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Terrific....

Why are US taxpayers on the hook for payments to foreign business concerns?

"The logic of the conspiracy theorists in this regard is, of course, impeccable: Goldman alumnus Josh Bolten runs the White House, while his former boss, Hank Paulson, runs the Treasury. They both speak regularly to former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, now over at Citigroup, who ran Goldman before Paulson and who keeps Paulson and Bolton dangling like puppets on a string. They all supposedly touch base with the heads of the Italian and Canadian central banks—both Goldman alumni—and with Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, ex Goldman. What's more Paulson is now getting his advice on how to handle the crisis from Ken Wilson, the recently retired Goldman partner and financial-institutions M&A banker, who Paulson just recruited to Washington to help him out. Already at Treasury were Goldman alumni Dan Jester, Anthony Ryan, David Nason and Bob Hoyt, the department's general counsel. And—the conspiracy crowd can't help but point out—Neel Kashkari, 35, a former vice-president at Goldman who Paulson recruited as assistant secretary of international affairs in 2006, has just been appointed—by Paulson—to run, on an interim basis, the new $700 billion bailout fund."

~~William Cohan, "Does Goldman Sachs Really Rule the World?" October 2008

“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.”

~~President Andrew Jackson, on the 2nd National Bank

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full list at www.nachumlist.com

Heard the most incredible thing today while watching replay of some of the Senate hearings on AIG - much of AIG’s problems seem to come from the fact that they were writing a lot of “Credit Default Swaps”, which paid big money to those who bought them if any of the mortgage derivatives they held went bust - in other words they were like insurance policies which paid if the deritatives they covered became worthless - when asked by one Senator why they were called “Swaps” and not insurance, the witness replied that if they had been called insurance they would have been regulated like other insurance, which would have meant that AIG would have had to have funds in place to back them up - since they weren’t officially insurance AIG didn’t have to have money to pay off the “Swaps”, and so Mr.and Mrs.Tazpayer are footing the bill - unbelivable scam based purely on semantics......

We have no choice we have to do this or else he doom will come! The Doom!!!!...

I want to choke the spineless idiots that said crap like that.

The two current largest zombie banks -- Citibank and AIG, have no rational chance of survival, short of the government simply pouring cash down their gullets until they are well and truly satiated. These banks have dedicated themselves towards building consumer debt in ever more creative ways. For example, they helped to push for the infamous bankruptcy bill that made it impossible for the struggling middle class to get out from under credit card debts.

As it turns out, that was probably a wonderfully stupid move on their parts. What happens when people can't pay credit card debts, and you pass a law saying they have to, period, no matter what? They don't magically have more money than they did before the law was passed, so something else has to give. Something like, say... their mortgages?

The two current largest zombie banks -- Citibank and AIG, have no rational chance of survival, short of the government simply pouring cash down their gullets until they are well and truly satiated. These banks have dedicated themselves towards building consumer debt in ever more creative ways. For example, they helped to push for the infamous bankruptcy bill that made it impossible for the struggling middle class to get out from under credit card debts.

As it turns out, that was probably a wonderfully stupid move on their parts. What happens when people can't pay credit card debts, and you pass a law saying they have to, period, no matter what? They don't magically have more money than they did before the law was passed, so something else has to give. Something like, say... their mortgages?

AIG needed immediate help from the Federal Reserve and Treasury to prevent a “catastrophic” collapse that would be worse for markets than the demise last year of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., according to a 21-page draft AIG presentation dated Feb. 26, labeled as “strictly confidential” and circulated among federal and state regulators.

“What happens to AIG has the potential to trigger a cascading set of further failures which cannot be stopped except by extraordinary means,’’ said the presentation by New York- based AIG. “Insurance is the oxygen of the free enterprise system. Without the promise of protection against life’s adversities, the fundamentals of capitalism are undermined.’’

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