roguepatriot
Member
- Joined
- Dec 6, 2007
- Messages
- 96
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/
Monday, March 31, 2008
And Now For Something Completely Different - Cannibalism!
Here it comes folks.....
As if you didn't know the mortgage trade was "dirty", here comes the proof....
" An internal JPMorgan Chase (JPM) memo titled "Zippy Cheats & Tricks" offers a peek into just the sort of dubious lending tactics that underpinned the housing market's deepening downward spiral."
Hehehehe.... But ossifer, we didn't mean it! Honest Ossifer!
And of course there's Lehman, who is now (in a stunning act of hubris) claiming they were the victims of fraud:
"Lehman provided the funds for a hospital investment business backed by guarantees from Marubeni, the people said. Marubeni in a statement yesterday said the guarantees were forged and two employees that may have been involved were fired on March 10. The Tokyo-based company said it had asked the police to investigate and that it was a victim of fraud. "
Awwwww, cry my a river!
Of course all the stated-income fraud and appraisal fraud and asset "documentation" fraud is ok, but boy, when we get our butthairs singed, why we're gonna SUE!
Oh, monoline insurance? What if you put something out there for sale and nobody bought, finally realizing that what you've been selling for the last 10 years is either overpriced or, worse, worthless?
"California Treasurer Bill Lockyer is leading more than a dozen state and local governments that say bond ratings exaggerate the risk of default, pushing up interest costs and forcing issuers to buy unneeded insurance. Lockyer said in a March 26 interview his state will shun Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s venture because Buffett's company supports the current ratings."
Yep - the system is worth nothing as it stands, but you're charging us for it. Sounds like the states are finally figuring out one of the best ripoffs of the last 20 years (writing "insurance" on something that is exceedingly unlikely to default, but for which there is no capital support if you have to pay) isn't a good bargain after all!
Of course Cramer and his minions are all screaming about "evil short sellers" and "bear raids."
Really? Take a look at the Shanghai Index you fool!
You can't short in China, nor are there options on their stocks! Here's what THAT does to your market....
Gee, looks like those evil short-sellers are actually stabilizing the markets! But its all those e-vile shorties faults..... honest!
(Psst: Without shorties there wouldn't be anyone to cover in a panic when your buddies at The Fed announce their latest and greatest "Sticksave Version 3.1.4.5.9.2.6.5.4")
In a clear sign that "no Mildred, commercial R/E won't be different this time" a huge project for the Las Vegas strip appears to have gone down in flames:
"The site of what was supposed to be the tallest tower in Las Vegas, and among the tallest in the U.S. at 1,064 feet, is now for sale. Las Vegas developers and Wall Street securities analysts assume the proposed $5 billion project, which was scheduled to open in 2011, is dead."
Take that, all you who said "this time its different."
Psst - don't read McKinnon's OpEd in The Wall Street Journal today. It points out the folly of playing "let's play liquidity games" when the issue is in fact solvency:
"The Fed responds to the credit crunch by cutting interest rates, which would be the seemingly correct textbook strategy if the economy were closed and the foreign exchanges could be ignored. But the economy is open, and capital flies out of the country. Because of the unique position of the U.S. at the center of the world dollar standard, the drain of Treasurys -- the prime collateral in impacted credit markets -- exacerbates the credit crunch, and monetary expansion abroad worsens world-wide inflation. The Fed then further expands in response to the tightening of U.S. credit markets."
Circle, meet jerk! Its about damn time that some ink was spilled in pointing out the obvious (gee, I've been singing this song for quite some time now) if for no other reason than to prevent policymakers from claiming "I didn't know!" when it all goes to hell in a handbasket.
Indeed, this morning the WSJ seems to be finally yelping about The Bear Deal and shines a white-hot light in a place that I missed and I'm sure the policy wonks at The Fed wished had never been unearthed:
"The flawed process employed by the Fed in that unprecedented move violated the spirit of an important law -- the Federal Deposit Insurance Improvement Act. The FDICIA was passed specifically to establish procedures to be used by regulators then dealing with failed financial institutions. But FDICIA applies only to federally insured depository institutions, like banks and savings and loan associations. When the statute was passed nobody in their wildest dreams thought that government bailouts would extend beyond federally insured deposit institutions to include investment banks -- which unlike commercial banks have no small creditors and no federally insured deposits to protect."
One has to wonder whether there might be a letter in there to go with the spirit..... note to self - more reading required on this one.
Of course the real problem - as I've written about since this whole ball of string started to unwind last year - is in fact lack of trust.
