WHO are these 'counterparties' we are protecting?

bobmcree

10 kW
Joined
May 25, 2006
Messages
618
The massive federal bailouts of AIG and others are designed to protect the 'counterparties', who made these risky investments. Who are these people? AIG and Bear-Stearns etc. claim it is a 'trade secret' who it is that buys these credit default swaps. Fortunately for us there is still a free press in America, maybe not for long... It turns out that we are giving billions of dollars to European banks!!! We are giving billions of dollars to UBS, the Swiss bank that refuses to identify the hundreds of thousands of tax cheats who keep their illegally gotten gains there. We are giving billions to Goldman Sachs and Merril-Lynch, to save them from losses they have incurred by making ridiculous investments that nobody should have ever made. Barclay's Bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank of Germany, Credit Agricole of France, and others made these risky investments, and now WE should bail them out? SCREW THAT!!!! Write to the president now! Write your senator or congressman. Tell them we do not want our grandchildren to suffer so that a bunch of wealthy European banks can be protected from losses that we would not be protected from had we made the same risky investments. DO SOMETHING NOW, before it is too late!

Google "who are the counterparties"....and try not to get too nauseated. or if you are not an american please try not to laugh too hard....
 
write to my president so he can laugh at my letter?

If you buy a piece of property with an old house on it that you don't want, you have to tear down the old house before you can build the new one.

If you want socialism/communism, you have to tear down capitalism first.

The US is being bankrupted on purpose.
 
The scam here is that those who bought the insurance on the risky investments did so expecting the US government to "bail out" the insurance providers.

I say caveat emptor. Let the fools, who thought they would get the benefit of backing from the US government for free, take the hit.

Even if we attempt to triage our way out of the current mess, we still have the same infrastructure continuing to bleed us.

As TPA points out this is the logical consequence of our road to increased socialism. Obama is a socialist, and unfortunately so are all the politicians we keep electing.

When you get to the root of popular philosophy you will find altruism. And brother, are we sacrificing ourselves to others on a grand scale! We will never do any better until the concept of altruism is considered as the ultimate sin. Just to put that in perspective, most religion is altruist at its core. How soon will religion be rejected? I'm not positively impressed with my fellow human beings at the moment.
 
AIG is the main risk underwriter for projects that fall under the umbrella of the 'black-budget'.
which is several-fold larger than the regular budget.
they will always be first in line for public monies because they represent those who are the owners of the government & country which they consider to rightfully be their money anyways.
the landlord doesn't owe any explanation to the tenant what he does with the rent money .
 
TPA said:
write to my president so he can laugh at my letter?

i guess your president is not the same as mine. i write obama regularly, and while i have no illusion that he personally sees my writing i am sure he gets a digest and that he considers what we are saying. you seem to feel it is just better to sit back and do nothing. as dr. phil would say "how's that working for ya?"
 
bobmcree said:
"how's that working for ya?"

I write to my senators who are both republican and ask them to take a conservative stance on any given issue and they ignore me...actually they respond with a form letter kindly stating that they are going to ignore me.

Imagine that, republicans ignoring the conservative base!

So I'd say that not writing our president is working as well as your going through the motions.

We have a rogue Government my friend!
 
TPA said:
write to my president so he can laugh at my letter?

If you buy a piece of property with an old house on it that you don't want, you have to tear down the old house before you can build the new one.

If you want socialism/communism, you have to tear down capitalism first.

The US is being bankrupted on purpose.

TPA is right. It's over. I had to come to terms with it as well and it was hard for me. I found out in 2005 that it's over. That's one of the reasons why I've switched to biking. I'm preparing myself. USA as we know it is finished.

