"I mean, Alan Greenspan said, I didn't understand
at all what they were trading." |
| "Bill, you are Mr.
Casey’s fair-haired boy … You and your state have been our greatest
asset. Mr. Casey wanted me to
pass on to you that unless you fuck up and do something stupid, you’re No.
1 on the short list for a shot at
the job that you’ve always wanted. You and guys like you are the
fathers of the new government. We are the new
covenant.” - William Barr, Compromised:
Clinton, Bush and the CIA, Terry Reed & John Cummings CIA Covert Operative William Barr Nominated by Trump |
Larry Summers and the Secret "End-Game" Memo
It's the Interest, Stupid! Why Bankers Rule the World
"Glass-Steagall is no longer appropriate to the
economy in which we live."
William
Jefferson Clinton
"Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices. Their failure deepened the crisis. Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place." - Paul Wellstone
"If we got a return to positive growth - an economy growing at 1% would be an economy with rising unemployment. I don't think we can hold out the prospect we'll stabilize at the current level." - Larry Summers 4/9/09
November 12, 1999
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act officially repeals the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.
The merger of commercial and investment banking once again allows investment bankers to use FDIC insured personal commercial deposits to purchase "financial instruments" from hedge funds.
2000
Larry Summers backs the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.
Larry Summers directly profits from the the deregulation he vigorously supports advising DE Shaw and Taconic Capital Advisors in hedging strategies.
Larry Summers circle of friends include the hedge fund managers Nancy Zimmerman, Laurence D. Fink, Kenneth D. Brody, Frank P. Brosens, H. Rodgin Cohen, Orin S. Kramer, Ralph L. Schlosstein and Eric M. Mindich.
Larry Summers later has Harvard purchase interest rate default swaps while president of Harvard that end up costing Harvard over $1 billion.
"The SEC's best estimate is that there are now approximately 8,800 hedge funds, with approximately $1.2 trillion of assets.
If this estimate is accurate, it implies a remarkable growth in hedge fund assets of almost 3,000% in the last 16 years.
Hedge funds are becoming more active in such varied activities as the market for corporate control, private lending, and the trading of crude petroleum.
Hedge funds account for about 30% of all US equity trading volume.
Investment strategies or operations of hedge fund include their use of derivatives trading, leverage, and short selling.
The number of enforcement cases against hedge fund advisers has grown from just four in 2001 to more than 90 since then.
These cases involve hedge fund managers who misappropriated funds assets; engaged in insider trading; misrepresented portfolio performance; falsified their experience and credentials; and lied about past returns." - Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, July 25, 2006
Short sellers attempt to profit from an expected decline due to volatility of fungible asset valuation in the price of a fungible financial instrument.
The short seller takes on loan fungible financial instruments - bonds, marketable securities, stock, futures contracts, securitized loans and collateralized debt obligations.
The short seller is betting on being able to purchase identical fungible security instruments at a lower price shortly before the loan comes due.
Profit comes when the fungible financial instrument declines in value.
"The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class.
Looked at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the US government into a kind of giant Enron - a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers." - Matt Taibbi
What does one TRILLION dollars look like?
World Derivatives Market Estimated As Big As
$1.2
Quadrillion Notional, as Banks Fight Efforts to Rein It In
America's Derivative Market :
Unbelievably Huge &
Totally Unregulated
"Making the most
of borrowed time"
speech delivered by Mr Jaime Caruana,
General Manager
of the BIS
predatory lending
"Predatory lenders deserve a lot of
blame for foreclosures and
bankruptcies.
How odd to think that the hopes of everyone owning
a piece of property is now
as utopian as the collectivist
dreams of communism." - Doug Doepke
90% of families in China own their home
US Home Ownership Rate: 64.1% in Q2 2019
"Tight residential real estate markets and low mortgage rates fueled a five-year property boom as the number of US households paying more than half their incomes for housing jumped from 13.8 million in 2001 to 17.9 million in 2007." - Brian Louis
"Between 1999 and 2004, more than half the states,
both red (North Carolina, 1999; South Carolina, 2004) and blue (California,
2001; New York, 2003), passed anti-predatory-lending laws.
Georgia lite
a firestorm in 2002 when it sought to hold Wall Street bundlers and holders of
mortgage-backed
securities responsible for mortgages that were fraudulently conceived.
