Wanker bankers corrupted and broke our economic system

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Keith Olbermann delivers an excellent summary of how Wall Street bankers corrupted the financial regulatory scheme put in place by FDR after the last time Wall Street bankers destroyed our economic system with their unbridled greed. With the help of Republicans and Democrats alike in the White House and Congress, these wanker bankers have managed to break our economic system once again with their unbridled greed.

The political players are all familiar: former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan "the maestro" Greenspan, current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Clinton Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin (now with bailed out Citi Bank) and Lawrence Summers (now head of the National Economic Council for the Obama administration), Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX) (now with UBS Bank, which is under investigation for assisting depositors with tax evasion) and Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) (serving time in prison) who gutted the New Deal regulatory scheme, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets Gary Gensler also supported this deregulation of the markets, which leaves me doubtful that President Obama intends to clean house and establish a new economic order that is not controlled by the very same white collar criminals of Wall Street who broke our economic system.

Only a couple of small-time Ponzi scheme brokers have been arrested so far. The rest of the white collar criminals of Wall Street are still at work, busy looting the U.S. Treasury through bail outs and stealing your money. The laws and regulations which were altered to permit them to enage in wholesale theft have not yet been repealed and replaced by a new regulatory scheme.

Until a new regulatory scheme is imposed – bring back the Glass-Steagal Act! – and bankers start going to prison, Americans' confidence in our financial system will not be restored.

NB: Revised and corrected 3/11/09

6 thoughts on “Wanker bankers corrupted and broke our economic system”

  1. Shorter sheapenny: Jimmy Carter, by trying to cut down on “red lining” in minority areas, caused banks and largely unregulated mortgage providers like Countrywide to leverage themselves to the hilt on no doc loans 30 years later.

    Makes sense of you ask me. Maybe we should just blame this on Martin Luther King Jr. marching in Chicago and cut out the middle man.

  2. Wow. Sheapenny you are the most seriously misinformed person who posts comments at this site. Let me help you out. I recommend that you make time to watch a CNBC (I know) investigative report that is actually extremely well produced and lays it all out for you, “House of Cards: Inside America’s Subprime Mortgage Crisis.” http://www.cnbc.com/id/28892719 The program is scheduled to air again on Sunday March 15th, and Sunday March 29th. Check your local listings.

    You will learn that Fannie and Freddie got into some accounting trouble around 2004. As a result, there was a vacuum created as to who set the industry standards. The Wall Street banks stepped in to fill the vacuum. Fannie and Freddie did not purchase securitized sub-prime debts until after 2004, and only then because everyone else on Wall Street was already so heavily leveraged in these securitized debts.

    Let me disabuse you of the notion that our current economic meltdown is solely the result of subprime mortgages. Hardly. It is the exotic derivative investment schemes concocted by investment banks of which mortgages play only a part. Remember the wild speculation that drove up the price of oil last year wholly unrelated to supply and demand? They were betting on the price of oil going up or down without ever actually having to take delivery of any oil. This was the result of a largely unregulated commodities futures market.

    The banks have turned our investment markets into a giant Casino Royale where people can place their bets on whether an investment succeeds or fails without ever owning the investment itself (e,g., credit default swaps). They are not investing in expanding businesss and creating jobs, their only motivation is to make lots of money quickly by gambling on others’ success or failure. They are not capitalists. They are predators. See Dick Meyer’s opinion from November 19, 2003, “The Predator Class.” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/19/opinion/meyer/main584424.shtml

  3. SheaPenny,

    “If Frank and Dodd would have done there jobs to REGULATE the Banks…”

    Are you actually complaining about a lack of regulation? I ask because in your comment on “Bushvilles,” this kind of thinking was deemed socialist and, apparently, Hitlerite.

  4. 65 TRILLION conservatives will quote whatever half-“truthy” nonsense they read on Townhall.

    “The Banks then created a way to package these sub-prime loans to Investment Banks like Goldmann Sachs who sold off these Credit Default Slots to AIG and every investment bank in the World taking a sub-prime problem of 100 Billion Dollars and turning it into a packaged conglomerate of other investments totalling more that 65 TRILLION DOLLARS Worldwide!”

    Wow….. Sheapenny is off his meds again.

  5. I think you left out Barney Frank the ranking member and chairman of the Congressional Banking Committee and Chris Dodd The Ranking Member and Chairman of The Senate Banking Committee who pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into Bankruptcy under the Chairmanship of Franklin Rains by demanding all the Banks referred to in this article give sub-prime loans or else!
    The Banks then created a way to package these sub-prime loans to Investment Banks like Goldmann Sachs who sold off these Credit Default Slots to AIG and every investment bank in the World taking a sub-prime problem of 100 Billion Dollars and turning it into a packaged conglomerate of other investments totalling more that 65 TRILLION DOLLARS Worldwide!
    If Frank and Dodd would have done there jobs to REGULATE the Banks and NOT demand that under the COMMUNITY REINVESTMENT ACT of 1976 passed under President Carter to FORCE Banks to do Sub-Prime Loans over the last 30 years the Banks would be solvent and we the Taxpayers would now be 10 TRILLION DOLLARS richer because we would not have had to bail them out with tax dollars the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve refuse to disclose to Congress who and what bank’s are getting the money!
    Today we are finding out TRILLIONS of dollars of taxpayers money and Federal reserve bail out have gone to CHINA AND EUROPEAN Banking concerns folks!
    Now you know the rest of the story!

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