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"When
Larry Summers, Obama's
chief economic advisor, piously tells us that the administration's hands are
tied because we all must abide "by the
rule of law," perhaps it's time to ask:
What rule and for whom?"
Tim
Rutten March 18, 2009 LA
Times
| The first
stage of the economy's domination of social life brought about an evident
degradation of being into having - human fulfillment was no longer equated with
what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social
life has become completely occupied by the accumulated productions of the
economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing - all
"having" must now derive its immediate prestige and its
ultimate purpose from
appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in
the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them.
Individual reality is allowed to
appear only insofar as it is not actually real. - Guy
Debord |
Economics is defined
as:domestic
management
theory and
management of economic
systems
"Karl Marx, whose
economic analyses are strikingly
prescient, saw how the credit economy is one way that
central banking systems
attempt to stretch out and soften
the boundary in which the private
accumulation of profit from production runs up against the waning
purchasing power of
consumers.
In a nation whose
governing parties and
increasingly wealthy corporate
elite can't restrain
themselves from devastating and
costly imperialist wars overseas while at the same time
impoverishing ever-growing numbers
of the struggling and poor at home." - Eric Brill 01/08
"Wherever
politics intrudes upon economic life, political success is readily attained by
saying what people like to hear rather than
what is demonstrably true. Instead of
safeguarding truth and honesty, the State then tends to become a
major source of insincerity and mendacity." – Hans F.
Sennholz
savings and loans debacle
The savings and loan debacle began
the regression of the American republic into
a "plutonomy" - a society in which the largest economic gains flow to an ever
smaller portion of the population creating a decadent
social order that poorly rewards human
labor.
After the stockmarket
crash of 1929, Congress passed a series of laws designed to
restrict the ability of Wall Street to
manipulate markets.
1933
Glass-Steagall Act
Congress passes the Glass-Steagall Act separating
commercial banking activity - savings and checking accounts, which accepted
wages as deposits and issued
small business loans and mortgages, from investment banking activity, which
underwrote stocks and
corporate
bonds.
This is the governing economic principle for more than half a
century.
1971
Nixon
Shock
Richard
Nixon consulted Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns, incoming Treasury
Secretary John Connally, and then Undersecretary for International Monetary
Affairs and future Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.
On the afternoon of
Friday, August 13, 1971, Nixon, on the advice of the
Connally, decided to break up Bretton Woods by announcing the following actions
on August 15:
Nixon
directed Treasury Secretary Connally to suspend, with certain exceptions, the
convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, ordering the
gold window to be closed such that foreign governments could no longer exchange
their dollars for gold.
Nixon issued
Executive Order 11615 (pursuant to
the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970), imposing
a 90-day freeze on wages and
prices in order to counter
inflation.
This was the first time the U.S. government had enacted wage
and price controls since World War II.
An import surcharge of 10
percent was set to ensure that American products would not be at a disadvantage
because of the expected fluctuation in exchange rates.
Speaking on
television on Sunday, August 15, when American financial markets were closed,
Nixon said the following:
We
must protect the position of the American dollar as a pillar of monetary
stability around the world.
In the past 7 years, there has been an average of one international
monetary crisis every year.
I have directed Secretary Connally to
suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve
assets, except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of
monetary stability and in the best interests of the United
States.
August
1979 Paul Adolph Volcker attempts to reign in the
money supply, and
inflation, by
raising interest rates to
stratospheric heights.
Most savings and loans fixed rate assets rate
of return are considerably below the prevailing rate of Federal Reserve
funds.
Savings and loans are paying, assume 12%, for loan capital but
their return on previous released capital is only 6%.
This policy
basically obliterates the Savings and Loan industry.
"The local
manufacturing sector never came back after the calamitous decline produced by
the Paul Volcker recession of 1979-1983, when
interest rates were deliberately raised
to over 20% to kill off family businesses so that global corporations could
step in and take over." - Richard C. Cook
December 12,
1980
Federal Reserve chairman Paul Adolph Volcker
BB /
CFR /TC raises the prime loan rate to
21.5%.
Deregulation
legislation is proposed to address the low rate of return of an investment
portfolio full of long-term, low fixed-rate assets.
