More than a year into the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of Americans have seen their home values and retirement savings plunge and their jobs evaporate.
What they haven’t seen are any Wall Street tycoons forced to swap their multi-million dollar jobs and custom-made suits for dishwashing and prison stripes.
There are plenty of civil and class-action lawsuits from aggrieved investors angered by the losses in their mortgage bonds, hedge funds or pensions. Regulators have stepped up their vigilance after the fact. But to date, no captain of finance tied to the crisis has walked the plank.
Despite updating its numerous disclosures to investors in 2007, Goldman never revealed its secret wagers….
WASHINGTON — In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.
Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.
Florida Democrat U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson wants Americans to help him block Congress from confirming the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to his second term unless he hands over documents relating to the bailouts of financial institutions, including the rescue of Bear Stearns.
In the “Unmask the Fed” campaign, Grayson calls on constituents to sign petitions demanding that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke “come clean” before senators re-confirm his appointment to the helm of the Federal Reserve.
“The long and the short of it is that we’ve been taken for a very big and costly ride by banks that created a huge crisis and that then got the government to bail them out of it with our money, and by two administrations, one Republican and now one Democratic, that have been submissive and willing servants of the big banks….”
Congressman Ron Paul discusses his new book End The Fed, as well as other economic issues and Federal Reserve related topics on CNN’s American Morning.
For the financial crisis that has wiped out trillions in wealth, many have felt the lash of public outrage.
Fannie and Freddie. The idiot-bankers. The AIG bonus babies. The Bush Republicans and Barney Frank Democrats who bullied banks into making mortgages to minorities who could not afford the houses they were moving into.
But the Big Kahuna has escaped.
The Federal Reserve.
“(T)he very people who devised the policies that produced the mess are now posing as the wise public servants who will show us the way out,” writes Thomas Woods in “Meltdown.”
As the U.S. financial crisis broadens and deepens, wiping out the wealth and savings of tens of millions, destroying hopes and dreams, it is hard not to see in all of this history’s verdict upon this generation.
We have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
For how did this befall us, save through decisions that brushed aside lessons that history and experience had taught our fathers?
It all began with the corruption called sub-prime mortgages.
In his campaign and inaugural address, Barack Obama cast himself as a moderate man seeking common ground with conservatives.
Yet, his budget calls for the radical restructuring of the U.S. economy, a sweeping redistribution of power and wealth to government and Democratic constituencies. It is a declaration of war on the Right.
The real Obama has stood up, and lived up to his ranking as the most left-wing member of the United States Senate.
Barack has no mandate for this. He was even behind McCain when the decisive event that gave him the presidency occurred — the September collapse of Lehman Brothers and the market crash.
In 2009 were going to see the worst economic collapse ever, the Greatest Depression, says Gerald Celente, U.S. trend forecaster. He believes its going to be very violent in the U.S., including there being a tax revolt.
So may have read the headline Friday, had not President Bush stepped in to save GM, Ford and Chrysler, which Senate Republicans had just voted to send to the knacker’s yard.
What are Republicans thinking of, pulling the plug, at Christmas, on GM, risking swift death for the greatest manufacturing company in American history, a strategic asset and pillar of the U.S. economy.
If you haven’t already, please do yourself and all of us a favor and watch this one hour video. Once you do, you will fully understand what is really going on with the banking bailouts and our current economy. Bottom line? Everything you hear on TV or read in the press regarding the bailouts and banking system is a lie. This video is possibly the most important you will ever watch – so much so that you may want to view it several times. As more Americans finally figure out what is really going on I expect to see some aggressive action against the Federal Reserve and their cheerleaders in Washington.
Barack Obama and George W. Bush seem to have come away from their study of the Great Depression with similar conclusions:
To wit: After the Crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve did not move fast enough to save the banks and inject cash into the economy. Second, the New Deal, far from being wastrel deficit spending, was not bold enough. So it was that America wallowed in depression for a decade until the unbridled spending and mammoth deficits of World War II pulled us out.
Bush and Obama seem determined not to make the same mistake.
When Hank Paulson demanded $700 billion to haul away the trash in the dumpsters of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs — assuring us we could hold a garage sale of the junk — they rebelled. They acted as the nation, by 100 to one, demanded. They killed the Wall Street bailout.
The Dow quickly sank another 1,000 points, and, charged with criminal irresponsibility by the elites, the GOP buckled, reversed itself, rescued the bailout — and was wiped out on Nov. 4.
Let’s start with those “headwinds” into which he was flying.
The president of the United States, the leader of his party, was at Nixon-Carter levels of approval, 25 percent, going into Election Day.
Sixty-two percent of the nation thought the economy was the No. 1 issue, and 93 percent thought the economy was bad. Two-thirds of the nation thought the war McCain championed was a mistake, and 80 percent to 90 percent thought the country was on the wrong course.
If Barack Obama is not a socialist, he does the best imitation of one I’ve ever seen.
Under his tax plan, the top 5 percent of wage-earners have their income tax rates raised from 35 percent to 40 percent, while the bottom 40 percent of all wage-earners, who pay no income tax, are sent federal checks.
If this is not the socialist redistribution of wealth, what is it?
A steeply graduated income tax has always been the preferred weapon of the left for bringing about socialist equality. Indeed, in the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848, Karl Marx was himself among the first to call for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.”
Two weeks after the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., John McCain and Sarah Palin were striding forward toward victory.
They had erased the eight-point lead Barack Obama had opened up in Denver and watched as one blue state after another moved into the toss-up category.
That is ancient history now.
Since mid-September, the stock market has cratered, losing half of the $8 trillion that has vanished since October 2007. All five of America’s great investment banks — Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill-Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — have either ceased to be independent or ceased to be.
More than a year into the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of Americans have seen their home values and retirement savings plunge and their jobs evaporate.
In the brief age of Obama, we have had “truthers,” “birthers,” Tea Party activists and town-hall dissenters.
Florida Democrat U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson wants Americans to help him block Congress from confirming the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to his second term unless he hands over documents relating to the bailouts of financial institutions, including the rescue of Bear Stearns.
“The long and the short of it is that we’ve been taken for a very big and costly ride by banks that created a huge crisis and that then got the government to bail them out of it with our money, and by two administrations, one Republican and now one Democratic, that have been submissive and willing servants of the big banks….”
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