Chevron and Boeing Warn After Hours; Jesse's Café Américain Forms Bank Holding Company

Chevron needs to lose their preoccupation with fossil fuels and move into banking and financial services. Fossils. LOL.

Perhaps they can convert their gas stations into drive through ATMs. Don't they have a credit card business?

Why don't they become a bank holding company? The one page EZ application forms are now online at the New York Federal Reserve website. Or you can just call 1-800-BEN-BANKS. Press 2 for 'Habla Español.'

I am working on developing a personal bank. How does Banc of One sound? I modified the old Banc One logo myself for cost efficiency.

The business plan is to borrow ten billion dollars from the Fed at .5 percent and to buy Treasuries paying 2.5 percent. Since there are no employees to lay off or complex record-keeping we (the kids are the Board of Directors) think we are ahead of the curve on this one. If the Treasuries default we can always apply for one of the toxic asset buyback plans. Stress test? LOL. Stress this.

Banc of One is announcing record earnings expectations, but don't look for a 10 Q yet (it worked for Wells Fargo). I'm waiting while the little rotating egg timer on the Fed site evaluates the consolidated application for holding company status and loans of less than 50 billion dollars. Be sure to click the boxes for automatic campaign contributions. Oh, there it is. Approved. Sweet!

As for Boeing, the obvious solution is a strategic move from airplane engines to internet search engines. Those propeller heads are too 'practical' to be financiers.

Manufacturing is so yesterday. We make our money by printing it, and the details of distribution are a government function.

See you at the TARP window.


Chevron Issues Interim Update for First Quarter 2009

SAN RAMON, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chevron Corporation (NYSE:CVX) today reported in its interim update that earnings for the first quarter 2009 are expected to be sharply lower than in the fourth quarter 2008. Upstream earnings are expected to decline substantially, in part due to lower prices for crude oil and natural gas. Downstream earnings are also anticipated to be much lower than in the previous period, with average margins on the sale of refined products off significantly.

Boeing Cuts 1Q Guidance, Slows Production On Customer Delays

Boeing Co. (BA) said first-quarter earnings were hurt as the company trimmed twin-aisle airplane production plans in response to customer requests to delay deliveries amid "unprecedented declines in global passenger and air-cargo volumes."

Obama's Failure and the Unfolding Financial Crisis

Kevin Phillips is a brilliant and insightfuly political commentator, and we have featured his videos and writings here many times.

His latest essay is worth reading over the long weekend.

"This is a much grander-scale disaster than anything that happened in 1929-33. Worse, it dwarfs the abuses of debt, finance and financialization that brought down previous leading world economic powers like Britain and Holland...

But for the moment, let me underscore: the average American knows little of the dimensions of the financial sector aggrandizement and misbehavior involved. Until this is remedied, there probably will not be enough informed, focused indignation to achieve far-reaching reform in the teeth of financial sector money and influence. Equivocation will triumph. This will not displease politicians and regulators leery of offending their contributors and backers."

It is ironic that Joe Biden predicted that our Community-Organizer-in-Chief would be tested severely in his first days in office. At the time everyone thought it would be some foreign power, some military machine which would temper the character of this new leader with a significant threat to the national welfare.

Little did we suspect that the test of our sovereign republic would come from the Wall Street and the money center banks.


Table for One - TPMCafe
The "Disaster Stage" of U.S. Financialization
By Kevin Phillips
April 7, 2009, 3:34PM

Thirty to forty years ago, the early fruits of financialization in this country - the first credit cards, retirement accounts , money market funds and ATM machines - struck most Americans as a convenience and boon. The savings and loan implosion and junk bonds of the 1980s switched on some yellow warning lights, and the tech bubble and market mania of the nineties flashed some red ones. But neither Wall Street nor Washington stopped or even slowed down.

In August, 2007, the housing-linked crisis of the credit markets predicted the arriving disaster-stage, the Crash of September-November 2008 confirmed the debacle, and now an angry, fearful citizenry awaits a further unfolding. There is probably no need to fear a second coming of nineteen-thirties Depression economics. This is not the same thing; the day-to-day pain shouldn't be as severe.

Indeed, for all that the 1930s evoke national trauma, that decade was in fact a waiting room for national glory and wellbeing. World War Two ushered in American global ascendancy, the "Happy Days" of the 1950s and an unprecedented middle-class prosperity.

Today's disaster stage of American financialization - the bursting of the huge 25-year, almost $50 trillion debt bubble that helped underwrite the hijacking of the U.S. economy by a rabid financial sector -- won't be nearly so kind. It is already ushering in the reverse: a global realignment in which the United States loses the global economic leadership won in World War Two. The ignominy deserved by Wall Street after 1929-1933 is peanuts compared with the opprobrium the U.S. financial sector and its political and regulatory allies deserve this time.

