Tag: Timothy Geithner

TARP Watchdog: 2011 $300 Billion Commercial Real Estate Time Bomb

Wednesday’s report from the Congressional Oversight Panel makes it very clear that while things may feel relatively stable right now on the commercial real estate front, the real bomb hits in 2011. Banks could lose $200 – $300 billion, and ‘every American’ could be affected:



The full force of the commercial real estate problem will be felt over the next three years and beyond, according to the panel’s February assessment, which means it starts to get worse starting today.

Download .pdf here (189 pages)

The Yawn.

The internetine blogosphere evinced a collective yawn as the toobzual chattering classes learned that, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, tax cheat Timothy Geithner advised AIG to withhold critical information from its SEC filing, information taxpayers deserve to know, because they were the ones Geithner was looting, and that by law shareholders have a right know, because, well, they’re the fucking shareholders.  None of the relevant disclosures were made until after the deal was done and Geithner was confirmed as Treasury Secretary.

Because yawning occurs on both the upward and downward limbs of motivational excitement, i.e., both when waking up and when going to sleep, it was unclear whether the collective yawn was due to the irrational exuberance, excitement, liveliness, energy, high spirits and cheerfulness related to President Obama’s promises of an era of unprecedented transparency in   government, or whether having been rapidly conditioned and  habituated to the new President’s lies and the general lack of accountability for law-breaking by the ruling elites, the yawning response rather reflected the quickly-formed hard-boiled, apathetic, blind to, careless, case-hardened, cold, cold-blooded, deaf to, hard, hard-bitten, hard-boiled, hardened, hardhearted, heartless, impassive, impenitent, indifferent, indurated, inflexible, insensate, insensible, insensitive, insentient, inured, obdurate, soulless, spiritless, stiff, stony, stubborn, thick-skinned, torpid, tough, toughened, unaffected, unbending, uncaring, uncompassionate, unconcerned, unfeeling, unimpressionable, unresponsive, unsusceptible, unsympathetic attitudes required to survive the next decade from fucking Hell.

Early indicators are that Las Vegas and Wall Street bookmakers are aggressively shorting “optimism.”

Should Wall Street Speculators, have to pay their Fair Share? w Poll



H.R. 1068
, the Let Wall Street Pay for Wall Street’s Bailout Act.

Wall Street Transaction Tax Proposed by Democrats

Ryan J. Donmoyer

Dec. 3, 2009 (Bloomberg) — A group of congressional Democrats proposed taxing large transactions in stocks and derivatives, an idea that has received a cool reception from the Obama administration. […]

.25 Percent for Stocks

The measure would be based on legislation DeFazio proposed in the House that would apply a tax of 0.25 percent or 25 basis points to stock transactions in excess of $100,000, and a levy of 0.02 percent or 2 basis points on derivatives including futures, options, swaps and credit default swaps.

Harkin and DeFazio said the proposed new levy is backed by more than 200 economists, the AFL-CIO labor union federation and business leaders including Warren Buffett and Vanguard Group Inc. founder John C. Bogle, now president of Bogle Financial Markets Research.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/…

The President of the United States, 2009

Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do. — Voltaire

The Point Grayson was trying to make about The Fed

The only thing Alan Grayson should Apologize for …

was not having the Fed’s Price List

for their services!

(imo)

Perhaps Grayson can be excused, since “The Fed” does favors for its clients, far from the scrutiny of prying eyes … giving away Billions to their good ole Buddies, both Foreign and Domestic, without so much as a Receipt or and IOU exchanging hands …

It’s easy to see how this shady activity just might get “mis-construed”:

Alan Grayson: Which Foreigners got the Fed’s 500 Billion?



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

With Friends in the Treasury — Bankers don’t need NO Accountability

Elizabeth Warren was appointed chair of a newly created Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), which is charged with keeping tabs on the $700 billion bailout of the financial sector – including Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).

Warren however, has had some “Trouble” getting straight forward answers … as she explained to the Boston Globe:

Massive Fraud at the Epicenter of U.S. Finance

Bill Moyers Journal:

In an explosive interview on PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal, William K. Black, a professor of economics and law with the University of Missouri, alleged that American banks and credit agencies conspired to create a system in which so-called “liars loans” could receive AAA ratings and zero oversight, amounting to a massive “fraud” at the epicenter of US finance.

