But we're supposed to move forward.

Maybe the news outlets are trying to protect poor little folks like me who are still traumatized by 2008?

I'm all in favor of helping a person in need, but really...

the teachers, policeman and public sector workers get laid off and dismantled.

then thes people who are stonewalling or plain refusing to anser questions should be brought up on comptempt charges and forced to pay back all of their unpaid tarp monies . and the bush era tax cuts should end and all loopholes closed .

We need forensic economist William K. Black put in charge of policing Wall Street, past, present and future:

Geithner Channels Greenspan and Airbrushes Fraud Out of Our Crises

Black supports Obama, BTW.

The reason you see this on CommonDreams and not Rachel Maddow is because it's bullshit. CommonDreams is either too clueless to understand the difference between trillion dollar bailouts and small overnight loans, or they're hoping you don't know the difference in order to promote outrage and get attention.

Common Dreams is a not-for-profit.

That makes a big difference in what gets covered.

PWNED!!

Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank have a word...

http://vimeo.com/43990725

Sounds like it's going to be a great broadcast.

$12,121 per man, woman and child! That's $48,485 for a family of four!

My family could use that to get out of debt!

[font size="1"](But then, we wouldn't owe anything to anyone... hmmm, I'll have to ponder this)

A good analysis of where we are:

Its the HOUSING INDUSTRY that was decimated by JP Morgan and others in the derivitive market
Banksters is right and with a little help of the Federal Reserve and lots of help of Congress

Now Americans gotta suck it up and pay for it

Austere measures folks and meanwhile you can just be our slaves

No pensions No healtcare and send our children to be in their armies

the American people are getting really fed up
and we KNOW WHO YOU ARE that did this to us

The Worker will Rise up

For those interested in a more complete story:

http://mediamatters.org/research/201206130012


Of course, you can always go with the Fox version of realty/reality:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/2012/06/13/reality-check-on-gloomy-net-worth-numbers/

homeowners weren't able to take out Home Equity Lines of Credit based upon them. In other words, what you're dismissing as not real wealth was real enough that banks were willing to lend against it.

I suppose you could say. I took out a second myself, which I would be much better off having left alone. It was a couple years of scraping by to get out of the woods on that one, and fortunately I kept my job...but there isn't one person I know who wasn't affected in some way. It was a brief and imaginary wealth, and believing in it was the dangerous thing.

...same as many other programs of the time. Unless you wanted to see complete collapse and a re-boot from Year Zero, the efforts back in 2008 saved millions of jobs and kept a whole lot of people on their feet, here and around the world.

Some of the money got paid back. OK. Great. So ask: Why some are allowed to profit at taxpayer expense?

False Narratives

“. . .this is not a movement that hates rich people just for being rich. If it were that kind of movement we`d call it Occupy Silicon Valley. No. It`s not about hating the economic winners. It`s about hating the economic cheaters. We`re tired of the cheaters. We`re tired of people rigging the game so that they can get ahead and the rest of us can`t get anywhere.”

http://usawatchdog.com/false-narratives/

hang it around Obama's neck like a big albatross (though it was a fully bipartisan plan), and hound him over every nickel and dime.
But then I've never been able to stand listening to Hannity, so maybe I'm wrong.

It wasn't so much to allow some people to profit as it was to stabilize the collapsing banking sector. And then another part was to rescue the US automakers.

But, really, why would you even brag about it being paid back? Every dime which was "paid back" represents money taken out of the real economy.

We should have broken up the banks and given the money to people to pay down debts and generate real economic activity.

They had to be paid back so that they could be lent over again, as the fund itself didn't have anywhere near that much. I think the primary numbers that are batted about as the banking bailout figures are $7.7 trillion, spread over 21,000 loans, over a period of a few months.

Sometimes its spoken of as if it were a secret program, but a minute or two with google gets you the public announcements about it before, during and immediately afterwards. The main goal was to instill overall confidence, so they played up the numbers, but they didn't want to weaken banks by naming names and saying who needed this or that. The exact transaction details were kept back for a year or two.

I feel the irs should go after those instituitions and get that money back from them who havent paied up. i look at the dollar amouts and the stonewalling , and we are broke ? gee jumapin jehosafat.

The bank bailouts (plural) did not turn a profit for the government. Your link was to an article on TARP, so here's an update on TARP:

which was one questionable decision that hasn't turned out well and remains questionable. The rest was mostly fine.

