Zero Hedge on the fraud and political payoffs from Fannie, Freddie, and the other GSEs.
Second, it becomes quite easy to construct a criminal case for literally millions of counts of accounting, securities, wire and mail fraud against the GSEs. To the extent executives at Fannie and Freddie signed off on financial statements disclosing the portion of their balance sheets that held “AAA” securities and these had been purposefully misidentified we should be exploring prosecution for violations under e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley. (Given, however, Rahm Emanuel’s involvement in Freddie and Fannie, we aren’t holding our breath).
Third, given the presence of blatant government price fixing in more than a third of the entire economy, the United States hasn’t been anything like a “free market” since before 2003.
It probably will not shock you (since you are reading Zero Hedge) to find what may be the largest example of securities fraud ever directly connected to elected officials of the United States and their cronies.
The one thing that can and will stop the thieves is a populist uprising, people getting pissed off enough that they rise up and throw the bastards out of power, jail some of them, then change the system so it can’t happen again. Don’t tell it can’t be done because it’s happened over and over in history. We quite probably we are in the early stages of it happening again.
What other alternative is there?
The Economist says that what passes for American political rhetoric is “like ships passing in the night.” The two sides scream at each other and achieve little or nothing. Pummeling the opposition and scoring points for your side is deemed vastly more important than working to get real solutions – while fat cats and parasites loot the country, I might add.
Viewed from the two-party system – Republicans vs Democrats – things seem nearly impossible to change. But when viewed as populism vs. corporatism then real possibilities for change begin to appear.