September 19, 2008

What in the world is going on here?

You've seen the headlines, and you heard of the failures and buyouts.
Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, AIG; all big names and all
in big trouble. Then those mysterious quasi-government agencies with names
like Freddie and Fannie become wards of the state and you learn that you
and your fellow taxpayers are potentially on the hook for tens of billions
of dollars. At the end of the week Washington Mutual is looking for a
buyer, and you start to wonder about the security of your own bank and
your own savings account. Let's change that ad copy to WaMu -- boo hoo.

Somewhere in the back of your mind you understand that this is all tied
somehow to bad mortgages. If you start reading a bit further to enhance
your understanding you run into terms like Mortgage Backed Securities
(MBS) and credit-default swaps, whatever in the world those are. Read
further and you find out that a combination of falling home prices and
mortgage defaults have put many investment banks and other financial
institutions in deep puddin'. All this reading, all this watching the
talking heads on TV, and you still don't really know what in the world is
going on here.

Fear not. I'm here to help. I know ... I'm just another talk show host;
but the fact is that when the stage was being set for the problems we're
seeing today I was making most of my money as a real estate lawyer ..
closing loans for some of the very institutions that are the tank today.
This rather unique combination - closing lawyer and radio talk show host -
gave me a front row seat to the politicization of mortgage loans that led
us to today's headlines.

OK .. so we all know that a lot of really bad real estate loans were made.
The political class would sure love for us to believe that the blame here
rests squarely on "greedy" (try to define that word) mortgage brokers and
lenders. The truth is that most of the blame rests on political meddling
in the credit decisions of these mortgage lenders.

Twenty years ago the buzz-word in the media was "redlining." Newspapers
across the country were filled with hard-hitting investigative reports
about evil and racist mortgage lenders refusing to make real estate loans
to various minorities and to applicants who lived in lower-income
neighborhoods. There I was closing these loans in the afternoons, and in
the mornings offering a counter-argument on the radio to these absurd
"redlining" claims. Frankly, the claims that evil mortgage lenders were
systematically denying loans to blacks and other minorities were a lot
sexier on the radio than my claims that when credit histories, job
stability, loan-to-value ratios and income levels were considered there
was no evident racial discrimination.

Political correctness won the day. Washington made it clear to banks and
other lending institutions that if they did not do something .. and fast
... to bring more minorities and low-income Americans into the world of
home ownership there would be a heavy price to pay. Congress set up
processes (Research the Community Redevelopment Act) whereby community
activist groups and organizers could effectively stop a bank's efforts to
grow if that bank didn't make loans to unqualified borrowers. Enter, stage
left, the "subprime" mortgage. These lenders knew that a very high
percentage of these loans would turn to garbage - but it was a price that
had to be paid if the bank was to expand and grow. We should note that
among the community groups browbeating banks into making these bad loans
was an outfit called ACORN. There is one certain presidential candidate
that did a lot of community organizing for ACORN. I won't mention his name
so as to avoid politicizing this column.

These garbage loans to unqualified borrowers were then bundled up and
sold. The expectation was that the loans would be eventually paid off when
rising home values led some borrowers to access their equity through
re-financing and others to sell and move on up the ladder. Oops.

Right now this crisis is being sold to the American public by the left as
evidence the failure of the free market and capitalism. Not so. What we're
seeing is the inevitable result of political interference in free market
economics. Acme bank didn't want to loan money to Joe Homebuyer because
Joe had a spotty job history, owed too much money on his credit cards, and
wasn't all that good at making payments on time. The politicians told Acme
Bank to figure out a way to make that loan, because, after all, Joe is a
bona-fide minority-American, or forget about opening that new branch
office on the Southside. The loan was made under politicial pressure; the
loan, with millions like it, failed - and now we are left to enjoy today's
headlines.

So ... why aren't you reading the whole story in the mainstream media?
Come on, are you kidding me? Do you really expect the media to blame this
mess on deadbeat borrowers and political interference in the free market
when it is so easy to put the blame on greedy lenders and evil
capitalists? Remember ... there's an election going on. One candidate is
decidedly anti-capitalist. Do the math.

The Rest of the Meltdown Story is by Neal Boortz

Neal Boortz is a nationally syndicated talk show host and co-author of The
FairTax Book.

On Sep 19, 2:39*pm, "Lu Powell" wrote:
September 19, 2008

What in the world is going on here?

You've seen the headlines, and you heard of the failures and buyouts.
Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, AIG; all big names and all
in big trouble. Then those mysterious quasi-government agencies with names
like Freddie and Fannie become wards of the state and you learn that you
and your fellow taxpayers are potentially on the hook for tens of billions
of dollars. At the end of the week Washington Mutual is looking for a
buyer, and you start to wonder about the security of your own bank and
your own savings account. Let's change that ad copy to WaMu -- boo hoo.

Somewhere in the back of your mind you understand that this is all tied
somehow to bad mortgages. If you start reading a bit further to enhance
your understanding you run into terms like Mortgage Backed Securities
(MBS) and credit-default swaps, whatever in the world those are. Read
further and you find out that a combination of falling home prices and
mortgage defaults have put many investment banks and other financial
institutions in deep puddin'. All this reading, all this watching the
talking heads on TV, and you still don't really know what in the world is
going on here.

