Humor Gazette: E*Trade coporatists start out young

source:http://www.humorgazette.com/hg/

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Dangerous Intersection: Financial collapse aftermath

Matt Taibbi's  latest article in Rolling Stone was crushing: “Wall Street’s Big Win: Finance reform won’t stop the high-risk gambling that wrecked the economy – and Republicans aren’t the only ones to blame.” Taibbi proposes that the recent Wall Street “reform” fixed about 10% of the problem, and that it was designed primarily to cover up an uncomfortable political truth:

The huge profits that Wall Street earned in the past decade were driven in large part by a single, far-reaching scheme, one in which bankers, home lenders and other players exploited loopholes in the system to magically transform subprime home borrowers into AAA investments, sell them off to unsuspecting pension funds and foreign trade unions and other suckers, then multiply their score by leveraging their phony-baloney deals over and over.

It was pure ­financial alchemy – turning ­manure into gold, then spinning it Rumpelstiltskin-style into vast profits using complex, mostly unregulated new instruments that almost no one outside of a few experts in the field really understood. With the government borrowing mountains of Chinese and Saudi cash to fight two crazy wars, and the domestic manufacturing base mostly vanished overseas, this massive fraud for all intents and purposes was the American economy in the 2000s; we were a nation subsisting on an elaborate check-­bouncing scheme.

And it was all made possible by two major deregulatory moves from the Clinton era: the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which allowed investment banks, insurance companies and commercial banks to merge, and the Commodity Futures (and the)

Modernization Act of 2000, which ­exempted the entire derivatives market from federal regulation.

Together, these two laws transformed Wall Street into a giant casino, allowing commercial banks to act like high-risk hedge funds, with a whole new galaxy of derivative bets to lay action on. In fact, the laws made Wall Street even crazier than a casino, because in a casino you have to put up actual money to make bets. But thanks to deregulation, financial companies like AIG could bet billions, if not trillions, without having any money at all to back up their gambles.

Rightardia would also mention that the SEC changed the Reserve rules in 2004 that substantially reduced the reserve requirements for five big Wall Street investment banks. This was the coup de grâce to the US economy. When the mortgages started to fail,  the banks had no reserves to cover the defaults. The US taxpayer was left holding the bag.

source: http://dangerousintersection.org/2010/08/12/matt-taibbi-what-wall-street-accomplished/

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Michale Moore runs surprise trailer for unnamed movie

Michael Moore surprised audiences in New York, Chicago and LA with the release of a special trailer for his fall release of an unnamed movie that pleads for help. But instead of saving the children, Moore wants people to save our CEOs.

Ushers entered the theaters with collection jars to give more post-bailout money to big banks. The upcoming movie is still untitled, but Moore has been with cameras in DC and Wall Street during the past year.

Michael Moore is back with a new movie on the US The Economy! In a just-released (see the YouTube hyperlink) teaser clip for the untitled film, Moore pokes fun at the big bad blue chip firms that helped get us into the recession.

Moore wants to stick it to the people who took Americas wealth. The film, which opens Oct. 2, will zero in on the corporations and politicians that caused the global financial crash.

Rightardia would expect former Texas Senator Phil Gram to mentioned in the film because he was the politician who got the Glass-Steagal Act (1933) repealed which had created barriers between the commercial banks and investment banks.

You should also hear about some SEC rules changes in 2004. A former SEC official, Lee Pickard, says a rule change in 2004 led to the failure of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch.

The SEC allowed five firms — the three that have collapsed plus Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley-- to more than double the leverage they were allowed to keep on their balance sheets. The companies were also allowed to remove discounts that had been applied to the assets they had been required to keep to protect them from defaults.

Wall Street robber barons are Moore's latest target

"The movie is not going to be an economics lesson; it's going to be more like a vampire movie," said Moore. "Instead of the main characters feasting on the blood of their victims, they feast on the money. And they never seem to get enough of it."

"If you go to see my movies, even if you don't agree with everything in the movies, you're going to have a good laugh," Moore says. "I want them to walk out at the end saying 'Wow, that was something!' And in this case, maybe they also walk out asking the ushers, 'Um, excuse me. Where are the pitchforks and torches?' "

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/14/michael-moores-save-our-c_n_215365.html

http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2009/06/michael-moores-new-movie-trailer-wants-your-money.html

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikeinthenews/index.php?id=14035

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhfzvzKm_xk&feature=popular