My 2002 book, Wealth and Democracy, in its section on the "Financialization of America" noted that the "finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector overtook manufacturing during the 1990s, moving ahead in the national income and GDP charts by 1995. By the first years of the next decade, it had taken a clear lead in actual profits. Back in 1960, parenthetically, manufacturing profits had been four times as big, and in 1980, twice as big." Hardly anyone was paying attention.

By 2006, the FIRE sector, its components mixed together like linguine by the 1999 repeal of the old New Deal restraints against mergers of commercial banks, investment firms and insurance, had ballooned to 20.6% of U.S. GDP versus just 12% for manufacturing. The FIRE Sector, now calling itself the Financial Services Sector, lopsidedly dominated the private economy. A detailed chart appears on page 31 of Bad Money. Some New York publications and politicians try to insist that finance per se is only 8%, but the post-1999 commingling makes that absurd.

This represented a staggering transformation of the U.S. economy - doubly staggering now because of the crushing burden of its collapse. You would think that that opinion molders and the national media would have been probing its every aperture and orifice. Not at all.

Thus, it was pleasing to read MIT economics professor Simon Johnson's piece in the April Atlantic fingering financial "elites" who captured the government for the latterday financial debacle. This is broadly true, and judging from my e.mail, even some conservatives accept Johnson's analysis and indictment. After the furor over the AIG bonuses, the public and some politicians may be ready to start identifying and blaming culprits. This would be useful. Having an elite to blame is a often prerequisite of serious reform.

Nevertheless, the extremes of financialization, together with the havoc we now know it to have wrought, represent a much more complicated historical and economic genesis, one which U.S. leaders must be obliged to confront if not fully acknowledge. Elite avarice and culpability has multiple and longstanding dimensions. It has been fifteen years since Graef Crystal, a wellknown employment compensation expert, brought out his incendiary In Search of Excess: the Overcompensation of American Executives. The data was blistering. Over the last decade, New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston has published two books - Perfectly Legal and Free Lunch - describing how the U.S. tax code, in particular, has been turned into a feeding trough for the richest one percent of Americans (especially the richest one tenth of one percent).

The backstop to avarice provided by a wealth culture and market mania from the late 1980s through the Clinton years to the George W. Bush administration, prompted another set of indictments that still resonate: William Greider's Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs The Country (1987), Robert Kuttner's Everything For Sale (1997), Thomas Frank's One Market Under God (2000) and John Gray's False Dawn (1998). More recently, Paul Krugman's books have been equalled or exceeded in timeliness by his New York Times columns blasting the perversity of the Obama-Geithner financial bail-out and the malfeasance of the financial sector.

James K. Galbraith, in his 2008 book The Predator State, has elaborated the valid point that too many conservatives over last few decades betrayed their free market rhetoric by supporting a relentless use of state power and government financial bail-outs to advance upper-income and corporate causes. On the other hand, some conservative economists of the Austrian school make related indictments of liberal bail-out penchants.

This could be a powerful framework. All of these critiques have merit, and ideally they might converge as earlier indictments of elite and governmental abuse did during the Progressive and New Deal eras. But I have to return to whether the public will ever be given full information on the fatal magnitude of financialization, who was responsible, and how it failed and crashed in 2007-2009. So far, political and media discussion has been so minimal that the early 21st century American electorate has much less readily available information on what took place than did the electorates of those earlier reform eras.

Towards this end, my initial emphasis in the new material included in the 2009 edition of Bad Money is on what techniques, practices and leverage the financial sector used between the mid-1980s and 2007 to metastasize early-stage financialization into an economic and governmental coup and, ultimately, a national disaster.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I found that the principal building blocks that the sector used to enlarge itself from 10-12% of Gross National Product around 1980 to a mind-boggling 20.6% of Gross Domestic Product in 2004 involved essentially the same combination of credit-mongering, massive sector borrowing, highly leveraged speculation, reckless, greedy pioneering of new experimental vehicles and securities (derivatives and securitization) and mega-trillion-dollar abuse of the mortgage and housing markets that became infamous as hallmarks of the 2007-2009 disaster. During Alan Greenspan's 1987-2006 tenure as Federal Reserve Chairman, financial bubble-blowing became a Washington art and total credit market debt in the U.S. quadrupled from $11 trillion to $46 trillion.

To try to put 20-30 pages into a nutshell, the financial sector hyped consumer demand - from teen-ager credit cards to mortgages for the unqualified - to make credit into one of the nation's biggest industries; nearly $15 trillion was borrowed over two decades to leverage de facto gambling at 20:1 and 30:1 ratios; banks, investment firms, mortgage lenders, insurers et al were all merged together to do almost anything they wanted; exotic securities and instruments that even investment chiefs couldn't understand were marketed by the trillions. To achieve fat financial-sector profits, the housing and mortgage markets might as well have been merged with Las Vegas.

