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Call To "Open Source" AIG Investigation
VValdo writes "As you may recall, the citizens of the US shelled out about $85 billion to bail out AIG and its creditors (Goldman Sachs in particular) last year. But as 80% owners of AIG, we still don't know what happened, exactly. That may change. In a new op-ed piece, former prosecutors (including former NY governor Eliot Spitzer) are calling for the US Treasury to force AIG to release its treasure-trove of emails to the public before allowing AIG to 'break free' of our control. As the prosecutors put it, 'By putting the evidence online, the government could establish a new form of "open source" investigation. Once the documents are available for everyone to inspect, a thousand journalistic flowers can bloom, as reporters, victims and angry citizens have a chance to piece together the story.' Good idea?"
That's a good one. Goldman Sachs and Lehman Bros ARE the government.
We own 80% of AIG, so 80% of AIG is technically part of the federal government. That means we should have open access to everything just like we should have open access to the Congress, senate, court system, etc.
This will *never* happen. GS is far too powerful to let that happen. The AIG bailout was quite simply a giveaway to GS.
No, not a good idea. What is the point in having a Cultural Revolution? Better to just split these companies which are too big to fail into smaller chunks, kick out the top management making sure they never work in that capacity anymore, enforce layers of separation between businesses and let them free. Restore the Glass–Steagall Act and separate commercial banking from investment banking.
Put PJ in charge! :)
Unlike movies, the guys in high places taking home the multimillion dollar salaries 99% of the time dont get caught. They cover for each other.
Sad fact of life,
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Shouldn't this have been required when the federal government first loaned them the money? Who F'd that one up?
Bear Sterns was deliberately crashed as part of a scheme to cover up the JP Morgan and Chase insolvency.
Audit the Fed!
As purported owners of 80% of AIG, shouldn't taxpayers also be concerned that the information released could compromise the viability of their investment necessary to regain their lost billions?
I'd love to know what happened but I also want the money they took from me plus an onerous amount of interest. I think the interest will discourage them (and anyone who looks up to their executives as examples of how to rape taxpayers) from repeating their greed/mistakes. Of course what they really deserved was to sink like the anchors they were... Seriously, if you divide the TARP bailout money it comes out to $20,000 per US citizen. My savings and investments can't cover that level of corporate charity disguised as taxes.
this stuff too? Who pays the piper calls the tune. I have to sign away exclusive publishing rights to any work I do with gov funding (no matter how peripheral or limited) if I accept it. AIG should get no waiver on that score either imho.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
A corporation's, or any other authority's "right to privacy" should be much more limited than it is. And even more obviously, we shouldn't be giving it rights as a person. What an absurd concept! But since we always try to put a human face on everything, from god on down, it seems inevitable. And vigilantism becomes inevitable when the confines of the law aren't applied equally and the system breaks down.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Which is why it will never, never happen. You'll learn the truth about Roswell and JFK before you see those emails.
If they can somehow ensure that the identity of the bank's customers will not be released or revealed, then I have no problem with the books being opened.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
We know exactly what happened... a few *idiots* in AIG's derivatives trading department thought they could sell credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities without keeping *anything* in reserve. It's actually a great strategy... unless housing prices go down, in which case you will take huge, mind-boggling losses. Essentially a few people in one department of an otherwise well run institution took down the whole thing by drastically underestimating risk.
Credit default swaps are an insurance product. If you sell them, then you had better keep proper reserves to cover claims AND you had better buy reinsurance in case there is a market downturn. AIG did neither and went kaput.
Shouldn't we have seen those emails BEFORE we bailed them out?
This is a great idea, but it is POST-crash thinking. That's how prosecutors think: They wait for something bad to happen, see blood in the water and then look for the crime. Certainly this is a part of how regulation must happen.
