Have a read
http://seekingalpha.com/article/128390-exclusive-big-banks-recent-profitability-due-to-aig-scam

Posted by: Mbuna | Mar 30 2009 6:43 utc | 1

Goldman Sachs and the Manipulation of Oil Prices

Also see...

How Goldman Sachs was at the center of the oil trading fiasco that bankrupted pipeline giant Semgroup.

Prices at the pump are slowly moving up again, as the do every spring /summer...

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 30 2009 6:58 utc | 2

The U.S. once again seeking the Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiíte Army´s assistance to quell a Saudi-backed Sunni uprising ... OUCH!

And some MoAers still doubt my frequently voiced predictions of a U.S.-Iran rapprochement?

Posted by: Parviz | Mar 30 2009 7:29 utc | 3

South Park on the mortgage crisis

I especially like then which is certainly based on inside knowledge of the Treasuries decision making.

Posted by: b | Mar 30 2009 8:54 utc | 4

Obama holds “very pleasant” meeting with top US bankers
Bank CEO's emerge satisfied that Obama understands his mission; give the meeting 4 1/2 stars:

While no transcript of the discussions has been released (nor will there be), the bankers emerged very pleased. Their post-meeting comments included:

* Ken Lewis, CEO of Bank of America: "We're just in this together. There's still some hard work to do, but a pleasant meeting." On executive bonuses, Lewis added, "I got the impression, both from [Obama] and from some of the things that are going on behind the scenes that cooler heads will prevail and nothing will be done that is that punitive."

* Vikram Pandit of Citigroup: "We all have a common goal for building momentum for a recovery. It was good constructive meeting with a lot of open dialogue."

* Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan: On the question of AIG bonuses, Obama "is very clear that he is not against wealth.... I think he would like to see an awful lot of self-restraint," as opposed to government regulation.

* Robert Kelly of New York Mellon Corp, on the toxic asset program detailed by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner earlier this week: "We don't know all the details...but we think it's a really encouraging first step to get the plan out there.... I think there's going to be a lot of interest in it.... I think that we are very much aligned with the administration."

* John Koskinen of Freddie Mac: "No one in that room gave any indication at all that they were anything other than enthusiastic about supporting the president and this program."

* John Mack of Morgan Stanley: "There was no tension. It was all about cooperation...It was all about getting the economy going and the banks taking a crucial role in making sure that happens...It was all about working together and was very encouraging."

* Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs: "Everybody was on the same page, one of cooperation. What we really wanted the president to understand, which of course he does understand, was that we recognize our interests are aligned, that we only do well if the economy does well."

For his part, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that Obama was "very pleased" with the outcome and that he hoped to keep the lines of communication open with the bankers.

Top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, who participated in the meeting with the bankers, said Thursday, "We're reliant upon them to help rebuild our economy. It would be very unnatural if we didn't engage them and have a direct opportunity to pick their brains and look to the future."

Clinical, methodical, and Goddamn, systemic...

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 30 2009 9:05 utc | 5

The 'revolution' starts here as 35,000 pack the G20 march

Chris Knight, the anthropology professor suspended from the University of East London last week for suggesting that bankers might be lynched, was wandering the march alone. "I just met a copper and I said to him, 'Is this the revolution?' He said: 'No, this is the dry run, the revolution starts on Wednesday. Midweek is when we will really start to dance'."

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 30 2009 10:02 utc | 6

Nice piece: My Manhattan Project - How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street

When I asked Leszek what the busy group did that sat next to us, he told me they created mortgage-backed securities. It was an instrument, he claimed, designed to keep programmers employed. Having started to overcome my aversion to the overpaid life—I had recently bought a suit at Barneys, the old one on Seventh Avenue—I asked him how the bonds worked.

“You put chicken into the grinder”—he laughed with that infectious Wall Street black humor—“and out comes sirloin.”

Posted by: b | Mar 30 2009 10:30 utc | 7

Last August I wrote First Sgt. Hatley and the Beauchamp TNR Affair and later First Sgt. Hatley Involved in a Second Murder.

A U.S. Army sergeant outed as a murderer in today's NYT seems to be the same one that led the unit involved in last years New Republic / Beauchamp controversy. Then he denied atrocities Beauchamp reported on.

The thread receive comments from some of his fellow soldiers defending him and calling him "the finest."

Now LA Times reports:

A military court convicted a second soldier of murder in the execution-style slayings of four bound and blindfolded Iraqi detainees in 2007 after the soldier pleaded guilty at his court-martial Monday.

