Comedian Lewis Black, of “The Daily Show,” speaks with WSJ/MarketWatch columnist David Weidner about the Tea-Party movement, taxes, bank bailouts and the iPad.
4/19/2010 12:20:04 PM
Sometimes, these things just line up perfectly:
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via Bloomberg
Afternoon humor, gathered from around the web:
The term “GS”, now entering the popular lexicon as a verb, meaning to lie AND make money from doing so, as opposed to “BS” – which is just to lie without the benefit of compensation.
-Richard Ambrose
~~~
There once was a man named Tourré
He toiled for The Squid night and day
At Paulson’s request
He created a mess
And sold it to bank IBK-Joshua Brown
~~~
Burning Documents Create Giant Smoke Plume over Goldman Sachs
~~~
With apologies to John Collins Bossidy
And this is good old Gotham,
The home of the rich and the odd.
Where Morgan talks only to Goldman,
And Goldman talks only to God.-Andrew Stanton
This letter is a call to (electronic) arms on Patriots’ Day.
Mr. President, please show the American people the AIG emails.
In the wake of the disclosures associated with Friday’s government fraud accusations against Goldman, Sachs & Co., one of our nation’s wealthiest, largest and most politically well-connected banks, it is inexcusable the U.S. government still refuses to release the thousands of emails that exist between AIG and Goldman Sachs.
Unlike the Icelandic volcano, this was no natural disaster. Trillions of dollars have been defrauded from the US taxpayer by a banking scam run by the top 1% of our country.
The mark for this con game has been and continues to be every teacher, cop, firefighter, nurse, conservative saver, small investor, student and retiree. People whose pensions, homes, jobs and monthly retirement stipends have been and continue to be deprived — so these people can use our government to transfer money from your work to themselves.
We also know that the same people responsible for this failed system are STILL RUNNING IT, leaving obvious conflicts of interest everywhere you turn.
But the American people still have one tremendous ally in not letting them get away with the fraud – a SEC law that forces these companies to keep records of all of their communications coupled with the most sophisticated, extraordinary ability to use 21st Century technology to quickly harvest relevant information out of billions of pieces of data.
And even by barely scratching the surface, this is what we already find:
A Goldman Sachs Vice President accused of fraud, writing “more and more leverage in the system, The whole building is about to collapse anytime now…”
An S&P ratings agent saying “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.”
Our government is in a position to grant access to a vast pool of information that could answer so many questions about why all our money was taken. But flush with money from these potentially fraudulent institutions, politicians have systematically gutted the very people charged with investigating these crimes.
As a final insult, they provide 23.7 trillion in direct and implied support for these bankers to keep bonusing themselves billions, yet offer a paltry 0.0000003% of that amount to investigate how this incredibly un-American event happened in the first place.
To add insult to injury, we the people now OWN the company at the center of much of the alleged fraud. Currently, you the US taxpayer, own 80 percent of AIG and there are now 5 people who represent us as trustees at the company.
Please Mr. President,
Show the American people the AIG emails. Many are suffering, our young are without work, our middle class is stuck in houses they can’t sell, making it impossible to move to new jobs for the future of our country, and our retirees who, at their most vulnerable, find the custodians of their life savings as either crooks or suckers for the bankster scams.
As our President, you are in charge of AIG. That means that without even a court order, the American people can see every email and it is long past due for you to release those 10 years of AIG emails to the people.
Today, in honor of our ongoing fight against tyranny, let’s send a plea to all our elected officials, Treasury Secretary and president to fulfill their custodial obligation to those they represent and show the American people the AIG emails.
And just to prove a point, look into your old email files and find some innocuous email from the past 10 years to attach to the bottom…perhaps if we show them ours, they will show us theirs.
Here is how to do it:
Your Representative http://www.house.gov/
Your Senator http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
In what can only be as described as a victory for Reality-Based news programming, I am delighted to see that my buddy Herb is coming back to CNBC !
Herb was one of the rare non-cheerleaders at CNBC. he never drank the Kool Aid, and always had a skeptical view of Wall Street. His presence will balance out some of the more extreme views (fantasy based economics) and be more factually driven.
Herb is a long standing investigative Journalist, rather than doing news flavored chat.
CNBC senior vice president of business news Jeremy Pink said:
We are delighted to have Herb and Kate join the CNBC team. They are two of the smartest, savviest, and well-respected business journalists anywhere.
