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Hush Son and Andrew Frye | Bloomberg.com

American International Group Inc., the insurer rescued by the U.S. government, reported its first profit in seven quarters on narrowing investment losses and a rebound in the value of some derivatives. The stock gained 20 percent in New York trading.

Second-quarter net income of $1.82 billion, or $2.30 a share, compares with a net loss of $5.36 billion, or a split- adjusted $41.13, a year earlier, New York-based AIG said today in a regulatory filing. Operating income, which excludes some investment results, was $2.57 a share, beating the average estimate of five analysts surveyed by Bloomberg by $1.07.

The results may ease pressure on Robert Benmosche, AIG’s fifth chief executive officer since 2005. The former MetLife Inc. head, who replaces Edward Liddy next week, has to dismantle AIG to repay loans within a $182.5 billion bailout. The insurer posted more than $100 billion in net losses driven by failed housing market bets in the six quarters ended March 31.

“This buys him more time because it shows they’re getting some traction,” said Haag Sherman, who helps oversee $7.3 billion as chief investment officer of Houston-based Salient Partners. “He can use the operating profit to show that they have good assets and they just need more time to divest them in an orderly fashion to get the best prices for shareholders and the U.S. government.”

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Rolling Stone: The Great American Bubble Machine 1 of 5

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Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was confronted yesterday by Congressman Alan Grayson about which foreign banks were the recipients of Federal Reserve credit swaps, but he was unable to provide an answer as to where over half a trillion dollars had gone.
Asked which European financial institutions received the money, which was handed out by The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), a component of the Federal Reserve System, Bernanke responded, “I don’t know.”

“Half a trillion dollars and you don’t know who got the money?” asked Grayson.

As we have previously reported, the destination of trillions in bailout funds remains hidden after the Fed refused to disclose where it had gone despite a lawsuit filed by Bloomberg.

Bernanke said the Fed had a “long standing legal authority” to hand money to foreign banks under section 14 of the Federal Reserve Act, a claim contradicted by Bernanke’s own report, as Grayson soon highlighted.
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Jbearlaw | DailyKos.com

$24 Trillion.  That’s the estimated amount of loan guarantees, TARP and TILF money handed out, along with the other programs designed to bailout the financial industry.

That’s according to the Inspector General, Neil Barofsky.  But it’s nothing to worry about, according to the AP.

• Jbearlaw’s diary :: ::

The government’s maximum exposure to financial institutions since 2007 could total nearly $24 trillion, or about $80,000 for every American, the watchdog overseeing the federal government financial bailout said Monday.

Many of the programs are backed by collateral and the $23.7 trillion represents the gross, not net, exposure that the government could face. No one has suggested that the full amount, in fact, will be used.

Neil Barofsky, the inspector general for the TARP, said in a report to Congress that Treasury’s inaction means taxpayers have not been told what the financial institutions that have received assistance are doing with the money.

MSNBC.

I looked elsewhere for information on this, and didn’t find much.  HuffPost had this article, but no mention of a possible pricetag of $24 Trillion.

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Robert Scheer | TruthDig.com

Connect the dots: Goldman Sachs made $3.44 billion in profit this past quarter, while the U.S deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time in the nation’s history and appeared to be headed toward doubling that figure before the budget year is out. Since most of the increase in the federal deficit is due to bailing out the banks and salvaging the greater economy they helped destroy, why is the top investment bank doing so well?

Well, because that was the plan, as devised by Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Remember that Lehman Brothers, Goldman’s competitor, was allowed to go bankrupt. The Paulson crowd wouldn’t let Lehman change its status to that of a bank holding company and thus qualify for federal funds; soon afterward, Goldman was granted just such a deal, worth a quick $10 billion. Much is now made of Goldman paying back part of its bailout money, but forgotten is the $12.9 billion that Goldman got as its cut of the $180 billion AIG payoff. That is money that will not be paid back.

Goldman is considered a very smart bank because it was early in reducing its exposure to the mortgage derivatives that in large part caused the meltdown. However, it had done much to expand the market and continued to sell suspect derivatives to unwary buyers as sound investments, even as Goldman divested. The firm still holds $1.85 billion in real estate and lost $499 million in the previous quarter on bad loans, but made up for it by playing the vulture role and issuing high-interest debt to governments and companies made desperate by the recession that the financial gimmicks of the banks brought on in the first place.