* Fear not. I'm here to help. I know ... I'm just another talk show host;
but the fact is that when the stage was being set for the problems we're
seeing today I was making most of my money as a real estate lawyer ..
closing loans for some of the very institutions that are the tank today.
This rather unique combination - closing lawyer and radio talk show host -
gave me a front row seat to the politicization of mortgage loans that led
us to today's headlines.

OK .. so we all know that a lot of really bad real estate loans were made..
The political class would sure love for us to believe that the blame here
rests squarely on "greedy" (try to define that word) mortgage brokers and
lenders. The truth is that most of the blame rests on political meddling
in the credit decisions of these mortgage lenders.

Twenty years ago the buzz-word in the media was "redlining." Newspapers
across the country were filled with hard-hitting investigative reports
about evil and racist mortgage lenders refusing to make real estate loans
to various minorities and to applicants who lived in lower-income
neighborhoods. There I was closing these loans in the afternoons, and in
the mornings offering a counter-argument on the radio to these absurd
"redlining" claims. Frankly, the claims that evil mortgage lenders were
systematically denying loans to blacks and other minorities were a lot
sexier on the radio than my claims that when credit histories, job
stability, loan-to-value ratios and income levels were considered there
was no evident racial discrimination.

Political correctness won the day. Washington made it clear to banks and
other lending institutions that if they did not do something .. and fast
.. to bring more minorities and low-income Americans into the world of
home ownership there would be a heavy price to pay. Congress set up
processes (Research the Community Redevelopment Act) whereby community
activist groups and organizers could effectively stop a bank's efforts to
grow if that bank didn't make loans to unqualified borrowers. Enter, stage
left, the "subprime" mortgage. These lenders knew that a very high
percentage of these loans would turn to garbage - but it was a price that
had to be paid if the bank was to expand and grow. We should note that
among the community groups browbeating banks into making these bad loans
was an outfit called ACORN. There is one certain presidential candidate
that did a lot of community organizing for ACORN. I won't mention his name
so as to avoid politicizing this column.

These garbage loans to unqualified borrowers were then bundled up and
sold. The expectation was that the loans would be eventually paid off when
rising home values led some borrowers to access their equity through
re-financing and others to sell and move on up the ladder. Oops.

Right now this crisis is being sold to the American public by the left as
evidence the failure of the free market and capitalism. Not so. What we're
seeing is the inevitable result of political interference in free market
economics. Acme bank didn't want to loan money to Joe Homebuyer because
Joe had a spotty job history, owed too much money on his credit cards, and
wasn't all that good at making payments on time. The politicians told Acme
Bank to figure out a way to make that loan, because, after all, Joe is a
bona-fide minority-American, or forget about opening that new branch
office on the Southside. The loan was made under politicial pressure; the
loan, with millions like it, failed - and now we are left to enjoy today's
headlines.

So ... why aren't you reading the whole story in the mainstream media?
Come on, are you kidding me? Do you really expect the media to blame this
mess on deadbeat borrowers and political interference in the free market
when it is so easy to put the blame on greedy lenders and evil
capitalists? Remember ... there's an election going on. One candidate is
decidedly anti-capitalist. Do the math.

The Rest of the Meltdown Story is by Neal Boortz

Neal Boortz is a nationally syndicated talk show host and co-author of The
FairTax Book.

Thanks! I knew there were fed arm twisters involved in these foolish
loans, but didn't know about those references. I shall spread the
word. Oh, the mystery name in the Lu's piece is... Barack Obrother!

Dale
www.fishwisher.com

Today's banking crisis is the THIRD trillion dollar plus
US-caused financial meltdown in the last twenty years.

Each one of these crises came into being through the same basic
mechanism...the fraudulent over-valuing of financial assets by
Wall Street - with a "wink and a nod" (and sometimes a lot more)
from the White House and Congress.

The fraudulently valued assets stimulate the economy, impart
the illusion of health and then, inevitably, the fraud goes
too far and the whole house of card comes painfully crashing
back to earth.

The three trillion dollar plus frauds we

Fraud #1: The so-called "Savings and Loan Crisis" of the late 80s

Fraud #2: The so-called "Tech Bubble" of the late 90s

Fraud #3: The so-called "Credit Crisis" of today

*** How the scam works

The mechanism of these frauds is simplicity itself...

....Take a shaky financial asset and blow up its value
and then sell as much of it as you can.

In the "Savings and Loan Crisis," the instrument was junk bonds.

In the "Tech Bubble" it was Internet stocks.

In the "Credit Crisis" it was individual mortgages collected
into pools and then re-sold to investors.

In each case, normal, well established "bread and butter"
financial principles were consciously thrown away by Wall Street
with no hint of protest from federal regulators.

***The "Savings and Loan Crisis" dissected

Junk bonds caused the Saving and Loan crisis which
resulted in the US taking over the assets of hundreds of
banks and selling them back over time to the marketplace
at fire sale prices.

Junk bonds, which caused the "Savings and Loan Crisis" were
shaky bonds that were pumped up by deliberate misrepresentation
and what I call "staged dealing."

Bonds get their value from two things: the amount of interest
they pay and how safe they are.

"Junk" bonds have to pay higher interest because they are less
safe. Therefore, until the "Savings and Loan Crisis," savings
and loan banks banks were not allowed by law to buy them and call
them assets.

