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Bailouts will cost the US Tax Payers 23 Trillion

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A series of bailouts, bank rescues and other economic lifelines could end up costing the federal government as much as $23 trillion, the U.S. government’s watchdog over the effort says – a staggering amount that is nearly double the nation’s entire economic output for a year.

If the feds end up spending that amount, it could be more than the federal government has spent on any single effort in American history.

For the government to be on the hook for the total amount, worst-case scenarios would have to come to pass in a variety of federal programs, which is unlikely, says Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the government’s financial bailout programs, in testimony prepared for delivery to the House oversight committee Tuesday.

The Treasury Department says less than $2 trillion has been spent so far.

Still, the enormity of the IG’s projection underscores the size of the economic disaster that hit the nation over the past year and the unprecedented sums mobilized by the federal government under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to confront it.

In fact, $23 trillion is more than the total cost of all the wars the United States has ever fought, put together. World War II, for example, cost $4.1 trillion in 2008 dollars, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Even the Moon landings and the New Deal didn’t come close to $23 trillion: the Moon shot in 1969 cost an estimated $237 billion in current dollars, and the entire Depression-era Roosevelt relief program came in at $500 billion, according to Jim Bianco of Bianco Research.

The annual gross domestic product of the United States is just over $14 trillion.

Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams downplayed the total amount could ever reach Barofsky’s number.

“The $23.7 trillion estimate generally includes programs at the hypothetical maximum size envisioned when they were established,” Williams said. “It was never likely that all these programs would be ‘maxed out’ at the same time.”

Still, the eye-popping price tag provoked an immediate reaction on Capitol Hill. “The potential financial commitment the American taxpayers could be responsible for is of a size and scope that isn’t even imaginable,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. “If you spent a million dollars a day going back to the birth of Christ, that wouldn’t even come close to just one trillion dollars – $23.7 trillion is a staggering figure.”

Congressional Democrats say they will call for Treasury to meet transparency requirements suggested by the inspector general, said a spokeswoman for the Oversight committee. “The American people need to know what’s going on with their money,” said committee spokeswoman Jenny Rosenberg.
 
Mind you this is without crap and trade and obamacare. Ok there is pink elephant in the living room.
 
They are flat-out robbing us man! This is Paulson's creation & now Geithner is gonna seal the deal. Both are complicit! Partisanship aside, the people will eventually wake up to the obvious theft
 
The economy is still shit after allocating $23 trillion+ to the financial industry.

I DEMAND AN APOLOGY!
 
How the Government Failed to Fix Wall Street

How the Government Failed to Fix Wall Street

In new accounts, insiders reveal why Wall Street big shots weren’t prosecuted and reforms faltered.
Oct 1, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

Four years have passed since Lehman Brothers’ collapse; two since Obama signed financial reform into law; one since the occupation of Zuccotti Park. But the Justice Department has yet to convict a single high-profile banker. And despite the Dodd-Frank reform package, critics suggest that the system is hardly safer than it was in 2008—from JPMorgan’s beached “whale” to MF Global’s missing billions. In a recent report (PDF), the International Monetary Fund called the capital markets just as “vulnerable” to crash and fraud as they were four years ago.

Why? There’s no simple, satisfactory answer. But in recent weeks, memoirs by crisis insiders such as former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chairman Sheila Bair have shed new light on the financial crisis. Interviews with officials like former senator Ted Kaufman lend further color to the crystallizing narrative. The Obama Justice Department was too timid and short-staffed to hunt down the bad guys. The White House, Treasury Department, and Federal Reserve stifled or sold out real financial reform, leaving megabanks too big to fail, and dangerous crisis-era practices untouched. Months after taking office, Obama told the CEOs of the nation’s third biggest banks, “My administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.” It has served as an effective shield.

In a departure from previous administrations, Eric Holder’s Justice Department won’t say how many bankers it has convicted. President Obama formed a “Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force” in November 2009 to “hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial crisis.” The current group says that the department is “working hard to investigate and prosecute” Wall Street “criminal activity,” and has sent many mortgage fraudsters to jail.

But the Obama administration has generally chosen to pursue institutions over individuals. As the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, put it in a speech in September 2012 at the New York City Bar, “our prosecutors … know the difference between a rogue employee and a rotten corporation.” Last February, the Justice Department settled with five of the nation’s biggest banks, which agreed to pay homeowners a collective $25 billion over charges of mortgage fraud. In July, it settled with Wells Fargo for $175 million over predatory subprime lending, targeted at minorities.

Sure sounds rotten. But none of these settlements entailed admissions of wrongdoing. And the price tags are little more than the cost of doing business. Meanwhile, Wall Street bankers have generally remained safe from criminal prosecution. Last month, the Justice Department declined to prosecute Goldman Sachs in a financial fraud probe. Former senator Ted Kaufman, appointed to fill Vice President Joe Biden’s senate seat in late-2008, says that the lack of individual prosecutions—of those who lost billions, not millions—is “a cause for wonderment.”

The Justice Department’s task force was a successor to Bush’s version, established after Enron. Neil Barofsky, later appointed chief cop for TARP, served on Bush’s and Obama’s. He characterized both as having “a lack of sophistication and high degree of timidity” when it came to financial crime. After 9/11, the lion’s share of its resources was redirected to counterterrorism, said Barofsky and a former Justice Department official. And many staffers lacked the accounting wherewithal to untangle the complex and toxic derivative products at the crisis’s ground zero, Barofsky added. The “inability of prosecutors to wrap their heads around [these] cases was somewhat stunning,” he said. Cases the FBI or Justice Department didn’t have the time or money to pursue were handed to the Postal Service. The taskforce “was much more of a press release repository,” says Barofsky. “They took preexisting cases and marketed them.”

