let’s think ahead re: the upcoming hearings
Now that the Sanity Check, Deepcapture, InvestigatetheSEC.com, Harry Markopolos, Gary Aguirre, Specter, Grassley, Fairfax, etc……have revealed the “rot” that IS our financial system, our beloved legislators and regulators will say what?

Goldman Sachs has “proprietary software ” that could “manipulate the markets”…(if it got into the “wrong hands”…)

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up …we’re all supposed to just sit here and go “oh yeah right…good thing they caught that guy, now I can go back to sleep’….yes, go to sleep, my little sheep…..dream of a retirement with money, because that’s all you will be able to do is dream about it..

So our regulators and elected ones will claim they were BLIND-sided….yeah that’s what you do when you decided that claiming to be blind is better than being CORRUPT. They will say that no one could see this coming…sure that’s right..none of the rating agencies could see the crap loans they were making, the SEC couldn’t see the naked shorting, the Senate Finance Cmte. couldn’t respond to the crisis…yeah it was all a really sneaky, stealthy attack that just took us all by surprise……

Yes, being blind is a great claim, especially when you spent years ignoring the pleas of people telling you about settlement failures, phantom shares , captured regulators, front running, while your campaign took money from the hedge funds that you failed to oversee….yep, being blind – that’s the ticket….

Just like all the put options that were bought on the airlines prior to 9-11 that were never traced back to the buyers….huh?

And so now we have been coerced into bailing out many of these people with public money as a desperate attempt to prevent the inevitable, as we and our children are saddled with debt of unspeakable proportions….and where was Bush during all this…? “Good job Brownie”….”Mission Accomplished”…”heheheheheh”…

Cramer? Anyone reading the Deepcapture blog and his infamous video of manipulating the markets who doesn’tt believe that he should be held accountable is either naive or on the dark side

Pelosi – with all due respect, this IS about CRIMINAL ACTS and for you to attempt to frame the debate otherwise makes one wonder WHY you would want to protect anyone from the FULL EXTENT of the law….Madame Speaker, please tell us WHY this is NOT a criminal investigation!

Dodd?Can’t even look at the man…Shelby? more of the same…

O’Brien’s recent Sanity Check is well worth reading – of course, it will make you even more depressed, but it is REAL.

The US is like the Titanic now , you see the ship above the water, but the outcome is pretty much sealed….and it’s all about unbridled greed and corruption….a well contrived plan to steal as much as possible and leave little behind, even if it means destroying companies like FRPT and DNDN…a story of buying off the regulators and the Congress so no one would “interfere” while the plundering took place…

One can only hope that the afterlife is an eternity of misery for the miscreants. ……all of them

I am dreaming of it…

“We’ll meet elsewhere and settle this O.K. Here IP addresses are’nt hard to locate.”

You think it’s okay for you to say things like that, and yet you want to remove all of Don’s posts for calling someone else a “dumb ass”??

You asked for my thoughts… there you have them. Again, this is all irrelevant to our common cause. We do no good by bickering amongst ourselves. I strongly suggest that you make your points, continue to share the information that you find, and simply ignore people who say things that you don’t like…..

The time to do something is now and not when it is too late.

I will bet it is not China, or Russia, or any communist organization at all, nor will it be in South America or Europe. Nor will they be followers of Islam or any of the other monsters we hear so much about.

If you’re a fund and you’re betting on stocks to go up, you short the index as insurance.

Short Selling of S&P 500 Increases to Highest Since Mid-April
By Nick Baker
July 10 (Bloomberg)

Bets against the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose to the highest since April last month as investors shorted shares of health-care, technology and financial companies.

Short interest on the S&P 500 increased to 10.01 billion shares as of June 30, a gain of 2.5 percent from two weeks earlier, according to data compiled by U.S. exchanges and Bloomberg today. That’s the most since April 15.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aTju8ldakq4E

What no one talks about is the exact same mortages backed more than one bond. In other words, they were selling claims on real mortages the same way they sell claims on real shares.

