by Thomas Graham

IF YOU are a first-home buyer who does not like the idea of spending $500,000 for an undistinguished, two-bedroom house in a middle-ring suburb of Sydney, perhaps you should look further afield.

While Sydney real estate prices have dropped, they have not been ravaged by the economic crisis as they have in many European countries. And the price crash is attracting overseas investors.

The managing director of Marsh and Parsons real estate agency in London, Peter Rollings, said prices had fallen massively. "[They] are down between 20-35 per cent since August 2007 and, on top of that, sterling also weakened dramatically … last year. As a result, we saw large numbers of overseas buyers coming to London buying blue-chip property at knock-down prices."

France seemed to have escaped the real estate woes of Britain, but its luck has run out, with house prices tumbling.

Charles Gillooley, a director of an agency in the Dordogne region in south-western France, said the crash meant good deals for foreign investors.

"The reality of the economic crisis is sinking in to most French vendors, who have adjusted their prices downwards.

"One of our houses with beautiful views, a swimming pool and a large garden was on the market for €278,000 [$490,000] and has been reduced for €214,000 [$377,000]. That's a huge drop."

In recent years, French real estate in areas such as the Dordogne and the south has relied on the British buying second homes. But with economic uncertainty, prices have been reduced to attract buyers.

For the extravagant type wanting to buy big, there are properties such as the 176-bedroom Chateau de Nainville-les-Roches, 45 kilometres south of Paris. The 19th-century chateau on 40 hectares was sold for $6.1 million last November. Real estate agents in the area said that before the crash it could have fetched $20 million.

If France isn't your thing, then you may want to look at the olive groves of Italy. Calabria, in the south, offers cheaper property than in the more popular areas of Tuscany and Umbria, and a seaside villa can be bought for a fraction of the price of a similar property in the south of France. But if Europe doesn't appeal, there could soon be more property bargains closer to home.

Professor Steve Keen of the University of Western Sydney said he expected the Australian housing market to crash spectacularly. "We are going to see huge levels of unemployment, people will be forced to sell their houses and this will bring prices crashing down.

"I'm expecting a depression out of this economic crisis and house prices will simply not hold up when a depression is occurring."

By Rob Kirby

Most widely accepted and reported accounts of our current global financial difficulties place its beginnings in the August 2007 timeframe, when sub-prime [mortgage] credit markets “seized up”.

The precarious state of our financial system was echoed some time before August 2007, when none other than Dallas Fed President, Richard Fisher, espoused [in a rare moment of clarity and candor] back on April 16, 2007,

“I have spoken in previous speeches of our “faith-based currency,” a term I use only slightly tongue in cheek. The dollar—like the euro, the yen, the British pound and other currencies—is what economists call a fiat currency. It is backed only by the federal government’s power to raise the revenues needed to meet its obligations and by the rectitude of the U.S. central bank. If the market were to lose faith in either assumption, the dollar would be debased.”

Fisher’s [then] words elicit connotations of “a sales job” – to make believers out of skeptics. After all, instilling faith in skeptics “IS” fundamentally what any religion is all about anyway, ehhh?

Why We Should All Be Skeptical

Generally speaking, Central Bankers are paid to lie. We know this because former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman, Alan Blinder, “slipped” back in the 1990’s when, on national television, he uttered the words,

"The last duty of a central banker is to tell the public the truth."

When one stops and connects the thoughts of these two esteemed Federal Reserve officers one can easily arrive at the conclusion that lies [or omissions of truth, if you prefer] are in all likelihood, tied to “keeping the faith”.

Recent changes in accounting procedures of FASB [Financial Accounting Standards Board] at the behest of the assemblage of Central Bankers at the latest G–20 meeting in London will serve to obfuscate the true financial condition of financial institutions. As Trace Mayer recently articulated, FASB Changes Perpetuate Fair Value Lying;

THE SPINELESS GELATINOUS FASB

Financial companies [read: the privately owned Federal Reserve] have used their agents, U.S. lawmakers, to pressure the FASB to relax fair-value accounting rules. Yahoo! Finance reports,

“The changes will allow the assets to be valued at what they would go for in an “orderly” sale, as opposed to a forced or distressed sale. The new guidelines will apply to the second quarter that began this month.”


You see folks, the real reason behind the lies of the bankers and their owned, puppet politicians through ACCOUNTING CHICANERY is, yet-again, to “keep the faith” in a dying, irredeemable fiat currency regime that has long past its due date.

This same mob would like us all to believe that they are doing their level-best to “unfreeze credit markets” and get the banks lending again.


If this were truly so, we must ask why the Obama Administration last week chose to villain-ize hedge funds and make spurious claims that they “stood” with ‘reasonable banks’ and the Chrysler employees.

The reality, folks, is that this issue has been severely [and purposely, perhaps?] mischaracterized:

You see, the hedge funds that were cast in the role of “villains” in this case just happened to be the most senior, secured debt holders of Chrysler.

When one contemplates what debt is, as an asset class [as opposed to common equity] and why an investor chooses secured / unsecured debt over equity, one must consider where each of these assets stands in a receivership. Secured debt or fixed income, by virtue of its FIXED coupon, limits the upside return of investor in favor of SECURITY – that of being first in line for repayment of principal should a company fail. Investors in equity [common stock] of a company have consciously and willfully chosen more risk and the prospect of greater, unbridled returns, but assume that risk at the expense of knowing – in the case of receivership – they stand BEHIND the secured lenders of said company. A recap of President Obama's remarks,


He [Obama] lauded the company's management and the United Automobile Workers, for making concessions. He even praised J.P. Morgan and other financial firms that "agreed to reduce their debt to less than one-third of its face value to help free Chrysler from its crushing obligations" and German automaker, Daimler, for agreeing to give up its stake.


Then he slammed unnamed hedge funds that rejected the government’s settlement offer in hopes of getting a taxpayer-funded bailout. "They were hoping that everybody else would make sacrifices, and they would have to make none," he said. "Some demanded twice the return that other lenders were getting."


Then, with pointed anger, the president added:


I don't stand with them. I stand with Chrysler's employees and their families and communities. I stand with Chrysler's management, its dealers and its suppliers. I stand with the millions of Americans who own and want to buy Chrysler cars. I don't stand with those who held out when everybody else is making sacrifices.

President Obama’s proposed solution to the Chrysler crisis would see secured debt holders recoup the same amount [percentage] of their investments as unsecured debt holders and equity holders.

Because secured debt holders would not agree to this proposal, the Obama Administration has forced Chrysler into bankruptcy, where they hope to use the power of the courts to “stuff” secured debt holders with their prescribed outcome.

If the Obama Administration is successful in enforcing this solution on the secured debt holders of Chrysler, this might constitute a “wooden stake through the heart” of global debt markets – effectively shuttering them forever.

Remember folks, President Obama is being counseled in this regard by an esteemed list of current, as well as former, Central Bankers. Should this action end up irreparably shuttering the debt markets forever, it would run contrary to the stated goals of Fed and Treasury officials that they are doing their level best to “unfreeze” credit markets and get banks lending again, wouldn’t it?

But then again, if Alan Blinder was telling the truth when he said that “the last duty of a Central Banker is to tell the public the truth”, should any of us really be surprised?

Got physical gold yet?

April 28 (Bloomberg) -- Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lewis lost the support of the largest U.S. pension fund as an analyst said the bank needs as much as $70 billion of capital.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System said it will vote against Lewis and all 18 directors at the annual meeting tomorrow in the bank’s hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. The lender needs $60 billion to $70 billion, according to Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group Inc. analyst Paul Miller, who cited stress tests performed by his firm.