Now we have Cramer and others clamoring for less trust instead of more, by allowing banks to continue marking to fictional, made-up "values" for their securities.
That, if permitted, will simply make the problems we face worse - perhaps much worse. We have already managed to provoke a mild form of capital flight and risk aversion; should we be foolish enough to permit institutions to simply make it up "indefinitely" we will have a re-run of the Japanese "experiment" with the same sort of foolishness and are quite likely to suffer the same result.
One has to wonder - does Cramer want to see the SPX trade at 500? Does he have a bunch of short hedge fund buddies that would welcome the destruction of our nation's financial strength?
It would certainly appear so.
In reality you can't fix any of this while Paulson, Bernanke and the other clowns sit around giving their "best friends on Wall Street" Lewinskis', and most of the rest of America finds that behavior, if they bother to notice it, disgusting. (As an aside, I would pay real money for a picture of any of these guys with a goat..... not that I'm suggesting that any such photo exists, of course.... )
Here's the "money shot" folks - when you have people in the "financial services" or "financial reporting" industry telling you its a good time to buy stocks because firms are going to be allowed to cheat even more than than they previously have in the statement of their financial results, you have to be a special brand of CRAZY to listen to them.
Indeed, such a pronouncement leads me to ask a rather pointed (and inconvenient) question - do we now have "commentators" on national television advocating for FRAUD as a means out of this mess? IT SURE SOUNDS THAT WAY TO ME!
Paulson's "new plan" is outrageous on several fronts, with the most important being that The Feds now want to take away state insurance regulation.
Let me remind everyone that during the last eight years The Federal Government literally stepped in and preempted state mortgage regulation under the rubric that OTS and OCC-regulated banking institutions were beyond the reach of state regulators, and that was, in large part, why these banks and other institutions were able to play their games with the "liar loans" that became pervasive during the last few years.
The Federal Government's preemption of state regulation of mortgage issuers was, in large part, WHY we had such a monstrous housing bubble and WHY we now face the turmoil that is roiling our capital markets. Instead of prosecuting these clowns Paulson wants to institutionalize some of these problems!
Equally important, it was The Federal Reserve, via the speeches of one Alan Greenspan, that organization's head, who ENCOURAGED homeowners to "lever up" via ARMs at the low point in an interest-rate cycle which they knew would not be sustained!
To be rather impolite (but accurate):
Alan Greenspan literally lured millons of Americans into the gaping maw of a debt trap which he and his cronies then snapped shut on YOUR HEAD!
There is much noise being made over The Fed being able to "examine" various institutions that presently are beyond its reach.
But there is nothing in this document or plan that forces public disclosure of those examinations, and in fact, bank examinations are by statute secret at the present time. Without public exposure of the results of these examinations the public cannot calibrate its own view of the risk being taken, and thus there is no market discipline that can be imposed by investors.
Is it wrong for there to be a run, for example, on Lehman? Its only wrong if Lehman is in fact strong - their balance sheet reflects reality and their liquidity position is solid. But for the average hedge fund or other person who owns some of their products there is no way for those investors to find out whether or not this is the case, since the information necessary to come to that conclusion is being intentionally hidden by the company with the explicit cooperation of the government, including Treasury!
So from where I sit it is not only appropriate for such "runs" to take place every single investment bank and other institution with ANY off-balance-sheet or "Level 3" exposure should suffer such a run.
THAT would be a "Come to Jesus" moment for these clowns, and if they didn't respond immediately with full disclosure it might bring what market discipline often brings to people who try to hide the details of their financial condition - bankruptcy.
The key issue here for Paulson and friends is that there is no part of the proposal that forces the garbage out into the light, there is no demand for a cessation of off-balance-sheet games, nor is there a demand that the OTC derivatives mess be brought out into the light where margin and capital requirements can be enforced.
As just one bit of this hidden reality, have you seen any writedowns of HELOC debt? Neither have I. Why not? An absolutely monumental part of that debt is uncollectable under present market conditions as the homes it was written on are underwater, and HELOCs are subordinate to the first mortgage. What this means in practice is that the HELOC writer gets nothing if the first forecloses and there is insufficient recovery to pay the first off in full!
Without changes to force disclosure, along with criminal charges for those who proffered debt securities that were intentionally misrepresented as to their credit quality and the capital adequacy of those standing behind them we cannot fix the underlying problem that got us into this mess.
That underlying problem, quite simply, is greed.
