Amazing interview on Bill Moyers with former S&L investigator

[Zebo]

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html

This interview with Bill Black, the regulator who cracked down on banks during the fathers banking crisis of the 1980s, talking about how the sons and continued by Obama allowing and continuing a fraud that is 100x worse. The fraud goes un-noticed by media, congress and all theses CEOs should be in prison. Instead, politicians are bailing them out in back room deals. Mr. Black, an Obama supporter , attributes this bailing out to looking out for the little guy - afraid we will make runs on banks etc, I'm a bit more cynical and say politicians are beholden to banksters for their office if you follow the money. Mr Black also goes on to say the Obama administration, and Bush before it, is in violation of laws that were borne out of S&L crisis to shut down these banks and hold investigations. Finally, he talks about what I comment on from time to time, a societal moral breakdown which allowed this to happen. There is basically no effective tool to stop someone from earning your trust then using that trust to extort you, also know as fraud. Back in the S&L days only 10% of S&L' CEOs felt the greed however today it's damn near universal with commercial big banks. We should be marching on Washington!!!

 

[StageLeft]

On pitchforks

The entry "Where's My Pitchfork?" explains simply how CDS don't really make sense. Is this math fair? Basically it says when you buy a high-return investment, by its very nature it's more risky, so trying to buy that risk down to zero with a CDS, but still ending up making more than a low risk (but not zero)/lower return just doesn't really make sense. If it did, nobody would ever buy the lower risk ones.

 

[Zebo]

Hey Skoorb!

"Where's My Pitchfork?"

Indeed!

Millions of savings and businesses ruined. Perhaps a unrecoverable debt load - certainly putting us and our children for generations in the chains of debt. And these banksters who perpetrated it are all billionaires and getting more each day.

Mr. Black does not go into the CDS fraud Skoorb - or more accurately it's assumed it was a fraud hence the government stepping in with 2 trillion so far.

In reading that piece he dead on with this statement about Obama (who I no longer call BlackBush but Bush^2)

It is even more outrageous for you and your administration to claim to present the government as a "shield" from the "pitchforks" of rightfully-pissed-off Americans who have discovered the scam, are being decimated by it, and are demanding justice.

 

[Zebo]

Double tap.

 

[bamacre]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan108.html

Pat Buchanan, "Should We Kill the Fed?"

For the financial crisis that has wiped out trillions in wealth, many have felt the lash of public outrage.

Fannie and Freddie. The idiot-bankers. The AIG bonus babies. The Bush Republicans and Barney Frank Democrats who bullied banks into making mortgages to minorities who could not afford the houses they were moving into.

But the Big Kahuna has escaped.

The Federal Reserve.

"(T)he very people who devised the policies that produced the mess are now posing as the wise public servants who will show us the way out," writes Thomas Woods in Meltdown.

Already in its sixth week on the New York Times best-seller list, this eminently readable book traces the Fed's role in every financial crisis since this creature was spawned on Jekyll Island in 1913.

The "forgotten depression" of 1920?21 was caused by a huge increase in the money supply for President Wilson's war. When the Fed started to tighten at war's end, production fell 20 percent from mid-1920 to mid-1921, far more than today.

Why did we not read about that depression?

Because the much-maligned Warren Harding refused to intervene. He let businesses and banks fail and prices fall. Hence, the fever quickly broke, and we were off into "the Roaring Twenties."

But, the Fed reverted, expanding the money supply by 55 percent, an average of 7.3 percent a year, not through an expansion of the currency, but through loans to businesses.

Thus, when the Fed tightened in the overheated economy, the Crash came, as the stock market bubble the Fed had created burst.

Herbert Hoover, contrary to the myth that he was a small-government conservative, renounced laissez-faire, raised taxes, launched public works projects, extended emergency loans to failing businesses and lent money to the states for relief programs.

Hoover did what Obama is doing.

Indeed, in 1932, FDR lacerated Hoover for having presided over the "greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history." His running mate, John Nance Garner, accused Hoover of "leading the country down the path to socialism." And "Cactus Jack" was right.

Terrified of the bogeyman that causes Ben Bernanke sleepless nights ? deflation, falling prices ? FDR ordered crops destroyed, pigs slaughtered, and business cartels to cut production and fix prices.

FDR mistook the consequences of the Depression ? falling prices ? for the cause of the depression. But prices were simply returning to where they belonged in a free market, the first step in any cure.

