How the Scam Works: The "Free Market" at Work, Financial Style

How the Scam Works: The "Free Market" at Work, Financial Style -Global Research

I think I may have figured out why banks are engaging in what seems to be over-paying. In fact, it was obvious from the outset that this is the danger. And it explains why the very worst offenders ­ Bank of America (now owner of Countrywide) and Citibank are the largest buyers. As the worst abusers and packagers of CDO's, shouldn't they be in the best position to see how worthless their junk mortgages are?

That turns out to be the key! Obviously, the government has failed to protect itself deliberately, intentionally failed to do so ­ in order to let the banks pull off the following scam.

Here's how I think it works: Suppose a bank is sitting on a $10 million package of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that was put together by, say, Countrywide out of junk mortgages. Given the high proportion of fraud (and a recent Fitch study found that every package it examined was rife with financial fraud), this package may be worth at most only $2 million as defaults loom on "liars' loan" mortgages and subprime mortgages where the mortgage brokers also have lied in filling out the forms for hapless borrowers or witting crooks taking out mortgages at far more than properties were worth and pocketing the excess.

The bank now offers $3 million to buy back this mortgage. What the hell, the more they bid, the more they get from the government. So why not bid $5 million. (In practice, friendly banks may bid for each other¹s junk CDOs.) The government ­ that is, the hapless FDIC ­ puts up 85% of $5 million to buy this ­namely, $4,250,000. The bank only needs to put up 15% ­ namely, $750,000.

Here's the rip-off as I see it. For an outlay of $750,000, the bank rids its books of a mortgage worth $2 million, for which it receives $4,250,000. It gets twice as much as the junk is worth.

The more the banks holding junk mortgages pay for this toxic waste, the more the government will pay as part of its 85%. So the strategy is to overpay, overpay, and overpay. Paying 15% is a small price to pay for getting the government to put in 85% to take the most toxic waste off your books.

OpenSecrets | Following the money in the Wall Street shakeout? Start here. - Capital Eye

OpenSecrets Following the money in the Wall Street shakeout? Start here. - Capital Eye: "The biggest [corporate] givers to American politics include the investment firms and commercial banks that have received [the most] federal bailout money."

Before the Fall, AIG Payouts Went to Washington - Capital Eye

OpenSecrets Before the Fall, AIG Payouts Went to Washington - Capital Eye: "Before the Fall, AIG Payouts Went to Washington"

In the last 20 years American International Group (AIG) has contributed more than $9 million to federal candidates and parties through PAC and individual contributions. That's enough to rank AIG on OpenSecrets.org's Heavy Hitters list, which profiles the top 100 contributors of all time.

Over time, AIG hasn't shown an especially partisan streak, splitting evenly the $9.3 million it has contributed since 1989. In the last election cycle, though, 68 percent of contributions associated with the company went to Democrats. Two senators who chair committees charged with overseeing AIG and the insurance industry, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), are among the top recipients of AIG contributions. Baucus chairs the Senate Finance Committee and has collected more money from AIG in his congressional career than from any other company--$91,000. And with more than $280,000, AIG has been the fourth largest contributor to Dodd, who chairs the Senate's banking committee. President Obama and his rival in last year's election, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), are also high on the list of top recipients.

AIG has been a personal investment for lawmakers, too. Twenty-eight current members of Congress reported owning stock in AIG in 2007, worth between $2.5 million and $3.3 million. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), one of the richest members of Congress, was by far the biggest investor in AIG, with stock valued around $2 million.

Last year AIG and its subsidiaries spent about $9.7 million on federal lobbying, or about $53,000 for every day Congress was in session in 2008. The company's spending on advocacy last year was down from an all-time high of $11.4 million spent on lobbying in 2007.

Paper gold - UK Telegraph

Paper gold: nice idea, shame about the politics - Telegraph: "A “paper gold” standard might be one way out of the global financial crisis. Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of China’s central bank, has proposed shifting the world from its dependence on the US dollar to a new reserve currency managed by the International Monetary Fund."

Economic Hitman

For more go to johnperkins.org.

