Revolt of the Rich:Our financial elites are the new secessionists.

This article is a MUST read

It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens.”

That was only the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.

At the end of the Cold War many writers predicted

Goldman Sachs's Emergency Loans From Fed Surpassed $24 Billion Amid Crisis

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-01/goldman-sachs-emergency-fed-loans-topped-24-billion-in-crisis.html

Did the SEC change the rules again and I missed it?
What's up with Sachs not reporting these loans?
It's a standard requirement.
God man how many veins where they tappin "us" from?



Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which rebounded from the financial crisis to post record profit last year, was a regular borrower from two emergency Federal Reserve programs in 2008 and early 2009, new data show.

The firm borrowed from the Fed’s Term Securities Lending Facility most weeks from March 2008 through April 2009, data released by the Fed today show. At the peak, Goldman Sachs borrowed $24.2 billion on Oct. 15, which included $18 billion for the firm’s U.S. broker-dealer and $6.2 billion for the firm’s London division, the data show.

In its quarterly filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Goldman Sachs didn’t disclose that it borrowed from the PDCF.

The firm also borrowed from the Term Securities Lending Facility, which offered longer-term funding than the PDCF’s overnight loans

The two largest TSLF loans to Goldman Sachs were $7.5 billion on Dec. 4, 2008, and the same amount on Dec. 31, 2008, the data show.

The firm also didn’t disclose its TSLF borrowing in its quarterly SEC filings, although it provided data on its borrowing to the U.S. Treasury.

Goldman In Insider Trading Probe?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/matt-taibbi/blogs/TaibbiData_May2010/236328/83512

Me thinks it's time to shut the market down and do a major anal probe.
Does the FBI mean it will be prison time instead of the customary charitable contribution to the SEC?
One can only hope so!

News leaked out today that the feds will soon be herding a whole pen full of Wall Street firms into court on insider trading charges, including, reportedly, our old friends Goldman, Sachs.

The basic charge here is that investment banks and other firms were leaking insider info about things like mergers to closely-allied hedge funds, who in turn placed the requisite bets on or against the companies in question.

The most interesting detail in the WSJ piece, to me, was a bit about an email sent by one John Kinnucan, a principal at an Oregon-based company called Broadband Research, to a number of his clients. The email reads, in part, as follows:

"Today two fresh faced eager beavers from the FBI

Ackermann's Deutsche Bank Follies:Chickens Come Home To Roost By F. William Engdahl

http://www.rense.com/general92/bankc.htm


Oh My God!
A massive load of shit just hit the fan.
And just when you thought the Investment Banking World got boring, the bag of shit that it is just split wide open. Oh My God what a mess.
They not only eat their own, they set them up for dinner!
I hear the chain gang calling out on this one kids.
Investment Banks busted dead to rights

The earlier filing of fraud charges against Wall Street banking titan Goldman Sachs by the US Government Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was only the tip of a huge fraud iceberg. Now a US mortgage insurer has charged one of the most aggressive banks involved in the US subprime mortgage scam of fraud. The bank is none other than Deutsche Bank. This case is also likely to be just the "tip of a very big iceberg."

Since he left his post as president of the Swiss-US Credit Suisse bank to go to Deutsche Bank, Swiss banker Josef Ackermann has focused on making the premier German bank into an imitation of the major Wall Street banks. It seems he has succeeded only too well.

Assured Guaranty Ltd., owner of Assured Guaranty Mortgage Insurance Company of New York has sued affiliates of Deutsche Bank AG over $312 million of mortgage-backed securities (MBS), the controversial bonds that the bond insurer guaranteed and says were "plagued by rampant fraud and misrepresentations." Assured Guaranty is asking a judge to force Deutsche Bank to repurchase the loans, on which the insurer has already paid almost $60 million in loss claims with potential for tens of millions of dollars more. The suit was filed in New York State Supreme Court against DB Structured Products Inc. and ACE Securities Corp. The bond insurer, backed by billionaire Wilbur Ross, is also seeking reimbursement for the claims paid and for future losses. This is major.

US veteran who killed unarmed Iraqis wins Tea Party support

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/26/us-veteran-killed-iraqis-tea-party

This war hero worked for Goldman Sachs.
They enjoy premeditated thrill killing to.
Riddle me this
Why on earth would the Tea party want another Goldman Sachs operative in office? Or do they even know?
The dude is a justified sociopath

The basic facts are undisputed: on 15 April 2004 Ilario Pantano, then a second lieutenant with the US marines, stopped and detained two Iraqi men in a car near Falluja. The Iraqis were unarmed and the car found to be empty of weapons.

