FedUpUSA

Archive for February 14th, 2010

Simon Johnson: Goldman Faces Special Audit and Possible Ban in Europe

Those of you who are familiar with my long trend forecasts will be aware of the thesis that the American Wall Street banks have become dominated by a culture of compulsive sociopaths who are incapable of reforming or restraining their greed. Like all addicts, they will push the envelope, emboldened by each successful scam, the weakness of regulators, and the craven support of politicians, going further and further until at long last they go one transgression too far.

Goldman Sachs may have reached that point. And as also suggested here, the rebuke may be coming from foreign nations who become weary of the extra-legal antics of the rogue American banks.

In the interests of harmony, the Europeans may once again bow to US pressure to permit the Money center privateers to roam through the interational financial system wreaking havoc, as they have been doing through the domestic US economy, and it will be too bad if they do.

If it ever comes to the light of day, the complicity of several central banks and governments in the actions of the money center banks in manipulating markets may ignite a firestorm of a scandal.

The banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, and the economy brought back into balance, before their can be any sustainable recovery.

Baseline Scenario
Goldman Goes Rogue – Special European Audit to Follow
By Simon Johnson

“…We now learn – from Der Spiegel last week and today’s NYT – that Goldman Sachs has not only helped or encouraged some European governments to hide a large part of their debts, but it also endeavored to do so for Greece as recently as last November. These actions are fundamentally destabilizing to the global financial system, as they undermine: the eurozone area; all attempts to bring greater transparency to government accounting; and the most basic principles that underlie well-functioning markets. When the data are all lies, the outcomes are all bad – see the subprime mortgage crisis for further detail.

A single rogue trader can bring down a bank – remember the case of Barings. But a single rogue bank can bring down the world’s financial system.

Goldman will dismiss this as “business as usual” and, to be sure, a few phone calls around Washington will help ensure that Goldman’s primary supervisor – now the Fed – looks the other way.

But the affair is now out of Ben Bernanke’s hands, and quite far from people who are easily swayed by the White House. It goes immediately to the European Commission, which has jurisdiction over eurozone budget issues. Faced with enormous pressure from those eurozone countries now on the hook for saving Greece, the Commission will surely launch a special audit of Goldman and all its European clients…

…Goldman will probably be blacklisted from working with eurozone governments for the foreseeable future; as was the case with Salomon Brothers 20 years ago, Goldman may be on its way to be banned from some government securities markets altogether. If it is to be allowed back into this arena, it will have to address the inherent conflicts of interest between advising a government on how to put (deceptive levels of) lipstick on a pig and cajoling investors into buying livestock at inflated prices.

And the US government, at the highest levels, has to ask a fundamental question: For how long does it wish to be intimately associated with Goldman Sachs and this kind of destabilizing action? What is the priority here – a sustainable recovery and a viable financial system, or one particular set of investment bankers?

To preserve Goldman, on incredibly generous terms, in the name of saving the financial system was and is hard to defend – but that is where we are. To allow the current government-backed (massive) Goldman to behave recklessly and with complete disregard to the basic tenets of international financial stability is utterly indefensible. (There is a case to be made that the money center banks, in particular Goldman and JPM, are sometimes acting as instruments of US foreign policy – Jesse)

The credibility of the Federal Reserve, already at an all-time low, has just suffered another crippling blow; the ECB is also now in the line of fire. Goldman Sachs has a lot to answer for.”

Wall Street and Washington Hope You Are Gullible: Disappoint Them

By Janet Tavakoli President, Tavakoli Structured Finance, Inc.

If a high-on-crack driver crashed his speeding rental car into your house and killed your spouse, you would be outraged if law enforcers took bribes and gave the driver a pass on a blood test. If the judge then merely fined the killer and ordered you to pay it, you would appeal, wondering what happened to justice. If the government then handed the crack-driver keys to a bigger rental car and presented you with the rental bill, you would certainly protest.

How is it, then, that you have remained largely silent in the face of the same sort of behavior by Wall Street and Washington? Bonus-seeking bankers careened off the right path and ran Ponzi schemes that nearly ruined our economy. Bureaucrats and elected officials bailed them out without demanding consequences. Bankers are revving their engines again.

