Posted on 04/14/2011 8:27:55 PM PDT by Chunga85
No, Fannie and Freddie made that market. They were the conduit and the gatekeepers. Had they not been willing to back those crap mortgages they would never made it into any MBS.
Anybody willing to use their brain could have seen what was going on, and some did get out in time. Everyone wanted a nice return without doing the due diligence, and they got what they got.
In my heart of hearts I believe my sole intention is to serve a common purpose.
Relentlessly.
America's integrity.
Got it.
During a coin toss just call heads and tails.
Leverage both sides and hit the road before the coin hits the ground. No brainer.
You have it right in that overleveraging bad bets was a primary cause of the financial failure of Wall Street. Congress and the regulators should have had leverage caps in place. But Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan and their ilk were on the other side of the bet.They were wrong. Goldman was right in 2008.You are not entitled to your own set of facts. Goldman did not “hit the road” before the bet was over. Goldman made the same bet in 2006 and 2007 but they were long and lost a few billion.None of their trading was criminal or unethical for that matter. But they were all foolhardy in overleveraging.
I guess if he spelled it out in the 640 pages, his claims wouldn’t have been so ignorant.
Very well said.
Btw, Silver is looking at $43 as I type this. It has gone there from around $7 when Urkel was elected. I believe gold was around $700 at that time. Imagine gold at $4300.
Soon you won’t need imagination.
And yeah, they are not all bad, but you nicely covered the situation and the coddling of the crooks.
Talk about betraying their “fiduciary responsibility”! They created the CDOs, sold them to their clients, and secretly, behind their backs, made credit default swaps on the same securities - in an untraceable, unreported market, all trades done by phone between buyer and seller. What’s worse is that there weren’t more than 5% of those loans inside the CDOs that went south - but since they were all packaged together, the 95% that were still paying off had to be written down as well. Then they have sold CDSs with a nominal value up to 600 times worth the face value of the securities!
THEN they went to the Fed and said, “Damn, you’ll have to bail us out. You have to cover all our bad bets with funds from the taxpayers - and if you don’t, we will collapse the entire system. Oh, by the way - don’t tell anyone how this happened. They might lose faith in us and the whole house of cards will collapse.”
So here are all these dumbfounded American suckers - err, *taxpayers* - who suddenly find that their houses, pensions, and investments are all worth zip. Not only that, but they no longer can get credit, and their consumer credit interest rates are 30%. But since they are so clueless, GS and their friends can blame it all on Fannie and Freddie and they’ll fall for it!
So now the Banksters can do it all over again.
Absolutely. BOTH White Houses - Bush and Obama! All I can think is that either they are all part of the conspiracy to defraud, or they are being extorted. “Pay up or the hostage (the entire US economy) gets it.”
The problem for a President is that when guys like Blankfein and Dimon and all the other nameless traders let the economy collapse. it’s no problem for *them.* They live in wealth-created bubbles - whether in Greenwich or Bermuda or some foreign country. All they have to do is get in a private jet and leave. The President is stuck with angry, confused, hurting citizens, who can’t get out of the country and who expect the Federal government to help them out. After all, the Feds helped out the Banksters, and *those* guys apparently don’t consider themselves citizens.
Bring back Glass-Steagall. It worked for 65 years. Deregulation of the financial markets was supposed to make us *all* wealthy and comfortable. It looks like deregulation was part of a Long Con, and we were the marks.
I share your confusion. We claim that wee follow the Founders - then why do we ignore Jefferson on corporations? He detested them:: “I hope we shall crush… in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
http://www.thenation.com/blog/37038/thomas-jefferson-feared-aristocracy-corporations
We talk about the Tea Party - but the original Tea Party was an attack against the East India Company, not against taxes per se. The Tea Act actually placed no new tax on tea. Instead it simply gave a tax break to the East India Tea Company - which made their tea’s price *undercut* the tea being imported by small business owners.
What made the colonists revolt was the unholy, small-business-crushing alliance between the British government and a large, overpowering corporation.
You know, Leftists might attack Big Business, but it seems that some of their critiques are correct. Conservatives - especially the Tea Party - are furious because government has grown so large. But what has made government grow so?