Pantano ordered the two men to search the car for a second time and then, with no other US soldiers in view, unloaded a magazine of his M16A4 automatic rifle into them, before reloading and blasting a second magazine at them – some 60 rounds in total.

Over the corpses, he left a placard inscribed with the marine motto: "No better friend, No worse enemy."

With the help of the right-wing Tea Party movement, and with the benefit of his image as a war hero acquired from what happened on that fateful day in 2004, he has raised almost $1m (£630,000) in donations and is now level-pegging with his Democratic opponent, Mike McIntyre.

Pantano is one of the new breed of hardline Republicans thrown up by the turmoil of the economic meltdown and the ensuing Tea Party explosion. He served in the first Gulf war, then worked for Goldman Sachs before rejoining the marines days after the 9/11 attacks.

Here We Go Again..... Dollar Debasement

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=170185

Now do you believe your government has absolutely no control over the banks and the Federal Reserve?
They will have made a conscious decision to just let you starve, by allowing the FED to cater to Goldman's needs.
And they are needs, the banks need to get those unstable assets that they didn't really commit to the MBS investors out of their hair.
The FED itself is demanding that the banks buy them back because they're not a legally sound material as well as go against the written rules of the being eligible to be considered a viable MBS.
Goldman wants the FED to buy away their Fraud and embezzlement charges, in an out of sight out of mind kind of way.
From the President on down, they continue on with the false story of "there's really no problem here" when the fraud and embezzlement is so blatant that the banks themselves are admitting to it in sworn statements to the court.
It's past time to take our country back from these criminals.

Goldman came out with a report basically demanding (you know how these guys are) $4 trillion in money printing - so says the FX chatter and Zerohedge.

The result? The dollar took an instant header, down more than a 1/2% this evening alone.

How about the price of some of the things sensitive to threats of monetary debasement? These are all price changes since the futures started trading this evening - that is, they're six hour changes in price. These are all things you need to buy, either directly or indirectly.

Oil, up 1%.

Wheat, up 1.49%.

Corn, up 2.05%. (Oh yeah, and ethanol on your gas will soon be mandated to be 15%, not 10%.)

Soy, up 1.5%.

Rough Rice, up 1.51%.

Oats, up a stunning 4.27% (!)

Cotton is lock-limit up 500 ticks. To be fair there's a crop disruption related to Cotton, which is adding to the problem. Dollar debasement, of course, isn't helping.

Remember, these are all soft commodities we produce right here at home. These aren't import prices, they're home-grown products (excepting oil, of course.)

And they're moving - at anywhere from double to eight times the devaluation in the dollar.

The stock futures, of course, are skyrocketing, with the Dow futures up nearly 100 points. After all, everyone loves the market impact of you going broke trying to buy food - especially if you're not rich, and most of America isn't.

This is all quite impressive. And what's even more impressive is that Bernanke and our government will, of course, claim that there is "no inflation", because they don't count the rise in the price of food or energy - even though every person in America has to buy those things.

Bernanke's "inflation target" of 2% a year was just met - literally - in less than six hours.

But don't expect him to stop.

He's will do this every day for the rest of the year, and into next year.

He won't stop unless someone removes him from office.

And there is no indication that anyone is going to do that.

Remember, both the Republicans and Democrats love Ben Bernanke. Obama renominated him and both Republicans and Democrats have lauded him for allegedly "saving us from a second Depression" - even though it is now clear that he knew what the banks were doing and he lied to both Congress and The American People about it.

That is, the truth is that he helped the banks CAUSE the Depression we are in right now. In a just world and a nation of laws he'd be serving a life sentence breaking rocks.

We don't live in that world, and if you're not wealthy, you're screwed - on purpose - by these very people.

All you can do, America, is bend over and a find a stick for your teeth.

