RollingStone.com: Matt Taibbi | Taibblog Thu 2010-09-23 09:37 EDT

Bob Rubin Cuddles

Matt Taibbi

...No man's behavior looks attractive when he's cheating on his wife, but this little tell-all by a woman who had a sort-of fling with former Goldman chief and Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin is more than unusually embarrassing...The most disgusting (and revealing) part of the story is, to me, this part of Iris Mack's narrative... A multi-multi-millionaire giving a homeless guy a dollar on the way to the Ritz...if that isn't the perfect metaphor for the modern ``Third Way'' Democratic Party, I don't know what is...Bob Rubin's main job at Citi was to hang around and be available for his political connections. His job, as I understand it, was a sort of permanent, ongoing bribe...

Bob Rubin cuddle; com; Matt Taibbi; rollingstone; Taibblog.

Wed 2010-08-04 20:48 EDT

Janet Tavakoli: Stranguflation: Deflation and Inflation Where it Hurts America Most

Janet Tavakoli

The U.S. is suffering from high unemployment combined with too much consumer debt in a weak economy...our bloated financial sector has been sucking the life-blood out of the U.S. economy for years, and recent decisions insure it will continue to feed off taxpayers, while the host economy struggles for life...The bailouts were a perversion of capitalism and the principles upon which The Republic was founded. This was the result of influential interested parties reaching into the U.S. Treasury with no accountability. Capitalism doesn't call for bailouts, instead investors take losses. Shareholders in failed financial institutions should have been wiped out, debt holders would have had to accept discounts combined with debt for equity swaps, and financial institutions would have then been recapitalized without taxpayers footing the bill. Instead banks lobbied for relaxed accounting and ineffective "financial reform." No one, including bank managers, can tell how much capital is truly needed, and taxpayers' ongoing heavy subsidies give these financial institutions the appearance of stability.

deflation; hurting America; Inflation; Janet Tavakoli; Stranguflation.

Fri 2010-07-16 18:36 EDT

Tremble, Banks, Tremble

James K. Galbraith

The financial crisis in America isn't over. It's ongoing, it remains unresolved, and it stands in the way of full economic recovery. The cause, at the deepest level, was a breakdown in the rule of law. And it follows that the first step toward prosperity is to restore the rule of law in the financial sector...

bank; trembling.

Fri 2010-04-09 08:08 EDT

charles hugh smith-The Contrarian Trade of the Decade: the U.S. Dollar

charles hugh smith

The majority of economic observers seem convinced that the dollar is doomed, and not in some distant future...But perhaps this thinking is wrong on virtually every important count...While the Federal Reserve successfully goosed money supply in their massive "quantitative easing" campaign, money supply is no longer expanding at a fast clip...It seems the money "created" by the Federal Reserve and lent to private banks at near-zero interest rates is simply sitting in the banks as reserves to offset their continuing horrendous losses. As a result, it is not flowing into the economy, and thus it cannot trigger inflation...Indeed, as has often been noted by Mish and others, this is what has happened in Japan for the past two decades: the central bank shovels money into private banks, who either engage in "carry trade" activities (borrowing at near-zero interest and then moving the money overseas to earn a decent yield elsewhere for easy profits) or they stash the funds to offset their ongoing losses in defaulted/impaired portfolios...

Charles Hugh Smith; Contrarian Trade; decades; U.S. dollar.

naked capitalism Tue 2010-02-16 16:38 EST

AIG Scandal: Fed as Chump or Fed as Crony?

No matter which way you look at it, the picture that is emerging of the Federal Reserve, as revealed by the ongoing probes into its AIG bailout, is singularly unflattering. The explanations for its actions can only support one of two interpretations: that the Fed was a chump, taken by the financiers, or a crony, and was fully aware that it was not just rescuing AIG, but doing so in an overly generous way so as to assist financial firms in a way it hoped would not be widely noticed or understood...

AIG Scandal; chump; crony; Fed; naked capitalism.

Taibblog Thu 2010-01-07 18:20 EST

Fannie, Freddie, and the New Red and Blue

Matt Taibbi

...what we've learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.

blue; Fannie; Freddie; New red; Taibblog.

naked capitalism Sun 2009-12-13 09:07 EST

Alan Grayson Asks Bernanke for Answers in Latest Retrade of AIG Deal

The ongoing tempest in a teapot about executive compensation at AIG appears to be a bit of Kabuki theater designed to divert attention from the real drama, which is the continuing sweetening of the deal to the troubled insurer...this deal could be considered a faked sale to generate a capital loss for the purposes of injecting Treasury funds into AIG without the consent of Congress.

