investment banks « TheCenterLane.com

Wall Streeters Who Support The Occupy Movement

December 8th, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized

Dec, 08 2011

Comments Off

Forget about what you have been hearing from those idiotic, mainstream blovaitors – who rose to prominence solely because of corporate politics. Those bigmouths want you to believe that the Occupy Wall Street movement is anti-capitalist. Nevertheless, the dogma spouted by those dunder-headed pundits is contradicted by the reality that there are quite a number of prominent individuals who voice support for the Occupy Wall Street movement, despite the fact that they are professionally employed in the investment business. I will provide you with some examples.

On October 31, I discussed the propaganda war waged against the Occupy Wall Street movement, concluding the piece with my expectation that Jeremy Grantham’s upcoming third quarter newsletter would provide some sorely-needed, astute commentary on the situation. Jeremy Grantham, rated by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as one of the Fifty Most Influential Money Managers, finally released an abbreviated edition of that newsletter one month later than usual, due to a busy schedule. In addition to expressing some supportive comments about the OWS movement, Grantham noted that he will be providing a special supplement, based specifically on that subject:

Meriting a separate, special point are the drastic declines in both U.S. income equality – the U.S. has become quite quickly one of the least equal societies – and in the stickiness of economic position from one generation to another. We have gone from having been notably upwardly mobile during the Eisenhower era to having fallen behind other developed countries today, even the U.K.! The net result of these factors is a growing feeling of social injustice, a weakening of social cohesiveness, and, possibly, a decrease in work ethic. A healthy growth rate becomes more difficult.

* * *

Sitting on planes over the last several weeks with nothing to do but read and think, I found myself worrying increasingly about the 1% and the 99% and the appearance we give of having become a plutocracy, and a rather mean-spirited one at that. And, one backed by a similarly mean-spirited majority on the Supreme Court. (I will try to post a letter addressed to the “Occupy … Everywhere” folks shortly.)

Hedge fund manager Barry Ritholtz is the author of Bailout Nation and the publisher of one of the most widely-read financial blogs, The Big Picture. Among the many pro-OWS postings which have appeared on that site was this recent piece, offering the movement advice similar to what can be expected from Jeremy Grantham:

To become as focused and influential as the Tea Party, what Occupy Wall Street needs a simple set of goals. Not a top 10 list — that’s too unwieldy, and too unfocused. Instead, a simple 3 part agenda, that responds to some very basic problems regardless of political party. It must address the key issues, have a specific legislative agenda, and finally, effect lasting change. By keeping it focused on the foibles of Wall Street, and on issues that actually matter, it can become a rallying cry for an angry nation.

I suggest the following three as achievable goals that will have a lasting impact:

1. No more bailouts: Bring back real capitalism
2. End TBTF banks
3. Get Wall Street Money out of legislative process

* * *

You will note that these three goals are issues that both the Left and the Right — Libertarians and Liberals — should be able to agree upon. These are all doable measurable goals, that can have a real impact on legislation, the economy and taxes.

But amending the Constitution to eliminate dirty money from politics is an essential task. Failing to do that means backsliding from whatever gains are made. Whatever is accomplished will be temporary without campaign finance reform . . .

Writing for the DealBook blog at The New York Times, Jesse Eisinger provided us with the laments of a few Wall Street insiders, whose attitudes are aligned with those of the OWS movement:

Last week, I had a conversation with a man who runs his own trading firm. In the process of fuming about competition from Goldman Sachs, he said with resignation and exasperation: “The fact that they were bailed out and can borrow for free – it’s pretty sickening.”

* * *

Sadly, almost none of these closeted occupier-sympathizers go public. But Mike Mayo, a bank analyst with the brokerage firm CLSA, which is majority-owned by the French bank Crédit Agricole, has done just that. In his book “Exile on Wall Street” (Wiley), Mr. Mayo offers an unvarnished account of the punishments he experienced after denouncing bank excesses. Talking to him, it’s hard to tell you aren’t interviewing Michael Moore.

* * *

I asked Richard Kramer, who used to work as a technology analyst at Goldman Sachs until he got fed up with how it did business and now runs his own firm, Arete Research, what was going wrong. He sees it as part of the business model.

“There have been repeated fines and malfeasance at literally all the investment banks, but it doesn’t seem to affect their behavior much,” he said. “So I have to conclude it is part of strategy as simple cost/benefit analysis, that fines and legal costs are a small price to pay for the profits.”

Mr. Kramer’s contention was supported by a recent analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission documents by The New York Times, which revealed “that since 1996, there have been at least 51 repeat violations by those firms. Bank of America and Citigroup have each had six repeat violations, while Merrill Lynch and UBS have each had five.”

At the ever-popular Zero Hedge website, Tyler Durden provided us with the observations of a disillusioned, first-year hedge fund analyst. Durden’s introductory comments in support of that essay, provide us with a comprehensive delineation of the tactics used by Wall Street to crush individual “retail” investors:

Regular readers know that ever since 2009, well before the confidence destroying flash crash of May 2010, Zero Hedge had been advocating that regular retail investors shun the equity market in its entirety as it is anything but “fair and efficient” in which frontrunning for a select few is legal, in which insider trading is permitted for politicians and is masked as “expert networks” for others, in which the government itself leaks information to a hand-picked elite of the wealthiest investors, in which investment banks send out their “huddle” top picks to “whale” accounts before everyone else gets access, in which hedge funds form “clubs” and collude in moving the market, in which millisecond algorithms make instantaneous decisions which regular investors can never hope to beat, in which daily record volatility triggers sell limits virtually assuring daytrading losses, and where the bid/ask spreads for all but the choicest few make the prospect of breaking even, let alone winning, quite daunting. In short: a rigged casino. What is gratifying is to see that this warning is permeating an ever broader cross-section of the retail population with hundreds of billions in equity fund outflows in the past two years. And yet, some pathological gamblers still return day after day, in hope of striking it rich, despite odds which make a slot machine seem like the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In that regard, we are happy to present another perspective: this time from a hedge fund insider who while advocating his support for the OWS movement, explains, in no uncertain terms, and in a somewhat more detailed and lucid fashion, both how and why the market is not only broken, but rigged, and why it is nothing but a wealth extraction mechanism in which the richest slowly but surely steal the money from everyone else who still trades any public stock equity.

The anonymous hedge fund analyst concluded his discourse with this point:

In other words, if you aren’t in the .1%, you have no access to the derivatives markets, you have no access to the special deals that hedge funds and other wealthy investors get, and you have no access to the resources, information, strategic services, tax exemptions, and capital that the top .1% is getting.

If you have any questions about what some of the concepts above mean, ask and I will try my best to answer. I’m a first-year analyst on Wall Street, and based on what I see day in and day out, I support the OWS movement 100%.

You are now informed beyond the influence of those presstitutes, who regularly attempt to convince the public that an important goal of the Occupy Movement is to destroy the livelihoods of those who work on Wall Street.

amending Constitution, Arete Research, Bailout Nation, bailouts, bank excesses, Bank of America, Barry Ritholtz, Bloomberg news, campaign finance reform, capitalism, Citigroup, CLSA, corporate politics, Crédit Agricole, DealBook, derivatives markets, equity fund outflows, equity market, Exile on Wall Street, expert networks, Fifty Most Influential Money Managers, financial sector, flash crash, frontrunning, Goldman Sachs, hedge fund, hedge fund analyst, income equality, insider trading, investment banks, investment business, Jeremy Grantham, John T Burke Jr, legislative process, liberals, Libertarians, mainstream news media, Merrill Lynch, Michael Moore, Mike Mayo, New York Times, Occupy Wall Street, OWS, plutocracy, presstitutes, repeat violations, retail investors, Richard Kramer, rigged casino, Securities and Exchange Commission, social injustice, Supreme Court, TBTF, Tea Party, The Big Picture, third quarter newsletter, too big to fail, Tyler Durden, UBS, Wall Street, wealth extraction mechanism, wealthy investors, Zero Hedge

Obama And The TARP

June 2nd, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized

Jun, 02 2011

Comments Off

I always enjoy it when a commentator appearing on a talk show reminds us that President Obama has become a “tool” for the Wall Street bankers. This theme is usually rebutted with the claim that the TARP bailout happened before Obama took office and that he can’t be blamed for rewarding the miscreants who destroyed our economy. Nevertheless, this claim is not entirely true. President Bush withheld distribution of one-half of the $700 billion in TARP bailout funds, deferring to his successor’s assessment of the extent to which the government should intervene in the banking crisis. As it turned out, during the final weeks of the Bush Presidency, Hank Paulson’s Treasury Department declared that there was no longer an “urgent need” for the TARP bailouts to continue. Despite that development, Obama made it clear that anyone on Capitol Hill intending to get between the banksters and that $350 billion was going to have a fight on their hands. Let’s jump into the time machine and take a look at my posting from January 19, 2009 – the day before Obama assumed office:

On January 18, Salon.com featured an article by David Sirota entitled: “Obama Sells Out to Wall Street”. Mr. Sirota expressed his concern over Obama’s accelerated push to have immediate authority to dispense the remaining $350 billion available under the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bailout:

Somehow, immediately releasing more bailout funds is being portrayed as a self-evident necessity, even though the New York Times reported this week that “the Treasury says there is no urgent need” for additional money. Somehow, forcing average $40,000-aires to keep giving their tax dollars to Manhattan millionaires is depicted as the only “serious” course of action. Somehow, few ask whether that money could better help the economy by being spent on healthcare or public infrastructure. Somehow, the burden of proof is on bailout opponents who make these points, not on those who want to cut another blank check.