Profits come from interest earned on short-term loans. The banks generate profits by lending at a higher rate than they borrow.

"Letting the parasite die" sounds simple enough, a Year Zero type of project where you let everything collapse and start from the ground up. Who makes that decision, and who is responsible to implement it, then? Who runs it, and how well would a national bank work, operating as it would have been under direct congressional (repug-controlled) oversight? How easy would it be for us all to come out worse?

I am guessing at alternate history here, but that would have been so much more easily played by the other side that they would have taken even bigger majorities in 2010 and we'd probably be winding down through impeachment proceedings now. Every bit of economic obstruction would be playing out on steroids and there would be no recovery. We'd be looking at massive losses at the polls again, including certainly the White House, in November.

"Profits come from interest earned on short-term loans. The banks generate profits by lending at a higher rate than they borrow. "

Sigh. This just one (decreasingly significant) source of revenue for modern TBTF banks. I really do wish people would take the time to try to learn how banks function today since it's become such a huge part of our economy and the risks of supporting this sector are now so outsized.

Banks paid these loans back mostly by lending the money back to the government at a higher rate and by jacking up fees on credit cards and financial services. That represents a loss to the rest of the private sector which had to pay these higher fees, and it represents an opportunity cost to the government which could have found a more productive use for these funds.

I'm so tired of all the good work some (very few) of our decent congress people do that is all for naught.

Why do I want to read about it if there's nothing I can DO about it and there's noone who can CHANGE it?

I'm too depressed for this - guess I need a DU break.

A forensic economist for Uncle Sam during the S&L Crisis, Professor Black says honest government is the answer. No wonder Charles Keating said: "Get Black. Kill him dead." The once-billionaire must've been speaking figuratively, of course.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html

Give your eyes a rest, cyberpj. Listen to the voice of reason and you'll know there's a way of doing it. To show you how messed up things are, Black says the current crisis is 1,000 times worse than the S&L Crisis, yet the FBI has only 1/5th the number of agents assigned to investigate Wall Street fraud.

Here's the best part: There are a LOT of still honest people in government. We the People can -- and WILL win. The reason is TRUTH is on our side.

I went to the site and recognized Professor Black.

Thanks for your encouragement. I listened again, but even this was from 2009; and what's been done? It appears to have only gotten worse I think.

I guess I just have to hope your optimistic view:

'There are a LOT of still honest people in government. We the People can -- and WILL win. The reason is TRUTH is on our side. '

The guy is still taking names. What we need is for Mr. Holder and Mr. Geithner use their authority and start kicking ass.

For when your eyes are feeling fresher:

Its socialize the losses, privatize the profits.

Last edited Thu Jun 14, 2012, 06:58 PM - Edit history (1)

are socialized for these parasites, but the rewards remain private).

Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, served on the New York Fed's
Board of Directors from 2006-2011. General Electric received $16 billion in lowinterest financing from the Federal Reserve’s Commercial Paper Funding Facility during this time period.

Stephen Friedman. In 2008, the New York Fed approved an application from
Goldman Sachs to become a bank holding company giving it access to cheap Fed
loans. During the same period, Friedman, who was chairman of the New York
Fed at the time, sat on the Goldman Sachs board of directors and owned
Goldman stock, something the Fed’s rules prohibited. He received a waiver in
late 2008 that was not made public. After Friedman received the waiver, he
continued to purchase stock in Goldman from November 2008 through January of
2009 unbeknownst to the Fed, according to the GAO.
During the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs received $814 billion in total financial assistance from the Fed.

Weird how the CEO of General Electric would head the Jobs Council at the same time General Electric is shipping jobs, infrastructure and investment to China -- where there are no unions and little, if any, protections for workers, their families and environment.

As for Mr. Friedman, while he resigned, I'd bet an honest prosecutor could find evidence to put him behind bars for a long time. It seems, for whatever reason, Mr. Holder has been too busy to notice the rampant criminality on Wall Street.

http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/153530/7_of_the_Nastiest_Scams,_Rip-Offs_and_Tricks_From_Wall_Street_Crooks?page=1

Most importantly: Thank you very much for the information, Autumn. It's amazing how the interests of conservatives and liberal seem to evaporate when billions and trillions of dollars are involved.

