Thread: Thousands to occupy Wall Street in protest

I struggle to understand why anyone is actually against the occupy people. The Fed, Wallstreet, the whole lot of them IS the reason for the wars, terrorism, starvation, basically everything that is bad in the world. Greed, Corruption. Companies over people.

Different Bank, same set of bankers pal. Nothing makes profit like wars especially when countries are broke, and need to borrow cash to fund them.

Ahem.....after some careful research and a scholarly examination of history, I have discovered that wars, starvation and numerous forms of "terrorism" were around in abundance long before the Fed, Wall Street..and the whole lot of them....even existed.

What a pathetic excuse this is. But then again you seem to be living in the 1800s so it probably is a realistic view on things for you. With this mentality then you must accept that shooting labor leaders is a proper thing to do. In fact, it is done in many places around the world. Slave labor isn't a problem either as it's always been around. Why not fight for child labor in the US. You must support that Brit politician who wants to make 13 the age of consent after all if you didn't it would be hypocrisy on your part. Keep living with your BS excuses. Too bad you didn't serve in Iraq and get your legs blown off. You could be proud of finding the WMDs and bringing that nation into the free world.

Originally Posted by Goodwill

Ahem.....after some careful research and a scholarly examination of history, I have discovered that wars, starvation and numerous forms of "terrorism" were around in abundance long before the Fed, Wall Street..and the whole lot of them....even existed.

What a pathetic excuse this is. But then again you seem to be living in the 1800s so it probably is a realistic view on things for you. With this mentality then you must accept that shooting labor leaders is a proper thing to do. In fact, it is done in many places around the world. Slave labor isn't a problem either as it's always been around. Why not fight for child labor in the US. You must support that Brit politician who wants to make 13 the age of consent after all if you didn't it would be hypocrisy on your part. Keep living with your BS excuses. Too bad you didn't serve in Iraq and get your legs blown off. You could be proud of finding the WMDs and bringing that nation into the free world.

Wow......you really have a special talent for living on some imaginary moral high ground don't you.?.... Love the way you send out snotty insulting little PM's but shut down anyone from sending one back....you must really inspired people with your moral courage.....well done.....

Now lets just deal with the paragraph above that seems to have you all in a flutter and frothing at the mouth....shall we?

Before the US Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs and even George W. Bush ever existed.....did we or did we not have: wars, famine, starvation, terrorism? Yes or No....

That, you see was simply a somewhat tongue-in-cheek response to what amounted to another posters statement that seemed to suggest that somehow all these evils of the world were attributable to these entities.....although I'm pretty sure that was not the intent of the statement.....any more than my response was intended to be interpreted the way you have managed to do.....sigh.....

An article by Matt Taibbi from May 9th Rolling Stone


The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever | Politics News | Rolling Stone

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix


By Matt Taibbi
April 25, 2013 1:00 PM ET



"Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture."

This story is from the May 9th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.



Read it all at Rolling Stone because it's a bit too big to post here.

A recent clip of a protestor in Atlanta who recently lost here home getting tasered. Just seems like there has to be a better solution than letting people lose their homes to the banks which were given bailouts. Shameful state things are in.

^
Obviously we should forgive their mortgages, student loans and put them all on Food Stamps the rest of their lives too...

Originally Posted by Goodwill

there has to be a better solution than letting people lose their homes to the banks which were given bailouts. Shameful state things are in.

Those "bailouts" were actually short term loans to re-liquidate the banks; which had they been allowed to go down would have created a massive implosion for the economy and a lot more people would have suffered.

Funny how people keep banging on and on about bailouts without really having a clue about what actually occurred and what was accomplished.

The "bailouts" were all paid back with bonuses and the government actually benefitted from the exercise.

It's a great pity that so many people lost their homes obviously, but then most (if not all) of them could not afford the home they bought in the first place. The whole thing was a fiasco but there were a lot more people than the bankers involved.

^ You seem to have a poor understanding of the scope and scale of the taxpayer funded bailouts.

We all know about TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which spent $700 billion in taxpayers’ money to bail out banks after the financial crisis. That money was scrutinized by Congress and the media.

But it turns out that that $700 billion is just a small part of a much larger pool of money that has gone into propping up our nation’s financial system. And most of that taxpayer money hasn’t had much public scrutiny at all.

According to a team at Bloomberg News, at one point last year the U.S. had lent, spent or guaranteed as much as $12.8 trillion to rescue the economy. The Bloomberg reporters have been following that money. Alison Stewart spoke with one, Bob Ivry, to talk about the true cost to the taxpayer of the Wall Street bailout:

Originally Posted by koman

Funny how people keep banging on and on about bailouts without really having a clue about what actually occurred and what was accomplished.

The "bailouts" were all paid back with bonuses and the government actually benefitted from the exercise.

Sorry mate, but you are completely wrong. The bailouts have NOT been paid back. Do you have a link to suggest otherwise?

Far bigger than the bank bailouts were the billions given to mortgage finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose bailouts took place outside of TARP.