And Goldman was not just another bank. Before Paulson ran the Treasury Department, another former Goldman head, Robert Rubin, pushed through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall controls on banking activity. While some now play down the significance of this radical deregulation, not so Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein—at least not back in June 2007, when the markets were still doing well. “If you take an historical perspective,” Blankfein told The New York Times by way of explaining his company’s spectacular success at the time, “we’ve come full circle, because that is exactly what the Rothschilds or J.P. Morgan the banker were doing in their heyday. What caused an aberration was the Glass-Steagall Act.”
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Steve Watson | InfoWars.com 

At time of writing, a bill that would see the Federal Reserve bank audited for the first time in 59 years has 207 cosponsers in the House and is gaining traction with every single day.

This means just 11 more are needed for a majority to be reached in the House.

If enacted, HR 1207 will amend title 31 of the United States Code and reform the manner in which the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is audited by the Comptroller General of the United States.

In other words, for the first time since 1950, the the independent financial powerhouse that creates and regulates all money in the US will be forced by law to open its books.

HR 1207 was sponsored and introduced by Rep. Ron Paul. On February 26, 2009, it was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services, where it remains under consideration.

HR 1207 also has a companion bill, S 604: F R Sunshine Act of 2009, in the Senate.

This news also dovetails with reports detailing how the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the panel responsible for investigating the use of bailout money, has issued a subpoena to the Federal Reserve, asking them to hand over all documents relating to the takeover of Merrill Lynch by the Bank of America.

Claims by New York Attorney-General Andrew Cuomo that former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke strong-armed BofA into buying Merrill, could see the two exposed to prosecution.

There is no doubt that the privately owned Federal Reserve is in hot water, and it knows it.

As we reported last week, the Fed is hiring a veteran lobbyist to “manage its relations with Congress”. According to a Reuters report, the Fed plans to hire Linda Robertson, who previously worked for now-defunct energy company Enron, as well as the Clinton administration.

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Matt Taibbi | RollingStone.com

It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses).

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Mark Pittman and Craig Torres | Bloomberg.com

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors receives daily reports on bailout loans to financial institutions and won’t make the information public, the central bank said in a reply to a Bloomberg News lawsuit.

The Fed refused yesterday to disclose the names of the borrowers and the loans, alleging that it would cast “a stigma” on recipients of more than $1.9 trillion of emergency credit from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed secrecy was the focus of a Senate Banking Committee hearing today in which the panel’s top two members said the central bank’s reluctance to identify companies benefiting from the American International Group Inc. bailout risks undermining public confidence in the government.

“If the American taxpayer’s money is at stake, and it is, big time, I believe the American taxpayers, the people, and this committee, we need to know who benefited, where this money went,” said Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the committee’s top Republican. “There is no transparency here. We are going to find out.”

The bank provides “select members and staff of the Board of Governors with daily and weekly reports” on Primary Dealer Credit Facility borrowing, said Susan E. McLaughlin, a senior vice president in the markets group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in a sworn statement. The documents “include the names of the primary dealers that have borrowed from the PDCF, individual loan amounts, composition of securities pledged and rates for specific loans.”

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Zbig props J.P. as someone who had the solution in 1907, yet does not mention that he actually helped create the problem… 

Mark Finkelstein | Finkelblog.comVideo Here.

Brzezinski fears class warfare. Not Mika. Zbigniew. And not Barney-Frank-on-Meet-the-Press class warfare. Real, blood-in-the-streets riots.

Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Adviser expressed his concern about the possibility of riots on Morning Joe today. To stave them off, he proposes the creation of a voluntary National Solidarity Fund, whose contributors would be those who made out very well in recent times.JOE SCARBOROUGH: You also talked about the possibility of class conflict.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I was worrying about it because we’re going to have millions and millions of unemployed, people really facing dire straits. And we’re going to be having that for some period of time before things hopefully improve. And at the same time there is public awareness of this extraordinary wealth that was transferred to a few individuals at levels without historical precedent in America . . . And you sort of say to yourself: what’s going to happen in this society when these people are without jobs, when their families hurt, when they lose their homes, and so forth?

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Rich Miller | Bloomberg.com 

The engines that have lifted the U.S. economy out of every recession since World War II will be of little help this time around.

Inventory rebuilding, household spending, home construction and payroll growth — the forces that powered, to a greater or lesser extent, each recovery since 1945 — may remain missing for much of 2009. A glut of unsold properties may keep housing depressed, while shriveled savings will discourage consumers. Companies may be reluctant to restock and rehire while their profits are squeezed.

“There are no obvious drivers of growth from the private sector,” says Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York.

The result: A recovery, whenever it comes, may be anemic and heavily dependent on low-cost lending by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and stepped-up spending by new President Barack Obama. Short-term interest rates might have to remain around zero throughout the year, while the federal budget deficitstays at or near record highs into 2010.

