I usually catch some of MSNBC’s Morning Joe a few times a week and I’ll check out the opening and closing shows on CNBC from time to time so I’m used to seeing Dylan Ratigan around. I considered him to be one of the smarter talking heads on the business news programs. Lately, I noticed him missing so i did a little digging…
Ratigan left (CNBC) on March 27, 2009.The New York Times reported he was considering all options but quoted him as saying he was dedicated to covering the economy, “the story that is affecting every American in every setting.”
Apparently, he’s waking up to the oligarchical nature of the US. But wait, it gets better…
In Ratigan’s final CNBC broadcast from the floor of the NYSE he reported on what he called “an important story developing” that Goldman Sachs and “a variety of European banks”, in his assessment and that of his guests, essentially “perpetrated securities fraud” and an “insurance fraud scam” against AIG—and, by extension, the government and taxpayers funding that insurance company’s “bailout”—by insuring their questionable investment vehicles and, upon their devaluation, making claims on them to be paid by AIG “at 100 cents on the dollar” despite all of the markdowns “being forced upon every other” entity including the government, banks, shareholders, bond holders, taxpayers and homeowners.
“I think that it should be a bigger political issue than whether somebody bought an airplane… Forget the private jets, forget who got a million dollar bonus. Fifty billion dollars“, he emphasized, minimizing what he saw as populist side issues to “the real question” of how “government policy makers” are to deal with the “problems of contract law” inherent in the agreements of businesses receiving government assistance during the financial crisis.
“The banks are being asked to take ‘haircuts’ on their toxic assets, why are the Goldmans and the Deutsche Banks of the world not being asked to take haircuts on their toxic credit default swaps? It’s a real question. I will continue to pursue it for sure, I hope others will as well.” Ratigan praised New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s subpoena of AIG to determine the bank payouts as “legitimate inquiry” and looked forward to “a body of lawmakers in Washington D.C. who are going to ask, it appears, some of the same questions that I’m asking.”
very interesting indeed…
more interesting still are the stories from fox & the new york post about why ratigan left CNBC…
fox does give us this little gem from Ratigan,”The value system of capitalism has been corrupted by a small group of bankers, insurance executives and politicians.”
what exactly is “strategic programming” for CNBC? George Orwell would LOVE that term…
these are interesting because the don’t even mention the AIG money story at all…. in other words, they have something to hide… namely: the biggest robbery in history perpetuated by Wall Street… specifically: Goldman Sachs.
Goldman Sachs, of course, the primary beneficiary of the Wall St orchestrated Crude Oil Speculation Bubble… remember Bart Stupak? and the AIG money… hmmm… gee, it’s starting to look like “Government Sachs” is living up to it’s nickname.
“United States Secretary of the Treasury, serving under President Barack Obama. He was previously the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner’s position includes a large role in directing the nation’s economic response to the financial crisis which began after December 2007. Specific tasks include directing how $350 billion of Wall Street bailout money is allocated. He is currently dealing with multiple high visibility issues, including the survival of the automobile industry, the restructuring of banks, financial institutions and insurance companies, recovery of the mortgage market, demands for protectionism, Obama’s new tax proposals, and relations with foreign governments that are dealing with similar crises.”
He then attended Dartmouth College, graduating with a B.A. in government and Asian studies in 1983. He earned an M.A. in international economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in 1985. He has studied Chinese and Japanese.
His father, Peter F. Geithner, is the director of the Asia program at the Ford Foundation in New York. During the early 1980s, Peter Geithner oversaw the Ford Foundation’s microfinance programs in Indonesia being developed by S. Ann Dunham-Soetoro, President Barack Obama’s mother, and they met in person at least once.
Geithner’s maternal grandfather, Charles F. Moore, was an adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and served as a vice president of Ford Motor Company.
He was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs (1998–2001) under Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Summers was his mentor, but other sources call him a Rubin protégé.
In 2002 he left the Treasury to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in the International Economics department. He was director of the Policy Development and Review Department (2001-2003) at the International Monetary Fund.
In October 2003 at age 42, he was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His salary in 2007 was $398,200. Once at the New York Fed, he became Vice Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee component. In 2006, he also became a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty.
In March 2008, he arranged the rescue and sale of Bear Stearns; in the same year, he played a pivotal role in both the decision to bail out AIG as well as the government decision not to save Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy, though claims were made after Geithner’s nomination that distanced him from both AIG and Lehman Brothers. As a Treasury official, he helped manage multiple international crises of the 1990s in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand.
Geithner believes, along with Henry Paulson, that the United States Department of the Treasury needs new authority to experiment with responses to the financial crisis of 2008.
Paulson has described Geithner as “[a] very unusually talented young man…[who] understands government and understands markets.”
Hank Paulson? Jim Cramer? Ben Bernanke? Larry Summers?
