In the present system, the more unrestricted the banks are, the more money they can generate “out of thin air,” and the more damage they can inflict upon the wealth-generation process. FULL ARTICLE by Frank Shostak
Add comment February 20th, 2010
Let’s hope he doesn’t end up the same way:
“Could it all be a bad dream, or a nightmare? Is it my imagination, or have we lost our minds? It’s surreal; it’s just not believable. A grand absurdity; a great deception, a delusion of momentous proportions; based on preposterous notions; and on ideas whose time should never have come; simplicity grossly distorted and complicated; insanity passed off as logic; grandiose schemes built on falsehoods with the morality of Ponzi and Madoff; evil described as virtue; ignorance pawned off as wisdom; destruction and impoverishment in the name of humanitarianism; violence, the tool of change; preventive wars used as the road to peace; tolerance delivered by government guns; reactionary views in the guise of progress; an empire replacing the Republic; slavery sold as liberty; excellence and virtue traded for mediocracy; socialism to save capitalism; a government out of control, unrestrained by the Constitution, the rule of law, or morality; bickering over petty politics as we collapse into chaos; the philosophy that destroys us is not even defined.
We have broken from reality–a psychotic Nation. Ignorance with a pretense of knowledge replacing wisdom. Money does not grow on trees, nor does prosperity come from a government printing press or escalating deficits.
We’re now in the midst of unlimited spending of the people’s money, exorbitant taxation, deficits of trillions of dollars–spent on a failed welfare/warfare state; an epidemic of cronyism; unlimited supplies of paper money equated with wealth.
A central bank that deliberately destroys the value of the currency in secrecy, without restraint, without nary a whimper. Yet, cheered on by the pseudo-capitalists of Wall Street, the military industrial complex, and Detroit.
We police our world empire with troops on 700 bases and in 130 countries around the world. A dangerous war now spreads throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Thousands of innocent people being killed, as we become known as the torturers of the 21st century.
We assume that by keeping the already-known torture pictures from the public’s eye, we will be remembered only as a generous and good people. If our enemies want to attack us only because we are free and rich, proof of torture would be irrelevant.
The sad part of all this is that we have forgotten what made America great, good, and prosperous. We need to quickly refresh our memories and once again reinvigorate our love, understanding, and confidence in liberty. The status quo cannot be maintained, considering the current conditions. Violence and lost liberty will result without some revolutionary thinking.
We must escape from the madness of crowds now gathering. The good news is the reversal is achievable through peaceful and intellectual means and, fortunately, the number of those who care are growing exponentially.
Of course, it could all be a bad dream, a nightmare, and that I’m seriously mistaken, overreacting, and that my worries are unfounded. I hope so. But just in case, we ought to prepare ourselves for revolutionary changes in the not-too-distant future.”
Add comment January 18th, 2010
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| Flagging: a US sailor stands on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington |
If a week is a long time in politics, a decade is starting to look like an age in geopolitics. Comparing the America that began the 21st century with the America of today is to witness a country that has in some ways quite radically altered its view of itself and its relationship to the world.
In short, the metallic rust of decline has crept into the American soul. “You could argue that the first decade of the 21st century was the last decade of the American century,” says David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and student of US foreign policy. “We are now entering the multipolar century.”
Add comment January 16th, 2010
In Judge Takes SEC and Bank of America Lawyers to Woodshed over Merril Bonus Settlement, Yves Smith covers the SEC-Bank of America hearing and considers the notion of Wall Street entitlement; their lawyers have ostensibly bought into this concept.
Add comment August 14th, 2009
Announced changes in the regulatory landscape, including for hedge funds, private equity, and derivatives and securitization markets, will contribute to an increase in overall credit costs. The secular trend towards lower nominal interest rates, which has sustained financial intermediation and credit markets in the past 25 years, has come to a halt.
Add comment August 13th, 2009
Homeowners are turning to the “strategic default” — walking away from a mortgage even when there are funds available to keep paying. “Increasingly, the determination of when to default is not guided by the moral question: Is this the right thing to do? It is guided by the pragmatic concern: Am I too far underwater on my mortgage?” writes Kelsey VanOverloop. Read more »
1 comment July 25th, 2009
Banks are quietly changing the terms of millions of credit card accounts as they brace for a tough new law that will limit rate hikes.