Bank of America should consider converting preferred shares to common stock, including $27 billion in private hands “as soon as possible,” Miller wrote in a note to clients today. Miller said his firm’s versions of the stress tests were “somewhat tougher” than those performed by U.S. regulators...

Comment:

"The recent stock market rally was sparked by encouraging $3 Billion earnings from Citigroup and Bank of America. Less than a month later we learn THEY NOW NEED $70 BILLION???? How long before citizens and the markets wake up and realize what is really going on here. Very soon we will all discover the emperor has no clothes.

Got gold?

from LeMetropole

The much touted "stress test" of the U.S. banking system is nothing but a PR sham and in reality, completely meaningless. The "worst case scenario used is a 3+% drop in GDP, and a 10% unemployment rate. If real GDP and unemployment numbers were ever offered up, my guess is that we already have had a minimum 5% contraction in GDP and true unemployment is approaching 13-15%. The stress test only addresses "tier one capital", my question is this, what about all the "off balance sheet" crapola that surely renders these reckless banks insolvent? No, really, I WANT TO KNOW! By trying to control and manipulate ALL markets, these banks have taken $ trillions upon $ trillions worth of fraudulent transactions on (and according to their accounting, off) their books. They are walking corpses that cannot be saved.

On books, off books, what is this crap!? If you enter into a transaction, is it not still a transaction whether you "account" for it or not? Are you not responsible to perform on the contract, no matter how you account for it? I did business my entire life on a handshake, I never had "off balance sheet" business because A DEAL IS A DEAL. Period. Even if it was a bad deal, it was still a deal and I would learn a lesson but still perform.

The "originator", the biggest abuser, the teacher if you will, for off balance sheet shenanigans, IS the U.S. government. They have used fraudulent accounting for nearly 50 years. The have used a fraudulent currency for nearly 40 years, invoking the "never pay" model. And now they are providing a stress test for the banks? How quaint, how brazen of them. I believe that the biggest stress test of all time will be imposed on the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve very soon by Mother Nature (the markets). The Dollar has completed it's short covering rally, it has made no headway since last November. The Treasury market has retraced all of it's gains since the "quantitative easing" announced by the Fed in mid March. The 10 year has moved up from sub 2.5% to an even 3% in the span of 6 weeks, a move higher from here should accelerate this move. The equity market is at a moment of truth, in that it's momentum has also stalled but it must continue higher in order to "prove" all the talk of "green shoots" and to spur consumer spending and confidence.

Should ANY of these markets fail, the jig will be up for the other 2. Should the Dollar collapse, it will spur Treasury selling and thus higher interest rates. Should Treasuries collapse, the laughable "bottom" in real estate will be proven to be false, and thus will spur further negative sentiment and consumer retrenchment. Should stocks collapse, well, you will have pension shortfalls, even more consumer retrenchment, in short, a "depressionary environment". But here is the "big enchilada", it is the government who will be most harshly affected by this market imposed stress test. Uncle Sam cannot afford higher rates, the debt service alone will kill him. He cannot afford a lower exchange rate currency because this will spook foreigners into a "bank run", nor can he afford a lower equity market as that will expose the invalid "stimulus plans" and spook the entire world.

The current "remedies" virtually guarantee a lower Dollar and higher interest rates, the correct remedies (necessary almost 10 years ago) will result in the same, a collapsed currency and a debt market with few bids. In short, this credit contraction is now becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. Tax revenue is imploding while at the same time they decided to spend like drunken sailors. This is rapidly becoming a sovereign bankruptcy that will spread faster than swine flu. Upon further thought, the real stress test will be how we, as individuals and family units, cope with the conditions thrust upon us. The past rewarded those who were blatantly reckless, now, even those who were prudent and played by the rules will get swept away by this perfect, man made storm. Only those that understand the difference between real money and fake fiat will stand a chance to survive and thrive as the paper promises get swept away. Quite stressful to say the least.

China called Sunday for reform of the global currency system, dominated by the dollar, which it said is the root cause of the global financial crisis. "We should attach great importance to reform of the international monetary system," Chinese Vice Finance Minister Li Yong told the spring IMF/World Bank Development Committee meeting in Washington. A "flawed international monetary system is the institutional root cause of the crisis and a major defect in the current international economic governance structure," Li said, according to a statement.

"Accordingly, we should improve the regulatory mechanism for reserve currency issuance, maintain the relative stability of exchange rates of major reserve currencies and promote a diverse and sound international currency system." As the world's main reserve currency, US dollars account for most governments' foreign exchange reserves and are used to set international market prices for oil, gold and other currencies. As the issuer of the key reserve currency, the United States also pays less for products and can borrow more easily. Li did not name the dollar but in late March the People's Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said he wanted to replace the US unit which has served as the world's reserve currency since World War II. "The outbreak of the crisis and its spillover to the entire world reflected the inherent vulnerabilities and systemic risks in the existing international monetary system," Zhou said, suggesting the International Monetary Fund could play a greater role. Zhou's remarks sparked uproar and concern since China has the world's largest forex reserves at 1.9 trillion dollars. China became the world's top holder of US Treasury bonds last September, and currently holds around 800 billion dollars, according to official US data. Beijing has voiced increasing concern over its massive exposure to the US dollar as the global crisis has steadily deepened but after some tense exchanges, the issue appears to have eased in recent weeks…

-

by Mike Whitney

Due to the lifting of the foreclosure moratorium at the end of March, the downward slide in housing prices is gaining speed. The moratorium was initiated in January to give Obama's anti-foreclosure program---which is a combination of mortgage modifications and refinancing---a chance to succeed. The goal of the plan was to keep up to 9 million struggling homeowners in their homes, but it's clear now that the program will fall well-short of its objective.

In March, housing prices accelerated on the downside indicating bigger adjustments dead-ahead. Trend-lines are steeper now than ever before--nearly perpendicular. Housing prices are not falling, they're crashing and crashing hard. Now that the foreclosure moratorium has ended, Notices of Default (NOD) have spiked to an all-time high. These Notices will turn into foreclosures in 4 to 5 months time creating another cascade of foreclosures. Market analysts predict there will be 5 MILLION MORE FORECLOSURES BETWEEN NOW AND 2011. It's a disaster bigger than Katrina. Soaring unemployment and rising foreclosures ensure that hundreds of banks and financial institutions will be forced into bankruptcy. 40 percent of delinquent homeowners have already vacated their homes. There's nothing Obama can do to make them stay. Worse still, only 30 percent of foreclosures have been relisted for sale suggesting more hanky-panky at the banks. Where have the houses gone? Have they simply vanished?

600,000 "DISAPPEARED HOMES?"

Here's a excerpt from the SF Gate explaining the mystery:

"Lenders nationwide are sitting on hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes that they have not resold or listed for sale, according to numerous data sources. And foreclosures, which banks unload at fire-sale prices, are a major factor driving home values down.

"We believe there are in the neighborhood of 600,000 properties nationwide that banks have repossessed but not put on the market," said Rick Sharga, vice president of RealtyTrac, which compiles nationwide statistics on foreclosures. "California probably represents 80,000 of those homes. It could be disastrous if the banks suddenly flooded the market with those distressed properties. You'd have further depreciation and carnage."