Common sense tells you that because the bailouts totaled way more than foreclosures. Why would bad loans ever cost more than the total amount of the bad loan?

Both democrats and republicans refuse to arrest the crooks that are responsible for this. Don’t sucker for partisanship because both parties report to Wallstreet, because Wallstreet is who decides who gets elected.

By William Greider – June 19, 2009

The most disturbing thing about Barack Obama’s call for financial reform was the way in which the president falsified our predicament. He tried to make it sound as though everyone was implicated in the financial breakdown and therefore no one was really to blame. “A culture of irresponsibility took root from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street,” Obama explained. “And a regulatory system basically crafted in the wake of a 20th century economic crisis–the Great Depression–was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st century global economy.”

That is not what happened, to put it charitably. Unlike some other presidents, Obama is much too intelligent not to know this. The regulatory system was not overwhelmed by historic forces. It was systematically gutted and dismantled by the government in Washington at the behest of the banking interests. If Obama wants details, he can consult his economic advisors–Summers-Geithner–who participated directly as accomplices in unwinding the prudential rules and regulations. Cheers were led by the Federal Reserve with heavy lifting by both political parties. ….
…

Right now, I think the political imperative is to slow down the rush to weak solutions. The political leaders understandably want to do something swiftly and get the subject off the table, but Congress would do well to drag its feet and insist instead on deeper investigations. (Rep. John Dingell and others have proposed establishing a Pecora-like commission to investigate the crisis.)

Give subpoena power to Elizabeth Warren the Congressional Oversight Board she chairs. Hire some of those investigative reporters who have no political investment in digging deeper into the mulch. What exactly went wrong? Who has bloody hands? Where are the fundamental reforms? If the economy returns to “normal’ rather soon, the ardor for serious reform might dissipate with much left undone. That is a small risk to take, especially if the alternative is enacting the bankers’ pallid version of reform.

( http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090706/greider2 )

By: Teddy Partridge Wednesday April 15, 2009 4:59 pm

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco today, said she would urge the House of Representatives upon its return next week to authorize an investigation into “what happened on Wall Street.”

Pelosi, speaking to the Commonwealth Club of California, said she wants the panel to be modeled after the Pecora Commission, a bipartisan investigative body established by the U.S. Senate in 1932 to examine the causes and abuses of the Wall Street crash of 1929 and to prevent a repeat.

“They investigated what happened in the markets,” including conflicts of interests and irregularities that set off such devastating effects on the U.S. economy, she said. When the commission issued its findings during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “they had tangible recommendations,” she said, which helped generate widespread public support for major banking system reforms and new securities laws.”

The Speaker has already discussed her proposal with Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner and expects to raise the matter with her House colleagues upon their return from spring district work period next week.

“People are very unhappy with these bailouts,” particularly multimillion-dollar bonuses paid out to executives of failing firms like American Insurance Group, or AIG, that have received federal bailout funds, she said.

“Seventy five percent of the American people, at least, want an investigation of what happened on Wall Street,” the Speaker said to applause from the audience.

“We’re going to have a commission… even if it is only in the House of Representatives,” Pelosi vowed, saying it would allow Americans “to have a clearer understanding of how we got here – and the risk that’s been taken by the taxpayers in all this.”

As Lambert writes today, “I post in haste, so Wikipedia:

“The Pecora Commission is the name commonly used to describe the commission established on March 4, 1932, by the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs to investigate the causes of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The name refers to the fourth and final Chief Counsel to the committee, Ferdinand Pecora.

The Pecora Commission initiated major reform of the American financial system. As Chief Counsel, Ferdinand Pecora personally examined many high-profile witnesses that included some of the nation’s most influential bankers and stockbrokers.

