Bill Black lays it out: Regulators- fraud. Obama- fraud. Bush and buddies- fraud. Congress- fraud. Wall Street- fraud. Goldman Sachs- fraud. Lobbyists- fraud. Pentagon- fraud. War contractors- fraud. CFTC- fraud. Etcetera ad infinitum.
From Bill Moyers Journal William K. Black on Fraud:
On Thursday, April 22, President Barack Obama made the case for increased regulation of the financial industry in a televised speech at Cooper Union in New York City. It was widely billed as President Obama's chance to harness the momentum behind reforming Wall Street and move forward the bills being considered in the House and Senate. Those measures face stiff opposition from most of the Republican Party and an army of lobbyists from Wall Street who have the ear of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.Bill Moyers last broadcast is going to be next week. You'll be sorely missed Bill. Transcript of the clip below and you can watch the entire interview here.
William K. Black thinks President Obama didn't acknowledge a key component in the financial crisis that the bills before Congress won't address — fraud. A former regulator who helped crack down on massive fraud during the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s, Black tells Bill Moyers on THE JOURNAL that, despite evidence of fraud at the top banks, prosecutions seem far away. "If you go back to the savings and loan debacle, we got more than a thousand felony convictions of the elite. These are not, you know, tellers or something. We today have zero convictions, zero indictments, zero arrests of any of the elite, non-prime lenders that, through their fraud, drove this crisis."
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Read the whole thing here at CrooksAndLiars. (Link to the whole episode there as well as the above link. This is a must see interview.)
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Goldman Sachs E-Mail by Montag Described CDO as ‘Shi**y Deal’
April 26 (Bloomberg) --
Thomas Montag, the former head of sales and trading in the Americas at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., called a set of mortgage-linked investments sold by his firm “one shi**y deal,” according to an excerpt from internal e-mails released today by Senate lawmakers.
The transaction was Timberwolf Ltd., a $1 billion collateralized debt obligation holding pieces of other CDOs, according to a statement today from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The CDO also included optimistic side-bets on the performance of CDOs, or derivatives, in which the firm took the opposite pessimistic side in “many” cases, the panel said.
“Boy that timberwo[l]f was one shi**y deal,” Montag, who is now Bank of America Corp.’s president of global banking and markets, said in a June 22, 2007, e-mail to Daniel Sparks, who ran Goldman Sachs’s mortgage business at the time, according to the panel’s statement. Within five months of Timberwolf’s debut, the CDO had lost 80 percent of its value, and it was liquidated in 2008, according to the panel.
Sales Incentives
Sparks, who left the bank in 2008, in one e-mail urged “personnel working on a potential Korean sale to ‘[g]et ‘er done,’ and sent a mass e-mail to the sales force promising “’ginormous credits’ for selling” the debt, according to Levin’s statement. “A congratulatory e-mail was sent to an employee who sold a number of the securities: ‘Great job … trading us out of our entire Timberwolf Single-A position,’ ” the panel said.
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