Reagan/Bush changed all this and then a group of Wall Street
fraudsters used the new loophole to kick off an orgy of junk
bond creation and junk bond selling to banks and insurance
companies.

The crooks would deal the junk bonds back and forth
amongst themselves thereby establishing their "value"
and then they'd sell them to outsiders. The bonds
then became "assets" which could be borrowed against
and leveraged to buy even more bonds.

When the bonds failed, the banks failed and in stepped the
US government to "fix" the problem that it created at the cost
of at least one trillion dollars to US tax payers.

Deja vu, eh?

***The "Tech Bubble" dissected

The instrument of fraud in the "Tech Bubble" was Internet
stocks, start ups in particular.

A stock gets its value from the underlying company's sales,
its growth and its overall prospects for the future.

Pre-tech bubble, companies used to have to prove themselves
by being in existence for several years before they could
be sold on major exchanges. That standard was thrown away
during the tech bubble.

To pump of their values, the companies engaged in
"staged dealing" just like the junk bond crooks.

Company #1 would "sell" 20 million dollars in banner
ads to Company #2 which would in turn "sell" 20 million
in banner ads to Company #1.

In fact, nobody sold anybody anything. Company #2 ran
ads for Company #1 and billed it for them. Company #1
ran ads for Company #2 and billed for an equal amount.

These should have been called media trades not sales, but
Wall Street was happy to claim them as legitimate cash sales
and then use the sales numbers to fraudulently value these
companies - many of them totally worthless - in the
hundreds of millions and sometimes even the billions.

***The "Credit Crisis" dissected

By now, you see how the scheme works.

It's not complicated at all.

You take near worthless pieces of paper (junk bonds, stock
of start up Internet companies, etc.) and declare them to
be good as gold.

Then you create as many junk bonds and Internet start up
stocks as you get and sell them as fast as you can.

In the case of our current crisis, the instrument of fraud
was so-called sub-prime mortgages.

Previously, sub-prime mortgages had very little trading value.
Only people in the sub-prime industry itself dealt in them and for
good reason. They're tricky to value and packed with financial
peril.

But Wall Street changed all that.

Wall Street said: "If we take LOTS of these mortgages and assemble
them into large pools and then slice and dice the pools in various
ways, we can sell the slices to banks and other investors as AAA
paper."

It sounds crazy, doesn't it?

If the underlying pieces of paper are garbage, how does assembling
a whole bunch of garbage into one place make it "better?"

It doesn't, of course, and this is a principle even a three year
old child can understand.

But greed and the need to pump up a shaky economy for propaganda
purposes are two very strong motivators.

Banks created these mortgage pools, sold them to each other,
and they by virtue of these "staged sales" declared them valuable.

Do you recognize the pattern now?

If you do, then you are now smarter than all the assembled j@ck@sses
who do financial reporting because they apparently can't - or
won't.

This is the THIRD trillion-dollar plus fraud driven financial
meltdown in twenty years and apparently no one in the financial
news media can see how it happened.

***But there's more...

Junk bonds were mass manufactured as fast as the crooks could
invent them. Ditto for Internet stocks.

But how did hundreds of billions of dollars worth of "toxic"
mortgages suddenly come into being?

Why did the mortgage industry change its lending standards so
radically and so suddenly to make their creation possible?

And why did real estate lending regulators in all 50 states -
because real estate lending is a STATE-level issue not a federal
- go along with it?

Here's where it gets very interesting...

The fact is state-level lending regulators were VERY concerned
about what was going on. They have been for years.

And they not only expressed their concern clearly, they also
took SERIOUS concerted legal action to stop lenders from making
bad real estate loans to their citizens.

(Most of the sub-prime loans in the news so much today were
designed to screw the people who borrowed the money and can
rightly be called "predatory" loans.)

Guess who stopped the states from enforcing their own time-proven
real estate lending laws and thus created the raw material that
made the current "Credit Crisis" possible?

*** The trillion dollar plus question

If you're a US taxpayer, you're going to pay for this fraud
so you might as well know who did it to you.

His initials are GB.

You know him well.

But perhaps more interesting is the name of the person who
single-handedly rallied first state attorneys general and then
fellow governors to fight the creation of these loans and who
in the process became Public Enemy #1 to the Bush Administration...

His initials are ES.

If you follow "silly" US political scandals, you'll recognize
his name instantly when you hear it.

And you will *finally* understand why he was quickly and
permanently assassinated politically earlier this year.

Had ES been allowed to "live," he would have been in position to
remind everyone every day of who made the current meltdown
possible.

Instead, he was silenced very effectively. Not with a bullet
in the back of the head, but the net effect was just the same.

So effective was his assassination that no one can even
mention his name in connection with today's crisis without
risking ridicule, or worse.

Last note:

The crisis this fraud has created is *exponentially* bigger
than the S & L and Tech Bubble combined.

It's not going to be resolved by a quick "patch up" and will
likely have the same impact on the current generation that the
depression of the 1930s had on its parents, grandparents and
great grandparents.

On that cheerful note, here's the big story everyone missed
this year and now you'll finally know what REALLY happened
and why:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/291.html

On Sep 20, 4:05*am, wrote:
Today's banking crisis is the THIRD trillion dollar plus
US-caused financial meltdown in the last twenty years.

