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:
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Thursday it was bringing civil charges against senior Bank of America executives, including former company CEO Ken Lewis, for their role in the company's controversial purchase of Merrill Lynch...
...The lawsuit contends that the bank's management team understated the losses at Merrill in order to get shareholders to approve the deal, then subsequently overstated the firm's willingness to terminate the merger to regulators weeks later in order to get $20 billion of additional aid from the federal government.
Anyone know why they are not bringing criminal charges? 'Cause I'd like to see some people go to jail. Is it that bringing criminal charges against rich people is gauche? Or something else? Oh, wells. The important thing is that it's a friggn' indictment of high-level wrong-doing.
I have always hated Darrell Issa. I live in California and Darrell Issa is largely the reason that we now have Arnold "will my term ever end?" Schwarzenegger in the governor's hot tub. He's also, quite simply, a scumbag.
But remiscent of the Bush years, when I found myself agreeing more with Pat "I'm also a scumbag" Buchanan, than I did with most "mainstream" Democrats like, well, almost all of them, I now want to pat Scumbag Issa on the back.
The controversy surrounding Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's role in the 2008 Wall Street bailouts was ramped up Thursday with the revelation of emails that show the New York Federal Reserve -- then run by Geithner -- pressured insurance giant AIG to withhold information about payments the company made to its creditors.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) obtained emails between AIG employees showing that the company had planned to disclose in its filings to the SEC that it had paid 100 cents on the dollar to creditors like Goldman Sachs and other banks, but "the New York Fed crossed out the reference," Bloomberg News reports.
AIG has received $183 billion in taxpayer relief. The news that the New York Fed attempted to keep from the public how that money was spent will likely increase political opposition to Geithner's appointment as Treasury Secretary.
Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer's payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.
AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a "backdoor bailout" of financial firms.
"It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information," said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers "deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation's securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information."
Will this become a mainstream story? Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? After all, it paints a "Democrat" in a negative light, and it's being pushed by a Republican.
But we're talking about Banksters here, and they don't play by the rules. They run the place.
NORRIS: You know that businesses are spending again. The administration has been asking the banks to try to free up more money for small business in particular. And I want you to help me understand something because on one hand the administration is telling the bankers that they need to take fewer risks, that they need to deleverage, that they need to have higher capital reserve. And at the same time you're also telling them that they need to lend more money. Those two things don't seem to square.
Sec. GEITHNER: It is very important that we work with Congress to pass legislation that can put in place financial reforms that can prevent the next crisis. So it's pretty important in the future we build a more stable financial system. We constrain risk taking in the future. But right now the real risk we face is that banks are not lending enough and not going to provide the capital businesses need to grow for the economy to strengthen going forward.
NORRIS: So it's okay for them to take risks right now?
Sec. GEITHNER: Absolutely. Right now the real risk is that the pendulum having been too soft and easy on the lending side. Right now the risk is that banks overcorrect or that supervisors overcorrect. And that's something we need to work against, lean against, because, again, the strength in recovery will depend in part on credit being available to businesses across the county.
What a confidence booster. Geithner doesn't see any job growth until Spring--we just lost half a million more jobs last week. His plan has been to take over toxic gambling losses in exchange for cash so the banks have no need to deleverage and can take more risks.
If you DON'T Study, DON'T play by the Rules, and DON'T CARE who is hurt by your careless actions -- would you expect an "all expenses paid" Scholarship? ... or record Bonuses? ... or more free Mad Money than you know what to do with?
Hardly!
Yet that is exactly what the reckless Wall Street Bankers got -- HUGE Rewards -- FOR BEHAVING BADLY!
In some circles, this is call Co-dependency and "Enabling" ...
In America we call it "Too Big to Fail".
Well Alan Grayson and Ron Paul, are about expose this Trillion Dollar "reward for failure" system, for what it is ...
Rep. Alan Grayson on the Fed Bailing Out Big Banks:
"You Don't Give Scholarships to Kids Who Fail"
If you haven't yet seen Frontline's documentary about Brooksley Born, the woman who warned about the dangers of the Derivatives markets during the Clinton Administration, and the resulting financial disasters that ensued from deliberately choosing to ignore her, you simply must see it.
Frontline is one of the few true journalistic documentary shows remaining in this country. And in this case they do their usual superlative job in presenting the story of what happened when Wall Street took over Washington, and when an idiot named Alan Greenspan channeled tricked everybody into thinking he was a genius.