The funny thing is that these senators, congressman, and Presidents are just doing what the country was built on. The country was built on the idea of competition and so the corporations and the people are competing but the corporations are winning because they can give much more money to the congress than the people can. Once you think about it, it really makes no sense for the poor and middle class to get anything from the Govt. This country was founded on benevolent ideas but yet we expect the rich to be kind to the middle class and poor and break us off a piece of the pie. If the poor were rich, they would do the same thing. They would keep their money and they would make sure that the people below them had no chance of coming up and giving them competition. Once you own everything, the only thing to do is to solidify your status in the world permanently and that means changing from a capitalist society to a communist society. Once it's changed into communism, their rich status is permanent and they no longer have to worry about the poor and middle class revolting. Over the years, it's been rich taking too much resulting in a revolt ---- and classes change ---- and then cycle repeats...the reason the rich want communism is that they know that a revolution always happens and so the only way to maintain their wealth is through communism and they now have the technology to prevent an uprising.
 
personally i believe that there is not enough money in all the economies of the planet to bail out aig and others like them. all we are doing is postponing the inevitable. these companies MUST be allowed to fail before we reward the counterparties with all we have and they still want more. The sooner we accept this the less money will be wasted in a futile effort to support this whole structure of international swindling.

I do not think that we are on an inevitable slide into russian style communism. Neither do i believe that altruism is the root cause of all evil. In fact I believe just the opposite. Greed is the root of almost all evil. Greed is the exact opposite of altruism. There are many examples in our society of co-ops that work well, supplying quality products at competitive cost and treating their workers as owners. My own electric utility is a perfect example. We pay half what most of the country does for our power, in large part because there are no insatiable stockholders who demand more and more profit while they just sit back and count their money.

If the basis of capitalism is that someone who inherits wealth should never have to produce but should take the lion's share of the profits from the work of others just because they own part of the company on paper, then capitalism has gotta go. I think the nature of capitalism is that i buy something at a fair price, improve upon it or make it available to someone who otherwise would not have access to it, and that i make a profit on that investment and on my own labor. If my business grows I hire some people to work with me, and I share the profits with them. The minute we let in non-contributing stockholders who just sit back and rake in profits without contributing anything, the system falls apart. This is what has happened to our country. Private companies make a profit, decide when enough is enough, and then just continue on as engines of prosperity. Public companies can never make enough to satisfy the greed of the stockholders. The market is not the solution, it is the problem. The sooner we get back to a work based economy and start to move away from a debt-credit based system, the sooner we can begin to recover.
 
bobmcree said:
Fortunately for us there is still a free press in America, maybe not for long...

Just wanted you to know that most of the press has been owned for a long time. Since about the 1920s, it's been owned I think mostly by Rockefeller. He owns just about all the media in the USA if not 1/4th of the world. You won't get real unbiased news unless you search for it on Google and even then, you are going to get disinformation and just little bits and pieces here and there and you'll most likely have to formulate a broader picture of the real truth.
 
nutsandvolts said:
...there is $684 trillion over-the-counter derivatives outstanding.
That's $100,000 for every man, woman and child on the planet!

Here's an interesting book which predicts an overabundance of capital and simultaneous declining rate of profit. Written just before the 1929 Wall Street crash and widely ignored... well I guess they were all too busy scratching a living and fighting each other. :? View attachment The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System.pdf
 
morph999 said:
bobmcree said:
Fortunately for us there is still a free press in America, maybe not for long...

Just wanted you to know that most of the press has been owned for a long time.

The key word in your post is "most"...If i believed the press was completely under control of the illuminati or the villain of your choice, i would give up. I don't. Have you read "State of Denial - Bush at War Pt 3" by bob woodward? with guys like him still around, there is still some freedom of the press around, and of course one must filter through a lot of nonsense to find the truth. That has been the case since long before we even developed language, which some consider the turning point that began our decline.
 
The whole derivatives thing is just obscene. Find out who actually ended up with all that money and take it back. It's probably in the hands of a select few, and they fully understood they were getting money for nothing. Then anyone with derivatives on their balance sheet just has to take their hickey. If their real assets and earning power can't support their real obligations, then they gotta go and size is irrelevant. Who's going to bail who out when this all doesn't work, and throwing good money after bad never works.