The "Nothingburger" Defense Gets Destroyed

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=168629

If there was a pool of money to dip from, that wasn't the banks, then how did the bank itself, make you a loan?
The simple answer is, is that they didn't.
They took the property deed and registered it in the pool and then took the cash out and gave it to you, but they did not make you a loan. Not with their own money anyway they didn't.
Which is why they didn't give a damn who they gave the loans to, because they were never responsible for the out come.
They didn't register the loan with MERS, they registered the deed, and that's a big difference.
There is NO existing paper work on the loan.
That was proved in the deposition of TAMMIE LOU KAPUSTA
What little information there was came out of Guam or the Philippines.
They had to use other people SS#'s to run Military checks to see if the person was in the military to be able to serve them with papers if they couldn't find them to do so.
A judge kicked back their filings for foreclosure because they hadn't done a full search for the person to be served.
If there were actually loan documents the SS# would have been on them, so there would have been no need to commit a further act of fraud by using someone else's SS#.
There is no way, shape, or form, that this situation can be unwound, because the documentation is just not there to do it.
Not legally anyway.
That's why it's actually mortgage-gate, it started there, and wasn't found out until foreclosure-gate brought it out in the open for the public's eye.
Bernie Madoff is going to have some very elite company.

This is NOT a "minor clerical error."

It is NOT correctable at this point in time.

These securities are FATALLY DEFECTIVE. The parties with the legal duty to check these facts did not do so.

It gets worse.

Most people don't understand that these securities were (and are) typically "sold forward."

That is, the bank doesn't take its own money, loan it to homebuyers, and then take the notes and securitize them, selling the pieces to recover its money.

No, what happened then (and still does today) is that these MBS are sold first and filled after!

That is, a pension fund calls up Vampire Squid Bank and says "I need $100 million of MBS that pay a 5% coupon."

Vampire Squid Bank takes the $100 million dollars and then proceeds to securitize loans.

But in doing so it took the $100 million on a prospective pooling and servicing agreement in which they agreed to provide loans of a certain credit quality and specification to the buyer.

So it's much worse than "we didn't know." It's "we took the money, then we build the security and didn't look, even though we told you we would."

There's no fix for this without something like an RTC structure.

Janet Tavakoli: This is the biggest fraud in the history of the capital markets. And it’s not something that happened last week. It happened when these loans were originated, in some cases years ago. Loans have representations and warranties that have to be met. In the past, you had a certain period of time, 60 to 90 days, where you sort through these loans and, if they’re bad, you kick them back. If the documentation wasn’t correct, you’d kick it back. If you found the incomes of the buyers had been overstated, or the houses had been appraised at twice their worth, you’d kick it back. But that didn’t happen here. And it turned out there were loan files that were missing required documentation. Part of putting the deal together is that the securitization professional, and in this case that’s banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, has to watch for this stuff. It’s called perfecting the security interest, and it’s not optional.

Warren Buffett says in future Wall Street chiefs should go broke - and their wives

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8044789/Warren-Buffett-says-in-future-Wall-Street-chiefs-should-go-broke-and-their-wives.html

Here's hoping Warren feels the same way about going broke, when Bershire has to eat all of those Wells foreclosures.

"People have a propensity to gamble, and it gets made easier and easier for them," Mr Buffett told a conference in Washington DC yesterday. "One of the problems we still have is we have unbalanced incentives for managers of huge financial institutions."

In future, chief executives of banks who need government assistance should "go broke", said Mr Buffett. Their wives "should go broke, too", he added

Mr Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway, is a major investor in American banks, with a stake in Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo.

Janet: You're So Close....

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=168266

Here's Karl doing what Karl does, making sure that YOU can see how the pieces tie in together. This house of cards is crumbling fast.

As Janet Tavakoli notes over at Huffington Post:

Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg, a German state-owned bank, is suing Goldman Sachs over a $37 million loss on its investment in its share (a tranche) of a CDO called Davis Square VI. TCW, the manager for all of Goldman Sach's Davis Square deals, is also being sued:

"Goldman knew at the highest levels of its organization that its representations to LBBW Luxemburg that the notes merited triple-A ratings and were high grade were blatantly false," the Stuttgart-based bank said. "Goldman committed fraud and, or, was negligent in marketing and selling the notes to LBBW Luxemburg."
Right.

Now, who knew that the REMICs and MBS being put together (which were the foundation for all these CDOs, CDO^2s and other hinky crap) were not "high grade" and did not merit "AAA" ratings?

How many notes were actually not conveyed but rather are sitting in an originator's warehouse, were shredded, or were shipped overseas? This, incidentally, is why we have a mess with foreclosures right now - the servicers don't have the notes (properly endorsed) with which to file their forelosures, despite the pooling and servicing agreements saying they will and do, or they'd just file the actual "wet signature" notes bearing those endorsements.

Why would the originators fail to properly convey all this stuff?