And yes, Virginia, it was Clinton's fault. It happened on Clinton's watch, when Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Alan Greenspan convinced everyone that NO REGULATION of the markets, of Wall Street, was a good idea.
Can you believe that? Alan Greenspan actually came out and said that even going after blatant fraud on Wall Street was a bad idea, a mistake even, because "the markets would take care of it themselves". He gave fraudsters a GREEN LIGHT.
This is like saying we shouldn't fight gangs of street thugs because it will sort itself out. Police? Just stay home. Rapists and murderers and thieves will somehow just take care of themselves and will magically eradicate themselves.
Indeed this was a classic example of Magical Thinking.
And Magical Thinkers ran this country's economy, and almost destroyed it completely.
And what is worse, is that the policies that led to this are still in place. Nothing has changed, and I mean nothing.
And some of the people who LED this disaster are now back in power, with the Obama administration. Larry Summers, for one, who was "the enforcer" for these fools, the tough guy who would really play hardball with people (and how that must have made his balls swell with manly pride when he would do that) is now Obama's chief economic adviser!
This is just insulting as hell.
This is like putting Charles Manson in charge of security for the Oscars.
Obama is an idiot to have these guys anywhere near his big-ass ears. These people should be too ashamed of themselves to ever step foot in Washington ever again, but here they are, in control.
What is astounding about this documentary is that what this woman warned about, regarding the derivatives market, happened.
No, not in 2008. It happened in 1998.
In 1998, exactly as she predicted, a major, enormous hedge fund went under and almost took the economy of the United States down with it. And what was the result? Nothing. Greenspan and the other fools managed to convince Congress that NOTHING was the thing to do, that NOTHING was the plan, that NOTHING could be done. "I can't conceive of any way we could regulate this!" was his refrain. He didn't want to. He had a childlike fascination with Ayn Rand and thought that there simply should be no regulations of any kind, that government should have absolutely no ability or power to TOUCH industry, or banking. And here we had a guy with this kind of MAGICAL THINKING in charge of the Federal Reserve! For years. And touted as a genius.
It blows the mind.
And keep in mind this happened on a Democrat's watch. Bill Clinton, the best Republican President ever, as I've always said. Indeed he was.
So what happened in 1998 happened ten years later, AGAIN, almost to the date. Only this time it was a mega-meltdown, the mother of all meltdowns, and once again EXACTLY what this woman warned against. This woman whose job as a regulator was destroyed by an Act of Congress, a woman who was deliberately neutered by these fools who didn't even know what a derivative WAS. And this time it nearly did take the economy of the world down with it and still very well might.
And what do we have now? This slimy old piece of dung FOOL, Alan Greenspan, saying "gosh, I guess I was wrong all my life". And his buddies Larry Summers and his mop-topped protoge Timmy Geithner back in the White House.
Obama, you're an idiot. Larry Summers, you should resign in shame at once. Congress, you should figure out a way to impeach Geithner and get rid of him. They all gotta go. If they don't clean house, this is all going to happen AGAIN. And that's not me saying that, that's Brooksley Born saying that, and she's saying that now, that if this isn't dealt with, and it is STILL not being dealt with, that this will happen again. And again. And again. Until we learn and finally get it right.
We have learned, and we are deliberately not getting it right? Why? Because Wall Street makes money off of it. Yes, the banks. And they will be bailed out, and they will have their billion dollar bonuses, and this country will see what is in effect NATIONALIZED GAMBLING taken hold, by the ultra-rich, in a game that they can never lose.
In fact, just today, it has come out that Geithner's idea to "fix" things, this little fuck actually has the gall to come out and propose that the Big Banks have an unlimited line of credit from the Executive Branch of the country, that they should be able to do whatever the FUCK they want and be PERMANENTLY BAILED OUT. With no limits as to the dollar amount behind the bailouts.
In my opinion, Geithner's proposal is "TARP on steroids." Section 1204 of the proposal [the proposal being the "Resolution Authority for Large, Interconnected Financial Companies Act of 2009"] allows the executive branch to use taxpayer money to make loans to, or invest in, the largest financial institutions to avoid a systemic risk to the economy.