Discomfort about another hasty dispersal of the remaining TARP funds was shared by a few prominent Democratic Senators who, on Thursday, voted against authorizing the immediate release of the remaining $350 billion. They included Senators Russ Feingold (Wisconsin), Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), Evan Bayh (Indiana) and Maria Cantwell (Washington). The vote actually concerned a “resolution of disapproval” to block distribution of the TARP money, so that those voting in favor of the resolution were actually voting against releasing the funds. Earlier last week, Obama had threatened to veto this resolution if it passed. The resolution was defeated with 52 votes (contrasted with 42 votes in favor of it). At this juncture, Obama is engaged in a game of “trust me”, assuring those in doubt that the next $350 billion will not be squandered in the same undocumented manner as the first $350 billion. As Jeremy Pelofsky reported for Reuters on January 15:

To win approval, Obama and his team made extensive promises to Democrats and Republicans that the funds would be used to better address the deepening mortgage foreclosure crisis and that tighter accounting standards would be enforced.

“My pledge is to change the way this plan is implemented and keep faith with the American taxpayer by placing strict conditions on CEO pay and providing more loans to small businesses,” Obama said in a statement, adding there would be more transparency and “more sensible regulations.”

Of course, we all know how that worked out . . . another Obama promise bit the dust.

The new President’s efforts to enrich the Wall Street banks at taxpayer expense didn’t end with TARP. By mid-April of 2009, the administration’s “special treatment” of those “too big to fail” banks was getting plenty of criticism. As I wrote on April 16 of that year:

Criticism continues to abound concerning the plan by Turbo Tim and Larry Summers for getting the infamous “toxic assets” off the balance sheets of our nation’s banks. It’s known as the Public-Private Investment Program (a/k/a: PPIP or “pee-pip”).

* * *

One of the harshest critics of the PPIP is William Black, an Economics professor at the University of Missouri. Professor Black gained recognition during the 1980s while he was deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC).

* * *

I particularly enjoyed Black’s characterization of the PPIP’s use of government (i.e. taxpayer) money to back private purchases of the toxic assets:

It is worse than a lie. Geithner has appropriated the language of his critics and of the forthright to support dishonesty. That is what’s so appalling — numbering himself among those who convey tough medicine when he is really pandering to the interests of a select group of banks who are on a first-name basis with Washington politicians.

The current law mandates prompt corrective action, which means speedy resolution of insolvencies. He is flouting the law, in naked violation, in order to pursue the kind of favoritism that the law was designed to prevent. He has introduced the concept of capital insurance, essentially turning the U.S. taxpayer into the sucker who is going to pay for everything. He chose this path because he knew Congress would never authorize a bailout based on crony capitalism.

Although President Obama’s hunt for Osama bin Laden was a success, his decision to “punt” on the economic stimulus program – by holding it at $862 billion and relying on the Federal Reserve to “play defense” with quantitative easing programs – became Obama’s own “Tora Bora moment”, at which point he allowed economic recovery to continue on its elusive path away from us. Economist Steve Keen recently posted this video, explaining how Obama’s failure to promote an effective stimulus program has guaranteed us something worse than a “double-dip” recession: a quadruple-dip recession.

Many commentators are currently discussing efforts by Republicans to make sure that the economy is in dismal shape for the 2012 elections so that voters will blame Obama and elect the GOP alternative. If Professor Keen is correct about where our economy is headed, I can only hope there is a decent Independent candidate in the race. Otherwise, our own “lost decade” could last much longer than ten years.

2012 elections, 350 billion dollars, bank bailout, bank stress tests, banking crisis, banksters, Barack Obama, Barrons, Black And Reich, Bush Presidency, Capitol Hill, comprehensive bank bailout plan, Congress, conservative, crony capitalism, David Sirota, Democrat, Democratic Party, Democratic Senators, Democrats, derivatives crisis, double-dip recession, economic crisis, economic recovery, economic stimulus program, economics, Economics professors, economists, economy, Evan Bayh, FDIC, Federal Reserve, Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, financial crisis, financial meltdown, Financial Stability Plan, FSLIC, Hank Paulson, insolvent banks, investment banks, Iran, Iraq, Jeanne Shaheen, Jeremy Pelofsky, John T Burke Jr, Larry Summers, liberal, lost decade, Maria Cantwell, National Economic Council, nationalization of banks, New York Times, Obama, Obama Administration, Obama And The TARP, Obama Presidency, Obama Sells Out to Wall Street, Obamas Tora Bora moment, Osama bin Laden, pee-pip, Politics, PPIP, President Bush, President of the United States, Public-Private Investment Program, quadruple-dip recession, quantitative easing, Republican, Republican Party, resolution of disapproval, Reuters, Russ Feingold, Salon website, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senate, socialized loss and privatized gain, Steve Keen, stress testing of banks, subprime debt, TARP, TARP bailout, taxpayer subsidies to investment banks, temporary receivership, The White House, Tim Geithner, Tora Bora moment, toxic assets, Treasury Department, Troubled Asset Relief Program, troubled assets, Turbo Tim, Turbo Tim Geithner, United States Treasury, University of Missouri, urgent need, Wall Street, Wall Street bankers, wealth transfer, William Black, zombie banks

Our Sham Two-Party System

May 23rd, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized

May, 23 2011

Comments Off

It’s becoming more obvious to people that our so-called, “two-party system” is really a just a one-party system. Last summer, I discussed how the Republi-cratic Corporatist Party is determined to steal the money American workers have paid into the Social Security program. While we’re on the subject, let’s take a look at an inconvenient law which the Beltway Vultures choose to ignore:

EXCLUSION OF SOCIAL SECURITY FROM ALL BUDGETS Pub. L. 101-508, title XIII, Sec. 13301(a), Nov. 5, 1990, 104 Stat. 1388-623, provided that: Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the receipts and disbursements of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund and the Federal Disability Insurance Trust Fund shall not be counted as new budget authority, outlays, receipts, or deficit or surplus for purposes of – (1) the budget of the United States Government as submitted by the President, (2) the congressional budget, or (3) the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.

In a recent interview conducted by Anastasia Churkina of Russia Today, investigative reporter and author, Matt Taibbi described the American political system as a “reality show sponsored by Wall Street”. Taibbi pointed out that “… the problem is Wall Street heavily sponsors both the Republican and the Democratic Parties” so that whoever gets elected President “is going to be a creature of Wall Street”. After noting that Goldman Sachs was Obama’s number one source of private campaign contributions during the 2008 election cycle, Taibbi faced a question about the possibility that a third party could become a significant factor in American politics. His response was: “Seriously, I don’t see it.” Taibbi went on to express his belief that the “average American” is:

… seduced and mesmerized by this phony, media-created, division between blue and red – and left and right, Democrats and Republicans, and people are conditioned to believe that there are enormous, profound differences between these two parties. Whereas, the reality is: their differences are mostly superficial and on the important questions of how the economy is run and how to regulate the economy – they’re exactly the same – but I don’t think ordinary people know that.

At this point, the question is whether there can be any hope that “ordinary people” will ever realize that our “two-party system” is actually a farce.

The type of disappointment expressed by Matt Taibbi in his discussion of Barack Obama during the Russia Today interview, has become a familiar subject. I was motivated to characterize the new President as “Disappointer-In-Chief” during his third month in office. An increasing number of commentators have begun to admit that Hillary Clinton’s campaign-theme question, “Who is Barack Obama?” was never really answered until after the man took office. One person who got an answer “the hard way” was Professor Cornel West of Princeton University.

