Finally, a Judge Stands up to Wall Street

 Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone  

Federal judge Jed Rakoff, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s office here in New York, is fast becoming a sort of legal hero of our time. He showed that again yesterday when he shat all over the SEC’s latest dirty settlement with serial fraud offender Citigroup, refusing to let the captured regulatory agency sweep yet another case of high-level criminal malfeasance under the rug.

The SEC had brought an action against Citigroup for misleading investors about the way a certain package of mortgage-backed assets had been chosen. The case is very similar to the notorious Abacus case involving Goldman Sachs, in which Goldman allowed short-selling billionaire John Paulson (who was betting against the package) to pick the assets, then told a pair of European banks that the “designed to fail” package they were buying had been put together independently.

This case was similar, but worse. Here, Citi similarly told investors a package of mortgages had been chosen independently, when in fact Citi itself had chosen the stuff and was betting against the whole pile.

This whole transaction actually combined a number of Goldman-style misdeeds, since the bank both lied to investors and also bet against its own product and its own customers. In the deal, Citi made a $160 million profit, while its customers lost $700 million.

Read more

close

Monty Python - Spanish Inquisition Torture Scene

One for #OWS → Here is how Obama fits into the problem #tcot

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone explains how Obama brought in a whole bunch of people from Wall Street, the very day he got elected.

Obama's Harvard classmate Michael Fromen is put in charge of running the Economic Transition Team, basically of hiring people for the team. He also brought in Jamie Ruben, son of Citigroup's Bob Ruben (head of Goldman Sachs - 1990-1992, head of Clinton's National Economic Council, who, as Treasury Secretary, made the Citigroup merger possible, then off to Citigroup.

G4it-Fs8RLw

And, here's a list of Goldman Sachs personnel in the Obama White House, including Elena Kagan.

Layoffs, Layoffs, Everywhere You Look There Are Layoffs

Courtesy of Michael Snyder of Economic Collapse

zero hedge

Corporations are laying people off which will increase their profits and decrease the general growth of the economy. At the end of the last article I posted by Russ Winter, several seem to argue that corporations should not be paying taxes, and that might help them increase profits and spend their money more productively. Keep in mind that American companies that are moving operations overseas and getting out of paying taxes, do business in the U.S. and get considerable benefits from this country.


Here's a portion of a list provided by JW n FL (thanks):

3) General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States over the past five years and, thanks to clever use of loopholes, paid no taxes...

4) Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009. (Source: See 2009 Chevron annual report here. Note 15 on page FS-46 of this report shows a U.S. federal income tax liability of $128 million, but that it was able to defer $147 million for a U.S. federal income tax liability of negative $19 million.)

7) Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department...

8) Citigroup last year made more than $4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. It received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury...

9) ConocoPhillips, the fifth largest oil company in the United States, made $16 billion in profits from 2006 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction...

Read The Rest