Study says most corporations pay no U.S. income taxes | Reuters

Study says most corporations pay no U.S. income taxes (Reuters): "The Government Accountability Office said 72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005."

According to the Government Accountability Office, nearly all of America's top 100 corporations maintain subsidiaries in countries identified as tax havens.

You are not going to hear much about this in the news because they are all doing it.

Presenting the Other Side: Hyperinflation is Impossible

To be balanced, here is information that suggests the sky is not falling at Futronomics blog: Hyperinflation Is Impossible.
Excerpt:

There are hundreds of trillions of dollars floating around the world in credit. Much of that is an insurance contract on top of another insurance contract, on top of a securitized mortgage, on top of an asset. The total value of all the aggregate claims on the asset vastly outnumber the value of the asset itself. That is what this crisis is about at it's very heart. Picture an inverse pyramid with assets occupying the bottom bit, securitized mortgages in the middle, and credit derivatives at the top. A stable economy would have a right-side-up pyramid with assets occupying the bottom, etc.

Our problem now, is not that the assets are going to go to zero. It's the value of the much larger derivatives and mortgages that back the assets going to zero. Their values were derived from faulty computer models that grossly underestimated risk in the underlying asset, but more importantly in the ability for a counterparty to make good on their promise in the event of a default. The counterparties, like AIG or Citi, issued 30 or 40 times more in insurance than there were in assets to back them up. Their models told them that the possibility of all the different assets declining at the same time was negligible, therefore justifying such enormous leverage. Now that the assets have fallen by at least 20-30%, the holders of the securities that were tied to them want to be paid for their insurance. Only there's nothing to pay them with. So the people that hold these contracts are trying to get rid of them as fast as they can, and for whatever price, because they fear that if the counterparty goes belly-up, they'll get nothing. If they can sell, they take the loss. If not, they keep the asset off their balance sheet in what's known as a SIV (Special Investment Vehicle) until they can be sold. While they are kept off the balance sheet, they are still considered to be worth 100% of their original value.

The total amount of these assets is far greater than the equity banks have and their sum represents future losses that eventually need to be realized. No, the value of these assets is not completely nil - because the value of the underlying assets are not nil. But for all intents and purposes, it might as well be zero because it dwarfs their tangible equity.

Read also Part Two.

Overpricing Toxic Assests?

Futronomics blog: Geithner Should Resign: "There are more inherent benefits for the private investors to purchasing these toxic assets at far above their real value than meets the eye. Enough for banks to over-price the toxic assest and commit fraud."

The Real AIG Scandal

The feds must investigate AIG's fishy $12.9 billion payment to Goldman. - By Eliot Spitzer - Slate Magazine: "The Real AIG Scandal, Continued!

The transfer of $12.9 billion from AIG to Goldman looks fishier and fishier.
Posted Sunday, March 22, 2009, at 9:42 AM ET

The AIG scandal is getting ever-more disturbing. Goldman Sachs' public conference call explaining its trading relationship and exposure with AIG established once again that Goldman knows how to protect itself. According to Goldman, even if AIG had failed, Goldman's losses would have been minimal.

How did Goldman protect itself? Sensing AIG's weakening capital position through 2006 and 2007, Goldman demanded more collateral from AIG and covered outstanding risk with instruments from other firms. Continued...

Rolling Stone: The Big Takeover

Sub-title: The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

Please read the entire RollingStone article. Here are a few excerpts the wet your appitite:

Joseph Cassano the head of a tiny 400-person unit within AIG called AIG Financial Products was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.

AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion

In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup.

Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities.

For six months before its meltdown, according to insiders, the company had been searching for a full-time chief financial officer and a chief risk-assessment officer, but never got around to hiring either. That meant that the 18th-largest company in the world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was safe and no one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on hand.

When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG executives to re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named Joseph St. Denis became "gravely concerned" about the CDS deals and their potential for mass destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing the poor sap out of the firm, telling him he was "deliberately excluded" from the financial review for fear that he might "pollute the process."

European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together ... They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five companies ... and ended up being regulated by no one.

By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented [by the FED] to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. ...[see article]... pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies ... this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.

When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary — a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension."

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.