Thursday, January 27, 2011

OBAMA PROMISES HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS NO PRISON, NO REGULATION, NO INTERFERENCE, AND HUGE GOV SUPPORTED WELFARE

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com


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Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com and read articles and comments from other Americans on what they’ve witnessed in their communities around the country. While most of the population of California is now ILLEGAL, the problems, costs, assault to our culture by Mexico is EVERYWHERE. copy and pass it to your friends.

HOW BADLY WILL THE BANKSTER OWNED PRESIDENT MUCK US OVER? HOW MUCH WIDER WILL HE PUSH OUR BORDERS OPEN? HOW MUCH MORE OF THE ECONOMY WILL HE HAND OVER TO HIS WALL ST. CRONIES?



HE IS ONE OF THE MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY, AND PERHAPS THE GREATEST ACTOR THAT MOVED INTO THE WHITE HOUSE!



FROM HIS FIRST DAY, OBAMA HAS PULLED TOGETHER THE MOST CORRUPT OF THE BUSH’S ADMINISTRATION’S BANKSTERS, SUCH AS BUSH’S ARCHITECT FOR BANKSTER WELFARE, BAILOUTS AND NO (REAL) REGULATION, TIM GEITHNER.

SHE IS BUSH’S WAR PROFITEER, AND ALSO ONE OF THE MOST CORRUPT POLITICIANS IN AMERICAN HISTORY, DIANNE FEINSTEIN SPOKE AT HIS INAUGUERAL. SHE FRONTED FOR HER BANKSTER DONORS, WELLS FARGO and BANK OF AMERICA AS THEY REWROTE THE BANKRUPTCY LAWS TO PROTECT THEIR CRIMINAL MORTGAGES FROM BEING REWRITTEN!



THE BANKSTER PRESIDENT MADE SURE THAT BANKSTER BOYS, CHRIS DODD AND BARNEY FRANK, BOTH LISTED ON JUDICIAL WATCH’S TEN MOST CORRUPT, WAS COOKING UP THE BOOKS FOR THE OBAMA NO (REAL) REGULATION.



FROM THE SENATE FLOOR, AND IN FRONT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, THIS PRESIDENT ANNOUNCED TO A NATION IN BANKSTER MELTDOWN, THAT HE WAS “not here to punish banks”….

HOW BADLY HAS OBAMA PUNKED US? WELL, THEY’RE STILL DOING IT TO US! AND OBAMA JUST MOVED IN A MAN OWNED BY HIS BIGGEST BANKSTER DONOR, J.P. MORGAN, INTO HIS OFFICE! THE ONLY OTHER PREREQUISATE THAT OBAMA HAD OF HIS NEW CHIEF OF STAFF, IS THAT HE BE AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS, AND MORE ILLEGALS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED FOR OBAMA’S WALL ST. DONORS



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FINANCIAL CRISIS PANEL URGES PROSECUTIONS OF INDUSTRY FIGURES



By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The congressional panel examining the root causes of the nation's financial crisis voted to refer to state and federal prosecutors a wide range of potential criminal wrongdoing by financial industry figures and corporations, people involved in the deliberations said Tuesday.

The politically divided Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is likely to detail the referrals on Thursday in releasing its final report, based on testimony from more than 700 people in coast-to-coast hearings and a review of millions of pages of documents.

The Huffington Post website first reported on the commission's referrals Monday evening.

It couldn't be learned which financial executives and companies were subject of the referrals to the Justice Department and state attorneys general. The panel investigated the roles of, among others, subprime mortgage brokers and lenders; Wall Street giants that bought, repackaged and resold the loans; bond ratings agencies; and a huge insurer that wrote protection on dicey bonds, enabling a U.S. housing bubble to swell until it burst, crashing the global economy.

Two people who had roles in the deliberations, speaking on condition of anonymity because the report is still confidential, said that the panel voted on a number of the Justice Department referrals months ago.

"And we've done some more," one of these individuals said.

The legislation creating the commission, signed by President Barack Obama on May 20, 2009, charged the 10-member panel to refer to the U.S. attorney general and appropriate state attorneys general "any person that the commission finds may have violated the laws of the United States in relation to (the) crisis."

"We did our duty," said one of the two involved in the process.