AIG Deal; Alan Grayson Asks Bernanke; answers; Latest Retrade; naked capitalism.

zero hedge Wed 2009-11-25 11:40 EST

Neil Barofski's AIG Counterparty Payment Report Released; Demands Federal Reserve Transparency

The full SIGTARP report on AIG and its counterparty payments has been released. It contains all you need to know about the NYFED's bailout of Goldman Sachs. We are currently going through the report, and will post our findings as we have them...the most critical conclusion presented by Neil Barofsky: The SIGTARP blasts the Fed's ongoing desire to keep everything hidden and under a layer of opacity, as it keeps on lying to taxpayers that all is fine with the US economy, and urges investors to part with their hard-earned dollars and "invest" in toxic husks of zombie companies, when it knows full well that the entire financial system is constantly on the cusp of yet another collapse, and the market ponzi scheme could collapse at any minute.

Demands Federal Reserve Transparency; Neil Barofski's AIG Counterparty Payment Report Released; Zero Hedge.

naked capitalism Fri 2009-10-23 09:50 EDT

Guest Post: The Ongoing Cover Up of the Truth Behind the Financial Crisis May Lead to Another Crash

George Washington of Washington's Blog

William K. Black -- professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis -- says that that the government's entire strategy now -- as during the S&L crisis -- is to cover up how bad things are (''the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts'')...PhD economist Dean Baker made a similar point, lambasting the Federal Reserve for blowing the bubble, and pointing out that those who caused the disaster are trying to shift the focus as fast as they can...Economist Thomas Palley says that Wall Street also has a vested interest in covering up how bad things are...The media has largely parroted what the White House and Wall Street were saying...One of the foremost experts on structured finance and derivatives -- Janet Tavakoli -- says that rampant fraud and Ponzi schemes caused the financial crisis. University of Texas economics professor James K. Galbraith agrees...Congress woman Marcy Kaptur says that there was rampant fraud leading up to the crash...Black and economist Simon Johnson also state that the banks committed fraud by making loans to people that they knew would default, to make huge profits during the boom, knowing that the taxpayers would bail them out when things went bust.

Crash; Financial Crisis; Guest Post; lead; naked capitalism; Ongoing Cover; truth.

Jesse's Café Américain Thu 2009-10-15 16:38 EDT

Sumitomo Forecasts Dollar to 50 Yen, End of Dollar as Reserve Currency

Jesse

"We can no longer stop the big wave of dollar weakness," said Daisuke Uno at Sumitomo. ...The market is taking the dollar where it should be, where it needs to go. If only countries with obvious pegs and ongoing manipulation to support export mercantilism were also to allow their currencies to float more freely. It is going to kill off global trade. It is the great failure of the WTO and US trade policy to have allowed pegs and overt currency manipulation policies which are de facto tariffs and subsidies on trade.

50 yen; Dollar; ending; Jesse's Café Américain; reserve currency; Sumitomo Forecasts Dollar.

Sun 2009-10-11 18:48 EDT

The Ongoing Plight of the U.S. "Nightcrawler" - Part 2 | zero hedge

We're just as scroomed as we were a year ago--skying stock markets and gold-hating trolls posting "Gold isn't money" notwithstanding. There is absolutey ZERO chance that the Fed raises their Fed Funds Politburo rates, and a ONE HUNDRED PERCENT CERTAINTY that both the Fed and Uncle Sugar MUST continue their monetizations, back stops and being the "lenders, insurers, and market of last resort" for all things credit, but especially the McHousing market where they have multi-trillion fiatsco exposure. So, it is little wonder that the U.S. fiatsco is getting pounded in the currency casino and that people are piling into PMs in droves--even going so far as to DEMAND physical delivery from the corrupt exchanges, even as the jawboning and pie-holing by the Fed Heads and Treasury twerps continues unabated. Because we are still very much in the midst of the "convulsions" of collapse AND the massive monetary and fiscal insanity the Fed and Uncle are undertaking to fight them.

nightcrawlers; Ongoing Plight; Part 2; U.S.; Zero Hedge.

Tue 2008-07-22 00:00 EDT

Jesse's Café Américain: The Failure of the American Financial System

Jesse's Café Américain: The Failure of the American Financial System; Nouriel Roubini on ongoing collapse

American Financial System; failure; Jesse's Café Américain.