Obama is repeating the failed policies of Hoover and FDR, by refusing to let prices fall. Obama, with his intervention to prop up housing prices and Bernanke with his gushers of money to bail out bankrupt banks and businesses are creating a new bubble that will burst even more spectacularly.

The biggest myth, writes Woods, is that it was World War II that ended the Great Depression. He quotes Paul Krugman:

"What saved the economy and the New Deal was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs."

This Nobel Prize winner's analysis, writes Woods, is a "stupefying and bizarre misunderstanding of what actually happened,"

Undoubtedly, with 29 percent of the labor force conscripted at one time or another into the armed forces, and their jobs taken by elderly men, women and teenagers with little work experience, unemployment will fall.

But how can an economy be truly growing 13 percent a year, as the economists claim, when there is rationing, shortages everywhere, declining product quality, an inability to buy homes and cars, and a longer work week? When the cream of the labor force is in boot camps or military bases, or storming beaches, sailing ships, flying planes and marching with rifles, how can your real economy be booming?

It was 1946, a year economists predicted would result in a postwar depression because government spending fell by two-thirds, that proved the biggest boom year in all of American history.

Why? Because the real economy was producing what people wanted: cars, TVs, homes. Businesses were responding to consumers, not the clamor of a government run by dollar-a-year men who wanted planes, tanks, guns and ships to blow things up.

"The Fed was the greatest single contributor to the crisis that unfolds before us," Woods writes of today, and "more dollars were created between 2000 and 2007 than in the rest of the republic's history."

After 9-11, the Fed kept interest rates low ? in one year as low as 1 percent. That money flooded into the housing and stock markets. And in 2008, as the Fed tightened, the bubble burst.

Now the money supply is again expanding, to rescue us from a crisis created by the previous expansion. Of Nicholas Biddle's Bank of the United States, the great Andrew Jackson was eloquent.

"It has tried to kill me," he said. "But I will kill it." And he did.

Should not this creature from Jekyll Island, for all its manifold crimes and sins against the republic, also be summarily put to death?

 

[First]

He makes a lot of sense. Thankfully a crisis always produces an opportunity for new legislation and regulation, which CDS/CDO desperately need. I like the idea that banks that aren't technically banks but act like them are going to finally bear the cost of their malfeasance. Thankfully the concept of entirely free markets is dying, a very quick but necessary death.

 

[bamacre]

Originally posted by: Evan
Thankfully the concept of entirely free markets is dying, a very quick but necessary death.

Yeah, because that's what we've had for the last 10 years, or the last 40 years even, right? Entirely free markets.

:roll:

 

[First]

Originally posted by: bamacre

Originally posted by: Evan
Thankfully the concept of entirely free markets is dying, a very quick but necessary death.

Yeah, because that's what we've had for the last 10 years, or the last 40 years even, right? Entirely free markets.

:roll:

The recent implosion is far and away due to unregulated CDS transactions and shadow banking without proper restrictions. It's common knowledge among non-fringe nuts.

 

[NoStateofMind]

Originally posted by: Evan

Originally posted by: bamacre

Originally posted by: Evan
Thankfully the concept of entirely free markets is dying, a very quick but necessary death.

Yeah, because that's what we've had for the last 10 years, or the last 40 years even, right? Entirely free markets.

:roll:

The recent implosion is far and away due to unregulated CDS transactions and shadow banking without proper restrictions. It's common knowledge among non-fringe nuts.

The recent implosion is far and away due to corruption in government and wallstreet. It's common knowledge among people who can actually think for themselves.

 

[First]

^ Like I said, non-fringe nuts.

Oh, and link, cite, and discuss or bow out. You know I won't bud.

 

[NoStateofMind]

Originally posted by: Evan
^ Like I said, non-fringe nuts.

Oh, and link, cite, and discuss or bow out. You know I won't bud.

You can do the same.

 

[First]

Originally posted by: PC Surgeon

Originally posted by: Evan
^ Like I said, non-fringe nuts.

Oh, and link, cite, and discuss or bow out. You know I won't bud.

You can do the same.

I already have here on pg.2 and many times before.

Now go puss out.

 

[Craig234]

Originally posted by: Skoorb
On pitchforks

The entry "Where's My Pitchfork?" explains simply how CDS don't really make sense. Is this math fair? Basically it says when you buy a high-return investment, by its very nature it's more risky, so trying to buy that risk down to zero with a CDS, but still ending up making more than a low risk (but not zero)/lower return just doesn't really make sense. If it did, nobody would ever buy the lower risk ones.

One thing about some of these bubbles is that they're not just 'things go up, things come down'. they're massive transfers of wealth. Take the housing bubble.