But, there is an even more powerful, I would say way more powerful, idea lurking behind what they are considering: Why not "open source" the whole industry? For example:
o Have open source analytics that measure risk and values and apply those analytics against firm positions to show aggregate exposures and stress values? The recent "stress tests" that were performed against the banks were generally considering quite weak by industry standards. For example, they were based on single scenarios being applied against option-like positions. And, the scenarios were simply housing and interest rate related but not further defined by prepayment and default models. A full analytics package applied with monte carlo methods would give a much more robust answer of the true risks. Shouldn't we know exactly what exposure all large firms have? If the market has much more information on the risks that various firms are taking, it will be much easier to reward good decisions and punish bad ones.
o Force all firms of a given size to publish their largest counter-party exposures on a daily basis. If I own BAC and they are long AIG, shouldn't I as a shareholder be able to see the exposure? Shouldn't anyone be able to see that, for the benefit of the whole? If you produce enough of the counter-party graph connectedness, the market will have much more information on system stability and be able to punish/reward bad/good decisions.
o Shouldn't we be able to see prices of ALL transactions that occur in the capital markets? This is a pretty simple database: CUSIP, Date/Time, Amount, Price. Currently members of the public can only see corporate and (I believe) muni prices. What about MBS/ABS/CMBS/CDO/CLO etc? Also, for OTC transactions there could be other databases that show counter-parties, etc.
o How about seller transparency in fixed income markets? If an MBS deal is coming to market, shouldn't the buyers get access to all material information the sellers have? This would allow for a market where the buyers can actually price risk without massive information asymmetry.
o Getting back to open source analytics, having such analytics (paid for by the large financial firms and produced by independent modelers) would greatly help the fractured buy-side firms who simply can't otherwise compete with the large firms that develop sophisticated, proprietary analytics.
If you want to open source the capital markets, there are many, many things you could do that are proactive and would lead to much greater transparency and stability.
Lets break them up. The last thing that we need is have companies that are 'too big to fail'. We need more competition. If these companies that 'required' and accepted help, then we should break them up into at least 3 companies so that if any are ran into the ground again, we let them die.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As many accountants have said: Show me a company who does not get audited, and I will show you fraud.
There are only two options here:
Option1: We the People get ripped off.
Option2: We the People are allowed to see exactly where OUR money went.
All other options are Option 1 in disguise.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
during this year's big UK politicians expenses scandal? All citizens could look over the lists of expenses and find the abuses. I'm not from the UK, so I don't know how this story ended, perhaps somebody from the UK could fill me in?
Being 80% owned does not integrate a corporation into the entity that owns it. Trust me, Verizon has been using the exact theory for decades to lock Verizon Wireless workers out of the main Verizon company's collective bargaining agreement. Also, ask the Rigases (who owned Adelphia) if full ownership entitles you to complete run of the company -- it can be a jailable offense if you go about owning the company you own to aggressively.
A stockholder company has a wide range of fiduciary issues. It's very likely that if the government, as 80% owner, tried to force corporate secrets into the open that the other 20% could sue them for abandoning their responsibility to the company.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
You mean, like the open source "investigation" of the leaked climate change research group emails? That turned out well...
Let's find out, in court, whether the shareholders or the government is sacred. This will be fun when the shareholders sue the government.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Making public the emails of any large organization (e.g. US Dept of Transportation, Sierra Club, Red Cross/Red Cresent, Google) will mostly be fodder for the trolls and pundits. Any large organization will have some (stupid) individual employees or contractors who expresses racially or sexually offensive views, or make threats or talk smack.
I'm not clear on what these guys are worried about. As far as I can tell, there was no expectation that this money was anything other than wasted, tossed down a giant rathole. So if we find, that say it got spent on a really amazing pool party or lost again in the same way that the original money had been squandered? Well that meets expectations.
I have no doubt that there is a lot of dirty stuff in those emails, so releasing them would be good.
Since clearly not everything could be released (HIPPA stuff, personal bank account numbers, etc.), this raises the question of who would remove the private information, and whether they could be trusted. Clearly, if this was done by AIG, an amazing amount of stuff would presumably be declared personal and private and not for release.
not only is it a great idea, it should have been a requirement before the bailout.
After all the fanfare and comradery inspired by P.J. of Groklaw fame, we need to ask whether this is a good idea? It's an EXCELLENT idea. Many eyeballs make a heap of problems very shallow, to coin a phrase from Richard Stallman's work.
While it is certainly easy to suggest something like this for those evil people at AIG, it presupposes that those good prosecutors and men at law that would protect us from such evil themselves are actually good. In truth the situation is much more grey than that. Firstly consider that many prosecutors in the country are elected and the prosecutorial policy is originates in the politics of the various office holders. Are politicians so indifferent to their own self interest that such a policy as being proposed by the article could be executed in good faith? Of course not. Politicians, and those that serve at them, are as notorious as any 'fat cat' in using their position and power to their own benefit at the expense of the others. All this policy does is feed a sort of populist anger that garners political support for those that suggest it and at the expense of real justice for the small minority that it targets... regardless of their past transgressions. One should remember that enshrining rights, such as prohibitions against search and seizure without convincing a court, exist largely to protect minorities from majority exploitation.