In a recent study, RealtyTrac compared its database of bank-repossessed homes to MLS listings of for-sale homes in four states, including California. It found a significant disparity - only 30 percent of the foreclosures were listed for sale in the Multiple Listing Service. The remainder is known in the industry as "shadow inventory." ("Banks aren't Selling Many Foreclosed Homes" SF Gate)

If regulators were deployed to the banks that are keeping foreclosed homes off the market, they would probably find that the banks are actually servicing the mortgages on a monthly basis to conceal the extent of their losses. They'd also find that the banks are trying to keep housing prices artificially high to avoid heftier losses that would put them out of business. One thing is certain, 600,000 "disappeared" homes means that housing prices have a lot farther to fall and that an even larger segment of the banking system is underwater.

Here is more on the story from Mr. Mortgage "California Foreclosures About to Soar...Again"

"Are you ready to see the future? Ten’s of thousands of foreclosures are only 1-5 months away from hitting that will take total foreclosure counts back to all-time highs. This will flood an already beaten-bloody real estate market with even more supply just in time for the Spring/Summer home selling season...Foreclosure start (NOD) and Trustee Sale (NTS) notices are going out at levels not seen since mid 2008. Once an NTS goes out, the property is taken to the courthouse and auctioned within 21-45 days....The bottom line is that there is a massive wave of actual foreclosures that will hit beginning in April that can’t be stopped without a national moratorium."

JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Fannie Mae have all stepped up their foreclosure activity in recent weeks. Delinquencies have skyrocketed foreshadowing more price-slashing into the foreseeable future. According to the Wall Street Journal:

"Ronald Temple, co-director of research at Lazard Asset Management, expects home prices to fall 22% to 27% from their January levels. More than 2.1 million homes will be lost this year because borrowers can't meet their loan payments, up from about 1.7 million in 2008." (Ruth Simon, "The housing crisis is about to take center stage once again" Wall Street Journal)

Another 20 percent carved off the aggregate value of US housing means another $4 trillion loss to homeowners. That means smaller retirement savings, less discretionary spending, and lower living standards. The next leg down in housing will be excruciating; every sector will feel the pain. Obama's $75 billion mortgage rescue plan is a mere pittance; it won't reduce the principle on mortgages and it won't stop the bleeding. Policymakers have decided they've done enough and are refusing to help. They don't see the tsunami looming in front of them plain as day. The housing market is going under and it's going to drag a good part of the broader economy along with it. Stocks, too.

China Added 454 Tons of Gold to Reserves Since 2003 (Update1)

April 24 (Bloomberg) -- China has added 454 metric tons of gold to its reserves since 2003 through domestic purchases and refining scrap, the official Xinhua News reported, citing Hu Xiaolian, head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

Total gold reserves now stand at 1,054 tons, it said. The country has the world’s biggest foreign-exchange reserves at $1.95 trillion as of March 31, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The foreign exchange reserves were $286 billion at the end of December 2002.

Got gold?

Since the Chinese put a new global reserve currency on the table at the G20 summit which created $250 billion in new IMF Special Drawing Rights, discussion of the new currency has increased, and the logic of putting precious metals into this basket is clear.

Gold and silver have been used as money for several millennium because even the most artful alchemist has failed to find a way to manufacture precious metals. Over recent centuries, fiat or paper money collapses have always been followed by a reversion to gold and silver. Why should it be different this time?

Money supply inflation

Global governments are expanding money supply as though there is no tomorrow. Only yesterday, the British government unveiled plans to borrow more in the next two years than in the previous 300 years of its history, including two world wars and the creation of the welfare state.

It is clear that a day of reckoning is coming for the fiat or paper currencies of the world whose governments have lost all reason in their desperate pursuit of a magic bullet to solve the global financial crisis. Printing money is the last resort of bankrupt governments.

If we go back to the South Sea Bubble of the early 1700s in France, there is the first example of modern times, with paper replacing gold until a mammoth inflation sent the government scurrying back to precious metals. The revolution came later.

Or in ancient times, the Roman emperor Nero debased the currency and so did his successors and with it fell the Roman Empire.

But an orderly exchange of fiat currency for precious metals is perfectly possible, and the Chinese proposals for a new reserve currency have suggested using the commodities model suggested by Keynes in the 30s.

Stiglitz support

Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz is the latest economist to back a new global reserve currency, although he does not detail a role for gold and silver.

However, precious metals should be at the heart of a new global currency, partly to give it credibility as something really different to combining several paper currencies, and also because of the discipline of a fixed supply of precious metals that will stop governments from devaluing and inflating away people’s money.

Will this happen as a result of informed debate? Probably not. The historical precedent is for a crisis followed by a reversion to gold and silver at prices far higher than those seen before the crisis

WSJ: BofA CEO Lewis testifies to NY AG that Bernanke, Paulson wanted Merrill losses kept quiet
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/WSJ-BofA-CEO-says-was-told-to-apf
-15006709.html?sec=topStories&pos=3&asset=&ccode=

A few comments from LeMetropole provide good insight into this amazing story....

Blackmail?

To all, so today we hear that Ken Lewis, CEO of Bank of America was told by Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson to shut up about the "material adverse change" that took place at Merrill Lynch before their merger. I would call this "blackmail", but then again, who am I anyway, I think Gold is money so I must be a whacko. Mr. Lewis has testified under oath (whatever that means) that he was told to remain silent about Merrill, otherwise his board of directors would be disbanded and the management team would be fired. Appalling yes, but does this surprise you?

What would you do? Remain silent? Cancel the deal? I know what I would have done, I would announce the piece of crap Merrill had become, cancel the deal so my shareholders didn't get left holding the "bag of pooh", and then simply resign. How could you wake up and go to work in the morning knowing you just shafted your shareholders over a blackmail? How could you remain silent? Was his silence going to save the system? No, it can't be saved because "it is what it is", the debt, derivatives, mal investment, etc., were all already in place, NOTHING could reverse that. If the system was so close to collapsing just a few months ago, how far away can we be now?

So, as for Mr. Bank of America, either he is a spineless buffoon that threw his shareholders under a steamroller, or he lacks the moral values to tell the truth no matter what the consequences, even if they included losing your job. Maybe he was afraid of becoming Mr. "Freddie Mac" and turning up as a suicide. Who knows? The point here is the confidence (lack of) this instills in foreigners with investments in the U.S.

Supposing Mr. Lewis is telling the truth, this means that Paulson and Bernanke are both "blackmailers" and liars. They told us umpteen times that the "banking system is solid", the "system is sound". WHO to believe? I think they are ALL full of $#I+!!! The system is busted, the banks are broke, the Dollar has ZERO intrinsic value, and the Treasury has become the biggest beggar in the history of the world. And now we get the stress test results? Yeah, I can't wait to see these morsels of truth and wisdom!

This can of worms that Mr. Lewis has opened has huge ramifications, most importantly one of CREDIBILITY. I can only guess what my thoughts would have been as a child growing up in the 60's, the Sec. of the Treasury and Fed Chairman lied and blackmailed someone? So what if Merrill went down, they are only one Investment house, you mean the system is THAT fragile? This is the world's biggest debtor trying to hide JUST how weak, debilitated, and fragile the whole situation has become. One can only hope that foreigners go deaf, dumb, and blind for few a weeks since it is they, that Treasury relies on so heavily to fund our debt.

From today forward, it is now clear that ANYTHING can happen at ANYTIME. Everything is not what it seems to be, nothing is real in the financial world, and everything is worth nothing. As it turns out, the economy, real estate, and stock markets were all propped up and "Bulled" by borrowed money and dirty tricks. The entire "fiat" bull run has been bull shit, and to think we EVER questioned Gold ownership. No wonder we have been told on a daily basis that Gold is a "barbarous relic" and has no use. So they lied to us, what's the big deal? They will lie to us again tomorrow, ...and your point is? Clearly, things aren't what they used to be, now I sound like my parents. Sorry for the rant, I do feel much better though!

