I'll try to answer my own cryptic questions about following the money.

The major banks, the insurers, and the government have all been suing each other since the 2008 meltdown. It is a tangled web. They are all claiming that they have been defrauded on the grounds that the values of the MBS's were over-stated.

But they are all claiming innocence and settling, on two major arguments:

1. The MBS's were all packaged into triple-A rated instruments, due to Federal regulations that they be required to be triple-A rated. Which never would have happened if Fannie/Freddie had not underwritten them, because no bank would have taken the risk otherwise.

2. All of the so-called buyers were expert institutional investors who had the ability to conduct their own due diligence.

Among the biggest claimants, of course, are none other than Fannie/Freddie, the same institutions that made the underwritings and forced the unrealistically high ratings grades in the first place.

The CNN TARP tracking project is a good source for who got bailed out by TARP and why.

 

this guy is as sharp as the come but...sweet jesus

 

Agreed. I've gone to the mattresses, too. And my bank is TD North (i.e., Toronto Dominion), which will likely sweep the table once the U.S. government has finished screwing BOA, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Chase.

 

But he has earned every penny, hasn't he? I mean, what's wrong with that?

Larry Ellison owns more than $300 million in residential real estate, from Newport, RI to Malibu. Is that wrong? Oracle has made millions of millionaires.

I don't know what is wrong with compensation for merit. Seems right, to me. Wish we had more of it. I'm sick and tired of all this baiting of the wealthy. They live within their means, as do we.

 

Every American should switch to a local credit union or withdraw from a major bank so these people finally fucking understand.

 

Seriously, dude, JPM/Chase is tops. Of this I really am sure. Took first place just last week. This (above) is a great chart, but it is as of March last year.

Mind you, I am not claiming JPM will hold the top rank. Although with the drubbing BOA is taking, JPM is likely to be on top for the foreseeable future.

 

If Ellison wants to pay himself 600 million it is fine with me.....

he did not fuck over the trust of this country by the way these bankers did.

Look I make money sleeping......the hedge funds I am with shorts these fuckers and plays the same games....if they are going to do it so will I ....

But what is going on with out Free Market Capitalism right now is out of fucking control.

 

They all need to be broke up and glass-stegall needs to be put back in place...

 

YES!!!! YES, goddamnit!

I'm from Massachusetts. I'm surrounded by leftists. And when I try to explain that banks selling brokerage services is a relatively new phenomenon, they glaze over and stop listening. They don't understand it, don't know why it is bad, yet dismiss it as a cause for the mess we're in.


But what I want to know is this: when and why was Glass-Steagall repealed, given it was put in place as a remedy/control for the Great Depression, and had worked for nearly seventy years???

And the answers to that question inform us as to exactly why it touches a nerve with leftist moonbats, and tells us why they don't want to talk about it, and tells us why it happened, and most importantly, answers the question of why the government's Angiledes report is a useless fucking whitewash.

Answers:

Bill Clinton's administration repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999, in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

The question is: why would they do such a thing?

This happened right around the time Clinton ordered his administration to boost enforcement of Carter's Community Reinvestment Act. And right around the time Janet Reno went after all of the biggest banks and told them that the government would sue them for redlining if they did not loosen their lending standards.

Now, I am sure the government will not ever investigate it, and I will never be able to prove it, but this is what I believe:

The banks told Reno and Clinton that they would not be able to abide by CRA unless they could mitigate their risk by bundling the poisoned loans and reselling them.

And they could not do that, because they could not broker investment instruments.

Because of Glass-Steagal.

So Clinton, Reno, and Congress threw them a bone.

By repealing Glass Steagal.

And Fannie/Freddie created the market of institutional investors that bought the new bundled assets (otherwise known as Mortgage Backed Securities) that the banks suddenly had the ability to sell, for the first time in sixty-six years.

For the first time in sixty-six years, the banks had not only the means, but the directive, from the U.S. government, to write mortgages to people who had no income, no work history, no credit history, and no money down.

