The Money Party (6):
Meltdown Perpetrators Position Themselves
Meet the New Boss - Robin Hood in Reverse
U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson
WikiCommons
"A Cascade of Ruin"
(Wash. DC) Well, they finally did it. The Money Party exposed the nauseating underbelly of first world finance. It's a cross between a Ponzi scheme and a complex math puzzle, all geared to let those in charge rake off as much money as they can, whenever they can, while they leave us out in the cold. Unfortunately, this time their greed and lack of control has the world poised for a systemic economic meltdown.
The collapse and subsequent government rescue of home mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, stock brokerage Merrill Lynch, investment bank Bear Stearns, and, an insurance company, AIG, are designed to show we're moving away from the brink of disaster to a safer place. "The system is working" to manage what Alan Greenspan is calling a once in a century event.
One thing the system might do while it's working so hard is explain why we're bailing out a stock brokerage and an insurance company? Isn't this about banks? Don't hold your breath. The corporate elite and political misanthropes who caused this are getting ready to put the final nail in the coffin of the United States economy and the livelihood of the vast majority of citizens.
If this happens, they will have achieved their goal: overshadowing nearly all of the domestic resistance to their schemes of perpetual empire and plunder with a financial meltdown that places survival and subsistence as the highest value.
The stock market rallied last Thursday indicating that some felt better. But who were those buying stocks? The same people who bought into the ridiculous schemes perpetrated by the fallen financial giants: Wall Street and the institutional investors who have the biggest stake in the market "recovery." The soon to fail financial institutions are reassuring each other that those in the tank were somehow different, deviant maybe, rather than the first in a long line of failures to come.
How did it start?
The dot.com stock frenzy was clearly over by 2001. Since Wall Street needs constant growth as a fix for its financial Jones, something had to replace tech stocks. That wasn't easy since good companies with solid products don't offer the type of immediate gratification required for those promising high returns to investors.
In a stroke of warped vision, "subprime securities" were created in 1990. Risky home mortgages called subprime loans were bundled together then sold as a premium investment representing an audacity of hype.
Adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) became easily available to hard working people struggling to buy a home, people who hadn't qualified for loans in the past. Nobody mentioned that the way the loan was structured they'd be unable to make payments in a year or two.
The funds of other hard working people who hoped to retire someday were used to purchase stocks based on these risky loans. Nobody bothered to tell them that their funds would go down the drain when those subprime loans started defaulting.
Then guru Greenspan made one of the few decipherable public statements of his career. He told home owners about that great opportunity, adjustable rate mortgages. "American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage," he said. He went on, "traditional fixed-rate mortgage may be an expensive method of financing a home." Alan Greenspan, Feb. 23, 2004
Greenspan endorsed what was already being done and gave it the patina of a smart financial move. Lower those payments. Get that equity line and catch the Wall Street wave by purchasing stocks. We were "rocking in the free world!" Millions got rich on increased home values.
