Wednesday, Oct 29th
Last update04:12:13 AM GMT
Economic Glance
Eileen Foster, a former senior executive at Countrywide Financial, told CBS's "60 Minutes" Steve Kroft that mortgage fraud was a way of business.
"From what I saw, the types of things I saw, it was — it appeared systemic. It, it wasn't just one individual or two or three individuals, it was branches of individuals, it was regions of individuals," she told Kroft.
Just take a look at banking. The "too big to fail" banks just keep getting bigger and bigger. Back in 2002, the top 10 U.S. banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today, the top 10 U.S. banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets.
If you can believe it, the "big six" U.S. banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo) now control assets equivalent to approximately 60 percent of America's gross national product.
Texas cotton grower Brad Heffington speaks Wall Street's language of hedges, correlation charts and the like as easily as he discusses weevils and pesticides. Yet today his financial knowledge is of limited use.
Heffington's been sidelined from the cotton futures market, thanks to a surge of financial speculators into the market, which originally was designed to protect farmers like him against price shifts.
and How Newt Gingrich Abetted the Theft of Average Joe’s Home
The untold story in the foreclosure crisis unfolding across America is that, following a foreclosure perpetrated by one of the October 2008 Bailout Banks (e.g. Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo) Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac suddenly appear as the record owner of Average Joe’s home. These federal government sponsored entities then go into local housing court and get a court order authorizing them to evict Joe. If Joe resists, these supposedly charitable institutions obtain a writ ordering the local sheriff to forcibly remove Joe from his home.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson stepped off the elevator into the Third Avenue offices of hedge fund Eton Park Capital Management LP in Manhattan. It was July 21, 2008, and market fears were mounting. Four months earlier, Bear Stearns Cos. had sold itself for just $10 a share to JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)
Now, amid tumbling home prices and near-record foreclosures, attention was focused on a new source of contagion: Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac, which together had more than $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities and other debt outstanding, Bloomberg Markets reports in its January issue.
We knew the last bailout from the Federal Reserve was pretty big, but not until now did we have statistics on the actually tally. If you thought that the $700 billion bailout for TARP was big, get a load of this.
Just exactly how big was the Federal Reserve’s bailout of the banks between the years of 2008 and 2010? Thanks to a Federal Request of Information Act gone fulfilled, America now knows the truth behind a colossal cover-up: almost $8 trillion.
The solution is simple. Every country should tell the bankers to take a hike and crash and burn and new currencies should immediately be proffered, based on whatever it is people want to collectively consider valuable. The hoarded excesses of the manipulative and psychopathic overlords, should be wiped out in the interest of returning balance. Iceland should be the guidon and standard behind which all following nations should march. If you don't do it you are basically saying, “Go ahead and destroy me, I deserve it.”
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