The Correspondents Explain – Political Parties – The Socialist Party (2:14)

The Correspondents Explain – Political Parties – The Tea Party (2:47)

Adapted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Because the big problem is not the U.S. obsession with guns, violence, and fame or a corrupt conventional media establishment and cowardly politicians; it’s people who dress up in fishnet stockings and teddies.

Madness takes its toll.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Geithner Raked Over the Coals in House Committee About Libor

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Wednesday July 25, 2012 9:35 am

Barney Frank operated as Geithner’s lawyer through all of this, saying that the 2008-era financial regulators were all Bush appointees. But that’s not the point; none of those regulators had access to documentary evidence of the commission of fraud.

Here’s the backstory. When Geithner ran the New York Federal Reserve Board, they failed to inform US regulators that they had an admission of guilt from a Barclays employee that the Libor was being rigged. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Justice Department had to build their case without the direct evidence of rigging that Geithner and his staff knew all about.

Geithner denied this today. He claimed that he did everything he could. “We took the initiative to bring those concerns to the attention of the broader U.S. regulatory community, including all the agencies that have responsibility for market manipulation and abuse,” he said in testimony.

Well, someone’s lying. And Geithner’s claim that he didn’t know about rate rigging until 2008, when the NY Fed acknowledged in documents that they had evidence in 2007, doesn’t make him a credible witness. Not to mention the fact that the NY Fed set the payouts for the AIG bailout, and the TALF lending facility, using Libor as a benchmark.

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If there were any justice in the world, Geithner would be dead to rights. He had documentary evidence of fraud, and he didn’t send it up the chain to the authorities. In fact, he continued to use the fraudulent rates in the NY Fed’s everyday business.

N.Y. Fed quiet on Barclays’ admission of rigging Libor

By Jia Lynn Yang and Danielle Douglas, Washington Post

Published: July 24

Geithner, who was then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, did not communicate in key meetings with top regulators that British bank Barclays had admitted to Fed staffers that it was rigging Libor, according to people familiar with the matter.

Instead, regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Justice Department worked largely without the Fed’s help to build a case against Barclays. That work has culminated in a massive scandal rocking the banking industry on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Still, the Fed proceeded to use Libor as a benchmark to determine how much insurance giant American International Group would pay back the government during its bailout. The measure also was used in the fall of 2008 to set the interest rate for the emergency lending program called the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF.

“That number [Libor] determined how the taxpayer would be compensated,” said Neil Barofsky, who was the chief watchdog of the financial system’s $700 billion bailout. “That’s putting the Federal Reserve’s imprimatur on a rate it has suspicion to think was fraudulent. The Federal Reserve’s use of that and Treasury’s use of that in the bailout sends a powerful message to the market: ‘Hey don’t worry about this, we’re endorsing it.’ ”

He added that the Fed’s response can be measured by the fact that no one has reformed Libor.

Libor is critical because it is used worldwide to set the rates for trillions of dollars’ worth of mortgages, student loans, auto loans and many other financial contracts. It was an especially important metric during the financial crisis because it was a key indicator for the health of the banking industry.

SIGTARP: Taxpayers still exposed as AIG shrinks CDS portfolio

By Jon Prior, HousingWire

July 24, 2012

Taxpayers are still owed more than half their original investment in American International Group even as its non-insurance business operates without a consolidated banking regulator, according to the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

AIG still has $30.4 billion from the original $67.8 billion TARP investment outstanding as of July, which is on track to actually earn a return, SIGTARP said in a special report (.pdf) Wednesday.

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“For more than two years, AIG has had no consolidated banking regulator of its non-insurance financial business,” SIGTARP said in its report.

Despite the regulatory uncertainty, AIG continues to bet on the mortgage market. From December 2010 through March 31, it doubled its commercial mortgage-backed securities and private-label mortgage bond holdings to $28.4 billion.

New York Fed Faces Questions Over Policing Wall Street

By BEN PROTESS and JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG, The New York Times

July 24, 2012

(T)he JPMorgan debacle and the interest-rate investigation have raised questions about the New York Fed. They highlight how the regulator is hampered by its lack of enforcement authority and dogged by concerns that it is overly cozy with the banks.

Mr. Geithner is expected to face questions from lawmakers on Wednesday about the rate-rigging inquiry that has ensnared more than a dozen big banks. In June, Barclays agreed to pay $450 million to authorities for manipulating the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.

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(T)he New York Fed, which knew Barclays had been reporting false rates at the time, did not stop the actions.

And when Mr. Geithner briefed other American regulators about Libor in May 2008, he did not disclose the specific wrongdoing, according to people briefed on the meeting. In later briefings, New York Fed officials did warn their counterparts about “allegations of misreporting.”

“The regulator has an obligation to make a criminal referral if it suspects a crime may have occurred,” said Bart Dzivi, who served as special counsel to the Federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. “How this doesn’t rise to that level, simply boggles the mind.”

The Correspondents Explain – Political Parties – The Democratic Party (1:59)

The Correspondents Explain – Political Parties – The Republican Party (2:05)

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Small Business Owners, Job Creators.

Randy Wray: Why We’re Screwed

L. Randall Wray, Naked Capitalism

Monday, July 23, 2012

A century ago Veblen analyzed religion as the quintessential capitalist undertaking. It sells an inherently ephemeral product that can not be quality tested. Most of the value of that product exists only in the minds of the purchasers, and most of that value cannot be realized until death. Dissatisfied customers cannot return the purchased wares to the undertakers who sold them-there is no explicit money back guarantee and in any event, most of the dissatisfied have already been undertaken. The value of the undertaker’s institution is similarly ephemeral, mostly determined by “goodwill”. Aside from a fancy building, very little in the way of productive facilities is actually required by the religious undertaker.