In a recent article for Truthdig, Chris Hedges discussed how Professor West made 65 appearances for Candidate Obama on the campaign trail. Nevertheless, Professor West never received an invitation to Obama’s Inaugural. Although he traveled to Washington for that historic occasion, Professor West ended up watching the event on a hotel room television with his family. As an adversary of Obama’s financial mentor, Larry Summers, Professor West quickly found himself thrown under the bus.

The following passage from Chris Hedges’ article presents an interesting narrative by Professor West about what I have previously described as Obama’s own “Tora Bora moment” (when the President “punted” on the economic stimulus bill). Professor West also lamented the failure of the Democrats to provide any alternative to the bipartisan tradition of crony corporatism:

“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.

“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties.

When one considers the vast number of disillusioned Obama supporters along with the number of people expressing their disappointment with the Republican field of Presidential hopefuls, the idea that 2012 could be the year when a third-party candidate makes it to the White House doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

2008 election, 2012, accountability, American political system, Anastasia Churkina, bailouts, banks, Barack Obama, Beltway Vultures, big business, campaign contributions, Chris Hedges, Cornel West, corporatism, corruption, crony corporatism, Democratic Party, Democrats, Disappointer-In-Chief, economic regulation, economic stimulus bill, economy, fascism, financial crisis, Goldman Sachs, government, Hillary Clinton, homeowners, investment banks, job creation, John T Burke Jr, Larry Summers, Matt Taibbi, Obamas Tora Bora moment, Our Sham Two-Party System, President, Princeton University, reality show, Republi-cratic Corporatist Party, Republican Party, Republicans, right-wing populism, Russia Today, Social Security, Tea Party, third parties, third party, third-party candidates, Truthdig, two-party system, Wall Street, White House, Who is Barack Obama

An Army Of Lobbyists For The Middle Class

March 3rd, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized

Mar, 03 2011

Comments Off

Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke appeared before the Senate Banking Committee this week to testify about the Fed’s monetary policy. Scot Kersgaard of The American Independent focused our attention on a five-minute exchange between Colorado Senator Michael Bennett and The Ben Bernank, with an embedded video clip. Senator Bennett asked Bernanke to share his opinions concerning the recommendations made by President Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission. Bernanke initially attempted to dodge the question with the disclaimer that the Fed’s authority extends to only monetary policy rather than fiscal policy – such as the work conducted by the deficit commission. If Congressman Ron Paul had been watching the hearing take place, I’m sure he had a good, hard laugh at that statement. Nevertheless, Bernanke couldn’t restrain himself from concurring with the effort to place the cost of Wall Street’s larceny on the backs of middle-class taxpayers.

The chant for “entitlement reform” continues to reverberate throughout the mainstream media as it has for the past year. Last May, economist Dean Baker exposed this latest effort toward upward wealth redistribution:

Emboldened by the fact that none of them have gone to jail for their role in the financial crisis, the Wall Street gang is now gunning for Social Security and Medicare, the country’s most important safety net programs. Led by investment banker Pete Peterson, this crew is spending more than a billion dollars to convince the public that slashing these programs is the only way to protect our children and grandchildren from poverty.

A key propaganda tactic used by the “entitlement reform” crusaders is to characterize Social Security as an “entitlement” even though it is not (as I discussed here). Phil Davis, avowed capitalist and self-described “serial entrepreneur”, wrote a great essay, which refuted the claim that Social Security is “broken” while explaining why it is not an “entitlement”. Unfortunately, there are very few politicians who are willing to step forward to provide the simple explanation that Social Security is not an entitlement. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) recently made a statement to that effect before a senior citizens’ group in East Haven, Connecticut – without really providing an explanation why it is not an entitlement. Susan Feiner wrote a great commentary on the subject last fall for womensenews.org. Here is some of what she said:

Moreover, Social Security is not an entitlement program as it’s paid for entirely by payroll taxes. It is an insurance program, not an entitlement. Not one penny of anyone’s Social Security comes out of the federal government’s general fund.

Social Security is, by law, wholly self-financing. It has no legal authority to borrow, so it never has.

If this incredibly successful and direly needed program hasn’t ever borrowed a dime, why is the president and his hand-picked commissioners putting Social Security cuts (and/or increases in the retirement age) in the same sentence as deficit reduction?

The attempt to mischaracterize Social Security as an “entitlement” is not a “Right vs. Left” dispute — It’s a class warfare issue. There have been commentaries from across the political spectrum emphasizing the same fact: Social Security is not an “entitlement”. The assertion has appeared on the conservative patriotsteaparty.net website, the DailyKos on the Left and in a piece by independent commentator, Marti Oakley.

The battle for “entitlement reform” is just one front in the larger war being waged by Wall Street against the middle class. Kevin Drum discussed this conflict in a recent posting at his Plutocracy Now blog for Mother Jones:

It’s about the loss of a countervailing power robust enough to stand up to the influence of business interests and the rich on equal terms. With that gone, the response to every new crisis and every new change in the economic landscape has inevitably pointed in the same direction. And after three decades, the cumulative effect of all those individual responses is an economy focused almost exclusively on the demands of business and finance. In theory, that’s supposed to produce rapid economic growth that serves us all, and 30 years of free-market evangelism have convinced nearly everyone — even middle-class voters who keep getting the short end of the economic stick — that the policy preferences of the business community are good for everyone. But in practice, the benefits have gone almost entirely to the very wealthy.

One of my favorite commentators, Paul Farrell of MarketWatch made this observation on March 1:

Wall Street’s corrupt banks have lost their moral compass … their insatiable greed has become a deadly virus destroying its host nation … their campaign billions buy senate votes, stop regulators’ actions, manipulate presidential decisions. Wall Street money controls voters, runs America, both parties. Yes, Wall Street is bankrupting America.

Wake up America, listen:

“Our country is bankrupt. It’s not bankrupt in 30 years or five years,” warns economist Larry Kotlikoff, “it’s bankrupt today.”

Economist Peter Morici: “Capitalism is broken, America’s government is two bankrupt political parties bankrupting the country.”

David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director: “If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians” the “tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing.”

BusinessWeek recently asked analyst Mary Meeker to run the numbers. How bad is it? America really is bankrupt, with a “net worth of a negative $44 trillion.” Bankrupt.

And it will get worse. Unfortunately, nothing can stop America’s self-destructive Wall Street bankers. They simply do not care that their “doomsday capitalism” is destroying themselves from within, and is bankrupting America too.

On February 21, I quoted a statement made by bond guru Bill Gross of PIMCO, which included this thought:

America requires more than a makeover or a facelift. It needs a heart transplant absent the contagious antibodies of money and finance filtering through the system. It needs a Congress that cannot be bought and sold by lobbyists on K Street, whose pockets in turn are stuffed with corporate and special interest group payola.

That essay by Bill Gross became the subject of an article by Terrence Keeley of Bloomberg News. Mr. Keeley’s reaction to the suggestions made by Bill Gross was this:

To redeem Wall Street’s soul, radical solutions are clearly needed, but advocating the eradication of profit-based markets that have served humanity well on balance without a viable replacement is fanciful. Gross deserves an “A” for intent — but something more practical than a “heart transplant” is required to restore trust and efficacy to our banking system.

* * *

But an economy based on something other than profit risks misery and injustice of another sort. The antibodies now needed aren’t those that negate profitability. Rather, they are the ones that bind financial engineering to value creation and advancement of society.