Each one of these crises came into being through the same basic
mechanism...the fraudulent over-valuing of financial assets by
Wall Street - with a "wink and a nod" (and sometimes a lot more)
from the White House and Congress.

The fraudulently valued assets stimulate the economy, impart
the illusion of health and then, inevitably, the fraud goes
too far and the whole house of card comes painfully crashing
back to earth.

The three trillion dollar plus frauds we

Fraud #1: The so-called "Savings and Loan Crisis" of the late 80s

Fraud #2: The so-called "Tech Bubble" of the late 90s

Fraud #3: The so-called "Credit Crisis" of today

*** How the scam works

The mechanism of these frauds is simplicity itself...

...Take a shaky financial asset and blow up its value
and then sell as much of it as you can.

In the "Savings and Loan Crisis," the instrument was junk bonds.

In the "Tech Bubble" it was Internet stocks.

In the "Credit Crisis" it was individual mortgages collected
into pools and then re-sold to investors.

In each case, normal, well established "bread and butter"
financial principles were consciously thrown away by Wall Street
with no hint of protest from federal regulators.

***The "Savings and Loan Crisis" dissected

Junk bonds caused the Saving and Loan crisis which
resulted in the US taking over the assets of hundreds of
banks and selling them back over time to the marketplace
at fire sale prices. *

Junk bonds, which caused the "Savings and Loan Crisis" were
shaky bonds that were pumped up by deliberate misrepresentation
and what I call "staged dealing."

Bonds get their value from two things: the amount of interest
they pay and how safe they are.

"Junk" bonds have to pay higher interest because they are less
safe. Therefore, until the "Savings and Loan Crisis," *savings
and loan banks banks were not allowed by law to buy them and call
them assets.

Reagan/Bush changed all this and then a group of Wall Street
fraudsters used the new loophole to kick off an orgy of junk
bond creation and junk bond selling to banks and insurance
companies.

The crooks would deal the junk bonds back and forth
amongst themselves thereby establishing their "value"
and then they'd sell them to outsiders. The bonds
then became "assets" which could be borrowed against
and leveraged to buy even more bonds.

When the bonds failed, the banks failed and in stepped the
US government to "fix" the problem that it created at the cost
of at least one trillion dollars to US tax payers.

Deja vu, eh? *

***The "Tech Bubble" dissected

The instrument of fraud in the "Tech Bubble" was Internet
stocks, start ups in particular.

A stock gets its value from the underlying company's sales,
its growth and its overall prospects for the future.

Pre-tech bubble, companies used to have to prove themselves
by being in existence for several years before they could
be sold on major exchanges. *That standard was thrown away
during the tech bubble.

To pump of their values, the companies engaged in
"staged dealing" just like the junk bond crooks.

Company #1 would "sell" 20 million dollars in banner
ads to Company #2 which would in turn "sell" 20 million
in banner ads to Company #1. *

In fact, nobody sold anybody anything. Company #2 ran
ads for Company #1 and billed it for them. Company #1
ran ads for Company #2 and billed for an equal amount.

These should have been called media trades not sales, but
Wall Street was happy to claim them as legitimate cash sales
and then use the sales numbers to fraudulently value these
companies - many of them totally worthless - in the
hundreds of millions and sometimes even the billions.

***The "Credit Crisis" dissected

By now, you see how the scheme works.

It's not complicated at all.

You take near worthless pieces of paper (junk bonds, stock
of start up Internet companies, etc.) and declare them to
be good as gold.

Then you create as many junk bonds and Internet start up
stocks as you get and sell them as fast as you can.

In the case of our current crisis, the instrument of fraud
was so-called sub-prime mortgages.

Previously, sub-prime mortgages had very little trading value.
Only people in the sub-prime industry itself dealt in them and for
good reason. They're tricky to value and packed with financial
peril.

But Wall Street changed all that.

Wall Street said: "If we take LOTS of these mortgages and assemble
them into large pools and then slice and dice the pools in various
ways, we can sell the slices to banks and other investors as AAA
paper."

It sounds crazy, doesn't it?

If the underlying pieces of paper are garbage, how does assembling
a whole bunch of garbage into one place make it "better?"

It doesn't, of course, and this is a principle even a three year
old child can understand.

But greed and the need to pump up a shaky economy for propaganda
purposes are two very strong motivators.

Banks created these mortgage pools, sold them to each other,
and they by virtue of these "staged sales" declared them valuable.

Do you recognize the pattern now?

If you do, then you are now smarter than all the assembled j@ck@sses
who do financial reporting because they apparently can't - or
won't. *

This is the THIRD trillion-dollar plus fraud driven financial
meltdown in twenty years and apparently no one in the financial
news media can see how it happened. * *

***But there's more...

Junk bonds were mass manufactured as fast as the crooks could
invent them. Ditto for Internet stocks.

But how did hundreds of billions of dollars worth of "toxic"
mortgages suddenly come into being?

Why did the mortgage industry change its lending standards so
radically and so suddenly to make their creation possible?

And why did real estate lending regulators in all 50 states - *
because real estate lending is a STATE-level issue not a federal
- go along with it?

Here's where it gets very interesting...

