Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

is it a good idea to give *anybody* that sort of rolling credit limit and say "use it as you see fit; we won't ask any questions"?

Exactly. No one person should be given that sort of authority.

http://i34.tinypic.com/2wodl6p.jpg

OMG WARE TO PUT $$$!!! OIL???

http://i33.tinypic.com/w7ea9l.jpg

Henry Paulson on Face The Nation yesterday:

"Is this going to fix the situation or is this a band-aid?"
"Well Bob... what we're doing now is not going to make the turbulence disappear overnight, this is going to take a while to work through this situation, but this is a very strong step... this is about doing what's right...."

Given Paulson's record, I propose we make arrangements to change our name to the United States of China.

Given Paulson's record, I propose we hang him.

I know I know threatening etc etc. I'm just APPALLED by the NERVE of these PEOPLE

Are you asking other foreign governments to help as well?
"We are urging others to do so. A number have expressed the willingness to do so. This is a global financial system."
Can you tell us which ones?
"Not at this time. But what we are doing, again, we're taking care of our situation. And I'm not saying anyone has committed to do this yet, but we have started that dialogue. And again, in terms of the United States of America, it is a distinction without a difference in terms of what's best for our citizens as to whether it happens to be owned by a foreign ownership or a U.S. ownership."

So actually you're going to bail out our shitty banks for us. Thanks, btw.

he's gotta bail out the foreign banks because he and his family are about to become persona non grata on these shores

hey our banks funded incredibly stupid investments in po duck clap board houses in las vegas too, give us your hard earned paper.

i am now sending u $5

FINALLY A RATIONAL VIEWPOINT

http://mediamatters.org/items/200809190021

wtf? seriously wtf?

what i cant believe is dems who dont refuse to answer the question on those terms. they should be like "wtf stfu u dum racist hick"

from 2006

NEW YORK — Record earnings on Wall Street are yielding windfall bonuses for its top executives.

Compensation experts predict a lucrative bonus season this year, as surging merger and underwriting activity, growing fixed income markets and a rebound in stock trading activity fuel unprecedented profit and pay.

This week traders, bankers and other executives at Goldman, Lehman and Morgan Stanley were told the size of their bonuses for the fiscal year ended Nov. 25. Bonuses make up the bulk of Wall Street compensation, and can be more than 10 times the base salary for top producers.

CEOs also saw big pay hikes amid strong growth in profit and share-price gains that outperformed the broader U.S stock market.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), which posted its second straight year of record profit Thursday, paid Chief Executive Henry "Hank" Paulson about $38 million in salary, restricted stock and options. The third-largest investment bank by market value saw its shares rise 22 percent this year.
Related

According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Goldman on Tuesday gave Paulson 224,777 restricted stock shares worth about $30 million when priced last month. Of these shares, 89,910 vested immediately and were withheld by the firm to cover Paulson's tax obligations while the remaining 134,867 shares vest in November 2008.

Paulson, who is 59, was also granted stock options on 220,392 shares valued by the firm at about $7.3 million, with 40 percent vesting immediately. Paulson, who received a salary of $600,000 and no cash bonus this year, now holds 3.89 million shares.

Overall, Paulson's compensation rose more than 21 percent from last year.

"The compensation considers the outstanding financial performance of the firm and Hank's leadership, the share price performance and the competitive environment," spokesman Lucas van Praag said.

Earlier this week Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LEH) whose stock soared 48 percent this year, said it paid chairman and chief executive officer Richard Fuld $14.9 million of restricted stock and options on 350,000 shares. Lehman, which didn't disclose the other portions of Fuld's pay package, received $10.4 million in restricted stock last year.

Morgan Stanley the largest securities firm by market value, said it paid chairman and CEO John Mack a bonus of $11.5 million for five months on the job. Acting President Zoe Cruz, a key lieutenant to both Mack and former CEO Philip Purcell, got a stock bonus of almost $14 million.

Directors at Morgan Stanley had offered Mack a $28 million bonus, citing his leadership, but said Mack requested a pro rata share of the bonus. The remainder of the bonus would be returned to the bonus pool for other executives.

The banking, brokerage and credit card company also this week raised the stock portion of bonuses for management committee members to 65 percent of total pay from 55 percent.

Shares of Morgan Stanley have risen just 3 percent this year amid a tumultuous management shake-up that led to dozens of executive departures. The firm next Tuesday is expected to report 1 percent earnings growth, as credit card losses and soaring compensation costs offset a 23 percent rise in revenue.

Last Year's Big Five Wall Street Bonuses
September 22, 2008 7:12 AM

As the Bush Administration asks for close to a trillion dollars to prevent a worldwide financial cataclysm, here are some numbers you might find interesting -- courtesy of the ABC News Research Center and ABC News' Barbara Paulson.

In 2007, Wall Street's five biggest firms-- Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley - paid a record $39 billion in bonuses to themselves.

That's $10 billion more than the $29 billion loan taxpayers are making to J.P. Morgan to save Bear Stearns.

