Something quite extraordinary is happening. The mainstream, regular business people and moderates, are speaking out. They are furious about the corruption on Wall Street and death grip the banks have on DC. The banks won’t win this time.
Quiet Coup. A former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund says the finance industry has effectively captured the US government.
When sober-minded individuals begin to regard an enterprise within a nation as “an enemy of the people” you can bet that some serious blood is going to flow. This is now essentially the situation for the Goldman Sachs company.
More insider trading cases coming after Rajaratnam arrest. There are a lot of scared hedgies on Wall Street now. Can you say “prison” and “asset forfeiture”?
IBM potential CEO arrested in Rajaratnam case. That’s how deep the rot and corruption is. A Senior VP at IBM in line to be CEO has been arrested for selling insider knowledge.
Bloomberg: FDIC failed to limit CRE loans. “Failed to enforce its own guidelines.”
Goldman Sachs’ black magic, Here’s how they did it.
Investment banks borrow money from gov’t at 0%, lend it back to them at 3%. Isn’t that convenient. A license to print money, really. Banks doing this are no better than parasites.
Banks securitized the glop and kept the good stuff
A study found that securitized mortgages were five times as likely to be delinquent as mortgages that were not resold to securitizers. In other words, banks held the good stuff and sold the glop to be securitized. Thus, they knew exactly what they were doing
Kinda makes you think that the banks that planned on keeping their mortgages had different lending standards than those that knew the paper would be off their hands soon.
Bob Cringely’s take on Moffat:
I have no idea whether IBM senior vice-president Bob Moffat is guilty of insider trading or not, though that’s what he was arrested for yesterday. What I do know is that Moffat’s job since 2005 has been as the architect of IBM’s project called LEAN, which is intended to adjust Big Blue’s global labor force to maximize profitability. I’ve written quite a bit about LEAN, much to the consternation of IBM, characterizing it in large part as a way to replace expensive older American workers with younger and cheaper workers in India and Argentina while cleverly dodging U.S. age discrimination and possibly other civil rights laws. Whatever the legality of LEAN it is downright mean and shows little respect for the people who made IBM what it is today.
What does it say, then, when the architect of LEAN is arrested for alleged insider trading?
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I’ve often thought that a lot of this outsourcing stuff was terribly corrupt, if only we could get some reporters and prosecutors to look into it.
Big banks, small banks, investment banks, hedge funds riddled with greed and corruption, out sourcing, (LEAN), financial sector controlling the government and lots of people making lots of money. Expecting them to abandon their ways for the benefit of the people seems rather naive. It’s how the system works, reduce your costs, increase your market share, maximise your profit. There is nothing in there that is altruistic, it is a dog eat dog system with winner take all and to hell with the hindmost. Capitalism hasn’t taken the wrong turning, it has just developed.