“Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.”
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
HCR6 Session Year 2009
Bill Text Title: Affirming States' Rights based on Jeffersonian principles.
G-Status: HOUSE
House Status: IN COMMITTEE
Senate Status:
Next/Last Comm: HOUSE STATE-FEDERAL RELATIONS AND VETERANS AFFAIRS
Next/Last Hearing: 02/05/2009 at 01:00 PM LOB 203
New Hampshire HCR 6 Text
Cisco and Visa after the bell.
January Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday.
Apparently this new rule about caps on executive pay was a motivation to choose other venues.
There are plenty of other feedbags from the Fed for a newly christened commercial bank, and the Fed is more tolerant of highly paid management.
Bloomberg
Goldman Sachs Would Like to Pay Back TARP Money, Viniar Says
By Christine Harper
Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which took $10 billion from the U.S. Treasury in October, would like to pay back the money from the so-called Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, said David Viniar, the firm’s chief financial officer.
“It would send a very good signal” if the firm could repay the money, he said. The firm would only do so if it got “the blessing” of the Treasury and Federal Reserve, he said at a Credit Suisse conference in Naples, Florida today.
Under current rules, Goldman and other firms that received money under TARP are required to raise common or preferred equity to replace the government funds, Viniar said. The company will consider raising money “if the markets are good,” he said.
The government investment “is not really restricting the way we do business,” Viniar said.
Goldman will also be “very cautious” about considering any acquisitions because there’s a longer record of unsuccessful deals in the financial services industry than successful ones, Viniar said. He said the firm is likely to maintain its current business of focusing on corporate and institutional clients rather than entering the retail business.
“I would not pick up the Wall Street Journal every morning looking for the big Goldman Sachs acquisition because I think you will be disappointed,” he said. “We don’t really like or know the retail business and I don’t expect that to change too much.”
"..."The government should allow every distressed bank to go bankrupt and set up a fresh banking system under temporary state control rather than cripple the country by propping up a corrupt edifice."
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist
This is the procedure, that is what we do with insolvent banks. That is what the FDIC is for.
We don't prop up the bad banks. The regulators help them become solvent through a resolution and restructuring of their bad debt, and then either sell them, sell their assets independently, or allow them to re-emerge as good banks once they are solvent
This is precisely what Le Café Américain has had on the menu for the banks over the past seven months, with some detail behind it, including systemic reforms.
We do not burden an entire national economy, we do not cripple an entire banking industry including many regional banks who have done no wrong, in propping up a few insolvent institutions who arrived at that state through outrageous bad management.
There is widespread suspicion that this exercise is designed to protect a handful of large money center banks from realizing their losses - JPM, C, Morgan Stanley, B of A, and Goldman Sachs.
Let the system work. Do not continue to privatize the gains and subsidize the losses.
And then let the criminal and civil investigations of the major actors in this modern tragedy begin, if we ever wish to 'restore confidence' in Wall Street in the public and the rest of the world.