Senator Kaufman and his former chief of staff, Jeff Connaughton—author of a new book—recall several frustrating meetings with Justice Department officials. In September 2009, Kaufman met with Lanny Breuer, then Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, to ask why so few cases were underway. According to Kaufman and Connaughton, Breuer explained that “we take the cases the FBI brings to us.”

In an interview, a high-ranking Democratic official and Justice Department veteran called that explanation “disturbing … While some federal prosecutors might just sit and wait to see what comes through the door, the good ones are ready, willing, and able to initiate investigations on their own.” As Barofsky puts it, “I’d be hard pressed to say if a single additional case was made becomes of one of these task forces.” Kaufman adds: “It was pretty damning that there were no referrals from the regulatory agencies on this.”

Connaughton says that Kaufman’s office then called a U.S. attorney's office, a full two months after the Breuer meeting, to ask about prosecutions progress. The office told the senate staff that the Justice Department had only just been in contact, “asking [them] if they were working on any financial fraud cases.” By then, says Kaufman, “the trail had gone cold” on several promising cases, from Washington Mutual’s mortgage lending fraud to charges of false reporting at the ratings agencies. In late-November, 2009, the Justice Department lost its high-profile case against two Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers: a huge blow to morale.

Money was also shorter than anticipated. While the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act had approved $165 million in new funds for the Justice Department, the Senate Appropriations Committee only approved $30 million.

The New York Southern District, Barofsky says, had a better understanding of financial fraud. But according to Kaufman, Connaughton, and another member of the senator’s staff, Ray Lohier, the head of the Southern District’s Securities Fraud Division, didn’t make financial crime Lohier’s “top priority” in 2008 and 2009, when the trail was still hot. According to Kaufman, Lohier told the then-senator that his “top priority” was “cybercrime”—that is, the threat that hackers pose to large banks. Kaufman was incredulous. “I’m spending every day trying to put these guys in jail, and he responds ‘cybercrime’?” the former senator said. “That was a genuine shocker.”

Kaufman also met with SEC enforcement division director Robert Khuzami, Connaughton later wrote. Asked about the relatively small fines his agency was handing down—then capped on $725,000 per offense for firms—Khuzami responded, “I’m not losing any sleep over them,” as Connaughton wrote.

The explanation, say insiders, was simply fear. As the Justice Department’s Lanny Breuer said in a speech earlier this month, “I have heard sober predictions that a company or bank might fail if we indict [them] … even that global markets will feel the effects. Sometimes—though, let me stress, not always—these presentations are compelling.”

The lack of prosecution might be easier to swallow if the banks had been prodded to change their ways. But in the aftermath of the crisis, legislative efforts to institute systemic changes were resisted or outright blocked by the White House, the Treasury, and the Fed. One such effort was a 2010 amendment, proposed by then-Senator Kaufman and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), to cap the size of a single bank’s assets to 10 percent of GDP—at the time, that would have required breaking up JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. As recently as this July, Sandy Weill—the creator of the original superbank, Citigroup—endorsed this proposal.

As has been well documented, Larry Summers, then director of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner fought this and other reform efforts. Both tried privately to dissuade Senators Brown and Kaufman from pursuing their amendment, and asked other lawmakers to vote against it, according to Kaufman and his staffers. Instead, Geithner reached across the aisle to recruit Republicans in an effort to “water down” extant Dodd-Frank proposals and kill the Brown-Kaufman amendment, writes former FDIC chair Sheila Bair in her just-published memoir. As Kaufman told me, he was “surprised” that he couldn’t “get some Republicans” to vote for his bank breakup.

Major Democrats also apparently worked to undermine the proposed reform. According to Connaughton, Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd left Kaufman an angry voicemail, warning him to “stop saying bad things about my bill.” And as it was being debated in the senate, California Senator Dianne Feinstein dismissed the amendment with the words “This is still America, isn’t it?” wrote Connaughton. Changing tack this July, Feinstein told Bloomberg that a bank-break-up proposal “warrants further consideration.”

The Brown-Kaufman amendment died 33-60 on May 6, 2010. “We got pretty well clobbered,” said Kaufman. Beyond Brown-Kaufman, other proposed reforms fell aside or were delayed. After the federal bailout of Citigroup, Bair and others proposed stricter conditions on the money center bank, including higher capital ratio requirements. Geithner, then head of the New York Fed, again said no. “Tim seemed to view his job as protecting Citigroup from [the FDIC],” wrote Bair, “when he should have been worried about protecting the taxpayers from Citi.”

Finally, efforts to regulate high-frequency trading, which was partly responsible for the 2010 Flash Crash and last month’s chaos at Knight Trading, were ignored by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said members of Kaufman’s office. In October 2009, the then-senator told SEC Chair Mary Schapiro, “I don’t believe you’re going to do anything about high-frequency trading.” She responded, “You just watch.” But the SEC wouldn’t enact HFT rules until July 2011—and those were preliminary. This February, Schapiro said, “While we haven’t landed on concrete things that we will do next, [many] ideas are live and subject for discussion within the agency.”

Although the president has poured hot rhetoric on the Wall Street set, his policy has been far sweeter: no major prosecutions, few major banking reforms, a stock market that has doubled in the past three years, and a new round of monetary stimulus—one that will make for a very happy Christmas on Manhattan’s trading floors.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/01/how-the-government-failed-to-fix-wall-street.html
 
Lamarr said:
:roflmao3:
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Investigation finds no evidence Holder knew of 'Fast and Furious' gun-running sting

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This article is too long to post, but can you believe this AIG fuck?