However, the other knowledgeable person stressed that the panel's thin investigative staff didn't attempt to compile evidence for solid criminal cases, but rather referred information that raised serious legal issues.

The panel sought to model itself after the hard-hitting Pecora Commission, the Depression-era panel that compiled evidence leading to prosecutions of high officials of some of the nation's biggest banks.

However, the Crisis Inquiry Commission's six Democrats and four Republicans split ideologically in the months after their appointment. The divisions showed up when Republicans chose to release their own findings in December, the original deadline for the final report, and blamed much of the crisis on the "national home ownership strategy" begun under President Bill Clinton and on secondary mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for jumping into the subprime market.

Commission members and staff signed agreements to keep details of the final report confidential until its release.

However, the New York Times reported late Tuesday that it had obtained a copy of the 576-page report, which it said concluded that the financial disaster was "avoidable" and laid blame on a range of actors from federal regulatory failures to shoddy mortgage lending and reckless risk taking.

Commission spokesman Tucker Warren said the report will be released Thursday and declined to comment further.

(Tish Wells contributed to this article.)





Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/25/107430/in-report-financial-crisis-panel.html#storylink=omni_popular#ixzz1CFd8kkpP



• Posted on Monday, January 24, 2011

Wall Street firms earn high profits with Uncle Sam's backing





Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/24/107342/wall-street-firms-earn-high-profits.html#ixzz1CFhXylu6



By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street giants that played roles in the subprime mortgage debacle are reporting huge profits and awarding hefty bonuses again even as the government remains on the hook for tens of billions of dollars of their debt.

Banking behemoths are among the scores of lenders and insurers that floated as much as $345.8 billion in federally guaranteed bonds under a program that's widely credited with helping to keep money flowing at the height of the financial crisis, when businesses had nowhere to turn for capital.

Now, with the crisis in the rearview mirror, banks that escaped tough federal pay restrictions by retiring more than $200 billion in direct loans from the Treasury Department are still benefiting from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s less-conspicuous debt guarantee program, which has no such strings attached.

Some of the Wall Street firms that are getting the guarantees are expected to draw criticism from the congressionally appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission this week when the panel issues its final report on the root causes of the subprime mortgage meltdown, which crashed the global economy.

Under the FDIC program, federal guarantees ensured that bonds that dozens of lenders, investment banks and insurers issued — including Goldman, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and General Electric — got gold-plated ratings that drew investors and drove down the cost of financing the debt.

The FDIC's bank insurance fund, which backs the bonds, has reaped more than $10 billion in fees from firms using the guarantees, while the outstanding debt declined to $267 billion as of Dec. 31.

The program doesn't expire until the end of 2012, and the agency says that most of the bonds don't expire until next year.

Robert Pozen, the chairman of Boston-based MFS Investment Management, argues that the government shouldn't have released firms from executive pay restrictions until they'd paid off the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program and the FDIC program.

"Any bank that gets out of TARP, it's basically saying that it's now 'good to go' in the private market," said Pozen, the author of the 2010 book "Too Big to Save?" "They shouldn't be continuing to have this big guaranteed subsidy."

However, the agency put tight restrictions on banks' ability to refinance the bonds. Further hampering refinancing is the fact that the market for unsecured bank debt is just beginning to thaw. Morgan Stanley only recently completed a $5.25 billion bond offering, the largest by a U.S. bank in 20 months.

Banking industry consultant Bert Ely said that the adequacy of the fees in the FDIC program, known as the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, was "the kind of thing that will be debated for years."

"If you don't charge enough, then that's what creates moral hazard" and the presumption that risky behavior won't be penalized, he said. "If you charge too much, you may end up sinking institutions that you need."

On Monday, the FDIC, which hadn't identified the participants in its program, gave McClatchy a list of the institutions involved.

Three of the nation's biggest banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Charlotte-based Bank of America — account for more than a third of the outstanding debt. Citigroup owes $58.2 billion, JPMorgan $36.1 billion and Bank of America $27.4 billion.

The biggest initial issuer, however, was GE Capital Corp., General Electric's financing arm, which reported nearly $74 billion in FDIC-backed debt as of March 2009, a figure that's since declined to $53.4 billion. Ally Financial, formerly the financing arm for General Motors, has $7.4 billion in guaranteed debt outstanding.