Beginning in 2004 Michigan and forty-nine other states battled the US
Comptroller of the Currency and the banking industry (and The Wall Street
Journal's editorial page) for the right to examine the books of Wachovia's
mortgage unit, a fight the Supreme Court decided in
Wachovia's favor in 2007 - about a year before it cratered." - Dean
Starkman
1863 National Bank Act
establishes the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as part of the Treasury Department and a system of nationally chartered banks.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced.
"Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders.
In 2003 the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative.
The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks.
The US government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.
But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, George Walker Bush in his goal of protecting the banks.
In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation." - Elliot Spitzer, Washington Post, February 13, 2008
On the afternoon of February 13 federal agents of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency staked out Elliot Spitzer's hotel in Washington.
Elliot Spitizer's dalliance with a prostitute became headline news March 10.
Corporate news never questioned the actions of the federal agents.
"One is struck by the similarities with the Savings and Loan scandal which was allowed to continue through the 1980s, long after it became apparent that deliberate bankruptcy was being used by unscrupulous profiteers to amass illegal fortunes at what was ultimately public expense.
The long drawn-out housing bubble of the current George Walker Bush decade, and particularly the derivative bubble that was floated upon it, allowed the Bush administration to help offset the trillion-dollar-plus cost of its Iraq misadventure." - Peter Dale Scott
investment bank meltdown
"The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest." - Brian Griffiths, Goldman Sachs public relations man
"We see TARP as an insurance policy. No matter how bad it gets, we're going to be one of the remaining banks."- John C. Hope III, Whitney National Bank chairman
1977 AL Williams establishes its base by mass-marketing the concept of "Buy Term and Invest the Difference." With "BTID" the incorporation illustrated how its middle-income client base could purchase sufficient protection with term life insurance and systematically save and invest in separate investment vehicles, such as mutual fund Individual Retirement Accounts.AL Williams is initially established as a privately held general agency, at first selling term life insurance policies underwritten by Financial Assurance.
1980 A.L. Williams enters into a contract with Boston-based Massachusetts Indemnity and Life Insurance incorporation (MILICO), a larger underwriter of life insurance, whose parent is PennCorp Financial Services, Santa Monica.
1980s Salomon Brothers is acquired by the commodity trading firm Phibro.
Salomon is noted for its innovation in the bond market, selling the first mortgage-backed security, a hitherto obscure species of financial instrument forged by Ginnie Mae.
Salomon begins purchasing home mortgages from thrifts throughout the US and packaged them into mortgage-backed securities, which it sells to local and international investors.
1981 First American National Corporation is established as a holding incorporation for First American Life Insurance (later renamed AL Williams Life Insurance) and First American National Securities (later renamed PFS Investments).
Shearson is acquired by American Express and operated as a subsidiary.
1982 First American National Corporation, renamed The AL Williams Corporation, underwrites a public stock offering.
1983 The AL Williams Corporation is listed on the NASDAQ exchange under ALWC.
American Can and PennCorp Financial Services merge.
1984 Shearson merges with Lehman Brothers/Kuhn Loeb evolving into Shearson Lehman.
1986 Sanford Weill, scion David-Weill family purchases Commercial Credit from Control Data for $7 million.
Lazard Freres - the biggest investment bank in France - is owned by Lazard and David-Weill families - old Genoese banking scions.
1987 86-year-old American Can announces a name change to Primerica Corporation.
Primerica Corporation completes a hostile takeover of Smith Barney.
Sanford Weill acquires Gulf Insurance.
1988 Commercial Credit acquires Primerica Corporation for $1.54 billion.
Shearson Lehman acquires EF Hutton to be Shearson Lehman Hutton.
1989 Sanford Weill acquires retail brokerage outlets Drexel Burnham Lambert.
Eight Charged in $50-Million Car Loan Fraud
1991 Primerica Corporation changes the name of AL Williams to Primerica Financial Services.
US taxpayers, already billed over $500 billion dollars for the S&L looting, are charged another $70 billion to bail out the FDIC.
US taxpayers then footed the bill for a secret 2 1/2-year rescue of Citibank, which was close to collapse after the Latin American debt crunch hit home.
The Saving of Citibank
John S. Reed, chairman and CEO of Citicorp, engineered a radical change in a major operating group, built a lucrative new business from scratch, and played a high-visibility role in the pivotal issue of Third World debt.
Citicorp Faces the World: An Interview with John Reed
(The Washington Post article above implies that the problem was domestic when clearly the problem revloved around Third World debt.)
1993 Primerica acquires Travelers Insurance and adopts the name Travelers.
Sanford Weill purchases Shearson Lehman Hutton from American Express for $1.2 billion.
