'PONZI SCHEME' AT CITI = SUIT SLAMS RUBIN

NY Post ^ | Flasback Dec 4, 2008 | By PAUL THARP

[databoss]

looks like “the most ethical, transparent and humble” administration in history could take on some serious water...wonder if Rahm can get to Israel to avoid extradition

[LomanBill]

Jim,

 

When Citi acquired Argent Mortgage/Ameriquest, it was my understanding the primary target was Argent's Loan Origination platform.

 

That platform was built around EMPOWER, for which Argent had acquired the source-code.

 

Having the source-code enabled modification of EMPOWER.

 

Among the modifications made was the ability to fabricate FICO scores.

 

 

 

 

It is incumbent upon the honorable craftsman

to be aware of whether or not his services are being used

as a means to accomplish evil ends -

and to act accordingly.

 

[gussiefinknottle]

Rubin has always been a crook. Rudy Guiliani tried to go after
him years ago but he left no fingerprints. He is a financial
vampire and helped Clinton cook the books on the economy
until the tech bubble broke. Fortunately for Rubin and Clinton,
they never had to bear any blame. Another player in this is George
Stephanapoulos who received a sweetheart deal on a mortgage he
did not qualify for, by convincing Clinton to let North Carolina
banker, Hugh McColl write the interstate banking law. Rubin, Clinton
McColl and Steph have made out like bandits, while the rest of the country
has suffered. They deserve jail time.

[maggief]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/business/12econ.html

Published: June 12, 2008

Acting quickly after securing his party’s presidential nomination, Barack Obama picked a well-known representative of Bill Clinton’s economic policies as his economic policy director and signaled this week that the major players from the Clinton economics team were now in his camp — starting with Robert E. Rubin.

Senator Obama, Democrat of Illinois, hired Jason Furman, a Harvard-trained economist closely associated with Mr. Rubin, a Wall Street insider who served as President Clinton’s Treasury secretary. ...

(snip)

[LomanBill]

pingski

[Larry381]

Investor-plaintiffs in the suit accuse Citi management of overseeing the repackaging of unmarketable collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that no one wanted - and then reselling them to Citi and hiding the poisonous exposure off the books in shell entities.

Could someone please explain to those of us who are financially dense what exactly are CDO's and what are toxic securities? I've been trying to figure out how these banks becamed embroiled in this situation and I am apparently too clueless to understand it thus far.

[PGalt]

The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means that a small number of financially “powerful” states stand out among all the rest. The extent to which this process is going on may be judged from the statistics on emissions, i.e., the issue of all kinds of securities. - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Thanks for everything, Jim.

[pankot]

Perhaps I over analyzed too much, but it seems that the REAL corruption began with the Clintons and has spread like cancer.

[PGalt]

CDO’s & CDS’s...
here...
http://blog.nationmultimedia.com/print.php?id=5916

[GOPJ]

Before his government service, he spent 26 years at Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs lookd like the liberal epicenter of the whole financial meltdown...

[maggief]

http://www.tdtnews.com/story/2008/11/08/53534

A look at Obama’s economic advisers
by Jim Kuhnhenn Associated Press Copyright
Published: November 8, 2008
As he confronts the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Depression, President-elect Obama has assembled a broad based team of economic advisers though those who stand closest to him tend to be non-ideological pragmatists.

They are drawn from academia and from past administrations, with an emphasis on Clinton-era veterans. Obama also is known to listen to a variety of top business leaders, including Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and billionaire financier Warren Buffett.

Among those in the president-elect’s circle of economic advisers:

ROBERT RUBIN
Rubin is a member of Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board. He was treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999 and is a director of Citigroup. He is considered a fiscal disciplinarian who views long-term deficits as a threat to the economy. Rubin was among those in the Clinton administration who championed legislation passed in 1999 that lifted many regulations over the financial industry and that have now been blamed for some of the current economic problems. In an unusual double bylined Op-ed piece in The New York Times on Monday, Rubin and Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute and also an unofficial Obama adviser, said ideological clashes over fiscal discipline and spending, capital and labor, and free trade and protectionism amounted to “false choices.” They argued for moving past such false choices in such difficult economic times and “toward a balanced pragmatism whose goal is broadly shared prosperity and increased economic security.”