-----------------------------------

Bof A and the DYKE!

The revelation that Bank of America was forced to buy Merrill Lynch is the nail in the coffin, the straw that broke the camels back, the beginning of the end...how many more sayings do you we need??!!

There are no more fingers to stick in the dyke!

This revelation is HUGE on so many fronts I can't even begin. First of all Bank of America will be sued by EVERY SHAREHOLDER for accepting this deal, not disclosing the "material information", falsely promoting the deal to the public and hiding the truth. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve will be investigated for illegally forcing the merger without any congressional approval or ANY PUBLIC DISCLOSURE....

AND THEY HAVE BEEN LYING TO THE PEOPLE FOR MONTHS THAT WE WERE AT THE BOTTOM AND THE BANKS ARE FINE!

Bank of America will likely see a "Run"on the bank" within the next few weeks as the liability from this is incalculable!

It's about to get VERY UGLY out there!

--------------------------------------------

Andrew Cuomo's Smoking Gun

New York State Attorney General has unleashed a letter today which could well lead to an avalanche of lawsuits against, Bank of America, Ken Lewis and the BAC board, John Thain, Henry Paulson, the U.S. Treasury and Ben Bernanke et al at the Fed.

If you read through Mr. Cuomo's letter, there can no question in anyone's mind that Lewis, Paulson and Bernanke are guilty of committing fraud. This must be a serious issue because when it was being exposed on CNBC, CNBC quickly cut away just as Ken Lewis was telling Erin Burnett that he was told to keep his mouth shut.

At issue is whether or not Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, along with staff members wholly and severally at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, forced Ken Lewis and the board at BAC to complete its merger with Merrill Lynch, despite Ken Lewis' decision that the financial condition of MER at the time of the merger agreement had been fraudulently misrepesented, covered up and had materially changed.

It would appear from a close reading of the letter sent from Andrew Cuomo to Government officials listed, that Ken Lewis was going to invoke a Material Adverse Change clause, due to a substantial deterioration in the assets of Merrill Lynch which appear to have been covered up during merger negotiations (i.e. hidden from sight during the due diligence process), in order to either abort or substantially renegotiate the terms of the BAC/MER shotgun wedding. Here is what the MAC clause is all about:

"THE MATERIAL ADVERSE CHANGE CLAUSE (MAC) as a closing condition has achieved permanent status as one of the most highly negotiated parts of acquisition agreements. The basic premise underlying a MAC is that the purchaser should receive the benefit of the bargain. In practice, a MAC included within the closing conditions of an acquisition agreement provides purchasers with an "out" in the event of unforeseen material adverse business or economic changes affecting or involving the target company or assets between the execution of the definitive acquisition agreement and the consummation of the transaction"

Please read the Cuomo letter in its entirety, as it contains statements and accusations from both Lewis and Paulson that are both accusatory of each other and self-incriminating. Here is just one snippet:

"Bank of America's attempt to exit the merger came to a halt on December 21, 2008. That day, Lewis informed Secretary Paulson that Bank of America still wanted to exit the merger agreement. According to Lewis, Secretary Paulson then advised Lewis that, if Bank of America invoked the MAC, its management and board would be replaced" page 2.

There is much more in that letter which can be used to go after every person listed above. Bernanke has denied making any of the statements contained in that letter. My bet would be that Bernanke is now on record lying.

At the very least, all the people listed above will subject to massive lawsuits by Bank of America shareholders. Hopefully Mr. Cuomo will prove to be more forthright than his predecessor, Eliot Spitzer who used his attacks on Wall Street to launch his bid for Governor of New York, and will use this as an opportunity to pursue justice for all the parties involved, not the least of which is the U.S. Taxpayer.

Here is the letter from Mr. Cuomo:

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/04/cuomo-letter-exposing-paulsons-and.html

------------------------------------------------

This Cuomo thing is getting gooooood

This is a postcard perfect example of what happens when rats are trapped in a corner - they turn on each other:

Paulson Contradicts Bernanke, Blames Bernanke For Lewis Threat

"Hank Paulson admitted to Andrew Cuomo that he threatened to oust Ken Lewis and the Bank of America board if Bank of America invoked a Material Adverse Change (MAC) clause to block the deal, Cuomo says. Paulson also added, however, that he made this threat at the request of Ben Bernanke"

http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-paulson-contradicts-bernanke-blames-bernanke-for-lewis-threat-2009-4

Ken Lewis Shafted Bank Of America Shareholders To Save His Job (BAC)

http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-ken-lewis-shafted-bank-of-america-shareholders-to-save-his-job-2009-4
I think the media is either being told to not report all of this, or they are vastly underestimating the seriousness of what Cuomo has unleashed today. This is going to be epic entertainment watching this unfold.

--------------------------------------------------------------

The cover of the latest Time magazine includes the headline story -- THE NEW FRUGALITY. The story is about Americans cutting back everywhere and in everything. Personally, I think the frugality trend is just starting. Right now, I don't think most people view the current recession as a major economic phenomenon. I think the public impression is that the government "won't let it happen," and that the government will stabilize the economy by the end of the year. The public reads about the trillions of dollars the Fed and the Treasury are spending, and it believes what we are going through is just a deeper version of the recessions that have plagued the US since WW II.

I've thought all along that the steadily rising rate of unemployment and loss of income will be the surprises of this bear market. Unemployment will produce a downward spiral of negative growth in the US. When an individual or a family leader is laid off, the full impact of a loss of income hits the unit. They will immediately cut back in every area possible -- doctor's visits, dentistry, meds, clothes, automobiles, travel, vacations, expensive colleges, food, entertainment, etc. This sets off a "downward spiral." It's a spiral that only halts with exhaustion.

-----------------------------------------------

Most Americans still cannot fathom what lies ahead … still believing that once the correction is over, life will go back like it has been for so long. Don’t think so. Years ago it was my contention that the standard of living in America would go down by 35%. I am sticking with that notion.

By Dominic Frisby

Armstrong: "I know too much"

27 February 2007 is not a date that stands out. It is not indelibly imprinted on the minds of millions; it does not carry the pain or notoriety of 9-11; unlike 'Black Wednesday', it has not been nicknamed Nor, like 31 August 1997, The Day Diana Died, did it send a nation into mourning.

Yet the repercussions of this day are, quite simply, enormous. They may be felt for decades, and possibly mark the beginning of the next Great Depression. For this was the day the greatest credit bubble in history peaked and popped.

And one man predicted this turn as far back as the 1970s. He is Martin Armstrong.

What's more, another one of his turn dates is coming this weekend …

Martin Armstrong's story reads like a thriller. He was a globe-trotting and extremely contrarian investment manager, who in the late 1990s was accused of misappropriating Japanese investors of some $700 million in some kind of Ponzi scheme.

It appears that, like Nick Leeson, the money was lost on bad bets in the currency markets and losses were being concealed, though Armstrong said he did not authorise the trades. Nevertheless, he was indicted in 1999 and ordered by Judge Richard Owen to turn over gold bars and antiquities, which he is said to have bought with his firm's money, as well as computers and documents.