Geithner's proposal reminds me of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the $700 billion Wall Street bailout adopted last year, but the TARP was limited to two years, and to a maximum of $700 billion. Section 1204 is unlimited in dollar amount and is a permanent grant of power to the executive branch. TARP contained some limits on executive compensation and an array of special oversight authorities. Section 1204 contains absolutely no limits on executive compensation and no special oversight.
When I asked Geithner whether he would accept a $1 trillion limit on the new bailout authority (if the executive branch wanted to spend more, it would have to come back to Congress), he rejected a $1 trillion limit, insisting that the executive branch be able to respond without coming back to Congress.
That's Geithner's idea of how to "fix" corruption on Wall Street -- KEEP GIVING THE CROOKS MONEY.
Why the FUCK does this guy have a job again? Why the FUCK isn't he fired? How DARE he propose something like this?
This documentary should be required viewing by everyone in this country.
And after watching it you will never want to see Larry Summer's ugly face ever again. But you will, because he's Obama's "guy".
With Dems like these, who needs Republicans?
They're all crooked. Time to throw them all out. All of them. Every last one.
When the historians finally finish sorting through the appalling decisions that have been made in the past two years, this one will probably be at the top of the heap.
Last fall, as AIG began to realize how screwed it was, it started negotiating with the counterparties to all the credit default swaps it had written. One of the AIG's goals was to persuade these counterparties--including Goldman Sachs--to accept buyouts discounts of as much as $0.40 cents on the dollar.
These sorts of negotiations are exactly what should happen when a company gets in trouble. It goes to its creditors and says, look, we can't pay you everything, so here's your choice: Take something, or take your chances in banktuptcy court. (And, in this case, this wouldn't have been much of a choice, given the standing of CDS holders in the liquidation line).
But then Tim Geithner, head of the New York Fed, stepped in.
A few weeks later, the counterparties--all of whom voluntarily did business with AIG and understood the risks--were bailed out at par: 100 cents on the dollar.
Thus began the most nauseating giveaway in the history of the country.
By Sept. 16, 2008, AIG, once the world's largest insurer, was running out of cash, and the U.S. government stepped in with a rescue plan. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the regional Fed office with special responsibility for Wall Street [run by Tim Geithner], opened an $85 billion credit line for New York-based AIG. That bought it 77.9 percent of AIG and effective control of the insurer.
The government's commitment to AIG through credit facilities and investments would eventually add up to $182.3 billion.
Beginning late in the week of Nov. 3, the New York Fed, led by President Timothy Geithner, took over negotiations with the banks from AIG, together with the Treasury Department and Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's Federal Reserve. Geithner's team circulated a draft term sheet outlining how the New York Fed wanted to deal with the swaps -- insurance-like contracts that backed soured collateralized-debt obligations...
Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has never been made public...
The New York Fed's decision to pay the banks in full cost AIG -- and thus American taxpayers -- at least $13 billion. That's 40 percent of the $32.5 billion AIG paid to retire the swaps. Under the agreement, the government and its taxpayers became owners of the dubious CDOs, whose face value was $62 billion and for which AIG paid the market price of $29.6 billion. The CDOs were shunted into a Fed-run entity called Maiden Lane III.
One change makes you larger,
And one change makes you small,
And the ones Obama gives you, don't do anything at all.
Go ask Geithner, when he's ten feet tall.
Bring a shovel with you, he's WAY down in that 10 trillion dollar rabbit hole no Obamabots want to talk about, he's down there with the Mad Hatters of Wall Street and the Cheshire Cats of the Fed, he's down there high-fiving his Goldman Sachs pals, they're on a roll, they've been raking in market bubble billions and cashing in when those bubbles have exploded ever since the 1920's.
Mad Hatters, Cheshire Cats, whacko wingnuts and Goldman Sachs.
Digby observes that the American economy is essentially in the hands of the High Priests of the Federal Reserve, who do not answer to anyone, least of all to the great unwashed masses who allegedly aren't equipped to handle something so important as money.
Considering the fact that America's banking system has become the Clusterfuck of All Time, it seems to me that the High Priests of the Temple of Bernanke are the ones who can't handle money. Or keep track of it. Or reveal how many trillions of dollars they've printed and who they're handing all those trillions of dollars to.
