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Wall Street's 'Disaster Capitalism for Dummies'
2008-10-21, MarketWatch.com (owned by Dow Jones)
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/14-reasons-main-street-loses/story.aspx...

Sorry to pop your bubble folks, but it no longer matters who's president. Why? The real "game changer" already happened. Democracy has been replaced by Wall Street's new "disaster capitalism." That's the big game-changer historians will remember about 2008, masterminded by Wall Street's ultimate "Trojan Horse," Hank Paulson. Congress simply handed over voting power and the keys to trillions in the Treasury to Wall Street's new "Disaster Capitalists" who now control "democracy." We let it happen. In one generation America has been transformed from a democracy into a strange new form of government, "Disaster Capitalism." Three decades of influence peddling in Washington ... accelerated under Reaganomics and went into hyperspeed under Bushonomics, both totally committed to a new disaster capitalism run privately by Wall Street and Corporate America. No-bid contracts in wars and hurricanes. A housing-credit bubble -- while secretly planning for a meltdown. Finally, the coup de grace: Along came the housing-credit crisis, as planned. Press and public saw a negative, a crisis. Disaster capitalists saw a huge opportunity. Yes, opportunity for big bucks and control of America. This end game was planned for years in secret war rooms on Wall Street, in Corporate America, in Washington and the Forbes 400. Naomi Klein summarizes the game in Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This "new economy" generates enormous profits feeding off other peoples' misery: Wars, terror attacks, natural catastrophes, poverty, trade sanctions, subprime housing meltdowns and all kinds of economic, financial and political disasters.

Note: The author of this highly critical commentary, Paul B. Farrell, is a well-known writer on finance and investment and a long-time columnist at The Wall Street Journal's sister-site MarketWatch.

Wealthy Americans Under Scrutiny in UBS Case
2008-06-06, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/business/worldbusiness/06tax.html?partner=r...

One afternoon in April, six dozen wealthy Americans were entertained at a luncheon party in Midtown Manhattan, along with a special guest from Paris: Henri Loyrette, the director of the Louvre. The host of the exclusive gathering was the Swiss bank UBS, whose elite private bankers built a lucrative business in recent years by discreetly tending the fortunes of American millionaires and billionaires. But now, as the federal authorities intensify an investigation into offshore bank accounts, the secrets of this rarefied world are being dragged into the open — and UBS’s privileged clients are running scared. Under pressure from the authorities, UBS is considering whether to divulge the names of up to 20,000 of its well-heeled American clients, according to people close to the inquiry, a step that would have once been unthinkable to Swiss bankers, whose traditions of secrecy date to the Middle Ages. Federal investigators believe some of the clients may have used offshore accounts at UBS to hide as much as $20 billion in assets from the Internal Revenue Service. Doing so may have enabled these people to dodge at least $300 million in federal taxes on income from those assets, according to a government official connected with the investigation. The case could turn into an embarrassment for Marcel Rohner, the chief executive of UBS and the former head of its private bank, as well as for Phil Gramm, the former Republican senator from Texas who is now the vice chairman of UBS Securities, the Swiss bank’s investment banking arm. It also comes at a difficult time for UBS, which is reeling from $37 billion in bad investments, many of them linked to risky American mortgages.

Note: For an illuminating overview of the secret world of banking and finance, click here.

Lou Dobbs Tonight: NAFTA Superhighway
2008-05-28, CNN News
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0805/28/ldt.01.html

[News anchor LOU DOBBS:] Open borders advocates are refusing to acknowledge rising evidence of plans for a NAFTA superhighway. Many in the mainstream media absolutely refuse to acknowledge the reality. The plans could be a major step toward that North American Union of the United States, Canada and Mexico. BILL TUCKER, CNN Correspondent: There is no NAFTA superhighway. Not officially. In Texas planning a development is under way for what are officially called transportation corridors. The Trans Texas Corridor, I-69, a combination of rail lines, utility lines, car and truck lanes, [is planned] to be as wide as three football fields laid end to end. It will be financed by a private foreign company ... who will then own the lease on the road and the revenue generated by the tolls. Texas may use eminent domain to lay claim to some of the land needed to build it. For an imaginary road there's a lot of money and effort involved [and] some very real opposition. TERRI HALL, TEXASTURF.ORG: There's just no doubt that this is happening. We've been to the public hearings. We've seen the presentations. We've seen the documents. We waded through them and there's a whole lot more groups besides just ours. And we've got Farm Bureau, Sierra Club, a whole host of groups from the left and the right. TUCKER: In Kansas a resolution opposing the superhighway overwhelmingly passed the State House.