The principal inventors, hustlers , borrowers and culprits were the nation's 15-20 largest and best known financial institutions - including the ones that keep making headlines by demanding more bail-out money from Washington and giving huge bonuses. These same institutions got much of the early bail-out money and as of December 2008 they accounted for over half of the bad assets written off.

The reason these needed so much money is that they government had let them merge, speculate, expand and experiment on dimensions beyond all logic. That is why the complicit politicians and regulators have to talk about $100 billion here and $1 trillion there even while they pretend that it's all under control and that the run-amok financial sector remains sound.

This is a much grander-scale disaster than anything that happened in 1929-33. Worse, it dwarfs the abuses of debt, finance and financialization that brought down previous leading world economic powers like Britain and Holland (back when New York was New Amsterdam). I will return to these little-mentioned precedents in another post this week.

But for the moment, let me underscore: the average American knows little of the dimensions of the financial sector aggrandizement and misbehavior involved. Until this is remedied, there probably will not be enough informed, focused indignation to achieve far-reaching reform in the teeth of financial sector money and influence. Equivocation will triumph. This will not displease politicians and regulators leery of offending their contributors and backers.

The Character of this "New Bull Market"

The paid for opinion pundits are touting a new bull market on the Bloomberg today.

Is this a bottom? Well perhaps, but until we see some positive change in the economic indicators that are not paper exercises in thinly veiled accounting fraud we choose to remain in cash and precious metals, while trading the ins and outs on a daily basis, trying to stay out of the way of the antics of the Wall Street wisenheimers.

So far this feels like a distribution rally before a retest of the lows. It is the timing of things that is the challenge, and the ability to spot a genuine change in character in the long market trend.

This is probably not the place for any investors to enter the markets, since the risk is still so historically high, although a little lower by recent standards.

Time will tell. The Fed fooled us in 2004 with their willingness to intentionally create a housing bubble to avoid the near term consequences. Perhaps Treasury and the Fed will cast caution to the wind and do it again, setting us up for a larger, more destructive collapse on the next group's watch.

But the character of this 'bull market' strikes us as the same as that of those who are our financial and political leaders: shallow, false, short-sighted, manipulated by dark forces, self-serving, a pleasant appearance over an underlying rot, and a in sum a terrible disappointment and lapse of the discovery and disclosure of things as they are.

Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

"Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner “is covering up,” Black said...“They're scared to death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent, they think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we'll run screaming to the exits"…

Bill Moyer's Journal
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

A cartoon in the Sunday comics shows that mustachioed fellow with monocle and top hat from the Monopoly game – “Rich Uncle Pennybags,” he used to be called – standing along the roadside, destitute, holding a sign: “Will blame poor people for food.”

Time to move the blame to where it really belongs. That means no more coddling banks with bailout billions marked “secret.” No more allowing their executives lavish bonuses and new corporate jets as if they’ve won the megalottery and not sent the economy down the tubes. And no more apostles of Wall Street calling the shots.

Which brings us to Larry Summers. Over the weekend, the White House released financial disclosure reports revealing that Summers, director of the National Economic Council, received $5.2 million last year working for a $30 billion hedge fund. He made another $2.7 million in lecture fees, including cash from such recent beneficiaries of taxpayer generosity as Citigroup, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. The now defunct financial services giant Lehman Brothers handsomely purchased his pearls of wisdom, too.

Reading stories about Summers and Wall Street you realize the man was intoxicated by the exotic witches’ brew of derivatives and other financial legerdemain that got us into such a fine mess in the first place. Yet here he is, serving as gatekeeper of the information and analysis going to President Obama on the current collapse. We have to wonder, when the President asks, “Larry, who did this to us?” is he going to name names of old friends and benefactors? Knowing he most likely will be looking for his old desk back once he leaves the White House, is he going to be tough on the very system of lucrative largesse that he helped create in his earlier incarnation as a de-regulating Treasury Secretary? (“Larry?” “Yes, Mr. President?” “Who the hell recommended repealing the Glass-Steagall Act back in the 90s and opened the floodgates to all this greed?” “Uh, excuse me, Mr. President, I think Bob Rubin’s calling me.”)

That imaginary conversation came to mind last week as we watched President Obama's joint press conference with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. When a reporter asked Obama who is to blame for the financial crisis, our usually eloquent and knowledgeable President responded with a rambling and ineffectual answer. With Larry Summers guarding his inbox, it’s hardly surprising he’s not getting the whole story.

If only someone with nothing to lose would remind the President of that old story – perhaps apocryphal but containing a powerful truth – of the Great Wall of China. Four thousand miles long and 25 feet tall. Intended to be too high to climb over, too thick to break through, and too long to go around. Yet in its first century of the wall’s existence, China was successfully breached three times by invaders who didn’t have to break through, climb over, or go around. They simply were waved through the gates by obliging watchmen. The Chinese knew their wall very well. It was the gatekeepers they didn’t know.