Congressman Grayson:
The Federal Reserve has refused multiple inquiries from both the House and the Senate to disclose who is receiving trillions of dollars from the central banking system. The Federal Reserve has redacted the central terms of the no-bid contracts it has issued to Wall Street firms like Blackrock and PIMCO, without disclosure required of the Treasury, and is participating in new and exotic programs like the trillion-dollar TALF to leverage the Treasury's balance sheet. With discussions of allocating even more power to the Federal Reserve as the 'systemic risk regulator' of the credit markets, more oversight over the central bank's operations is clearly necessary.
Even more oversight than there already is???
Wow. I didn't know it was possible to have even more oversight over that Temple of Secrets and its Branch Temples on Wall Street than we already have. But I know this much. . .
The High Priests will be very offended. They'd already ordained themselves as Supreme High Pontiff Systemic Risk Regulators and now some heathen asshole in Congress is suggesting that they should be subject to even more blasphemous oversight.
Tuesday ANKOSS wrote here in Obama's Capitulation Statement that we have arrived at a point of "Capitulation complete; surrender accomplished. The banks are running America, and Obama is now their top PR man".
These two short videos from Pepe Escobar should help to put that statement into the broader world context that wraps it...
Real News - April 14, 2009 Welcome to the new "New World Order" Pepe Escobar Pt1: A tsunami of hype around another New World Order
Geithner's in the basement,
Mixing up the medicine,
I'm on the pavement,
Thinking about the government.
Bankers in trench coats,
Every one's a Madoff,
Say they got toxic debts,
Wanna get 'em paid off . . .
The banking system is rubble. The economy's imploding. How did it come to this? Why didn't our "representatives" in Washington D.C. see this crisis coming? Because they were too busy kissing Wall Street's ass and K Street's ass and Bush's ass and the ass of every CEO in sight, that's why they didn't see this coming.
We saw it coming. We're progressives. We don't need a fucking weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
We told America a hard rain's gonna fall. But America wouldn't listen.
We saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
We saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
We saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin,
We saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin,
We saw a white ladder all covered with water,
We saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
We saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children.
Thomas Ferguson is a political scientist and author who studies and writes on politics and economics, often within an historical perspective. He is a Political Science professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a contributing editor of The Nation, and is also the author of several books, the most recent of which is Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political System.
Today, in the fourth of a series of interviews with Real News CEO Paul Jay, Ferguson calls the Obama/Geithner/Summers plan a "recipe for disaster".
Real News - April 4, 2009 Obama should save the banks, not the bankers Pt.4
Tom Ferguson: Obama's plan is a "recipe for disaster, if the US reflates, the rest of the world doesn't"
Note: I believe this interview was done before the G20.
The crisis surrounding the American International Group was a near-tragedy that underlines the need for broad new government authority to regulate or even take control of financial institutions other than banks, the government's top fiscal officials told lawmakers on Tuesday.
Geithner claims that if this power existed back in September, current measures such as endless bailouts and seven-figure bonuses for mentally-questionable financial fuck-ups would not have happened.
There's a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over Mr. Obama's failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern.
Here's how the pattern works: first, administration officials, usually speaking off the record, float a plan for rescuing the banks in the press. This trial balloon is quickly shot down by informed commentators. Then, a few weeks later, the administration floats a new plan. This plan is, however, just a thinly disguised version of the previous plan, a fact quickly realized by all concerned. And the cycle starts again.
Welcome to Monty Python's Flying Bank Bailout Circus. Everything is under control. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink . . .
Moyers talked on Friday's Bill Moyers Journal with Simon Johnson, Former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), MIT Sloan School of Management professor and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who examines President Obama's plan for economic recovery.
In a Bill Moyers interview with Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF and now a Professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management, Johnson expressed a pessimistic view of those empowered to lead us out of this economic crisis.
Johnson isn't for "nationalization" per se, he's for "scaled up FDIC intervention," breaking down the "oligarchy" by pitting one faction against the other. Based on his analysis of who is holding the financial keys at the moment, he fundamentally believes that the people in charge of determining the outcome of the situation have a vested interest in not standing up to the banking interests and doing the things that need to be done. And that is not a comforting thought.
No. It's not a comforting thought. There's no comfort in knowing that Captain Geithner seems intent upon ramming into the same iceberg Captain Paulson rammed into, there's no comfort in knowing only the elites will get to board the lifeboats, there's no comfort in being trapped below decks in steerage class while all of this iceberg ramming is going on.
Reform Immigration -
March on Washington