Greed is, to a large degree, what powers innovation. In that regard it is not evil - greed is, in fact, why we have automobiles, personal computers, stereos, DVD players and plasma TVs.
But for Henry Ford's greed, we would still be riding horses to get around town.
But when greed is not counterbalanced both by the risk of financial pain upon failure and the certainty of criminal punishment when one lies, cheats or steals, instead of a culture of innovation we foster a culture of theft, fraud and deceit.
We live in a nation where our government works for us, not the other way around.
Yet this model only serves as its proper check and balance when the people are willing to step forward and make noise.
SILENCE IS CONSENT, and if you don't get that into your head - and soon - we will add yet another layer of institutionalization of fraud, deceit and theft as "how stuff works" in our capital markets, ensconced into law, with your consent via your silence.
Never mind that the foreign press - you know, those fine folks who we need in order to finance our profligate entitlement spending - are already on to the game and saying "eat me!":
"The most striking thing about the current problems is just how much money the banks and the investment banks have lost. They apparently had no idea of how risky their own exposure was. The supposedly smart guys were simply stupid.
For me, the main lesson from this debacle is that both banks and investment banks must be required to fully report what securities they are holding, both directly and indirectly. No more off-the-book special purpose vehicles, no more hiding derivatives under the table. If a bank or an investment bank is holding a security, they have to publish the amount and the basic characteristics."
No kidding.
Now think about what happens WHEN, not if, those foreigners decide they're not going to prop us up any more. How would you like to see Social Security and Medicare collapse - no, not in 20 or 30 years, BUT RIGHT HERE AND NOW.
Think it can't?
You'd be very wrong - we need roughly $2 billion every day from foreign governments in order to sustain our government's (our) entitlement spending binge and if they come to the conclusion that we are going to institutionalize fraud and theft, effectively becoming a banana republic, they can and will go somewhere else with their funds!
Foreign governments have been willing to do this because we have bought so much of their crap (e.g. cheap Chinese products) that they have needed a way to "recycle" (or "sterilize") those funds, lest they fuel insanely-destructive inflation bubbles in their economies.
But that golden goose - consumerism - has been contaminated and destroyed by greed, fraud and theft in the financial markets, and now our consumption is slowing. Thus, we now have two things working against us - less demand for foreign products AND a lack of trust in the safety of our markets, leading foreign governments to quite-reasonably ask - should we bother with recycling these funds into the United States, or should we be looking for somewhere that is SAFER?
The amusing part of this is how "in front" of this all bloggers like myself have been. Now we're finally seeing it from "mainstream media":
"We should be as bold as Volcker, he suggests: Face the scale of the mess, take a $1 trillion writedown and shore up regulatory measures. His recommendations include forcing loan originators to retain the first losses; requiring prime brokers to stop lending to hedge funds that don't disclose their balance sheets; and bringing the trading of credit derivatives onto exchanges.
What he fears is that the U.S. will instead follow the Japanese precedent, seeking to 'downplay and to conceal. Continuing on that course will be a path to disaster.'"
I'll be damned.
Its time to choose folks - if you choose NO more fraud, NO more deceit and NO more theft, you need to head over to http://financialpetition.org/ and get your "John Hancock" on that petition here, now, and today.
WE START as a society by DEMANDING that Congress reverse the Bear Stearns transaction and $29 billion "TaxPayer Guarantee" and, if The Fed and Treasury refuse, that President Bush and Hank Paulson be impeached.
WE CONTINUE by calling, writing and visiting our Congressfolk, literally flooding the Capitol switchboard and lawmaker's fax machines, making clear that we will not allow the institutionalization of fraud, deceit and theft as a matter of public policy in the United States.
WE DO NOT STOP ringing the phones and faxes on Capitol Hill until we see legislation enforcing daily mark to market, public exchange trades for all derivatives, public bank examination reports, enforced margin and capital requirements on a level basis for all market participants, an immediate end to all off-balance-sheet "securitizations", and finally, prison terms for those who game the system, no matter who they are or what position they hold.
It has always been illegal to rip people off and commit or conceal fraud. We have seen no prosecution against those running rumors of incessant "Buffett Buyouts" or "AAA credit" that is really toilet paper because we refuse, as a society, to get off our fat asses and raise hell, even as our own pockets are REPEATEDLY PICKED by the Wall Street goon squad.
Time is running out, and its not just you we're talking about being screwed here. Its also your children and grandchildren who are having their futures systematically destroyed by the rampant fraud and abuse.
Remember:
"If you choose not to decide.....
You still have made a choice!"
