More and more revealing pieces of the AIG bailout puzzle keep emerging as various subpoenas and FOIA requests extract more and more details. One odd bit is why the Fed decided to take out the AIG credit default swap counterparties at par, rather than simply guarantee the contracts? The Fed keeps protesting that the rescue […]
Read more...Not that I have the time or patience to dig through 250,000 pages of documents, but I have a nagging suspicion that the people who are pouring through various AIG-related disclosures may be missing key points or snookered into interpretations that may be unduly flattering to various banksters. The focus of the recent investigations into […]
Read more...Oh, this is starting to get VERY interesting. L’affaire Fed/AIG is beginning to smell a little like Watergate, where an imperial organization that thinks it writes its own rules (then the Nixon administration, here the Fed) fights tooth and nail to keep certain activities hidden well away (recall, for instance, the Saturday night massacre). Now […]
Read more...The Administration put on a full court press this weekend to shore up Bernanke’s confirmation vote, which was looking increasingly doubtful as of Friday. Over the weekend, Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate said they were confident that Bernanke would be confirmed. The media took up the call, with stories appearing in virtually every […]
Read more...By Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney and author of Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences The US Senate should not reappoint Ben Bernanke. As Obama’s reaction to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s old seat showed, real change in policy only occurs after political […]
Read more...Early on in the TARP fee discussion, we mentioned in passing that it would probably have an impact on repo financing. Repo means “sale with agreement to repurchase.” It’s a pawn-broker-like procedure that involves securities. The borrower gets to park his holdings with another party, with an agreement to buy them back at a specified […]
Read more...The New York Times describes today (hat tip reader Peter A) how more and more Senators are voicing public opposition to a confirmation of a second term for Bernanke: The confirmation of Ben S. Bernanke to a second four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve ran into further trouble on Friday as two more […]
Read more...By Thomas Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive, and Yves Smith In September 2008, the Federal Reserve bailed out AIG, and ever since then, controversy has swirled around the motivation and terms of the bailout. A major part of the bailout funds went directly to three banks: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and the French […]
Read more...By Thomas Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive, and Yves Smith Our accompanying post at Naked Capitalism describes, at a high level of abstraction, a data compilation and analysis that shows that a substantial majority of the transactions in Maiden Lane III are in the public domain. These transactions have long been a focus […]
Read more...You will hear much more about this topic (AIG and Fed secrecy) here on Friday, but Bloomberg reports the lengths to which the Fed has gone to try to keep the details of Maiden Lane III, the entity created to buy drecky CDOs from AIG counterparties who received 100% credit default swap payouts. Get a […]
Read more...Time Magazine still gets first prize for shameless pandering to the interests of the elites (in my childhood, it was called the Establishment) with its designation of Bernanke as “Person of the Year” and the fawning accompanying story. But the FT has a piece tonight that is almost as bad, because unlike Time, the FT […]
Read more...Today, Obama said to the banking industry, “We want our money back and we’re going to get it.” Has he forgotten that possession is nine-tenths of the law? While Uncle Sam is normally able to defeat such long odds, all bets are off with our “Speak moderately and carry no stick” President. The fact that […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. A week ago, in Atlanta, Bernanke responded to his critics, including John Taylor of Taylor Rule fame (the Taylor […]
Read more...Ah, the machinations that Faustian bargains produce! The Obama Administration is now caught in its own machinations and is having to backpedal fast and hard from its bankster friendly posture, or at least have the public believe it is executing that maneuver. While I cannot fathom the logic, Team Obama clearly decided to throw in […]
Read more...William Black is a former senior bank regulator, now associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City (UMKC), who writes for New Deal 2.0. The first decade of this century proved how essential effective regulators are to prevent economic catastrophe and epidemics of fraud. The most severe failure was […]
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