Grayson on the Fed bailout: “If you’re not a Wall Street bank, you’re screwed”

Bloomberg: Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion

By Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz – Nov 27, 2011 4:01 PM PT
Bloomberg Markets Magazine

Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. No one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue. Betty Liu reports on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop.” (Source: Bloomberg)
Enlarge image Kenneth D. Lewis Former CEO of Bank of America Corp.

On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” He didn’t say that his firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day. Photo: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

More:

VIDEO: Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing of May 5, 2009.

Read Full Post »

Tea Party Assortment

H/T- Daily Kos

Read Full Post »

The Kooky Konservative Klown Kar

Donald Trump at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. Trump recently announced he would not be running for President. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

Tuesday 17 May 2011

by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout

We all want to be big stars
But we don’t know why
And we don’t know how…

– Counting Crows

Say it ain’t so, Donald.

This is so depressing. I was actively looking forward to following the Trump For President crazy train for at least a few weeks longer, if not more. You couldn’t stay in long enough to participate in one debate, Donald? It would have been the show of the year. “Birth certificates the blacks love me derp derp derp…” All lost forever now. The hairpiece has moved on.

I know, I know, it was a joke campaign, a ploy to get people to watch some stupid reality show I am proud to say I’ve never even peeked at once. But you have to understand my perspective here: the quintessential excellence of Trump’s absurd pre-candidacy was the fact that it dragged the fundamental derangement of the GOP base into the light for all to see. After Mr. Obama gelded Trump with the birth certificate release, the explosion of nonsense from the hedgerows of the far right took on an almost mythical quality, and editorial cartoonists from sea to shining sea had great sport portraying Trump and his followers as tinfoil-wearing brain donors.

This is what I’m going to miss. But I guess you can’t have everything, and besides, there is plenty here to play with until the race begins in earnest.

Take Mitt Romney, for instance. Here is a man who, by any meaningful measure, should be the runaway favorite to be the Republican nominee…until, once again, you take the berserkers of the GOP base into account. They are going to be the largest voting bloc in the Republican primaries, and they consider Mormonism a cult (which cracks me up, given the cultish nature of that crew). Add to that the fact that Romney chopped his own legs off last week trying to explain away the fact that he wrote the blueprint for “Obamacare,” which is roundly despised by the party base. E.J. Dionne nailed the crux of Romney’s dilemma in a Sunday column for the Washington Post:

The candidates appear much smaller than they are because the party’s primary voters and core interest groups insist upon cutting them down to size. To win a Republican nomination, a candidate has to move right, recant absolutely any past position that violates the current conservative catechism and never dare to speak the truth that solving our deficit problem will require new revenue – a.k.a. taxes.

Thus we have Mitt Romney defending the individual mandate to buy insurance that was part of the health plan he championed in Massachusetts but then denouncing President Obama for imposing a similar mandate at the national level. This shuffle wasn’t good enough for the guardians of conservative orthodoxy. It ruled that Romney will merit salvation only by fully repudiating his greatest achievement as governor.

And then there’s Newt. I literally jumped for joy when he announced his candidacy. Trump was more entertaining, but Newt will do. Straight out of the gate, he blasted the Paul Ryan plan to destroy Medicare with both barrels, calling it “social engineering,” a loaded phrase for anyone on the far right, especially since the Tea Party freshmen in the House are going to try and roll the plan out again this week. There were perhaps ten beats of silence after Gingrich delivered his broadside before his people scrambled to walk back his comments with the predictable “The liberal media misinterpreted him” claim. Expect many more moments like this as the election approaches; one of these days, Newt is going to open his mouth too wide and fall right in.

Ron Paul is in the race, which should be an effective sop for those in the GOP base who pine for Donald Trump and his bright ideas. Paul is, after all, the fellow who voted against sending federal aid money to New Orleans after the Katrina disaster, and just recently told people along the flooding Mississippi River to build their own levies, because the federal government is too big and too controlling in his opinion. Yet this is the same fellow who wants to pass laws that will charge anyone who gets an abortion with first-degree murder. This is just the kind of obnoxious, witless, false libertarianism the GOP base can really sing its teeth into.

And then, of course, there are Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann to consider. Neither are in it yet – Palin has all but disappeared from public view after covering herself in sackcloth and ashes when Gabrielle Giffords was shot – but one can dream. The bottom of the insanity barrel has not yet been found; there is already a self-described vampire named Jonathon Sharkey running for the Republican nomination, speaking of sinking your teeth in.

How can this not be fun?

SOURCE

Read Full Post »

The Unraveling Of The Tea Party Convention

Tea Party Nation Speaks Out: ‘We Never Did This To Be Rich And Famous’

TPM Muckraker

Christina Bellantoni | January 30, 2010, 5:49PM

Tea Party Nation organizers today issued a long defense of their unraveling convention, lambasting former members they say are trying to harm the movement and outlining for the first time in great detail their event’s sponsorships and problems.

We’ve been following the travails of the upcoming Tea Party Nation convention for weeks, with key speakers withdrawing and the Tea Party Express group backing out as well thanks to feuds over the cost and expected profits of the convention.

Sherry Phillips wrote a long email to members of the Tea Party Nation mailing list titled “Setting The Record Straight.”

Phillips said organizers were encouraged to speak out against the “intense media scrutiny and attacks by former members” but she stayed silent so as not to further divisions “that are already hurting this movement.”

“We will stay silent no longer,” she wrote.

She goes into detail about convention sponsors American Liberty Alliance, American Majority and Campaign for Liberty, and said the Tea Party Express only withdrew because of their push to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada.

She calls out “former Tea Party Nation members” for “discussing their association with liberal media outlets” and “conspiring” to harm TPN and the convention.

MORE HERE

Read Full Post »

The Wingnut Revolution Is Upon Us

After nearly three decades of Reaganomics in which the wealthiest two percent of Americans have grown exponentially wealthier while middle class wages have remained stagnant, a growing faction of super rich Americans is seriously pissed off — and their Wingnut Revolution is upon us.

Sure, the interests and influence of the wealthiest two percent make them more responsible than most for the free market policies that created this current economic crisis. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about those responsible for this recession, it’s that the concept of accountability is about as foreign as their live-in au pairs. Instead, they’re blaming this on Barney Frank and a legion of “losers” (read that: working class minorities) even though Ben Bernanke himself has debunked this myth.

But accountability (a “reckoning” as President Obama called it) is underway in the form of the president’s housing proposal, his healthcare plan and, naturally, the recovery act. At the end of the day, ninety-five percent of Americans will benefit from what amounts to the largest tax cut in American history, along with increased access to affordable healthcare and millions of new jobs.

Though, alas, the super rich will have to pay slightly more in taxes.

Yeah, that’s a shame.

Read Full Post »