Note: To watch a video of this Lou Dobbs Tonight segment, click here.

What Power Looks Like
2008-04-14, Newsweek magazine
http://www.newsweek.com/id/130637

[In] speaking [with New York Federal Reserve Bank president Timothy] Geithner while I was doing the research for my recently published book Superclass, he sketched in fascinating detail how the world's power elite rallies when the markets quake. Recalling an earlier crisis in global securities markets that he helped to manage, Geithner said the Fed brought together the leaders of the world's 14 major financial firms, from five countries, representing 95 percent of all the activity in global markets. The Swiss were there, the Germans were there, the British were there. Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein "jokingly called them 'the 14 families,' like in 'The Godfather'," says Geithner. "And we said to them, 'You guys have got to fix this problem. Tell us how you are going to fix it and we will work out some basic regime.' You ... need a critical mass of the right players. It is a much more concentrated world." Geithner's description of the financial elite in crisis mode came many months before the recent meltdown of Bear Stearns, yet foreshadowed [it] in an uncanny way. The people ... described by Geithner, plus a few thousand more like them, not only in business and finance, but also politics, the arts, the nonprofit world and other realms, are part of a new global elite that has emerged over the past several decades. I call it the "superclass." They have vastly more power than any other group on the planet. Each of the members is set apart by his ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide. Each actively exercises this power, and often amplifies it through the development of relationships with other superclass members.

Note: For many revealing stories from reliable sources on secret societies of the world's most powerful people, click here.

The three trillion dollar war
2008-02-23, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/articl...

The Bush Administration was wrong about the benefits of the war and it was wrong about the costs of the war. The president and his advisers [forecast] a quick, inexpensive conflict. Instead, we have a war that is costing more than anyone could have imagined. The cost of direct US military operations - not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans - already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War. And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion. Most Americans have yet to feel these costs. The price in blood has been paid by our voluntary military and by hired contractors. The price in treasure has, in a sense, been financed entirely by borrowing. Taxes have not been raised to pay for it - in fact, taxes on the rich have actually fallen. Deficit spending gives the illusion that the laws of economics can be repealed, that we can have both guns and butter. But of course the laws are not repealed. The costs of the war are real even if they have been deferred, possibly to another generation. From the unhealthy brew of emergency funding, multiple sets of books, and chronic underestimates of the resources required to prosecute the war, we have attempted to identify how much we have been spending - and how much we will, in the end, likely have to spend. The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions.

Note: For many reports from major media sources which reveal massive war profiteering, click here.

Stimulus Plan a Scam to Benefit the Rich
2008-02-03, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/03/IN8LUO095.DTL

Congress is about to sell us the biggest fraud in American history. It's been highly touted as an economic stimulus bill that will help millions of Americans. As part of the bill, Congress is set to rush through an increase in the mortgage loan limits for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and Federal Housing Administration insurance, too) - from $417,000 to $729,750 - the first step toward a massive financial disaster in which taxpayers will end up paying through the nose. Now, thanks to Congress, junk bond investors will be able to pawn off their bad debt to Fannie and Freddie. This shift will certainly doom Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so don't be surprised if we, the taxpayers, have to bail out poor Fannie and Freddie - to the tune of more than $1 trillion. The irony here is that the collapse in housing prices could make Fannie insolvent even without raising the loan limit. Increasing Fannie's limit is like going on a spending spree with your credit cards because you know you are going to file for bankruptcy in a few months. Only here the taxpayer is left holding the bag. Our children will pay interest on this debt in perpetuity. It is our debt. It is inescapable. In the coming months, Fannie and Freddie will buy up mortgages based on old, fraudulent appraisals and on loans with bogus inflated incomes. Unfortunately, many of these loans will still default. Expansion of Fannie and Freddie's reckless lending is exactly what Congress wants because it's plausibly deniable. Teary-eyed lawmakers can take to the airwaves a year from now and declare: "We had no idea Fannie could go under, but we can't cut and run now. Those same lawmakers won't mention the fact that they get paid far more by real estate lobbyists than they do from our Treasury.

Note: The author wrote this article seven months before the collapse of Fannie Mae and eight months before the huge banking bailout. For more news articles suggestion major manipulations to transfer public tax monies to the banking sector, click here.

