The global financial collapse edges ever closer

breaking news from the financial times...

Moody's downgrades biggest global banks

Fifteen of the biggest global banks were downgraded by Moody’s Investors Service on Thursday, adding to pressure on their borrowing costs and triggering multi-billion dollar collateral calls.

Morgan Stanley, seen as the most vulnerable, escaped the three-notch downgrade that Moody’s had threatened but saw its rating cut from A2 to Baa1, three notches above “junk”.

Stock markets fell as anticipation of the downgrades, which came after US markets closed, added to fears over the global economy. Shares in Bank of America, Citigroup and RBS fell by more than 3 per cent by the closing bell. The S& P 500 closed down 2.2 per cent at 1,325.51.

bring it on... i've been praying for this absurd house of cards to fall for a very long time...

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Yep, the banksters have a LOT to be thankful for - massive bailouts and no regulation

meanwhile, all we peasants can expect is a lump of coal in our christmas stockings...

from the wapo... (the strikeout is mine...)

The nation's bankers banksters have much to be thankful for as they sit down to their turkey dinners on Thursday.

At this time last year, the American financial system was near collapse, rescued only by hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Now the system has stabilized, and the industry is on the verge of a coup that many would have thought impossible a year ago: an escape from any major reform of financial regulations.

On Tuesday, the American Financial Services Association even held a conference call with reporters to update them on its efforts -- successful so far -- to torpedo plans for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would protect people from the sort of lending abuses that led to last year's implosion.

The ASFA, a trade group of credit card issuers, auto-finance companies, mortgage lenders and others leading the fight against the CFPA, took the unusual approach on Tuesday of publicly celebrating the reform's fading prospects.

"This was supposed to be a slam-dunk," crowed Bill Hempler, the group's top lobbyist. But instead, he said, "Democratic members are increasingly having heartburn over CFPA and maybe second thoughts."

[...]

Now these same companies [CIT, CitiFinancial, Countrywide, EquiFirst, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo Financial and GMAC], suffering from some combination of amnesia and ingratitude, are determined to fight off regulatory efforts to prevent a repeat of the same cycle of bubble, collapse and bailout. Big firms such as J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America -- direct or indirect beneficiaries of federal bailouts -- are all battling efforts to rein in derivatives. And credit card issuers, facing new regulations scheduled to take effect in February, have responded by increasing their rates and fees.

check THIS as a rationale for fighting re-regulation...

[T]he argument most likely to prevail for the financial firms on Capitol Hill was offered by Chris Stinebert, the trade group's chief. "Especially now, when we're in a very, very sensitive time, when the capital markets are just starting to recover," he said, "introducing a high level of uncertainty in the marketplace could be very detrimental."

amazingly enough, dana milbank, well-known for shilling the views of his ultra-establishment employer, actually decides to call a spade a spade...

Or, to put it another way: Don't regulate us now because the economy is still suffering from the mess we made because we weren't regulated the last time. Chutzpah, it appears, is recession-proof.

how long will it take the long-suffering citizens of our formerly devoted-to-the-common-good country to realize we've been the victims of yet another coup d'etat, this one of truly staggering proportions... bless the 17+% unemployed who owe their circumstances largely to the banksters... and fie on the banksters who will be celebrating the latest fast one they pulled on us peasants...

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Banksters: ‘Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’

let them eat cake... who gives a shit about the peasants when you can collect a BONUS well over five times the median u.s. household income and, oh, btw, who gives a shit that billions of people around the world are STARVING TO DEATH...?

Three of the largest Wall Street firms -- which together received $45,000,000,000 in taxpayer bailouts -- are on track to hand out $29,700,000,000 in bonuses this year.

That's only the three largest firms. JP Morgan Chase took $25 billion in government aid; Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, $10 billion each. All three have paid back the government bailout money they've received, but the liquidity and "cheap money" offered by the Fed have kindled record profits at their investment and trading arms.

According to analyst estimates published by Bloomberg News, the financial banking triumvirate will shell out $29.7 billion in bonuses this year -- up 60 percent from 2008, and higher than the previous record of $26.8 billion in 2007.

If divided equally among the firms' collective 119,000 employees, the sum total per worker comes to $250,400 each (which Bloomberg notes is almost five times the median US household income of $50,000).