Armstrong delivered four of the five computers sought, eight of the 11 requested boxes of documents and gold coins worth $1.1 million. The receiver said assets worth about $15 million were missing; Armstrong insisted that was all he had. Judge Owen – revisiting the order every 18 months - held him on contempt of court for some seven years, some kind of record for time in prison without trial. Nevertheless, Owen repeatedly held that Mr. Armstrong was motivated by greed and was awaiting his release from jail to retrieve the $15 million that the government said was missing.

Mr. Armstrong's years in jail for civil contempt match the sentence of six-and-a-half to eight years that he would have received if he had been convicted of all 24 criminal counts of securities fraud, commodities fraud and wire fraud. But in late 2006, after appeal, Judge Owen was removed from the case. In 2007, after a period in solitary, Armstrong faced trial, pleaded guilty and is now serving a prison sentence for a further five years.

Armstrong's unique 'economic confidence model'
What makes Armstrong's story exceptional is his astonishing economic confidence model, which he developed in the 1970s and 80s.

Looking back at centuries of economic data, Armstrong identified a long-term business cycle of 309.6 years, which is broken down into six waves of 51.6 years – roughly the same duration as Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev 's more famous cycle. Armstrong's 51.6 year wave breaks down into a further six waves of 8.6 years, which break down into a further three individual waves of different duration.



What many will find interesting is that the total number of days in one 8.6 year cycle is 3141 – or Pi times 1000. Hence the model is also known as the 'Pi Cycle'.

The next chart shows the key wave dates of the recent past and near future.



Let's look at some of these turn dates and see what happened. 2007.15 equates to 27 February 2007 (That is .15 of the year). The chart below shows the Dow Jones US Financials – an index of the major stocks relating to banking, insurance, real estate and financial services.



You can see he's nailed the turn to the day.

1987.8 equates to 19 October 1987. The next chart shows the Dow during the stock market crash of 1987. You can see Armstrong again nailed the low to the day.



Not precisely to the day, but to within a fortnight, 1989.95 (December 89) saw the highs in the Nikkei, 2007.



2000.7 (September 2000) saw the turn down in the S&P (September 2000), while 2002.85 (Octover-November 2002) saw the post crash lows.



1998.55 coincided with Russian debt default and the longtTerm capital management crisis, 1994.25 saw an intermediate S&P low. More recently we had 2008.225 (23 March 2008). That caught the turn in the dollar that surprised just about everyone – myself included – especially those who thought the dollar's collapse was imminent.



Some will say that it's easy to look back at history, attach an arbitrary pattern after the event, then call it a 'cycle', but you cannot deny that Armstrong's calls have been astonishing.

In fact, his forecasting abilities and imprisonment have made him a cult figure among conspiracy theorists. He claimed to have developed a 32,000-variable super-computer based on his economic model, with "perhaps the largest economic database in the world". In fact, some claim the CIA and Chinese wanted this very computer model and the reason he was held in prison for so long without trial was that he refused to hand it over. Armstrong himself commented, "I know too much".

The next big turning point: this weekend
Nevertheless, of note to all investors, is that there is another Armstrong turn date coming on 2009.3, or 19-20 April. What we have to figure out is which market is going to turn.

Armstrong once advised Canadian technical analyst Ross Clark that markets which were trending the strongest going into a cyclic turn point would be the most likely to reverse. "It is the concentration of capital that creates booms and the subsequent busts."

So we have to ask ourselves which market fits this bill. Could this bounce in the stock or commodity markets run out of steam? It's possible. This year might be yet another when you should sell in May and go away. If we get a big rally into the weekend, perhaps we should look to sell.

But I must say, I think this rally may have further to go. Could gold turn back up? Again, I see a low for gold coming in the summer – although $840-$850, if it gets there, is an obvious place to make a low. Could it signal the long-awaited end of the US bond market? Perhaps we'll see some turn in the currency markets. The yen could turn back up… or the pound could turn back down. As I write this, I can't see a market that's showing any signs of exhaustion.

My bet is that we'll either see another major bankruptcy – perhaps a corporation such as GM, or even a country (Ireland?) – or we'll see some kind of turn in the currency markets.

I should stress this is only a secondary turn date. There are plenty of examples in the past where nothing of any significance has happened at these junctures. In other words, they do not always work. But the outcome of this weekend, 19-20 April, bears watching with interest.

William Black, associate professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City

He was a deputy director at the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. during the thrift crisis of the 1980s. He believes that unless the current administration changes course dramatically, it will destroy the Obama presidency. The Bush administration was worse but they are out of town. He says we have failed bankers giving advice to failed regulators on how to deal with failed assets. The current economic team of Geithner and Summers were important architects of the problems. The PPIP program is worse than a lie with Geithner pandering to the interests of a few select group of banks. He is flouting the law that requires quick corrective action to deal with insolvencies. His plan essentially perpetuates zombie banks by mispricing toxic assets that were mispriced to the borrower and mispriced by the lender, and which only served the unfaithful lending agent. The IndyMac, Bear Stearns and Lehman situations tell us the real losses will be roughly 50-80 cents on the dollars. Most of America's biggest banks are insolvent. The government does not want to admit the depth of the problem because it would place some of the biggest financials into receivership. The people running these banks are some of the best connected in Washington. The big international institutions need to be broken into smaller units that can be managed effectively. We don't necessarily need new regulations but folks who will enforce the ones already on the books. We need to return to a system that takes the competitive advantage away from the cheats.

Comment:

The Corruption in the Financial System and Obama's Failure to Reform

This interview with William Black in Barron's is an articulate and reasonably detailed summary of our own view of the current crisis from an exceptionally well-informed and experienced source.

The big question in our own mind is the depth of complicity and the motivations of the government, the media and major institutions in continuing to support this financial corruption through silence or participation.

Is Obama really merely listening to the wrong advice from highly placed sources in the Democratic Party? And how sincere are they? The record of corruption in the Obama Administration in the form of conflicts of interest and tax evasion is already the smoke that warns of fire.

All good questions, more relating to the length of time to a cure rather than its essential character.

The banks must be restrained, the financial system must be reformed, before there can be a sustained economic recovery.

The United States, the world's most developed country, is scrambling to answer the question "Who will 'feed' the US?" [Answer: “no one”] years after it had asked the most populous developing country a similar question: "Who will feed China?"

Is it sensational to ask the richest country the same question that China faced more than 10 years ago? The reply is "No." This time, it is not about "grain supply", but "capital supply" and "supply of order."

An unprecedented financial crisis that originated in the US is shattering the world, without exception to any region. In response, the US has announced massive rescue plans to revive the economy, and is ready to roll out more such plans, yet leaving a big question mark as to how it will get enough money to finance those plans.

The US Congress sanctioned a $787 billion stimulus plan submitted by the Obama administration last month, which media reports said is only a small fraction of the overall plan.

The US-based San Francisco Business Times reported on Nov 26 that the US government and the Federal Reserve is harboring a huge $8.5 trillion rescue plan, or about 60 percent of the country's GDP.

US President Barack Obama is expecting a record $1.75 trillion in federal fiscal deficit this year. The fiscal figure reached a high of $459 billion last year.

This year's deficit would account for 12.3 percent of the GDP, the highest since the World War II and far exceeding the recognized 3-percent alarm level.

In addition, Obama also foresaw an average $1 trillion in deficits each year for 2010 and 2011.

Many US experts said Obama's estimate was too optimistic [Agreed], and the actual deficit would be even bigger, as the president excluded the country's liabilities in his projection.

Where does the money come from? [Answer: “printing press”]

Who will be able to provide the financial support for the enormous fiscal deficit of the US government?