Was it pure laziness in the "go-go" years or something more?

Well, consider this one Janet (and everyone else).....

You can't audit what you don't have, can you?

PS: This is not intended to be "snarky"; yes, I'm aware you've been hollering on this in various professional venues. But until it makes the mainstream press in a cogent form such that the essence of how this happened and is STILL being covered up is laid out in a form that the common man can understand, and why he should care - such as what's now happening where people's homes are literally being stolen, we cannot hope to have anything done about it.

Time to Investigate Blankfein and Paulson (More AIG Shenanigans Edition)

Time to Investigate Blankfein and Paulson (More AIG Shenanigans Edition)

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/06/30/time-to-investigate-blankfein-and-paulson-more-aig-shenanigans-edition/

Those CDO's that blew up, were filled with MERS recorded mortgage contacts.
Now just how will the current day mortgage drama with MERS affect the sorted dealings of what now be seen for what it actually was.
The covering up of a mass ponzi scheme that had become exposed.
It's time to take another look at the crime that Congress, the Treasury and the FED all aided to cover up for the mortgage banking industry.
I think it's time "WE" all take a new look at an old problem with fresh eyes.






The New York Times has unearthed a damning tidbit about the bailout of AIG:

When the government began rescuing it from collapse in the fall of 2008 with what has become a $182 billion lifeline, A.I.G. was required to forfeit its right to sue several banks — including Goldman, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch — over any irregularities with most of the mortgage securities it insured in the precrisis years.

Yves here. How one reacts to this depends in no small measure as to how one views the salvage operation. For all intents and purposes, the rescue of AIG was merely a way to save the banks; the credit default swaps had been too big a source of faux capital (for US firms, via risk-dumping, and for Eurobanks, as part of a regulatory arbitrage) to let the insurer go. So any effort by the officialdom to aid the banks, most notably by paying out 100% on credit default swap exposures (which had already been written down by counterparties to less than par) was simply an effort to funnel more cash to the banks. Since we’ve had massive backdoor bailout mechanisms in addition to the overt ones, this orientation should come as no surprise.

But then we get to the funny business. Why a broad waiver? Why shouldn’t AIG (and by extension, taxpayers) not recover in the event of fraud? And we turn again to the ambiguous standing of AIG. By all rights, it ought to be owned by the government. The reason it isn’t is that we don’t do nationalization in America, and full ownership would require AIG’s debts to be consolidated with government debt. So another way to read this requirement is that the Fed and Treasury were opposed to having fraud at the banks exposed, period.

That is a very troubling stance for bank regulators to take. And experts agreed:

“Even if it turns out that it would be a hard suit to win, just the gesture of requiring A.I.G. to scrap its ability to sue is outrageous,” said David Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “The defense may be that the banking system was in trouble, and we couldn’t afford to destabilize it anymore, but that just strikes me as really going overboard.”

“This really suggests they had myopia and they were looking at it entirely through the perspective of the banks,” Mr. Skeel said.

Yves here. Also note that the banks mentioned by the Times account for a significant proportion of the Maiden Lane III exposures (the $62.9 billion CDO portfolio; note this does not include all CDO guarantees assumed by the Federal Reserve; seven Goldman Abacus trades stayed with AIG and were salvaged via credit extensions to AIG). An analysis by Tom Adams and Andrew Dittmer showed the significance of Merrill, Goldman, and SocGen (percentages based on par amount):

1. Merrill as both packager and counterparty 7.7%

Goldman reveals where bailout cash went

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/banking/2010-07-24-goldman-bailout-cash_N.htm
By Karen Mracek and Thomas Beaumont, Des Moines Register

It's enough to make you sick.

Goldman Sachs sent $4.3 billion in federal tax money to 32 entities, including many overseas banks, hedge funds and pensions, according to information made public Friday night.
"We thought originally we were bailing out AIG. Then later on ... we learned that the money flowed through AIG to a few big banks, and now we know that the money went from these few big banks to dozens of financial institutions all around the world."

Grassley said he was reserving judgment on the appropriateness of U.S. taxpayer money ending up overseas until he learns more about the 32 entities.

Goldman Sachs (GS) received $5.55 billion from the government in fall of 2008 as payment for then-worthless securities it held in AIG. Goldman had already hedged its risk that the securities would go bad. It had entered into agreements to spread the risk with the 32 entities named in Friday's report.

