Financial Crisis: The Greatest Hits
by Morgan Housel - The Motley Fool"We conclude this financial crisis was avoidable," says the official report from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, released yesterday. "The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire."
The committee's report, two years in the making, is a 623-page tome of everything you could ever want to know about the financial crisis. Most of it is dry repetition of standard stuff reported ad nauseum over the past three years: Housing prices went up. Banks were idiots. The bubble popped. Hell broke loose.
But a few quotes caught my attention. Hopefully they will catch yours, too.
On regulation: We do not accept the view that regulators lacked the power to protect the financial system. They had ample power in many arenas and they chose not to use it. To give just three examples: the Securities and Exchange Commission could have required more capital and halted risky practices at the big investment banks. It did not. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other regulators could have clamped down on Citigroup's excesses in the run-up to the crisis. They did not. Policy makers and regulators could have stopped the runaway mortgage securitization train. They did not.
. . . .
On Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) riding the AIG (NYSE: AIG) bailout train: Goldman also produced documents to the FCIC that showed it received $3.4 billion from AIG related to credit default swaps on CDOs that were not part of Maiden Lane III. Of that $3.4 billion, $1.9 billion was received after, and thus made possible by, the federal bailout of AIG. And most -- $2.9 billion -- of the total was for proprietary trades (that is, trades made solely for Goldman's benefit rather than on behalf of a client) largely relating to Goldman's Abacus CDOs. Thus, unlike the $14 billion received from AIG on trades in which Goldman owed the money to its own counterparties, this $2.9 billion was retained by Goldman.
Read the entire article here
5 COMMENTS:
HOW MANY AVERAGE HOMEOWNERS WERE ACTUALLY HELPED?
THIS IS NAUSEATING!!
THE PERFECT BAILOUT: Fannie And Freddie Now Send Taxpayer Cash Directly To Wall Street
How does this bailout work?
Fannie and Freddie got a "blank check" from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner at the end of the financial crisis. This blank check allows the housing giants to lose as much money as they want, with the taxpayer footing the bill.
Fannie and Freddie use much of this money to buy mortgages from Wall Street at what may be grossly inflated prices. This is a super arrangement for the banks, because they get to unload all their terrible mortgages at prices that won't produce losses. And it's fine for Fannie and Freddie because, well, because they have the blank check.
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/the-perfect-bailout-fannie-and-freddie-now-send-taxpayer-cash-directly-to-wall-street-535882.html
Do people even have a clue how bad the acceptance of these practices are to the mores of our society over the long term?
A Tale Of Outright Fraud From An Ex-Member Of Citi's Corporate Derivatives Team
Zero Hedge has long claimed that the best stories of Wall Street fraud and corruption come from disenchanted former insiders of the very firms that in 2010 were paid a record $135 billion in compensation. And while we spend day after day chronicling what to other more normal banana republics would seem to be unprecedented criminal activity south of Canal street (and let's not forget the Park Ave corridor), we are always delighted when an ex-insider discovers their conscience and discloses all the massive fraud they and their coworkers engaged in "once upon a time" especially on Over the Counter desks - the same place where firms such as Goldman Sachs dominate all trading. Today's story from Omar Rosen on Citigroup's corporate derivatives team is just such a blatant example. If America had anything even remotely resembling a fair and honest enforcement arm in its regulatory body, this disclosure would be enough to shut down the entire Citigroup derivatives team. As it stands, the firm will probably not even have to pay a fine, without either having to admit or denying guilt.
If a client requested verification of our pricing, we volunteered to fax a time-stamped printout of market data from when the trade was executed. One person talked to the client on the phone while another stood by the computer and repeatedly hit print. The printouts were sorted, and the one showing the most profitable rate for the bank was faxed to the client, regardless of which rate was actually transacted. If a rate for the client’s specific trade was not on the printout, we might create rigged conversion spreadsheets for them to use in conjunction with the printout.
And if Citi was doing it, you can bet that Goldman, JPM, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, UBS, Credit Suisse, Bank of America, and everyone else was doing it... all in the "privacy" of their own prop/flow trader-commingled, football field-sized trading floors.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/tale-outright-fraud-ex-member-citis-corporate-derivatives-team
Croesus Watch: Banker Pay Levitates to New Highs
My pet joke from the dot bomb era scandals is now looking a bit tired:
If you steal $1000 from the local convenience store, you go to jail for ten years. If you steal $100 million, you get called before Congress and get called bad names for ten minutes.
You need to add at least another zero to the amount you need to steal before Congress can even be bothered to take notice.
Seriously, thought, this is just continued looting. The profits the banking industry is showing is heavily dependent on government subsidies: super low interest rates, regulatory forbearance, and its kissing cousin, dubious accounting (for instance, a lot of banks have been underreserving). So these are not in any normal sense private sector profits, yet we allow the banking industry to maintain that they are and pay a ton of these fictive returns out rather than retaining them to bolster their equity bases.
The best methods to induce a real change in values would be criminal prosecutions, barring lesser miscreants from the industry for life (and we don’t mean young insider traders, but business unit managers for more complex abuses), and measures that come closer to approximating unlimited liability, like clawbacks (if someone who leaves his firm with a big hole in its balance sheet can have pretty much all of his tangible wealth seized, that might focus a few minds).
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/02/croesus-watch-banker-pay-levitates-to-new-highs.html
Maybe they'll reap what they sowed??
Gerald Celente
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2011/2/3_Gerald_Celente.html
Goldman Sachs should do business with SAM in the case the latter keep using RepRisk.
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