Shearson Lehman Hutton acquires Colorado-based lender, Aurora Loan Services, an Alt-A lender.
1994 Sanford Weill spins Lehman Brothers out of American Express.
The CEO is Richard Severin Fuld Jr.
1995 Travelers becomes The Travelers Group.
1996 The Travelers Group purchases the property and casualty business of Atena.
1997 Timeline of the Asian financial crisis
1998 Citicorp and Travelers merge and form the behemoth Citigroup.
Travelers aquires Salomon and merges it with Smith Barney creating Salomon Smith Barney.
Citibank schemed with firm to hide its woes: Ex-Dewey partner
2000 Shearson Lehman Hutton purchases West Coast subprime mortgage lender BNC Mortgage LLC.
BNC Mortgage LLC quickly becomes a force in the subprime market.
September 11, 2001 Salomon Smith Barney is by far the largest tenant in 7 World Trade Center, occupying 1,202,900 sq ft (111,750 m2) (64% of the building) which included floors 28–45.
Shearson Lehman Hutton occupies three floors of World Trade Center where one employee dies.
2002 Citigroup spins off Travelers Property and Casualty.
2003 Shearson Lehman Hutton makes $18.2 billion in loans and ranked third in lending.
2004 Shearson Lehman Hutton makes over $40 billion.
Shearson Lehman Hutton has morphed into a real estate hedge fund disguised as an investment bank.
2005 Goldman Sachs receives approximately $1.6 billion in taxpayer subsidies (mostly through Liberty Bonds) from New York City and state taxpayers to finance a new headquarters near the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan.
2006 Aurora and BNC are lending almost $50 billion per month.
Goldman Sachs changes its corporate structure into a bank holding corporation.
Employees earn an average of $622,000 on a profit of $9.4 billion.
Much of the commercial paper wealth is made on takeovers and leveraged buyouts.
Goldman Sachs employees:
George Herbert Walker Bush (Lehman);
Robert Zoellick (World Bank BB CFR TC);
Henry Paulson (US Treasury Secretary);
Robert Rubin* (US Treasury Secretary, Chairman Citigroup);
John Thain (Merrill Lynch, Chairman NYSE);
Henry H. Fowler, (US Treasury Secretary);
Edward Lampert (hedge fund manager);
Michael Cohrs (Global Banking at Deutsche Bank);
Mark Carney (Bank of Canada);
Robert Steel (CEO of Wachovia);
Ed Liddy ( CEO of AIG);
Neel Kashkari;
Gary Gensler (Commodity Futures Trading Commission)
Stephen Friedman (Chairman Intelligence Oversight Board, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Aspen Institute, CFR, Brookings Institution, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Barack Obama received $981,000 for his campaign from Goldman Sachs.
2007 4th quarter Citigroup posts a $10 billion loss, 21,200 Citigroup employees are laid off.
Citigroup's single largest shareholder becomes Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the investment arm of Abu Dhabi government, with a $7.5 billion injection of capital in late 2007 in exchange for a 4.9% stake which pays a $1.7 billion a year dividend.
The second largest Citigroup shareholder, with a 3.6% stake, is now Kingdom Holding incorporation owned by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.
$6.88 billion of prefered stock is sold to an investment fund controlled by the government of Singapore.
March through September 2008
Five largest investment bankers on Wall Street go bankrupt.
March 2008 Lehman Brothers assets of $680 billion are supported by $22.5 billion of firm capital.
From an equity position, its risky commercial real estate holdings are three times greater than capital.
In such a highly leveraged structure, a 3 to 5% decline in real estate values wipes out all capital.
Federal Reserve sells Bear Stearns to JP Morgan Chase for ten dollars per share, a price far below the previous 52-week high of $133.20 per share.
June 2008 Merrill Lynch seizes $850 million worth of the underlying collateral from Bear Stearns but only recoups $100 million in auction.
Merrill Lynch is sold to Bank of America for 0.8595 shares of Bank of America common stock for each Merrill Lynch common share, or about $50 billion or $29 per share.
The market valuation of Merrill Lynch was about $100 billion one year earlier.
During the final quarter of 2008 Merrill Lynch loses $15.3 billion.
August 2008 Morgan Stanley is contracted by the Treasury Department to advise the government on potential rescue strategies for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
September 21, 2008 Federal Reserve allows Morgan Stanley to change its status from investment bank to bank holding incorporation in order to survive.
November 23, 2008 Fed and Treasury announce a rescue package for Citigroup to provide insurance against large losses on bundled securities and derivatives of approximately $306 billion backed by residential and commercial real estate.