The US Treasury Department estimated the US government would issue up to $2.56 trillion of treasury bonds this year, and at least $1.14 trillion more next year. [It will be far more.]

By the end of last year, outstanding treasury bonds stood at $10.7 trillion. About 29 percent, or $2.862 trillion, is held by foreign governments or investors. That means the country's reliance on overseas investors holding treasury bonds has been raised by 10 percentage points from eight years ago.

"The world simply cannot buy any more new issuance of US treasury bonds," [Agreed] said Yu Zuyao, an honorary economist with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), who used to head the CASS Institute of Economics.

Many countries have their own hands full, like the US, using their capital to counter the financial crisis, consolidate their financial system, and fuel their own stimulus packages to revive the real economy, even though they have some foreign exchange reserves in US dollars.

Thanks to trade surpluses, emerging economies hold a combined $5.5 trillion in forex reserves [more when sovereign wealth funds are added in], but most of the reserves have already been used to buy US treasury bonds, said Yoko Kitazawa, an expert on international affairs, in a February issue of Sekai (The World), a Japanese monthly journal.

However, trade surpluses of these regions and countries are eroding because of a collapse in global trade.

As a result, forex reserves of these regions and countries are expanding at a slower pace, or even declining. The latest forecast from the World Trade Organization said global trade may shrink by 9 percent, or more, this year.

As the largest holder of US treasury bonds and the world's second largest exporter, China had seen exports decline since November last year, with its actual use of foreign capital falling since October.

Media reports said China's forex reserves may have decreased by more than $30 billion in the first two months. China's forex reserves stood at about $1.95 trillion at the end of last year, the largest in the world.

The Xinhua-run newspaper Economic Information Daily reported this month China had liquidity of only $300 billion to $500 billion in forex reserves, citing a report from an unidentified ministry-level research institute.

Crowding out effect of US capital pool

Yang Bin, also a CASS economist, said the US was luring capital scattered all over the world to pool in the US by floating excessive treasury bonds, which could be a threat to developing countries which are crying out for capital. [The US treasury market is sucking the life out of the world economy. Capital needed to fund economic growth in developing countries is being used to bail out doomed US financial institutions via treasury sales. The sooner the treasury market and the dollar collapse, the sooner the world can begin to heal.]

Economic development in many developing countries is, to a large extent, counting on such an influx of overseas capital.

The US-based Institute for International Finance warned in January that capital flows into emerging markets are in danger of collapsing this year as a result of the financial crisis.

The association of large banks estimates that net private sector capital flows to emerging markets will be no more than $165 billion this year, which is less than half of $466 billion in 2008 and only a fifth of $930 billion in 2007.

The crisis and a global economic recession are also aggravating the world poverty. The United Nations said in a report published this month that reduced growth this year would lead to a total income loss of around $18 billion ($46 per person) for 390 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa living in extreme poverty.

The projected loss represents 20 percent of the per capita income of the poor in Africa, far exceeding the losses of developed nations.

The majority of low-income nations, or 43 out of 48, are incapable of providing a government stimulus for the poor, according to the report.

In addition, the excessive US treasury bonds, its enormous fiscal deficit, and issuance of the dollar that far exceeds the demand of the economy would drive the world nearer to inflation and a depreciating US dollar. This could be another heavy blow to the world economy in a downturn and to developing countries in particular.

Worries over dollar-denominated assets

"The immense 'US treasury bonds bubble' has not only badly weakened new demand among investors, but also put foreign investors in danger of seeing their dollar-denominated assets shrink in value," [Agreed] said Yu.

The US Treasury Department said the US government bonds held by foreign countries were down by $4.7 billion at the end of January from a month ago.

This is the first time for other countries to sell US treasury bonds since March 2007.

China's purchase of US treasury bonds decelerated. The country purchased $12.2 billion in treasury bonds in January, the smallest monthly increase since the second half of last year.

Capital is fleeing the US in January, foreign investors sold $43 billion of long-term US bonds, compared with an inflow of $34.7 billion into the country.

The US is facing a capital account deficit of $148.9 billion, if short-term bonds are included, as foreign governments and institutions became reluctant to buy more US bonds. The deficit compares to $609.9 billion in surplus for the whole of 2008.

Returns on US government bonds will be down by 2.69 percent in 2009, according to the Caijing Magazine, citing a treasury bonds index of Lehman Brothers. In 2008, returns on US government bonds were almost 14 percent.

China held US treasury bonds worth $740 billion by the end of January, about 7 percent of the total of US government bonds. In all, the country holds $1.2 trillion of dollar-denominated assets, including institutional bonds and equity investment as well.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on March 13 expressed worries over the safety of these assets and called on the US to keep to its commitments and ensure the safety of such assets.

More than a week ago, however, US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, dubbed "Helicopter Ben" for his speech about using a "helicopter drop" of money into the economy to fight deflation, actualized his threat to print more greenbacks.

He said on March 18 the Fed would purchase up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months, along with an additional $750 billion in mortgage-backed securities.

It is the first time since World War II that the Fed has bought long-term government bonds.

The Fed's decision to print more money to finance the purchase immediately led the greenback to fall against all other major currencies.

The San Francisco Business Times reported the Fed's printing press is financing about two thirds, or $5.5 trillion, of the $8.5 trillion of the US rescue money. The Fed needs no approval from the Congress to start the printing press.

Analysts said the Fed is left with no other option but to print, with the key interest rate staying at a record low of zero to 0.25 percent.

"The US is indeed capable of paying off its government bonds, but, what is the real value of bunches of dollars by the time the bonds are due," said Yang.

In a move to dispel concerns over the US extravagance in spending, the Obama administration said it aimed to halve the country's fiscal deficit to $533 billion in 2013. The goal is based, however, on optimistic estimation of a strong rebound in the US economy.

"People have every reason to doubt whether this could be possible," Yang said.

Over the next 10 years, the federal fiscal deficit is bound to swell as the government will have to address the structural problems of the US social insurance and medical insurance plans.

US economists believe that a ballooning deficit would be inevitable, regardless of the status of the US economy.

Finding a way out

China's central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan last week suggested the creation of a super-sovereign reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, to avoid inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies.

The repeated and escalating financial crisis since the collapse in 1971 of the Bretton Woods system showed the whole world may be paying more than what it gained from the current currency system, he wrote in an article.

As the world's reserve currency, about two thirds of the international trade and financial transactions are priced and settled in the US dollar. [That is a disaster waiting to happen.]

At the core of the ongoing financial crisis that started in the US are the fundamental flaws of the US economic systems and the neo-liberal economic policies of US that led to tremendous trade deficit, fiscal deficit and personal credit deficit, Yu Zuyao said.

"It is not in the least a problem in US financial regulation," Yu said. "What is needed is to overhaul the US neo-liberalist system, reform the current international financial system and restore the world's economic order, otherwise, such crises will be repeated." [Agreed]

A currency is intended to serve the economy; however, Wall Street took the lead in creating a currency-focused economy that is parallel to the real economy.

The market value of US financial assets is $40 trillion to $50 trillion, but market capital has been indulged to operate in away that makes financial derivative products spiral up to more than $600 trillion in value, about 50 times the 2007 US GDP.

More than 97.5 percent of the world's capital in circulation is speculative capital and only 2.5 percent is enough to meet the demand of the real economy, said Yoko Kitazawa.

In the meantime, the US has long been a supreme power in the world.

The US-led developed countries are actually receiving $3.5 from developing countries for every dollar in aid that goes to the developing countries, Yoko Kitazawa said.