Greenberg added:
I’m excited to return to CNBC as a full-time member of the best team in business journalism. I look forward to reconnecting with astute viewers and can’t wait to rejoin the good friends I’ve worked with over the years.
Source: MediaBistro, CNBC
“There’s Never Just One Cockroach”:
~~~
Source:
“There’s Never Just One Cockroach”: Can Bulls Survive the Goldman Fraud Fallout?
Aaron Task
Yahoo Tech Ticker, Apr 19, 2010 07:30am
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/%22there%27s-never-just-one-cockroach%22-can-bulls-survive-the-goldman-fraud-fallout-470111.html
Don’t walk run over to Jesse’s Café Américain to read his palpable anger and frustration with a complicit media as enabling the crisis:
Good times . . .
I love this stylized version of the now defunct cable station MTV:
Let’s shift gears a bit, and move from Goldman to Merrill.
Specifically, Merrill Lynch’s retired deposed CEO, Stan O’Neal. About 18 months after getting the boot, O’Neal has crawled out from under his $161 million rock. He found a sympathetic ear in Fortune contributing writer William Cohan, who assisted his spinning a new narrative as to his days at Mother Merrill.
Not surprisingly, the new version that portrays him in a much more favorable light.
O’Neal now joins a long list of former Masters of the Universe trying to burnish their badly tarnished reputations by taking their “Who? Me?” tour on the road. As with just about all of the others, it is unlikely to work. The essence of O’Neal’s argument: “Hey, I might have run the company into the ground, but it was that damn Cribiore who prevented me from getting a better price for my shareholders.”
From Cohan’s article story:
The magnitude of the [CDO] problem “hadn’t been apparent in ways it should have,” O’Neal tells Fortune in his first on-the-record interview since he was forced to resign in October 2007.
As O’Neal dug into the issue from his vacation home off the coast of Massachusetts, he was flabbergasted by what he discovered. “A few things became clear,” he says. “One is the complexity of it was far beyond what I would have imagined. Second, the number of people who actually understood the aggregated view of this — not just in terms of size and scale but the potential complications associated with it — were few and far between.”
When O’Neal finally came to grasp what the “aggregated view” meant, he realized his firm was facing an increasingly dire threat.
The NY Times is apparently buying some of the fertilizer that Mr. O’Neal is selling:
“The revelation of this [Cribiore's opposition to a sale of the company] could go some way to salvaging Mr. O’Neal’s reputation which, Fortune wrote, had been reduced to the tag line: “C.E.O. who played golf alone while his firm struggled to survive.”
Contrary to O’Neal’s take on the matter, the magnitude of the problem was apparent. At least, it was to Merrill people like Jeff Kronthal and his colleagues, who voiced their concerns about the degree of risk the firm was taking on.
They were summarily kicked to the curb. (See here, here: “…many have said that had Kronthal and the other sacked fixed-income veterans not left, the bank might not be in the shape it is today. According to the Journal, Kronthal received a standing ovation when he appeared on a Merrill trading floor yesterday.” (here and here. )
Kronthal was subsequently asked back by O”Neal’s replacement, John Thain.
Sorry, Stan, take your hoocoodanode elsewhere, because there were folks who knew, and you canned them, which is exactly why “the number of people who actually understood the aggregated view of this — not just in terms of size and scale but the potential complications associated with it — were few and far between.” Most of them had involuntarily left the building, and you’d surrounded yourself with yes-men. Puh-leeze.
And by the way, who was responsible for the stellar $1.3 billion purchase of subprime mortgage originator First Franklin at the top — the absolute pinnacle – of the real estate market?
Hat tip Martin Kronicle
"I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." -Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Taylor in 1816)
After 3 quarters in a row that averaged just 1.2%, Q4 GDP grew 2.8%, a touch below expectations of 3.0% BUT Nominal GDP grew well below forecasts. Because the price deflator was up just .4% vs the estimate of 1.9%, Nominal GDP was up 3.2% vs the estimate of 4.9%. Personal Consumption rose 2.0% vs the forecast of 2.4%. Fixed Investment rose 3.3% helped by a 5.2% increase in equipment and software spending and residential construction rose by 10.9%. Trade was a slight drag on GDP growth and government spending was as well led by a 12.5% decline on national...
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