well-heeled employees."

***

In the old days, crowds would be heading for Wall Street with pitchforks, tar and feathers!

INTERESTING QUOTES ON THE BAILOUT

"How much inflation has there been? From the signing of the Constitution right up until landing a man on the moon the whole American experience, every house, car, television, freeway, airplane, war... everything, cost one trillion dollars. Then consider that the debt ceiling has been raised 2 1/2 trillion dollars just this last 12 months. Do you see the value in that? Of course not; that is because you didn't get it. The rich bankers and their Wall Street friends that you are now being told you have to bail out got the lot."

--Sam Mathid

"It is just that simple. When the Secretary of the Treasury said it is too complicated and that time was critical and that no one needs to understand all this and that we just needed to give him the biggest blank check ever written in the history of the world and that he would be exempt from all prosecution and his use of these funds was final... I almost burst a blood vessel. The 700 billion dollar fund is just the start. How many times have you heard of a deal gone bad that asks for more money only to come back a while later and say they needed even more; and then more; and then more. Does anyone think it a bit odd that the very man asking for dictatorial power over the finances of these United States was the chairman of Goldman Sachs; one of the largest culprits that got us into this mess and that profited greatly in the process. We, as a country, are being asked to give a known arsonist the keys to the fire truck and then look the other way? We are being told that there is no other option but to give one of the very men who got us into this mess by unrestrained greed a blank check to spend with his cronies to fix the mess... with no oversight... and a get out of jail free card stapled to the check for good measure?"

--Larry LaBorde

"The scheme is actually pretty simple. Please forgive my primitive graphics abilities.
The fund will buy mortgages from the banks at market value, and then re-sell them back to the banks at a discount. The fund will then repurchase those mortgages from the banks, who will sell them back to the fund again. The same product (perhaps an ill-advised mortgage for a half-million dollars taken out on a house in the distant suburbs of Las Vegas) will be bought, then resold, then re-bought and re-resold in an endless spiral of profit-taking. The taxpayer will lose on every transaction, the banks robbing the treasury each time each mortgage, or package of mortgages is swapped.

It is amazing to observe the greatest transfer of wealth in history, from Main Street to Wall Street,from the many to the few. What is even more amazing is that nobody seems to be stopping it."

--breadwithcircus.com

"I was sitting at the table on Saturday night trying to figure out which bills to pay. Times are tough. I owe $25 billion on my GM Visa card and they are bitching about payment. I've been paying the minimum and the bastards just raised my interest rate to 31%. My AIG Master Card is sitting at $85 billion and they want to lower my credit limit. Like where am I supposed to raise enough money to pay that down?

My FDIC Sears card is bumping the limit at $150 billion but I may be able to hold them off for another month. It would be nice to have some money for food this month.

Then my brother-in-law Bill comes over. He's a nice guy but he's a crack addict and hits the bottle and my sister a little hard. But a nice guy at heart.

He hits me up for a loan. How can I turn him down? As I said, he's a nice guy. He needs $700 billion. Or is it trillion? Those numbers are so high I can barely cope with them. He needs $700 billion and he needs it now so he can sort out his crack problem. I can understand that, a crack problem needs sorting out.

'Here,' I say, 'Take my American Express Platinum card and punch it for the $700 billion. They may give you a little bit of a hard time but they know I'm good for it. I pay my bills mostly on time. What's $700 billion between friends?'

I know it's foolish but he really does need help with his crack problem and I want to do everything I can. My friends at American Express are sure to understand."

--Bob Moriarty

"We won the battle. Please remember this is a war."

--Mike Shedlock

And just a side note about caring from above:
"The Bush administration has abruptly halted a program that tests levels of pesticides in fruits, vegetables and other crops, arguing that the $8 million dollar a year program is too expensive."

--greendaily.com

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[October 4]

"Less than two weeks after Uncle Sam gave American International Group (AIG) an $85 billion loan - staving off financial collapse - execs from one of its insurance subsidiaries, AIG American General, gathered for a conference at the uber-swank St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort, billed as “California’s only Mobil Travel Guide Five-Star Resort,” where ocean-view rooms start at $565 a night and “world class luxury” is the rule."

BACK IN THE USSA

Hard to focus these days on the beauty of the autumn... I'll go out into it and take a deep breath, do some physical work right in the midst of all that actual magnificence, as soon as I post this...

Never thought I'd live to see what's going down in the US of late, particularly under what was ostensibly labeled a conservative administration; but then again, since when have political labels actually meant anything... China, the last major bastion of socialism, now looks to be a model of financial wisdom and capitalist probity compared to the US. Karl Popper once said that he knew socialism would fail because its success hinged upon the innate goodness of man. It appears that the same is true of capitalism.

The US taxpayers are now, without their consent or prior notice, the collectively puzzled owners of several (and soon to be more) failed financial services (or is it the other way around), with their neonotional debt limit not a freshly printed and inflationary 700 billion dollars (the figure being bandied about by those who don't want the public to know what's going on just yet beyond the smoke and mirrors), but hundreds (thousands?) of trillions of dollars. Money borrowed by the US government taxpayer from the private banking consortium known as the Federal Reserve, the taxpayers' new hedge fund.

I've always wondered why, if the Federal Reserve is a private corporation, it gets to use the .gov domain; just a little thing that bugged me; a small point, really-- never been so small before, though...

.....

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

---Alexis deTocqueville