The banks also had a ready-and-waiting market for all the poisoned garbage, for the first time since the Great Depression.

Thanks to Fannie/Freddie.


And that created the explosion, two years later, of the Subprime industry, from a bit player in the housing market to a major force.

All thanks to Clinton's repeal of Glass-Steagal.

Without which, CRA would have remained nothing more than Jimmy Carter's pipe dream.

That is why I believe.

And now, my friends, I suppose I really do have to read the Angiledes report, so that I will be able to defend myself against all the leftist moonbats who will come after me now, for blaspheming their glorious legends, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Because it's all the fault of those greedy banks, right?

Right?

 

Uh huh

 

Why do you have to call me names to make your point?

It's a spin,

the bank$ went to the admini$tration and $aid, hey we have a plan to help people that can not buy home$. It was a grand $cheme by the bank$ to boo$t holding$ and imaginary worth. I think Clinton was victimized by Wall $t.

Right

Tina :rose:

 

I did not realize that I have sparred with you personally, Tina, but if you are often in Cambridge, I suppose it is possible. Pop quiz time!

Is your bicycle locked to a parking meter?

Do you drive a hybrid automobile or a scooter?

Do you use your EBT card at an all-organic grocer?

Do you live in, or are you from, or do your parents live in, Arlington, Somerville or Brookline?

Do you still have a Kerry/Edwards bumpersticker?

Do you have a Darwin bumpersticker?

Do you wear black combat boots?

Do you wear plaid pants and/or a plaid coat?

Do you still have student loans, thirty years on?

Do you have a family trust fund?

Do you believe peace is the answer?

Do you have more than one tramp stamp?

Is your hair dyed in a primary color?

Do you have rings in your tongue, nose, and/or eyebrows?

Are your children quadrapeds?


If you have answered five or more of those questions in the affirmative, you are most likely a moonbat.

This is a joke. Right?

 

WallStreet and the Banks control the rest of us.

 

(sigh)

What's the use.

You're all right.

Carter was a great man.

Clinton was a great man.

Obama is a great man.

They are all victims of a grand scheme.

Obama, for four more years. Resume descent. Full speed ahead.

There. Are we all happy, now?

Have we had our warm milk and cookies? Is all right with the world? Back to our pleasant dreams?

Good.

Last night I watched a kids' movie. Didn't imagine it would hold my attention for five minutes, but I watched the whole thing. City of Ember. A story about the remnants of humanity, living a mile below the earth, after the fall of civilization.

That's where we're headed. Straight to the bottom.

And it is important to have demons to blame, as we descend. The greedy banks. The filthy Jews. The "unreasonable" media. The inconvenience of facts and history.

Maybe that is what I will blame, as we crash. Facts, history, and their failure to teach us.

 

I am neither right or left....I have an extensive background in finance..real estate..insurance and investment banking.

Big Problems

most people in this country do not have the education to understand what happened

most people in the country do not have the time to figure out what happened

most people will just blame the ones they are always against

there are so much smoke and mirrors surrounding this mess it is hard for the educated to figure it out and to make maters worst is the cover up on so many areas for the purpose of continuing to keep it forgoing.

here is the link to the Commission report

http://fcic-static.law.stanford.edu/cdn_media/fcic-reports/fcic_final_report_conclusions.pdf

yes Bill Clinton signed the law

 

I am not a Republican, either; I am unenrolled. I do lean right, fiscally, but as an atheist, technologist and proponent of basic research, much of the Republican platform offends me.

I am not a financial expert; just a regular reader of financial papers. I often get it wrong. I admit it when I do (as I have done above), and I have respect for the few people in this place who know their stuff (yourself, FNG, and one or two others).

Your last post thinly conceals a striking detail:

Check the Dow Industrials on the close of the day Glass-Steagall was repealed.

10,769.

Nearly twelve years ago.

That price is roughly equivalent to the current monthly average for the Dow, as of September 2011.