Ely said the banks "are clearly profiting by virtue of having this relatively low-cost funding in place, even though it's in this runoff mode. The question is, to the extent they're making money, how much of that is going into the bonuses? ... There's no way to figure that out."

Goldman, which is doling out $15 billion in employee bonuses for 2010, borrowed as much as $29.8 billion under the FDIC program. It still owes $18.8 billion.

Goldman became something of a pariah in Washington before it settled an SEC civil fraud suit last summer for $550 million that stemmed from its controversial sales of subprime mortgage securities. It's sought to restore its image by announcing an array of internal revisions.

Last week, perhaps symbolizing a return to normalcy, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein was among U.S. corporate chiefs invited to attend a White House luncheon with President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao, followed by a state dinner.

Some skeptics have suggested that firms such as Goldman and Morgan Stanley could easily have used the proceeds of the guaranteed bond sales to pay off their TARP loans.

A spokesman for Goldman, which repaid a $10 billion TARP loan in the summer of 2009, declined comment on its government-backed debt.

Spokeswoman Sandra Hernandez of Morgan Stanley, which also repaid a $10 billion TARP tab from Treasury, said the money didn't come from the proceeds of its government-backed bonds, on which it still owes $21.3 billion.

MORE FROM MCCLATCHY





Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/24/107342/wall-street-firms-earn-high-profits.html#ixzz1CFdcr7D4



MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com





Obama seldom brings anyone into his administration that is not corrupt, a bankster, or LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER.

WITH HIS NEW CHIEF OF STAFF DALEY, OBAMA HAS BOTH! A J.P. MORGAN BANKSTER (J.P.s PROFITS UP THIS YEAR 47%), AND AN OPEN BORDERS ADVOCATE PER THE U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE.



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“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”



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FROM CREOLE FOLKS



Obama Seeks Brother of "Chicago Mob Boss" for Top White House Post

The roaches and con-artist, fake journalist on cable news are all lying about William Daley being all this and all that, this man is an open borders, down with America, free trade globalist. MSNBC and Gretta "the Scientology" Van Susteren from Fox News are knowingly deceiving the public about D. Issa & his letter to "business owners"=which they made into such a BIG DAM DEAL, but no one says anything whenBarrack Hussein Obama, comes around with all of these shady bankers, hedge fund managers and Wall St. Tycoons, which he puts in his cabinet. All of Obama's meeting with Wall Street asking, "What can I do for you?" is never something covered by Keith Oberman or Rachel Maddow.

(Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a high-level administration post, possibly White House chief of staff, people familiar with the matter said.



MIT Professor and co-author of 13 Bankers

Posted: December 3, 2010 09:14 AM

Jamie Dimon: Becoming Too Big To Save -- Creating Fiscal Disaster

In Sunday's New York Times magazine, Roger Lowenstein profiles Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan Chase. The piece, titled "Jamie Dimon: America's Least-Hated Banker," is generally sympathetic, but in every significant detail it confirms that Mr. Dimon is now -- without question -- our most dangerous banker.

Mr. Dimon is not dangerous because he is in any narrow sense incompetent. On the contrary, Mr. Dimon is very good at getting what he wants. And now he wants to run a bigger, more interconnected, and more global bank that -- if it were to fail -- would cause great chaos around the world. Lowenstein writes: "Dimon has always been unusually blunt, and he told me that not only are big banks like JP Morgan (it has $2 trillion in assets) not too big, but that they should be allowed to grow bigger."

The problem with very big banks is not that they are "too big to fail," in the sense that it is physically impossible for them to fail. It is that they are so large and therefore so connected with each other -- and with all aspects of how the modern economy operates -- that the failure of even one such bank would cause great damage throughout the world.

Lehman Brothers had a balance sheet of around $600 billion when it failed. Its collapse helped trigger the worst financial crisis and deepest recession since the 1930s. Imagine what would happen if JP Morgan Chase -- even at today's scale -- were allowed to go bankrupt.

Dimon is brilliantly disingenuous on this key point: "No one should be too big to fail," he tells me. And J. P. Morgan? "Right," he says. "Morgan should have to file for bankruptcy."

