Comments on: FDL Book Salon Welcomes Matt Taibbi, The Great American Bubble Machine

By: Gitcheegumee

Gitcheegumee — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:04:44 +0000

Blinded by his own brilliance, and baffled all the rest of us with his bullshit.

By: Gitcheegumee

Gitcheegumee — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:39:33 +0000

That was pretty much my impression too.

Sort of a pre-emptive CYA strike.

Kinda like the CEO salaries of health insurance company CEO’s dropping by half in some cases,just last year as compared with 2007.

By: torgo2009

torgo2009 — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:28:34 +0000

“must read” if you have any interest in the financial market melt down.
(Three-part conversation between Johnson and Talbott on the causes of the current economic crisis)

http://www.salon.com/opinion/f.....index.html

By: torgo2009

torgo2009 — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:24:33 +0000

Well said!

By: torgo2009

torgo2009 — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:20:38 +0000

In my opinion Greenspan is the biggest villain (certainly not the only one) in this whole mess. He kept interest rates too low for too long and lobbied hard against regulating derivatives.
Greenspan was, at one time, brilliant. I’ve read some of his writings from the 1960’s and they are great. When he was appointed Fed chairman in the mid 1980’s he checked his brilliance at the door.

By: masaccio

masaccio — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:07:38 +0000

I think this is a count of “suspicious activity reports”, called SARs, which all financial institutions are required to file if certain red flags are raised. This has been around for some time, but after 9/11, FinCEN, the Financial Crime Enforcement Network, got after financial institutions, which started to report a lot more.

It doesn’t mean there are that many fraud cases out there. There is a lot of defensive filing to keep FinCEN off their backs.

By: PPDCUS

PPDCUS — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:04:30 +0000

Sorry to just be getting here… I agree, Hugh

Obama’s proving to be more Hoover, than FDR and on other issues, more Ford, than Lincoln or TR.

By: Hugh

Hugh — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:58:01 +0000

A final word on mortgage fraud, it was pervasive and systemic. There was also control fraud by the executives of the banks that knew what was going on but let it go on, even encouraged it. Tens of thousands of cases sounds like a lot but when you consider that samples studied have shown large percentages of fraud, we are easily talking millions of mortgages.

In the Bush years, states were expressly forbidden to pursue a lot of this. At the same time, a lot of manpower in the fraud units of the FBI was transferred to counter-terrorism. So fraud remains under investigated and prosecuted, and few of the executives involved outside of Mozilo have seen any action taken against them.

By: Gitcheegumee

Gitcheegumee — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:53:58 +0000

heh heh!

By: SouthernDragon

SouthernDragon — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:47:57 +0000

heh heh