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Mark Brown | Guardian.co.uk

Politicians searching for historical precedents for the current financial turmoil should start looking a bit further back after an Oxford University historian discovered what he believes is the world’s first credit crunch in 88BC.

The good news is that Philip Kay knows how the Romans got themselves into financial bother. The bad news is no one knows how they got themselves out of it.

“The essential similarity between what happened 21 centuries ago and what is happening in today’s UK economy is that a massive increase in monetary liquidity culminated with problems in another country causing a credit crisis at home. In both cases distance and over-optimism obscured the risk,” said Kay, a supernumerary fellow at Wolfson College.

The monetary historian is giving a lecture today in which he will reveal how Cicero, the Roman orator, gave a speech in 66BC in which he alluded to the credit crunch. Cicero was arguing that Pompey the Great should be given military command against Mithridates VI, king of Pontus on the Black sea coast of what is now Turkey. He reminded his audience of events in 88BC, when the same Mithridates invaded the Roman province of Asia, on the western coast of Turkey. Cicero claimed the invasion caused the loss of so much Roman money that credit was destroyed in Rome itself.
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ritholtz.com

Whenever I discussed the current bailout situation with people, I find they have a hard time comprehending the actual numbers involved. That became a problem while doing the research for the Bailout Nation book. I needed some way to put this into proper historical perspective.

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion
TOTAL: $3.92 trillion (data courtesy of Bianco Research)

That is $686 billion less than the cost of the credit crisis thus far.
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Robert Kiyosaki | YahooFinance.com

How did we get into the current financial mess? Great question.

Turmoil in the Making

In 1910, seven men held a secret meeting on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. It’s estimated that those seven men represented one-sixth of the world’s wealth. Six were Americans representing J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the U.S. government. One was a European representing the Rothschilds and Warburgs.

In 1913, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank was created as a direct result of that secret meeting. Interestingly, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank isn’t federal, there are no reserves, and it’s not a bank. Those seven men, some American and some European, created this new entity, commonly referred to as the Fed, to take control of the banking system and the money supply of the United States.

In 1944, a meeting in Bretton Woods, N.H., led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. While the stated purposes for the two new organizations initially sounded admirable, the IMF and the World Bank were created to do to the world what the Federal Reserve Bank does to the United States.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon signed an executive order declaring that the United States no longer had to redeem its paper dollars for gold. With that, the first phase of the takeover of the world banking system and money supply was complete.

In 2008, the world is in economic turmoil. The rich are getting richer, but most people are becoming poorer. Much of this turmoil is directly related to those meetings that took place decades ago. In other words, much of this turmoil is by design.
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William Engdahl | GlobalResearch.ca 

On Friday November 21, the world came within a hair’s breadth of the most colossal financial collapse in history according to bankers on the inside of events with whom we have contact. The trigger was the bank which only two years ago was America’s largest, Citigroup. The size of the US Government de facto nationalization of the $2 trillion banking institution is an indication of shocks yet to come in other major US and perhaps European banks thought to be ‘too big to fail.’

The clumsy way in which US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, himself not a banker but a Wall Street ‘investment banker’, whose experience has been in the quite different world of buying and selling stocks or bonds or underwriting and selling same, has handled the unfolding crisis has been worse than incompetent. It has made a grave situation into a globally alarming one.

‘Spitting into the wind’

A case in point is the secretive manner in which Paulson has used the $700 billion in taxpayer funds voted him by a labile Congress in September. Early on, Paulson put $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for his old firm, Goldman Sachs. However, if we compare the value of the equity share that $125 billion bought with the market price of those banks’ stock, US taxpayers have paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could have bought for $62.5 billion, according to a detailed analysis from Ron W. Bloom, economist with the US United Steelworkers union, whose members as well as pension fund face devastating losses were GM to fail.

That means half of the public’s money was a gift to Paulson’s Wall Street cronies. Now, only weeks later, the Treasury is forced to intervene to de facto nationalize Citigroup. It won’t be the last.
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Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com 

As we reported at the time, on October 2, Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman gave a stunning speech on the House floor during which he decried the fact that, “Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day, another couple of thousand the second day, and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no.”

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Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com

Congressman Ron Paul confronted Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke this morning about plans to replace the dollar with a new global currency during the House Financial Services Committee meeting on Capitol Hill.

“Already we see talk….about a new international world reserve currency and to me that’s pretty important because the fiat dollar reserve system is not gonna work anymore,” said the Congressman, adding that currencies have failed throughout history.
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