The fact is state-level lending regulators were VERY concerned
about what was going on. *They have been for years.

And they not only expressed their concern clearly, they also
took SERIOUS concerted legal action to stop lenders from making
bad real estate loans to their citizens.

(Most of the sub-prime loans in the news so much today were
designed to screw the people who borrowed the money and can
rightly be called "predatory" loans.)

Guess who stopped the states from enforcing their own time-proven
real estate lending laws and thus created the raw material that
made the current "Credit Crisis" possible?

*** The trillion dollar plus question

If you're a US taxpayer, you're going to pay for this fraud
so you might as well know who did it to you.

His initials are GB.

You know him well.

But perhaps more interesting is the name of the person who
single-handedly rallied first state attorneys general and then
fellow governors to fight the creation of these loans and who
in the process became Public Enemy #1 to the Bush Administration...

His initials are ES.

If you follow "silly" US political scandals, you'll recognize
his name instantly when you hear it. *

And you will *finally* understand why he was quickly and
permanently assassinated politically earlier this year.

Had ES been allowed to "live," he would have been in position to
remind everyone every day of who made the current meltdown
possible.

Instead, he was silenced very effectively. Not with a bullet
in the back of the head, but the net effect was just the same.

So effective was his assassination that no one can even
mention his name in connection with today's crisis without
risking ridicule, or worse. *

Last note:

The crisis this fraud has created is *exponentially* bigger
than the S & L and Tech Bubble combined.

It's not going to be resolved by a quick "patch up" and will
likely have the same impact on the current generation that the
depression of the 1930s had on its parents, grandparents and
great grandparents.

On that cheerful note, here's the big story everyone missed
this year and now you'll finally know what REALLY happened
and why:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/291.html

I shoulda known: It's was all Bush's fault! Him, and of course, the
black helicopters!

Dale
www.fishwisher.com

FishWisher wrote:
On Sep 20, 4:05 am, wrote:
Today's banking crisis is the THIRD trillion dollar plus
US-caused financial meltdown in the last twenty years.

Each one of these crises came into being through the same basic
mechanism...the fraudulent over-valuing of financial assets by
Wall Street - with a "wink and a nod" (and sometimes a lot more)
from the White House and Congress.

The fraudulently valued assets stimulate the economy, impart
the illusion of health and then, inevitably, the fraud goes
too far and the whole house of card comes painfully crashing
back to earth.

The three trillion dollar plus frauds we

Fraud #1: The so-called "Savings and Loan Crisis" of the late 80s

Fraud #2: The so-called "Tech Bubble" of the late 90s

Fraud #3: The so-called "Credit Crisis" of today

*** How the scam works

The mechanism of these frauds is simplicity itself...

...Take a shaky financial asset and blow up its value
and then sell as much of it as you can.

In the "Savings and Loan Crisis," the instrument was junk bonds.

In the "Tech Bubble" it was Internet stocks.

In the "Credit Crisis" it was individual mortgages collected
into pools and then re-sold to investors.

In each case, normal, well established "bread and butter"
financial principles were consciously thrown away by Wall Street
with no hint of protest from federal regulators.

***The "Savings and Loan Crisis" dissected

Junk bonds caused the Saving and Loan crisis which
resulted in the US taking over the assets of hundreds of
banks and selling them back over time to the marketplace
at fire sale prices.

Junk bonds, which caused the "Savings and Loan Crisis" were
shaky bonds that were pumped up by deliberate misrepresentation
and what I call "staged dealing."

Bonds get their value from two things: the amount of interest
they pay and how safe they are.

"Junk" bonds have to pay higher interest because they are less
safe. Therefore, until the "Savings and Loan Crisis," savings
and loan banks banks were not allowed by law to buy them and call
them assets.

Reagan/Bush changed all this and then a group of Wall Street
fraudsters used the new loophole to kick off an orgy of junk
bond creation and junk bond selling to banks and insurance
companies.

The crooks would deal the junk bonds back and forth
amongst themselves thereby establishing their "value"
and then they'd sell them to outsiders. The bonds
then became "assets" which could be borrowed against
and leveraged to buy even more bonds.

When the bonds failed, the banks failed and in stepped the
US government to "fix" the problem that it created at the cost
of at least one trillion dollars to US tax payers.

Deja vu, eh?

***The "Tech Bubble" dissected

The instrument of fraud in the "Tech Bubble" was Internet
stocks, start ups in particular.

A stock gets its value from the underlying company's sales,
its growth and its overall prospects for the future.

Pre-tech bubble, companies used to have to prove themselves
by being in existence for several years before they could
be sold on major exchanges. That standard was thrown away
during the tech bubble.

To pump of their values, the companies engaged in
"staged dealing" just like the junk bond crooks.

Company #1 would "sell" 20 million dollars in banner
ads to Company #2 which would in turn "sell" 20 million
in banner ads to Company #1.

In fact, nobody sold anybody anything. Company #2 ran
ads for Company #1 and billed it for them. Company #1
ran ads for Company #2 and billed for an equal amount.

These should have been called media trades not sales, but
Wall Street was happy to claim them as legitimate cash sales
and then use the sales numbers to fraudulently value these
companies - many of them totally worthless - in the
hundreds of millions and sometimes even the billions.

***The "Credit Crisis" dissected

By now, you see how the scheme works.