But modern finance has replaced religion as the supreme capitalistic undertaking. Again, it has no need for production facilities-a fancy building, a few Bloomberg screens, greasy snake-oil salesmen, and some rapacious traders is all that is required to separate widows and orphans from their lifesavings and homes. Religious institutions only want 10%; Wall Street currently gets 20% of all the nation’s output (and 40% of profits), but won’t stop until it gets everything.

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And that is just the start. They also place tens of trillions of dollars of bets on derivatives whose value is purely “notional”. The thieves get paid when something goes wrong-the death of a homeowner, worker, firm, or country triggers payments on Death Settlements, Peasant Insurance, or Credit Default Swaps. To ensure that death comes sooner rather than later, the undertaker works with the likes of John Paulson to handpick the most sickly households, firms and governments to stand behind the derivative bets.

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The top four US Banks hold $171 Trillion worth of derivative deals like this. Derivatives are really just bets by Wall Street that we will get screwed-it is all “insurance” that pays off when we fail. Everything is insured-by them against us.

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You see, all the top financial institutions are dens of thieves, and thieves know better than to trust one another. So lending to fellow thieves has to be collateralized by safe financial assets-which is the traditional role played by Treasuries. But there were not enough of those to go around so Wall Street securitized home mortgages that were sliced and diced to get tranches that were supposedly as safe as Uncle Sam’s bonds. And there were not enough quality mortgages, so Wall Street foisted mortgages and home equity loans onto riskier borrowers to create more product.

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Suddenly there was no collateral behind the loans Wall Street’s thieves had made to one another. Each Wall Street thief looked in the mirror and realized everything he was holding was crap, because he knew all of his own debt was crap.

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And that is why we are screwed.

I see two scenarios playing out. In the first, we allow Wall Street to carry on its merry way, as the foreclosure crisis continues and Wall Street steals all homes, packaging them into bundles to be sold for pennies on the dollar to hedge funds. All wealth will be redistributed to the top 1% who will become modern day feudal lords with the other 99% living at their pleasure on huge feudal estates.

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In the second, the 99% occupy, shut down, and obliterate Wall Street.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Banks Caught Up In Libor Scandal Seek Group Settlement

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Friday July 20, 2012 7:04 am

As regulators and law enforcement officials around the world begin to dig into the Libor scandal, the 15 or so banks who know they’re responsible for the massive rate-rigging are trying to limit the damage. That’s right, it’s time for another round of: let’s have a global settlement!

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Reuters did add that regulators would like the idea of a global settlement because they would get to have a big press conference and announce a headline number, and I think that’s right. We saw the appeal of that in the foreclosure fraud settlement.

Yves Smith @ Naked Capitalism–

Dudes, we gave you a link last week from Sky News saying the same thing!

Exclusive: Banks in Libor probe consider group settlement – sources

By Katharina Bart and Diane Bartz, Reuters

2012/07/19

A group agreement would appeal to financial watchdogs because they would be able to announce a headline-grabbing figure, showing that they were dealing firmly with the banking industry’s misdemeanors, a banker told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Earlier this year, five top U.S. banks negotiated a $25 billion settlement with the U.S. Justice Department and other federal and state agencies to resolve allegations of mortgage services abuses.

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However, if they were able to reach a group settlement it would enable them to share the pain of negative publicity.

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Analysts have estimated that the scandal could cost the industry between $20 billion to $40 billion, further damaging a sector that is struggling to work its way through the aftermath of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, economic downturns in Europe and the United States, and increased regulatory demands.

Told you so–

Exclusive: Push For Libor Settlement

Mark Kleinman, City Editor, Sky News

Wednesday 11 July 2012

Investors believe that an industry-wide settlement will be necessary if other banks are to avoid a clear-out of their top executives, although one mitigating factor which might assist those who get fined for Libor-rigging is likely to be the fact that many of them have changed their top management since the periods under investigation.

“A drip-feed of Libor-related fines would be hugely damaging to investors with large exposures to international banks,” one leading shareholder told me.

Of course, it’s the view of many that banks which are found guilty of such an important offence as manipulating the rate of Libor should sack those responsible and that they should face further punishment under the law.

Hah hah hah.

On dark weeks The Daily Show and The Colbert Report post mashups.  This week’s are from TDS on 8/22/11 and are the oldest I can find.  Should you happen on any earlier examples I’d be delighted to know about them.

The Correspondents Explain – Political Parties – The Two-Party System (2:40)

DirecTV and Viacom reach deal, end blackout

By Joe Flint, Los Angeles Times

July 20, 2012

“There was an increase, but not nearly the increase they were seeking,” DirecTV Executive Vice President Derek Chang said.

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Although programmers and distributors often bicker over new contracts, the Viacom-DirecTV battle was particularly public and nasty. Both companies ran ads blasting each other and their executives took potshots at one another as well.

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When Viacom’s channels went off DirecTV, which is in about 20 million homes, ratings for its networks dropped more than 20% in some cases. The longer the networks were off DirecTV, the more Viacom had at stake.

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DirecTV did get one concession from Viacom. As part of the deal, DirecTV subscribers will now be able to access live feeds of Viacom’s channels on tablets and mobile devices outside the home. This marks the first time that Viacom has agreed to allow such an arrangement with a distributor.

However, Viacom also is likely to continue to put a lot of its television shows on its own websites for free, which was a sore point for DirecTV.