Perhaps the most constructive solution to the problem is my suggestion from February 10: Recruit and employ an army of lobbyists to represent and advance the interests of the middle class on Capitol Hill. Some type of non-partisan, “citizens’ lobby” could be created as an online community. Once its lobbying goals are developed and articulated, an online funding drive would begin. The basic mission would be to defend middle-class taxpayers from the tyranny of the plutocracy that is destroying not just the middle class – but the entire nation. Fight lobbyists with lobbyists!

advancement of society, An Army Of Lobbyists For The Middle Class, army of lobbyists, banking system, bankrupt, bankrupting America, Ben Bernanke, Bernanke, Bill Gross, bipartisan deficit commission, Bloomberg news, budget director, business interests, BusinessWeek, capitalism, Capitalism is broken, Capitol Hill, Chapter 11, citizens’ lobby, class warfare, Commentary, Connecticut, corrupt banks, crisis, DailyKos, David Stockman, Dean Baker, Deficit Commission, deficit reduction, Doomsday Capitalism, East Haven, economic growth, entitlement, entitlement reform, Federal Reserve, Federal Reserve Chairman, Federal Reserve monetary policy, Fight lobbyists with lobbyists, finance, financial crisis, fiscal policy, free-market evangelism, government general fund, greed, Independent, insurance program, investment banks, K Street, Kevin Drum, Larry Kotlikoff, lobbying goals, lobbyists, mainstream media, MarketWatch, Marti Oakley, Mary Meeker, Medicare, middle-class taxpayers, middle-class voters, monetary policy, moral compass, Mother Jones, non-partisan, online community, online funding, patriotsteaparty net, Paul Farrell, payroll taxes, Pete Peterson, Peter Morici, Phil Davis, Pimco, Plutocracy Now, politicians, President Obama, presidential decisions, profit, profitability, propaganda tactics, regulation, retirement age, Right vs Left, Ron Paul, Ronald Reagan, safety net programs, Scot Kersgaard, self-financing, Senate Banking Committee, senate votes, Senator Michael Bennett, Senator Richard Blumenthal, senior citizens, Social Security, Social Security cuts, Social Security is not an entitlement, special interest groups, Susan Feiner, Terrence Keeley, The American Independent, The Ben Bernank, the Left, the rich, tyranny of the plutocracy, Wall Street, Wall Street bankers, Wall Street larceny, womensenews org

Two Years Too Late

October 11th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized

Oct, 11 2010

Comments Off

October 11, 2010

Greg Gordon recently wrote a fantastic article for the McClatchy Newspapers, in which he discussed how former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson failed to take any action to curb risky mortgage lending. It should come as no surprise that Paulson’s nonfeasance in this area worked to the benefit of Goldman Sachs, where Paulson had presided as CEO for the eight years prior to his taking office as Treasury Secretary on July 10, 2006. Greg Gordon’s article provided an interesting timeline to illustrate Paulson’s role in facilitating the subprime mortgage crisis:

In his eight years as Goldman’s chief executive, Paulson had presided over the firm’s plunge into the business of buying up subprime mortgages to marginal borrowers and then repackaging them into securities, overseeing the firm’s huge positions in what became a fraud-infested market.

During Paulson’s first 15 months as the treasury secretary and chief presidential economic adviser, Goldman unloaded more than $30 billion in dicey residential mortgage securities to pension funds, foreign banks and other investors and became the only major Wall Street firm to dramatically cut its losses and exit the housing market safely. Goldman also racked up billions of dollars in profits by secretly betting on a downturn in home mortgage securities.

By now, the rest of that painful story has become a burden for everyone in America and beyond. Paulson tried to undo the damage to Goldman and the other insolvent, “too big to fail” banks at taxpayer expense with the TARP bailouts. When President Obama assumed office in January of 2009, his first order of business was to ignore the advice of Adam Posen (“Temporary Nationalization Is Needed to Save the U.S. Banking System”) and Professor Matthew Richardson. The consequences of Obama’s failure to put those “zombie banks” through temporary receivership were explained by Karen Maley of the Business Spectator website:

Ireland has at least faced up to the consequences of the reckless lending, unlike the United States. The Obama administration has adopted a muddle-through approach, hoping that a recovery in housing prices might mean that the big US banks can avoid recognising crippling property losses.

* * *

Leading US bank analyst, Chris Whalen, co-founder of Institutional Risk Analytics, has warned that the banks are struggling to cope with the mountain of problem home loans and delinquent commercial property loans. Whalen estimates that the big US banks have restructured less than a quarter of their delinquent commercial and residential real estate loans, and the backlog of problem loans is growing.

This is eroding bank profitability, because they are no longer collecting interest on a huge chunk of their loan book. At the same time, they also face higher administration and legal costs as they deal with the problem property loans.

Banks nursing huge portfolios of problem loans become reluctant to make new loans, which chokes off economic activity.

Ultimately, Whalen warns, the US government will have to bow to the inevitable and restructure some of the major US banks. At that point the US banking system will have to recognise hundreds of billions of dollars in losses from the deflation of the US mortgage bubble.

If Whalen is right, Ireland is a template of what lies ahead for the US.

Chris Whalen’s recent presentation, “Pictures of Deflation” is downright scary and I’m amazed that it has not been receiving the attention it deserves. Surprisingly — and ironically – one of the only news sources discussing Whalen’s outlook has been that peerless font of stock market bullishness: CNBC. Whalen was interviewed on CNBC’s Fast Money program on October 8. You can see the video here. The Whalen interview begins at 7 minutes into the clip. John Carney (formerly of The Business Insider website) now runs the NetNet blog for CNBC, which featured this interview by Lori Ann LoRocco with Chris Whalen and Jim Rickards, Senior Managing Director of Market Intelligence at Omnis, Inc. Here are some tidbits from this must-read interview:

LL: Chris, when are you expecting the storm to hit?

CW: When the too big to fail banks can no longer fudge the cost of restructuring their real estate exposures, on and off balance sheet. Q3 earnings may be the catalyst

LL: What banks are most exposed to this tsunami?

CW: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, Citigroup among the top four. GMAC. Why do we still refer to the ugly girls — Bank of America, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo in particular — as zombies? Because the avalanche of foreclosures and claims against the too-big-too-fail banks has not even crested.

* * *

LL: How many banks to expect to fail next year because of this?

CW: The better question is how we will deal with the process of restructuring. My view is that the government/FDIC can act as receiver in a government led restructuring of top-four banks. It is time for PIMCO, BlackRock and their bond holder clients to contribute to the restructuring process.

Of course, this restructuring could have and should have been done two years earlier — in February of 2009. Once the dust settles, you can be sure that someone will calculate the cost of kicking this can down the road — especially if it involves another round of bank bailouts. As the saying goes: “He who hesitates is lost.” In this case, President Obama hesitated and we lost. We lost big.

Adam Posen, asset bubble, bank bailout, Bank of America, banking crisis, banking lobby, Barack Obama, Blackrock, blog, Business Spectator, centrist, Chris Whalen, Citigroup, CNBC, Commentary, comprehensive bank bailout plan, conflict of interest, Congress, conservative, credit default swaps, crony capitalism, Democrat, Democratic Party, Democrats, derivatives crisis, economic crisis, economics, economists, equities markets, Fast Money, FDIC, February of 2009, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve, financial crisis, financial reform, foreclosures, GMAC, Goldman Sachs, government guarantees, government-led restructuring, Greg Gordon, Hank Paulson, insolvent banks, Institutional Risk Analytics, investment banks, Ireland, Jim Rickards, John Burke, John Carney, John T Burke Jr, JPMorgan, Karen Maley, liberal, lobbyists, Lori Ann LoRocco, McClatchy Newspapers, moral hazard, mortgage bubble, mortgage securities, mortgage-backed securities, NetNet, News, Obama Administration, Obama Presidency, Omnis, Opinion, Pictures of Deflation, Pimco, Political, Politics, President of the United States, problem loans, Professor Matthew Richardson, proprietary trading, regulatory capture, Republican, Republican Party, revolving door, risky mortgage lending, SEC scandals, self-dealing insiders, socialized loss and privatized gain, stock markets, stress tests, subprime mortgage crisis, systemic risk, TARP, TARP bailout, taxpayer subsidies to investment banks, taxpayers, Temporary nationalization, temporary receivership, The Business Insider, the center lane, the economy, The White House, thecenterlane, too big to fail, toxic assets, transparency, Treasury Department, Treasury Secretary, troubled assets, Troubled Assets Relief Program, Two Years Too Late, United States Senate, United States Treasury, unscrupulous lenders, Wall Street, Wall Street lobbyists, Wall Street meltdown, wealth transfer, welfare for the rich, Wells Fargo, zombie banks

We Took The Wrong Turn

October 7th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized

Oct, 07 2010

Comments Off

October 7, 2010

The ugly truth has raised its head once again. We did it wrong and Australia did it right. It was just over a year ago – on September 21, 2009 – when I wrote a piece entitled, “The Broken Promise”. I concluded that posting with this statement:

If only Mr. Obama had stuck with his campaign promise of “no more trickle-down economics”, we wouldn’t have so many people wishing they lived in Australia.

I focused that piece on a fantastic report by Australian economist Steve Keen, who explained how the “money multiplier” myth, fed to Obama by the very people who caused the financial crisis, was the wrong paradigm to be starting from in attempting to save the economy.