Paradoxically, as the world's largest debtor with more than 20 years of consecutive years of trade deficit, the US is witnessing, at the same time, a surplus in capital account and in capital inflows. This is a testimony to the unfairness in the international financial system and the global economic order.

"It's time to have the resolution to change it," Yang said. "It is what the financial and economic crisis has told us."

The production of real goods in the developed nations is plummeting. Even the mighty export driven economy of Japan appears to be heading lower.

Countries must begin to encourage consumption in their own economies. To do this, they ought not to be stimulating the old credit/speculation machine called the neo-liberal financial system.

Real economic growth is to be found in a broad employment and consumption, and an increase of the median wage.

This is the deep flaws in much of the third world economies, especially in Asia and Latin America. Economic health can be measured by the size and well being of the middle class in a relatively free society.

The reason is simple. Individuals can only borrow so much before they are unable to service the debt. And the greedy few can only spend so much on consumption using the wealth which the tax and financial system has delivered to them from the many.

Gaming the system so that it overtaxes the income of the many for theincreasing benefit of a few has natural limitations, unless one can enforce a type of involuntary servitude. This model has its roots far back in history, in empires like Rome, Egypt, and Sparta.

As the elite few accumulate real assets using their surplus, they will find that holding on to their wealth as the rest of society deteriorates in a downward spiral of privation can be a bit of a challenge.

Until the financial system is reformed and the economy is brought back into a balance, there will be no recovery, and the fabric of order will remain fragile.

If things continue on as they are, despite all the stimulus and fine rhetoric, the madness will once again be unleashed on the earth, and the people will wonder from whence it came, as they do each time it rises from the same sources and ravages civilization: unbridled greed, malinvestment, and corruption.

"Our fractional reserve financial system is just a gigantic Ponzi scheme. It can only survive as long as it expands, which is to say, as long as new debt is flushed through the system to finance old debt. But like all Ponzi schemes, the larger it grows the more unstable it becomes. Eventually, it collapses of its own weight." … James Sinclair.

Russia has become the first major country to call for a partial restoration of the gold standard to uphold discipline in the world financial system.

Arkady Dvorkevich, the Kremlin's chief economic adviser, said Russia would favour the inclusion of gold bullion in the basket-weighting of a new world currency based on Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund.

Chinese and Russian leaders both plan to open debate on an SDR-based reserve currency as an alternative to the US dollar at the G20 summit in London this week, although the world may not yet be ready for such a radical proposal.

Mr Dvorkevich said it was "logical" that the new currency should include the rouble and the yuan, adding that "we could also think about more effective use of gold in this system."

The gold standard was the anchor of world finance in the 19th century but began breaking down during the First World War as governments engaged in unprecedented spending. It collapsed in the 1930s when the British Empire, the United States, and France all abandoned their parities.

It was revived as part of fixed-dollar system until US inflation caused by the Vietnam War and "Great Society" social spending forced President Richard Nixon to close the gold window in 1971.

The world's fiat paper currencies have lacked any external anchor ever since. It is widely argued that the financial excesses and extreme debt leverage of the last quarter century would have been impossible -- or less likely -- under the discipline of gold.

Russia is a major gold producer with large untapped reserves of ore, so it has a clear interest in promoting the idea. The Kremlin has already instructed the central bank to gradually raise the gold share of foreign reserves to 10 percent.

China's government has floated a variant of this idea, suggesting a currency based on 30 commodities along the lines of the "Bancor" proposed by John Maynard Keynes in 1944.

(Reuters)In remarks on the People's Bank of China website yesterday (23-Mar in China), governor Zhou Xiaochuan outlines how the IMF's special drawing rights could become the world's main reserve currency. Citing "institutional flaws" with the current system, the comments do not explicitly mention the US dollar, which would be replaced. Zhou says global liquidity would be enhanced by not having a country's currency as the yardstick for global trade.

Bullionmark comment:
Momentum is accelerating. The G20 meeting in London April 2nd is likely to be the tipping point where China and Russia finally hold the US to account over the US dollar reserve currency status. Don't expect the US to give this up without a fight. Lets hope the tensions remain economic and don't deteriorate into military conflict. Remember as the reserve currency of the world and with no gold backing the US Treasury and Fed can essentially print all the money they want (and havent Tim and Ben done this so well recently. This is exit strategy for the US from its current woes. The next few months promise to be the most interesting in currency markets since Nixon removed the dollar and gold link in 1971, maybe even the original Bretton Woods in 1944. Stay tuned.

Got gold

from Rolling Stone

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

It's over — we're officially, royally f--ked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

I. PATIENT ZERO

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating — meaning it has close to zero credit risk.

Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.

The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts."

Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages — read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down — to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets — some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.

Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do — leave me alone." Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS.

The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia," as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap.

In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job.

When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators — from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.

What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to back it up.

Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.

In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come.

Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their money — and then it all went to shit.

II. THE REGULATORS

Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm — a grinning, laissez-faire ideologue from Texas — had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 A.D. For years, Washington had kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks — those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses — had not been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business.

But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more "business-friendly." Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared?

The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks — which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks for customers — were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search of higher yields. "By ruling that credit-default swaps were not gaming and not a security, the way was cleared for the growth of the market," said Eric Dinallo, head of the New York State Insurance Department.

The blanket exemption meant that Joe Cassano could now sell as many CDS contracts as he wanted, building up as huge a position as he wanted, without anyone in government saying a word. "You have to remember, investment banks aren't in the business of making huge directional bets," says the government source involved in the AIG bailout. When investment banks write CDS deals, they hedge them. But insurance companies don't have to hedge. And that's what AIG did. "They just bet massively long on the housing market," says the source. "Billions and billions."

In the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be defiantly uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small OTS is yet another triumph of the deregulatory instinct. Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans). Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation.

Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP — a London-based subsidiary of an American insurance company — ought to have been regulated by one of Europe's more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services Authority. But the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the muscle to regulate these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred legitimacy to OTS supervision of three mammoth firms — GE, AIG and Ameriprise.

That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a "disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees." Among other things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist on staff — and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for the world's largest insurer!

"There's this notion that the regulators couldn't do anything to stop AIG," says a government official who was present during the bailout. "That's bullshit. What you have to understand is that these regulators have ultimate power. They can send you a letter and say, 'You don't exist anymore,' and that's basically that. They don't even really need due process. The OTS could have said, 'We're going to pull your charter; we're going to pull your license; we're going to sue you.' And getting sued by your primary regulator is the kiss of death."

When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of overseeing the insurance giant — a guy named C.K. Lee — basically admitted that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he believed all those credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were "fairly benign products." Why? Because the company told him so. "The judgment the company was making was that there was no big credit risk," he explained. (Lee now works as Midwest region director of the OTS; the agency declined to make him available for an interview.)

In early March, after the latest bailout of AIG, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took what seemed to be a thinly veiled shot at the OTS, calling AIG a "huge, complex global insurance company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that was allowed to build up without any adult supervision." But even without that "adult supervision," AIG might have been OK had it not been for a complete lack of internal controls. For six months before its meltdown, according to insiders, the company had been searching for a full-time chief financial officer and a chief risk-assessment officer, but never got around to hiring either. That meant that the 18th-largest company in the world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was safe and no one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on hand. The situation was so bad that when outside consultants were called in a few weeks before the bailout, senior executives were unable to answer even the most basic questions about their company — like, for instance, how much exposure the firm had to the residential-mortgage market.

