Tag: fraud

Timmy-Gate: Did Geithner Help Hide Lehman’s Fraud?   By L. Randall Wray

Timmy-Gate Takes a Turn For The Worse: Did Geithner Help Lehman Hide Accounting Tricks?

Just when you thought that nothing could stink more than Timothy Geithner’s handling of the AIG bailout, a new report details how Geithner’s New York Fed allowed Lehman Brothers to use an accounting gimmick to hide debt. The report, which runs to 2200 pages, was released by Anton Valukas, the court-appointed examiner. It actually makes the AIG bailout look tame by comparison. It is now crystal clear why Geithner’s Treasury as well as Bernanke’s Fed refuse to allow any light to shine on the massive cover-up underway.

Recall that the New York Fed arranged for AIG to pay one hundred cents on the dollar on bad debts to its counterparties-benefiting Goldman Sachs and a handful of other favored Wall Street firms. (see here) The purported reason is that Geithner so feared any negative repercussions resulting from debt write-downs that he wanted Uncle Sam to make sure that Wall Street banks could not lose on bad bets. Now we find that Geithner’s NYFed supported Lehman’s efforts to conceal the extent of its problems. (see here) Not only did the NYFed fail to blow the whistle on flagrant accounting tricks, it also helped to hide Lehman’s illiquid assets on the Fed’s balance sheet to make its position look better. Note that the NY Fed had increased its supervision to the point that it was going over Lehman’s books daily; further, it continued to take trash off the books of Lehman right up to the bitter end, helping to perpetuate the fraud that was designed to maintain the pretense that Lehman was not massively insolvent.

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?”

Timmy “sizzle chest” G, also known as “Timmy the Moocher,” “Two-timing Tim,” “Hey, you little bastard, where’s my wallet,” “Timmy the Stress Test,” “Timothy the Treasury Mouse,” “Hey, who stole my cheese?” “Geithner the Purse Lightener,” “‘T’ that rhymes with ‘P’ that stands for ‘pool,'” “Gangsta Rap,” “Who stole the cheese?  I wanna know who cut the cheese!” “The Invisible Regulator,” “G is for Growth,” “Fake it ’til you Make it,” “Tricky Tim,” “Humbug Jive,” “Shell Game,” “Dirty Trick,” “Swindler’s List,” “The Fiddling Fed,” “The Treasurer’s Measurer,” “Bill O’Goods,” “The Two-Fer Spoofer,” “Run Around Tim,” “Too Money,” “Fictional Assets,” “Mark T. Fantasy,” “Timmy Too Bigs,” “Turbo Tim,” “Timmy the Greek,” “Fail-safe,” “Don’t Stop Me Now,” “Chopper Pilot,” “Flim-Flam,” “Shock Doc,” and “Jelly, You Broke My Heart, Geithner…”  Smack!  Smack!  You wanna fresh one?  –  was apparently over-seeing financial fraud at Lehman before they went kaput.

Tangled webs make us sad and frustrated.  And vengeful.

Update

Oh, fun.  A plug for Yves:

Update 2: Hell, just go read bobswern for content:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

How bizarre.  About 8 in 10 Americans want to clamp down on Wall Street’s fraudulent behavior?  

Someone needs to help me understand what in blazes is going on here.  82% is a scary big super-mega-majority.  Where does a really big percentage, like 80% plus, come from?  Did someone pull it out of a hat?  Did someone conjure it from a lamp?  A crystal ball?  Ouija boards?  Playing cards?  Who in the heck is reading the coffee grounds around here?  Where on gawd’s green earth does a number like that come from?

I am appealing to you, the inside dopesters having a strong strain of frustrated idealism and just the right touch of hard-boiled cynicism, to lend me a hypothesis, a conspiracy theory, if you will, of who “we,” the 80% are, and who “they,” the other 20% might be.  Please try to cast your theory in a form that makes it virtually impossible to disprove.  

This could have implications for democracy, and who rules America.

Afghanistan “Awash with US Cash and US Blood”

Congressman Dennis Kucinich will introduce a new resolution on Thursday, March 4, 2010, that will force the U.S. Congress (against their will) until debating the merits of continuing to fund the fraud and folly of the Afghnistan foreign occupation.  

It is expected that the resolution will be taken up for consideration on the following Wednesday, March 10, 2010, and that the debate will be subject to a rule providing for three hours of debate.

Dennis Kucinich urges that we all sign the petition in favor of this resolution, and getting out of Afghanistan on his web site: http://kucinich.us/

Sign the Petition at: http://kucinich.us/

Afghanistan “Awash with US Cash and US Blood”

WASHINGTON – February 26 – Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement about the ongoing war in Afghanistan:

“The Washington Post reports that nearly one billion dollars per year in cash, suspected to include U.S. aid, opium receipts or both, is moving from Afghanistan to Dubai, where friends and family of Afghanistan’s President Karzai have multimillion dollar villas.

“Dubai real estate deals and a number of crooked enterprises connected to the Karzai family have created crony capitalism in a country awash with U.S. cash and U.S. blood.

“Nearly 1000 U.S. soldiers have died. And for what? Hundreds of billions spent. And for what?  To make Afghanistan safe for crooks, drug dealers and crony capitalism?

“Next Thursday, I will bring a privileged resolution to this House so that Congress can claim our constitutional right to end this war and to bring our troops home.  Please support the resolution.”

      –Congressman Dennis Kucinich

I just came across this article in Mother Jones, which is a bit horrifying:

Walters’ discovery that her home had been sold out from under her marked the low point of a four-year fiasco that began when Ocwen Loan Servicing became her mortgage servicer in late 2004. Through no fault of her own, Ocwen incorrectly processed or lost dozens of Walters’ payments and charged her more than $2,000 in late fees and thousands more in additional charges-all without notifying her. The Florida-based company tried to foreclose on her three times. After she paid more than $10,000, Walters figured things were settled. But Ocwen had other ideas.

Please read the entire article, it’s a tale of shocking usury, which we’re used to by now, but what is more telling to me is the reaction of various agencies of the Federal government, which I am mournful to remind people who believed in Barack Obama, he now heads.

Today, the BRAD BLOG is reporting that there’s a fair chance Prop 8 was not decided by bigoted voters, but by “fraud or gross errors” in the election.  From WasProp8Straight.org:

A new analysis of independent exit polls conducted in L.A. County at the November 2008 election indicates significant likelihood that the official vote counts are incorrect. It is indeed possible that the California state constitution was amended to strip marriage rights of some of the state’s people as a result of vote counts that were incorrect and possibly even fraudulent.

A “no” vote for Prop 8 meant that you wanted marriage equality.  In some places in Los Angeles, the difference between the official vote totals and this study were a not so alarming 2%, but in other places they approached a shocking 18%.  Just to clarify, this study is saying that in some places the actual votes that people cast differed from what was recorded by the state by nearly 18%.  And Prop 8 passed by a margin of less than 5% of the vote.