I’m surprised more people haven’t seen this Dennis Kucinich clip yet. It deserves more attention. He basically is calling or all the things we want, as people of good will. The original source is Russia Today. It goes without saying that this interview was ignored by the US media.
highlights:
War in Afghanistan, Iraq, & threats against Iran totally unnecessary
We need to go back to Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and build infrastructure to fix the economy
We need a new energy infrastructure – wind, solar, etc
We need to cooperate with Russia to disarm & develop the world
The Polish & Czech missiles are wrong & should be removed immediately
Georgia was clearly the aggressor in the South Ossetia/Abkhazia conflict
We have to stop Brzezinski and the policy of empire
Paulson’s bailout is a failure
I’ve included a transcript of Kucinich’s answers with some commentary and links to background info. (more…)
Here are three suggested guidelines for voters in the general election.
Defeat Obama at all costs, since an Obama victory would put a crypto-Weatherman foundation operative and Trilateral Wall Street puppet into the White House, taking this country and the world towards catastrophe.
Defeat all members of Congress who supported the $700 billion derivatives bailout for Obama’s backers at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.
Do everything possible to avoid a one-party regime controlled by the Obama-Pelosi-Reid cabal, which would impose a modern version of the Mussolini fascist corporate state, building on the state-sponsored compulsory cartelization embodied in the first installment of the bailout. The realistic goal is to obtain divided government, partisan paralysis, as much gridlock as possible, and a legislative standoff to provide time for the maturation of the necessary New Deal programmatic alternative to the current Democratic and Republican leaderships. We must avoid a Democratic Senate majority so large that opposition filibusters become impossible. (more…)
Well, Paulson got his $770 billion (more like $1.8 trillion) bailout. Now why is the market crashing?
McCain was on today talking about buying up bad mortgages.. some $330 billion for that. Wasn’t this what the bailout was supposed to be for?
The 678.91 point plunge on the DOW today is being blamed on GM losing 30% of it’s value. This is absurd. Blame anyone but Wall Street.
What we’re seeing is the irresistible gravity of $1-2 quadrillion of derivatives turning their “super profit” leverage in the negative direction. It’s a black hole and must be deleted.
Paper is NOT Wealth. Commodities are wealth. Property is wealth. Production is wealth. Paper is an abstraction.
It’s very interesting that the USD is holding up pretty well vs the pound, euro, CAD. The crash seems to be hitting all currencies somewhat equally.
NEW YORK, October 8 (RIA Novosti) — The U.S. stock market has suffered a $700 billion paper loss in a single session, as measured by the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Composite Index, which tracks the stocks of 5,000 U.S.-based companies. (more…)
Ok, small consolation here but it’s still entertaining to hear about Lehman Bros CEO getting knocked out after bankrupting the company… He still made out like a bandit, to the tune of $480 million. Fuld should be jailed, his assets should be seized and distributed to the people who lost money… stealing from ppl’s retirement fund is about as reprehensible an act as one can commit. Old people will suffer as a result of this.
The other funny thing is – I’m not sure anyone noticed, but – the hedge fund in question was named Harbinger, as in Harbinger of DOOM. How prophetic.
If there is one post you should read on this blog, it’s this one.
September 29, 2008 was a historic day for America and getting out from underneath Wall Street oppression.. the first of many, i hope. Forget what the talking heads are saying, yesterday was a Victory of Populism. The only thing the market lost yesterday was a bunch of numbers in an accounting book. God didn’t come down and take $1.2 trillion worth of property from the world. Factories didn’t disappear, only paper. And paper “assets” are NOT real.
Expect the oligarchy to try every scare tactic in the world to try and extort money from America… but do NOT submit and they will collapse into their own derivatives black holes. BE STRONG and invest in sustainable production, local communities, things in the REAL world. Real commodities, real production. NOT futures. NOT indexes. NOT paper gambling.
They will NOT tell you the people are winning. DOWN WITH OLIGARCHY!
Do not be fooled. The $700 billion (ultimately $1 trillion or more) bailout is not predominantly for mortgages and homeowners. Instead, the bailout is for mortgage-backed securities. In fact, some versions of these instruments are imaginary derivatives. These claims overlap on the same types of mortgages. Many financial institutions wrote claims over the same mortgages, and these are the majority of claims that have “gone bad.”
At this point, such claims have no bearing on the mortgage or housing crisis; they have bearing only on the holders of these securities themselves. These are ridiculously risky claims with little value for society. It is as if many financial institutions sold “earthquake insurance” on the same house: when the quake hits, all these claims become close to worthless — but the claims are simply bets disconnected from reality.
This report, from September 12, puts the bailout figure much higher than the $700 billion we were told
The U.S. Treasury Department is working through the weekend with Congress to craft a plan to spend as much as $700 billion to absorb bad mortgages and other assets from bank or other institution balance sheets to keep the financial system from collapsing.
The move comes close on the heels of an $85 billion Federal Reserve rescue of American International Group and the Treasury’s takeover of housing finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The Treasury plan, which follows a new federal guarantee for money market fund holdings, would push Washington’s potential bailout tab to $1.8 trillion.