- (Rush, from the lyrics from Freewill)
Monday, March 31, 2008
And Now For Something Completely Different - Cannibalism!
Here it comes folks.....
As if you didn't know the mortgage trade was "dirty", here comes the proof....
" An internal JPMorgan Chase (JPM) memo titled "Zippy Cheats & Tricks" offers a peek into just the sort of dubious lending tactics that underpinned the housing market's deepening downward spiral."
Hehehehe.... But ossifer, we didn't mean it! Honest Ossifer!
And of course there's Lehman, who is now (in a stunning act of hubris) claiming they were the victims of fraud:
"Lehman provided the funds for a hospital investment business backed by guarantees from Marubeni, the people said. Marubeni in a statement yesterday said the guarantees were forged and two employees that may have been involved were fired on March 10. The Tokyo-based company said it had asked the police to investigate and that it was a victim of fraud. "
Awwwww, cry my a river!
Of course all the stated-income fraud and appraisal fraud and asset "documentation" fraud is ok, but boy, when we get our butthairs singed, why we're gonna SUE!
Oh, monoline insurance? What if you put something out there for sale and nobody bought, finally realizing that what you've been selling for the last 10 years is either overpriced or, worse, worthless?
"California Treasurer Bill Lockyer is leading more than a dozen state and local governments that say bond ratings exaggerate the risk of default, pushing up interest costs and forcing issuers to buy unneeded insurance. Lockyer said in a March 26 interview his state will shun Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s venture because Buffett's company supports the current ratings."
Yep - the system is worth nothing as it stands, but you're charging us for it. Sounds like the states are finally figuring out one of the best ripoffs of the last 20 years (writing "insurance" on something that is exceedingly unlikely to default, but for which there is no capital support if you have to pay) isn't a good bargain after all!
Of course Cramer and his minions are all screaming about "evil short sellers" and "bear raids."
Really? Take a look at the Shanghai Index you fool!
You can't short in China, nor are there options on their stocks! Here's what THAT does to your market....
Gee, looks like those evil short-sellers are actually stabilizing the markets! But its all those e-vile shorties faults..... honest!
(Psst: Without shorties there wouldn't be anyone to cover in a panic when your buddies at The Fed announce their latest and greatest "Sticksave Version 3.1.4.5.9.2.6.5.4")
In a clear sign that "no Mildred, commercial R/E won't be different this time" a huge project for the Las Vegas strip appears to have gone down in flames:
"The site of what was supposed to be the tallest tower in Las Vegas, and among the tallest in the U.S. at 1,064 feet, is now for sale. Las Vegas developers and Wall Street securities analysts assume the proposed $5 billion project, which was scheduled to open in 2011, is dead."
Take that, all you who said "this time its different."
Psst - don't read McKinnon's OpEd in The Wall Street Journal today. It points out the folly of playing "let's play liquidity games" when the issue is in fact solvency:
"The Fed responds to the credit crunch by cutting interest rates, which would be the seemingly correct textbook strategy if the economy were closed and the foreign exchanges could be ignored. But the economy is open, and capital flies out of the country. Because of the unique position of the U.S. at the center of the world dollar standard, the drain of Treasurys -- the prime collateral in impacted credit markets -- exacerbates the credit crunch, and monetary expansion abroad worsens world-wide inflation. The Fed then further expands in response to the tightening of U.S. credit markets."
Circle, meet jerk! Its about damn time that some ink was spilled in pointing out the obvious (gee, I've been singing this song for quite some time now) if for no other reason than to prevent policymakers from claiming "I didn't know!" when it all goes to hell in a handbasket.
Indeed, this morning the WSJ seems to be finally yelping about The Bear Deal and shines a white-hot light in a place that I missed and I'm sure the policy wonks at The Fed wished had never been unearthed:
"The flawed process employed by the Fed in that unprecedented move violated the spirit of an important law -- the Federal Deposit Insurance Improvement Act. The FDICIA was passed specifically to establish procedures to be used by regulators then dealing with failed financial institutions. But FDICIA applies only to federally insured depository institutions, like banks and savings and loan associations. When the statute was passed nobody in their wildest dreams thought that government bailouts would extend beyond federally insured deposit institutions to include investment banks -- which unlike commercial banks have no small creditors and no federally insured deposits to protect."
One has to wonder whether there might be a letter in there to go with the spirit..... note to self - more reading required on this one.
Of course the real problem - as I've written about since this whole ball of string started to unwind last year - is in fact lack of trust.
