A Diary A Day – The losers are winning and it isn’t us

(8 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Well, well, well it seems Ben Bernanke is at it again, joined by ex-treasury guy from Goldman Sachs, Andrew Tilton. You might have already guessed they are finding ways to take OUR money. Their remarks are in this article from Bloomberg. We will discuss below the fold.

Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Federal Reserve policy makers may have to ramp up their purchases of mortgage securities and other assets after the economy and job market deteriorated further since they last met.

Wasn’t he just saying the recession could be over this year, next year for sure? I guess he isn’t buying the Wall Street rally being indicitive of anything meaningful either.

The Federal Open Market Committee, gathering today and tomorrow in Washington, needs to redouble its efforts after the central bank’s balance sheet shrank 17 percent from a $2.3 trillion December peak, Fed watchers said. The retreat came even as Bernanke acknowledged the chance that the unemployment rate will exceed 10 percent for the first time in a quarter century.

People aren’t buying houses, banks aren’t lending money, banks are taking houses right and left while we continue to fund CSD lunacy at AIG.

“It takes massive balance-sheet expansion to generate significant easing in financial conditions,” said Andrew Tilton, an economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York who used to work at the Treasury. “More needs to be done.”

That “more” came as Geitners’s comments to the Senate regarding the AIG bonuses.  “I agree it is an outrageous thing for our government to be in the position where a company was allowed to get to the point with no constraints and their future is critical to the future of the financial system.”

Geitner called AIG CEO Liddy and demanded he renegotiate the bonus structure, it seems AIG thinks they can reduce the bonuses by 30%. Did you get that? 30 freaking percent for losers, for people who helped torpedo your company and the global economy? Our money is going to bailout the counterparties, the rest of the participants in the CDS scam. Which begs the question didn’t we bail a bunch of them out already, giving them money to cover this toxic paper? Why are these banks being allowed to collect again and then Geitner talking about a “bad bank” to buy all these toxic assets again, paid three times for the same bad judgement loans? 1.2 Trillion to buy toxic paper? We know one is Goldman Sachs but the others have never been disclosed. If we already own 80% of AIG, why pretend, just take them over. Find out who those counterparties are. Geitner is now saying blaming Liddy is unfair. Really? How interesting, is no one accountable, no one responsible, no one in a position to change the way AIG does business even the folks who own a 80% share.

Geitner has made some noises about regulating CDS, honestly they need to be made illegal again, they are a house of cards. How anyone can believe this kind of business makes sense or builds a strong economy is beyond me. Well, we should more at the G20, thats when team Obama unveils THE PLAN.

While the economy continues to melt down we have suffered other losses no one is noticing. Biofuel refiners have been in big trouble for a while.

The US biofuels industry is expected to undergo consolidation in 2009, with many of ethanol and biodiesel plants either closing or being absorbed by a few larger players who will dominate the market.

The US has 171 biodiesel refineries with estimated capacity at more than 2.4bn gal/year, well ahead of the 6m gal/year mandated by the US government for 2009.

On the ethanol side, consolidation and mothballing were poised to be the buzzwords for 2009, market sources said. The vulnerability of the US ethanol industry came under the spotlight in October, when VeraSun Energy, the country’s second-largest producer, filed for bankruptcy, citing shrinking liquidity. VeraSun was only one of at least six producers that have halted production or sought bankruptcy protection in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Vera-Sun has offers to purchase their facilities for $993 million. This represents about a quarter of what it would cost to replace the facilities. It is considered this selling price will be the bench mark for other sales out of bankruptcy courts. All or parts of the bio-refineries are being snapped up by companies like Valero Energy Corp.  the nation’s largest independent refiner. I’m not sure if we really want medium sized oil owning our renewable resources. It would seem with all the trillions being thrown around there could be some help to let these pioneers survive this crisis. The country called and they answered, unfortunately no one is listening now when they need help. Biofuels are still part of the green energy plan or the oil companies wouldn’t be so eager to buy up the failing refineries. Once they are in the hands of oil big or small, the can do entrepreneurial spirit of taking the solution on ourselves will be gone forever and probably whatever advantage we may have ahd producing our own biofuels.