Wearing his dress uniform and speaking crispy and confidently, Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Mayo, of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, pleaded guilty to charges of premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit premeditated murder at the proceeding at the U.S. Army's Rose Barracks in southern Germany.
...
Mayo, Leahy and Master Sgt. John Hatley, 40, are accused of pulling the trigger.

"Hatley stated that if we took (the) individuals to detention they'd be released in a matter of days," Mayo told the court. "He said we should take care of them. I agreed."
...
Hatley's court-martial on charges of premeditated murder, conspiracy to commit premeditated murder and obstruction of justice is scheduled for April.

Posted by: b | Mar 30 2009 11:08 utc | 8

Bank walkaways - Banks declining to take possession at end of foreclosure process

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Mercy James thought she had lost her rental property here to foreclosure. A date for a sheriff’s sale had been set, and notices about the foreclosure process were piling up in her mailbox.

After Ms. James had her tenants move out, vandals hit the home. It is set for demolition, but the title is still in her name.

Ms. James had the tenants move out, and soon her white house at the corner of Thomas and Maple Streets fell into the hands of looters and vandals, and then, into disrepair. Dejected and broke, Ms. James said she salvaged but a lesson from her loss.

So imagine her surprise when the City of South Bend contacted her recently, demanding that she resume maintenance on the property. The sheriff’s sale had been canceled at the last minute, leaving the property title — and a world of trouble — in her name.

“I thought, ‘What kind of game is this?’ ” Ms. James, 41, said while picking at trash at the house, now so worthless the city plans to demolish it — another bill for which she will be liable.

City officials and housing advocates here and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal — from legal fees to maintenance — exceeds the diminishing value of the real estate.

This is fucking insanity...

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 30 2009 11:47 utc | 9

Bank walkaways - Banks declining to take possession at end of foreclosure process

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Mercy James thought she had lost her rental property here to foreclosure. A date for a sheriff’s sale had been set, and notices about the foreclosure process were piling up in her mailbox.

After Ms. James had her tenants move out, vandals hit the home. It is set for demolition, but the title is still in her name.

Ms. James had the tenants move out, and soon her white house at the corner of Thomas and Maple Streets fell into the hands of looters and vandals, and then, into disrepair. Dejected and broke, Ms. James said she salvaged but a lesson from her loss.

So imagine her surprise when the City of South Bend contacted her recently, demanding that she resume maintenance on the property. The sheriff’s sale had been canceled at the last minute, leaving the property title — and a world of trouble — in her name.

“I thought, ‘What kind of game is this?’ ” Ms. James, 41, said while picking at trash at the house, now so worthless the city plans to demolish it — another bill for which she will be liable.

City officials and housing advocates here and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal — from legal fees to maintenance — exceeds the diminishing value of the real estate.

This is fucking insanity...

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 30 2009 11:47 utc | 10

U$-
The ghost in the machine and I agree completely with you on this (again) :)

Does the bank "own" the property? Or does the former owner?

I imagine this is gonna be the norm soon. We'll lose ownership of anything but debt and problems...

The flip side of this could mean some serious squatter's rights movements springing up... possession being 9/10ths the law.

If this happens I have my eye on a couple of 8,000 sqft snowmass village homes where I used to poach the hot tub 'cause no one was ever home... There are plenty to be had in and around aspen and in teluride an entire lost civilization! where you could put down some roots.

Posted by: d.13 | Mar 30 2009 14:01 utc | 11

Maldistribution, maldistribution.
I have said before that profit being impossible the distribution of wealth is based upon force and mostly upon deception. Eventually the economists will discover that there is a Mediterranean sea or that it is possible to design the wheel.

Posted by: jlcg | Mar 30 2009 15:01 utc | 12

Club Orlov lulz: Bullets from the Drug War

"This is an inter-US conflict, because Americans are the most avid consumers, sellers, and prosecutors of drugs ... Life in the USA gives everyone a pain that is for many people simply not survivable without drugs: either alcohol, pharmaceuticals or illegal drugs"

Posted by: Cloud | Mar 30 2009 15:18 utc | 13

hudson: Financing the Empire

Posted by: b real | Mar 30 2009 18:14 utc | 14

U$, I think this fits with your "clinical, methodical, systemic" story @5:

Michael Hudson at Counterpunch: Financing the Empire

Strange as it may seem – and irrational as it would be in a more logical system of world diplomacy – the “dollar glut” is what finances America’s global military build-up. It forces foreign central banks to bear the costs of America’s expanding military empire – effective “taxation without representation.” Keeping international reserves in “dollars” means recycling their dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury bills – U.S. government debt issued largely to finance the military.