Overall, Goldman Sachs received a $12.9 billion payout from the government's bailout of AIG, which was at one time the world's largest insurance company.

Goldman Sachs also revealed to the Senate Finance Committee that it would have received $2.3 billion if AIG had gone under. Other large financial institutions, such as Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, sold Goldman Sachs protection in the case of AIG's collapse. Those institutions did not have to pay Goldman Sachs after the government stepped in with tax money.

Goldman had not disclosed the names of the counterparties it paid in late 2008 until Friday, despite repeated requests from Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel.

"I think we didn't get the information because they consider it very embarrassing," Grassley said, "and they ought to consider it very embarrassing."

Congress OKs Wall St. crackdown, consumer guards

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_financial_overhaul;_ylt=AurfNYgWXRUmAoGwT3cReVKs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNsNWpwZWpsBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwNzE1L3VzX2ZpbmFuY2lhbF9vdmVyaGF1bARjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzEEcG9zAzIEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA3NlbmF0ZWNsZWFycw--

What a Party joke and Goldman is the punch line.
What's the point of all those Senate hearings if they never hear a thing.
It's just another massive waste of time and money to make it look like the Senate is actually doing something besides parting on the taxpayers dime.

A year in the making and 22 months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered a worldwide panic in credit and other markets, the bill cleared its final hurdle with a 60-39 Senate vote. It now goes to the White House for President Barack Obama's signature, expected as early as Wednesday.

The law will give the government new powers to break up companies that threaten the economy, create a new agency to guard consumers in their financial transactions and shine a light into shadow financial markets that escaped the oversight of regulators. The vote came on the same day that Goldman Sachs & Co. agreed to pay a record $550 million to settle charges that it misled buyers of mortgage-related investments.

S.E.C. Settling Its Complaints With Goldman

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/business/16goldman.html?_r=1&ref=global-home


If approved by a Federal Judge, Goldman gets off the hook for fraud for a paltry little sum.
America THIS is unacceptable.
Fraud is fraud on any level,and should not be considered just a piss poor business practice that can be made to disappear by making a cash contribution to the SEC.
They make Federal prisons for the crap that Goldman was practicing.
The allowance of a payoff with just a fine for committing fraud in itself makes our whole Justice system nothing more than a joke.
Don't accept this garbage as a solution for the answering of fraud.
This option would not be given to you!



WASHINGTON — Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay $550 million to settle federal claims that it misled investors in a subprime mortgage product as the housing market began to collapse, officials said Thursday.


S.E.C. Accuses Goldman of Fraud in Housing Deal (April 17, 2010)

If approved by a federal judge in Manhattan, the settlement would rank among the largest in the 76-year history of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but it would represent only a small financial dent for Goldman, which reported $13.39 billion in profit last year.

News of the settlement sent Goldman’s shares 5 percent higher in after-hours trading,

Goldman lied

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/29/96779/goldman-admits-it-had-bigger-role.html#ixzz0sMNx7tIe

Oh what the heck it's only a case of perjury, if we can overlook money laundering for the Mexican drug cartels, this shouldn't even register on the attention scale.


Reversing its oft-repeated position that it was acting only on behalf of its clients in its exotic dealings with the American International Group, Goldman Sachs now says that it also used its own money to make secret wagers against the U.S. housing market.

A senior Goldman executive disclosed the "bilateral" wagers on subprime mortgages in an interview with McClatchy, marking the first time that the Wall Street titan has conceded that its dealings with troubled insurer AIG went far beyond acting as an "intermediary" responding to its clients' demands



Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/29/96779/goldman-admits-it-had-bigger-role.html#ixzz0sOz7cnkO

Finance Panel Accuses Goldman of Stalling

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703303904575292530057313818.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection

It would seem none of the big boys feels to comfortable playing the game of "Show and Tell"

A commission probing the financial crisis denounced Goldman Sachs Group Inc., saying the firm first dragged its feet over requests for information then dumped hundreds of millions of pages of documents on the panel.

Commission chairman Philip Angelides last week.
.The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission issued a subpoena to Goldman, demanding that the firm provide a key for identifying customer names and a way of matching up specific documents to the commission's requests for information. The subpoena also demanded documents concerning Goldman's mortgage-backed derivative securities, which are central in current federal probes of the firm.

Goldman joins FCIC's dirty dozen

http://wallstreet.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/06/07/goldman-joins-fcics-dirty-dozen/?source=yahoo_quote

First Warren now Goldman.
Why the non-compliance?
Just exactly what is it that they have to hide?
Or is it the simple fact that they think they are to important to have to be questioned for their actions?