LAWRENCE SUMMERS

...

LAURA D’ANDREA TYSON

...

JASON FURMAN

...

AUSTAN GOOLSBEE

...

PAUL VOLCKER

...

[keepitreal]

I believe the Clinton’s were the downfall of this country. Corruption abounds after them. “Public servants” now leave government and instantly become millionaires. Everyone now parses the language to slip by legally and ethically, and then that scum Bill led our young people to believe that anything goes in the morals department.

[PGalt]

More technical,...here...

http://www.riskglossary.com/link/collateralized_debt_obligation.htm

[raptor29]

“He was Treasury Secretary under Bubba.”

See, that’s one of the keys, because the foundation for this whole financial industry meltdown was laid during the Clinton years, when the money supply was sent sky-rocketing and interest rates were lowered. So everyone got a nice phony financial party for a while, and now we get the hangover.

[maggief]

Sorry, no link available ...

GREENSPAN, RUBIN DIFFER IN TURF WAR OVER BANKS - BEST FRIENDS ARE AT ODDS OVER HOUSE REFORM BILL
St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Thursday, June 18, 1998
Author: Scripps Howard Service
The nation’s most powerful voices on economic policy found themselves in rare discord Wednesday as Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin publicly squared off over legislation to update Depression-era banking laws.

Sitting side by side at the Senate Banking Committee, the two men, known for sharing breakfast and economic views, split over House-passed legislation that squeaked through last month on a 214-213 vote, dimming Senate Banking Chairman Alfonse D’Amato’s hopes of brokering a compromise this year.

Greenspan and Rubin agreed they have a turf war over whether the Treasury or the Fed should be the principal bank regulator in the new world of one-stop financial shopping at conglomerates that offer banking, brokerage accounts, insurance and other services.

But the two insisted that no less is at stake than the safety and soundness of the U.S. financial system in the face of global change.

To Greenspan, a strong supporter of the House bill, it’s “a sound and much-needed framework for launching our financial services industry into the 21st century.”

Greenspan likes the way the House bill requires financial services firms that want to get into other lines of business to form holding companies with separate divisions conducting banking, stock and bond sales and insurance activities.

Under that arrangement, the Fed would be the ultimate overseer of all holding companies, while Treasury would continue to supervise only nationally chartered banks.

And under that arrangement, Greenspan said, banks couldn’t sluice assets from other divisions into banking operations and risk fraying the taxpayer-backed federal deposit insurance safety net for bank accounts of up to $100,000.

But Rubin countered that the House bill is opposed by most of the banking community because it “discriminates against banks and in favor of insurance companies” and would impose the high cost of forming a holding company on small community banks that want to enter other lines of business.

He also noted that the House bill is opposed by leading consumer groups that say it weakens customer protections. It is also opposed by community activists for letting the new generation of global financial conglomerates out from under requirements that they re-invest in the communities where their customers live.

Faced with pending mergers such as the $700 billion combination of Citicorp and Travelers Group, Greenspan insisted that Congress cannot afford to delay action lest the United States lose its competitive advantage. But Rubin called the bill “important but not urgent.”

Congress has tried and failed for 20 years to update the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that tried to create firewalls to keep banks, brokerages and insurers out of each other’s business. Prior versions have passed the Senate, but the House never approved financial service reform legislation until last month.

(snip)

[bray]

Looks like the DNC is in the middle of the storm. What exactly did Bawny Fag’s Banking committee do, besides take bribes?

Pray for America, Our Troops and obama

[Jim Robinson]

I hate wiki, but that deserves it’s own thread:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2191700/posts

[nc28205]

If you have a few minutes, watch this video. It does a fairly good job of explaining cdos, mbs, and the current crisis.

www.crisisofcredit.com

[Ciexyz]

Makes ya wanna puke.

[donaldo]

What’s with all these sleazy scumbags and their sucking up to the Democrat Party? Rubin, Corzine, and Paulson, all previous Goldman Sachs honchos are all left-leaning dingbats. Ever notice that people who earn their money honestly have no sense of shame in being conservative. Through some strange alchemy of time the Democrats have become the slimeball rich guy’s party. Even Warren Buffet sucks up to the fraud Obama. What gives?