It's not complicated at all.

You take near worthless pieces of paper (junk bonds, stock
of start up Internet companies, etc.) and declare them to
be good as gold.

Then you create as many junk bonds and Internet start up
stocks as you get and sell them as fast as you can.

In the case of our current crisis, the instrument of fraud
was so-called sub-prime mortgages.

Previously, sub-prime mortgages had very little trading value.
Only people in the sub-prime industry itself dealt in them and for
good reason. They're tricky to value and packed with financial
peril.

But Wall Street changed all that.

Wall Street said: "If we take LOTS of these mortgages and assemble
them into large pools and then slice and dice the pools in various
ways, we can sell the slices to banks and other investors as AAA
paper."

It sounds crazy, doesn't it?

If the underlying pieces of paper are garbage, how does assembling
a whole bunch of garbage into one place make it "better?"

It doesn't, of course, and this is a principle even a three year
old child can understand.

But greed and the need to pump up a shaky economy for propaganda
purposes are two very strong motivators.

Banks created these mortgage pools, sold them to each other,
and they by virtue of these "staged sales" declared them valuable.

Do you recognize the pattern now?

If you do, then you are now smarter than all the assembled j@ck@sses
who do financial reporting because they apparently can't - or
won't.

This is the THIRD trillion-dollar plus fraud driven financial
meltdown in twenty years and apparently no one in the financial
news media can see how it happened.

***But there's more...

Junk bonds were mass manufactured as fast as the crooks could
invent them. Ditto for Internet stocks.

But how did hundreds of billions of dollars worth of "toxic"
mortgages suddenly come into being?

Why did the mortgage industry change its lending standards so
radically and so suddenly to make their creation possible?

And why did real estate lending regulators in all 50 states -
because real estate lending is a STATE-level issue not a federal
- go along with it?

Here's where it gets very interesting...

The fact is state-level lending regulators were VERY concerned
about what was going on. They have been for years.

And they not only expressed their concern clearly, they also
took SERIOUS concerted legal action to stop lenders from making
bad real estate loans to their citizens.

(Most of the sub-prime loans in the news so much today were
designed to screw the people who borrowed the money and can
rightly be called "predatory" loans.)

Guess who stopped the states from enforcing their own time-proven
real estate lending laws and thus created the raw material that
made the current "Credit Crisis" possible?

*** The trillion dollar plus question

If you're a US taxpayer, you're going to pay for this fraud
so you might as well know who did it to you.

His initials are GB.

You know him well.

But perhaps more interesting is the name of the person who
single-handedly rallied first state attorneys general and then
fellow governors to fight the creation of these loans and who
in the process became Public Enemy #1 to the Bush Administration...

His initials are ES.

If you follow "silly" US political scandals, you'll recognize
his name instantly when you hear it.

And you will *finally* understand why he was quickly and
permanently assassinated politically earlier this year.

Had ES been allowed to "live," he would have been in position to
remind everyone every day of who made the current meltdown
possible.

Instead, he was silenced very effectively. Not with a bullet
in the back of the head, but the net effect was just the same.

So effective was his assassination that no one can even
mention his name in connection with today's crisis without
risking ridicule, or worse.

Last note:

The crisis this fraud has created is *exponentially* bigger
than the S & L and Tech Bubble combined.

It's not going to be resolved by a quick "patch up" and will
likely have the same impact on the current generation that the
depression of the 1930s had on its parents, grandparents and
great grandparents.

On that cheerful note, here's the big story everyone missed
this year and now you'll finally know what REALLY happened
and why:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/291.html

I shoulda known: It's was all Bush's fault! Him, and of course, the
black helicopters!

Dale
www.fishwisher.com


D'oh. Guess who sets the fiscal policies for the United States? For the
past eight years, it was George W. Bush or his appointee. Those policies
include regulations and enforcements.

Got the picture?

On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 11:43:54 -0400, A Real Boater
wrote:

Got the picture?

Sure do.

Barack Obama has slammed the banking industry for its predatory use of
sub-prime mortgages, which are pushing millions of American homeowners
toward foreclosure.

But his campaign's Finance Chair, Penny Pritzker, owned a failed
Chicago thrift that helped pioneer sub-prime financial instruments and
faced accusations of abuse.

Superior Bank of Chicago went belly up in 2001 with over $1 billion in
insured and uninsured deposits. This collapse came amid harsh
criticism of how Superior's owners promoted sub-prime home mortgages.
As part of a settlement, the owners paid $100 million and agreed to
pay another $335 million over 15 years at no interest...

But this seven-year-old bank failure has relevance in another way
today, since the chair of Superior’s board for five years was Penny
Pritzker, a member of one of America’s richest families and the
current Finance Chair for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama,
the same candidate who has lashed out against predatory lending.

Though Superior Bank collapsed years before the current sub-prime
turmoil that is rocking the world’s financial markets – and pushing
those millions of homeowners toward foreclosure – some banking experts
say the Pritzkers and Superior hold a special place in the history of
the sub-prime fiasco.

“The [sub-prime] financial engineering that created the Wall Street
meltdown was developed by the Pritzkers and Ernst and Young, working
with Merrill Lynch to sell bonds securitized by sub-prime mortgages,”
Timothy J. Anderson, a whistleblower on financial and bank fraud, told
me in an interview.