Mr. Middle class, you want a home? OK, buy the home that was $300,000 for the current bubvle price of $500,000, taking out a mortgage. If you do it early enough, you might even see the value rise in the bubble - $600K, $700K. A few people will even sell for a profit, but most won't - just as a few people win at casinos but most don't. In the meantime, the money you have fed into the system with that mortgage by taking on debt can be used to profit others - those who sell and re-sell the mortgage, who bet on it.

But when the bubble pops, all that money doesn't just disappear - it's been pocketed by the people who benefitted earlier. But your mortgage doesn't pop, you stilll owe it.

And you have then that transfer of wealth. Trillions that were temporarily pretended to be given to the middle class on paper, in exchange for the middle class actually borrowing it.

Then, if you can FURTHER do a wealth transfer by the public spending their tax money to 'bail out the banks' from the bubble pop, you get even more money out of them.

Sometimes what's hard to discern is how much of this is planned, how much is known but ignored, and how much 'just happens'.

What does seem clear is that those who benefit can out-donate the public interest who says 'hold off' by a wide margin.

There was no shortage of people pointing out the danger, there was a shortage of their message getting much attention though.

 

[Craig234]

Originally posted by: Evan

Originally posted by: PC Surgeon

Originally posted by: Evan
^ Like I said, non-fringe nuts.

Oh, and link, cite, and discuss or bow out. You know I won't bud.

You can do the same.

I already have here on pg.2 and many times before.

Now go puss out.

I went looking for your post on page 2 and see nothign there from you.

 

[First]

Originally posted by: Craig234

Originally posted by: Evan

Originally posted by: PC Surgeon

Originally posted by: Evan
^ Like I said, non-fringe nuts.

Oh, and link, cite, and discuss or bow out. You know I won't bud.

You can do the same.

I already have here on pg.2 and many times before.

Now go puss out.

I went looking for your post on page 2 and see nothign there from you.

I can't really help with you that, it's literally there.

 

[NoStateofMind]

Originally posted by: Evan

Originally posted by: PC Surgeon

Originally posted by: Evan
^ Like I said, non-fringe nuts.

Oh, and link, cite, and discuss or bow out. You know I won't bud.

You can do the same.

I already have here on pg.2 and many times before.

Now go puss out.

How about you read the thread you are in? I forgot, it doesn't fit your "government is always right" attitude. Too fucking bad, get over yourself.

EDIT: Nothin on page two here either. Sure you didn't mistype?

 

[bamacre]

Evan is right. The government should regulate the corruption between banks and the government. And I'm sure the federal reserve will help any way they can.

 

[Craig234]

Originally posted by: Evan
I can't really help with you that, it's literally there.

I'm guessing we have posts per page set differently or something.

 

[43st]

Thanks for posting this Zebo.

 

[Craig234]

Watched the segment, it's an excellent summary of much of the problem, the best I've seen on many points.

Bill Moyers has been doing great in recent weeks with these guests.

I suggest everyone here watch this segment.

And yes, he reinforces my concerns with the Obama administration on their policies on this.

He's also supporting what I and others have said for years about the problems with the lack of oversight, the selling out, of the Bush administration.

Sadly, that fell on deaf ears at the time, people had no interest. 'Bush derangement syndrome!'

I note his saying 'there was no one looking during the Bush years, until the Democrats got congress and did an investigation and found the problems'; I notice his saying that the information on the problems was kept hidden by AIG and treasury until the democrtic Congress put pressure on AIG to force them to disclose the info.

 

[LegendKiller]

Originally posted by: PC Surgeon

Originally posted by: Evan

Originally posted by: PC Surgeon

Originally posted by: Evan
^ Like I said, non-fringe nuts.

Oh, and link, cite, and discuss or bow out. You know I won't bud.

You can do the same.

I already have here on pg.2 and many times before.

Now go puss out.

How about you read the thread you are in? I forgot, it doesn't fit your "government is always right" attitude. Too fucking bad, get over yourself.

EDIT: Nothin on page two here either. Sure you didn't mistype?

As usual, PCS posts nothing of substance and runs around trolling in threads. Thanks for not changing.

People keep blaming interest rates. Had the banks not been able to lever up, due to the 2004 rule change, this would never have happened.

As far as this nutjob saying we should follow a law they got passed, without consideration to the harm that law may cause, is stupid. There have been tons of harmful laws that shouldn't be there, but were, and should have been changed but needed to be circumvented.

Just look at the Jim Crow laws.