Citigroup agrees to absorb the first $29 billion in losses on the bundled securities and derivatives; the government will then cover 90% of losses that exceed that figure.
Citigroup spends $1.77 million on lobbying fees in the fourth quarter.
"Citigroup, like many others, had sought to insure itself against losses with a variety of transactions, including the purchase of insurance, only to learn that the losses were overwhelming those who had promised to pay. Insurance on the assets was issued both by the bond insurers and by others that wrote what were known as credit default swaps, which amounted to insurance but were not regulated in the same way. Those who wrote large amounts of such insurance are now in trouble, either negotiating to pay claims for less than promised or, in the case of the American International Group, still in business only because of a government bailout. The American International Group officials responsible for writing the swaps told investors they would never suffer any losses." - Floyd Norris, November 24, 2008
"Sovereign wealth funds operated by China, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and other countries have taken large equity stakes in Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and other firms, including leading European financial institutions." - Mark Jickling
The Shadow Superpower
"The Wall Street banks - which are the recipients of the bailout money - are also the brokers and underwriters of the US public debt. We are dealing with an absurd circular relationship: To finance the bailout, Washington must borrow from the banks, which are the recipients of the bailout." - Michel Chossudovsky
"With the Long-Term Capital Management bailout as a precedent, creditors came to believe that their loans to unsound financial institutions would be made good by the Fed - as long as the collapse of those institutions would threaten the global credit system. Bolstered by this sense of security, bad loans mushroomed. The major creditors of the fund included Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, all of which went on to lend and invest recklessly. The ad hoc aspect of the bailout created a precedent for what has come to be called "regulation by deal" - now the government's modus operandi." - Tyler Cowen, December 26, 2008
"When the "credit crunch" began and Washington began the rush to solve the problem with taxpayer cash, no accounting of this derivative nightmare was ever brought to bear. In all the deliberations and press releases there was not a single mention of the fact that the primary cause of the bank collapse was due to these 'time bombs'." - Andrew Hughes 1/27/09
April 2, 2009 Financial Accounting Standards Board relaxes the "mark-to-market" rule.
Financial institutions are given the go ahead to value their derivative assets in a "mark-to-model" manner - use creative accounting methods to value their toxic debt at 'projected market value'.
"The announcement April 2, 2009 by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) weakening "mark-to-market" accounting rules allowing banks to value their toxic debt at inflated prices. This is a green light to continue the same methods of fraud and double bookkeeping that triggered the breakdown of the financial system in the first place." - Tom Eley
"US taxpayers may be on the hook for as much as $23.7 trillion to bolster the economy and bailout financial companies." - Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) Treasury Department, July, 2009
November 25, 2008 to July 8, 2009
Financial institutions issue $274 billion in debt under the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program.
General Motors Financial Services auto and home lender which recieved $13.5 billion from US taxpayers in exchange for corporate debt in the form of junk bonds becomes a bank to qualify for the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program.
To insure $10 million of General Motors Acceptance Corporation junk bonds annually with a five-year credit default swap contract it costs $895,000.
To insure the entire $13.5 billion in General Motors Acceptance Corporation junk bonds annually will cost over $1.2 billion annually.
Is Bank Debt a Security?
GMAC fined £2.8m for 'mistreating' mortgage customers
GDP Measures Everything 'Except That Which Makes Life Worthwhile'
This web site is not a commercial web site and is presented for educational purposes only.
 This website defines a new perspective with which to engage reality to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has forged a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of a system of philosophy named The Truth of the Way of the Lumière Infinie - a rational gnostic mystery religion based on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a personal relation with the Creator and Sustainer through the pursuit of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of the Lumière Infinie are spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a "hate crime." This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The international corporate cartel already controls the world economic system, corporate media worldwide, the global industrial military entertainment complex and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization is based on coöperation. Coöperation does not occur at the point of a gun. American social mores and values have declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general through corporate media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population through prior corporate media psychological operations. The results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which further their purposes. All views and opinions presented on this web site are the views and opinions of individual human men and women that, through their writings, showed the capacity for intelligent, reasonable, rational, insightful and unpopular thought. All factual information presented on this web site is believed to be true and accurate and is presented as originally presented in print media which may or may not have originally presented the facts truthfully. Opinion and thoughts have been adapted, edited, corrected, redacted, combined, added to, re-edited and re-corrected as nearly all opinion and thought has been throughout time but has been done so in the spirit of the original writer with the intent of making his or her thoughts and opinions clearer and relevant to the reader in the present time. |
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