Ms. Yellen indicated that she would continue the Fed’s “quantitative easing” (QE) polices, despite QE’s failure to improve the economy. Coincidentally, two days before the Yellen hearings, Andrew Huszar, an ex-Fed official, publicly apologized
The left-wing billionaire is helping fund two major conferences that start on the same day, in two different locations just a three hours apart by car. Two liberal events packed into one long weekend. God created the world in six days. Apparently, So
GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt has got to be patting himself on the back for the coup he is pulling off to supply his company with not only cash - but now he's getting a post and a big pass from his newest, bestest buddy, Barack Obama. While we have people..
Currently, it is my belief that as a nation we are in the process of a hostile takeover facilitated by government on behalf of multi-national corporations and world organizations. At stake is our land, water, food, communications and even the air we
Ok! We’ve gone from blue to red. What an event! Why! It is positively historic! It’s a mandate! A landslide! A big steaming crock of BS the likes of which we will probably never see again….at least until 2012. What is it all you sheeple out there
The two heads of Microsoft are finding themselves on opposite sides of a battle in Washington State over the imposition of a state income tax that would apply to only upper-income earners.
The debt created by usury based sovereign debt is perpetual; it can never be paid off. The contract cannot be culminated. Any contract that cannot be culminated is an act of fraud. A contract based upon fraud is invalid from its inception. It would a
If one is alert, it is evident that the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury have disposed of the need for Congressional approval, and have engineered a de facto bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, at public expense.
Top Secret Banker Manual in it there are examples of court filings that could be used to force the hands of bankers. It is in PDF and quite an interesting read.
…And they would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling... laws. Of course, Breaking the law while pretending to enforce it (for profit) is business as usual for American Traffic Solutions.
The headlines say it all. Miami Herald: “Legal challenges mount for Florida’s red-light cameras.” Daytona Beach News-Journal: “Red-light camera lawsuit looms.” Naples News: “[Suit claims] red-light cameras are unconstitutional.”
John Crudele is justifiably suspicious. He writes:
Another curious thing happened before the employment report was made public.
Sometime before late afternoon Thursday, Goldman Sachs suddenly broke with the Wall Street pack that was predicting a loss of 320,000 or so jobs in July.
Talk about the best interview since “Frost-Nixon.” How about Blodget-Spitzer? Henry Blodget interviewed former New York Attorney General and Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who ran Blodget out of Wall Street. Both are bloggers/columnists, both have suffered disgrace and both are looking for redemption.
And wonder of wonders, during the interview Spitzer was in agreement with yet another of his former targets, the peripatetic Hank Greenberg. The former CEO of American International Group is another in a long line of bosses who lost their jobs to Spitzer’s tough investigative tactics.
Spitzer probably wouldn’t want to admit that he essentially repeated what Greenberg said last December, and which BNET Finance ran: that the real villain in the AIG bailout wasn’t Greenberg or Spitzer; it was Goldman Sachs, the investment bank whose tentacles reached into the highest levels of government.
Beleaguered photo radar and red light camera provider Redflex Traffc Solutions was dealt a blow last week when a Superior Court judge in Orange County, CA. found their contract with the City of Santa Ana to be illegal:
"…Orange County Superior Court Commissioner Kenneth Schwartz declared the city’s program void because it had ignored several provisions of state law."
Put the kids away before reading.
If this does not make your blood boil.....
Herein lies the problem. The FHA’s standard insurance program today is notoriously lax. It backs low downpayment loans, to buyers who often have below-average to poor credit ratings, and with almost no oversight to protect against fraud. Sound familiar? This is called subprime lending—the same financial roulette that busted Fannie, Freddie and large mortgage houses like Countrywide Financial.
The article goes on to note that as of the end of this year FHA and Ginnie will have issued and hold one trillion dollars of mortgages, that the current default rate is now 7%, and the delinquent rate is running some 13%.
Why?