Our markets have lost a decade, since the day Glass-Steagall was repealed.


***********

Another observation. The story says Congress had been trying to revise or repeal Glass-Steagall for "twenty-five years."

When did Great President Jimmy Carter sign CRA into law? In 1977. Roughly twenty-five years before Great President Bill Clinton's repeal of Glass-Steagall.

What happened during those two decades, when Glass Steagall remained in force?

The banks said "screw the CRA; we have shareholders to protect," and ignored it, and took constant drubbing for "redlining." All those greedy banks that supposedly cooked up a "grand scheme" to "increase their holdings" with "imaginary wealth," according to tramp-stamp bedecked, orange haired, pot-smoking Vespa-riding hirsute bisexual moonbats from sea to shining sea.

(sigh)


***********


Okay. Back to our previously scheduled program: Re-Elect President Obama. Four more years. Resume descent.

 

Hmmm are you trying to distance yourself from the right?

If you are, I can understand why you would.

TMK, none of us are running for office in here, thank God for that, so our opinions on the affairs of state are just that, our opinions.

Likewise, I am not a avowed Republican party loyalist, there is far too much wrong within that group for me to want to join it. However, I do tend to agree with much of what many on the right espouse on both fiscal and social matters.

IMO our country's leadership is way too far left on far too many issues. Even a move to the extreme right would be better for us in the end, because it would be easier to correct those mistakes than it is to correct the mistakes to the left.

What I know of finance and the economy is gleaned from experience and this observation, "rarely does a liberal have a good idea on how to fix fiscal problems", so I am usually much more suspect of the lefts agenda.

On the other hand, I am a believer in the saying that: "If it is too good to be true, it probably isn't". It is quite easy to see through the bullshit if you look at both ends of the proposal, what's in the middle is usually just propaganda. Which makes me look closely at any politicians claim to have the "answer", the real answer is usually quite simple, "Let the people who know how to do it, do it".

 

Agreed on the Dow and with the cooked books in Washington on inflation being what it really is those invested on a forever hold basis have lost a lot of their dollar value.

The handwriting was beginning to appear on the wall in the early 2000's that the general stock market was turning to a stock pickers market and not a buy and hold type investment. This was when I started letting those more professional than me handle portions of my funds which led me to hedge funds and bond managers. Believe me I have watched them very close and have pulled my money at times.

( a little know fact that in 1985 a Little Rock, Arkansas Bank got an exemption from glass-steagall when an Arkansas Investment bank Bailed it out of Bankruptcy and the co-mingling for investments seemed to work very well....Bill Clinton was Governor then and maybe that is why he thought it would work.)

I am not a wealthy person by today's standards but at my age on the charts with my liquid assets I rank in the upper percentages. World Markets are as much a hobby or a passion as trying to guard what I have.

I am a free market capitalist but as I said before things have gotten way out of hand.

I had told friends back in 2008 and 2009 that it would take at least 5 years to work out of this mess mainly drawing on personal experience from the real estate and banking mess in the 80's. I am not sure at this point I was any where near correct in those assumptions because very little headway has been made.

I do not feel Obama is the answer at all however I see nothing from the Republicans at this point. The only person who makes sense will never be elected...Ron Paul.

I will say it one more time....The Big Banks need to be broken up and we need to go back to a glass-steagall type of law for Banks.

A student of finance back in the 60's and early 70's the first thing you learn is that an Insurance Company or a Bank managed properly CAN NEVER GO BANKRUPT. We have proven this wrong and right at the same time. The banks were not managed properly and loop holes allowed them to get in that mess.

 

Phil Angelides (FCIC) - Financial System `Still At Risk' (27-Jan-11)​

[YOUTUBE]zDwVPtmQPAQ[/YOUTUBE]

 

This one is even better...but which keeps the two sided thoughts a confussion

[YOUTUBE]cHdir01eR7Y&NR=1[/YOUTUBE]