But Dimon himself argued, in a November 2009 op-ed in the Washington Post, that regular bankruptcy is not a feasible option for megabanks. Instead he eloquently advocated the creation of a special resolution mechanism for big banks -- an update and expansion of the powers that the FDIC has long used to handle the orderly failure of small and medium-sized banks with insured retail deposits:

Creating the structures to allow for the orderly failure of a large financial institution starts with giving regulators the authority to facilitate failures when they occur. Under such a system, a failed bank's shareholders should lose their value; unsecured creditors should be at risk and, if necessary, wiped out. A regulator should be able to terminate management and boards and liquidate assets. Those who benefited from mismanaging risks or taking on inappropriate risk should feel the pain. We can learn here from how the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. closes banks. As with the FDIC process, as long as shareholders and creditors are losing their value, the industry should pay its fair share.

Unfortunately, the resolution authority that ended up being created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation does not cover JP Morgan Chase because Dimon's bank operates so extensively outside the US (30 percent non-US in its current business, on its way to 50 percent, according to Lowenstein). There is nothing in the current resolution mechanism or the broader powers of the Financial Stability Oversight Council that enables the relevant authorities to implement the orderly winding down of a cross-border bank, like JP Morgan is today or Lehman was in 2008.

And there is no prospect of any kind of inter-governmental agreement to put in place a process for imposing orderly and foreseeable losses on the creditors to cross-border bank. In fact, the Basel Committee of bank regulators, which has jurisdiction in this matter -- and which Dimon praises in the New York Times interview -- has definitely decided not to take up the issue.

JP Morgan Chase is already Too Big To Fail. If it were to threaten failure, the government would face a terrible choice: provide some form of unsavory bailout, i.e., fully protecting creditors; or risk the outbreak of a Second Great Depression. While the executive branch pondered these alternatives, there would be global financial panic.

But that is not the worst of our worries. Jamie Dimon is apparently dead set on ensuring JP Morgan Chase becomes even larger, in part by expanding its operations in emerging markets in India, China, and elsewhere.

As Ireland and other European countries have recently discovered to their horror, Too Big To Fail banks that want to expand globally can grow so large that they become Too Big To Save. "Too Big To Save" means that the government wants to save the bank -- e.g., by providing a blanket guarantee, as the Irish did in October 2008 -- but that creates such a large liability for the state that it pushes the entire country into insolvency.

JP Morgan Chase is well on its way to becoming Too Big To Save. Through expanding overseas, it effectively bypasses the weak controls we still have in place on bank size (no bank is supposed to have more than 10 percent of total retail deposits). Experience in Europe is that this strategy can enable individual banks to build balance sheets that are larger than the GDP of the country in which they are based -- in the UK, for example, the Royal Bank of Scotland had a balance approaching 1.5 times the size of the British economy. And then it failed.

If JP Morgan Chase were to reach the equivalent size in the US, it would be a $20 trillion bank. Perhaps that would take awhile, but JP Morgan Chase soon at $4 trillion or $8 trillion is easy to imagine.

Dimon argues that banks becoming bigger is the natural outcome of market processes. He is completely wrong -- as Thomas Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Fed explained in a New York Times op-ed this week:

These firms [big banks] reached their present size through the subsidies they received because they were too big to fail. Therefore, diminishing their size and scope, thereby reducing or removing this subsidy and the competitive advantage it provides, would restore competitive balance to our economic system.

(See also this news coverage on Hoenig's views.)

Or listen to Gene Fama -- the father of the modern "efficient markets" view of finance. He told CNBC that Too Big To Fail banks are "perverting activities and incentives", giving big financial firms, "a license to increase risk; where the taxpayers will bear the downside and firms will bear the upside."

Or read the recent letter to the Financial Times by Anat Admati and other top names in academic finance. They could be speaking directly of Dimon and his views in the New York Times piece when they say:

Many bankers oppose increased equity requirements, possibly because of a vested interest in the current systems of subsidies and compensation. But the policy goal must be a healthier banking system, rather than high returns for banks' shareholders and managers, with taxpayers picking up losses and economies suffering the fall-out.

(See also Professor Admati's follow up letter to the FT this week, further blasting the views of top bankers and their acolytes.)

Jamie Dimon's job is to make money for his shareholders and even he has struggled -- the bank's stock price is only roughly where it was when Dimon took control in 2004. He really believes that the answer to his stock price doldrums is to make JP Morgan Chase bigger and more complex. In effect, he wants to load up on risk -- hoping that this will pay off for him, his employees, and (presumably) his shareholders, and really not caring much about who bears the downside risk.