III. THE CRASH

Ironically, when reality finally caught up to Cassano, it wasn't because the housing market crapped but because of AIG itself. Before 2005, the company's debt was rated triple-A, meaning he didn't need to post much cash to sell CDS protection: The solid creditworthiness of AIG's name was guarantee enough. But the company's crummy accounting practices eventually caused its credit rating to be downgraded, triggering clauses in the CDS contracts that forced Cassano to post substantially more collateral to back his deals.

By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to keep his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That August, balls bulging, he announced to investors on a conference call that "it is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions." As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 million in losses. When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG executives to re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named Joseph St. Denis became "gravely concerned" about the CDS deals and their potential for mass destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing the poor sap out of the firm, telling him he was "deliberately excluded" from the financial review for fear that he might "pollute the process."

The following February, when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, it announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an auditor had found a "material weakness" in the CDS portfolio. But amazingly, the company not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his fuck-ups. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to "retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had." (Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, could not be reached for comment.)

What sank AIG in the end was another credit downgrade. Cassano had written so many CDS deals that when the company was facing another downgrade to its credit rating last September, from AA to A, it needed to post billions in collateral — not only more cash than it had on its balance sheet but more cash than it could raise even if it sold off every single one of its liquid assets. Even so, management dithered for days, not believing the company was in serious trouble. AIG was a dried-up prune, sapped of any real value, and its top executives didn't even know it.

On the weekend of September 13th, AIG's senior leaders were summoned to the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. Regulators from Dinallo's insurance office were there, as was Geithner, then chief of the New York Fed. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who spent most of the weekend preoccupied with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, came in and out. Also present, for reasons that would emerge later, was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. The only relevant government office that wasn't represented was the regulator that should have been there all along: the OTS.

"We sat down with Paulson, Geithner and Dinallo," says a person present at the negotiations. "I didn't see the OTS even once."

On September 14th, according to another person present, Treasury officials presented Blankfein and other bankers in attendance with an absurd proposal: "They basically asked them to spend a day and check to see if they could raise the money privately." The laughably short time span to complete the mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, the bankers came back and told the government officials, gee, we checked, but we can't raise that much. And the bailout was on.

A short time later, it came out that AIG was planning to pay some $90 million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate the payout of $277 million in bonuses to others — a move the company insisted was necessary to "retain key employees." When Congress balked, AIG canceled the $90 million in payments.

Then, in January 2009, the company did it again. After all those years letting Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano's old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! Yes, that's right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe!

"We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats," AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.

"But didn't these 'highly expert people' basically destroy your company?" I ask.

Pretto protests, says this isn't fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit's operations in an orderly fashion.

The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. "These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs," says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. "They don't function well without them."

IV. THE POWER GRAB

So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people — to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG — are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm's fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone — then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee — collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.


The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America — and in turn helped those companies slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory measures. "We're moving to an oligopolistic situation," Kenneth Guenther, a top executive with the Independent Community Bankers of America, lamented after the Gramm measure was passed.

The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and — with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson — made a pitch to George Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful decision.

Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4 trillion. But in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and did not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which originally complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and ended up being regulated by no one.

Once the capital requirements were gone, those top five banks went hog-wild, jumping ass-first into the then-raging housing bubble. One of those was Bear Stearns, which used its freedom to drown itself in bad mortgage loans. In the short period between the 2004 change and Bear's collapse, the firm's debt-to-equity ratio soared from 12-1 to an insane 33-1. Another culprit was Goldman Sachs, which also had the good fortune, around then, to see its CEO, a bald-headed Frankensteinian goon named Hank Paulson (who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government), ascend to Treasury secretary.

Freed from all capital restraints, sitting pretty with its man running the Treasury, Goldman jumped into the housing craze just like everyone else on Wall Street. Although it famously scored an $11 billion coup in 2007 when one of its trading units smartly shorted the housing market, the move didn't tell the whole story. In truth, Goldman still had a huge exposure come that fateful summer of 2008 — to none other than Joe Cassano.

Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20 billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS book. Which might explain why Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank Paulson that weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was supposedly bailing out AIG.

When asked why Blankfein was there, one of the government officials who was in the meeting shrugs. "One might say that it's because Goldman had so much exposure to AIGFP's portfolio," he says. "You'll never prove that, but one might suppose."

Market analyst Eric Salzman is more blunt. "If AIG went down," he says, "there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect." The AIG bailout, in effect, was Goldman bailing out Goldman.

Eventually, Paulson went a step further, elevating another ex-Goldmanite named Edward Liddy to run AIG — a company whose bailout money would be coming, in part, from the newly created TARP program, administered by another Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari.

V. REPO MEN

There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs — a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.

Some aspects of the bailout were secretive to the point of absurdity. In fact, if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called "Factors Affecting Reserve Balances") summarizes the activities of the Fed each week. You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the Fed ever tells the world about what it does. For the week ending February 18th, the number under the heading "Repurchase Agreements" on the table is zero. It's a significant number.

Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills, U.S. securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, who would then "repurchase" them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up.

If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than usual — $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion — "out of control now," according to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into the economy — until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero.

The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.

No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even temporary at all — or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders.

"They're supposed to be temporary," says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to Rep. Ron Paul. "But we keep getting notices every six months or so that they're being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it."

None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself — or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything." According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.

VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS

Stevens isn't the only person in Congress to be given the finger by the Fed. In January, when Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida asked Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn where all the money went — only $1.2 trillion had vanished by then — Kohn gave Grayson a classic eye roll, saying he would be "very hesitant" to name names because it might discourage banks from taking the money.

"Has that ever happened?" Grayson asked. "Have people ever said, 'We will not take your $100 billion because people will find out about it?'"

"Well, we said we would not publish the names of the borrowers, so we have no test of that," Kohn answered, visibly annoyed with Grayson's meddling.

Grayson pressed on, demanding to know on what terms the Fed was lending the money. Presumably it was buying assets and making loans, but no one knew how it was pricing those assets — in other words, no one knew what kind of deal it was striking on behalf of taxpayers. So when Grayson asked if the purchased assets were "marked to market" — a methodology that assigns a concrete value to assets, based on the market rate on the day they are traded — Kohn answered, mysteriously, "The ones that have market values are marked to market." The implication was that the Fed was purchasing derivatives like credit swaps or other instruments that were basically impossible to value objectively — paying real money for God knows what.

"Well, how much of them don't have market values?" asked Grayson. "How much of them are worthless?"

"None are worthless," Kohn snapped.

"Then why don't you mark them to market?" Grayson demanded.

"Well," Kohn sighed, "we are marking the ones to market that have market values."

In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine,'" says Dan Fuss, an analyst with the investment firm Loomis Sayles. "The salesman says, 'Don't worry about it. Trust me.' It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much farther? None of us knows."

When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary — a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension."

Count Sanders among those who don't buy the argument that Wall Street firms shouldn't have to face being outed as recipients of public funds, that making this information public might cause investors to panic and dump their holdings in these firms. "I guess if we made that public, they'd go on strike or something," he muses.

And the Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its implementation even of the TARP program, which was mandated by Congress. To this date, no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department used to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't — particularly the first $350 billion given out under Bush appointee Hank Paulson.

The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to, Treasury responded — and this isn't a joke — by directing the panel to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by the response.

"Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had in mind."

Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money," he says.

This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away — remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency — many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.

"There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not," says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.

Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking."

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.

In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a nightmare.

VII. YOU DON'T GET IT

The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner — himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm — picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets — the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.

God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.