The real sin in the AIG case, to be fair, was not any action of AIG at all. It was that we bought into the bogus notion that a firm can be 'too big too fail' and must be bailout out by Government. AIG made bad judgments and bad investments and its owners (shareholders, including big investment banks) allowed it to be managed poorly. The company should have been allowed to fail, something all those involved earned. What we did instead was reward the foolish risk taking made by the shareholders and the managers and, worse still, told future generations of shareholders and managers that taking these risks is OK... the government will bail you out if you lose so there really is no risk at all... you're too big too fail. Let em fail! Stop taking my savings, diluting my money, borrowing on my behalf to save businesses that by all rights have earned their failure (including all those that chose to have a business relationship). There are other insurance companies, there are other investment banks, and there are others capable of filling the gap responsibly. Sure none of them have such good friends as Geithner, Paulson, Obama, & Bush... but they can rise to the occassion.
under the sunshine act, one would think they have no choice but must, by law, open their e-mails and any other correspondence to the public. we paid for for them, then we should have full access. and the excuse that this would make them less competitive is total BS.
That's what they do whenever you point out that this was an engineered, deliberate economic crisis. Or that fiat currency based on fractional reserve banking is inherently unsustainable and absolutely must have an ever-growing amount of debt attached to it. I think the people who are capable of realizing the truth of these things have already done so, and an attempt to share this knowledge with anyone else just leads to dismissal without examination. No evidence is ever good enough when the person is naive, cowardly, in deep denial, or otherwise just doesn't want to believe that a few puppeteers can manipulate and micromanage both our political and economic systems despite the multitude of signs and abundance of evidence that this is so.
It's sort of like when Galileo tried to convince the Church to look through his telescope; he was right, but he was offering evidence of something that the Church just didn't want to acknowledge. So naturally the Church tried to discredit, marginalize, intimidate, dismiss, stigmatize, pretty much anything other than examine his evidence. Just like you guys do when someone points out the social and economic engineering that should be obvious and you respond by calling him a conspiracy nut.
In the old days, you had to take someone's money from them by force or fraud in order to steal from them. That model is now obsolete. Through inflation, the powerful can steal the value of your money without ever taking one cent out of your pocket or bank account. For the thieves, this has the added bonus that the average American is so stupid that they don't feel victimized when this happens, not like they would feel if a mugger pointed a gun at them and said "stick 'em up".
Let me guess, I suppose none of you find it strange or noteworthy (or obvious like a sore thumb) that public (government-run) schools generally do not teach the well-known fact that under the Federal Reserve system, dollars represent debt and not wealth. They don't teach that if all debt were paid off there would be no money in circulation. They don't make it clear that when money is created out of thin air and has interest attached to it the moment it is created, there is not enough money in circulation to pay off all debt. They especially don't explain that this puts our government into a debt cycle that is like a downward spiral. The only thing it can do is borrow money, and then borrow more money to pay off the interest on the money they borrowed, and borrow more money to pay for the interest of that, etc, until there is so much debt that foreclosures and bankruptcy and who has them become only a game of musical chairs. Isn't it "odd" that during the entire 12 years of public schooling, they never once find a few moments to mention important facts like that?
Strong individuals can do their own research, process their own information, and obtain their own understanding. Helpless sheep need someone to both provide and interpret information for them. If the only thing you know about how our society operates is what they tell you in school and in the media, then you my friend are part of the problem. Sheep demand a shepherd. Individuals demand freedom. Freedom includes an honest economic system based on representative currency; otherwise, debt becomes a slightly nicer way to enslave people than men with guns.
Those emails were made under certain expectations of privacy and confidentiality -- that they would be read by the recepients and authorized corporate officers/audit. To dump them to the public is a gross violation of those employees rights and shareholder rights -- the minority shareholders _do_ have rights.
Look at what happens in criminal searches and civil discovery -- anything that does not make it into evidence (much is disputed and requires judge's rulings) remains confidential. Investigators are granted extraordinary [search] powers, but also have consequent responsibilities.