There are ways Congress could stop this, but obviously they know there are more important problems.

 

[First]

Originally posted by: PC Surgeon

Originally posted by: Evan

Originally posted by: PC Surgeon

Originally posted by: Evan
^ Like I said, non-fringe nuts.

Oh, and link, cite, and discuss or bow out. You know I won't bud.

You can do the same.

I already have here on pg.2 and many times before.

Now go puss out.

How about you read the thread you are in? I forgot, it doesn't fit your "government is always right" attitude. Too fucking bad, get over yourself.

EDIT: Nothin on page two here either. Sure you didn't mistype?

lol, just look at the last few posts then. Has nothing to do with "gov't is always right" and everything to do with reality and stats that say Austrian economics is bunk and anyone who believes in it whole-heartily has never broken into high-level investing anywhere in the history of mankind. When push comes to shove Austrian nutbags continue to see their bottom-lines pummeled compared to index funds. It's why you, bamacre, et al Austrians always shrivel up and die from a thread when basic data and acronyms start getting thrown at you because you're out of your league in any debate that requires any bit of experience or education. The fact that anyone could think at this point that we should be loosening regulations and cutting back a few temp gov't takeovers shows a basic lack of critical thinking skills, and that's putting it nicely. How? Why? Where? Data? Studies? Yeah, woops, non-existent fucking research to prove your points.

 

[LegendKiller]

Originally posted by: Evan

Originally posted by: PC Surgeon

Originally posted by: Evan

Originally posted by: PC Surgeon

Originally posted by: Evan
^ Like I said, non-fringe nuts.

Oh, and link, cite, and discuss or bow out. You know I won't bud.

You can do the same.

I already have here on pg.2 and many times before.

Now go puss out.

How about you read the thread you are in? I forgot, it doesn't fit your "government is always right" attitude. Too fucking bad, get over yourself.

EDIT: Nothin on page two here either. Sure you didn't mistype?

lol, just look at the last few posts then. Has nothing to do with "gov't is always right" and everything to do with reality and stats that say Austrian economics is bunk and anyone who believes in it whole-heartily has never broken into high-level investing anywhere in the history of mankind. When push comes to shove Austrian nutbags continue to see their bottom-lines pummeled compared to index funds. It's why you, bamacre, et al Austrians always shrivel up and die from a thread when basic data and acronyms start getting thrown at you because you're out of your league in any debate that requires any bit of experience or education. The fact that anyone could think at this point that we should be loosening regulations and cutting back a few temp gov't takeovers shows a basic lack of critical thinking skills, and that's putting it nicely. How? Why? Where? Data? Studies? Yeah, woops, non-existent fucking research to prove your points.

You can beat the piss out of them, like you did in that thread, over and over. They simply puss out and then come back trolling in another thread, only to be beaten there. It is the way they work, it is the essence of the YouTube education they have.

The CRA bullshit has been debunked hundreds of times, yet they keep coming back. It is a crutch for those to weak to think on their own.

Same thing with low interest rates. It allows them to skip over things they don't understand.

Another funny one is he kept saying how Madoff was a failure of the SEC. ROFL, the fucking moron couldn't even figure out that the SEC doesn't regulate hedge funds. Then the moron couldn't even understand that the "free market" regulated them. Hell, he couldn't even comprehend how the "free market" got abused, especially when the investor list was slapping him in the face with it. I bet you he still hasn't figured out how Madoff, operating in a nearly pure "free market" got away with what he did.

But that's what you get from naive morons with no logic, little/no understanding of financial markets beyond YouTube and MoneyMasters, no understanding of psychology of humans, and purely idealistic bullshit ideals.

 

[Zebo]

Seems we can put this CRA stuff to rest once and for all - the CEO's of these banks encouraged, directed, forced the most riskiest loans ever not at behest of pols but to line their own pockets. Meanwhile, while convenient to blame powerless minorities or whatnot you all of us got taken to cleaners and still are!

Craig234 - Investigation, if you want to call it that, was prompted by market realities no?

 

[bamacre]

The best regulating we could do would be to get rid of the Federal Reserve, get rid of fractional reserve banking, and work toward being able to implement honest money.

The government cannot effectively regulate the banking industry when the banking industry is in bed with government.

All you are supporting is giving up more economic freedom for economic security. And as we already have seen, over and over, when we do that, we get neither.

And, Evan, you keep saying that "austrian economics" is bunk, well, pick up a goddamn newspaper, turn on the TV, talk to people in the soup lines. Keynesian econ has been a fucking disaster.