Since the mortgage meltdown occurred, many bloggers and reporters have known that the financial system was rigged to allow the fabricated fraud to go forward without any serious scrutiny, supervision, accountability, regulation, or transparency over what has been called “financial innovations”, in other words, fraudulent derivatives and securities, as well as credit default swaps, which established the marketplace as a revolving Wall Street casino establishment betting on something, but then, without notifying the “something”, betting that the “something” will fail.
What has come forward by such first rate reporters-bloggers-analysts, such as Michael Whitney, Karl Denninger, and the people at ZeroHedge, and explained in the television media by such personalities as Dylan Ratigan and Eliot Spitzer, Lehman Brothers appears to have engaged in fraud when it was still an investment banking institution.
Simon Johnson wrote in his piece “Senator Kaufman: Fraud Still at the Heart of Wall Street”, “He [Senator Kaufman-D.DE, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee] goes after Lehman -- with its infamous Repo 105 -- as well as the other entities potentially implicated in those transactions, including Ernst and Young (Lehman's auditors). This is the low hanging fruit -- but have you heard even a squeak from the White House or anyone else in the country's putative leadership on this issue?” Where is President Obama? Where is your outrage, sir? Where is the Change We Can Believe In? Is it in a Goldman Sachs bank account? Is it in your reelection campaign fundraising account over at Bank of America located at 3401 Connecticut Avenue NW?
I believe Michael Whitney coined the term “a planned demolition” when describing what the Too-Big-To-Fail financial banking investment institutions were doing to the economy as they performed their mortgage magic mirages upon the American people as they duped them into buying homes they couldn’t afford, with no money down, and no analysis of the buyer’s financial ability to pay. And, what went along with that was a bet that they couldn’t pay at some point down the line. From there, home prices grew in their asset values and formed a massive bubble that eventually exploded.
Michael Whitney wrote in his piece, 3-15-10, “Lehman Brothers Scandal Rocks the Fed”, “After a year-long investigation, court-appointed bank examiner Anton Valukas has produced a deadly 2,200 page report which details the activities that led to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. The report is a keg of dynamite.”
We might say that this just could be the smoking gun, the mushroom cloud that erupted out of the volcanic rubble left by the toxic mortgage’s magma meltdown brought to all us by capitalism gone bad as designed by Alan Greenspan, Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Timmy Geithner—the Four Financial Fustian Fiends, or the Four-Squared Fleecing Fools.
I have been calling the TBTF syndicate a financial crime syndicate with Bernanke and Geithner as the mobster’s governmentally appointed financial operating field generals doing what is necessary to make sure that the Federal Reserve cranks out cash to them through its Quantative Easing operation keeping the failed mega-investment banks saturated with liquidity.
This appears to be a full-blown conspiracy to dupe the Congress, American people and the world to believe that QE was designed to infuse the investment banks with taxpayer cash in order to loosen up the credit markets and bring the economy back on-line after being shut down. April Fools!!!
Written in Naked Capitalism, by Professor L. Randall Wray, “Timmy-Gate: Did Geithner Help Hide Lehman Fraud”, “Now we find that Geithner’s NYFed supported Lehman’s efforts to conceal the extent of its problems. Not only did the NYFed fail to blow the whistle on flagrant accounting tricks, it also helped to hide Lehman’s illiquid assets on the Fed’s balance sheet to make its position look better…it continued to take trash off the books of Lehman right up to the bitter end, helping perpetuate the fraud that was designed to maintain the pretense that Lehman was not massively insolvent.” “In terms of dollar costs to the government, this is surely the biggest scandal in US history.”
Professor Wray continued: The abuse was so flagrant that no US law firm would sign off on the practice, fearing that creditors and stockholders would have grounds for lawsuits on the basis that this caused a “material misrepresentation” of Lehman’s financial statements.”
As I have said before, why isn’t the RICO statute being dusted off and charges slapped down into the hands of former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld, Fed Chairman Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, who was president of the New York Federal Reserve at the time when he should have been regulating LB. It appears that these three were engaged in the cover-up of Lehman Brothers worthless capital, which Fuld was using to borrow from other banks through what is called Repo-105. This is like a pawnbroker operation between investment banks. You give up some collateral that has market value, and in return, you get and equal value of cash to use for a very short term period of time, with the guarantee that you will pay it back soon, and reclaim your collateral.
But what was happening was Lehman was using worthless collateral and no one at the central bank, or the NYFed made Fuld and his underlings accountable for this shell game, yet it appears the NYFed knew about it and kept it from the investing public!!
Even though a New York Fed spokesman said the collateral accepted from Lehman was up-to-snuff, Lehman ended up failing two stress tests performed by the NYFed in order to determine if the collateral had real market value.
You might say that the New York Fed Outlet Store was pumping up the Lehman Brothers brand of tires, only to find they wouldn’t hold air, yet sold them to unsuspecting buyers without letting them know that in just about 10 miles, the tires would go flat.
Michael Whitney wrote that “[t]his is the huge scandal: [there were] collusive government officials who operate[d] as de facto agents for an industry saturated with corruption and conflicts of interest. [There was a conniving cover-up] of Lehman’s true position because he [Fuld] doesn’t work for the 10 million people who are now standing in unemployment lines, or the 35 million people who are now on food stamps, or the 6 million people who have lost their homes to foreclosure, or the hundreds of millions of people who have seen the home equity evaporate, their retirement funds plunge and their hopes for the future dashed so that a handful of insatiable landsharks could fatten their bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.”
“Today, there is only one market for junk: the Federal Reserve, which has lent $1.3 trillion in cash for trash, no questions asked. This amount exceeds the forecast[ed] Obama medical [health] care plan for the decade. No money for health insurance, but all for the junk-mortgage lenders.” (Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism, Whitney article)
Rave-on Michael Whitney! Beautifully said!!!
Mr. Whitney continues: “Is there really any doubt that Tim Geithner at the New York Fed, or Bernanke knew that Lehman was trading its junk assets to finance its ongoing operations? Doesn’t that in-itself constitute a cover up or [an “intentional” mislead[ing of] investors? And, if Lehman was exchanging garbage to feign solvency, then it seems likely that the other investment giants were engaged in the same type of charade. (Which implies that the rating agencies were culpable, as well.)”
Mr. Whitney had an email exchange with the brilliant, and former Wall Street economist, Professor Michael Hudson, who put this all into perspective. “If investigators can prove that the Fed exchanged US treasuries for MBS [Mortgage-Backed Securities] and other toxic assets that they knew were worth-less than the amount they provided via short-term loans (repos), then it is reasonable to assume that Bernanke’s quantative easing (QE) program operated under the same guidelines. That means, that the $1.25T QE program-which was supposed to extend credit to consumers and businesses—was actually a scam designed to transfer a gigantic load of capital to the very people who gamed the system and precipitated the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. [Therefore, w]ithout question, that misallocation of capital has deepened the recession and sent unemployment skyrocketing.”
So, the big question now is what is President Obama going to do about this smoking gun, this mushroom cloud of information? Will he pull the curtain from behind the stage revealing the fraudsters that have engaged in a possible conspiracy against the United States in order “to transfer a gigantic load of capital to the very people who gamed the system”?
The Time Magazine’s Man Of The Year, and his side-kick dummy may actually be traitors, at the most, and, at the least, small fish mobster field generals who engaged in a conspiracy to perform criminal negligence. What would Joe McCarthy say about this one?
Thanks for reading, jerry
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
