Tag: Wall Street

Courtesy of Firedoglake.com…

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Going after some more of the best? of the best? of the best?……… in the financial Meltdown!

Financial crisis panel demands documents from Moody’s

Introduction To Weather Derivatives

by Felix Carabello, Associate Director, Environmental Products, Chicago Mercantile Exchange

Weather: Risky Business

It is estimated that nearly 20% of the U.S. economy is directly affected by the weather, and that the profitability and revenues of virtually every industry – agriculture, energy, entertainment, construction, travel and others – depend to a great extent on the vagaries of temperature. […]

In a 1998 testimony to Congress, former commerce secretary William Daley stated, “Weather is not just an environmental issue; it is a major economic factor. At least $1 trillion of our economy is weather-sensitive.”

[…]

If there were only some way, to “Hedge that Bet” — against the ever present risk of Foul Weather.

No Worries — Where there’s a Market Risk, there’s always a Wall Street Way!

This American Life is a weekly public radio show broadcast on more than 500 stations to about 1.7 million listeners. Produced by Chicago Public Radio, it’s distributed by Public Radio International, has won all of the major broadcasting awards, and is often the most popular podcast in the country, with more than a half million downloaders each week. They’ve won three Emmys for a television version of This American Life on the Showtime network, and they co-produce with NPR News an economics podcast and the blog Planet Money.

On April 9, 2010 This American Life produced a one hour radio show/podcast titled “Inside Job”, to tell the story in an entertaining way of how scams like what Magnetar and Goldman Sachs did happen:

A hedge fund named Magnetar comes up with an elaborate plan  to make money. It sponsors the creation of complicated and ultimately toxic financial securities… while at the same time betting against the very securities it helped create. Planet Money‘s Alex Blumberg teams up with two investigative reporters from ProPublica, Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, to tell the story. Jake and Jesse pored through thousands of  pages of documents and interviewed dozens of Wall Street Insiders. We bring you the result: a tale of intrigue and questionable behavior, which parallels quite closely the plot of a Mel Brooks musical.

Listen to podcast stream here (opens new window)

How does your Obligation to make your Mortgage Payments, turn into some unseen Investor’s “Income Stream”?

Easy — thanks to Derivatives and CDO’s (Collateralized Debt Obligation).

For the mere Price of Admission, those unseen Investor’s get to divvy up your Mortgage Payments, among themselves — long as they “promise to pay off” that Debt, WHEN, for whatever reason, you are no longer able to make those Obligatory Payments …

Piece of Cake!

Geesh … WHAT could ever go wrong with this picture?

The defining feature of our time will be the awful reckoning following years of denial.

Steve Pearlstein describes the false optimism bubbling up from the economy:

In recent weeks, a wave of relief and optimism has washed over the economy. The corporate sector is closing out another quarter of solid profitability. Business and consumer confidence is on the rise. The Dow Jones industrial average is flirting with 11,000. The Treasury secretary and the chairman of the Federal Reserve have declared that the economy is on a path of sustained recovery. State tax revenue is finally picking up. And on Friday, the Labor Department may even report that the number of jobs actually increased in March, ending two years of nearly uninterrupted declines.

Basically, we have moved Wall Street’s fraudulent assets onto the public spreadsheet, and Wall Street approves, thus perpetuating the fraud at public expense.  Hip-hip, Hooray!    

Chris Dodd Asks Department Of Justice To Probe Lehman’s Repo 105 And Other Firms’ Shady Accounting Practices   Zero Hedge

March 19, 2010

The Honorable Eric H. Holder, Jr.

Attorney General of the United States

United States Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, D.C.  20530

Dear Attorney General Holder:

I am deeply concerned about the facts that have come to light regarding the demise of Lehman Brothers and the accounting manipulation that contributed to it. I respectfully ask you to commission a task force to investigate the Lehman situation as well as other companies that may have engaged in similar accounting manipulation with a view to prosecution of employees or agents who contributed to any violations of the law.    

According to the Report of the U.S. Trustee-appointed Examiner Anton R. Valukas, Lehman presented a misleading picture of its financial condition to the public by using extensive repurchase agreements known as Repo 105 transactions. The Examiner found that “Lehman did not disclose its use — or the significant magnitude of its use — of Repo 105 to the Government, to the rating agencies, to its investors, or to its own Board of Directors.” The result was to conceal its holdings of bad assets and to temporarily remove approximately $50 billion of assets from its balance sheet at the end of the first and second quarters of 2008. The Examiner found that Lehman used Repo 105 transactions for no other articulated purpose than to shrink its balance sheet at the quarter-end, in a manner that deceived investors and creditors about its true financial state and misleading others.    

We must work tirelessly to reduce the incidence of financial fraud in order to restore trust and confidence in the financial markets. A task force investigation and taking appropriate Federal actions in these matters will contribute to these goals.

Sincerely Christopher J. Dodd Chairman

It’s a veritable calliope of tea kettles a-whistling through the tubes.  First, from zerohedge, the Fed has lost its Freedom of Information Act disclosure requirement to Bloomberg news, and now must apparently reveal some bank names and lending practices surrounding the bail-out:

Key selection from the Second Circuit’s Fed FOIA appeal:

The requirement of disclosure under FOIA and its proper limits are matters of congressional policy. The statute as written by Congress sets forth no basis for the exemption the Board asks us to read into it. If the Board believes such an exemption would better serve the national interest, it should ask Congress to amend the statute.

In other words: if the Fed wants to maintain its strict secrecy, it better get Congress to change the laws immediately. Of course, if that happens it will become very clear who controls not just the fiscal and monetary destiny of America, its executive control (via the recently institued bilateral decision making of who apoints who – the President of the United States <-> The President of the FRBNY, and vice versa ), but also the legislative. As for the judicial, we will know definitively when the Supreme Court overturns this decision. In other words, the Federal Reserve is about to become the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court (not to mention Wall Street) all rolled into one.

This could be a terrible blow to secrecy and the shadow banking/government system.

Dylan Ratigan & Eliot Spitzer plainly explain the fraud that occurred at Lehman.  Ratigan hands Spitzer collateral (a trash can), and Spitzer hands Ratigan cash.  Lehman “pawned” its garbage in exchange for short-term loans to spruce up the quarterly books with “more cash, less trash.”  This is the “repo 105” fraud everyone is talking about since the release of the bankruptcy examiner’s report.  Please watch:

CEO Dick Fuld alone made half a billion bucks off this fraud.  He remains a free man today.  As Spitzer said, the accounting firm Ernst & Young, the Fed, and the Treasury were also involved in this fraud.

Ratigan: “This report comes just short of suggesting this is by no means an accident but instead one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated by a group of people, and enabled by the US government.”

And Spitzer concludes: “there is no doubt civil cases will be brought. We had a failure of CEO, the CFO, the accountants, and indeed the regulators, the Fed and the Treasury, that were inside these banks, and the question has to be asked: where were they?”