Posted by: catlady | Mar 30 2009 18:19 utc | 15

U$cam @9&10

Just goes to show...as D13 said, possession is 9/10. This deal where lender takes possession just ain't right, and to hell with the logic and legality of it all.

Posted by: rapt | Mar 30 2009 18:24 utc | 16

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/03/pension-fund-shifted-billions-into-stocks-just-before-crash/>Raw Story has this gem about how the Bush administration moved 64 billion in pension funds from the bond market to the stock market just before the collapse. TPM's Davis Kurtz speculates as to why;

Notes Talking Points Memo's David Kurtz: "A finance professor who had previously advised the agency not to make the switch away from bonds compared the move to an insurance company writing policies to cover hurricane damage and then investing the premiums in beachfront property."

TPM's Josh Marshall, meanwhile, sees the move not as incompetence but possibly as part of a more general move by the Bush Administration to push more money into the stock market (a la their failed Social Security 'private accounts' bid).

"The [Fund] decided to put most of its $64 billion of reserves into stocks," Marshall notes. "And already by September 2008, i.e., before the bottom really fell out on Wall Street, the stock portfolio had already lost 23%. That percentage must be much higher today.

"One of the big drives behind Social Security privatization was the desire to find more money -- in the case of Social Security, a lot more money -- to keep the fires burning on Wall Street," he adds. "Not just more fees for the people handling the money, but more money to keep pushing asset values higher. This looks like the same thing just using slightly different means."

This seems about right, and explains why the Bush administration so forcefully pushed the politically DOA notion that SS should be privatized. The street became starved for cash in order for the ponzi to continue, otherwise they realized that the whole thing would collapse. This is yet more evidence confirming that all the big players knew well in advance that what had been created was indeed a ponzi scheme on the verge of collapse - and that the wall street/government CONSPIRED together to loot the public treasury.

Posted by: anna missed | Mar 30 2009 19:10 utc | 17

And incidently, the above would also be evidence that the collapse was not a black swan event, given that efforts were advanced YEARS before to prevent it from happening.

Posted by: anna missed | Mar 30 2009 19:20 utc | 18

am

their utter criminality leaves me cold

i suppose it's my reading of wm reich - but the body language of tyrants whether they be bush berlusconi, le pen, blair , sarkozy - is one of open hatred of people - theyè don't hide it & on the contrary in the evangilical tradition - there are those who make a virtue of that hatred - kenneth copeland, hagee come immediately to mind. they are sneering, coleric, irritated people who hate to share their time & 'ideas' with the people - even if those people are 'represented' by the most haigiographic of whores in the press

one look at madoff & you know he thinks we have less value than a goat

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 30 2009 19:39 utc | 19

@anna missed - And incidently, the above would also be evidence that the collapse was not a black swan event, given that efforts were advanced YEARS before to prevent it from happening.

Yep - well prepared. Watch out for the application of all the new internal security laws and procedures enacted in the last years. They were always under 'terrorism' label which never made sense and will com in handy when now as the shit really hits the fan. It is not only a U.S. phenomenon. Briton, where the current prime minister is the top guy who created the mess is even further advanced.

Posted by: b | Mar 30 2009 20:13 utc | 20

once the world was truly tragic in the sense of a dante, a cervantes, a goethe or a shakespeare

now it is simply a rerun of a very bad movie with doris day & james stewart

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 30 2009 20:37 utc | 21

@17 The GOP wanted a police state for general fascist purposes, not because they anticipated economic trouble. PBGC won't disclose the precise timing of their reallocation but this looks like they were gaming the election, not forestalling anticipated disaster. You're giving them way too much credit when you say that they knew what was coming. Certainly not by February. The party fanatics all just sat there ignoring the cracks in the ice - bad signs indicated liberal subversion, not problems. Millard in particular was entirely too stupid to know better. Millard's Lehman experience was running 'wealth management,' which does the smooth talking for the jackals in the brokerage. He was a lawyer by training and essentially a salesman, trading on the upper-crust contacts he made working for Millicent Fenwick. She was great but he was a hack who tacked right along with the party. There was no evil genious here.

Posted by: ...---... | Mar 30 2009 21:17 utc | 22

genius.