But worse still, said Black, Timothy Geithner, President Barack Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury, is currently engaged in a cover-up to keep the truth of America’s financial insolvency from its citizens.

Gosh.  Why would a Wall Street insider like Geithner be reluctant to admit that Wall Street criminals turned the US financial system into a giant Ponzi Scheme?

I’m stumped.

Fortunately, Professor Black has an explanation . . .

“Overcapacity” and a Robert Brenner interview

Mostly this is an explanation of a theory behind the current economic crisis.  Robert Brenner, who teaches economic history at UCLA, suggests that the fundamental root of the crisis is the stagnant nature of the neoliberal economy, which attempts to evade its problems with overcapacity by intensifying borrowing.

In plain English: once the loans dry up, the neoliberal economy tends to sink.  Turn the page to discover why.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

Some perspective please: Gowan’s piece in NLR

This is a review piece on Peter Gowan’s article “Crisis in the Heartland” in the Jan./Feb. 2009 issue of the New Left Review, in light of the significant number of diaries upon the most recent “toxic assets” plan of Treasury Secretary Geithner and in light of the foregrounding of Gowan’s article in the weblog Feral Scholar.  Perhaps the most meaningful way to resolve economic debates is to go back through history to examine what happened.  This is a diary about why the current economic crisis has happened.  Mainstream economics is typically obsessed with the present-day, at the expense of a longer view, and this is precisely what Gowan hoped to circumvent.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

Why I’m not buying this whole “fire Geithner” thing from the GOP

Has Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, done a good job so far?  Kinda, I wouldn’t give him a gold star or anything.  In fact, I’d say he’s done a mediocre job.  Did he know about the whole bonus thing at AIG?  And what about how the situation that went down with Lehman Brothers?  Bottom line, is the GOP push to have Geithner removed legit?  I say no.

AIG Scandal: America Wakes Up To Extent of Capitalist Thievery

The news that AIG executives were to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses (maybe as high as $450 million!), even after a $170 billion dollar bailout, has fueled a populist revolt not seen since the initial shock of the economic crisis hit Americans last October. When Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told American Insurance Group CEO, Edward M. Liddy, that government loans to AIG might be renegotiated as a result, Liddy responded with “grave concern” over the firm’s ability to retain “talented staff.”

Talented in rip-off, that is. But former New York governor and supposed scourge of Wall Street, Elliot Spitzer, is reporting over at Slate that the outrage in the media over the bonuses is a diversion. (H/T Inky99 at Daily Kos.) Not that they aren’t an outrage, the scandal misses the larger crime: the siphoning off of billions of taxpayer dollars to a handful of companies, who insured their highly risky investments with AIG. These companies have received hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money. Now they are to receive 100% on the dollar reimbursement for their losses from AIG. Spitzer comments:

Clarence Darrow & Yogi Berra

Photobucket Photobucket

The topic below was originally posted at the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

Arguably America’s greatest trial lawyer, Clarence Darrow, famously once said,

“First and last, it’s a question of money. Those men who own the earth make the laws to protect what they have. They fix up a sort of fence or pen around what they have, and they fix the law so the fellow on the outside cannot get in. The laws are really organized for the protection of the men who rule the world. They were never organized or enforced to do justice. We have no system for doing justice, not the slightest in the world.”

Reading this morning’s headlines about A.I.G. utilizing nearly $165 million of their $170 billion tax payer financed bailout for bonuses, reminded me of Darrow’s insight. The excuse being offered after all is that a “contract is a contract” and A.I.G. must fulfill their obligations.

Isn’t it curious how contracts are deemed sacrosanct for Wall Street beneficiaries but not blue-collar members of unions in the auto industry? Unions are expected to get “realistic” and ” renegotiate” their contracts but moneyed elites are allowed to carry on as before. Anyone who has the temerity to point out the contradiction is “unreasonable,” “angry,” “extreme,” or heaven forbid, one of those “crazy left wing bloggers.”

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