The law would restrict interest rate increases unless a credit card has a variable rate. So at least two major lenders are switching their cards with fixed rates to — you guessed it — variable rates.
“It’s completely unfair,” said Linda Sherry, a spokeswoman for Consumer Action. “It’s an end run around the intent of the new law.”
That law is the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, which President Obama affixed with his signature in May. Its various provisions will be phased in between next month and February.
Congress passed the law to curb what politicians called abuses of cardholders by lenders, including runaway interest rates and constantly changing terms.
Credit Card Firms Try End Run Around New Federal Rules – LA Times
Add comment July 10th, 2009
By Kathleen M. Howley
June 29 (Bloomberg) — Driving through Riverside, California, Bruce Norris pointed to a half-dozen empty houses with “For Sale” signs stuck in untended lawns that he said investors might buy if banks would just extend some credit.
“People today look at us as the enemy,” said Norris, 57, head of Riverside-based Norris Group, which purchases and renovates homes to rent or sell. “That’s a big problem for housing because if we can’t get the financing we need, a lot of these properties are going to sit vacant.”
Four months after President Barack Obama pledged $275 billion to shore up home sales, the engine that powered every U.S. recovery since 1960 is stalled. Bankers’ reluctance to finance buyers who won’t live in properties is one barrier to a turnaround. Stricter qualifying rules and a rise in the cost of residential loans to 5.42 percent have impeded new mortgage lending, which is at a 13-year low. An inventory of 2.1 million unoccupied houses on the market, created by the fastest foreclosure pace in history, may be a drag on a revival.
The $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit in the U.S. economic stimulus package and a government program to subsidize some mortgage payments have had little effect, according to Eric Belsky, executive director of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“It hasn’t been much more than a see-sawing of data,” Belsky said in an interview. “Housing has led the U.S. economy out of every recession for at least 50 years, and for that to happen again more stimulus is going to be needed.”
Leading Indicator
The residential real estate market improved ahead of the end of the past seven contractions, with home construction starts beginning to climb an average of seven months before gross domestic product picked up and sales gaining about four months in advance, according to data compiled by David Berson, chief economist of PMI Group, a mortgage insurer in Walnut Creek, California.
Expenditures by homeowners — first on transaction fees, then on necessities and luxuries including furniture, gardening tools, kitchen renovations, basic upkeep and property taxes — kept the momentum going, Belsky said.
Existing U.S. home sales in May rose 2.4 percent to an annual rate of 4.77 million, lower than forecast, and the median price was down 16.8 percent from the same month in 2008, according to the Chicago-based National Realtors Association.
There’s little chance the turnover will increase enough this year to end the housing recession, said Andres Carbacho- Burgos, an economist with Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
‘Lousy Job Market’
“We have a lousy job market and an excess of around 1 million extra homes that has to be worked off,” he said in an interview. “The housing market is not going to hit bottom before mid-2010.”
Housing starts are at their lowest level since 1945, even with a 17 percent increase in May that pushed the annual rate to 532,000 from a 454,000 pace the prior month. So many properties are for sale — 3.8 million as of last month — that it would take 9.6 months to unload them at the current sales pace, according to the Realtors group. The inventory averaged 4.5 months in the six years from 2000 to 2005.
While there is pent-up demand that would eat away at the stock, “people are scared to spend the money because they’re worried about losing their jobs,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts, in an interview.
6 Million Jobs
The unemployment rate, which reached a 26-year high of 9.4 percent in May, will probably exceed 10 percent this year, Obama said at a June 23 White House news conference.
“The American people have a right to feel like this is a tough time right now,” Obama said, calling it “pretty clear” payrolls will continue to shrink. About 6 million jobs have disappeared since January 2008, marking the biggest employment loss of any retrenchment since the Great Depression.
Personal bankruptcies rose 37 percent in May from a year earlier, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute, based in Alexandria, Virginia. Credit card defaults in the first quarter went to 7.79 percent from 4.83 percent a year ago, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data show. While the share of loans entering foreclosure moved to 1.37 percent, the highest ever, the first-quarter mortgage delinquency rate climbed to a record 9.12 percent, the Washington-based Mortgage Bankers Association said.
