d Blog

Welcome to d blog, also known as Dan's rant. The content herein is essentially comprised of miscellaneous ramblings and random thoughts on the nature of contemporary existence.

"Broken Banks"

Bankers Binge Breaks, Big Oil Tops Off Tank, Shocking Revelations Regarding Global Warming and Economy (They All Knew)

What with the media bombarding the population with a veritable plethora of, buy this house, fix this house, flip this house and now do it all again programming, is it any wonder that an epidemic of the House Lust disease has infected America?

Which came first? The chicken or the egg? GREED came first. Irrational exuberance followed.

News item:
Merrill Lynch, the world’s largest brokerage, had its embattled Chief Executive Stan O’Neal retire. The departure of O’Neal, 56, was expected after the company took more than $8 billion in writedowns in the third quarter for bad bets on bonds and other instruments backed by subprime mortgages. Was O’Neal to blame for Merrill’s woes?

Undoubtedly. They were all in on it. How could it have been otherwise? If I knew........how could it be a surprise to anyone? Especially the C-suite execs and high level managers at the world's greatest financial institutions. Isn't that sort of knowledge and insight their stock in trade? How can anyone be shocked at developing difficulties in the subprime arena? When a family earning $45,000 per year is given an "interest only" mortgage at a low temporary rate for 110% the value of a $450,000 home, what happens when the introductory period ends? Not only did the family get to enjoy living large, but they put a nice chunk of change in their pockets. The party is over my friends. Somewhere in the USA there are now 800,000 homes in the trajectory of foreclosure. This is said to be only the beginning with the worst yet to come. How can anyone from the agents to the brokers, bankers and bond purveyors be that deaf, dumb and blind? The answer is they are not. Everyone knew and the less than scrupulous lined up at the feeding trough to line their pockets while the getting’ was good. Commissions and fees is where the money went. Every hop in the circuit from the realtor to banks and bundlers packaging the mortgages as investment instruments took their slice of the pie. Obviously a way was found to make the pie bigger until it was so big that it fell apart under it's own weight. As always the obfuscating spin is plausible deniability. There are so many culprits thats it's hard to point the finger at any particular group. The ruse works. No great hue and cry goes up throughout the land, this was allowed, nay encouraged. This time the scope of debacle has resulted in proposed government bailouts. In the end everyone pays to line the pockets of the few. This was nothing more than the standard Ponzi scheme when you get right down to it.

Having met more than a few mortgage brokers in the last few years I had noticed their ranks swelling wildly and was wondering about the market dynamics that enabled such shady characters (defrocked commodities brokers, grifters & racketeers of all varieties…) to receive such a consistently robust revenue stream. All the players including the big boys like Citigroup had to know that securities backed by jumbo mortgages held by people earning marginal incomes were not secure. THEY HAD TO KNOW. But as is always the case the lure of easy money was overwhelming. The system has been made so complex with dynamics like securities backed by mortgage pools that it is extremely difficult if not nigh onto impossible to determine who it is exactly that holds any particular mortgage. Everyone in the food chain (from the front lines to the bond traders in the back) who profited should be required to return the fees and commissions from any mortgage that defaults. Let’s not get so vindictive as to ask for penalties, the simple principal of their fees and commissions will do.
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When your family tree historically contains the accountants for Big Oil and you count the Bin Ladens among close family friends it may be hard to tell whether you’ve got the Saudi’s in your pocket or they have you in theirs. One thing for sure is that there is a confluence of interests aligning global events. Exxon Mobil Corp. broke its own record; as rising oil prices enabled the company bring in better-than-ever income and revenue for the fourth quarter and 2007. Texas-based Exxon's net income rose 3% to $40.6 billion in 2007, surpassing its 2006 record of $39.5 billion. Chevron Corp. also posted strong earnings Full-year profit at the oil company jumped 9% to $18.7 billion. That was happy news for company shareholders, but bad news on the public relations front. These robber baron era economics cannot be simply lucky happenstance. In a prescient anticipation of the inevitable tidal wave of Global Warming press there must have been some sort of intelligent design behind the launch of the Iraq War.

I believe that the conspiracy that enabled this was more than brilliant. To have as a front man a likable idiot who believes what he says. I can see the old white guys in the smoke filled room now. White haired man saying, “He comes across like everyman and Cheney can control him” Bald fellow in tux, “yes and judging by his performance so far he won’t even know the setup, he’ll really believe in the measures we need.”

having listened to his last State Of the Union message, It is so absurd that our leader is just now waking up to the reality of what exists. Yet he is still not acknowledging his mistakes in everything environmental, economic, social and political. The hipocracy, the spin, the untruth of it all. In the end it is about putting the plenty in the hands of the few. It is all about greed. Apparently they are not above spending trillions to skim billions and they don't even consider the hundreds of thousands of lives chewed up by their scheme anything more than grist for the mill. Populations pay for their lifestyle. Yes if we really want good government and a decent society we simply must elect smart ethical people. We must find a method of determining who these people are. We have just experienced the alternative. It is unacceptable.

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