Posted on 03/23/2009 6:16:12 AM PDT by dennisw
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.
I. PATIENT ZERO
The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.
That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."
Doom and gloom ping list-—
I got as far as the short bald managers part and I felt deeply hurt.
I moved on. (Confidentially, I still see Brad Pitt).
Article was removed because language is far from family-friendly.
Secondly, we're also slaves to the world. Billions of welfare checks are sent overseas every year to the very nations that loath us and attack us.
I can't say what wall streets motives are, but I'd love to see the government beast starved to death, and be forced to end most of the social programs. They're wasteful and unnecessary, and no man should be used as another mans slave just so the democrats and world socialists can sleep all day and vote "correctly."
Well worth reading. A real eye opener.
More anti-capitalist drivel for the ignorants.
Would it have been so bad if Goldman and AIG went under?
“forced the banks to make home loans that the borrowers had no way to repay.”
Banks are private entities, how can they be forced?
You can add up everyone of those few bad loans and never come near the hundreds of trillions these financial institutions have lost.
I don’t believe it. We have bancruptcy courts for that. Lehman Brothers is still basically functioning. They didn’t go up in a huge fireball spewing radioactive material to everyone within 50 miles.
“Good banks” would have bought up their good assets and would have become stronger which would have been their reward for practicing good business policies. As it is, they’re being left behind by the “bad banks” who just got massive cash injections. We’ve screwed up the whole system now, and I don’t see it getting better until we fix the flaw we created.
It is a major error to blame this all on the Government. Follow the money and see who made billions wrecking our financial system
Clue—It wasn’t Barney Frank or Chris Dodd. They were bit players
Some of the sliced, diced, pureed assets could have been problematic trying to track them down. The big issue I guess was foreign banks, foreign pensions, foreign governments(?) bought a belly full of this stuff.
Our government was supposed to be regulating them or at least keeping an eye on what they were doing. That didn’t happen and created a world holding the USA by the nads saying, you had better make good on this.
Right, so the real issue is international poltics, not whether or not the free market would have adequately taken care of the problem.
Lehman's toxic assets and derivatives were sold off in a bankruptcy liquidation a few months ago and the total damage was about 4 billion which is pretty cheap in my book
AIG should have been forced into bankruptcy.
But it was bailed out meaning Goldman Sachs (12 billion) and other players like UBS and Deutsche Bank were bailed out
Why are taxpayers bailing out these Wall Street gamblers?
You might want to read section 2 again - The Regulators.
great article
Simple, it's called banking regulations. Bawney's Fwank's specialty. In this case the banking regulations said you had to lend about 50% of your funds to otherwise unqualified borrowers. The new improved by Bill Clinton banking regulations says you cannot ask for proof of job, citizenship or have the borrower list any assets they have.
When the fed lowered the interest rate it all went wild.
The derivatives came from banks trying to unload and spread the risk, since most knew the loans would go bad.
Here is the video form.
The money was being made by the mortgage brokers, hence all the legal actions against same all over the place.
This is Rolling Stone, people. Disregard please.
I know that's hard to believe, but it's true nonetheless.
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