Posted by: | Mar 30 2009 21:17 utc | 23

Yeah, these bastards have known about the sinking of the ship for quite awhile. A buddy who is a dirt pimp was telling me two years ago this was about to come down on everyone's head. He knew the poor credit risk who were getting loans, but even more, he understood how the market was using those loans to scam the system. We call them CDS now, but he only knew there was something rotten because of all the queer loans banks were giving.

Smart kid, I guess I should have listened to him and sold my soul to the devil, and bought a place when I could have pretty easy.

Even the wall street boys who "lost" will retire with more money than most of us will ever know. So did they really "lose"? Or were they just playing the fall guy for their other buddies who are still running (ruining) things?

b-thanks for the south park take on the Fed. I think that's probably closer to the truth than we'd like to admit.

Posted by: DavidS | Mar 30 2009 23:03 utc | 24

Ex-Saudi envoy Prince Bandar 'disappears'

Ex-Saudi envoy Prince Bandar 'disappears' , father seriously ill

Keys to the kingdom: Inside Saudi Arabia's royal family

The crown prince is seriously ill, and Saudi Arabia's normally secretive royal family is openly clashing over who will take the throne, reports Hugh Miles

The Independent on Sunday

A dispute over Saudi Arabia's royal succession burst into the open yesterday, revealing a power struggle in which one of the most senior princes in the oil-rich kingdom is reported to have disappeared. The prospect of instability in a country that is not only the world's largest oil exporter but also a key Western ally at the heart of the Middle East will cause serious concern in Washington, London and beyond.

Rumours are rife over the position of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, 60, son of the heir to the Saudi throne, who has not been seen in public for weeks. Prince Bandar is better known abroad than almost any other member of the Saudi royal family, not only for his extravagant lifestyle, but because of his daring foreign policy initiatives during 22 years as the Saudi ambassador in Washington, where he played an important role after 9/11 and during two Gulf wars. His absence from public life comes at a sensitive time in Saudi Arabia: his father, Crown Prince Sultan, is gravely ill with cancer, throwing the succession to King Abdullah into question.

One theory in political circles in Riyadh is that Prince Bandar was seeking to oust King Abdullah before Prince Sultan dies, thus placing his father on the throne. Other rumours claim that Prince Bandar is ill, or that he angered King Abdullah by dabbling in Syrian politics without authorisation. The Saudi embassy in London could not be contacted for comment last week, but this weekend political tensions in the kingdom came dramatically to the surface.

On Friday night King Abdullah unexpectedly announced the appointment of one of his half-brothers, Prince Nayef, the 76-year-old interior minister, to the post of second deputy prime minister, which had been left vacant. This was immediately taken as an indication that he would become crown prince when Prince Sultan dies or becomes king. But yesterday Prince Talal, another senior figure, publicly demanded that the king confirm that the appointment did not mean Prince Nayef would automatically become the next crown prince. Such public disagreement among senior Saudi royals is highly unusual.

As, said elsewhere, "If anything could shake up world politics and the existing power structures of the world right now, this would be it."

Better hold on tight, the shit is getting ready to pop..

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 31 2009 0:09 utc | 25

U$-

Nice catch, and as you said this could be a very interesting development in what has been the status quo for many years.

On a side note, Bandar has a 55,000 sqft of home up in Starwood, Aspen's first gated community. And probably an equal amount of space in separate houses for guest, a big security detail, and employees. I heard a rumor he sold the 28,000 sq ft house, or that it was on the market. Big expensive homes are much like art; if the price is right they're always for sale. And sometimes they're put on sale just to stroke the ego of the owner who likes turning down lavish offers... Ah the old days, before Madoff made-off with a third of Aspen's fortune... HeHeHe.

Yeah, that's a bit mean spirited, not all of them are assholes, but most of them were, are and will always be.

I'd say five years from now we are gonna look back at this time from a very different mountain top than the one we're standing on now. Yeah, there is a sea change coming, things like Bandar disappearing are as much a sign as a Goethe glass pouring water out it's small spout... There is a big storm abrewin' out there in old politico land. There are going to be some big ships sunk (a few have already went down) but I'll bet the only folks in the lifeboats are the ones who opened the ballast to flood the ship... all those paying passengers sinking into poverty while the captain and crew again hoist their jolly roger and seek a new ship to board and loot. Arrgh!

Posted by: d.13 | Mar 31 2009 3:48 utc | 26