Now we have Cramer and others clamoring for less trust instead of more, by allowing banks to continue marking to fictional, made-up "values" for their securities.
That, if permitted, will simply make the problems we face worse - perhaps much worse. We have already managed to provoke a mild form of capital flight and risk aversion; should we be foolish enough to permit institutions to simply make it up "indefinitely" we will have a re-run of the Japanese "experiment" with the same sort of foolishness and are quite likely to suffer the same result.
One has to wonder - does Cramer want to see the SPX trade at 500? Does he have a bunch of short hedge fund buddies that would welcome the destruction of our nation's financial strength?
It would certainly appear so.
In reality you can't fix any of this while Paulson, Bernanke and the other clowns sit around giving their "best friends on Wall Street" Lewinskis', and most of the rest of America finds that behavior, if they bother to notice it, disgusting. (As an aside, I would pay real money for a picture of any of these guys with a goat..... not that I'm suggesting that any such photo exists, of course.... )
Here's the "money shot" folks - when you have people in the "financial services" or "financial reporting" industry telling you its a good time to buy stocks because firms are going to be allowed to cheat even more than than they previously have in the statement of their financial results, you have to be a special brand of CRAZY to listen to them.
Indeed, such a pronouncement leads me to ask a rather pointed (and inconvenient) question - do we now have "commentators" on national television advocating for FRAUD as a means out of this mess? IT SURE SOUNDS THAT WAY TO ME!
Paulson's "new plan" is outrageous on several fronts, with the most important being that The Feds now want to take away state insurance regulation.
Let me remind everyone that during the last eight years The Federal Government literally stepped in and preempted state mortgage regulation under the rubric that OTS and OCC-regulated banking institutions were beyond the reach of state regulators, and that was, in large part, why these banks and other institutions were able to play their games with the "liar loans" that became pervasive during the last few years.
The Federal Government's preemption of state regulation of mortgage issuers was, in large part, WHY we had such a monstrous housing bubble and WHY we now face the turmoil that is roiling our capital markets. Instead of prosecuting these clowns Paulson wants to institutionalize some of these problems!
Equally important, it was The Federal Reserve, via the speeches of one Alan Greenspan, that organization's head, who ENCOURAGED homeowners to "lever up" via ARMs at the low point in an interest-rate cycle which they knew would not be sustained!
To be rather impolite (but accurate):
Alan Greenspan literally lured millons of Americans into the gaping maw of a debt trap which he and his cronies then snapped shut on YOUR HEAD!
There is much noise being made over The Fed being able to "examine" various institutions that presently are beyond its reach.
But there is nothing in this document or plan that forces public disclosure of those examinations, and in fact, bank examinations are by statute secret at the present time. Without public exposure of the results of these examinations the public cannot calibrate its own view of the risk being taken, and thus there is no market discipline that can be imposed by investors.
Is it wrong for there to be a run, for example, on Lehman? Its only wrong if Lehman is in fact strong - their balance sheet reflects reality and their liquidity position is solid. But for the average hedge fund or other person who owns some of their products there is no way for those investors to find out whether or not this is the case, since the information necessary to come to that conclusion is being intentionally hidden by the company with the explicit cooperation of the government, including Treasury!
So from where I sit it is not only appropriate for such "runs" to take place every single investment bank and other institution with ANY off-balance-sheet or "Level 3" exposure should suffer such a run.
THAT would be a "Come to Jesus" moment for these clowns, and if they didn't respond immediately with full disclosure it might bring what market discipline often brings to people who try to hide the details of their financial condition - bankruptcy.
The key issue here for Paulson and friends is that there is no part of the proposal that forces the garbage out into the light, there is no demand for a cessation of off-balance-sheet games, nor is there a demand that the OTC derivatives mess be brought out into the light where margin and capital requirements can be enforced.
As just one bit of this hidden reality, have you seen any writedowns of HELOC debt? Neither have I. Why not? An absolutely monumental part of that debt is uncollectable under present market conditions as the homes it was written on are underwater, and HELOCs are subordinate to the first mortgage. What this means in practice is that the HELOC writer gets nothing if the first forecloses and there is insufficient recovery to pay the first off in full!
Without changes to force disclosure, along with criminal charges for those who proffered debt securities that were intentionally misrepresented as to their credit quality and the capital adequacy of those standing behind them we cannot fix the underlying problem that got us into this mess.
That underlying problem, quite simply, is greed.
Greed is, to a large degree, what powers innovation. In that regard it is not evil - greed is, in fact, why we have automobiles, personal computers, stereos, DVD players and plasma TVs.