The trouble began immediately after President Obama assumed office. I wasn’t the only one pulling out my hair in February of 2009, when our new President decided to follow the advice of Larry Summers and “Turbo” Tim Geithner. That decision resulted in a breach of Obama’s now-infamous campaign promise of “no more trickle-down economics”. Obama decided to do more for the zombie banks of Wall Street and less for Main Street – by sparing the banks from temporary receivership (also referred to as “temporary nationalization”) while spending less on financial stimulus. Obama ignored the 50 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, who warned that an $800 billion stimulus package would be inadequate. At the Calculated Risk website, Bill McBride lamented Obama’s strident posturing in an interview conducted by Terry Moran of ABC News, when the President actually laughed off the idea of implementing the so-called “Swedish solution” of putting those insolvent banks through temporary receivership.

With the passing of time, it has become painfully obvious that President Obama took the country down the wrong path. The Australian professor (Steve Keen) was right and Team Obama was wrong. Economist Joseph Stiglitz made this observation on August 5, 2010:

Kevin Rudd, who was prime minister when the crisis struck, put in place one of the best-designed Keynesian stimulus packages of any country in the world. He realized that it was important to act early, with money that would be spent quickly, but that there was a risk that the crisis would not be over soon. So the first part of the stimulus was cash grants, followed by investments, which would take longer to put into place.

Rudd’s stimulus worked: Australia had the shortest and shallowest of recessions of the advanced industrial countries.

Fast-forward to October 6, 2010. Michael Heath of Bloomberg BusinessWeek provided the latest chapter in the story of how America did it wrong while Australia did it right:

Australian Employers Added 49,500 Jobs in September

Australian employers in September added the most workers in eight months, driving the country’s currency toward a record and bolstering the case for the central bank to resume raising interest rates.

The number of people employed rose 49,500 from August, the seventh straight gain, the statistics bureau said in Sydney today. The figure was more than double the median estimate of a 20,000 increase in a Bloomberg News survey of 25 economists. The jobless rate held at 5.1 percent.

Meanwhile — back in the States — on October 6, ADP released its National Employment Report for September, 2010. It should come as no surprise that our fate is 180 degrees away from that of Australia: Private sector employment in the U.S. decreased by 39,000 from August to September on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the ADP report. Beyond that, October 6 brought us a gloomy forecast from Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist for the ever-popular Goldman Sachs Group. Wes Goodman of Bloomberg News quoted Hatzius as predicting that the United States’ economy will be “fairly bad” or “very bad” over the next six to nine months:

“We see two main scenarios,” analysts led by Jan Hatzius, the New York-based chief U.S. economist at the company, wrote in an e-mail to clients. “A fairly bad one in which the economy grows at a 1 1/2 percent to 2 percent rate through the middle of next year and the unemployment rate rises moderately to 10 percent, and a very bad one in which the economy returns to an outright recession.”

Aren’t we lucky! How wise of President Obama to rely on Larry Summers to the exclusion of most other economists!

Charles Ferguson, director of the new documentary film, Inside Job, recently offered this analysis of the milieu that facilitated the opportunity for Larry Summers to inflict his painful legacy upon us:

Then, after the 2008 financial crisis and its consequent recession, Summers was placed in charge of coordinating U.S. economic policy, deftly marginalizing others who challenged him. Under the stewardship of Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke, the Obama administration adopted policies as favorable toward the financial sector as those of the Clinton and Bush administrations — quite a feat. Never once has Summers publicly apologized or admitted any responsibility for causing the crisis. And now Harvard is welcoming him back.

Summers is unique but not alone. By now we are all familiar with the role of lobbying and campaign contributions, and with the revolving door between industry and government. What few Americans realize is that the revolving door is now a three-way intersection. Summers’ career is the result of an extraordinary and underappreciated scandal in American society: the convergence of academic economics, Wall Street, and political power.

* * *

Now, however, as the national recovery is faltering, Summers is being eased out while Harvard is welcoming him back. How will the academic world receive him? The simple answer: Better than he deserves.

Australia is looking better than ever — especially when you consider that their spring season is just beginning right now . . .

ABC News, ADP National Employment Report, Australia, Australian employers, bank bailout, banking crisis, banking lobby, Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Bill McBride, blog, Bloomberg news, Calculated Risk, campaign contributions, campaign promise, centrist, Charles Ferguson, Commentary, comprehensive bank bailout plan, conflict of interest, Congress, conservative, crony capitalism, Democrat, Democratic Party, Democrats, economic crisis, economics, economists, Federal Reserve, financial crisis, financial reform, Goldman Sachs, government guarantees, Harvard, Inside Job, insolvent banks, investment banks, Jan Hatzius, jobless rate, John Burke, John T Burke Jr, Joseph Stiglitz, Kevin Rudd, Keynesian stimulus, Larry Summers, liberal, lobbying, lobbyists, Main Street, money multiplier myth, moral hazard, News, Obama Administration, Obama Presidency, Opinion, Political, Politics, President of the United States, Private sector employment, recession, regulatory capture, Republican, Republican Party, revolving door, securities, self-dealing insiders, socialized loss and privatized gain, Steve Keen, stock markets, Swedish solution, systemic risk, TARP, TARP bailout, taxpayer subsidies to investment banks, taxpayers, Temporary nationalization, temporary receivership, Terry Moran, The Broken Promise, the center lane, the economy, The White House, thecenterlane, Tim Geithner, too big to fail, transparency, Treasury Department, trickle down economics, Turbo Tim Geithner, United States Senate, United States Treasury, Wall Street, Wall Street lobbyists, We Took The Wrong Turn, wealth transfer, welfare for the rich, Wes Goodman, zombie banks

Fighting The Old War

September 30th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized

Sep, 30 2010

Comments Off

September 30, 2010

The New York Times recently ran a story about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to support the campaigns of centrist Republicans out of concern that the election of “Tea Party” – backed candidates was pushing the Republican Party to the extreme right. The article by Michael Barbaro began this way:

In an election year when anger and mistrust have upended races across the country, toppling moderates and elevating white-hot partisans, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is trying to pull politics back to the middle, injecting himself into marquee contests and helping candidates fend off the Tea Party.

Although it’s nice to see Mayor Bloomberg take a stand in support of centrism, I believe he is going about it the wrong way. There are almost as many different motives driving people to the Tea Party movement as there are attendees at any given Tea Party event. Although the movement is usually described as a far-right-wing fringe phenomenon, reporters who have attended the rallies and talked to the people found a more diverse group. Consider the observations made by True Slant’s David Masciotra, who attended a Tea Party rally in Valparaiso, Indiana back on April 14:

The populist anger of the Northwest Indiana tea partiers could be moved to a left-wing protest rally without much discernible difference.

As much as the NWI Patriots seemed to hate Obama and health care reform, they also hate large corporations and the favorable treatment they are given by Washington.

* * *

They have largely legitimate concerns and grievances about the quality of their lives and future of their children’s lives that are not being addressed in Washington by either party. Their wages have stagnated, while the cost of raising a family has crushingly increased.

My pet theory is that the rise of the Tea Party movement is just the first signal indicating the demise of the so-called “two-party system”. I expect this to happen as voters begin to face up to the fact that the differences between Democratic and Republican policies are subtle when compared to the parties’ united front with lobbyists and corporations in trampling the interests of individual citizens. On July 26, I wrote a piece entitled, “The War On YOU”, discussing the battle waged by “our one-party system, controlled by the Republi-cratic Corporatist Party”. On August 30, I made note of a recent essay at the Zero Hedge website, written by Michael Krieger of KAM LP. One of Krieger’s points, which resonated with me, was the idea that whether you have a Democratic administration or a Republican administration, both parties are beholden to the financial elites, so there’s not much room for any “change you can believe in”:

. . . the election of Obama has proven to everyone watching with an unbiased eye that no matter who the President is they continue to prop up an elite at the top that has been running things into the ground for years. The appointment of Larry Summers and Tiny Turbo-Tax Timmy Geithner provided the most obvious sign that something was seriously not kosher. Then there was the reappointment of Ben Bernanke. While the Republicans like to simplify him as merely a socialist he represents something far worse.

Barry Ritholtz, publisher of The Big Picture website, recently wrote a piece focused on how the old Left vs. Right paradigm has become obsolete. He explained that the current power struggle taking place in Washington (and everywhere else) is the battle of corporations against individuals:

We now live in an era defined by increasing Corporate influence and authority over the individual. These two “interest groups” – I can barely suppress snorting derisively over that phrase – have been on a headlong collision course for decades, which came to a head with the financial collapse and bailouts. Where there are massive concentrations of wealth and influence, there will be abuse of power. The Individual has been supplanted in the political process nearly entirely by corporate money, legislative influence, campaign contributions, even free speech rights.