Lowenstein mentions at various points that Dimon was a protégé of Sandy Weill, but he neglects to remind us that Weill in his heyday espoused many of the same ideas that Dimon stresses in the interview. Weill believed there were great synergies between commercial and investment banking (and insurance). Weill was convinced that bigger was undoubtedly better both for shareholders and for society. He was wrong on all counts, as explained by Katrina Brooker in the New York Times earlier this year:

"The dream, the mirage has always been the global supermarket, but the reality is that it was a shopping mall," says Chris Whalen, editor of The Institutional Risk Analyst, of Citi's evolution over the last decade. "You can talk about synergies all day long. It never happened."

Sandy Weill, of course, built the modern Citigroup, which effectively collapsed -- in spectacular fashion -- in 2008-09, and which had to be rescued by the government at least twice. What was Citigroup's balance sheet at the time? It was just over $2 trillion, roughly the size of JP Morgan Chase today. And Citigroup was (and is) extremely global -- doing business in more than 100 countries.

Jamie Dimon is intent on building a bank that will surpass all the size and complexity records set by Sandy Weill's Citigroup.

Whether or not JP Morgan Chase will fail on Jamie Dimon's watch remains to be seen. He is, without doubt, a relatively careful risk manager in an industry where hubris tends to run amok.

But sooner or later Jamie Dimon will hand over the reins to someone who is decidedly less careful, someone who goes with the groupthink, and perhaps even someone like Chuck Prince, head of Citigroup, who inherited Sandy Weill's mantle and said -- in July 2007, "When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing."

The music had already stopped when he said that.

If the Dimon's bigger, more global, and greatly interconnected JP Morgan Chase is still dancing next time the music stops, the choice will not be bailout vs. great recession. The real choice will be no choice at all: fiscal disaster through attempted bailout (Ireland), or fiscal disaster through economic collapse (Iceland).

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Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).



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BY DAVID SALTONSTALL



DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT

July 1st 2008

Wall Street firms have chipped in more than $9 million to Barack Obama. Zurga/Bloomberg

Wall Street is investing heavily in Barack Obama.



Although the Democratic presidential hopeful has vowed to raise capital gains and corporate taxes, financial industry bigs have contributed almost twice as much to Obama as to GOP rival John McCain, a Daily News analysis of campaign records shows.



"Wall Street wants change and wants a curtailment in spending. It wants someone who focuses on the domestic economy," said Jim Cramer, the boisterous host of CNBC's "Mad Money."



Cramer also does not discount nostalgia for the go-go 1990s, when Bill Clinton led the largest economic expansion in history.



"It wants a Clinton like in 1992, but not a Hillary Clinton," he said. "That's Barack Obama."



For both candidates, Wall Street's investment and banking sectors have become among their portliest cash cows, contributing $9.5 million to Obama and $5.3 million to McCain so far.



It's a haul that is already raising concerns that, as the nation's faltering economy has become issue No. 1, the two candidates may have a hard time playing tough on issues like market regulation or corporate-tax loopholes.



"No matter who wins in November, Wall Street will have a friend in the White House," said Massie Ritsch of the Center for Responsive Politics, which crunched the data for The News.



Wall Street's generosity toward Obama, in particular, would seem to run counter to its self-interests.



In addition to calling for corporate and capital gains tax hikes, Obama has proposed raising income taxes on those earning more than $250,000.



But Wall Street is often motivated by something more than money - winning.



"In general, these are professional prognosticators," said Ritsch. "And they may be putting their money on the person they predict will win, not the candidate they hope will win."



Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).



McCain's top five include Wall Street's Merrill Lynch ($230,310) and Citigroup ($219,551).



Obama's Wall Street haul is not the biggest ever. That distinction belongs to President Bush, who as an incumbent in 2004 raised $10,852,696 from Wall Street interests through April that year - about $1 million more than Obama.



"Sen. Obama went to Wall Street to tell executives that our economy isn't working if they alone are prospering but people living on Main Street are not," Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said.



MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

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Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com and read articles and comments from other Americans on what they’ve witnessed in their communities around the country. While most of the population of California is now ILLEGAL, the problems, costs, assault to our culture by Mexico is EVERYWHERE. copy and pass it to your friends.



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