This is data rape, and can have nothing but a chilling effect on legal communications (the badguys don't care). Prior restraint writ large.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, not a good idea. What is the point in having a Cultural Revolution? Better to just split these companies which are too big to fail into smaller chunks, kick out the top management making sure they never work in that capacity anymore, enforce layers of separation between businesses and let them free. Restore the Glass–Steagall Act and separate commercial banking from investment banking.
That fits with my idea that the standard politician idea of going after bankers' salaries and bonuses is moronic. The crux of the problem is how fat the BANKS get, not how they pay bigwigs.
One more comment: all governments seem bent on getting aid money back from the banking system ASAP, and the Herds are mooing that that's a good thing; but if you consider that the regulations of the banking system is more or less what it was when Lehman went under, central bankers included, I see it more as a "blank check " for keeping regulation lax ( or stupid, witness Basel II ); It would be very difficult for governments to press for reenacting the Glass- Steagall act, which would permanently erase excess profits at realities like Goldman Sachs, all the while asking the same companies to make those excess profits in order to repay the Government.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
So you're saying law should be executed privately lest the public go vigilante without even wearing spandex?
All this "Evil Bankers" stuff is getting ridiculous. The banks/bankers are just the scapegoats for a fundamentally corrupt and unsustainable system.
The magic with blaming the banks/bankers is that we cant get rid of them since we need them. Hence blaming them is the perfect way of maintaining things just the way they were.
IMO FDIC is an abomination ... government bonds should be the investment of choice for people who want to have guaranteed savings (and private citizens should be first in line during issuance). Banking and other types of investment should be for people who want to bear the risks. Implicit or explicit insurance for financial instruments causes moral hazard.
It will distract the quote miners away from ClimateGate.
Adam Smith talked about markets with reverence because an open market is a truly free market. When the consumers are able to see the effect of their purchases, they make much better decisions.
The problem with markets today is that they value opaqueness and secrecy above anything else. If a financial institution dared to let any of their investors see the mish mash of VBA slugged excel spreadsheets that are running their lives, they would probably lose half of their customer base overnight. If McDonalds, or any major restaurant for that matter, had to provide origin information for the products it sold, and those slaughterhouses in turn had to show the conditions that their animals live in, or the salary they paid for vegetable picking, or the environmental damage of the pesticides that overwhelm local ecosystems, they would also see a drop in businesses.
The vast majority of modern capitalism is finding some entity to exploit or enslave for a profit, and then covering that up with lies and marketing.
But Spitzer consorted with prostitutes! He's as bad as Tiger Woods!
Won't somebody think of the children?
Emails, that is. But please, no "frontier justice". The lawyers would miss their cut.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
When they released the Enron emails for that particular court case, the academics had a field day: behold! a real live data set of emails. It was useful for the study of text mining techniques: throw some algorithms at it and see the emails automatically classified into categories, and then look and see that this category has all the fantasy-football, and this one has the defraud-the-shareholders, and this other one....
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Ordinarily, I would think this might be a good idea. However, Eliot Spitzer is among those calling for it. In the past there were several times where he called for "public accountability" of various corporations. Those seemed like good ideas too. They turned out to just be shakedowns and/or publicity opportunities to advance his political career, not attempts to serve the public interest. If an organization has Eliot Spitzer as a member, I will not believe that they are seeking something in the public interest. This is about serving the personal interests of the people calling for it, not about serving the public interest.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
And here's the way it'll happen:
Support Ron Paul's bill http://www.auditthefed.com/ and http://www.campaignforliberty.com/
Why audit smalltime thieves when we could be coming after the GREATEST financial criminals this far into human history!!!
They stole trillions from us and wont tell us what they did with the money.
There's a difference between having 80% ownership of a corporation and owning indebtedness of 80% of a loan for the agreed value of a property. The bank can only ask you to satisfy the debt owed, not vote upon your decisions dealing with the property nor claim ownership before foreclosure.
There are two time frames which require serious investigation. The first is the period Sept 10-Sept 17. What was said in these meetings? Who was there? It is not even entirely clear that AIG would have failed so spectacularly had they been allowed (as proposed by NYS) to tap into some of the excess liquidity of the subs. AIG, similar to Lehmans, was all about liquidity and the lack of access to short term lending facilities. The marks that the CDS portfolio was set to take that quarter were survivable. The cash crunch came from the securities lending side as well as some debatable collateral calls by the likes of Goldmans. The government then decided to effectively do eniment domain on AIG - taking it from its shareholders (80%, they would have done 100% if law permitted) and making it a conduit to funnel money into other institutions. There was never any serious consideration given to assisting AIG, either through relaxed regulation or temporary bridge financing (public or some mixture private/public) at rates similar to those given other institutions which were far, far less punative..