Because the same crooks, swindlers and thieves that infested the housing market in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 in "subprime" and "ALT-A" have now moved into the FHA product.
There is only ONE way to guarantee safety and soundness in mortgage lending. ONE!
You gotta love the recent report on Freddie Mac's performance. The headline was a profit BUT only if they didn't include the dividend on its senior preferred stock. So they lost money, again. But that's not what is being reported.
Moreover, no one is talking about the fact that Freddie Mac made more than $4B on their derivative portfolio. I just don't get it. First, we loan Goldman Sachs and the Banksters money that they are supposed to put to work in the economy . . . but instead they just trade stocks and bonds - casino style. Now we have Freddie Mac admitting in the fine print that they would have actually lost almost $5 billion if they did not throw the dice on the derivatives markets.
I guess my question is this. Who is going to cover their losses when they lose? Same thing for the big banks. Who is going to cover their losses when they lose? A
We have all heard plenty about Government Sachs but very little about BO supporter Warren Buffet. Since this WELFARE QUEEN just made another Fortune I thought you should see this. As a side note remember when Durbin said "Frankly the banks own the place?" He should know a thing or two about that on a personal level! The Omaha, Neb., conglomerate run by Warren Buffett posted net income of $3.3 billion, or $2,123 per Class A share in the quarter
Gee, was this just a "simple" short squeeze, or was AIG's surprise profit announcement this morning leaked?
Hmmmm.....
Not that it would be anything new, of course. We know from past experience that only rumors (or leaked facts!) that make stocks go down are ever investigated by the SEC, and then only when the persons doing the leaking (or rumoring) are not big broker/dealers and their crony hedge funds.
This sort of nonsense is nothing new; it is in fact as old as the stock market. But the blatant level of inside baseball during this crisis (and now the rally) has gotten entirely out of hand.
A powerful House Democrat who has turned down a Republican's call to subpoena records of a mortgage program at Countrywide Financial Corp. received two home loans from the lender.
Some information in the lawmaker's mortgage documents raises the possibility they were made through the program, which provided loans to public figures and other favored borrowers often at lower interest rates or with lower origination fees than were available to the general public.
The loans were made to Rep. Edolphus Towns of New York, who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform committee. The panel's ranking Republican, California Rep. Darrell Issa, has been pushing to have the committee subpoena mortgage records showing who received loans through Countrywide's VIP program -- operated under former Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo and known within the company as "Friends of Angelo."
lol I doubt it is "misguided" I believe he knows full well how to spin the propaganda!
A group known as ShareOwners.org, which supports such "say on pay" legislation finds that most of the investing public wants such provisions. The group says that after conducting a national survey it found that 83% of U.S. investors feel that shareholders should be permitted active involvement in CEO pay.
With such strong backing behind it you would expect top execs to be quaking in their loafers. But they're probably not, and there's one big reason why: The legislation is non-binding, and in no way can it ever overrule what a firm's board decides to actually pay its executives. So, in effect, we have, once again, a great amount of sound and fury--and Barney Frank is among the most furious--amounting to very little.
Makes sense with all those Government give aways of your tax dollars with the residents "AIG Breakup Is Fee Bonanza" Wall Street banks and lawyers could collect nearly $1 billion in fees from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and American International Group Inc. to help manage and break apart the insurer, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
That would represent one of Wall Street's biggest paydays -- four times the fees paid to break up AT&T Corp. in 1996, and nearly double those paid for Visa USA's 2008 initial public offering, the largest U.S. IPO ever.
They know they will make a killing off of YOU!
The stock maket edged lower on Thursday but some major financial names remained as bright spots, limiting the declines in major indexes. American International Group, whose shares surged 60% Wednesday, was up by another 11.8%.
I will believe it when I see it...
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday that the Securities and Exchange Commission plans to ban so-called "flash trading," where high-frequency traders can get information just before it becomes public.
"We salute the SEC for moving forward with this ban that will restore integrity to the markets. The agency is absolutely making the right call by stepping up and ending this unfair practice," Schumer said.