John
 
Hi,

Brief interview excerpts below:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/4/sold_out_new_report_follows_lobbying

While the Obama administration is looking to turn around the economy with its stimulus plan and budget proposal, what about the issue of financial regulation, what some people point to as the fundamental cause of the crisis? A new report points to twelve deregulatory steps that led to the financial meltdown. It also does an analysis of the amount of money Wall Street poured into Washington in campaign contributions and lobbying over the last decade. Their answer? A staggering $5.1 billion over the past decade.

Rob Weissman is the author of the report. It’s called “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America.” He is director of Essential Action, editor of the Multinational Monitor, joining us from Washington, D.C.

Perhaps the signature move was the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prevented co-ownership of commercial banks and securities firms, investment banks. That was precipitated by and directly authorized the creation of Citigroup, which is now sucking so much public taxpayer money and has really been at the cutting edge of driving the financial crisis we’re now in.

You can go forward another year and see that Congress, with the Clinton administration authorization, prohibited the executive branch agencies from regulating financial derivatives, the instruments that no one can really understand or get a handle on but which have multiplied the problem from the housing crash many-fold over. So we now have $600 trillion in financial derivatives being traded around the world, with no one having a handle on what they are, who owes whom, and all of this requiring us to pour tens of billions of more dollars more every day, it seems, into AIG.

You can step forward and look at the failure to enforce rules against predatory lending, beginning with the Clinton administration, but really accelerating in a really terrifying way with the Bush administration, so that there were about three actions taken by federal regulators in the peak period of predatory lending—three—against some of the commercial lenders and mortgage brokers who were undertaking some of the most abusive predatory lending activities. And on and on it goes.

And there was, of course, over the last three decades a real surge in deregulatory ideology. And perhaps the people who were putting this stuff forward believed in it. But it also makes sense to think that, maybe a little bit, they were influenced by the staggering amounts of money that the financial sector was pouring into Washington, as you said, more than $5 billion in campaign contributions and lobbying money. And, you know, they got a good return on investment, and it was good for them while it lasted. It’s turned out to be quite a disaster for them but, more importantly, for the rest of the country and the world.

Summers, Rubin and Greenspan banded together with Republicans in Congress, led by Phil Gramm, to prevent the efforts within the executive branch to regulate derivatives, and then in 2000, they passed a law—Congress passed a law, which Clinton signed into law, prohibiting the federal government from regulating financial derivatives at all, with the result that not only are they not regulated, not only are they not required to register to show that they serve some social purpose before they’re allowed onto the market, but no one has a sense of who owes what to whom.

In the course of—we’re bailing out AIG, because they have engaged in so many of these—hundreds of billions of dollars worth of these financial derivative arrangements. It’s clear now that AIG itself did not know who they owed—who they were going to owe, who they had entered into all these contracts for. They were engaged in such a wild speculative frenzy that they’d cut a deal with anybody. It turns out that the executives at AIG literally thought they would never have to pay out any money on these whatsoever. So they thought they were being paid to do nothing. Money for nothing, we’ve called it. And that turned out to be wrong. Unfortunately, the money that’s coming is not just coming from the AIG shareholders, but now, to the tune of almost $200 billion, from the US taxpayer.

Original report is here:
http://www.wallstreetwatch.org/reports/sold_out.pdf

Related info:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/26/david_korten_agenda_for_a_new
DAVID KORTEN: Yeah. And part of the really insidious nature of it is the way the money managers are running the system. They’re creating all of these fictitious transactions as a justification for collecting fees from the system, such as you know, that some of the highest compensated hedge fund managers were taking home more than a billion dollars a year in compensation. Now, that’s where we need to do some serious taxation to recover that money. I mean, that’s pure theft. What they were really doing was raiding the equity of these funds, which was supposed to be the cushion against risk. And so, again, I mean, this is a form of fraud that cannot be allowed to endure.