He's saying the Fed and Treasury owes him for paying back the bailout money and should thank him, which of course, people stupidly did since they were sufficiently frightened by their politicians.

Stop supporting bailouts for these ingrate bastards.


AIG's CEO Bob Benmosche on Why Capitalism Still Works
 
‘Too big to fail’ fears rise as banks bulk up; lessons from past forgotten?

‘Too big to fail’ fears rise as banks bulk up; lessons from past forgotten?
By Patrice Hill
Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Nearly three years after Congress passed the most far-reaching new regulations on Wall Street since the Great Depression, worries have resurfaced that the biggest U.S. banks have only grown in size and remain bailout candidates because they are “too big to fail.”

The latest fears cropped up as a result of statements by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who raised hairs on Capitol Hill last month when he testified that the Justice Department hasn’t indicted any of the major U.S. banks or their top officers in cases of financial crimes in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis because he has been concerned that doing so might hurt the economy or destabilize financial markets.

“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “That is a function of the fact that some of the institutions have become too large … [which] I think it has an inhibiting influence.”

Though Mr. Holder’s testimony didn’t initially get much publicity, his comments soon provoked outrage across a broad spectrum of legislators, from conservatives such as House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, Texas Republican, to liberals such as Sen. Sherrod Brown, Ohio Democrat. Key legislators have since written Mr. Holder to demand an elaboration of his statement, which on its face amounts to an admission that the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law signed by President Obama did not accomplish one of its major goals: ensuring the government would never again have to worry about “too-big-to-fail” banks.

Sen. Bob Corker, Tennessee Republican, and Sen. Mark Warner, Virginia Democrat, questioned whether Mr. Holder was placing the top executives of the world’s biggest banks above the law and pointed out that the Wall Street reform law was supposed to remove the danger that such banks pose for the economy when they massively fail by setting in place procedures for the government to take over and liquidate the banks.

“Like many of our colleagues, we believe that criminal behavior at any institution ought to be prosecuted,” they wrote. “If the administration believes that the orderly liquidation process is insufficient in some respect, then the administration and Congress should address any necessary changes right away to ensure that no institution is ‘too big to jail.’”

Fed worries
While legislators were still smoldering over the Holder comments, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S. Bernanke added fuel to the fire last week when he acknowledged that, despite sharply increased capital requirements for the biggest banks and a slew of proposed regulations aimed at reining in their power and discretion to get into risky ventures, Washington still hasn’t eliminated the “too big to fail” problem.

“I don’t think ‘too big to fail’ is solved now. We’re doing a number of things which, I think, will help,” he said at a press briefing.

The Fed chairman suggested that before legislators try to pass new legislation, they wait until all the rules are in firmly in place to see if they start to work as intended to curb the banks’ power. Among the pending regulations targeting the problem are requirements that big banks set aside more reserves for risky investments that could lead to their collapse; write “living wills” explaining to regulators how to break them apart in case of failure; and prohibit them from establishing in-house hedge funds and trading for their own profit, among other risky ventures.

Despite the proliferation of rules aimed at reining in the big banks, Mr. Bernanke said that it may not be enough.

The “too-big-to-fail” syndrome “was a major source of the crisis, and we will not have successfully responded to the crisis if we do not address that issue successfully,” he said. “If we don’t achieve the goal, I think we’ll have to do additional steps. … It’s not just something we can forget about.”

Breaking up is hard to do
Since a raft of regulations doesn’t seem to have eliminated the problem, legislators are starting to flock again to the idea of breaking up the big banks as perhaps the simplest way to ensure their failure does not reverberate through the economy. Hundreds of smaller banks failed during and after the financial crisis, and were shut down without causing a ripple in the markets.The option of breaking up the big banks has drawn interest from left-leaning legislators like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, and right-leaning ones like Sen. David Vitter, Louisiana Republican. It also has been championed by some regulators at the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which were given some tools to downsize the big banks as part of the 2010 law that they so far haven’t used.

The top four banks - J.P. Morgan & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. - continue to hold nearly 70 percent of the nation’s bank deposits and dwarf the rest of the banking system with assets ranging from $1.4 trillion at Wells Fargo to $2.4 trillion at J.P. Morgan. Small community banks that have to compete with the megabanks for customers and deposits are pushing hard for a breakup or other drastic remedies.

“The megabanks are allowed to continue operating as if the crisis they caused never happened,” said Camden R. Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America. “They should be downsized and split up to help restore sanity to our financial system.”

Some of the world’s biggest banks are based overseas and may be beyond the reach of U.S. regulators, including such financial giants as Barclays Bank PLC, HSBC and Deutsche Bank. While regulators in Great Britain and other nations are also attempting to rein in their banks, not all are taking the same approach or being as strict as U.S. legislators may want.

Ms. Warren raised the “too big to fail” question at a hearing with Mr. Bernanke last month and suggested that perhaps another way to tackle the problem was to essentially charge the big banks for an estimated $83 billion subsidy they enjoy from lower interest rates they are able to pay on debt obligations because of their perceived backing from the government.

Mr. Bernanke appeared to pooh-pooh that idea at the time, questioning whether that was an accurate figure for the subsidy. But his remarks last week appeared to soften his earlier skepticism as he conceded that the banks do in fact continue to receive some subsidy through preferential interest rates that has not gone away as a result of the reform regulations.