Second, the time period when Treasury decided to force AIG to pay par on the CDS held by many of the counterparts, even though they were not entitled to par as most, if not all, the underlying CDOs had not yet entered default. Even so, CDS held by other institutions *never* paid at par, even when underlying bonds/structures had legitimately defaulted. It was not uncommon to only receive 65 or 70c on the dollar. Yet AIG was forced to make whole a slew of counterparts who at the least should have taken a sizable haircut if not been made to go to court to enforce their agreements if AIG had violated any of the terms.
Instead, not only did the government via Paulson/Geitner/Bernanke pay off the likes of Goldmans and Deutche, they hosed the US tax payer as well as the shareholders of AIG. Some may object to the last but consider that all the above events, particularly those in early September, amounted to the pilfering of the AIG shareholders too. Yes, they may ultimately have lost everything but the way things went down was a sham.
If you do any real research, non YouTube University and Blogger College type research you will find 'Greenland' per say was primarily a real estate scam and nothing more and there is no physical proof that grapes were ever grown in 'Greenland'. The ice cores do not even support this hypothesis.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
TARP was signed by Bush, but was passed by a Democrat controlled House and a Democrat controlled Senate (including a vote for it by then Senator Obama). Congress authorized the first $350 billion to be spent by the Treasury under Bush and then, in December, Bush asked Congress for the other $350 billion at the behest of incoming President-Elect Obama.
If you have a problem with TARP, don't just blame Bush or the Republicans, blame Obama and the Democrats too. Along with Bush, Obama, the Republicans and Democrats, don't forget the roles played by the Treasury Secretary (Paulson), the head of the Federal Reserve (Ben Bernake) and the then head of the NY Federal Reserve/new Treasury Secretary (Geithner).
I could care less about the executive pay situation... what TARP did, was let companies that were already "too big to fail" have cash to buy their former competitors, making them "really too big to fail." The market was concentrated into even fewer hands, which means an even smaller group of people making the financial decisions of the country, and that they are even more insulated (by virtue of being too big to fail) from systemic failures created by them fleecing consumers.
Blame them all, they're all at fault. They all had their hands in the jar. Enough with the "it was all Bush" stuff, it was Bush, Obama, McCain, Democrats, Republicans, et al.
Stop Koolaid Politics
Because all the major news media realized, after the initial frenzy was over, there was no real story.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
On the surface this sounds like a great "power to the people" type democratic initiative. Certainly there is much good in public disclosure.
Where I see issues is in exactly how it's implemented. Broadly speaking, not every citizen, when given the chance to comment, takes that opportunity to make an actionable comment. In fact the majority of comments on newspaper stories, forums, or government communication channels, when they're allowed and implemented in a web-enabled method, tend to be of the angry, snide, or generally unhelpful kind.
The problem then becomes you have to get people to read these things for it to be of any actual value. Slashdot, for all the (often justified) complaints by users that there is a lot of chaff per grain of wheat, is amongst the better examples when it comes to useful posts. Newspaper story comments, at least the ones I read online, tend to be more-or-less useless venting or political grandstanding and sniping, or broad challenges to the competency of this organization or that one. Even when valid, they are not actually helpful in solving whatever issue may be at stake.
Even when there are professionals involved, an open submission policy may result in the sheer number of comments and objections tending to bog down any useful work. I'm reminded of the WiFi implementation saga; the very companies with a stake in the outcome and the IEEE which was just trying to get a standard set, were plagued by verbose and often redundant comments that had to be waded through and followed up on, making the typical Government Committee seem, remarkably, swift and efficient by comparison.
With the right limits, it might work. But, care would have to be taken so that a certain number of hoops had to be jumped through to discourage flippant public input. This (rightly so) is frowned upon by democracy advocates; it's a form of elitism and there is always the danger that people with valuable input may be suspicious of leaving identifying information associated with their input.
Even then, it would definitely add a time penalty to any useful resolution; if none of the public input was valuable, and especially if it were.
I don't see how you could simply release information and not allow people to give a response to that information. I think it's an issue that has yet to be addressed satisfactorily in the modern connected world we live in.
Another Zeitgeist victim. Here's a tip; read a book on basic finance. Better yet, just read a book. Any book. The Great Crash. Animal Farm. I don't care. Stop getting your information from YouTube and the odd polemical internet site.