Bankers Get Bonuses, the USA Gets the Great Recession

Taxpayers are asked to believe that over-borrowing by U.S. consumers created a global financial crisis. This myth aids and abets Wall Street. The economy was nearly destroyed because banks borrowed massively, and they borrowed many multiples more than they could afford. Wall Street pumped the Fed’s cheap money through financial meth labs, and deceptive financial vehicles ran over securities laws at top speed.

More than 20% of mortgage loans–including originally sound loans–are underwater, meaning the borrower owes more than the home is worth. Official unemployment numbers hover at around 10%. If you include underemployment, it is around 18%. In depressed areas where the nation’s poorest–chiefly minorities–have been hurt the most, unemployment has soared past 30%. For this destitute group, unemployment combined with underemployment exceeds 50%.

As U.S. soldiers fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Wall Street flattened Main Street. Our foreign wars drag on, while the U.S. battles a crippling recession at home.

Global Ponzi Scheme

Fraud by borrowers, fraud on borrowers, and speculation by people who thought home prices would rise forever have all tarnished mortgage lending. Yet this pales compared to the epidemic of predatory lending.

Predatory snipers committed financial murder as deliberately as British soldiers sold smallpox contaminated blankets to Native Americans. Honest homeowners were systematically targeted and actively misled into bad mortgage products. Loans were presented as gifts, but these Trojan horse loans hid destructive risk. “Disclosures” were acts of malice.

When Wall Street packaged these loans and sold deceptive “investments,” documents did not specifically disclose that credit ratings were misleading. If you know or should know a car’s gas tank will blow up, you cannot use a misleading third-party consumer report as an excuse. Yet bonus-seeking bankers used this sort of excuse to get through a few more highly-paid bonus cycles, before it all fell apart. Only the elite crowd of insiders prospered.*

This was the most massive Ponzi scheme in the history of the global capital markets. U.S. taxpayers became unwilling unsophisticated investors when we bailed out the financial system. We must hold Wall Street accountable for its fraud.

More Bonuses for Bankers, a Deeper Recession for the USA

Banks that contributed to our economic distress are heralded as geniuses at risk management, after taxpayers saved them from ruin. Wall Street escaped prosecution (so far), and Congress gave it a faster and more powerful car.

Paul Volcker suggested reforms, and special interest groups successfully lobbied to make them meaningless. His proposal to limit “proprietary” trading–a small step in the right direction–has been thwarted by banks claiming they engage in high risk trades on behalf of customers. Washington seems to have already forgotten that AIG nearly went bankrupt–and nearly took the entire financial system down with it–because of Wall Street’s “customer” trades. Wall Street and AIG insiders grew rich on bonuses based on a myth, and taxpayers funded AIG’s $180 billion bailout.

Wall Street now makes most of its “profits” from high-risk trading, and rewards risk with huge bonuses. It has unfettered access to more U.S. taxpayer money than in the history of the United States. Traditional banking suffers; it cannot generate enough revenue to “justify” massive bonuses. Bankers get billions in bonuses based on a myth, and U.S. taxpayers get a deeper recession and more risk.

Reform Starts with the President and Congress

Congress has protected Wall Street and passed on the costs to hard-working taxpayers. “Too-big-to-fail” financial institutions are too big to exist, and it is past time to break them up. They currently enjoy around $13 trillion of taxpayer-funded support, including tens of billions of FDIC debt guarantees for each of the too-big-to-fail banks and more than $2 trillion in nearly zero-cost funding from the Fed.

President Obama has not yet condemned Wall Street’s massive fraud, and Congress’s bailout methods rewarded Wall Street’s malicious mischief. The House just passed a bigger bailout bill that will give too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks access to $4 trillion dollars the next time they crash the economy.

Congress must start again from scratch, and give us real reform. Washington needs to get back in the driver’s seat, and voters need to make Congress steer straight this time by calling and writing representatives and senators.

* In a control fraud, only insider agents prosper. The losers are financial institutions’ shareholders and debtors, investors, borrowers, and the U.S. taxpayer. Banks covered-up indefensible lending–enabled by complicit rating agencies, “creative” accounting at related mortgage lenders, crooked CDO “managers,” venal hedge funds, crony accountants, and captured regulators. They parked the risk on their own balance sheets, on the balance sheets of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, in off-shore vehicles, or on unwary investors around the globe. Sometimes banks “transferred” risk with credit derivatives backed by phony securities that harmed “sophisticated” insurers like AIG, Ambac, MBIA, FGIC, and ACA–all of which were either bankrupted or damaged.

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