Recipients of aid through TARP’s housing programs (such as mortgage servicers and state housing orgs) received subsidies that were never intended to be repaid, yet taxpayers who paid for the aid are still being thrown out of their homes.

On Sep. 7, 2008, Fannie and Freddie were essentially nationalized: placed under the conservatorship of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Under the terms of the rescue, the Treasury has invested billions to cover the companies' losses.
Initially, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson put a ceiling of $100 billion for investments in each company. In February of 2009, Tim Geithner raised it to $200 billion. In December of 2009, the Treasury removed any cap for the aid. The money was authorized by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, passed in July, 2008.
(Source: Preferred Stock Investments | Eye on the Bailout | ProPublica)



Many Americans would be shocked to find out that the same Wall Street megabanks which received bailouts from taxpayers five years ago, at the height of the financial crisis, continue to receive taxpayer-funded advantages today simply because of their “too big to fail” status.


And while these megabanks receive an implied federal guarantee provided by taxpayers at no charge, “too small to save” community banks in towns across America have been allowed to fail. This taxpayer-supplied subsidy is wrong, and it puts community banks across the nation at a competitive disadvantage.



Millions of families and small businesses depend on their community banks for their savings accounts, home mortgages, and business loans. Community banks help create countless jobs and provide safe and reliable financing options to Ohio’s families. They deserve a chance to compete on a level playing field.


But because Wall Street megabanks know that the government will bail them out if they ever again reach the point of collapse, they have access to cheaper funding and more favorable borrowing terms than dependable Main Street institutions.


Megabanks are viewed as having the ultimate insurance policy – one with no coverage limits or premiums. This funding advantage has now been confirmed by three independent studies in the last year, one of them quantifying the subsidy at $83 billion per year. We have a financial system that rewards banks for their size, not the quality of their operations. Simply put, it's a “heads megabanks win, tails taxpayers lose” scenario that squashes innovation and competition and is distinctly un-American.


(Source: Virtually ALL of the Big Banks’ Profits Come from Taxpayer Bailouts and Subsidies | Washington's Blog)

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

Far bigger than the bank bailouts were the billions given to mortgage finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose bailouts took place outside of TARP.

I'm not arguing that point. I was specifically referring to the banks which in some cases did not even want bailout money (Wells Fargo as an example. They were forced to take it anyway) There was shitloads of bailout money given to all kinds of people that had nothing much to do with banking.

The whole mortgage fiasco is what started the financial meltdown in the first place...and that was driven by the government itself via Fanny and Freddie. Bush and company wanted every American to own their own home....without any regard for affordability apparently. Simple arithmetic was thrown out the window...the financial institutions were pressured into reckless practices in many cases, and acted accordingly....knowing that it had to fail at some point, and also knowing that they would be protected in order to keep the economy afloat. It was all political obviously, because there was no signs of sound banking practices or economic thinking anywhere to be seen.

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

^
Obviously we should forgive their mortgages, student loans and put them all on Food Stamps the rest of their lives too...

Perhaps they should have bailed out the people that needed the money to keep their homes, rather than the bankers' bonus pots?

It's supposed to be Government for the people, not for the bankers.

A lot of people were given assistance to allow them to keep their homes, and not all banks were bailed out. Lehman Bros was allowed to fail; which created havoc. There was really no viable option except for the injection of liquidity into the system, which was essential to prevent a total collapse of the banking sector....which is vital to the operation of the overall economy.

Such a collapse would have been a lot more damaging than what ultimately occurred. Lesser of evils you might say.

The vast majority of banks were innocent of any wrongdoing and bonuses are usually pretty modest, except for the very top level of executives in the largest banks. Bonus payments are also tied to contractual agreements, and many of those that received bonus payments actually earned them through performance. Just because the bank overall fucks up, does not mean that many of the employees and managers did not perform well and earn their individual performance bonuses.

It would hardly make much sense to allow the entire financial industry to fail because of the actions of a few.....who were able to act the way they did only because of excess de-regulation and a lack of supervision.

It would not have made much sense to allow General Motors to fail either. An iconic company that employees hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

We can debate the causes for all these things till the cows come home, but in the end it had to come down to choosing the best from a selection of bad options. The alternatives were not too attractive.... and in particular, allowing a banking system failure to occur.

Originally Posted by koman

A lot of people were given assistance to allow them to keep their homes, and not all banks were bailed out. Lehman Bros was allowed to fail; which created havoc. There was really no viable option except for the injection of liquidity into the system, which was essential to prevent a total collapse of the banking sector....which is vital to the operation of the overall economy.

Such a collapse would have been a lot more damaging than what ultimately occurred. Lesser of evils you might say.

The vast majority of banks were innocent of any wrongdoing and bonuses are usually pretty modest, except for the very top level of executives in the largest banks. Bonus payments are also tied to contractual agreements, and many of those that received bonus payments actually earned them through performance. Just because the bank overall fucks up, does not mean that many of the employees and managers did not perform well and earn their individual performance bonuses.