Every single one of the arguments applied to "fiat money" can be just as easily applied to supposed "hard currencies" like gold. Remember, when gold or platinum or what have you is mined out of the ground, from a currency standpoint, that's exactly equivalent to some new dollar bills being printed. Dollars, euros and yen are worth money because they are (relatively) rare. It has sweet FA to do with debt. The circulation money has nothing to do with debt levels. Debt is not "created" by printing bills or mining metals. Debt is created when people spend more than they earn; which is what western society has been doing economically for 20 or more years. We'd be in debt if we used fiat money, the bren-whatever gold muck-about, or else just traded in bottlecaps.
And brainless fools require someone to pre-digest their information into a pseudo-intellectual web-video so it can be masticated into their waiting mouths. Learn to chew.
May the Maths Be with you!
What we really need is a giant freaking RESET button. Everybody's debt and credit is now at 0. You have what you have, start over. And be smarter this time.
Your brain is not a computer.
This cannot be allowed to happen, since as we all know AIG is both a national treasure *and* a national secret. Can't give away our secrets to just anybody!
That ignores the history of AIG malfeasance, in the same manner the McMedia conveniently ignores JPMorgan Chase's history of malfeasance ($2.6 billion fraud with Enron, etc.).
AIG and their reinsurance scams, AIG and their phony accounting fraud with Brightpoint, etc.
The largest insurance swindle in history rates far more investigation.
That is such unadulterated bullcrap! AIG did plenty of things wrong, first and foremost writing zillions of insurance policies (CDSes) without having the requisite capital reserves on hand when they exploded!
Half of the profits to investment banks goes to compensation, and AIG operated in the same manner. You are right in allowing AIG to fail, of course.
They might not care much if you add a new deck and rebuild the fence but they would probably put a fast stop to your plans to demolish the house or do anything else that they felt would devalue the property.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I liked this comment so much, causality, that I made it my FB status for today (properly attributed).
Buy Text Processing in Python
Is transparent capitalism possible? To find out, we need a different model for understanding economics. Legislation can be seen as a certain set of instructions with a very clear outlined syntax. Every individual is trying to get what they want, and they have to abide by this set of instructions (software) to become a part of an economic system. When the economic system crashes, so eventually does everybody's economic software. People have to fall back to various firmware boot cycles (to psychologists known as "imprinting phases"). If every individual had the ability to offer "patches" to their economic software (the set of laws they follow), and there were distributed authorities approving this new set of laws for that individual with a few basic guidelines (don't hurt anybody, don't steal anything, don't leave a mess), then wouldn't the system be much more resilient and stable? Most people in the United States know absolutely nothing about the economic software they are running. That's because it's not open source. All we see is the graphical user interface. The money changes color and value, but it always has the same dead masons on it.
Making money is not evil. Making money at the expense of a non-consenting individual is.
There are certainly problems with "hard currencies" as was seen when private individuals were able to corner markets on physical gold when much of the world currencies were based on the gold standard. However, the argument about how the current Federal Reserve system works in the US right now, is factually correct. All debt, when you count lending by banks to businesses and individuals, as well as government debt, could not be paid off as the debt in total is greater than the money supply. That is just one of the side effects of fractional reserve accounting.
The question is, can the overall system be sustained without succumbing to hyperinflation and collapse. If gradual inflation can be maintained the system is sustainable and the paradox of more debt than can be paid off is not disastrous. If on the other hand the debt grows too large too fast, hyperinflation can set in and the system collapses, resets, defaults, or what ever poison you want to pick.
This leads us to consider if the current pattern employed by our government, and population, in the US has already hit the point where hyperinflation is now inevitable due to the debt load. Going by WWII debt to GDP numbers, it would appear that collapse is not a foregone conclusion. How ever individual debt at that point was not at current levels. The US at that time was a net producer while now it is a net consumer. I myself am not very worried about a collapse. The Federal Reserve owns approximately 50% of the total debt. It is within the authority of Congress to dismantle the Fed and discharge all obligations to it, and I have no doubt that if faced with certain collapse emergency actions would be taken.
Molog
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Dollars, euros and yen are worth money because they are (relatively) rare....... We'd be in debt if we used fiat money
who modded that informative?