1.) The Defense budget has more than doubled since 2001 - and 65% of it is spent on military contractors. Medicare costs are through the roof - because the money is going to a for-profit health system. *Neither* of these industries has any reason to cut costs, because they are latched onto the teat of Federal financing.
Why couldn’t we form an alliance with all the Democrats and Independents who also share our outrage at how corrupt business practices and government collusion are raping us financially? Once we get these bloodsuckers off our backs, we can always battle them on other grounds. But these two areas - Medicare and Defense - are monsters.
\If we could get the costs associated with these areas under control, we could lower taxes all around.
More power to you!
The question is - what can we do? It seems that the American Conservative movement is being used by these Banksters to attack anyone that might try to restrain them at all. Since the issues themselves are so convoluted, it’s easy to toss out a false explanation (”it’s all the fault of Federal mortgage loans to poor people”) that sounds truthy, and have it swallowed wholesale.
I believe that if Conservatives really knew the extent to which they has been used, robbed, cheated and deceived by these Banksters, they would rise up and vote out *everyone* who is indebted to them. Everyone, both Democrat and Republican, Liberal and Conservative. Party affiliation wouldn’t matter anymore, nor would Tea Party affiliation. An elected official who doesn’t understand how America has been fleeced by these people - or, worse, plays defense for them - should be thrown out on his or her ear.
SEC exempted OTC contracts from being regulated, in other words if parties could come to an agreement then it was a done deal, no oversight involved. Shorting via derivatives was done OTC, also CDS are actually insurance contracts but those too were exempted from insurance authorities and auditors so could be sold but underfunded via OTC.
The scam had to overcome legal hurdles but once avenues were in place, it was off to the races with great commissions on contracts.
I wonder who oversees SEC? Couldn’t be Congress could it? (hypocrisy)
The derivative business is well established and the scam goes on, even growing larger and maybe just moved to Euroland to avoid the latest US scrutiny and spotlight.
Which claims do you consider to be ignorant? It is more likely that you are the one who are ignorant. For example, you do not seem aware of the method that Goldman Sachs used to fleece the buyers of their CDOs. Here’s a great intro to the issue: http://moneymorning.com/2008/09/18/credit-default-swaps/
that 640 pages wasn’t Levin’s explanation - it was all the evidence. The evidence is pretty straightforward. What I can’t understand is why you are so determined to make apologies for these thieves. They utterly betrayed their clients’ fiduciary trust.
Per Jefferson’s comments on corporations: The corporations or chartered companies of the 18th and early 19th centuries bore little resemblance to the modern limited liability corporation. They were usually individually established by act of a legislature and granted to a favored group exemption from the laws that applied to everybody else.
You may consider today’s corporations better or worse than those of Jefferson’s day, but they were certainly not the same thing.
Discovery requests per your RESPA rights.
Upon failure to comply (they won't) file suit. Here are two examples that have yet to be defeated in ANY court.
The fraud doesn't begin with default. That's when it becomes vulnerable to exposure. It begins at origination.
If you are a lawyer good enough to do one of these you'll end up with something like this.
Was appealed to Supreme Court a month ago. Appeal dismissed. Filed Motion to Reconsider, Motion for Relief Denied based on Law of the Case.
The Moll Brief in this first link is 42 pp but makes for an interesting read. The JPMorgue got a good spanking. With so much at stake you know their counsel was not comprised of bench warmers.
The second link is only 8 pages. The judge dared defendant to go federal. They did. They lost. Only one more court to appeal to....the Nine...lol.
They'll settle.
Read them...you will laugh for a few minutes then cry. Your "moral obligation" to pay results in massive "unjust enrichment".
Some people hate this stuff...ping on - ping off...just let me know.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011103180345
It just illustrates how lenders are always bad, and homeowners are innocent victims.
Ping off please,. Thank you.
Jefferson’s arguments against the pseudo-aristocracy of inherited wealth still ring true, however. “Favored group exemption from the laws that applied to everybody else” also exist today in the most blatant form, Otherwise, banks like Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan, Wells Fargo/Wachovia and Citigroup would see their Presidents and Boards of Directors in jail, rather than paying meager fines and trundling along to repeat their crimes.
http://www.truth-out.org/goldman-sachs-and-executive-charged-fraud/1302937200
Take care and enjoy !
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