Flash orders are trades that flash in milliseconds to only a select group of market participants which can disadvantage other investors. Traders with access to the information because of super-fast computers can act on it quickly to trade ahead of other traders, influencing the pricing of stocks.
In this recent article, Some U.S. bank pay "unmoored" from performance: Cuomo
By Grant McCool of Reuters, Jul 30, 2009 7:22pm the reporter makes the comment,
..."bonuses for Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co were "substantially greater" than the banks' net income."
Goldman earned $2.3 billion, paid out $4.8 billion in bonuses and received $10 billion in TARP funding,...
How is it any company can pay out more in bonuses then they earn? One way is to use taxpayer money. New York's AG, Cuomo is on the right path in this investigation but the outcome of his efforts are yet to be seen or heard.
But Goldman Sachs is not alone in this. Yet it is very possible from reading Michael Lewis' book "Liars Poker" that they may have invented the concept of overpaying people and then found ways to justify it which in turn they possibly shared with the others in their "club".
Is it a coincidence that Pa
Call it another sign that fear is out, greed is back, and we have entered the new post-crisis era. Subprime Stan is back on Wall Street, after less than three years away.
Stanford "Stan" Kurland, the Countrywide Finance executive who pocketed more than $140 million at the expense of outside investors at the height of the subprime mania, has raised about $300 million from fresh investors for his latest venture -- trying to profit from the crisis.
His PennyMac Mortgage Investment Trust (PMT) made its stock-market debut last week
The name of the game: Distressed mortgages, particularly the kind of troubled subprime loans that Countrywide used to make.
I guess this kind of behavior it is to be expected from the do as I say not what I do no class trash in government. Smoke and mirrors anyway since the so called regulations of Obama's Economic Regulations Are Like a Law Which Makes Arson Illegal, But Exempts Convicted Arsonists.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner blasted top U.S. financial regulators in an expletive-laced critique last Friday as frustration grows over the Obama administration's faltering plan to overhaul U.S. financial regulation, according to people familiar with the meeting.
The proposed regulatory revamp is one of President Barack Obama's top domestic priorities. But since it was unveiled in June, the plan has been criticized by the financial-services industry, as well as by financial regulators wary of encroachment on their turf.
Goldman Sachs' reputation among both the general public and financially sophisticated Americans has been damaged by the events of the past year. Meanwhile, Goldman shares look set to open around $165 today, over 300% off their lows from the crisis. If this reputational hit mattered, nobody bothered to tell paid-up Goldman Sachs shareholders.
The report doesn't quantify the decline, but we can surmise that it's significant.
Want another shocker? Barack Obama has received more from one source–Goldman Sachs $542,252.00–than McCain has from all of the companies combined. Who the hell is more beholden to lobbyists? And why does a junior Senator from Illinois rate this kind of dough?
http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/09/21/baracks-wall-street-problem-is-now-americas/
Wall Street banks are reaping outsized profits by trading with the Federal Reserve, raising questions about whether the central bank is driving hard enough bargains in its dealings with private sector counterparties, officials and industry executives say.
The Fed has emerged as one of Wall Street’s biggest customers during the financial crisis, buying massive amounts of securities to help stabilise the markets. In some cases, such as the market for mortgage-backed securities, the Fed buys more bonds than any other party.
However, the Fed is not a typical market player. In the interests of transparency, it often announces its intention to buy particular securities in advance. A former Fed official said this strategy enables banks to sell these securities to the Fed at an inflated price.
Mr. Bud Burrell has extensive experience working with major brokerage
firms on the trading desk and arbitrage desk with almost 30 years
experience -- Industry authority, expert, Wall Street veteran. Love him
or hate him, you will always know where he stands - his no-holds-barred
style and frank honesty make his blogs a must read, from one of the
originals. View his landmark correspondences in The Bud Files.
(Publisher: Want to understand from the inside of The Greatest Depression?)