Savings and
loans are given additional investment opportunities and adjustable rate
mortgages are allowed.
Wall
Street now sees the savings and loan industry as a "cash cow" to be "levered"
accordingly.
"I was working in the Carter
White House in
1979-80.
Paul Volcker, a Rockefeller
protégé, suddenly raised interest rates to fight inflation
the bankers caused by the OPEC
oil price deals creating recession.
Through the "Reagan Revolution" regulatory controls over bank
loans were lifted allowing banks to use
fractional reserves
for consumer loans.
Volcker's recession
shattered American manufacturing and hastened the flight of jobs abroad.
Under the "Reagan
Doctrine," the US embarked on a
mission of world conquest,
attacking one small
nation at a time, starting with
Nicaragua.
Global capitalism was on the
march, with the US armed forces its
own private police force." -
Richard C. Cook
Nancy Teeters, the lone dissenter
"People think the Federal
Reserve central bank is US
government institution.
It is not a government
institution.
It is a
private credit monopoly of those who prey upon the people of the US for the
benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic
speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders.
Twelve
private credit monopolies were deceitfully foisted upon this country
by bankers who came here from Europe
and who repaid us for our hospitality by undermining
our American institutions." - Louis T. McFadden, House Banking Committee
Congressional Record, pg 1295 & 1296, June 10, 1932
1982
Gain-St Germain Depository Institutions Act
deregulation legislation
expands acceptable savings and loans investments by permitting savings and
loans to make short term consumer loans, issue
credit cards, and make
commercial real estate loans.
This was the method of stoking commerce after dumping water on the
entire economy by increasing the prime loan rate to 21.5% on December 12,
1980.
Financial
engineers claim broader investment opportunities will allow savings and loans
to better diversify their portfolios enabling financial stabilty.
Beginning from a situation where
liabilities exceed assets, financial managers cannot overcome shortages by
pursuing a conservative investment course.
This provided
the means for increased risk taking
while ignoring the need for future capital investments by lowering capital
requirements.
With revised accounting rules to artificially boost
reported fractional
reserve equity savings and loans began to look for new investment
opportunities.
Once the interstate lending rules had been suspended the
preferred method became raising rates paid on certificates of deposits - CDs -
to garner more deposits and to
make new investments promising still higher returns.
In the past
depositors had no reason to send funds to savings and loans halfway across
America but rapidly advancing computer technology - the overnight transfer -
changed that by making possible a
nationwide market in deposits while the higher rates made it worth the
trouble.
The Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation (FDIC) preserves and
promotes public confidence in the
US financial system by insuring deposits in banks and
thrift institutions for at least
$250,000.
Are All Bank Accounts Insured by the FDIC?
Federal
deposit insurance put insolvent
institutions in a position to abuse the new market as federally insured
depositors are unconcerned about the health of the institutions in which they
placed their money.
Undercapitalized savings and loans assured
themselves a continuous inflow of capital by simply offering to pay
higher interest rates than
competitors.
Healthy savings and loans are asked to pay increasing
deposit insurance premiums to protect depositors in
failed institutions and consequently gain little or no cost advantage from
the fact they are well capitalized.
Funds flow from stronger banks and
savings and loans to the weakest banks.
1986
The movement to use the Federal Reserve Board to kill
Glass-Steagall begins.
Federal
Reserve Board reinterprets existing law to allow commercial banks to derive
a minuscule 5% of their revenues from investment banking
activities.
1989 Alan Greenspan bumps
investment banking activities up to 10%.
1996
Through creeping incrementalism Alan Greenspan kills
Glass-Steagall when he ups the limit investment banking activities to
25%.
July 1999
Larry Summers is appointed
Treasury Secretary when Robert Edward
Rubin leaves to become Vice Chairman of Citigroup.
Larry Summers is directly responsible for the financial
institution meltdown.
As William Jefferson Clinton's Treasury
Secretary from July 1999 - January 2001 he shaped the financial deregulation
that unleashed the crisis.
"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
Short sellers attempt to profit
from an predicted decline in the fungible asset valuation of the value of
a fungible
financial instrument.
Short sellers take loans on
fungible financial
instruments - bonds,
marketable securities,
futures contracts,
securitized loans,
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.