In 1939 Ferdinand Pecora published his memoirs that recounted details of the investigations. Titled “Wall Street Under Oath”, Pecora wrote: “Bitterly hostile was Wall Street to the enactment of the regulatory legislation.” As to disclosure rules, he stated that “Had there been full disclosure of what was being done in furtherance of these schemes, they could not long have survived the fierce light of publicity and criticism. Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker’s stoutest allies.”

Banksters beware!

( http://firedoglake.com/2009/04/15/breaking-pelosi-calls-for-pecora-commission/ )

Bill Black has been calling for a Pecora-style commission for a long time. I asked him if he had a comment on Nancy Pelosi’s call such a commission to investigate the crisis in the financial community:

“Speaker Pelosi’s announcement that she favors a Pecora investigation into the causes of the ongoing crises is very encouraging. Public support for such an investigation has been surging and played a decisive role in encouraging Speaker Pelosi’s position. We need to continue that public support and ensure both that Congress promptly begins a Pecora investigation and that it is a real investigation. Mr. Pecora was the former prosecutor that Congress hired during the Great Depression with the missions to determine the abuses that contributed to the crash, identify the key people that had led the abuses, and recommend reforms to limit future abuses and crises. He was chosen because of his reputation for vigor and integrity and he employed staff, including investigative reporters, that made his investigation successful.

Here are keys to ensuring that Congress authorize a successful investigation.

1. We need to select a single person to run the investigation with a reputation for integrity and a track record of investigative success. We should not use “majority” and “minority” counsel. The parties need to settle on one person they trust.
2. The investigators need to be backed with Congressional subpoena authority.
3. The investigators, not the legislators, need to lead the questioning.
4. The investigators need authority to hire competent, vigorous, and adequate staff.
5. There must not be any limits on what they can investigate
6. We need public investigations, though they can of course interview witnesses in private first.”
( http://firedoglake.com/2009/04/17/financial-oversight-bill-black-responds-to-pelosis-call-for-pecora-commission/ )

I hope so.

Pelosi – Modern Day Pecora Hearings Won’t Be Criminal
http://thepage.time.com/details-on-pelosi-call-for-wall-street-investigative-commission/ I guesss Pelosi doesn’t consider crashing the US economic system by Banksters and Ultra – secretive, Unregulated, Short Selling Hedge Funds which were aided by those in charge of our Federal Regulatory Systems and Captured Mainstream Financial Media along with Captured Ratings Agencies a criminal offense.

By ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer Anne Flaherty, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 7 mins ago

WASHINGTON – The huge amount of money tied up in complex derivative transactions helped cripple the economy, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told lawmakers Friday as he laid out a case for greater government control over a generally unregulated sector of the financial markets.

“Establishing a comprehensive framework of oversight is crucial,” Geithner said in his opening remarks to a joint hearing by the House agriculture and financial services committees.

Despite apprehension among Republicans, the effort to add government restrictions to these more freewheeling financial instruments has gained support within the Democratic-controlled Congress….
…

Additionally, Obama wants to regulate for the first time derivatives that are being privately traded “over the counter,” or away from an exchange.

The influence that derivatives can have on the financial sector was most evident when American International Group Inc. sold so-called credit-default swaps to protect investors against potential losses on mortgage-backed securities. When the housing market collapsed, AIG was unable to make good on its promises and took a $182 billion government bailout to keep from collapsing.

But Geithner said many investors used the instruments to evade regulation, exploit regulatory loopholes or minimize taxes.

Over-the-counter derivatives “grew explosively” in the past decade, with the face value of outstanding transactions rising sixfold to almost $700 trillion in 2008, he added.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090710/ap_on_bi_ge/us_financial_overhaul

“Cuban is living proof that even the billionaires’ club has an IQ bell curve. Gates defines one end, Cuban the other.”

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/07/10/overstock-com-ceo-patrick-byrne-on-the-nations-ills-being-call/

http://www.caretolive.com/ScherOnThe4OfJuly.pdf

OT Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil Comments on GoldmanGate (Video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrlQSMCx-aE