“Wall Street is beginning to resemble Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in the film ‘Gone With the Wind’: ‘Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’” Paul Hodgson, a compensation expert, told the wire. “It doesn’t seem as if even political threat, disastrous PR, envy, rising unemployment rates and home repossessions is enough to get any of these people to refuse the bonuses they have ‘earned.’”

what kind of people are these...? after visiting auschwitz-birkenau last week and seeing once again just how monstrous certain elements of the human race can be toward their fellow human beings, is THIS kind of behavior any the less complicit...? just because they're not sitting in watchtowers or manning gas chambers doesn't mean they're not forcing people into misery and death by grabbing such a disproportionate share of the world's resources for themselves... and don't give me any crap about it isn't a sin to be rich... after a certain point, a point well in excess of any reasonable definition of "rich," you're guilty as hell, believe me...

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Tradesters and banksters continue to enrich themselves ($5B) at our expense

more validation for what we already knew was happening...

Thousands of top traders and bankers on Wall Street were awarded huge bonuses and pay packages last year, even as their employers were battered by the financial crisis.

Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008, according to a report released Thursday by Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York attorney general.

At Goldman Sachs, for example, bonuses of more than $1 million went to 953 traders and bankers, and Morgan Stanley awarded seven-figure bonuses to 428 employees. Even at weaker banks like Citigroup and Bank of America, million-dollar awards were distributed to hundreds of workers.

[...]

The report suggests that those roughly 5,000 people — a small subset of the industry — accounted for more than $5 billion in bonuses. At Goldman, just 200 people collectively were paid nearly $1 billion in total, and at Morgan Stanley, $577 million was shared by 101 people.

All told, the bonus pools at the nine banks that received bailout money was $32.6 billion, while those banks lost $81 billion.

where's the outrage...?

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More bullshit maneuvering by the Fed PLUS now EVERBODY wants access to the federal tit

good god almighty... can it get more obscene...? sadly, the answer probably is yes, absolutely, it is going to get a LOT more obscene...

In one of the biggest changes to Wall Street in decades, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two independent investment banks, will become bank holding companies, the Federal Reserve said Sunday night.

The move fundamentally changes one of the mainstays of modern Wall Street. It heralds new regulations and supervisions of previously lightly regulated investment banks.

The move comes after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the near-collapses of Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch.

Being a bank holding company would give Morgan and Goldman access to the discount window of the Federal Reserve. While they have had access to Fed lending facilities in recent months, regulators had planned to take away discount window access in January.

The regulation by the Federal Reserve brings a host of accounting rule changes that should benefit the two banks in the current environment.

the rules ain't workin' for ya...? no sweat... change them goddam, pesky rules...

as if that weren't enough to gag a maggot, ALL the piggies want a place at the trough...

Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.

Nobody wants to be left out of Treasury’s proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions.

“The definition of Financial Institution should be as broad as possible,” the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents big financial services companies, wrote in an e-mail message to members on Sunday.

The group said a wide variety of institutions as varied as mortgage lenders and insurance companies should be able to take advantage of the bailout, and that these companies should be able to sell off any investments linked to mortgages.

The scope of the bailout grew over the weekend. As recently as Saturday morning, the Bush administration’s proposal called for Treasury to buy residential or commercial mortgages and related securities. By that evening, the proposal was broadened to give Treasury discretion to buy “any other financial instrument.”

call and write your senators... call and write your congressman... call or write your newspaper... scream bloody murder... this shit has got to stop... NOW...!!

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"Lending locks up"

here's a quote to catch your eye...

"...buyers were at one point willing to accept interest rates for Treasury bills of only 0.2 percent, the lowest since World War II..."

front page of the wapo...

Markets in Disarray as Lending Locks Up
Federal Intervention Fails to Stem Crisis of Confidence on Wall St.

The flow of money through critical parts of the financial system all but stopped yesterday, prompting the stock market to plunge again as banks lost faith in one another and investors rushed to U.S. government securities to protect their savings.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the only major investment banks still standing amid the wreckage of Wall Street's old order, tottered.

In one of the most tumultuous days ever for financial markets, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 449 points, or 4 percent, and so much money fled into safe U.S. debt that buyers were at one point willing to accept interest rates for Treasury bills of only 0.2 percent, the lowest since World War II.

we b goin' DOWN...!

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