PS: Sorry I couldn't embed the links. Some sort of conflict in coding or something.

Sometimes I wonder if this administration is that clueless or just that corrupt.

While I've never been in a position to vouch for this personlly, but the amounts of money are so huge that almost no one in authority is immune to being influenced. Remember what William Colby said about the money:

“The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It’s possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government.”

If you really believe this story is unvarnished fact then perhaps you should apologize to Ron Paul.

But seriously ....

I was curious to see just how the real data was tortured into aggregating to 4 trillion dollars

Found it in footnote of the original GAO report... To wit

If an institution borrowed 10 billion overnight, but each day, for thirty days, rolled over that 10 billion dollar loan it shows up in the aggregate "aggregate borrowing"  300 billion dollars.    If that same institution borrowed the same 10 billion dollars for the same 30 days but did the initial loan as a 30 day term loan instead, that loan shows up as "aggregate borrowing" of only 10 billion dollars.   

Cute!

This 4 trillion dollar figure is one of those "gee whizzz" numbers that has little bearing on what happened in reality, but is designed to elicit a particular response from the reader.

Like saying I have a 150,000 dollar mortgage.   I refinanced it  twice to get lower rates

According to this logic I  borrowed 450,000 dollars.

The FED board of governors used their positions to make decisions that benefited their private concerns to the tune of $4 trillion. That's what we know about. And we wouldn't even know that if it wasn't for Bernie Sanders, who made the audit of the Fed part of the Wall Street bailout package. That package, so far, has found to total $16 trillion.

Weird how they can find money to bail out the crony banks -- even when based in Switzerland, like UBS -- yet can't find a way to finance urban renewal, education, or universal healthcare -- anything that makes life better for the majority of Americans.

We don't have to thank Ron Paul for that. We have to thank Phil Gramm.

Hiya, econoclast! Thanks for contributing!

there is no decision to be made by the Board of Governors.

All a bank has to do is provide collateral and request the loan. Then they repay it.

During the financial crisis, at least 18 former and current directors from Federal Reserve Banks worked in banks and corporations that collectively received over $4 trillion in low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve.

Jamie Dimon Is Not Alone in PDF:

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/061212DimonIsNotAlone.pdf

All these conflicts of interest make me think Neil Bush and the Silverado S&L Crisis was just a run-through for the really big job. After all, these board governors had business interests that benefitted from their decisions.

Saunders floated a version of this same story last year in an even more outrageously inflated form. Saunders original number was 16 trillion and it was inflated exactly as I stated above. This new 4 trillion number is trimmed down indeed, but not to remove the egregious over counting. This time around Saunders is using the same over counting sleight of hand, but only reporting it for banks whose managers were once part of the Fed.

It is the same old regurgitated, BS number, but reported for a smaller number of firms.

I can only suppose that the original iteration of this exercise using the 16 trillion figure was so clearly inflated that it got no traction. 16 trillion dollars is bigger than US GDP so it is clearly beyond the realm of credibility.

What is the over counting trick?

If an institution borrowed 10 billion overnight, but each day, for thirty days, rolled over that 10 billion dollar loan it shows up in the aggregate "aggregate borrowing"  300 billion dollars.    If that same institution borrowed the same 10 billion dollars for the same 30 days but did the initial loan as a 30 day term loan instead, that loan shows up as "aggregate borrowing" of only 10 billion dollars.   

Cute! And completely bogus!

This new exercise uses the same discredited tecchnique, but I guess the thought is that by reporting it for a limited number of banks makes the 4 trillion number more believable. It's not. Except perhaps to the most gullible. But its Still BS.

By whom?

No offense, econoclast, I'll take Bernie Sanders' word.

http://my.firedoglake.com/wendydavis/2011/10/20/bernie-sanders-explains-first-ever-fed-audit-showing-massive-conflicts-of-interest/

Geithner, the names of those who benefited from the bailouts, to no avail.

Some links are actually posted here on DU...in the "Video's Forum."

It's wonky...and not to everyone's taste...but, it's GOOD STUFF!

REALLY!

and not "libertarian jesus" Ron Paul after he's been screaming about it for 20 years?

A stopped clock is right twice a day?

Here's the point: If it weren't for Bernie Sanders, no one would know any of this, including the names and amounts going to the connected FED board members and their cronies.

I'm getting old and cranky...