A Modern Tale of Financial Loss

A developer (Goldman) built houses that looked well built, but were in reality designed to be firetraps, using plans provided by an architect (Paulson). They were sold as conforming to code with certain characteristics represented and endorsed by the building inspectors (Ratings Agencies) and overseen by fire inspectors who did spot checks (the SEC).

After the sale, the developer and the architect bought huge amounts of fire insurance on the homes from a friendly insurance agent (AIG London) who was eager to collect the commissions. The amounts that were insured were sometimes well in excess of what a home might actually be worth. They even took out policies on nearby homes that they had not even built or sold.

The developer had also encouraged the city government to allow the firetrucks and safety equipment to fall into disrepair, and for too few inspectors to be hired to do spot safety checks. So when the houses inevitably burned, the fire department was unable to adequately respond. The fires became so bad that they destroyed entire neighborhoods and threatened whole sections of the city.

The developer and architect were able to submit their insurance claims for sums that were so staggering that the insurance company for which the London agent worked was itself facing bankruptcy. This would have placed at risk the holders of its other policies in completely unrelated areas such as life and auto insurance, and retirement annuities.

So the developer had government people, whom he had helped to elect, provide government backing for the insurance company, for the good of the public. The people who had lost their homes and those who were forced to help to pay the developer were very upset.

But the developer was a large advertiser in the local newspaper, and a old school friend of the owner, so it ignored the complaints, and reported on the story from every perspective except what had really happened. It blamed the people who had lost their homes for being foolish and not inspecting the homes more closely, and taking the developer and the housing inspectors at their word, and trusting the fire departments and its inspectors to do their jobs.

And anyone who complained too loudly was at first ignored, then ridiculed, and finally threatened with arrest. After all, the developer was one of the most important and influential people in the city, and had many powerful friends. Any suggestion that they had done anything wrong was simply unbelievable.

After all, it is inconceivable that an upstanding member of the commuity would ever endanger so many people's lives and homes like that just for personal profit.

The End (for now)

Slick Willy Rewrites the History of the Financial Crisis and Regulation, Blames His Advisors

The hypocrisy of the oligarchs knows no bounds.

Bill Clinton conveniently forgets the hundreds of millions of campaign contributions that he and Hillary so famously raised from Wall Street for the Democrats. They taught their party, always a bit chaotic but left dispirited after the Kennedy assassinations, that 'greed is good.,' and it certainly pays well. You can put up $1000 and obtain a return of $100,000 in a futures market of which you know nothing, and do nothing, if you know the right people.

The price of their perfidy was the overturning of Glass-Steagall and the planting of the seeds of the bubbles and financial crises that the US is still experiencing today.

There is no doubt that George W. Bush hatched the egg, and nurtured it into a ferocious buzzard of fraud and greed. But Bill Clinton laid the egg. And Obama continues to feed the beast, and maintains the very same advisors that Clinton blames in the Rubin proteges Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.

Americans embrace the "CEO defense." Hey, everyone makes mistakes. All you have to do is say, "Oops, I made a mistake" and all is forgiven, from Greenspan to Clinton.

When you make a big enough mistake, or a series of mistakes, and profit by it, and your actions have the stench of corruption, you should be sacked, disgraced, and shunned for a decent period of time.

The elite media is in a panic. I had the opportunity to watch "The Chris Matthews Show" and the comparisons of Tim McVeigh, Ruby Ridge, and Waco to the Tea Party Movement went way over the top, suggesting the possibility of imminent crisis. I can almost see the over-reaction and paranoia coming over the horizon.

There is a tremendous temptation for the old media, and even the bloggers, to go along to get along, to deal only with the 'safe subjects' and reforms, and to play the party line for the status quo. It provides the admittance to the powers, and the venues where they pose for the press. It brings connections and praise from those in power. All you have to do is say thing, or deal with this legitimate problem but in the way we suggest. And ignore these other things.

It does happen. It is not always obvious, but it is there. And if you say 'no' you are attacked or shunned. And being your own person, not taking 'sides' in distorting the facts in one direction or the other, puts one is in the 'grays' always caught between black and white. It sounds noble, but it is a lonely watch.

I am absolutely no follower or even admirer of Sarah Palin. I think she is a shameless opportunist playing to the crowd, saying whatever will deliver money and power. She is the Bill Clinton of the right, or even worse, a Huey Long. And the Tea Party crowd is badly in need of adult supervision. And Fox News is too often blatant propaganda, and pandering to and inflaming extremism for commercial gain. I often suspect that they are part of the Hegelian dialectic, the means of defusing legitimate reform into ineffective noise.