It would hardly make much sense to allow the entire financial industry to fail because of the actions of a few.....who were able to act the way they did only because of excess de-regulation and a lack of supervision.

It would not have made much sense to allow General Motors to fail either. An iconic company that employees hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

We can debate the causes for all these things till the cows come home, but in the end it had to come down to choosing the best from a selection of bad options. The alternatives were not too attractive.... and in particular, allowing a banking system failure to occur.

Every single bank that required a bailout should have had its senior executives dismissed, and those complicit in the creation and sale of toxic debt should have been imprisoned.

Bankers bonuses should have been outlawed and no federal money used in a bailout unless it was transparently used to repair the damage to individuals inflicted by these scum.

Banking products that risk other peoples money without their permission should be illegal.

The banking system did not have to "fail", but those who benefited from this should have been the ones paying for it.

Those same banks which benefited from the bailouts continue to grow. They are a third larger than they were just five years ago. Small community banks are allowed to fail leaving people fewer choices to do business with.

Originally Posted by misskit

Those same banks which benefited from the bailouts continue to grow. They are a third larger than they were just five years ago. Small community banks are allowed to fail leaving people fewer choices to do business with.

Which was probably part of the plan.

Originally Posted by koman

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

Far bigger than the bank bailouts were the billions given to mortgage finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose bailouts took place outside of TARP.

I'm not arguing that point. I was specifically referring to the banks which in some cases did not even want bailout money (Wells Fargo as an example. They were forced to take it anyway) There was shitloads of bailout money given to all kinds of people that had nothing much to do with banking.

The whole mortgage fiasco is what started the financial meltdown in the first place...and that was driven by the government itself via Fanny and Freddie. Bush and company wanted every American to own their own home....without any regard for affordability apparently. Simple arithmetic was thrown out the window...the financial institutions were pressured into reckless practices in many cases, and acted accordingly....knowing that it had to fail at some point, and also knowing that they would be protected in order to keep the economy afloat. It was all political obviously, because there was no signs of sound banking practices or economic thinking anywhere to be seen.

Wasnt it Hilary Clinton that orchestrated it, rather than Bush ?

Originally Posted by koman

It would hardly make much sense to allow the entire financial industry to fail because of the actions of a few

A sickening statement. Let them burn.

Originally Posted by koman

who were able to act the way they did only because of excess de-regulation and a lack of supervision.

Your repubtards want even more deregulation. Go figure.

Originally Posted by Warrior

Over 50,000 usd for every citizen. Would love to know if that's more than the average citizen actually owns.

It is. But the repubtards will tell you this is the peoples problem and that the debt should come out of their own sweat and toil. This is a perfect example of how income redistribution can be made to work. Let the 1% pay off the debt.

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

^
Obviously we should forgive their mortgages, student loans and put them all on Food Stamps the rest of their lives too...

Or bailing out bankers so they could give the crooked underlings bonuses for screwing the country. They are scum.

The cycle repeats itself. Very informative Keiser Report from last week

In The Beginning

Originally Posted by bsnub

It would hardly make much sense to allow the entire financial industry to fail because of the actions of a few A sickening statement. Let them burn.

Bsnub; have you been face down in beer swill at the Union hall again?.... "a sickening statement"? ... So you would have been in favor of allowing the whole system to go down then, because of a small number of large institutions being reckless. So what would you replace it with?



[quote] who were able to act the way they did only because of excess de-regulation and a lack of supervision.

Your repubtards want even more deregulation. Go figure.

No, most sensible people want proper regulations and perhaps more importantly they would like the regulations enforced.

There was a time when banks and other institutions were so strictly regulated that it was preventing them from expanding and doing a lot of things that could be seen as beneficial to all parties. The great depression caused an almost hysterical climate of regulation...and resulted in what many believed to be suffocating over-regulation. (naturally there are many different views on this)

Deregulation was initially a good thing, but over time it incubated into virtually no regulation, and the enforcement was so weak anyway; the unscrupulous and greedy kunts in some of the largest banks ran amok. The drive for "performance" and "results" became grossly excessive and caused people to do things and take risks they would perhaps not otherwise have done to earn their pay and promotions. A climate of excess risk taking and corrupt practice evolved and grew until it became the core value in some places. Goldman Sachs probably being the prime example.

The Icelandic banks failed for some of the same reasons...and were allowed to fail by the Icelandic government; but they were miniscule operations compared to the Wall St and London banks. A few bush-league banks had accumulated liabilities equal to about 400% of the entire Icelandic economy. ....definitely not prudent banking practice.

The failure caused great hardship and distress for the people of Iceland, but it's quite a wealthy little place and the government was able to soften the blow a bit.
It was clearly a good decision that has worked out well for the country.
Having a population about the size of Biloxi helps....and a fairly basic and simple economy. I can't imagine that the same tactic in the US would be likely to produce the same results.....that only happens in the smoke filled air, and beer fumes of the local union hall my dear fellow.....