How big a subsidy?
The true size of the subsidy the big banks enjoy has become a subject of hot debate, with estimates ranging from zero to Ms. Warren’s $83 billion a year. The nation’s top banks, in a statement responding to Ms. Warren, contended that most if not all of the subsidy was wiped out or offset by the heavy new capital requirements and regulatory regime in the 2010 law. But other analysts say she understated the funding advantage the banks enjoy by not taking into account the nearly interest-free loans the financial giants get from the Fed, among other perks.”Despite the claims made by the paid cheerleaders of the megabanks, ‘too big to fail’ is alive and well, and the banks receive taxpayer subsidies,” said Mr. Vitter. “Chairman Bernanke knows it, the market knows it, and the taxpayers know it.”

The big banks continue to “operate above the law,” as Mr. Holder’s candid comments revealed, said Robert Borosage, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future. “They are not disciplined by the market. They know their losses are covered, while they pocket their winnings. They have multimillion dollar personal incentives to leverage up, use other people’s money to make big bets on high risk operations that offer big rewards. Their excesses blew up the economy, but they got bailed out and emerged bigger and more concentrated than ever.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news...to-fail-fears-rise-as-banks-bulk-up/?page=all
 
23 trillion!!!

:lol::lol::lol::lol:

Some of the banks and financial institution should not have gone bankrupt or needed a bailout like Bear Stearns.

It was bad accounting practices that led to the financial collapse (which have not been fixed) that overstated net income during the good years and piled on losses during the bad year sucking capital out of the market which the government had to replace to stabilize the markets.

The financial statements send the wrong signals to the market causing collapse.
 
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AIG, Prudential Named Systemically Important by Panel

Well, I'm glad Dodd-Frank fixed Too Big to Fail.

I'm also glad that when your government gave AIG $180 billion to unwind financial positions, that apparently threatened life as we know it, a condition was to bring the company's assets down to a level where it wouldn't be a threat to taxpayers ever again.

Luckily there's a difference between Republican and Democrat. Just imagine if the sellout pro-business party was in charge.

AIG, Prudential Named Systemically Important by Panel
By Ian Katz & Zachary Tracer
Jun 3, 2013 11:00 PM CT

American International Group Inc. (AIG), Prudential Financial Inc. (PRU) and a unit of General Electric Co. were identified by U.S. regulators as potential risks to the financial system in a step toward putting the firms under tighter government scrutiny.

AIG and Prudential, in statements issued yesterday after a meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, said they were notified of the proposed designations. Russell Wilkerson, a spokesman for GE Capital, said in an e-mail that his company also received a notice.The council didn’t identify the companies it decided should be subjected to heightened Federal Reserve oversight. AIG, Prudential and GE Capital had previously said they were in the final stage of review.

“The council took another important step forward by exercising one of its principal authorities to protect taxpayers, reduce risk in the financial system and promote financial stability,” Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said in a statement.

Prudential, the second-largest U.S. life insurer, said it is evaluating whether to appeal the decision. AIG previously said it wouldn’t oppose such a ruling.

The vote marks the first time the council, which is led by Lew and includes Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, has designated companies systemically important, meaning they could pose a risk to the broader financial system if they were to fail. The panel was created by the Dodd-Frank law three years ago to help prevent another financial crisis.

30 Days

Designated companies have 30 days to appeal. The council’s final vote will take place after the companies have a chance to challenge. The council, or FSOC, doesn’t release company names until the final designation is made, in part because of “the potential for market participants to misinterpret such an announcement,” according to the council’s rules.

“The number of firms that will be affected is very limited,” Stephen Myrow, managing director at Washington-based ACG Analytics Inc., said in a phone interview. “Those firms had plenty of time to prepare for the consequences.”

Myrow, a former Treasury official under the George W. Bush administration, said “it’s too optimistic to think that we’re going to prevent future crises, but the goal is to mitigate the consequences of those.”

The panel’s decision was criticized by the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

Taxpayer Risk

The council’s move puts taxpayers at “greater risk of being forced to fund yet another Wall Street bailout,” Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican, said in a statement. “Designating any company as ‘too big to fail’ is bad policy and even worse economics.”

AIG Chief Executive Officer Robert Benmosche told the council in November that the insurer wouldn’t oppose designation. Regulators are working to prevent a repeat of 2008 bailouts such as AIG’s by subjecting some firms to added oversight. AIG received a rescue that swelled to $182.3 billion after bets on housing soured amid the financial crisis. The insurer finished repaying the U.S. in December.

GE Capital, based in Norwalk, Connecticut, is a savings-and-loan holding company regulated by the Fed. It had $538 billion of assets at the end of last year, making it larger than all but six U.S. banks, Fed data show. It sold $32.1 billion of bonds in the U.S. last year, more than any other company, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Credit Dwindled

General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt pledged to shrink GE Capital after its access to credit dwindled in the wake of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s 2008 bankruptcy. He has since exited businesses such as Irish mortgage lending and sold Canadian real estate holdings.

Immelt cut GE’s dividend for the first time since the Great Depression and tapped Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) for a $3 billion investment to stabilize the company as the finance unit struggled. GE Capital sold $59 billion of bonds backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and tapped the Fed’s Commercial Paper Funding Facility to issue $16 billion in short-term debt.

MetLife Inc. (MET), the largest U.S. life insurer, wasn’t included in the final stage of review with AIG, Prudential and GE Capital because it was already regulated by the Fed due to its size and ownership of a deposit-taking institution. The New York-based insurer sold its deposits to end the oversight, and said it could eventually be named a systemically important financial institution, or SIFI.