* *   *

For those of you who are stuck in the old Left/Right debate, you are missing the bigger picture. Consider this about the Bailouts: It was a right-winger who bailed out all of the big banks, Fannie Mae, and AIG in the first place; then his left winger successor continued to pour more money into the fire pit.

What difference did the Left/Right dynamic make? Almost none whatsoever.

*   *   *

There is some pushback already taking place against the concentration of corporate power: Mainstream corporate media has been increasingly replaced with user created content – YouTube and Blogs are increasingly important to news consumers (especially younger users). Independent voters are an increasingly larger share of the US electorate. And I suspect that much of the pushback against the Elizabeth Warren’s concept of a Financial Consumer Protection Agency plays directly into this Corporate vs. Individual fight.

But the battle lines between the two groups have barely been drawn. I expect this fight will define American politics over the next decade.

Keynes vs Hayek? Friedman vs Krugman? Those are the wrong intellectual debates. It’s you vs. Tony Hayward, BP CEO, You vs. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO.   And you are losing   . . .

Barry Ritholtz concluded with the statement:

If you see the world in terms of Left & Right, you really aren’t seeing the world at all . . .

I couldn’t agree more. Beyond that, I believe that politicians who continue to champion the old Left vs. Right war will find themselves in the dust as those leaders representing the interests of human citizens rather than corporate interests win the support and enthusiasm of the electorate. Similarly, those news and commentary outlets failing to adapt to this changing milieu will no longer have a significant following. It will be interesting to see who adjusts.

banking lobby, Barack Obama, Barry Ritholtz, Ben Bernanke, blog, centrism, centrist, centrist Republicans. Tim Geithner, Commentary, conflict of interest, Congress, conservative, Consumer Financial Protection Agency, corporate influence, corporations, crony capitalism, David Masciotra, Democrat, Democratic Party, Democrats, economic crisis, economics, economists, Elizabeth Warren, Fighting The Old War, financial collapse, Financial Consumer Protection Agency, financial crisis, financial elites, financial reform, Goldman Sachs, government guarantees, investment banks, John Burke, John T Burke Jr, Larry Summers, Left vs Right paradigm, liberal, lobbyists, Michael Barbaro, Michael Bloomberg, Michael Krieger, New York Times, News, Obama Administration, Obama Presidency, one-party system, Opinion, Political, Politics, President of the United States, regulatory capture, Republi-cratic Corporatist Party, Republican, Republican Party, self-dealing insiders, socialized loss and privatized gain, taxpayer subsidies to investment banks, taxpayers, Tea Party candidates, The Big Picture, the center lane, the economy, The War On YOU, The White House, thecenterlane, transparency, Treasury Department, True Slant, two-party system, United States Senate, United States Treasury, Wall Street, Wall Street lobbyists, wealth transfer, Zero Hedge

Where Obama Went Wrong

September 27th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized

Sep, 27 2010

Comments Off

September 27, 2010

One could write an 800-page book on this subject. During the past week, we’ve been bombarded with explanations from across the political spectrum, concerning how President Obama has gone from wildly-popular cult hero to radioactive force on the 2010 campaign trail. For many Democrats facing re-election bids in November, the presence of Obama at one of their campaign rallies could be reminiscent of the appearance of William Macy’s character from the movie, The Cooler. Wikipedia’s discussion of the film provided this definition:

In gambling parlance, a “cooler” is an unlucky individual whose presence at the tables results in a streak of bad luck for the other players.

Barack Obama was elected on a wave of emotion, under the banners of “Hope” and “Change”. These days, the emotion consensus has turned against Obama as voters feel more hopeless as a result of Obama’s failure to change anything. His ardent supporters feel as though they have been duped. Instead of having been tricked into voting for a “secret Muslim”, they feel they have elected a “secret Republican”. At the Salon.com website, Glenn Greenwald has documented no less than fifteen examples of Obama’s continuation of the policies of George W. Bush, in breach of his own campaign promises.

One key area of well-deserved outrage against President Obama’s performance concerns the economy. The disappointment about this issue was widely articulated in December of 2009, as I pointed out here. At that time, Matt Taibbi had written an essay for Rolling Stone entitled, “Obama’s Big Sellout”, which inspired such commentators as Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns to write this and this. Beyond the justified criticism, polling by Pew Research has revealed that 46% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans incorrectly believe that the TARP bank bailout was signed into law by Barack Obama rather than George W. Bush. President Obama invited this confusion with his nomination of “Turbo” Tim Geithner to the position of Treasury Secretary. As President of the Federal Reserve of New York, Geithner oversaw the $13 billion gift Goldman Sachs received by way of Maiden Lane III.

The emotional battleground of the 2010 elections provided some fun for conservative pundit, Peggy Noonan this week as a result of the highly-publicized moment at the CNBC town hall meeting on September 20. Velma Hart’s question to the President was emblematic of the plight experienced by many 2008 Obama supporters. Noonan’s article, “The Enraged vs. The Exhausted” characterized the 2010 elections as a battle between those two emotional factions. The “Velma Moment” exposed Obama’s political vulnerability as an aloof leader, lacking the ability to emotionally connect with his supporters:

The president looked relieved when she stood. Perhaps he thought she might lob a sympathetic question that would allow him to hit a reply out of the park. Instead, and in the nicest possible way, Velma Hart lobbed a hand grenade.

“I’m a mother. I’m a wife. I’m an American veteran, and I’m one of your middle-class Americans. And quite frankly I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are.” She said, “The financial recession has taken an enormous toll on my family.” She said, “My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot-dogs-and-beans era of our lives. But, quite frankly, it is starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we are headed.”

What a testimony. And this is the president’s base. He got that look public figures adopt when they know they just took one right in the chops on national TV and cannot show their dismay. He could have responded with an engagement and conviction equal to the moment. But this was our president — calm, detached, even-keeled to the point of insensate. He offered a recital of his administration’s achievements: tuition assistance, health care. It seemed so off point. Like his first two years.

Kirsten Powers of The Daily Beast provided the best analysis of how the “Velma Moment” illustrated Obama’s lack of empathy. Where Bill Clinton is The Sorcerer, Barack Obama is The Apprentice:

Does Barack Obama suffer from an “empathy deficit?” Ironically, it was Obama who used the phrase in a 2008 speech when he diagnosed the United States as suffering from the disorder. In a plea for unity, candidate Obama said lack of empathy was “the essential deficit that exists in this country.” He defined it as “an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.”

* * *

And at a 2008 rally in Westerville, Ohio, Obama said, “One of the values that I think men in particular have to pass on is the value of empathy. Not sympathy, empathy. And what that means is standing in somebody else’s shoes, being able to look through their eyes. You know, sometimes we get so caught up in ‘us’ that it’s hard to see that there are other people and that your behavior has an impact on them.”

Yes, President Obama, sometimes that does happen. Take a look in the mirror. Nothing brought this problem into relief like the two Obama supporters who confronted the president at a recent town hall meeting expressing total despair over their economic situation and hopelessness about the future. Rather than expressing empathy, Obama seemed annoyed and proceeded with one of his unhelpful lectures.

* * *

One former Emoter-in-Chief, Bill Clinton, told Politico last week, “[Obama’s] being criticized for being too disengaged, for not caring. So he needs to turn into it. I may be one of the few people that think it’s not bad that that lady said she was getting tired of defending him. He needs to hear it. You need to hear. Embrace people’s anger, including their disappointment at you. And just ask ‘em to not let the anger cloud their judgment. Let it concentrate their judgment. And then make your case.”

Then the kicker: “[Obama has] got to realize that, in the end, it’s not about him. It’s about the American people, and they’re hurting.”

The American people are hurting because their President sold them out immediately after he was elected. When faced with the choice of bailing out the zombie banks or putting those banks through temporary receivership (the “Swedish approach” – wherein the bank shareholders and bondholders would take financial “haircuts”) Obama chose to bail out the banks at taxpayer expense. So here we are . . . in a Japanese-style “lost decade”. In case you don’t remember the debate from early 2009 – peruse this February 10, 2009 posting from the Calculated Risk website. After reading that, try not to cry after looking at this recent piece by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture entitled, “We Should Have Gone Swedish . . .” :

The result of the Swedish method? They spent 4% of GDP ($18.3 billion in today’s dollars), to rescue their banks. That is far less than the $trillions we have spent — somewhere between 15-20% of GDP.