Bear in mind I was a conservative before 'conservatism' was cool, going back to the Goldwater movement and the traditional and principal conservatism embodied by Edmund Burke and James Burnham. These Fox conservatives for the most part are the worst of breed. But such is the quality of discourse and action in the States as it declines.

But having said all that, the grievances are legitimate, the Congress is corrupted by the current campaign contribution laws, the US financial system is rife with fraud, the economy is dysfunctional as a price discovery and capital allocation system, and the inequality of power and wealth is a significant obstacle to progress and domestic tranquility.

Obama is leaving a leadership vacuum by his indolent style of leading by indirection, trying to build a consensus to do the right thing, teaching the Congress to fish. I have great sympathy for the challenge he faces. The problem is that the Congress cannot even find the stream for hitting one another with their poles. There are serious and fundamental flaws in the political and economic structure in the US that become more acute and systemically threatening with each false recovery.

How all this resolves is difficult to see. A new financial crisis will almost certainly bring things to a head, but it remains to be seen how America will react to the realization that they have been badly used, and are expected to suffer, in some cases greatly, for it. But before America the jackals appear to be descending on Europe. And Europe, and especially the UK, may provide us with some insight into the future of the world's greatest but declining superpower.

Bloomberg
Clinton Says He Had Bad Advice on Derivatives
By Joshua Zumbrun

April 18 (Bloomberg) -- Former President Bill Clinton said he should have pushed for regulation of financial derivatives when he was president, rejecting the advice of top economic advisers Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.

The argument was that derivatives didn’t need transparency because they were “expensive and sophisticated and only a handful of people would buy them,” Clinton said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “The flaw in this argument was that first of all, sometimes people with a lot of money make stupid decisions and make it without transparency.”

“Even if less than 1 percent of the total investment community is involved in derivative exchanges, so much money was involved that if they went bad, they could affect 100 percent of the investments,” Clinton said. The show was taped yesterday for broadcast today.

Tighter regulation of derivatives trading is part of a package of financial reforms being pushed by the Obama administration against Republican opposition. The Senate is debating a bill introduced by Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd that would also give the federal government the authority to unravel institutions whose failure threatens the financial system.

Bush Blamed

Clinton also said the Bush administration contributed to the financial crisis with lax regulation.

“I think what happened was the SEC and the whole regulatory apparatus after I left office was just let go,” Clinton said. If Clinton’s head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Arthur Levitt, had remained in that job, “an enormous percentage of what we’ve been through in the last eight years would not have happened,” Clinton said.

Levitt is a director of Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News.

Clinton also said that Republicans who controlled Congress would have stopped him from trying to regulate derivatives. “I wish I had been caught trying,” Clinton said. “I mean, that was a mistake I made.”

"Do you think he is so unskillful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the Truth?

No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform. He promises you illumination, he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind.

He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them. He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods.

Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

John Henry Newman, The Antichrist

Janet Tavakoli: Did Goldman Sachs Commit Fraud?

Highlights:

Yes. The only thing that was surprising how long the SEC took to do it.

The complaint does not go quite far enough. It was a blatant fraud, more than just a failure to disclose information.

And this may be the beginning of a lot of questions about a lot of investment banks. It has massive implications IF the SEC does its job right, which they have not done in the past.

Tavakoli Structured Finance

Weekly Metals WrapUp with Ted Butler on King World News

Ted Butler April 16 Metals Review mp3

• The weekly change all occurred on Friday, related to the Goldman Sachs fraud scandal.
  
  
• GLD holdings are high or near the highs. But there are continuing noticeable withdrawals in SLV making a sharp decline in the metal claimed to back the silver exchange-traded fund SLV. This may signify that the metal is needed somewhere else amid a worsening shortage of metal that is at worst neutral and most likely bullish.
  
  
• Market analyst Jim Rickards' interview last week with King World News was important for citing the lack of transparency of the London Bullion Market Association and confirmed Ted's judgement. It's as "far away from transparency as you can get without being completely opaque." "You can't depend on anything the LBMA says," Butler complains, adding that the LBMA discloses "nothing verifiable" and "I wouldn't trust anything from the LBMA."
  
  
• Having sued Goldman Sachs for fraud on Friday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission may give some backbone to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to act against Goldman and J. P. Morgan and other banks in their manipulation of the precious metals and commodities markets. The SEC action is a real 'cage rattler' in the financial reform discussions in Washington.
  
  
• The only question is that maybe the 'commercial crooks' can work the metals market lower in the short term, but silver looks well set up to take off in the not too distant future.