Regulating Insurers

U.S. insurers are overseen by state regulators. The Fed hasn’t yet written final rules for oversight of non-bank SIFIs, so it’s not clear what the designation will require, Ed Mills, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets, wrote in a research note. The Fed will probably tailor the regulations to insurers, rather than using rules written for banks, he said.

Dodd-Frank puts bank-holding companies with more than $50 billion in assets, such as Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co., under increased Fed supervision. It gives the council the responsibility to decide which non-bank financial companies warrant heightened Fed supervision.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...-label-some-non-banks-systemically-risky.html
 
In the haze of revisionism, let's remember who is most responsible for running blocker for the banks!


source: Think Progress

Sep 13, 2011

After Helping Banks Water Down Dodd-Frank, Scott Brown Tries To Claim He’s A Wall Street Reformer

Facing a potential electoral challenge from consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren next year, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) appears to be trying to portray himself as a stronger Wall Street reformer than she, telling NECN this month that he “worked very hard” to ensure the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law:
BROWN: I worked very hard to make sure that banks didn’t act like casinos with our money. So the bill that she was apparently working on, I mean was able to work through as a result of [Warren's] position, you know, I worked on it, I voted on it, I pushed it through. [...] So, who doesn’t want to protect the Middle class? But there’s a big difference between talking and actually doing it.
​
Watch it:

<IFRAME height=315 src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/4VwGmcWd_iE" frameBorder=0 width=560 allowfullscreen></IFRAME>


As the Boston Globe’s Alex Katz notes today of the comments, “By painting himself as a strong supporter of Wall Street reform, Brown appears to be trying to neutralize Warren,” who was a leading advocate of Dodd-Frank and went on to help establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which the law created.

Contrary to “push[ing] it through,” Brown dragged his feet on supporting Dodd-Frank and only did so after his demands to water down the bill were met. After his upset election in January 2010, he became the key vote on the bill and leveraged that position to extract big concessions favored by banks, who had given generously to his campaign. First, Brown forced Democrats to strip from the bill a $19 billion bank tax. He also successfully pushed to water down a key reform — the so-called “Volcker rule” — that was aimed at preventing banks from making risky trades with dollars backed by the government. The carve out helped large mutual funds in his state.

In fact, Brown initially opposed the entire Wall Street reform bill and threatened to join the Republican filibuster of the legislation, which would have prevented it from even getting an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

Meanwhile, as “Brown and his Senate staff were working both publicly and behind the scenes to scuttle” these reforms, the senator took in $140,000 from financial firms — 400 percent more than the average received by other GOP senators over the same time period — according to the Boston Globe. A ThinkProgress analysis revealed that during his campaign, banks and their allies gave Brown’s campaign huge 11th hour contributions and helped with a significant get-out-the-vote effort. He was also supported by outside groups friendly to Wall Street like the Club for Growth. Overall, the financial industry is Brown’s second largest contributor.

Warren, on the other hand, has devoted her entire career to making the world of finance work better for consumers. She had previously chaired the TARP oversight panel and has a distinguished academic career focusing on these issues. Yet Brown suggests that she’s been merely “talking” while he’s been “actually doing it.”
 
thoughtone said:
In the haze of revisionism, let's remember who is most responsible for running blocker for the banks!


source: Think Progress

Sep 13, 2011

After Helping Banks Water Down Dodd-Frank, Scott Brown Tries To Claim He’s A Wall Street Reformer

Facing a potential electoral challenge from consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren next year, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) appears to be trying to portray himself as a stronger Wall Street reformer than she, telling NECN this month that he “worked very hard” to ensure the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law:
BROWN: I worked very hard to make sure that banks didn’t act like casinos with our money. So the bill that she was apparently working on, I mean was able to work through as a result of [Warren's] position, you know, I worked on it, I voted on it, I pushed it through. [...] So, who doesn’t want to protect the Middle class? But there’s a big difference between talking and actually doing it.
​
Watch it:

<IFRAME height=315 src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/4VwGmcWd_iE" frameBorder=0 width=560 allowfullscreen></IFRAME>


As the Boston Globe’s Alex Katz notes today of the comments, “By painting himself as a strong supporter of Wall Street reform, Brown appears to be trying to neutralize Warren,” who was a leading advocate of Dodd-Frank and went on to help establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which the law created.

Contrary to “push[ing] it through,” Brown dragged his feet on supporting Dodd-Frank and only did so after his demands to water down the bill were met. After his upset election in January 2010, he became the key vote on the bill and leveraged that position to extract big concessions favored by banks, who had given generously to his campaign. First, Brown forced Democrats to strip from the bill a $19 billion bank tax. He also successfully pushed to water down a key reform — the so-called “Volcker rule” — that was aimed at preventing banks from making risky trades with dollars backed by the government. The carve out helped large mutual funds in his state.

In fact, Brown initially opposed the entire Wall Street reform bill and threatened to join the Republican filibuster of the legislation, which would have prevented it from even getting an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

Meanwhile, as “Brown and his Senate staff were working both publicly and behind the scenes to scuttle” these reforms, the senator took in $140,000 from financial firms — 400 percent more than the average received by other GOP senators over the same time period — according to the Boston Globe. A ThinkProgress analysis revealed that during his campaign, banks and their allies gave Brown’s campaign huge 11th hour contributions and helped with a significant get-out-the-vote effort. He was also supported by outside groups friendly to Wall Street like the Club for Growth. Overall, the financial industry is Brown’s second largest contributor.

