Social Security Will Fall To Obama Before The Taliban Do

Hank Paulson, the Gold Sacks bankster/US Treasury Secretary, who deregulated the financial system, caused a world crisis that wrecked the prospects of foreign banks and governments, caused millions of Americans to lose retirement savings, homes, and jobs, and left taxpayers burdened with multi-trillions of dollars of new US debt, is still not in jail. He is writing in the New York Times urging that the mess he caused be fixed by taking away from working Americans the Social Security and Medicare for which they have paid in earmarked taxes all their working lives.

Wall Street's approach to the poor has always been to drive them deeper into the ground.'

Read more...

The Wall Street White House

Robert Hormats, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs, is to be installed as Under Secretary of Economics, Business, and Agricultural Affairs. This comes as one more, probably unnecessary reminder of the total control exercised by Wall Street over the Obama administration’s economic and financial policy. True, Hormats is “a talker rather than a decider” according to one former White House official, but he will find plenty of old friends used to making decisions, almost all of them uniformly disastrous for the U.S. and global economy.

Read more...

Geithner Rejects Limits On Bailed out Bankers Pay

Timothy Geithner, US treasury secretary, said on Monday he opposes caps on executive pay in companies receiving bailouts from the federal government under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Geithner, speaking at a live broadcast interview hosted by Newsweek, made a number of notable remarks, including the claim that the economy has “clearly stabilized” despite the daily growth of unemployment and other indices of social distress. However, his comments on executive compensation stood out most of all.

Geithner, who said he received a “generous salary appropriate for a public servant,” was asked if “it would be a reasonable proposal that companies receiving TARP money should [have their executive pay] capped at what the secretary of the treasury makes?"

“No, I don't think so.” Geithner replied. “I don't think our government should set caps on compensation.”

Well aware of the popular hostility towards the banking executives, Geithner attempted to qualify his statement, adding, “What I think we need to do is set in place some broad constraints on the incentives compensation systems created.”

“We can bring about broader reforms... that will make it less likely that people will get paid to take large amounts of short-term risk at the expense of their firms and at the expense of the system as a whole.”

The only such “reform” mentioned by Geithner was his proposal that “companies submit to shareholders their broader compensation packages.” Such a proposal is ridiculous. Shareholder votes are, of course themselves monopolized by multimillionaires and billionaires, who are perfectly happy to let their colleagues rake in tens of millions of dollars in compensation every year, knowing full well that they will receive the same treatment.

Read more...

Darling Rejects bankers Pay Cap

Alistair Darling has refused to cap the level of pay and bonuses handed to the bosses of Britain's bailed-out banks because of the dent it would make in Treasury coffers.

The Chancellor told MPs yesterday that while the Government was keen to take action on excessive remuneration in the financial sector, he added his view was "double-edged" because a strict ceiling would leave a black hole in tax revenues.

Read more...

AIG: Billions Dished Out in the Dark

This is crazy! Forget the bleating of Rush Limbaugh; the problem is not with the quite reasonable and, if anything, underfunded stimulus package, which in any case will be debated long and hard in Congress. The problem is with what is not being debated: the far more expensive Wall Street bailout that is being pushed through--as in the case of the latest AIG rescue--in secret, hurried deal-making primarily by the unelected secretary of the treasury and the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Read more...

Treasury To Nationalise Bradford And Bingley Bank

THE Treasury was poised last night to nationalise Bradford & Bingley (B&B), the troubled mortgage bank.
In an attempt to try to avoid a rerun of the Northern Rock debacle the government plans to hold an immediate fire sale to sell off B&B’s assets to one or more banks.
The Spanish banking giant Santander was in talks last night about its potential role in the rescue. Another buyer could be HSBC.
Although the Financial Services Authority had been trying to find a single white-knight bidder to take over B&B’s loans in their entirety, Britain’s big banks refused to get involved.

Read more...

$700 Billion - The Treasury Just pulled The Number Out Of Thin Air

You know the $700 billion price tag of the proposed bailout? Treasury pulled that number out of thin air.
As Forbes writes:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday.

“We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

George Washington's Blog

WTF?