Shifting the blame for the financial crisis to where it belongs also means no more playacting in round after round of congressional hearings devoted more to posturing and false contrition than to truth. We need real hearings, conducted by experienced and fiercely independent counsel asking the tough questions, or an official commission with subpoena power that can generate evidence leading, if warranted, to trials and convictions – and this time Rich Uncle Pennybags shouldn’t have safely tucked away in his vest pocket a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.

So far, the only one in the clink is Bernie Madoff and he was “a piker” compared to the bankers who peddled toxic assets like unverified “liars' loan” mortgages as Triple-A quality goods. So says Bill Black, and he should know. During the savings and loan scandal in the 1980s, Black, who teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, was the federal regulator who accused then-House Speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L’s in exchange for campaign contributions and other perks. They got off with a wrist slap but Black and others successfully led investigations that resulted in convictions and re-regulation of the savings and loan industry.

Bill Black wrote a book about his experiences with a title that fits today as well as it did when he published it four years ago – "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." On last Friday night’s edition of BILL MOYERS JOURNAL, he said the current economic and financial meltdown is driven by fraud and banks that got away with it, in part, because of government deregulation under prior Republican and Democratic administrations.

“Now we know what happens when you destroy regulation,” Black said. “You get the biggest financial calamity for anybody under the age of 80.”

What’s more, the government ignored warnings and existing legislation to stop it before the current crisis got worse. “They didn't even begin to investigate the major lenders until the market had actually collapsed, which is completely contrary to what we did successfully in the savings and loan crisis,” Black said. “Even while the institutions were reporting they were the most profitable savings and loans in America, we knew they were frauds. And we were moving to close them down.”

There was advance warning of the current collapse. Black says that the FBI blew the whistle; in September 2004, “there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to continue it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle.”

But after 9/11, “The Justice Department transfers 500 white-collar specialists in the FBI to national terrorism. Well, we can all understand that. But then, the Bush administration refused to replace the missing 500 agents.” So today, despite a crisis a hundred times worse than the Savings and Loan scandal, “there are one-fifth as many FBI agents” assigned to bank fraud.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner “is covering up,” Black said. “Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have massive losses, and that they're fine…

“They're scared to death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent, they think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we'll run screaming to the exits… And it's foolishness, all right?

“Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, ‘We just can't let the big banks fail.’ That's wrong.”

Black asked, “Why would we keep CEO’s and CFO’s and other senior officers that caused the problems? That’s nuts… We’re hiding the losses instead of trying to find out the real losses? Stop that… Because you need good information to make good decisions… Follow what works instead of what’s failed. Start appointing people who have records of success instead of records of failure… There are lots of things we can do. Even today, as late as it is. Even though we’ve had a terrible start to the [Obama] administration. They could change, and they could change within weeks.”

He called for a 21st century version of the Pecora Commission, referring to hearings that sought the causes of the Great Depression, held during the 1930’s by the US Senate Committee on Banking and Currency.

Ferdinand Pecora was the committee’s chief counsel and interrogator, a Sicilian émigré who was a progressive devotee of trust busting Teddy Roosevelt and a former Manhattan assistant district attorney who successfully helped shut down more than a hundred Wall Street “bucket shops” selling bogus securities and commodity futures. He was relentless in his cross-examination of financial executives, including J.P. Morgan himself.

Pecora’s investigation uncovered a variety of Wall Street calumnies – among them Morgan’s “preferred list” of government and political insiders, including former President Coolidge and a Supreme Court justice, who were offered big discounts on stock deals. The hearings led to passage of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

In the preface to his 1939 memoir, “Wall Street under Oath,” Ferdinand Pecora told the story of his investigation and described an attitude amongst the Rich Uncle Pennybags of the financial world that will sound familiar to Bill Black and those who seek out the guilty today.

“That its leaders are eminently fitted to guide our nation, and that they would make a much better job of it than any other body of men, Wall Street does not for a moment doubt,” Pecora wrote. “Indeed, if you now hearken to the Oracles of The Street, you will hear now and then that the money-changers have been much maligned. You will be told that a whole group of high-minded men, innocent of social or economic wrongdoing, were expelled from the temple because of the excesses of a few. You will be assured that they had nothing to do with the misfortunes that overtook the country in 1929-1933; that they were simply scapegoats, sacrificed on the altar of unreasoning public opinion to satisfy the wrath of a howling mob….”

According to Politico.com, at his March 27 White House meeting with the nation’s top bankers, President Obama heard similar arguments and interrupted, saying, “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that…. My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Stand aside, Mr. President, and let us prod with our pitchforks to get at the facts.