Warren, on the other hand, has devoted her entire career to making the world of finance work better for consumers. She had previously chaired the TARP oversight panel and has a distinguished academic career focusing on these issues. Yet Brown suggests that she’s been merely “talking” while he’s been “actually doing it.”
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Scott Brown would have relation to my post if you asserted he put Too Big to Fail in the bill where it otherwise wouldn't be.

Or AIG wouldn't STILL be Too Big to Fail if it weren't for Scott Brown.

The Volker Rule is not Glass-Steagal. Do you comprehend that? I know you don't.

You pretend to give a shit about $19B stripped from the bill after the financial industry had access to $23T in aid. Where is your consistency. Trust me I know you have none.

A bad law was passed with 57 Democrats and you blame Brown. Why not Snowe or Collins? Why are they your brave heroes?
 
Greed said:
Scott Brown would have relation to my post if you asserted he put Too Big to Fail in the bill where it otherwise wouldn't be.

Or AIG wouldn't STILL be Too Big to Fail if it weren't for Scott Brown.

The Volker Rule is not Glass-Steagal. Do you comprehend that? I know you don't.

You pretend to give a shit about $19B stripped from the bill after the financial industry had access to $23T in aid. Where is your consistency. Trust me I know you have none.

A bad law was passed with 57 Democrats and you blame Brown. Why not Snowe or Collins? Why are they your brave heroes?
Click to expand...

I blame Baucus, Nelson, Bayh (all three are more corporatist than populous) a well as Brown.

That's why all four are gone or will be gone and assume their rightful places as lobbyists for the capitalist parasites!
 
thoughtone said:
I blame Baucus, Nelson, Bayh (all three are more corporatist than populous) a well as Brown.

That's why all four are gone or will be gone and assume their rightful places as lobbyists for the capitalist parasites!
Click to expand...
You really are an apologizing piece of work. You must be exhausted every day.

1st, one Republican bullied 57 Democrats, then it's 3 "corporatist" Democrats.

How do explain away the 230 Dem votes in the Democratic majority house?

It's never the nature of the Democratic Party that's at fault. Just getting tricked and being corporatist.
 
Greed said:
You really are an apologizing piece of work. You must be exhausted every day.

1st, one Republican bullied 57 Democrats, then it's 3 "corporatist" Democrats.

How do explain away the 230 Dem votes in the Democratic majority house?

It's never the nature of the Democratic Party that's at fault. Just getting tricked and being corporatist.
Click to expand...


Most of those Dems are gone!
 
Warren Joins McCain to Push New Glass-Steagall Law for Banks

Warren Joins McCain to Push New Glass-Steagall Law for Banks
By Carter Dougherty & Cheyenne Hopkins
Jul 11, 2013 6:04 PM CT

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren said she and a bipartisan group of lawmakers are introducing a bill aimed at re-creating the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era measure that separated commercial and investment banking.

“Banking should be boring,” Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said yesterday in a conference call with reporters. “Anyone who wants to take big risks should go to Wall Street and should stay away from the basic banking system.”

The bill sponsored by Warren along Senators John McCain, an Arizona Republican, Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, and Angus King, a Maine independent, would separate traditional banks that offer checking and savings accounts insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from “riskier financial institutions.” The latter category includes companies involved in investment banking, insurance, swaps dealing, hedge funds and private equity, according to the lawmakers’ statement.

Warren, who announced plans for the bill at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Dodd-Frank Act implementation, told regulators testifying before the lawmakers that she didn’t expect them to back her right away.

‘Keep Pushing’

“Based on what the regulators did to Glass-Steagall over the last 30 years, I don’t expect anyone on this panel will jump and endorse the new Glass-Steagall bill,” Warren told officials from the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and other agencies. “Even so we’re going to keep pushing for it.”

Previous Senate attempts to revive Glass-Steagall, which was repealed in 1999, or otherwise limit the size of banks have failed to gain enough support to become law.

The Senate turned back an attempt to impose limits on the size of banks during debate over legislation that became the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. An amendment sponsored by two Democrats, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Ted Kaufman of Delaware, was defeated 61-33.

McCain, a former Republican presidential candidate, said he’s reintroducing a measure to restore the firewall because it’s needed to protect taxpayers and restore confidence in the financial system.

‘Dangerous Greed’

“Since core provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act were repealed in 1999, shattering the wall dividing commercial banks and investment banks, a culture of dangerous greed and excessive risk-taking has taken root in the banking world,” McCain said in the statement. McCain in 1999 voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which overturned Glass-Steagall.

The idea of restoring the law has also gained some support from Wall Street veterans such as Sanford “Sandy” Weill, whose creation of Citigroup Inc. ushered in the era of U.S. bank conglomerates in the 1990s. Weill has said ending Glass-Steagall’s prohibitions was a mistake.

“What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking,” Weill said in July 25, 2012, CNBC interview. “Have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not going to be too big to fail.”

Weill helped engineer the 1998 merger of Travelers Group Inc. and Citicorp, a deal that led Congress to repeal the law. The New York-based company became the biggest lender in the world before taking a $45 billion taxpayer bailout in 2008 to avoid collapse.

Richard Parsons, who in 2012 ended a 16-year tenure on Citigroup’s board, said in April that the repeal of Glass-Steagall made the business more complicated and contributed to the financial crisis. Former Citicorp Chief Executive Officer John Reed apologized in 2009 for his role in building Citigroup and said banks that big should be divided into separate parts.