But for Henry Ford's greed, we would still be riding horses to get around town.
But when greed is not counterbalanced both by the risk of financial pain upon failure and the certainty of criminal punishment when one lies, cheats or steals, instead of a culture of innovation we foster a culture of theft, fraud and deceit.
We live in a nation where our government works for us, not the other way around.
Yet this model only serves as its proper check and balance when the people are willing to step forward and make noise.
SILENCE IS CONSENT, and if you don't get that into your head - and soon - we will add yet another layer of institutionalization of fraud, deceit and theft as "how stuff works" in our capital markets, ensconced into law, with your consent via your silence.
Never mind that the foreign press - you know, those fine folks who we need in order to finance our profligate entitlement spending - are already on to the game and saying "eat me!":
"The most striking thing about the current problems is just how much money the banks and the investment banks have lost. They apparently had no idea of how risky their own exposure was. The supposedly smart guys were simply stupid.
For me, the main lesson from this debacle is that both banks and investment banks must be required to fully report what securities they are holding, both directly and indirectly. No more off-the-book special purpose vehicles, no more hiding derivatives under the table. If a bank or an investment bank is holding a security, they have to publish the amount and the basic characteristics."
No kidding.
Now think about what happens WHEN, not if, those foreigners decide they're not going to prop us up any more. How would you like to see Social Security and Medicare collapse - no, not in 20 or 30 years, BUT RIGHT HERE AND NOW.
Think it can't?
You'd be very wrong - we need roughly $2 billion every day from foreign governments in order to sustain our government's (our) entitlement spending binge and if they come to the conclusion that we are going to institutionalize fraud and theft, effectively becoming a banana republic, they can and will go somewhere else with their funds!
Foreign governments have been willing to do this because we have bought so much of their crap (e.g. cheap Chinese products) that they have needed a way to "recycle" (or "sterilize") those funds, lest they fuel insanely-destructive inflation bubbles in their economies.
But that golden goose - consumerism - has been contaminated and destroyed by greed, fraud and theft in the financial markets, and now our consumption is slowing. Thus, we now have two things working against us - less demand for foreign products AND a lack of trust in the safety of our markets, leading foreign governments to quite-reasonably ask - should we bother with recycling these funds into the United States, or should we be looking for somewhere that is SAFER?
The amusing part of this is how "in front" of this all bloggers like myself have been. Now we're finally seeing it from "mainstream media":
"We should be as bold as Volcker, he suggests: Face the scale of the mess, take a $1 trillion writedown and shore up regulatory measures. His recommendations include forcing loan originators to retain the first losses; requiring prime brokers to stop lending to hedge funds that don't disclose their balance sheets; and bringing the trading of credit derivatives onto exchanges.
What he fears is that the U.S. will instead follow the Japanese precedent, seeking to 'downplay and to conceal. Continuing on that course will be a path to disaster.'"
I'll be damned.
Its time to choose folks - if you choose NO more fraud, NO more deceit and NO more theft, you need to head over to http://financialpetition.org/ and get your "John Hancock" on that petition here, now, and today.
WE START as a society by DEMANDING that Congress reverse the Bear Stearns transaction and $29 billion "TaxPayer Guarantee" and, if The Fed and Treasury refuse, that President Bush and Hank Paulson be impeached.
WE CONTINUE by calling, writing and visiting our Congressfolk, literally flooding the Capitol switchboard and lawmaker's fax machines, making clear that we will not allow the institutionalization of fraud, deceit and theft as a matter of public policy in the United States.
WE DO NOT STOP ringing the phones and faxes on Capitol Hill until we see legislation enforcing daily mark to market, public exchange trades for all derivatives, public bank examination reports, enforced margin and capital requirements on a level basis for all market participants, an immediate end to all off-balance-sheet "securitizations", and finally, prison terms for those who game the system, no matter who they are or what position they hold.
It has always been illegal to rip people off and commit or conceal fraud. We have seen no prosecution against those running rumors of incessant "Buffett Buyouts" or "AAA credit" that is really toilet paper because we refuse, as a society, to get off our fat asses and raise hell, even as our own pockets are REPEATEDLY PICKED by the Wall Street goon squad.
Time is running out, and its not just you we're talking about being screwed here. Its also your children and grandchildren who are having their futures systematically destroyed by the rampant fraud and abuse.
Remember:
"If you choose not to decide.....
You still have made a choice!"
- (Rush, from the lyrics from Freewill)