Those 2007 bonuses were paid even though the shareholders in those firms last year collectively lost about $74 billion in stock declines --their worst year since 2002.

If split equally among the approximately 186,000 workers at the former Big Five Houses, that bonus money means an average of $201,500 per person -- more than four times the $48,201 median household income in the U.S. last year.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/09/last-years-big.html

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/paulsonpp_5_1.png

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), which posted its second straight year of record profit Thursday, paid Chief Executive Henry "Hank" Paulson about $38 million in salary, restricted stock and options.

where are the riots?

it's all the democrats' fault, though

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aSKSoiNbnQY0

says mccain economic advisor

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that's worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

This is no time for politics of the playground

By Clive Crook

Published: September 21 2008 17:58 | Last updated: September 21 2008 17:58

Every four years, despite ample evidence to the contrary, the US celebrates the myth of presidential omnipotence – of the office, at least, if not its occupant. The country is looking for the one man or woman who can do the biggest job in the world, take the 3am phone calls and use those awesome powers to set to rights all that is wrong, from the war on terror to indiscipline in schools, from economic inequality to the state of the roads. It is a cherished illusion. In 2008, the worst financial crisis since the 1930s has shattered it before the new president is even in the job.

The technocrats are in charge – Hank Paulson at the Treasury and Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve – and even they are making it up as they go along. President George W. Bush appeared briefly last week, noting that the country was worried about the current financial difficulties and saying, as though this were important information, that he shared those concerns. Wisely, he did not affect to take command of the situation (you thought the collapse of Lehman was a blow to confidence).

Over the weekend, Congress became deeply involved, because the Fed-Treasury plan to take bad assets off the balance sheets of banks and non-bank financial institutions will require congressional action. Even as the issue thus became intensely political, the president was off to the side – and will stay there, even if wheeled in to chair some meetings. What is true of the president is more true of the presidential candidates.

The rescue of Bear Stearns in March should have woken the authorities up to the possible need for a more systematic approach to the subprime meltdown, and it should have persuaded Barack Obama and John McCain to get a grip on the elements of financial regulation so that they could express a view on that matter. But every one acted as though the crisis would blow over, at least until after the election. That is why the Fed and the Treasury are having to put together a complicated and expensive regime for the resolution of bad assets – in the space of hours and under extreme duress. It is why Mr Obama and Mr McCain are obliged to play politics rather than having anything helpful to say.

So much for the idea that Mr Obama’s experience resides in “being tested on the campaign trail”. A fat lot of use that was when the financial system approached meltdown last week. Mr McCain did no better, fronting his trademark decisiveness – decisively adopting one position then decisively reversing himself the day after. What about rallying round in a crisis? Before the situation worsened last week, both campaigns had already taken on a stridently negative tone. The financial emergency only reinforced this, giving no impetus whatever to the pragmatic, post-partisan consensus-seeking that both men once espoused and that the situation so urgently demands. They left that to Congress.

For Mr Obama, what has happened is not so much a result of specific regulatory failures (of which there have been plenty) but a wholesale failure of the enemy ideology. Here is his recommendation on how to move forward, almost in full: “You can fire the whole trickle-down, on-your-own, look-the-other-way crowd.”

Mr McCain, likewise playing to stereotype, sounded loud populist notes about greed on Wall Street and (again) the need for change in Washington. Both men continue to accuse the other of lies, distortions and gratuitous insults. This now constitutes the bulk of each campaign’s television advertising. Welcome to the new politics.

Given the timing, Mr Obama and Mr McCain were bound to seem irrelevant to the task of stabilising the financial system, even though important principles are at stake in that effort. But whichever of them wins in November, the fallout from this emergency will probably cloud the next administration’s first two years in office. It would be good to see some dawning of this reality in remaining weeks before the election.

First and foremost, there should be an acknowledgement that the outlook for fiscal policy is transformed. Contrary to reports, the planned arrangements for relief from bad assets will in most respects not resemble the Resolution Trust Corporation of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The RTC absorbed hundreds of distressed savings-and-loan companies wholesale. It did not have to pick and choose the assets it would acquire, and those assets were infinitely simpler than the tangled instruments today’s banks and non-banks will seek to shed. But the parallel is apt in one way. The history of the RTC tells you something about the likely cost, and the fiscal politics, of this venture.

The final cost to taxpayers will be enormous – hundreds of billions of dollars – and keeping this new entity funded will be a preoccupation of the next administration. The RTC is now regarded as a success in its way. Yet it was detested on Capitol Hill and keeping it funded was a constant struggle: actual outlays of cash were required and Congress has its own ideas about where public money should go. The tens of billions required to keep the RTC running are an order of magnitude smaller than the likely needs of its successor.