Size Limits

Some U.S. regulators back the idea of splitting up banks or limiting their size. Thomas Hoenig, the FDIC’s vice chairman, has said FDIC-backed banks should only offer “core services.” Daniel Tarullo, the Federal Reserve governor in charge of bank supervision, has urged caution on the question of breakups, but has also said rules could link caps on bank size to the size of the U.S. economy.

Other lawmakers have introduced legislation designed to limit bank size without restoring Glass-Steagall. For instance, Brown, an Ohio Democrat, and David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, have offered a bill that would impose a 15 percent capital requirement on the largest banks.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...o-push-new-glass-steagall-bill-for-banks.html
 
uh and you wonder why these parasitic leeches are making record profits...

we are stupid, they control the news and televison program and news paper articles and we still look to that for direction.

we shouldve been shut all this shit down..

the only folks who would suffer are the blood suckers on top, but somehow they convinced the masses that they will suffer..
 
Mrfreddygoodbud said:
uh and you wonder why these parasitic leeches are making record profits...

we are stupid, they control the news and televison program and news paper articles and we still look to that for direction.

we shouldve been shut all this shit down..

the only folks who would suffer are the blood suckers on top, but somehow they convinced the masses that they will suffer..
Click to expand...
The reason they get away with it and will continue to get away with it is exhibited in your post. Where is the chunk of blame for the politicians who have a duty to look out for the taxpayer?

Parasitic companies, immoral politicians, and an electorate full of horrible people are what facilitated this retarded principle of wealth redistribution through government.

That principle of redistribution has always worked in one direction in this country, from the bottom to the top.

That can't happen without politicians being fully complicit. Plus, even in hindsight, average people will defend this bailout as necessary to the survival of this country. Why? Because their favorite politicians still defends it.

This country deserves what it gets.
 
Subprime Borrowers With Best Credit Score Denied Help

Subprime Borrowers With Best Credit Score Denied Help
By Kathleen M. Howley
Jul 16, 2013 12:04 PM CT

Travis Armstrong, a long-haul trucker, has made his mortgage payments for six years and has a credit score of about 800 that would entice most lenders. Because he owes more than his home is worth and his debt lacks federal backing, he’s stuck paying 7.5 percent interest, almost twice the rate of new loans.

U.S. President Barack Obama has failed to win Congressional backing for his proposal to expand eligibility for government-backed refinancing nationally to include people with mortgages like Armstrong’s. The only inroad so far -- a $10 million pilot program that began last month in Oregon that will purchase mortgages out of bonds and refinance them -- won’t help Armstrong, though. He lives about 14 miles (23 kilometers) from the only county accepting applications.

“It’s OK to skip payments and get help, or walk away and let the bank foreclose, but I’m stuck with no help ’cause I keep making my payments every month,” Armstrong said in a mobile phone interview from Interstate 64 in Illinois as he headed to Oregon. “It feels like the world has forgotten about people like me.”

As the U.S. real estate recovery accelerates into its second year, home prices are still 26 percent below the 2006 peak and almost 10 million people are underwater, or owe more than their houses are worth. While some of the hardest-hit regions such as Phoenix and Las Vegas are rebounding the fastest, cities like Cleveland are struggling to keep pace with national gains.

‘Uneven Healing’

Federal efforts to put the rebound on firmer footing and boost the economy by helping subprime borrowers like Armstrong so far have fallen short, said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Chicago-based Mesirow Financial Inc.

About 20 percent of subprime mortgages were 90 or more days delinquent or in foreclosure in the first quarter, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The rate for prime loans was 4.1 percent.

“The housing market is healing, but it’s healing unevenly,” said Swonk. “Part of clearing out the bottom and keeping the momentum of the recovery going is putting underwater loans on firm ground.”

Expanding eligibility for the government’s Home Affordable Refinance Program, or Harp, is at the top of the White House’s agenda for housing. The effort is dubbed ‘Where’s my refi?” Treasury, which funds the nation’s anti-foreclosure efforts, supports the program, said Andrea Risotto, a spokeswoman. Four years after the peak of the foreclosure crisis, Treasury has spent only a fifth of the $38.5 billion of funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or Tarp, set aside for housing.

‘Out There’

“This is where you get to the heart of the subprime lending problem -- these expensive private loans where people kept paying,” Swonk said. “It’s easy to forget they are still out there.”

Borrowers who refinanced through Harp in the first quarter had an average interest-rate reduction of 2.1 percentage points and will save about $4,300 in the first 12 months of the new loan, according to mortgage financier Freddie Mac. Much of that cash goes right into the economy, said Christopher Mayer, a professor at Columbia Business School in New York.

“There’s a real benefit to the overall economy when people refinance their mortgages and put money into their pockets to spend,” said Mayer. A refinancing “also puts household balance sheets on firmer ground,” he said.

The economy grew at a 1.8 percent pace in the first quarter, a number revised downward from the previous estimate of 2.4 percent, the Commerce Department said June 26. The rate in the second quarter probably slowed to 1.6 percent, according to the average estimate of about 86 economists in a Bloomberg poll.

Retail Spending

Commerce Department figures issued yesterday showed American consumers are also keeping their buying in check for goods other than automobiles. Sales at retailers climbed 0.4 percent last month, short of the 0.8 percent gain that was the median estimate of 82 economists surveyed by Bloomberg.

“Another expansion to Harp when rates were at rock bottom would have given a big boost to the economy,” Mayer said. “With higher rates, the economic benefit becomes smaller.”

The start of the Oregon program to refinance private-label loans, those not guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, came two weeks after rates rose from a near-record low of 3.35 percent in early May. The average for a 30-year fixed mortgage reached a two-year high of 4.51 percent last week after the Federal Reserve said it may begin tapering its bond buying program later this year. Costs are still near historic lows with the rate down from 6.8 percent in 2006, more than 10 percent in 1990 and 18.6 percent in 1981.

Save Money

“We once thought that mortgage rates could never go below 5 percent, and now we think a rate of four and a half is high,” said Mesirow’s Swonk. “People would still save money and stabilize their finances by going down to anything around the 5 percent level.”

While expanding Harp would benefit homeowners, it wouldn’t benefit investors, said Walt Schmidt, a mortgage strategist at FTN Financial. Bondholders in private-label securities would lose a paying loan, and potential buyers of government-backed securities would fear another mid-stream change in eligibility standards, he said.

“The fact that Harp was changed” would concern investors, Schmidt said. “After all, what would stop another revision to Harp to prepay their new security at some point in the future?”

The government created Harp in 2009 to add to its housing programs. The Home Affordable Modification Program, known as Hamp, helps homeowners who have fallen behind on mortgage payments renegotiate loan terms. There’s also Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives, or Hafa, to help owners sell homes for less than they owe and escape the remaining debt.

Harp Extended

For Harp, borrowers have to be current on their mortgages. They aren’t required to have the 20 percent equity in their properties lenders typically stipulate for a refinancing. The program was expanded in 2011 to include all government-backed mortgages -- instead of the limit to mortgages 25 percent or less underwater in the first version -- and some fees were lowered. The new version is called Harp 2.0. In May, the deadline for Harp was extended to 2015.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, has proposed legislation to refinance mortgages held in private-label bonds by setting up a national trust to purchase and refinance loans similar to the Great Depression’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation that returned a profit to the Treasury after helping 1 million homeowners. The Oregon pilot program, confined to Multnomah County that includes the state’s largest city of Portland, is similar to that proposal though on a smaller scale.

Oregon Model

“There have been many different programs like this discussed at the federal level, but none of them has gotten any traction,” Columbia’s Mayer said. “Oregon may end up being a model for some other states, and Treasury has generally been supportive, but the odds of a program on a national level are fairly low.”

The Oregon refinancing program uses funds from the Hardest Hit Fund, established by Treasury in 2010 to give $7.6 billion to the nation’s capital and 18 states that had price declines of more than 20 percent during the housing bust or had high unemployment during the financial crisis, including California, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Illinois, and North and South Carolina.

So far, only about 20 percent has been spent, according to Treasury data. Other states with the funds have shown interest in the Oregon program, and are free to copy it if they wish, said Risotto, the Treasury spokeswoman.

Hardest Hit

“The terms of the Hardest Hit funds allow participating states to share promising ideas like the Oregon program with each other,” Risotto said. “We’ve helped facilitate some of those conversations.”

While the real-estate market is gaining at the fastest pace since the height of the boom, the share of borrowers who owe more than their homes are worth was about 20 percent in the first quarter, down from 23 percent at the end of 2011, according to CoreLogic Inc. There’s a larger group that lack the 20 percent equity needed for a traditional refinancing.

In the first-quarter, the median price for a single-family home in metropolitan Portland gained 22 percent, about twice the national pace, according to the National Association of Realtors. Still, values there remain more than 20 percent below a 2007 peak. Someone who bought a $350,000 home then could be about $77,000 underwater today.

Someone who got a $350,000 mortgage in Phoenix that year probably is now more than $150,000 underwater, despite this year’s surge in prices. A borrower would have to contribute that amount of cash plus the funds needed to get a 20 percent equity stake to qualify for a non-Harp refinance.

Not Everyone

“People seem to think that because prices have gained, it means everyone is above water now, or close to it,” said Matt McHugh, a mortgage broker at Alliance Capital Partners in Portland. “It shows an amazing lack of understanding of what happened in these hardest-hit markets.”

Travis, the 57-year-old trucker, who bought his home in St. Helens, Oregon, in 2006 for $138,500 using a subprime mortgage, said he has been trying to refinance for two years without success.

“I have a good income, and I have a good credit score, but that won’t do me any good because I’m still $27,000 underwater,” said Travis. “No one will talk to me.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-16/subprime-borrowers-with-best-credit-score-denied-help.html
 
Looking back there was a bunch of things that went wrong, that need to be addressed to prevent another catastrophe.
 
Fed Finds 18 Large Banks Weak in at Least One Capital Area

As long as health care is a Right.

How long do you leeches think you can't feed off each other?

Fed Finds 18 Large Banks Weak in at Least One Capital Area
By Craig Torres & Laura Marcinek
Aug 19, 2013 5:19 PM CT

Five years after one of the most costly financial crises in U.S. history, the 18 largest banks still fall short in at least one of five areas critical to risk management and capital planning, the Federal Reserve said.

While many banking companies have improved capital planning techniques and raised capital levels, “there is still considerable room for advancement across a number of dimensions,” central bank supervisors said in a 41-page paper released today in Washington outlining weaknesses and successes in recent stress tests. The Fed (FDTR) didn’t cite any banks by name.

The Fed staff study shows that, after four such tests, some of the largest banks still lack comprehensive systems and policies to model, test, report and plan for economic calamities. While highlighting strengths and weaknesses, the central bank said all of the bank holding companies “faced challenges across one or more” of five areas, and called for better analysis tailored to each bank’s business and risk.
Click to expand...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...ak-in-at-least-one-capital-planning-area.html
 

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