Final cost to the Swedes? Less than 2% of G.D.P. (Some officials believe it was closer to zero, depending on how certain rates of return are calculated).

In the US, the final tally is years away from being calculated — and its likely to be many times what Sweden paid in GDP % terms.

It has become apparent that the story of “Where Obama Went Wrong” began during the first month of his Presidency. Whoever undertakes the task of writing that book will be busy for a long time.

2010 campaign, aloof leader, bank bailout, banking crisis, banking lobby, Barack Obama, Barry Ritholtz, Bill Clinton, blog, Calculated Risk website, centrist, CNBC town hall meeting, Commentary, comprehensive bank bailout plan, conflict of interest, Congress, conservative, Credit Writedowns, crony capitalism, Democrat, Democratic Party, Democrats, economic crisis, economics, economists, Edward Harrison, empathy, empathy deficit, Federal Reserve, Federal Reserve of New York, financial crisis, financial reform, George W Bush, Glenn Greenwald, Goldman Sachs, government guarantees, insolvent banks, investment banks, Japanese-style lost decade, John Burke, John T Burke Jr, Kirsten Powers, liberal, lobbyists, Maiden Lane III, Matt Taibbi, moral hazard, News, Obama Administration, Obama Presidency, Obamas Big Sellout, Opinion, Peggy Noonan, Pew Research, Political, Politico, Politics, President of the United States, recession, regulatory capture, Republican, Republican Party, Rolling Stone, Salon com, secret Muslim, secret Republican, self-dealing insiders, socialized loss and privatized gain, Swedish approach, systemic risk, TARP, TARP bailout, taxpayer subsidies to investment banks, taxpayers, temporary receivership, The Big Picture, the center lane, The Cooler, The Daily Beast, the economy, The Enraged vs The Exhausted, The White House, thecenterlane, Tim Geithner, too big to fail, toxic assets, transparency, Treasury Department, troubled assets, Troubled Assets Relief Program, Turbo Tim Geithner, United States Senate, United States Treasury, Velma Hart, Velma Moment, Wall Street, Wall Street lobbyists, We Should Have Gone Swedish, wealth transfer, welfare for the rich, Where Obama Went Wrong, William Macy, zombie banks

A Shocking Decision

September 23rd, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized

Sep, 23 2010

Comments Off

September 23, 2010

Nobody seems too surprised about the resignation of Larry Summers from his position as Director of the National Economic Council. Although each commentator seems to have a unique theory for Summers’ departure, the event is unanimously described as “expected”.

When Peter Orszag resigned from his post as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the gossip mill focused on his rather complicated love life. According to The New York Post, the nerdy-looking number cruncher announced his engagement to Bianna Golodryga of ABC News just six weeks after his ex-girlfriend, shipping heiress Claire Milonas, gave birth to their love child, Tatiana. That news was so surprising, few publications could resist having some fun with it. Politics Daily ran a story entitled, “Peter Orszag: Good with Budgets, Good with Babes”. Mark Leibovich of The New York Times pointed out that the event “gave birth” to a fan blog called Orszagasm.com. Mr. Leibovich posed a rhetorical question at the end of the piece that was apparently answered with Orszag’s resignation:

This goes to another obvious — and recurring — question: whether someone whose personal life has become so complicated is really fit to tackle one of the most demanding, important and stressful jobs in the universe. “Frankly I don’t see how Orszag can balance three families and the national budget,” wrote Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post.

The shocking nature of the Orszag love triangle was dwarfed by President Obama’s nomination of Orszag’s replacement: Jacob “Jack” Lew. Lew is a retread from the Clinton administration, at which point (May 1998 – January 2001) he held that same position: OMB Director. That crucial time frame brought us two important laws that deregulated the financial industry: the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (which legalized proprietary trading by the Wall Street banks) and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which completely deregulated derivatives trading, eventually giving rise to such “financial weapons of mass destruction” as naked credit default swaps. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that Lew does not believe that deregulation of the financial industry was a proximate cause of the 2008 financial crisis. Lew’s testimony at his September 16 confirmation hearing before the Senate Budget Committee was discussed by Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post:

Lew, a former OMB chief for President Bill Clinton, told the panel that “the problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation,” and after discussing those issues, added that he didn’t “personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it, but I don’t believe that deregulation was the proximate cause.”

Experts and policymakers, including U.S. Senators, commissioners at the Securities and Exchange Commission, top leaders in Congress, former financial regulators and even Obama himself have pointed to the deregulatory zeal of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations as a major cause of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

During 2009, Lew was working for Citigroup, a TARP beneficiary. Between the TARP bailout and the Federal Reserve’s purchase of mortgage-backed securities from that zombie bank, Citi was able to give Mr. Lew a fat bonus of $950,000 – in addition to the other millions he made there from 2006 until January of 2009 (at which point Hillary Clinton found a place for him in her State Department).

The sabotage capabilities Lew will enjoy as OMB Director become apparent when revisiting my June 28 piece, “Financial Reform Bill Exposed As Hoax”:

Another victory for the lobbyists came in their sabotage of the prohibition on proprietary trading (when banks trade with their own money, for their own benefit). The bill provides that federal financial regulators shall study the measure, then issue rules implementing it, based on the results of that study. The rules might ultimately ban proprietary trading or they may allow for what Jim Jubak of MSN calls the “de minimus” (trading with minimal amounts) exemption to the ban. Jubak considers the use of the de minimus exemption to the so-called ban as the likely outcome. Many commentators failed to realize how the lobbyists worked their magic here, reporting that the prop trading ban (referred to as the “Volcker rule”) survived reconciliation intact. Jim Jubak exposed the strategy employed by the lobbyists:

But lobbying Congress is only part of the game. Congress writes the laws, but it leaves it up to regulators to write the rules. In a mid-June review of the text of the financial-reform legislation, the Chamber of Commerce counted 399 rule-makings and 47 studies required by lawmakers.

Each one of these, like the proposed de minimus exemption of the Volcker rule, would be settled by regulators operating by and large out of the public eye and with minimal public input. But the financial-industry lobbyists who once worked at the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. know how to put in a word with those writing the rules. Need help understanding a complex issue? A regulator has the name of a former colleague now working as a lobbyist in an e-mail address book. Want to share an industry point of view with a rule-maker? Odds are a lobbyist knows whom to call to get a few minutes of face time.

You have one guess as to what agency will be authorized to make sure those new rules comport with the intent of the financial “reform” bill . . . Yep: the OMB (see OIRA).

President Obama’s nomination of Jacob Lew is just the latest example of a decision-making process that seems incomprehensible to his former supporters as well as his critics. Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism refuses to let Obama’s antics go unnoticed:

The Obama Administration, again and again, has taken the side of the financial services industry, with the occasional sops to unhappy taxpayers and some infrequent scolding of the industry to improve the optics.

Ms. Smith has developed some keen insight about the leadership style of our President:

The last thing Obama, who has been astonishingly accommodating to corporate interests, needs to do is signal weakness. But he has made the cardinal mistake of trying to please everyone and has succeeded in having no one happy with his policies. Past Presidents whose policies rankled special interests, such as Roosevelt, Johnson, and Reagan, were tenacious and not ruffled by noise. Obama, by contrast, announces bold-sounding initiatives, and any real change will break eggs and alienate some parties, then retreats. So he creates opponents, yet fails to deliver for his allies.

Yes, the Disappointer-In-Chief has failed to deliver for his allies once again – reinforcing my belief that he has no intention of running for a second term.

A Shocking Decision, ABC News, bank bailout, banking crisis, banking lobby, Barack Obama, Bianna Golodryga, Bill Clinton, blog, centrist, Citigroup, Clinton administration, Commentary, Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, comprehensive bank bailout plan, confirmation hearing, conflict of interest, Congress, conservative, crony capitalism, de minimus exemption, Democrat, Democratic Party, Democrats, deregulation, derivatives trading, Disappointer-In-Chief, economic crisis, economics, economists, FDIC, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve, financial crisis, financial reform, financial reform bill, Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, financial weapons of mass destruction, government guarantees, Hillary Clinton, Huffington Post, insolvent banks, investment banks, Jack Lew, Jacob Lew, Jim Jubak, Joel Achenbach, John Burke, John T Burke Jr, Larry Summers, liberal, lobbyists, love child, Mark Leibovich, moral hazard, msn, Naked Capitalism, naked credit default swaps, National Economic Council, New York Post, New York Times, News, Obama Administration, Obama Presidency, Office of Management and Budget, OIRA, OMB, OMB Director, Opinion, Orszagasm com, Peter Orszag, Political, Politics, Politics Daily, President of the United States, proprietary trading, regulatory capture, Republican, Republican Party, revolving door, securities, self-dealing insiders, Senate Budget Committee, Shahien Nasiripour, socialized loss and privatized gain, State Department, stock markets, systemic risk, TARP, TARP bailout, taxpayer subsidies to investment banks, taxpayers, the center lane, the economy, The White House, thecenterlane, too big to fail, toxic assets, transparency, Treasury Department, troubled assets, Troubled Assets Relief Program, United States Senate, United States Treasury, Volcker Rule, Wall Street, Wall Street Banks, Wall Street lobbyists, Washington Post, wealth transfer, welfare for the rich, Yves Smith, zombie banks

The Smell Of Rotting TARP

September 16th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized

Sep, 16 2010

Comments Off

September 16, 2010

I never liked the TARP program. As we approach the second anniversary of its having been signed into law by President Bush, we are getting a better look at how really ugly it has been. Marshall Auerback picked up a law degree from Corpus Christi College, Oxford University in 1983 and currently serves as a consulting strategist for RAB Capital Plc in addition to being an economic consultant to PIMCO. Mr. Auerback recently wrote a piece for the Naked Capitalism website in response to a posting by Ben Smith at Politico. Smith’s piece touted the TARP program as a big success, with such statements as:

The consensus of economists and policymakers at the time of the original TARP was that the U.S. government couldn’t afford to experiment with an economic collapse. That view in mainstream economic circles has, if anything, only hardened with the program’s success in recouping the federal spending.

Marshall Auerback’s essay, rebutting Ben Smith’s piece, was entitled, “TARP Was Not a Success — It Simply Institutionalized Fraud”. Mr. Auerback began his argument this way:

Indeed, the only way to call TARP a winner is by defining government sanctioned financial fraud as the main metric of results. The finance leaders who are guilty of wrecking much of the global economy remain in power – while growing extraordinarily wealthy in the process. They know that their primary means of destruction was accounting “control fraud”, a term coined by Professor Bill Black, who argued that “Control frauds occur when those that control a seemingly legitimate entity use it as a ‘weapon’ to defraud.” TARP did nothing to address this abuse; indeed, it perpetuates it. Are we now using lying and fraud as the measure of success for financial reform?

After pointing out that “Congress adopted unprincipled accounting principles that permit banks to lie about asset values in order to hide their massive losses on loans and investments”, Mr. Auerback concluded by enumerating the steps followed to create an illusion of viability for those “zombie banks”:

Both the Bush and Obama administration followed a three-part strategy towards our zombie banks: (1) cover up the losses through (legalized) accounting fraud, (2) launch an “everything is great” propaganda campaign (the faux stress tests were key to this tactic and Ben Smith perpetuates this nonsense in his latest piece on TARP), and (3) provide a host of secret taxpayer subsidies to the systemically dangerous institutions (the so-called “too big to fail” banks). This strategy is the opposite of what the Swedes and Norwegians did during their banking crisis in the 1990s, which remains the template on a true financial success.

Despite this sleight-of-hand by our government, the Moment of Truth has arrived. Alistair Barr reported for MarketWatch that it has finally become necessary for the Treasury Department to face reality and crack down on the deadbeat banks that are not paying back what they owe as a result of receiving TARP bailouts. That’s right. Despite what you’ve heard about what a great “investment” the TARP program supposedly has been, there is quite a long list of banks that cannot boast of having paid back the government for their TARP bailouts. (Don’t forget that although Goldman Sachs claims that it repaid the government for what it received from TARP, Goldman never repaid the $13 billion it received by way of Maiden Lane III.) The MarketWatch report provided us with this bad news:

In August, 123 financial institutions missed dividend payments on securities they sold to the Treasury Department under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. That’s up from 55 in November 2009, according to Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.

More important — of those 123 financial institutions, seven have never made any TARP dividend payments on securities they sold to the Treasury. Those seven institutions are: Anchor Bancorp Wisconsin, Blue Valley Ban Corp, Seacoast Banking Corp., Lone Star Bank, OneUnited Bank, Saigon National Bank and United American Bank. The report included this point:

Saigon National is the only institution to have missed seven consecutive quarterly TARP dividend payments. The other six have missed six consecutive payments, KBW noted.

The following statement from the MarketWatch piece further undermined Ben Smith’s claim that the TARP program was a great success:

Most of the big banks have repaid the TARP money they got and the Treasury has collected about $10 billion in dividend payments from the effort. However, the rising number of smaller banks that are struggling to meet dividend payments shows the program hasn’t been a complete success.

Of course, the TARP program’s success (or lack thereof) will be debated for a long time. At this point, it is important to take a look at the final words from the “Conclusion” section (at page 108) of a document entitled, September Oversight Report (Assessing the TARP on the Eve of its Expiration), prepared by the Congressional Oversight Panel. (You remember the COP – it was created to oversee the TARP program.) That parting shot came after this observation at page 106:

Both now and in the future, however, any evaluation must begin with an understanding of what the TARP was intended to do. Congress authorized Treasury to use the TARP in a manner that “protects home values, college funds, retirement accounts, and life savings; preserves home ownership and promotes jobs and economic growth; [and] maximizes overall returns to the taxpayers of the United States.” But weaknesses persist. Since EESA was signed into law in October 2008, home values nationwide have fallen. More than seven million homeowners have received foreclosure notices. Many Americans’ most significant investments for college and retirement have yet to recover their value. At the peak of the crisis, in its most significant acts and consistent with its mandate in EESA, the TARP provided critical support at a time in which confidence in the financial system was in freefall. The acute crisis was quelled. But as the Panel has discussed in the past, and as the continued economic weakness shows, the TARP’s effectiveness at pursuing its broader statutory goals was far more limited.

The above-quoted passage, as well as these final words from the Congressional Oversight Panel’s report, provide a greater degree of candor than what can be seen in Ben Smith’s article:

The TARP program is today so widely unpopular that Treasury has expressed concern that banks avoided participating in the CPP program due to stigma, and the legislation proposing the Small Business Lending Fund, a program outside the TARP, specifically provided an assurance that it was not a TARP program. Popular anger against taxpayer dollars going to the largest banks, especially when the economy continues to struggle, remains high. The program’s unpopularity may mean that unless it can be convincingly demonstrated that the TARP was effective, the government will not authorize similar policy responses in the future. Thus, the greatest consequence of the TARP may be that the government has lost some of its ability to respond to financial crises in the future.

No doubt.

Alistair Barr, Anchor Bancorp Wisconsin, bank bailout, bank stocks, banking crisis, banking lobby, Barack Obama, Ben Smith, blog, Blue Valley Ban Corp, Bruyette and Woods, centrist, Commentary, comprehensive bank bailout plan, conflict of interest, Congress, Congressional Oversight Panel, control fraud, crony capitalism, Democrat, derivatives crisis, economic crisis, economic meltdown, economics, economists, EESA, Federal Reserve, financial crisis, financial fraud, financial meltdown, financial reform, Financial Stability Plan, foreclosures, Goldman Sachs, government guarantees, huge financial institutions, insolvent banks, Institutionalized Fraud, investment banks, John Burke, John T Burke Jr, Keefe, lobbyists, Lone Star Bank, Maiden Lane III, MarketWatch, Marshall Auerback, moral hazard, mortgage-backed securities, Naked Capitalism, News, Obama Administration, Obama Presidency, OneUnited Bank, Opinion, Pimco, Political, Politico, Politics, President Bush, President of the United States, Professor Bill Black, regulatory capture, Republican, Saigon National Bank, Seacoast Banking Corp, securities, self-dealing insiders, September Oversight Report, socialized loss and privatized gain, stress tests, systemic risk, TARP, TARP bailout, taxpayer subsidies to investment banks, taxpayers, the center lane, the economy, The Smell Of Rotting TARP, The White House, thecenterlane, too big to fail, toxic assets, transparency, Treasury Department, troubled assets, Troubled Assets Relief Program, United American Bank, United States Senate, United States Treasury, unscrupulous lenders, Wall Street, Wall Street lobbyists, Wall Street meltdown, wealth transfer, welfare for the rich, zombie banks

TheCenterLane.com

© 2008 – 2024 John T. Burke, Jr.

Obama And The TARP

Two Years Too Late

We Took The Wrong Turn

Fighting The Old War

Where Obama Went Wrong

A Shocking Decision

The Smell Of Rotting TARP

Tip Jar

Recent Posts

Stock Market

Blogroll

Archives

About TheCenterLane.com