-US prints Dollars on a whim, they are NOT rare
-US IS using Fiat money
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I see NO transparency or open records with our government. As of this writing and senseless back and forth about some flame-bait stale news-musings, the united states congress is cramming some senseless bill up the people's collective behind, with proven numbers of public opposition. To make things worse, the senate bill is rewritten and will not be available to the public until it is too late to react. I will predict a christmas morning package of a newly transcribed Reid bill.
I do not care what you vote for, and it doesn't matter what I prefer, I am just pissed that the US government, paid for 100% by our money, can NOT show any transparency, yet, asks others to disclose highly confidential data?
I WOULD like to see AIG laying out a few records, but let us start small, with the inmates that run this asylum.
So being in a position where your skills are worth millions of dollars is akin to manslaughter? Do you feel the same way about star athletes and movie stars?
Not only is it good, it should be mandatory, to open your source to the gov chosen rep that will sift through all the code for these supposed blank cheques that was evident during the process with that guy that stole 50 billion dollars. Every financial institution should at least pass some sort of NSA approved code review (as encryption does to become a standard).
I see no harm done, as you are not giving away bank account numbers or passwords, merely showing the code structure that will handle them. If a backdoor is discovered, this is where it becomes interesting. The banks are already liable for any fraud that is
criminal in nature, but they do not want to be responsible for any faults that are software related.
That big shell out was based on banks using softwares to automate the lending process and have a sort of AI for deciding who got loans. Too many got loans that should not have gotten, however, I should never have gotten my load, but I make sure that the honor I received to start fresh and be able to rebuild my credit, will not be lost on me. I am sure many people feel the same.
Not because you had bad credit before that you wont pay them back this time, however, I did not feel the pinch during the crisis, so
I can not speak for everyone in my situation. Sometimes it is nice to be given a break that some machine would never have given you
(well in this case a pickier machine).
I just hope that people understand banks need to be held accountable for what happened to the world economy.
Nonono, didn't you hear? Because this is CAPITALISM, the only way to get rich is by contributing many more times to the greater good.
Understand that before anyone had HEARD "AIG" there were problems. The Fed made deals with AIG, who, like a lot of people, pays their high-fliers with bonuses at the end of the year, rather than weekly.
Imagine that. Getting paid ONLY once a year. Once a month is hard enough. But this kinda of thing is required, due to congressional interferance. (The kind that makes Conservatives' blood boil, btw).
That would suck, if it were in any way how things worked. Even if your claim were true (that they only got paid once a year), the bonuses they were receiving were absurdly large (much larger than 95% of the population makes in a year).
Being that it isn't true, however, these are bonuses that they earn on top of their existing salary (which they tended to place at actually moderate levels, as I recall, so that they didn't look like they were screwing us out of so much money when their salaries were reported to various governing bodies), so they had plenty of money each month to get by.
Stop being a nutter, seriously.
You know, this is one of those ideas that sounds good the first time you hear it but requires a "shoe on the other foot" perspective to see just how bad it is. Lets say for a moment, that it was your whole life opened for every tom, dick and harry to see. Would you like every one of your emails, receipts, bank records, blog entries, facebook submissions, etc all laid out for everyone to see. Suppose you did absolutely nothing wrong at all. How much of your time to do think would be required to answer the lame ass public who didn't understand that late night run to Taco Bell, your penchant for overpriced Starbucks coffee, or the need to have a flat screen TV in your bathroom. Ah, but you say, I haven't received taxpayer money like AIG. Really? No school loans, no unemployment, no subsidized food products. How about that tax rebate we all got in 2008 to help stimulate the economy. We taxpayers would like to know EXACTLY how YOU spent that money? So are you willing to let the entire globe, or at least the American public see that? I definitely think AIG, Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac, blah, blah, etc, etc, should pay back the money, and if they can't do that in a reasonable time, let the pros investigate them, the people who actually have a clue about what are appropriate business practices and what are not, rather than some joe six pack who sucks off the government teet themselves.
Be More, Be Manly, The Manly Geek Ubergeek Extraordinaire Blogger: www.manlygeek.com/blog Podcaster: podcast.man
Substance-free handwaving. Bitch about Spitzer all you want, but the fact is that he went after Wall Street before the crash when no one else was interested in doing so, and got convictions and settlements out of it.
The things that Spitzer went after were completely unrelated to the crash and they were not subject to his authority. The reason he got settlements was because the companies decided that the settlement was cheaper than the PR hit they would take during the process.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison