Remember, not a progressive.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
NY Times has rumors of a deal on citi.
I’m not optimistic about it working.
I don’t really appreciate paying five bucks for a two dollar stock. I don’t pretend to be qualified to opine with any authority on these matters, but I think they are slow-walking this too slowly.
The real bad part? If Citi goes under, that 36% stake in common stock goes poof…and billions in taxpayer dollars along with it.
We’re now committed as taxpayers to buoy the stock prices of these banks, because if they go down, we lose our investment.
Obama, Timmy, and Helicopter Ben are playing the Too Big To Fail card on banks that are already insolvent.
And lots of 401ks and pension funds are invested there. This isn’t about individual investors.
If only he’d taken an ax to the defense budget like he did to the Reaganonic tax code.
I would like to see this too, but come on! The guy has only been president for a little over a month. He can’t do everything at once.
In one of the debates, he said he was for missile defense. That’s something he could have chopped immediately. But he chose not to.
In a post-9-11 world, where $500K and box cutters can bring a nation to its knees, spending zillions on military “defense” is pointless and stupid.
Yet he’s doing what he said he was going to do during the campaign. For good or ill.
has been one of the best reporters on the economic scene for quite a while.
If Republicans are going to oppose everything 100% anyway, you might as well go with what you believe in. The is no incentive to compromise if there is no-one who wants to compromise with you. Pretty soon the GOPers will learn they have zero influence if they have zero positive contribution to make.
Maybe not, but why did I keep hearing Sam & Dave while watching Stevie Wonder play at the White House?
At last I feel happy no matter what the muggles say.
I loved this piece – read it last night. This is to the point:
AIG is coming back onto center stage really soon too.
Part of the whole credit default swap mess is that AIG actually managed to run their insurance business in such a way that they were actually doubling down their obligations by providing collateral assurance to their CDS insurance CLIENTS (yep, that sure is weird, there it is). But the collateral was effectively just being reused for each new client.. uhoh…
So AIG really almost doubled the amount of debt the bad lending creating by icing it with collateral that they could never pay under these conditions or even just a significant downturn in housing without all the rest of the mess. They did this in what everyone knew was an unsustainable bubble condition.
That obvious, willingly deployed increased vulnerability means they were scamming for income with no regard for the future (Making Madoff look like a novice): Nothing forced them into the collateralized CDS business, their system obviously depended on endless bubble-rate growth and they knew it all along.
They are insurers for crying out loud – they know risk more than any other business.
I believe they simply chose to use their ‘Too Big to Fail Status’ as justification: we can do this crazy shit because the risk will ultimately be socialized.
In other words: AIG was the largest ponzi scheme in the history of mankind and that sucker is coming down AS EXPECTED! Bear in mind the huge difference between a corporate failure and the wealth of it’s ownership/managers. Those guys are just fine.
In this particular case, it’s obvious the company has to be split up, but I also think that here is one place where you MUST fine individuals to begin to recover some of the losses, if not also throwing them in jail.
The idea that a company or person who made fortunes on scamming people should be able to get caught, be punished and not forfeit ALL ill gotten gains is beyond me. That’s our enforcement history for white collar crimes, no matter the scale.
Oh, but a guy who get’s a third strike on a parole violation should go to jail forever.
The idea that the wealthy contribute to the greater good cannot be applied in these cases, so light sentencing would be tantamount to condoning the worst of the worst behavior that directly caused a HUGE proportion of our troubles today.