The Monster That Ate Wall Street (Newsweek admits the mess began on Clinton's watch)

Newsweek/MSNBC ^ | 9/28/2008 | Matthew Philips

[tobyhill]

They're called "Off-Site Weekends"—rituals of the high-finance world in which teams of bankers gather someplace sunny to blow off steam and celebrate their successes as Masters of the Universe. Think yacht parties, bikini models, $1,000 bottles of Cristal. One 1994 trip by a group of JPMorgan bankers to the tony Boca Raton Resort & Club in Florida has become the stuff of Wall Street legend—though not for the raucous partying (although there was plenty of that, too). Holed up for most of the weekend in a conference room at the pink, Spanish-style resort, the JPMorgan bankers were trying to get their heads around a question as old as banking itself: how do you mitigate your risk when you loan money to someone? By the mid-'90s, JPMorgan's books were loaded with tens of billions of dollars in loans to corporations and foreign governments, and by federal law it had to keep huge amounts of capital in reserve in case any of them went bad. But what if JPMorgan could create a device that would protect it if those loans defaulted, and free up that capital?

[ken21]

wow!

they oughta tell bill o’reilly.

i thought he was going to lose it, and be taken off to a mental hospital friday.

he was so angry that the “right wing” was blaming the clinton administration.

[Pelham]

“What the bankers hit on was a sort of insurance policy: a third party would assume the risk of the debt going sour, and in exchange would receive regular payments from the bank, similar to insurance premiums. JPMorgan would then get to remove the risk from its books and free up the reserves. The scheme was called a ‘credit default swap’,...”

[Tublecane]

O’Reilly is off his meds. If the other talking heads weren’t so worse, his show would be sinking right now. He goes after fat cats and protects “the folks” so often that he’s morphing into a Hitler-esque demagogue.

[ronnie raygun]

WHAT NEWSweak! CAN YOU SAY THAT LOUDER SO obama and the other rats in congress can hear you! You mean it’s not Bushes fault? Oh thats right the congress criminals blamed Bush for not watching the candy store when the rats came in and stole the candy! PARENT/CHILD ISSUES!

[Tublecane]

I meant “weren’t worse,” not “weren’t so worse”.

[tobyhill]

I blame Bush too for not putting an end to the ghetto loans the day he took office. He should have rescinded every letter sent by people in the Clinton administration that forced these lending institutions to provide money to people and companies they knew had no means to pay back.

[hiredhand]

Our opinion of this, and our verdict of NO BAILOUT is soundly based in fact.

First off, there is ample proof that the government facilitated this collapse, and that the banks aggressively pushed high risk mortgages. The stock market gobbled them up, along with Fannie Mae and Freedie Mac. Then, the gas crunch hit, and TOO many of the high risk borrowers defaulted on their loans when they ballooned around third quarter 2005. The loans which were now in the form of securities on Wall Street also lost value accordingly, and here we are now.

As far as we’re concerned, everybody operated “eyes wide open”. The government was implicit for orchestrating a mandate of forced credit to high risk borrowers. The banks are implicit for aggressively pushing the loans. Wall Street is implicit with NO EXCUSE OR COMPLAINT because investing in the stock market carries certain acknowledged risks. The borrowers are implicit because they should have read the terms of the loan!

So our verdict is that Wall Street should TAKE THE LOSS! Hence our mandate of NO BAILOUT!

If they bail this mess out, in any way, shape, or form, we’ll see a run on the banks, followed by hyperinflation, followed by the full brunt of The Great Depression #2, and no amount of money that they print will help after that.

The starting point for this mess, along with a goodly portion of it's history, up to current can be found HERE.

[ridesthemiles]

It started with Jimmah Carter—
Clinton put it on steroids and it really bulked up.

[billhilly]

Bill O’Reilly is a sick, egotistical, raving maniac. He is one of the best examples of how the media have gone into lala land.

FOX is a necessary news outlet, but they all too often try to compete with the worse tendencies of the other cable outlets. Chris Wallace is a case in point.

And that’s my opinion.

[PGalt]

Good article by Matthew Philips. Thanks for posting.

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

[tobyhill]

I know where it started but it's just amazing Newsweek put it on any Democrat administration even if it's the wrong one.

[PGalt]

FOX is a necessary news outlet, but they all too often try to compete with the worse tendencies of the other cable outlets.

We Decide What To Report So That You Can Decide On What WE DEEMED IMPORTANT

The Spin NEVER STOPS Here.

[tobyhill]

You're welcome. It is a good one and amazingly from Newsweek.

[listenhillary]

Bush was pushing getting low income into housing. Speech in 2003 he bragged about an new push with 400+ billion dollars committed to the effort via new funding committed Freddie and Fannie.

He changed his tune later in 2003 when get got a clue that Freddie and Fannie were totally screwed up and he urged reform. It didn’t stop him from crowing about home ownership increase in the USA in his state of the union address.

I can understand where he was coming from as he was trying to get the economy jump started after the 9/11 attacks.

[ventana]

I am thankful that there is a counterpoint to the left, but I wish it was, overall, more Noonenesque. Peggy can be a wee bit of a pontificator, and a bit twee and treacly, but overall, she is sober and rational and balanced. The idiotic playboy bunny babes mouthing the news adds nothing to the national conversation. We need thoughtful people. Brit Hume is great; let’s have more. That would be a real news channel. C’mon Roger, do it because it’s right; not because it’s popular. Have a bit of faith in the American people.

Ah, but that is why the internet, in the end, will trump this game. V’s wife.

[ventana]

Bill is a tool. Golly gee whilikers (trying to be post-vulgar here), the other day I heard him lapse in to New Yawkese. He didn’t say “yuz,” but something incorrect and a lot like that. I thought, “oh know he IS lapsing into Queens bar mode, and Bridey let me have another...” Don’t take me wrong, Irish Catholic here, but Harvard airs worn by a blue collar man IS like lipstick worn by a pig; apologies for that overworked simile. What a pompous yahoo he has furthered in to. V’s wife.

[ventana]

I thought, “oh know he IS lapsing"

I thought, "oh, no he IS lapsing..". V's wife

[crop circles]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tZc8oH—o

[Fred Nerks]

Interesting comment to the Newsweek article:

Posted By: Nowforthetruth @ 09/28/2008 9:09:09 PM

Comment: Here’s the lead of a New York Times story on Sept. 11, 2003: “The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.” [see link below]

McCain said in co-sponsoring the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole.”

What was Barney Frank and fellow Democrats saying at the time of these attempted reforms? According to reports, Representative Barney Frank(D-MA) claimed of the thrifts “These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis, the more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.” Representative Mel Watt (D-NC) added “I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing.” [ See Community Reinvestment Act, second link below w/ history]

The first link below contains a purported list of the top 25 in Congress who got contributions from the folks at Fannie and Freddie. Obama is listed second, after Dodd, even though Obama is just a junior Senator. Obama is followed next by Kerry and then Clinton. The last link describes how some in Congress tried to use the original bailout bill to funnel money to groups like ACORN. See:

http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=16&artnum=1&issue=20080918

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=M2QwNDhkZTg2OGYzZjkzM2E2NDEwM2U5OGVkNTc0YzU=

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E3D6123BF932A2575AC0A9659C8B63

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122247015469280723.html?mod=googlenews_wsj