GMAC: The scariest zombie (Another Geithner Failure. How many more can we stand anyway?)

Now that Citigroup and AIG are rolling in the bucks, GMAC is looking like the most egregious zombie bank of them all.

A report released Thursday questions the wisdom of the government's decision to spend $17 billion propping up the money-losing maker of car and home loans.

Elizabeth Warren's TARP oversight panel questions Treasury's investment in GMAC. The report, released by the Congressional Oversight Panel, noted that the White House thinks taxpayers will lose at least $6 billion on the GMAC bailout. Two members of the panel projected that losses could reach $10 billion, based on the expected cost of the bailouts of GM and Chrysler.

But that's not the worst of it. Thanks to Treasury's decision to avoid a comprehensive restructuring of the company, pre-bailout shareholders in GMAC -- including private equity firm Cerberus -- could still profit on their investments, the report said.

And while the costs are mounting, the panel, chaired by Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, said it remains unclear what Treasury accomplished by shielding GMAC from bankruptcy.

AUGUST 2009 Taxpayers Face Heavy Losses on Auto Bailout. The Congressional Oversight Panel recommends the Treasury Dept perform a legal analysis for providing TARP funds to (1) GM, (2) Chrysler Motors, (3) their financing arm.

BIGGER QUESTION---WHERE IS THE MONEY? Americans have yet to learn the full extent of official corruption, thievery, schemes and scams involving $TRILLIONS of tax dollars aided and abetted by the dupes on Capitol Hill.

THE WHIFF OF MADOFF J, Ezra Merkin---ousted head of GMAC (GenMotors financing arm)---got a $6 Billion taxpayer bailout---and was also feeding hundreds of millions to jailed money launderer Bernie Madoff from Merkin's four offshore investment vehicles.

BAILOUT SWILLERS Stephen A. Fineberg's private equity firm---Cerberus Capital Management LP--- owns Chrysler Motors. The US Treasury bought a $5 billion stake in GMAC (GM's financing arm), and lent $1 billion to GM. This latest loan is IN ADDITION to the $13.4 billion the US Treasury lent earlier to Merkin's GMAC, and Fineberg's Chrysler.

SWILLING TIMELINE In 2006, GM sold 51% of Merkin's GMAC to Feinberg's private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP (which also owns Chrysler).

HOGGING AT THE PUBLIC TROUGH In May 2004, Feinberg's "private investment group," Cerberus Capital Management, LP became majority owner of IAP Worldwide Services, Inc, one of the US Army’s largest contractors in Iraq. In Afghanistan, Feinberg's IAP runs a drug/addiction center" in Kunduz---Kunduz is the largest opium supplier in the world. BUSY LITTLE BEAVER IAP also provides infrastructure support for the British Ministry of Defence in Kandahar....apart from supporting the US Army in Basra.

BAILED OUT AND STILL SWILLING Stephen A. Feinberg's IAP also serves a broad array of federal clients including the US DOD, NASA, the US Geological Survey, the US Agency for International Development, the IRS, and a variety of other federal agencies.

BACKSTORY GMAC's Merkin and Chrysler's Feinberg paid the Israeli govt $500M to buy Bank Leumi. An “inside” deal not just anybody could get. Bank Leumi looms large in the missing billion dollar bailouts since Israel is the only place in the world where an individual can fly-in, go to a bank with a suitcase full of cash, and nobody asks where they got it, or whether taxes were paid on it.

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REFERENCE Treasury Dept officials have acknowledged that most of the $23 billion provided by the Bush administration is likely to be lost.

Bush should have refused to do it (there was $15B fund already appropriated and committed but unspent - for "greening" of the auto industry - that should have been used) and could help convince the management of both companies to file for prepackaged bankruptcy, which would allow both companies (and maybe Ford, as well) to restructure their debts and union and pension contracts, reorganize and emerge far stronger, without taxpayers losing a dime. Now he is (rightly) being blamed by media and Democrats, who at the time demanded the auto companies bailout, for wasting taxpayers money.............

The report also recommends the department perform a legal analysis of its decision to provide TARP funds to GM and Chrysler, their financing arms and many auto parts suppliers. Some critics say the law creating TARP didn't allow for such funding.

DID YOU KNOW? TARP was not designed to be a pool of money available for bailout of just anything that didn't move, like a couple of bankrupt unionized companies in the automobile industry. It was very specific in its purpose to provide liquidity to frozen banking and financial system and stave off the run on the banks (attack on the financial system, by proxy) and allow the 'netting' of the [frozen] assets on the books of financial institutions, in the aftermath of fall of Lehman Bros and run on trillions of dollars in the money market funds in the consequent "breaking the buck" by Reserve Primary Fund managed by Bruce Bent.

Ezra Merkin Relationships Map (interactive at web site) NOTE: In the Merkin relationship map, Daphne is his sister.

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THE MERKIN STORY J. Ezra Merkin lives in a posh duplex at 740 Park Ave, Manhattan, known as the richest address in NYC. Merkin is the son of the late Hermann Merkin, a lion of Jewish philanthropy who gave millions to help build Yeshiva University, the Fifth Avenue Synagogue, and NYC's Merkin Concert Hall. Merkin's father was a director of the Israel Discount Bank of New York......the bank US investigators investigated for money laundering fraud.

MERKIN BIO Jacob Ezra Merkin (born 1954) is an American money manager, financier, and philanthropist. He served as the Non-executive Chairman of GMAC until his resignation on January 9, 2009, at the insistence of the U.S. government.

He is the general partner of Gabriel Capital LP, a $5 billion family of hedge funds.

On April 6, 2009, Mr. Merkin was charged with civil fraud by the State of New York, for "secretly steering $2.4 billion in client money into Bernard Madoff's Ponzi fraud without their permission."