Housing in Peril as Financing Breakthrough Fails – Bloomberg
Add comment July 1st, 2009
Bankruptcy Epitaphs 2009–And We’re Only In June! – Reformed Broker
Add comment June 19th, 2009
June 5 (Bloomberg) — Today was supposed to be the day that Chrysler LLC sold itself to Fiat and embarked on a new, government-designed chance at survival. Instead, its lawyers are arguing in a federal appeals court this afternoon to please, please let the sale go through.
It probably will. No matter what the law says, it’s hard to picture a three-judge appellate panel throwing itself into the path of a speeding train carrying the futures of Chrysler and General Motors Corp. and, with them, a segment of the ailing U.S. economy.
However messy, derailment is what the law seems to demand. But that’s not what these judges are likely to order.
“Circumstances have conspired to force them to find a way to approve the sale,” says Daniel Glosband, a bankruptcy lawyer with Goodwin Procter in Boston.
The package the White House hammered together to convert big, old, dying Chrysler into a smaller, healthier car company looks a lot like a massive violation of bankruptcy law. A few dissident creditors, namely three Indiana pension funds that banded together, remain defiant enough to say so.
The Chrysler plan “seeks to extinguish the property rights of secured lenders, trampling the most fundamental of creditor rights in disregard of over 100 years of bankruptcy jurisprudence,” the funds argued in bankruptcy court papers.
Their share is tiny, to be sure. Out of $6.9 billion in senior secured loans, the Indiana funds have $42 million. They paid 43 cents on the dollar, and would get roughly 29 cents after the sale.
The Gall
What galls them is that the United Auto Workers’ retiree health care trust fund, the most prominent of the unsecured creditors, would own 55 percent of the new company and get a $4.5 billion note for its $10.5 billion unsecured claim.
Putting unsecured creditors ahead of secured lenders isn’t how bankruptcy law is supposed to work.
Plus, the government has no business giving Chrysler money meant only for financial institutions under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the funds say.
They say the sale is really reorganization in disguise, which is illegal under bankruptcy law. By claiming it’s a sale, Chrysler avoids months of court scrutiny and legal wrangling over how much to give each creditor. They slip past rules that reorganization requires.
“If there ever was a stealth reorganization plan, this is it,” David Skeel, law professor the University of Pennsylvania, told Bloomberg Radio.
Heated Debate
It looks like a sub rosa reorganization to me, too, but bankruptcy experts hotly debate the point in blogs and in news interviews.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Arthur Gonzalez this week declared it a bona fide sale, a fair deal for creditors and the best possible result under dire circumstances.
As for using TARP funds to save a car company, Gonzalez didn’t rule on that, saying the Indiana funds had no legal authority to raise the issue in the first place.
It would have been almost impossible for him to turn down the Chrysler-Fiat deal. If you think the Second Circuit Court of Appeals feels pressure to give Chrysler what it wants, imagine the stress on a sole bankruptcy judge.
The Obama administration decided Chrysler and, behind it, General Motors, are too American to fail, no matter how poorly they’ve been run. It’s pumped billions into the companies while structuring this quick sale and dragging most secured creditors into agreement. If the sale doesn’t go through this very minute, or at least by June 15, Fiat can walk away, leaving liquidation as the only option, Chrysler and its partners in the deal declare.
Contrived Emergency
But the urgency is largely self-inflicted. The government, as financier-in-chief, created the emergency in fashioning the sale the way it did.
It’s a common tactic for debtors to declare themselves in imminent danger of total demise while demanding a rushed sale to avoid reorganization, says Glosband, the Boston bankruptcy lawyer. Judges usually see through it.
If Chrysler gets away with it, and he predicts it will, the precedent will ripple through bankruptcy courts for years to come.
“It basically circumvents the bankruptcy code provisions that deal with how you address the rights of all the different constituencies in the case,” says Glosband.
Those rules are there to make the process fair. But in this case, the Obama administration played the lead role in figuring out who gets what, and providing the finances to make it work before the matter ever got to court.
Fast Moving
After today’s argument in New York, the Second Circuit judges could rule as soon as this weekend. That’s extraordinary speed for a federal appellate court.
