Dylan Ratigan: Goldman Sachs magic trick - 10/16/09

Run time: 07:43 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-4wpoBIYjU   Posted on YouTube: October 16, 2009 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: October 17, 2009 By DU Member: Joanne98 Views on DU: 941

 

I'm becoming a big Dylan Ratigan fan.

MSNBC is the best. They have commentators from different points of view but they are all good at what they do and represent their point of view clearly. What a great explanation.

neighborhood, reap thousands of dollars in profit when the home values go up again, and then pay back the government loan with interest---would I have done something wrong in that hypothetical?

If you owned the bank, and your bank was on the verge of going belly up due to reckless investing on your part, and the only way to save your bank was to get all your neighbors to come to your rescue by forking over their life savings, creating panic and depressing property values, forcing your neighbors into foreclosure, then using their money to buy up all the homes, making record profits after the panic stabilizes, then giving huge bonuses to your pals, equal to the exact amount that you took from your neighbors; if you have to ask, "would I have done something wrong in that hypothetical", then you may have what it takes to be a true capitalist.

Good explanation.

Dylan did a masterful job explaining the most recent sleight-of-hand by the rich and famous. I'm all for government staying out of private business, UNTIL what they do enriches a big corporation at the expense of the rest of us. These guys are putting the nails in their own coffin with the blatant theft of taxpayer money. Regulate the crap out of them!! The arrogance of the wall street big-wigs is absolutely stunning.

WILLIAM BLACK: There’s no palpable outrage, certainly not in Congress. The reform efforts on derivatives, for example, are a scandal. They exempt virtually all of the problem derivatives, and they’re designed to exempt it. And that’s the bill that’s introduced, and of course it’s likely to get worse with additional lobbying from the special interests.

Link the things that you’ve just been talking about. You talked about foreclosures reaching record highs. But in fact, foreclosures, relative to delinquencies, are quite low compared to historical ratios. In other words, banks have tons of folks who are not paying their mortgages on time, and they’re not foreclosing. And the reason they’re not foreclosing is, once you foreclose, you have to recognize losses under the accounting rules. And the banks gimmicked the accounting rules. They put pressure on Congress, and Congress put pressure on the accounting profession to gimmick the accounting rules now about a year ago. Now, these bonuses, of course, are paid compared to alleged profits. What happens if you understate your losses dramatically? You report much higher profits and much higher bonuses. So this is a web of fraud, in which they are getting as much as they can before the place goes to hell in a handbasket again.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/15/black