“The sub-prime mortgages,” Anderson said, “were provided to Merrill
Lynch, by a nation-wide Pritzker origination system, using Superior as
the cash cow, with many millions in FDIC insured deposits. Superior’s
owners were to sub-prime lending, what Michael Milken was to junk
bonds.”

In other words, if you traced today’s sub-prime crisis back to its
origins, you would come upon the role of the Pritzkers and Superior
Bank of Chicago.

It's a pretty picture huh?

On Sep 20, 8:43*am, A Real Boater wrote:
FishWisher wrote:
On Sep 20, 4:05 am, wrote:
Today's banking crisis is the THIRD trillion dollar plus
US-caused financial meltdown in the last twenty years.

Each one of these crises came into being through the same basic
mechanism...the fraudulent over-valuing of financial assets by
Wall Street - with a "wink and a nod" (and sometimes a lot more)
from the White House and Congress.

The fraudulently valued assets stimulate the economy, impart
the illusion of health and then, inevitably, the fraud goes
too far and the whole house of card comes painfully crashing
back to earth.

The three trillion dollar plus frauds we

Fraud #1: The so-called "Savings and Loan Crisis" of the late 80s

Fraud #2: The so-called "Tech Bubble" of the late 90s

Fraud #3: The so-called "Credit Crisis" of today

*** How the scam works

The mechanism of these frauds is simplicity itself...

...Take a shaky financial asset and blow up its value
and then sell as much of it as you can.

In the "Savings and Loan Crisis," the instrument was junk bonds.

In the "Tech Bubble" it was Internet stocks.

In the "Credit Crisis" it was individual mortgages collected
into pools and then re-sold to investors.

In each case, normal, well established "bread and butter"
financial principles were consciously thrown away by Wall Street
with no hint of protest from federal regulators.

***The "Savings and Loan Crisis" dissected

Junk bonds caused the Saving and Loan crisis which
resulted in the US taking over the assets of hundreds of
banks and selling them back over time to the marketplace
at fire sale prices. *

Junk bonds, which caused the "Savings and Loan Crisis" were
shaky bonds that were pumped up by deliberate misrepresentation
and what I call "staged dealing."

Bonds get their value from two things: the amount of interest
they pay and how safe they are.

"Junk" bonds have to pay higher interest because they are less
safe. Therefore, until the "Savings and Loan Crisis," *savings
and loan banks banks were not allowed by law to buy them and call
them assets.

Reagan/Bush changed all this and then a group of Wall Street
fraudsters used the new loophole to kick off an orgy of junk
bond creation and junk bond selling to banks and insurance
companies.

The crooks would deal the junk bonds back and forth
amongst themselves thereby establishing their "value"
and then they'd sell them to outsiders. The bonds
then became "assets" which could be borrowed against
and leveraged to buy even more bonds.

When the bonds failed, the banks failed and in stepped the
US government to "fix" the problem that it created at the cost
of at least one trillion dollars to US tax payers.

Deja vu, eh? *

***The "Tech Bubble" dissected

The instrument of fraud in the "Tech Bubble" was Internet
stocks, start ups in particular.

A stock gets its value from the underlying company's sales,
its growth and its overall prospects for the future.

Pre-tech bubble, companies used to have to prove themselves
by being in existence for several years before they could
be sold on major exchanges. *That standard was thrown away
during the tech bubble.

To pump of their values, the companies engaged in
"staged dealing" just like the junk bond crooks.

Company #1 would "sell" 20 million dollars in banner
ads to Company #2 which would in turn "sell" 20 million
in banner ads to Company #1. *

In fact, nobody sold anybody anything. Company #2 ran
ads for Company #1 and billed it for them. Company #1
ran ads for Company #2 and billed for an equal amount.

These should have been called media trades not sales, but
Wall Street was happy to claim them as legitimate cash sales
and then use the sales numbers to fraudulently value these
companies - many of them totally worthless - in the
hundreds of millions and sometimes even the billions.

***The "Credit Crisis" dissected

By now, you see how the scheme works.

It's not complicated at all.

You take near worthless pieces of paper (junk bonds, stock
of start up Internet companies, etc.) and declare them to
be good as gold.

Then you create as many junk bonds and Internet start up
stocks as you get and sell them as fast as you can.

In the case of our current crisis, the instrument of fraud
was so-called sub-prime mortgages.

Previously, sub-prime mortgages had very little trading value.
Only people in the sub-prime industry itself dealt in them and for
good reason. They're tricky to value and packed with financial
peril.

But Wall Street changed all that.

Wall Street said: "If we take LOTS of these mortgages and assemble
them into large pools and then slice and dice the pools in various
ways, we can sell the slices to banks and other investors as AAA
paper."

It sounds crazy, doesn't it?

If the underlying pieces of paper are garbage, how does assembling
a whole bunch of garbage into one place make it "better?"

It doesn't, of course, and this is a principle even a three year
old child can understand.

But greed and the need to pump up a shaky economy for propaganda
purposes are two very strong motivators.

Banks created these mortgage pools, sold them to each other,
and they by virtue of these "staged sales" declared them valuable.

Do you recognize the pattern now?