“If Chrysler wins,” says Stephen Lubben, bankruptcy law professor at Seton Hall University, “it takes the wind out of a lot of objections likely to be filed with GM.”
Lubben considers that a fine result, as he believes the Chrysler sale’s legit.
But those who argue Chrysler can’t win if the courts follow law worry that when judges let big cases bend the rules, they erode the rule of law for everyone.
(Ann Woolner is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
Chrysler Speeds Past Legal Limits to Live – Ann Woolner, Bloomberg
Add comment June 11th, 2009
Opinion from The Economist : http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13610871
An Offer You Can’t Refuse
NO ONE who lent money to General Motors (GM) or Chrysler can have been unaware of their dire finances. Nor can workers have failed to notice their employers’ precarious futures. These were firms that barely stayed afloat in the boom and both creditors and employees were taking a punt on their promise to pay debts and generous health-care benefits.
The bet has failed. The recession has tipped both firms into the abyss—together they lost $48 billion last year. Chrysler has entered bankruptcy, from which it may emerge under Fiat’s control (see article). GM could soon follow if efforts to hammer out a voluntary restructuring fail. America’s government, keen to protect workers, is providing taxpayers’ cash to keep the lights on at both firms. But in its haste it has vilified creditors and ridden roughshod over their legitimate claims over the carmakers’ assets. At a time when many businesses must raise new borrowing to survive, that is a big mistake.
Bankruptcies involve dividing a shrunken pie. But not all claims are equal: some lenders provide cheaper funds to firms in return for a more secure claim over the assets should things go wrong. They rank above other stakeholders, including shareholders and employees. This principle is now being trashed. On April 30th, after the failure of negotiations, Chrysler entered Chapter 11. Under the proposed scheme, secured creditors owed some $7 billion will recover 28 cents per dollar. Yet an employee health-care trust, operated at arm’s length by the United Auto Workers union, which ranks lower down the capital structure, will receive 43 cents on its $11 billion-odd of claims, as well as a majority stake in the restructured firm.
The many creditors who have acquiesced include banks that themselves rely on the government’s purse. The objectors have been denounced as “speculators” by Barack Obama. The judge overseeing the case has consented to a quick, “prepackaged” bankruptcy, which seems to give little scope for creditors to argue their case or pursue the alternative of liquidating the company’s assets. In effect Chrysler and the government have overridden the legal pecking order to put workers’ health-care benefits above more senior creditors’ claims, and then successfully argued in court that the alternative would be so much worse for creditors that it cannot be seriously considered.
The Treasury has also put a gun to the heads of GM’s lenders. Unsecured creditors owed about $27 billion are being asked to accept a recovery rate of 5 cents, says Barclays Capital, whereas the health-care trust, which ranks equal to them, gets 50 cents as well as a big stake in the restructured firm. If creditors refuse to co-operate, the government will probably seek to squash them using the same fast-track legal process.
The collapse of Detroit’s giants is a tragedy, affecting tens of thousands of current and former workers. But the best way to offer them support is directly, not by gerrymandering the rules. The investors in these firms are easily portrayed as vultures, but many are entrusted with the savings of ordinary people, and in any case all have a legal claim that entitles them to due process. In a crisis it is easy to put politics first, but if lenders fear their rights will be abused, other firms will find it more expensive to borrow, especially if they have unionised workforces that are seen to be friendly with the government.
It may be too late for Chrysler’s secured creditors and if GM’s lenders cannot reach a voluntary agreement, they may face a similar fate. That would establish a terrible precedent. Bankruptcy exists to sort legal claims on assets. If it becomes a tool of social policy, who will then lend to struggling firms in which the government has a political interest?
Add comment May 12th, 2009
In a Bloomberg article today, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn said that the central bank’s emergency lending programs aren’t creating a significant risk for U.S. taxpayers and went on to clarify that the major sense of security is prompted by the quality of the collateral pledged against these loans. To quote Kohn:
“We are not taking significant credit risk that might end up being absorbed by the taxpayer. For almost all the loans made by the Federal Reserve, we look first to sound borrowers for repayment and then to underlying collateral.”
Add comment May 5th, 2009
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