David Cay Johnston: More Corporate Tax Breaks Will Not Stimulate the Economy
Johnstonweb

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/2/david_cay_johnston_more_corporate_tax
“Getting the economy back on its feet, giving taxpayers a break, saving your retirement fund and your kid’s college tuition? Done. And it won’t cost you a penny.” David Cay Johnston outlines his own “fiscal therapy” to end the economic crisis.

David Korten, co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine. He is also a former professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Business and the author of several books, including When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. His newest book is titled Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth

As President Barack Obama reveals more details of his $825 billion economic stimulus plan, we turn to David Korten of YES! Magazine. In his new book, Korten argues that the nation faces a monumental economic challenge that goes far beyond anything being discussed in Congress. He writes that now is an opportune moment to move forward an agenda to replace the failed money-serving institutions of our present economy with the institutions of a new economy dedicated to serving life.

David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist. He has the cover story in the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine, titled ‘Fiscal Therapy’ His most recent book is titled Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill). He is a former reporter at the New York Times.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about—well, in Mother Jones, “Fiscal Therapy” is the title—“Getting the economy back on its feet, giving taxpayers a break, saving your retirement fund and your kid’s college tuition? Done. And it won’t cost you a penny.” What is it that you are laying that you feel could save the economy?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, fundamentally, several key pieces. One is, you and I are allowed to save, if we have a 401(k) plan, up to $22,000 a year without paying taxes; if we don’t have one, up to six, if you’re an older American. But executives, movie stars, athletes are allowed to save unlimited amounts of money. Hedge fund managers, unlimited amounts of money, without paying taxes. We should end those deferrals. It will bring in hundreds of billions of dollars.

Secondly, the Cayman Islands and other little parasitic operations like it are causing enormous damage to the state of our government’s finances. In 1990, about ten percent of corporate profits were taken in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. Today, it’s roughly one-quarter of all corporate profits. The only purpose served by these operations is to reduce the financial viability of the United States of America government. There’s no reason for us to continue allowing these rules. And the ways that individuals use the Cayman Islands are the same devices that are used by terrorist organizations and narcotics dealers to hide their money, as well as spouses trying to cheat the other spouse in a divorce.

One of the things I suggest is that we stop the business of college. We have turned college from an investment in the future of the country into an $85 billion business. It is so unbelievably profitable. Commercial banks, over a long period of time, make a 17 percent annual return on equity, but Sallie Mae makes about 50 percent per year. That’s unconscionable. It’s unnecessary. And we need to get away from that, so that we develop the most valuable resource we have: young minds.
 
bobmcree said:
Neither do i believe that altruism is the root cause of all evil. In fact I believe just the opposite. Greed is the root of almost all evil. Greed is the exact opposite of altruism. There are many examples in our society of co-ops that work well, supplying quality products at competitive cost and treating their workers as owners. My own electric utility is a perfect example. We pay half what most of the country does for our power, in large part because there are no insatiable stockholders who demand more and more profit while they just sit back and count their money.

If the basis of capitalism is that someone who inherits wealth should never have to produce but should take the lion's share of the profits from the work of others just because they own part of the company on paper, then capitalism has gotta go. I think the nature of capitalism is that i buy something at a fair price, improve upon it or make it available to someone who otherwise would not have access to it, and that i make a profit on that investment and on my own labor. If my business grows I hire some people to work with me, and I share the profits with them. The minute we let in non-contributing stockholders who just sit back and rake in profits without contributing anything, the system falls apart. This is what has happened to our country. Private companies make a profit, decide when enough is enough, and then just continue on as engines of prosperity. Public companies can never make enough to satisfy the greed of the stockholders. The market is not the solution, it is the problem. The sooner we get back to a work based economy and start to move away from a debt-credit based system, the sooner we can begin to recover.

Ignorance and craving always leads to greed, hatred, and delusion.

think someone posted this link here a while ago:

http://www.thevenusproject.com/

its apparent the current strategy is nothing more than rubbing some dirt on it and taking a lap. collapse is the only real catalyst for a complete direction change in approach.

len
 
I figure the problems we are having now is just the way human nature is.

