Posted on 12/07/2008 9:33:39 PM PST by Attention Surplus Disorder
A new Citigroup scandal is engulfing Robert Rubin and his former disciple Chuck Prince for their roles in an alleged Ponzi-style scheme that's now choking world banking.
Director Rubin and ousted CEO Prince - and their lieutenants over the past five years - are named in a federal lawsuit for an alleged complex cover-up of toxic securities that spread across the globe, wiping out trillions of dollars in their destructive paths.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Let’s watch another RAT coverup be buried because it might hurt the media’s golden boy, osama.
Well, tell you what. The article cites a “federal lawsuit” which is a bit more weighty than “an SEC inquiry”, but I’ll have to use the two word sentence I hate most: “We’ll see”.
I’d be stunned if anything came of this. There won’t be a shred of accountability in government/high finance until those at the pinnacle of the dungheap extract every nickel they possibly can.
Amen! Corrupt rich like Rubin will just get richer because he’s now osama’s advisor.
Not just Rubin. He was always portrayed as a ex-Goldman Sachs genius but he is just a petty crook. The whole Obama gang is. Emmanuel and Gorelnick at Fannie/Freddie. Penny Priztker looting her familiy’s bank and the list goes on.
“...Ponzi-style scheme...”
Citi does it and the feds call it criminal. The feds do it and they call it Social Security.
New York state does it every year.
They call it a “budget”.
I have been one upped!
Rubin is always seen as the Golden Boy, but he and his cohort Sanford Weill got Clinton to sign the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. A few days later, Rubin resigns as Treasury Secretary and joins Citigroup to reap the benefits and to start the whole subprime/derivatives/securities fiasco.
The public needs to understand the truth about what caused this economic mess. Rubin and Clinton changed the rules at Fannie/Freddie giving birth to the caustic subprime loans. Democrats resisted all attempts to regulate and oversee Fannie/Freddie and all efforts to stop the coming trainwreck failed.
LOL!
We have got to get ourselves into the business of politics.
Then everything that is illegal for everyone else becomes legal.
The feds do it and they call it Social Security.
Grand theft is more like it. IIRC the idea was to invest the public’s money in order to cover the future obligations, but the government found it impossible to invest and much more “profitable” to spend the money. Had they indeed invested, at insurance rates, I believe they would have easily covered obligations far into the future.
The public is never going to get it. Too many people have a rich guy vs little guy mentality, and they don’t understand that crooked politicians and their cronies are the real problem. Just look at those workers who took over that factory. They haven’t a clue as to what really caused this whole mess, and I don’t think they care. They here “corporate greed” and they think “rich Republicans”. The level of economic ignorance in the world is amazing.
The SS System was never designed to “invest” in any usual meaning of the word. It was meant to buy US Treasuries only - in other words, it was just feeding the black box of government finance, in other words it is and always was just a tax.
It was NEVER meant to store value to meet future obligations - obligations were to be paid out of current SS collections, i.e., taxes. If the government ever tried to liquidate the “trust fund” it would effectively just be printing money and borrowing it back, just like any other deficit spending. There is no trust fund, thats a fiction.
The idea is actually sound, given a stable population of retirees vs workers; the problems come when the ratio of retirees to workers increases. Unfortunately the idea has this misleading veneer of “investment” over it, which makes it difficult to understand and generates a lot of misdirected rhetoric.
One argument for SS of the sort we have is that a government-run investment system that purchases private assets will eventually end with direct government control of the economy; government-appointed investment managers will be calling the shots in every boardroom, besides working from the outside through regulation.
IRA’s and 401K’s are a way around this, which have been quite successful; but they don’t provide the social insurance functions of SS.
ping
what is required is a republican leader who will shout this out
and not stop. talking points need to be made about this. rudin
has been a crook from the get go. it amazes me that republicans allow themselves to be painted as the party of “big business,” while the dems
are incredible crooks. apparently, robert rubin has always hated rudy guiliani
because when rudy was ag, he knew rubin was a crook and tried but
failed to nail him. of course, rudy has his own problems and conflicts.
There is no trust fund, thats a fiction.
But, but, everyone knows there is a trust fund. After all, that is all the dems can talk about when the subject of SS comes up. Like every time a Republican gets the idea that some type of privatization would be good for America. /sarc
Maybe I should have said, the system SHOULD have been designed to allow private insurance to cover future obligations, under government control. That is until I reviewed this:
One argument for SS of the sort we have is that a government-run investment system that purchases private assets will eventually end with direct government control of the economy;
AAAKK! There must be a better way? What was Chile’s program that got such rave reviews a few years back. Apparently it had holes also, or we would still be hearing about it.
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