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?
Instead of giving the money to bankers to bailout toxic paper, China is following in the footsteps of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It will be interesting to see which plan actually works, the US or China’s.
The 4 trillion yuan plan ($849 billion), equivalent to about 20% of China’s GDP, is the biggest injection of cash by a government in history.
The Chinese package is expected to focus overwhelmingly on construction. A statement by China’s State Council said the money would be spent on 10 projects including low-income housing, rural infrastructure, water, electricity, transportation, the environment, technological innovation and rebuilding from disasters.
It is also interesting that China expects its own population to pick up the slack in business lost to Chinese factories because Americans are spending less.
The measures are just shy of the $700bn (£442bn) bail-out promised by the United States, but are wider and more comprehensive than the American plan.
The Chinese government said it would “massively” crank up its spending on roads, railways, healthcare, education, power grids and low-cost housing. It also abolished the tight limits on lending that applied to banks, in a move that will open up credit to tens of millions of riskier borrowers.
The State Council said it would boost the economy partly through hiring millions of workers to build a slew of new projects and partly by encouraging Chinese, who are traditionally inclined to save their money, to spend more.
The government hopes that Chinese households will replace American families as the main customers for China’s slew of low-cost factories. Currently, almost 40pc of China’s economy is tied to exports.
Timothy Bond, chief Asian economist at Merrill Lynch, compared the package to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which shored up the American economy after the Wall Street crash of 1929. “The past two weeks have emphasised a simple point,” he said. “Policy works. In China’s case we expect this positive policy to prevent a sharp slowdown.”
He added: “Financing is not an issue. Public debt is only 21pc of gross domestic product.” In the UK, the official statistics show public debt is 43.4pc of GDP, while the ratio is nearly 61pc in the US.
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…)
I like how he differentiates between financial markets and the “real economy”.. priceless!
And once again was the fact of being concrete and the efficacy of the actions we agree upon which is helping us to solve one of the most recent crises which have affected our countries, that of the financial crisis, which we must absolutely prevent from being a crisis affecting real economy, as well. (more…)
Remember when Volcker was head of the FED and we had a 22% Prime Lending Rate? He’s telling is now we have TRILLIONS – not millions, not billions – in credit default swaps
Paul Volcker, FED Chairman (1979-87) when Jimmy Carter was in power:
“Active efforts are underway to develop stronger netting, clearing and settlement arrangements for certain derivatives, in particular the notional trillions of credit default swaps, (more…)
I just saw Interactive Brokers.com on CNBC advertising “No derivatives” so I took a peek at their website. Under the “safety” tab I found this… watch for other financial companies to follow suit.
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…)
IMO, this is evidence of their handiwork. The wind didn’t change direction and fix the market, something clearly interfered around 2:45PM, October 6, 2008..
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.
Derivatives is a taboo word these days. It’s rare that someone even mentions them directly. As a protest vote, Ron Paul is good. However, I question his economic polices. Libertarian Austrian School economics is what got us into this mess in the first place. It’s time to get rid of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek and return to the Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, FDR New Deal, and the American School of economics.