When times are good, people can be liberal with spending and they did, they got real liberal.

Now everyone is running for cover, getting overly conservative, not knowing if they will be able to make it through the next couple of years.

Also after all these years of people wanting more and more in the way of government projects and services, they are now fixed costs that will be hanging around every ones necks, like a ton of weights, in the way of taxes.

Deron.
 
basically, every system of government is bound to fail as soon as enough people learn that they can feed from the public trough without producing anything. i do not see any way of preventing this. human nature will always win out and humanity is bound to fail unless we can find a way to adopt a new way of thinking.
 
Here's an old way of thinking that should be mandatory. However. it won't be as long as we talk about the Senate or the congress or the Oversight Committee. We have to say Senator Dodd or Barney Frank or B. Obama or whoever it is that's actually responsible.

"It's Dec. 8, 2008, 11:11 a.m., and a young Marine pilot takes off from an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, on a routine training flight. The carrier is maybe 90 miles southwest of San Diego. Lt. Dan Neubauer is flying an F/A-18 Hornet. Minutes into the flight, he notices low oil pressure in one of the two engines. He shuts it down. Then the light shows low fuel for the other engine. He's talking to air traffic control and given options and suggestions on where to make an emergency landing. He can go to the naval air station at North Island, the route to which takes him over San Diego Bay, or he can go to the Marine air station at Miramar, with which he is more familiar, but which takes him over heavily populated land. He goes for Miramar. The second engine flames out. About three miles from the runway, the electrical system dies. Lt. Neubauer tries to aim the jet toward a canyon, and ejects at what all seem to agree is the last possible moment. The jet crashed nose down in the University City neighborhood of San Diego, hitting two homes and damaging three. Four people, all members of a Korean immigrant family, were killed -- 36-year-old Youngmi Lee; her daughters, Grace, 15 months, and Rachel, 2 months, and her 60-year-old mother, Seokim Kim. Lee's husband, a grocer named Dong Yun Yoon, was at work.. The day after he'd lost his family, he humbled and awed San Diego by publicly forgiving the pilot -- 'I know he did everything he could' -- and speaking of his faith -- 'I know God is taking care of my family.' ... The Marines launched an investigation -- of themselves. [Last] Wednesday the results were announced. They could not have been tougher, or more damning. The crash, said Maj. Gen. Randolph Alles, the assistant wing commander for the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, was 'clearly avoidable,' the result of 'a chain of wrong decisions.' ... Twelve Marines were disciplined; four senior officers, including the squadron commander, were removed from duty. Their military careers are, essentially, over. The pilot is grounded while a board reviews his future. ...

A young Naval aviator [who also flies the F-18] said the Marine investigation 'kept me up last night' because of how it contrasted with 'the buck-passing we see' in the government and on Wall Street. By contrast, he says, when the economy came crashing down, 'nowhere did we see a board come out and say: "This is what happened, these are the decisions these particular people made, and this was the result. They are no longer a part of our organization." There was no timeline of events or laymen's explanation of how a credit derivative was actually derived. We did not see congressmen get on television with charts and eviscerate their organization and say, "These were the men who in 2003 allowed Freddie and Fannie unlimited rein over mortgage securities." Instead we saw ... everybody against everybody else with no one stepping forth and saying, "We screwed up."' There is no one in national leadership who could convincingly 'assign blame,' and no one 'who could or would accept it.'" --columnist Peggy Noonan
 
jerryt said:
Here's an old way of thinking that should be mandatory. However. it won't be as long as we talk about the Senate or the congress or the Oversight Committee. We have to say Senator Dodd or Barney Frank or B. Obama or whoever it is that's actually responsible.

i agree completely. we all know who the senators are who got us into this mess. i have written obama repeatedly and told him he would lose my support if he signs this current spending bill. he will. he has.
 
Back
Top