Merkin is the son of Hermann Merkin, a prominent banker, philanthropist, and author, and Ursula Merkin. He is the brother or Daphne Merkin, a writer. He is married, and the father of four children.

Merkin attended Ramaz, an Upper East Side Modern Orthodox prep school, two yeshivas in Israel, then Columbia University and Harvard Law School.

He briefly worked for the law firm Milbank Tweed. But in the early 1980s he moved on to Wall Street finance, his father’s business, working at a hedge fund run by Alan Slifka, his father's friend.

There he met Joel Greenblatt, who founded Gotham Capital in 1985, where Merkin worked as an analyst until 1988. “It’s very, very difficult for Ezra to make decisions. He worried about the big picture, fretted over allocations. His gift was that he was a world-class salesman. He recognized that many people didn’t have (investment decision) confidence, that if people had confidence in him, then he could give them confidence,” said one money manager who worked with him over the years.

In 1995, he paid $11 million for an apartment at 740 Park Avenue, an 18-room duplex formerly owned by Ron Perelman, a member of his synagogue. In 2003, he began to collect 12 Mark Rothko paintings, the largest private collection in the world, worth an estimated $150 million.

In 1988, Merkin started Gabriel Capital to raise capital, and funnel it to managers in exchange for a fee.

By 1992, Merkin was raising money and co-managing securities with and for Stephen A. Feinberg, a manager whose private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, later bought controlling shares in Chrysler (80%) and GMAC (51%, at a cost of $ 6.4 billion), the financing arm of General Motors.

Merkin invested his funds into Cerberus and its portfolio companies. His Gabriel fund invested $79 million in Chrysler, $66 million in GMAC, and $67 million in Cerberus partnerships, according to year-end statements. On March 30, 2009, it was announced that Cerberus would lose its controlling stake in Chrysler.

Merkin manages Ascot Partners LP, a hedge fund which was valued at $1.8 billion prior to the collapse of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC.

REFERENCE We kept reading and hearing about Ohaha rushing Congress to approve $787 billion stimulus package" early last year. Now uber-Lobbyist Thomas Hale Boggs, Esq interviewed by network news said, "there's $2 TRILLION federal stimulus waiting to be distributed". Boggs said he is getting unprecedented numbers of calls from all over the US......from those who want a piece of it. (Boggs is the son of former Cong Hale Boggs and brother of former ABC-TV commentator Cokie Roberts).

The reality of the Ohaha govt:

Behind The Real Size of the Bailout (Mother Jones reports it's $14 trillion)
Mother Jones | Dec. 21, 2009 / FR Posted January 04, 2010 by E. Pluribus Unum

A guide to the abbreviations, acronyms, and obscure programs that make up the $14 trillion federal bailout of Wall Street.

The price tag for the Wall Street bailout is often put at $700 billion—the size of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. But TARP is just the best known program in an array of more than 30 overseen by Treasury Department and Federal Reserve that have paid out or put aside money to bail out financial firms and inject money into the markets. To get a sense of the size of the real $14 trillion bailout, see our chart here. Below, a guide to the pieces of the puzzle:

Treasury Department bailout programs (controlled by Rahm Emanuel)

Money Market Mutual Fund: In September 2008, the Treasury announced that it would insure the holdings of publicly offered money market mutual funds. According to the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), these guarantees could have potentially cost the federal government more than $3 trillion [PDF].

Public-Private Investment Fund: This joint Treasury-Federal Reserve program bought toxic assets from banks and brokerages—as much as $5 billion of assets per firm. According to SIGTARP, the government's potential exposure from the PPIF is between $500 million and $1 trillion [PDF].

TARP: As part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Treasury has made loans to or investments more than 750 banks and financial institutions. $650 billion has been paid out (not including HAMP; see below). As of December 21, 2009, $117.5 billion of that has been repaid. Government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) stock purchase: The Treasury has bought $200 million in preferred stock from Fannie Mae and another $200 million from Freddie Mac [PDF] to show that they "will remain viable entities critical to the functioning of the housing and mortgage markets." GSE mortgage-backed securities purchase: Under the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, the Treasury may buy mortgage-backed securities from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. According to SIGTARP, these purchases could cost as much as $314 billion [PDF].

--SNIP--- long read

Federal Reserve bailout programs

Commercial Paper Funding Facility: With the support from the Treasury, the Fed established the CPFF in October 2008 to increase the availability of short-term debt (commercial paper) funding. Up to $1.8 trillion [PDF] was earmarked for the program.

Mortgage-backed securities purchase: In 2009, the Fed earmarked up to $1.25 trillion to buy investments based on home loans.

Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility: TALF provides financing to investors who are buying asset-backed securities. In February 2009, the Fed and Treasury announced an expansion of the program to generate up to $1 trillion in new lending.

Foreign Central Bank Currency Liquidity Swaps: The Fed has provided $755 billion [PDF] for currency liquidity swaps with foreign central banks.

--SNIP--- long read

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CIRCA Sept 15, 2009 A SHOCKING DISPLAY OF OBAMA'S THIRST FOR POWER

FOX News' Judge Napolitano notes: if implemented, the unconstitutional proposals Obama urged in his Sept 2009 speech to Wall Street will amount to a final coup d’état by banksters, their technocrats and enforcers, at the Federal Reserve (*the privately-held bankster cartel that masquerades as a government agency). Obama's "reforms" would install a dictatorial regulatory power controlled by international bankers over the entire US economy — down to the local grocer and hot dog vendor on the corner. It will control our lives down to the smallest detail. It will require us to ask permission for the most mundane and routine of financial transactions. IT MUST BE BE RESISTED AT ALL COSTS. VIDEO LINK AVAILABLE Judge Andrew Napolitano On Obama/Bankster Takeover

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