The firm is the proud recipient of one of just 12 subpoenas issued by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission since its creation last year

The FCIC, the congressionally-appointed body charged with assembling an authoritative explanation for the financial meltdown by year-end, said Monday that it subpoenaed Goldman Sachs (GS) "for failing to comply with a request for documents and interviews in a timely manner."

Goldman Sachs and the Obama government

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/46267

Who really runs America?

This essay shows the pervasive influence of Goldman Sachs and its units (like the Goldman-Robert Rubin-funded Hamilton Project embedded in the Brookings Institution) in the Obama government. These names are in addition to those compiled on an older such list and published here at FDL. In the future, I will combine the names here and those on the earlier article but I urge readers to look at the earlier list too (links below). Combined, this is the largest and most comprehensive list of such ties yet published.

For readability and clarity, I have NOT included many of the details and links that are found in the earlier article so as to make this one less repetitive and easier to read. So, if you want more documentation, please look at my earlier diary here at Firedoglake called "A List of Goldman Sachs People in the Obama Government: Names Attached To The Giant Squid’s Tentacles" published on April 27, 2010

Goldman Joins Race to Save Chicago Bank

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703950804575242772016889464.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection

Lol is this Goldman's attempt at philanthrope?......LOL yeah right...like that's believable on any level at this point.
So what's the catch.......political persuasion?
Or is there something more serious hidden that the average person can't see upfront?
Enquiring minds definitely want to know, or at least I do anyway


ShoreBank's Distress Galvanizes Wall Street; Blankfein Works Phones to Raise the $125 Million


Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has jumped into an effort to save a Chicago bank whose efforts to expand lending in poor communities have high-profile supporters in Washington and Chicago.

Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein has discussed the Wall Street bank making an investment in ShoreBank Corp. with Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair, according to people familiar with the situation. He has also telephoned other bank executives as ShoreBank tries to raise $125 million it needs to forestall a possible takeover by the FDIC, people familiar with the discussions say.

Geithner and Paulson say more regulation needed

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Geithner-and-Paulson-say-more-apf-383173243.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=5&asset=&ccode=

Paulson and Geithner still spewing the same ole swill.
WE didn't know.
They caused it but hey they still didn't know and still won't admit that they did know now.
But they want more power to MAKE SURE that they'll know next time.

Addressing the market for so-called repurchase agreements, which banks depended on for massive daily loans from other financial companies -- Paulson said no one had recognized its danger as it grew.

"It grew like topsy-turvy," he said. "The system didn't keep up, the infrastructure didn't keep up ... and the participants got sloppy in their credit decisions."

Paulson also criticized Wall Street credit rating agencies that gave unrealistically high ratings to securities before the crisis. He said he supports legislation that would force them to disclose more and subject them to more scrutiny from reguluators.

Laws and regulations should no longer make specific references to ratings provided by Fitch, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, Paulson said.

"I don't want the rating agencies to be held up as the font of all truth," he said. He said investors should "do some thinking for themselves."

Asked about the complex investments arranged by banks that have come under scrutiny and criticism as dangerous betting in the aftermath of the housing crisis, Paulson said "That business, I think, is a very beneficial business, a very legitimate business."

But he said it must be conducted with high standards and integrity. For two years before he became Treasury secretary, Paulson headed Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs, which sold to investors tens of billions of collateralized debt obligations -- pools of securities tied to mortgages or other types of debt. The Securities and Exchange Commission has accused Goldman of civil fraud in connection with its disclosures to investors on one of the CDOs.

Paulson said he didn't recall the specifics of the Goldman transactions.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who was scheduled to appear later before the panel, says a root cause of the financial crisis was Congress' failure to give regulators enough power to rein in risk-taking by financial firms operating outside traditional rules.

As president of the New York Federal Reserve in 2008, Geithner was one of the key architects of the government's response to the crisis and the federal bailout.

Goldman boss admits handling of conflicts can be 'a little off'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/7683202/Goldman-boss-admits-handling-of-conflicts-can-be-a-little-off.html

Lol just a "little off"

Mr Blankfein admitted that Goldman's judgement on conflicts of interests with clients has been "a little off". He said the bank had embarked on a process of self-examination as to how it has found itself at the centre of civil fraud charges, adding that Goldman has to acknowledge that it has put itself in this position