As though nothing has happened, the campaigns are fighting over who is proposing the bigger tax cuts and who will more generously support investment in energy efficiency, better schools, smarter hospitals, new bridges or whatever. Those promises were dubious to begin with and are now worthless. The next administration will spend most of its time finding taxes to increase and spending programmes to cut, or risk presiding over the bankruptcy of the government itself. Something to talk about, after the election.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), which posted its second straight year of record profit Thursday, paid Chief Executive Henry "Hank" Paulson about $38 million in salary, restricted stock and options.

where are the riots?

They can be started here.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=30+Hudson+St,+Jersey+City,+New+Jersey+07302,+United+States&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=45.197878,77.255859&ie=UTF8&cd=1&geocode=FRg7bQIdcFGW-w&z=16&iwloc=addr

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1843168,00.html?cnn=yes

I enjoyed this ^^^

This weekend my dad, triumphantly, adduced the piece of legislation that McCain advanced in 2005, as proof of McCain's prescience. Anyone know its name so I can read it my damn self?

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s109-190&tab=speeches

http://thomas.loc.gov/home/multicongress/multicongress.html

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:SN00190:@@@P

I thought the subprime problem was the mortagages that didn't go through Freddie/Fannie, though?

LOL:

http://markets.on.nytimes.com/cgi-bin/upload.dll/file.png?z0408210az7a0351dc6ca3481fb4801eb18d8692cf

In seriousness, I think oil is probably a dumb place to put money unless you plan to sell again in the short term. Even the mild, early stage recession we were in, combined with higher prices, took a big enough bite out of demand to deflate the last bubble pretty quickly, and demand is probably going to fall even more now.

I thought the subprime problem was the mortagages that didn't go through Freddie/Fannie, though?

1. No.

2. There IS NO subprime spoon. Subprime is a high-risk/high-profit lending category and served as the canary in the coalmine. That's all. People were borrowing with exotic instruments all up and down the credit scale. Some were sophisticated; some were naive; all of them expected real estate values to keep rising, and all of their investments became worthless when the music stopped.

From today's Evening Standard:

Our authorities did nothing; the Americans, led by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson came up with an answer. Throughout the credit crunch, Paulson has played a blinder. ... That is leadership from the front... (In England) there's nobody with the character and aura to climb above all that and to take charge.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23558554-details/Hank+puts+us+to+shame+in+handling+the+crisis/article.do

Got two paragraphs into that. stopped here and killed self.

Of course, they were US organisations and it was only natural that their futures should be determined on their home patch. But that's not how it's been played in London in the past few years, where we've come to regard the London end as just as important, if not more so, than New York.

Aw it's like his feewings got hurt. I wonder if it's ever occurred to him that the United States economy is.. just a little bigger than England's.

Ha Lou Dobbs just called Paulson an incompetent empty-suit buffoon who needs to shut up and get over himself 4 times in a row; guess there's no border-crossing outrage story to lead with tonight

$6.6bn: Losses by Lehman Bros in 2008 up to point it went bankrupt.

$8.7bn: Staff bonuses paid out by Lehman Bros in 2006.

Hey, they had to attract the best talent.

CNBC Poll: Your Opinion

Are Democrats right in insisting homeowners be helped in financial bailout plan? * 32389 responses

Yes
35%

No
58%

Not Sure
7.4%

Not a Scientific Survey.

And now weighing in...

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2008-09/42510887.jpg
ballin

xpost is CNBC correct to refer to people with no equity in the homes they happen to live in as "homeowners" Y/N?

Money renters yes, homeowners.. not so much

This whole $700bn thing is so greatly fucked, it depresses me.

Essentially the originators of all that subprime debt paper perpetrated a huge fraud, baited it with high front-end returns and unloaded it on bankers made stupid by greed, who now wish they had not been so mind-fuckingly stupid and greedy. Too late, fools. Should have thought of that sooner, you manicured bastards.

So, what is the answer we're given for all this? Oh, the government selectively buys only the worthless fraudulent assets, swallows the entire mass of crapulent shit, hands over $700bn to the idiots who made the mess, and the idiots walk off grinning like madmen, while uttering pious nonsense about how it is all for the best. Like hell it is.

I can think of a few things that $700bn could buy that had some actual value to the people of the USA, that would create more genuine wealth and in the process not reward greasy con men and the criminally negligent. What are we buying again for all this money? Nothing! We are just acquiring a debt.

STOP THIS!!!!

dear gov,

can i get like $1m?

thx

nah dawg you gotta blow like a bill first before they start giving it to you

Should just let the banks deal with their own shit and spend the $700bn and more on a new WPA, build a health service, fix up the railways and the bridges.

“When there’s a fire in your kitchen threatening to burn down your home, you don’t want someone stopping the firefighters on the way and demanding they hand out smoke detectors first or lecturing you about the hazards of keeping paint in the basement.” - Mitch McConnell, arguing for immediate passage of the bailout

Idiot,

The analogy should be

"when surveying the smouldering ruins of a building where they kept open petrol tanks, kindling, firelighters and fidgety arsonists you shouldn't be handing the soot blackened people matches"