It's all Friedman's doing
2007-09-09, Toronto Star (Toronto's leading newspaper)
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/254550

[Naomi Klein in her new book The Shock Doctrine] argues persuasively that over the last 40 years, no single thinker has shaped the economic and political policies of corporate CEOs, military dictators, presidents, prime ministers and bankers more than [Milton] Friedman. His thesis was simple: The job of governments is to facilitate the free flow of capital across national borders by removing any impediments to trade [and establishing] a drastic regimen of market deregulation, free trade treaties, spending cuts to social programs, the breaking of labour unions and mass privatization of publicly owned resources and industries ... chiefly through the careful manipulation of collective crises such as wars, military coups, natural disasters and economic recessions and depressions. For Friedman's ideas to be implemented, a nation's existing economy and civic society must first be reduced to a state of tabula rasa before being rebuilt according to the [Chicago School] model. [Klein contends] that this capitalist doctrine also has its roots in a series of mind-control experiments performed on often unwilling patients by psychiatrist Ewan Cameron, working out of McGill University in the late 1950s. He imposed a sustained regimen of sensory deprivation, isolation, enforced sleep and a cocktail of LSD, PCP, insulin and barbiturates [and] a barrage of electroshock therapy. The CIA, which paid for Cameron's experiments, modified these techniques for use in prisoner-interrogation sessions. The results were so good that the CIA taught the methods to the Latin American security forces in charge of reprogramming anyone who dared resist the devastating free market "reforms" that swept through South and Central America after Augusto Pinochet's successful, Chicago-School inspired (and CIA-sponsored) coup of populist leader Salvador Allende in 1973.

Special Note: For an incredibly revealing interview on the role of the Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economists in promoting radical change against democracy by using states of public shock to push through unwanted changes, don't miss the powerful talk with Naomi Klein available here.

1934: The Plot Against America
2007-07-28, Harper's magazine
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000651

In November 1934, federal investigators uncovered an amazing plot involving some two dozen senior businessmen, a good many of them Wall Street financiers, to topple the government of the United States and install a fascist dictatorship. An alert FDR shut it down but stopped short of retaliatory measures against the plotters. A key element of the plot involved [Smedley Butler,] a retired prominent general who was to have raised a private army of 500,000 men from unemployed veterans and who blew the whistle when he learned more of what the plot entailed. The plot was heavily funded and well developed and had strong links with fascist forces abroad. A story in the New York Times and several other newspapers reported on it, and a special Congressional committee was created to conduct an investigation. The records of this committee were scrubbed and sealed away in the National Archives, where they have only recently been made available. The Congressional committee kept the names of many of the participants under wraps and no criminal action was ever brought against them. But a few names have leaked out. And one is Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the incumbent president. Prescott Bush was ... deep into the business of the Hamburg-America Lines, and had tight relations throughout this period with the new Government that had come to power in Germany a year earlier under Chancellor Adolph Hitler. It appears that Bush was to have formed a key liaison for the group with the new German government. The role of the most powerful political dynastic family in the nation’s history in this whole affair is shocking.

Note: You can listen to the BBC Radio broadcast on Bush/Nazi ties by clicking here. And to watch a History Channel documentary on the coup plot, click here. U.S. Marine Corps General Smedley Butler was the author of "War is a Racket," summarized here.

Indebted
2007-03-18, Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20070317-113251-1533r.htm

The U.S. current-account deficit is the broadest measure of America's activity in international trade and global finance. It totaled $857 billion last year, the Commerce Department reported last week. For the fifth year in a row, the nation's current-account deficit set a record. As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified last year before Congress: "The immediate implication [of the nation's soaring current-account deficit] is that the U.S. economy is consuming more than it's producing, and the difference is being made up by imports from abroad, which in turn is being financed by borrowing from abroad." Last year's current-account deficit meant that Americans effectively borrowed $3.3 billion every single working day to fund the gap between their spending and their income. The accumulation of ever larger current-account deficits over the past quarter century has played an indispensable role in transforming the United States from the world's largest creditor nation into the planet's biggest debtor nation. Specifically, in 1982, America's net international investment position was a positive $236 billion. That meant that foreigners owed us nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars more than we owed them. At the end of 2005 (the latest year for which data are available), the net international investment position of the United States was a negative $2.55 trillion. In other words, we owed foreigners more than $2.5 trillion than they owed us. Since 1994 alone, America's net international investment position has deteriorated by more than $2.4 trillion.

Note: The Washington Times was the only media source to report on this highly important story. Why? For a possible answer, click here. For more underreported, yet massive government corruption, click here.

To Fill His Shoes, Mr. Bernanke, Learn to Dance
2005-10-30, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR20051028024...

In his 18 years as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan has occasionally drawn criticism, but no one disputes his technical prowess or sniffs at his track record of low inflation and steady, almost uninterrupted growth. Enter Ben S. Bernanke, President Bush's nominee to take Greenspan's place. The former Princeton economics professor is currently the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers. The following are excerpts from [a speech] by Ben S. Bernanke. "On Milton Friedman's Ninetieth Birthday," Nov. 8, 2002: "I first read 'A Monetary History of the United States' early in my graduate school years at M.I.T. I was hooked, and I have been a student of monetary economics and economic history ever since. Friedman and [his co-author Anna J.] Schwartz made the case that the economic collapse of 1929-33 was the product of the nation's monetary mechanism gone wrong. What I take from their work is the idea that monetary forces, particularly if unleashed in a destabilizing direction, can be extremely powerful. "I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."

Note: The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board admits here that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression. The Federal Reserve is owned by powerful private banks. It was created in 1913 largely in secrecy and fought by many who understood the dangers involved. For more reliable information on this, click here.

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power
2004-09-25, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1312540,00.html

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. Newly discovered files in the US National Archives [confirm] that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism. His business dealings...continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war...he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now [a] multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson. Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system. Like his son, George, and grandson, George W, he went to Yale where he was, again like his descendants, a member of the secretive and influential Skull and Bones student society.

U.S. corporations paying less in taxes
2004-09-23, MSNBC/Forbes
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6080561/

The effective tax rate for America's largest and most profitable corporations has sharply declined in recent years, and one third of such companies paid zero taxes -- or less -- in at least one of the last three years. In 2003 alone, 46 of the 275 companies...paid no taxes at all in 2003, despite reporting a total of $42.6 billion in pre-tax profits. Indeed, these companies received $5.4 billion in tax rebates that year. Half of the "tax-break dollars" over the three-year period went to just 25 companies. All told, 82 companies paid zero or negative taxes in at least one of the last three years and 28, including Boeing, paid negative taxes for the entire period. The largest beneficiaries were some of the most profitable companies: General Electric, SBC Communications, Citigroup, IBM and Microsoft. Of the 10 most profitable U.S.-based companies on the Forbes 2000, only Wal-Mart and Freddie Mac do not appear on the study's list of top 25 tax break beneficiaries. At the same time, IRS data indicates that the overall share of federal taxes paid by corporations in now less than 10 percent, down from nearly 13 percent in 1997. This trend occurred against a backdrop of rising corporate earnings. The study attributes the trend to the widening availability of offshore tax shelters and other lawful avoidance techniques.

Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US
2002-12-09, Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1209/p16s01-wmgn.html

Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today's population, that is more than $5,700 per person. This is an estimate by Thomas Stauffer, a consulting economist in Washington. Mr. Stauffer has tallied the total cost to the US of its backing of Israel in its drawn-out, violent dispute with the Palestinians. The bill adds up to more than twice the cost of the Vietnam War. Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid. It has been getting $3 billion a year for years. Israel has been given $240 billion since 1973, Stauffer reckons. In addition, the US has given Egypt $117 billion and Jordan $22 billion in foreign aid in return for signing peace treaties with Israel. Stauffer wonders if Americans are aware of the full bill for supporting Israel since some costs, if not hidden, are little known. Other US help includes: • Israel buys discounted, serviceable "excess" US military equipment. Stauffer says these discounts amount to "several billion dollars" over recent years. • Israel uses roughly 40 percent of its $1.8 billion per year in military aid, ostensibly earmarked for purchase of US weapons, to buy Israeli-made hardware. It also has won the right to require the Defense Department or US defense contractors to buy Israeli-made equipment or subsystems, paying 50 to 60 cents on every defense dollar the US gives to Israel. US help ... has enabled Israel to become a major weapons supplier. Weapons make up almost half of Israel's manufactured exports. US defense contractors often resent the buy-Israel requirements and the extra competition subsidized by US taxpayers. Stauffer [has] been assisted in this research by a number of mostly retired military or diplomatic officials who do not go public for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic.

Note: Israel has a population of 6.5 million. Yearly foreign aid to Israel has generally varied between $2.5 to 3.0 billion for many years (it's difficult to locate these figures on U.S. government websites). If you do the math, U.S. taxpayers are giving every man, woman, and child, in Israel about $400/year -- over ten times the per capita rate paid to any other country. That's quite a tax break, especially considering they are not Americans.

The demise of the dollar
2009-10-06, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-demise-of-the-dollar-1798...

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar. Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars. The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets. The Americans ... are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China's former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security." This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil – yet again turning the region's conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy.

Note: The publication of this article caused the value of the dollar to fall and the price of gold to rise worldwide. For important ideas on how to reform the role of money in the world, click here.

Michael Moore blames capitalism for meltdown
2009-09-18, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/18/MN0V19OTKP.DTL

Two weeks before his movie "Capitalism: A Love Story" opens nationwide, filmmaker Michael Moore swept through San Francisco ... with a rally, a Commonwealth Club appearance and an unlikely new antagonist: Democrats. When Moore criticized Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., this week on NBC's "The Jay Leno Show" for getting "sweetheart loans" from a mortgage company he was charged with overseeing, Moore said he got a call from a top Democratic Party official telling him to "back off." But Moore, a longtime supporter of a single-payer health plan, didn't back off. In an interview with The Chronicle, he chided House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not being aggressive enough in pushing health care reform and ripped President Obama's financial team as "the foxes guarding the henhouse." There is plenty of conservative-bashing in the film, which focuses on capitalism as the "evil" at the root of the financial crisis, but the film also refers to Democratic leaders as the "deliverymen" of the government bailouts for financially troubled Wall Street firms. In his new film, Moore focuses on the investment house Goldman Sachs as a main beneficiary of capitalism's largesse. He notes that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and senior White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers are proteges of Robert Rubin, longtime Goldman executive and President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary. "The fact that Geithner and Summers are part of this administration makes everything that happens open to question and needs our vigilance," Moore said, "because, literally now, the foxes are guarding the henhouse."

Note: For a review of Michael Moore's new film, "Capitalism: a Love Story," click here.

Why Are Corporate Insiders Selling Their Shares?
2009-09-08, Time magazine
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1920635,00.html

Any time corporate executives and directors are heavily selling their company's stock there's reason for concern. And lately they've been doing just that. The last time insider selling was as high as it is now was in the period from late 2006 to late 2007. It was right after that insider-selling surge that the stock market began its long painful decline, says Charles Biderman, CEO of TrimTabs, an independent institutional research firm. Biderman believes that insider trades shoot higher when there's a disconnect between broad market opinions and what business executives feel in their gut. "When [insiders think] things are going better than most people think, they buy stock," he says. "When things are going worse than people think, they sell." That's to say, insiders have no crystal ball but they often have access to up-to-the-minute sales data as well as firsthand impressions from their sales managers — and that gives them an inside track on what's happening in the economy. When this special access leads them to be big sellers of their stock, well, it's a vote of no confidence in their employer's near-term future. Biderman has measured the ratio of insider selling to buying since 2004, and says historically the ratio is 7 to 1. (Insiders almost always sell more than they buy because they receive stock as part of their compensation.) Right now the ratio is 30, one of the highest he's recorded. November 2007 is the last time the ratio even came close, at 24.

Note: According to the New York Times, insider trading levels are at the "highest levels since the firm started keeping numbers in 2004." Why does this Time article state they were higher in 2006 to 2007? For a treasure trove of revealing reports from reliable sources on the realities of the Wall Street bailout, click here.

Revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street
2009-04-03, PBS Bill Moyers Journal
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/transcript1.html

BILL MOYERS: For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." In fact, the man you're about to meet wrote a book with just that title. Bill Black, ... what's your definition of fraud? WILLIAM K. BLACK: Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value." And as a result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have. Well, The way that you do it is to make really bad loans, because they pay better. Then you grow extremely rapidly, in other words, you're a Ponzi-like scheme. And the third thing you do is we call it leverage. That just means borrowing a lot of money, and the combination creates a situation where you have guaranteed record profits in the early years. That makes you rich, through the bonuses that modern executive compensation has produced. It also makes it inevitable that there's going to be a disaster down the road. BILL MOYERS: So you're ... saying that CEOs of some of these banks and mortgage firms in order to increase their own personal income, deliberately set out to make bad loans? WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes. BILL MOYERS: If I wanted to go looking for the parties to this, with a good bird dog, where would you send me? WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, that's exactly what hasn't happened. We haven't looked, all right? You'd look at the specialty lenders. The lenders that did almost all of their work in the sub-prime and what's called Alt-A, liars' loans.

Note: William K. Black is the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. He is now an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri. The video of this fascinating interview is available here. For a powerfully revealing archive of reports from reliable sources on the hidden realities of the financial bailout, click here.

Hidden Pension Fiasco May Foment Another $1 Trillion Bailout
2009-03-03, Bloomberg News
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=alwTE0Z5.1EA

Public pension funds across the U.S. are hiding the size of a crisis that’s been looming for years. Retirement plans play accounting games with numbers, giving the illusion that the funds are healthy. The paper alchemy gives governors and legislators the easy choice to contribute too little or nothing to the funds, year after year. The misleading numbers posted by retirement fund administrators help mask this reality: Public pensions in the U.S. had total liabilities of $2.9 trillion as of Dec. 16, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Their total assets are about 30 percent less than that, at $2 trillion. With stock market losses this year, public pensions in the U.S. are now underfunded by more than $1 trillion. That lack of funds explains why dozens of retirement plans in the U.S. have issued more than $50 billion in pension obligation bonds during the past 25 years -- more than half of them since 1997 -- public records show. The quick fix for pension funds becomes a future albatross for taxpayers. The public gets nothing from pension bonds -- other than a chance to at least temporarily avoid paying for higher pension fund contributions. Pension bonds portend the possibility of steep tax increases. By law, states must guarantee public pension fund debts. “What appears to be a riskless strategy is actually very risky,” says David Zion, director of accounting research for New York-based Credit Suisse Holdings USA Inc. “If the returns on the pension bond-financed assets don’t exceed the cost of servicing the debt, the taxpayers bear the brunt.”

Note: The risks to pension funds may require yet another huge public bailout. Where will the money come from? For lots more on the realities of the Wall Street bailout, click here.

Stimulus Plan Places New Limits on Wall St. Bonuses
2009-02-14, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/business/economy/14pay.html?partner=rss&emc...

Buried deep inside the ... economic stimulus bill ... is some bitter medicine for companies that have received financial bailout funds. Over staunch objections from the Obama administration, Senate Democrats inserted a provision that would impose restrictions on executive bonuses at financial institutions that are much tougher than those proposed 10 days ago by the Treasury Department. The provisions would prohibit cash bonuses and almost all other incentive compensation for the five most-senior officers and the 20 highest-paid executives at large companies that receive money under TARP. The restriction with the most bite would bar top executives from receiving bonuses that exceed one-third of their annual pay. The provision, written by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., highlighted the growing wrath ... over the lavish compensation that top Wall Street firms and big banks awarded to senior executives at the same time that many of the companies, teetering on the brink of insolvency, received taxpayer-paid bailouts. "The decisions of certain Wall Street executives to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers have seriously undermined public confidence," Dodd said Friday. "These tough new rules will help ensure that taxpayer dollars no longer effectively subsidize lavish Wall Street bonuses." Top economic advisers to President Obama adamantly opposed the pay restrictions, according to congressional officials.

Note: For powerfully revealing reports on the realities of the Wall Street bailout, click here.

Bad bank + toxic debts = moral hazard x10
2009-02-02, MarketWatch.com
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Bad-bank-toxic-debt-one/story.aspx?guid...

BusinessWeek says Paulson/Bush & Co. wasted $350 billion in TARP money ... the Congressional Budget Office and GOP say Obama & Co. will waste another $800 billion on "non-stimulus" programs ... Nobel economist [Joseph Stiglitz] calls [the Bad Bank] plan "cash for trash" ... Warning, you are entering a bizarre space-time continuum ... where Wall Street makes random quantum leaps between metaphoric realities. In the "Lost" television series we're transported into a parallel reality, a perfect metaphor for today's global economic meltdown, which is misunderstood and grossly mismanaged. Wall Street crashed ... on the "Lost Island ... of Manhattan," the former center of world banking. The collateral damage has been enormous: Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, global trade, Iceland. [Wall Street's] clueless leaders ... are "Lost" with no bottom, no recovery, no strategy in sight. A new president, a secretive Fed and an old Congress are throwing around taxpayer trillions like free candy ... on top of Bush's "$10 Trillion Hangover" ...after a clueless Wall Street wrote off trillions in toxic debt, then wasted $350 billion in TARP bailout money, buying $50 million private jets, attending golf outings at exclusive resorts, spending millions on CEO's office renovations and paying $18 billion in year-end bonuses. Hope masks denial: Even President Obama's consultant [Warren] Buffett acknowledges that the proposed stimulus plan "might not work." The stimulus might not work? What if this last bullet is a blank? Should you prepare for the worst-case scenario?

Note: For many revealing reports on the realities of the Wall Street bailout, click here.

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