Wayne Madsen Report: Washington warned in 2008 of coming Irish banking "perfect storm."

An October 9, 2008, cable from U.S. ambassador to Ireland Thomas C. Foley warns of an impending "perfect storm" for Irish financial institutions.

Future drastic budget cuts were predicted in the cable, which stressed that the Irish financial crisis was caused by "external events."

According to Foley, The Irish working people are now expected to make severe sacrifices because of the "external events," which are not that external, but can be drawn to the collapsing European Union bureaucracy in Brussels and its financial contrivance in Frankfurt and the international banking shysters in London and New York.

Of course, Bush was president and the Irish ambassador was appointed by Bush. Foley is a long time Republican and former governor Of Connecticut.

Ireland was a conservative poster child during the Celtic Tiger years. It had the lowest corporate income tax rate in Europe and was criticized by other European union countries for its tax policies. 

The Irish also had a housing boom that inflated the price of real estate.  When the real estate bubble burst, it crippled the economy and many Irish lost their houses.

Because the government had marginal tax revenues, it wasn't able to do much when the Irish recession started.

The existing conservative government collapsed and the new government has instituted draconian measures to qualify for an EU bailout.

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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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GOP Lawmakers Shockingly Uninformed About Financial Crisis

First Posted: 04- 7-10 10:36 AM | Updated: 04- 7-10 10:48 AM

Michael Lewis, the celebrated author of "The Big Short," claims that about 50 House Republicans skipped a December hearing by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. Instead they spent to spend three hours with Leiws talking about the financial crisis.

The lawmakers, who are members of the House Republican book club, were stunningly uninformed about major elements of the crisis, says Lewis, during a recent conversation with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter:

"And their questions were increasingly: 'Oh my God, Goldman Sachs did what? A.I.G. did what?' They didn't understand it ... At the end, there was smoke coming out of their ears. I thought they were going to go kill someone at the end of it,..

The minute they started to understand, they were outraged. And I think the more things are explained, the more outraged people will get."

At first, several dozen of the lawmakers told Lewis that they were going to leave early to attend the Bernanke hearing but they stayed because "they said, 'We never learn anything from him [Bernanke], he never explains anything to us'," according to Lewis.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/07/house-republican-book-clu_n_528385.html

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Frank Luntz writes 17-page memo on killing financial reform

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The actual Luntz document can be viewed below:
Language of Financial Reform -

source: Huffington Post and MSNBC

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Stephan Colbert: Eliot Spitzer unimpressed with banking reforms

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Eliot Spitzer
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Eliot Spitzer thinks Americans should be furious that the financial system is being rebuilt exactly as it was before the economic collapse. (06:09) This is a long video, but Spitzer has nothing to lose by telling the truth.

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White House PowerPoint on Financial Reform

This week, the House Financial Services Committee began its formal deliberations regarding the President's financial reform plan.  This is a crucial piece of President Obama's agenda for change and something you will be hearing much more about in coming weeks.  Yesterday, we held a meeting at the White House with stakeholder groups to discuss the importance of passing financial reform.  We hope you'll take a moment to look through the materials from that meeting below, and we will post the video of the meeting later once it is read.

Financial Regulatory Reform: A New Foundation

View more presentations from White House.

Despite the extraordinary depth of this most recent crisis, the pattern it followed – a pattern in which instability emanating from the financial sector ultimately resulted in hundreds of thousands of middle class families who had nothing to do with the financial sector losing their jobs or much of the their savings – is disturbingly familiar:

• The Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s
• The stock market crash of 1987
• The savings and loan debacle of the late 1980s
• The Mexican financial crisis of 1994
• The Asian financial crisis of 1997
• The bursting of the dot-com bubble
• The collapse of the hedge fund LTCM in 2000
• The fraud and bankruptcy at Enron
• And now the financial crisis that began in 2007

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Bernie Saunders discuses the financial meltdown and an ominous Supreme Court case

Sen. Bernie Sanders: More than a year ago, we suffered the most significant financial collapse since the Great Depression, and the result of that is massive unemployment and underemployment.

People lost their savings. People lost their homes. Now, despite the greed and illegal behavior of Wall Street, there is a massive effort to make sure that Congress does nothing about it. You know what? That might end up being the result.

Saunders also discuses a critical court case that is before the Supreme Court.  Due to fluke by a law clerk in an old Supreme Court case, US corporations are protected by the US Constitution by legal precedent. The conservative Supreme Court may overturn campaign laws that will allow unlimited political contributions by corporations and unions.



source: http://bravenewfilms.org/


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