If you do, then you are now smarter than all the assembled j@ck@sses
who do financial reporting because they apparently can't - or
won't. *

This is the THIRD trillion-dollar plus fraud driven financial
meltdown in twenty years and apparently no one in the financial
news media can see how it happened. * *

***But there's more...

Junk bonds were mass manufactured as fast as the crooks could
invent them. Ditto for Internet stocks.

But how did hundreds of billions of dollars worth of "toxic"
mortgages suddenly come into being?

Why did the mortgage industry change its lending standards so
radically and so suddenly to make their creation possible?

And why did real estate lending regulators in all 50 states - *
because real estate lending is a STATE-level issue not a federal
- go along with it?

Here's where it gets very interesting...

The fact is state-level lending regulators were VERY concerned
about what was going on. *They have been for years.

And they not only expressed their concern clearly, they also
took SERIOUS concerted legal action to stop lenders from making
bad real estate loans to their citizens.

(Most of the sub-prime loans in the news so much today were
designed to screw the people who borrowed the money and can
rightly be called "predatory" loans.)

Guess who stopped the states from enforcing their own time-proven
real estate lending laws and thus created the raw material that
made the current "Credit Crisis" possible?

*** The trillion dollar plus question

If you're a US taxpayer, you're going to pay for this fraud
so you might as well know who did it to you.

His initials are GB.

You know him well.

But perhaps more interesting is the name of the person who
single-handedly rallied first state attorneys general and then
fellow governors to fight the creation of these loans and who
in the process became Public Enemy #1 to the Bush Administration...

His initials are ES.

If you follow "silly" US political scandals, you'll recognize
his name instantly when you hear it. *

And you will *finally* understand why he was quickly and
permanently assassinated politically earlier this year.

Had ES been allowed to "live," he would have been in position to
remind everyone every day of who made the current meltdown
possible.

Instead, he was silenced very effectively. Not with a bullet
in the back of the head, but the net effect was just the same.

So effective was his assassination that no one can even
mention his name in connection with today's crisis without
risking ridicule, or worse. *

Last note:

The crisis this fraud has created is *exponentially* bigger
than the S & L and Tech Bubble combined.

It's not going to be resolved by a quick "patch up" and will
likely have the same impact on the current generation that the
depression of the 1930s had on its parents, grandparents and
great grandparents.

On that cheerful note, here's the big story everyone missed
this year and now you'll finally know what REALLY happened
and why:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/291.html

I shoulda known: It's was all Bush's fault! Him, and of course, the
black helicopters!

Dale
www.fishwisher.com

D'oh. Guess who sets the fiscal policies for the United States? For the
past eight years, it was George W. Bush or his appointee. Those policies
include regulations and enforcements.

Got the picture?

The picture I developed was one that began years ago with Clinton and
gang, embraced by the Dems who have the closest ties to Fannie and
Freddy, that insisted on threatening lenders with government's big
club it they didn't quit "red lining" lousy neighborhoods and flaky
people. And so the feds got their way, and that's where it all began.

So now we privatize profit and socialize loss; you Democrats are half
way to your socialist utopia!

But I understand, yes suh! I do understand, that it's all Bush's
fault. And so is my weight problem and the dust that blows in on the
wind. Damn that Bush!!

Dale
www.FishWisher.com

A Real Boaterer wrote:
On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 11:43:54 -0400, A Real Boater
wrote:

Got the picture?

Sure do.

Barack Obama has slammed the banking industry for its predatory use of
sub-prime mortgages, which are pushing millions of American homeowners
toward foreclosure.

But his campaign's Finance Chair, Penny Pritzker, owned a failed
Chicago thrift that helped pioneer sub-prime financial instruments and
faced accusations of abuse.

Superior Bank of Chicago went belly up in 2001 with over $1 billion in
insured and uninsured deposits. This collapse came amid harsh
criticism of how Superior's owners promoted sub-prime home mortgages.
As part of a settlement, the owners paid $100 million and agreed to
pay another $335 million over 15 years at no interest...

But this seven-year-old bank failure has relevance in another way
today, since the chair of Superior’s board for five years was Penny
Pritzker, a member of one of America’s richest families and the
current Finance Chair for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama,
the same candidate who has lashed out against predatory lending.

Though Superior Bank collapsed years before the current sub-prime
turmoil that is rocking the world’s financial markets – and pushing
those millions of homeowners toward foreclosure – some banking experts
say the Pritzkers and Superior hold a special place in the history of
the sub-prime fiasco.

“The [sub-prime] financial engineering that created the Wall Street
meltdown was developed by the Pritzkers and Ernst and Young, working
with Merrill Lynch to sell bonds securitized by sub-prime mortgages,”
Timothy J. Anderson, a whistleblower on financial and bank fraud, told
me in an interview.

“The sub-prime mortgages,” Anderson said, “were provided to Merrill
Lynch, by a nation-wide Pritzker origination system, using Superior as
the cash cow, with many millions in FDIC insured deposits. Superior’s
owners were to sub-prime lending, what Michael Milken was to junk
bonds.”

In other words, if you traced today’s sub-prime crisis back to its
origins, you would come upon the role of the Pritzkers and Superior
Bank of Chicago.

It's a pretty picture huh?

Better watch out or you will be called a riech wing rectal fissure by
Harry Krause (aka A Real Boater).