Larry
Summers backs the Commodity
Futures Modernization Act.
Larry Summers directly profits from
the deregulation by vigorously 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
"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.
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." - Matt Taibbi
speech delivered by Mr Jaime Caruana,
General
Manager of the BIS
"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 gamblers 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 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 examines the books of national banks to make
sure they are 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.
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 PR
"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."
AL Williams
suggests its middle-income client base purchase sufficient protection with term
life insurance to 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.
Facing a capital crisis Kuhn & Loeb merges
with Lehman
Brothers, to form Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb Inc.
Internationally known as Kuhn Loeb Lehman Brothers
Inc.
1980 AL Williams enters into a
contract with Boston-based Massachusetts Indemnity and Life Insurance
(MILICO), a larger underwriter
of life insurance, whose parent is PennCorp Financial Services,
Santa Monica.
1981 John
H. Gutfreund orchestrates the sale of Salomon Brothers to the commodity
trading firm Phibro.
Salomon is noted in the
bond market for selling
mortgage-backed securities, a hitherto obscure species of financial instrument
first created by Ginnie
Mae.
Salomon begins purchasing home mortgages from thrifts and
packaging them into mortgage-backed
securities then sold to local and international investors.
First American National Corporation is
established as a holding company for First American Life Insurance
(renamed AL Williams Life Insurance) and First American National
Securities (renamed PFS Investments).
Shearson is
acquired by American Express and
operated as a subsidiary.
1982 First American
National Corporation, renamed The AL Williams Corporation, begins
underwriting public stock offerings.
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 Inc. evolving into Shearson
Lehman.
Original Phibro CEO David Tendler is replaced by John
H. Gutfreund.
"The move puts Mr. Gutfreund, who is 54 years old, at the
helm of a two- pronged company with $42 billion in assets, $30 billion in
revenue, $617 million in annual profits, 6,700 employees and 25,000
shareholders. It has the capability of trading virtually anything, from wheat
to mortgage-backed securities." - Michael Blumstein, After the coup at
Phibro-Salomon 8/12/84
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
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 depleted FDIC.
US
taxpayers foot the bill for a secret 2 1/2-year rescue of
Citibank, close to collapse
after the Latin American debt crunch.
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 (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 company.
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, Aspen
Institute, CFR, Brookings
Institution, Federal Reserve Bank of
New York.
Barack Obama
receives $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 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 at a discount to JP Morgan Chase for ten
dollars per share, 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 given to
Bank of America for $50
billion or $29 per share.
The market valuation of Merrill Lynch was $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 comoany 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 of $306 billion backed by residential and commercial real
estate.
Citigroup agrees to absorb the first $29 billion in
losses on the securities
and derivatives; the Fed
agrees to cover 90% of losses exceeding 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
AIG, still in business only because of a government bailout.
The
AIG 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
"With Long-Term Capital Management
bailout as a precedent, creditors saw loans to
unsound financial institutions would
be made good by the Fed - as long as the collapse of those
institutions threatened
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), July,
2009
May 18,
2009 A top-secret meeting of the world’s richest people to discuss
the global financial crisis is held in New York.
The mysterious meeting
held in the President's Room at Rockefeller University in New York was called
by Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire-Hathaway;
Bill Gates, co founder of Microsoft;
and David Rockefeller Jr.,
chairman of Rockefeller
Financial Services.
Attendees included Oprah Winfrey,
George Soros, Ted Turner, and
Michael Bloomberg, among
others.
In their letter of invitation they note the worldwide recession
and the urgent need to plan for the
future.
Each attendee delivered a presentation on how they saw the
future global economic climate, the
future priorities for philanthropy, and what they felt the elite group
should do.
They're called the Good Club - and they want to save the
world
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
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
2016 Phibro acquired by
Energy Arbitrage Partners.
BlackRock $1.9 Billion Credit Hedge Fund Suffers Worst
January
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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.
Fair Use Notice
This site may contain
copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically
authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our
efforts to advance understanding of criminal justice, human rights, political,
economic, democratic, scientific, and
social justice issues,
etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without
profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes. For more information see:
www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted
material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you
must obtain permission from the copyright owner. |
 Copyright
© Lawrence Turner
All Rights Reserved
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