This is slightly off topic but interesting. Time introduces the 25 people responsible for this current financial mess. The time article gives a brief synopsis of each and then asks you to vote. At the end they give their top 6 or 7 and then show you how the common folk voted. I agree with each and everyone of the 25 named in the article.
They all make me angry with their greed but the one that I am currently furious about is Madoff. WHY IN THE HELL is this man still not being confined to jail. I mean Martha Stewart got a rapid sentence and 6 months for insider trading which basically only hurt herself. Madoff has wiped out retirement and savings accounts of thousands and he is still living in luxury.
Older_Wiser
· 10 months ago
I see that Blythe Masters was left off the list. Google her--she headed the group who initiated, pushed and oversold credit default swaps. And she's still working, too.
As for Martha, yeah, she was just too easy. They almost always go after the easy fish, don't they, while letting the rest of the economy go down the drain. Can't jail those Masters of the Universe, you know!
Joneses
· 10 months ago
Rove needs to be in jail, along with Cheney and Bush.
gizmo
· 10 months ago
Pandit is going to have a tough time foreclosing on his bad mortgages. They were bundled into complicated "structured investment vehicles," and then re-sold so many times that nobody knows who the fuck is actually holding the mortgage. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur in northern Ohio is telling her constituents to stay in their homes and fight foreclosure. She is challenging the banks to actually come up with a hard copy of the loan agreeement. If they can't, they don't have a leg to stand on in court.
Older_Wiser
· 10 months ago
No, they'll have no trouble foreclosing. The original mortgage financing may be scattered to the financial winds, sliced and diced in CDOs, but the servicing agents (such as Citi) still have the pertinent records of the mortgage transaction itself. In your closing papers, you have a Deed of Trust, a legal instrument which shows the amount of your loan. There is no law which forbids the company which holds it from selling it, so the financial "experts" came up with the idea of CDOs which just chip pieces off it for sale. Actually, they've done all this damage to themselves, with their CDOs, sliced and diced mortgages which were broken up, overvalued and oversold to myriad investors, further profitized at each turn.
Clearly, this whole debacle is a portrait of the mortgage industry run amok, aided and abetted by unscrupulous real estate brokers, appraisers and the original mortgage holders, such as the company you thought held your mortgage in its entirety.
anonymoose
· 10 months ago
I'll be sure to contact Pandit several months before I have a catastrophic illness that forces me out of work and puts me behind the economic 8-ball. I will be sure to contact Pandit before I am suddenly laid off and my stream of income disappears. I will also be sure contact Pandit before Citi decides to chop my credit card limit in half and double my interest rate without warning.
Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit came to the House Financial Services committee yesterday to talk about their use of TARP money. While people have their eye on the bailout money, what the Federal Reserve is doing is actually much larger and more scary. The Federal Reserve has guaranteed over $200 billion of Citigroup's toxic assets, in return for $7 billion in warrants that are probably worthless. Bulldog Congressman Alan Grayson spent about five minutes questioning Pandit and taking this farcical deal apart. He forced Pandit to admit that this arrangement gives taxpayers the downside and Citigroup all the profits.
and there's the hearing video at the link as well..
Older_Wiser
· 10 months ago
Why are any of them still the heads of these corporations?
Older_Wiser
· 10 months ago
What gets me (and most of the public outrage is over this) is that the $750B TARP program initiated by Bush and Paulson was simply designed to save the profiteers from going under due to their own greed.
Now we have another $789B, of which only $311B goes directly to aid individuals (through "infrastructure" programs mainly), and there is $478B which seems to be aiding companies, badly run, directly, through various means.
And of course, there are the billions most of the public doesn't know about which were disbursed under Paulson, out of any sunlight or even less transparency, to the financials.
Really, heads should roll for what they've done to this economy. Is it really the consumers' fault if they've been laid off, bankrupted by medical bills, had the terms of credit cards changed without their input, etc? They can try to blame the consumer for buying all those extra shoes, the big house they didn't need, or the fancier SUV, but in the end, it's the entire fault of the financials, which pushed credit on the masses, with no, or few, restrictions.
Will
· 10 months ago
Why is anyone even still bothering to loan their money/make savings&checking deposits to bailed out banks?
Make payments on loans and credit accounts...otherwise...pull your money out of those house of losers and put it someplace where other people's greed has no quarter.
davec
· 10 months ago
One of the big reasons that Citi wasn't allowed to fail is their role in laundering drug money. Same for AIG, among others. Wall Street's dirty little secret is that they cleanse in excess of $600 billion/ year. Read about it in M Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon.
Steve Pipenger
· 10 months ago
Maybe it's time we told Congress and Courts to go fuck themselves and bring back the lynch mob. I'd love to see 100,000 people with lighted torches walking down Wall Street to the stock exchange. That would get their attention.
blackwolf
· 10 months ago
LOL..good call Steve. That will always get their attention.
All Comments
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/arti...
They all make me angry with their greed but the one that I am currently furious about is Madoff. WHY IN THE HELL is this man still not being confined to jail. I mean Martha Stewart got a rapid sentence and 6 months for insider trading which basically only hurt herself. Madoff has wiped out retirement and savings accounts of thousands and he is still living in luxury.
As for Martha, yeah, she was just too easy. They almost always go after the easy fish, don't they, while letting the rest of the economy go down the drain. Can't jail those Masters of the Universe, you know!
Clearly, this whole debacle is a portrait of the mortgage industry run amok, aided and abetted by unscrupulous real estate brokers, appraisers and the original mortgage holders, such as the company you thought held your mortgage in its entirety.
and there's the hearing video at the link as well..
Now we have another $789B, of which only $311B goes directly to aid individuals (through "infrastructure" programs mainly), and there is $478B which seems to be aiding companies, badly run, directly, through various means.
And of course, there are the billions most of the public doesn't know about which were disbursed under Paulson, out of any sunlight or even less transparency, to the financials.
Really, heads should roll for what they've done to this economy. Is it really the consumers' fault if they've been laid off, bankrupted by medical bills, had the terms of credit cards changed without their input, etc? They can try to blame the consumer for buying all those extra shoes, the big house they didn't need, or the fancier SUV, but in the end, it's the entire fault of the financials, which pushed credit on the masses, with no, or few, restrictions.
Make payments on loans and credit accounts...otherwise...pull your money out of those house of losers and put it someplace where other people's greed has no quarter.