It looks like Dexia Bank will be the first large European bank to fall to speculation about losses on its loans to Greece, and this may be a sign of things to come. Dexia is partly owned by the Belgian Government and partly by the French Government, the result of a 2008 bailout. It’s another sign that many other banks, all of whom “passed” stress test, are also in trouble.

I’m not sure if this is information we already knew from the Fed audit, or an additional set of data, or maybe just the specifics that came out of that Bloomberg FOIA request. At any rate, Bloomberg has presented it in a very direct manner with a very provocative title: “Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Secret Fed Loans.” I think some activist snuck into the Bloomberg offices and wrote this report.

One of the more revealing elements of the Greek bailout discussions is not that the IMF and European finance ministers want another round of austerity from Greece before providing funding, and not even that banks are being urged to take haircuts or engage in restructuring to accommodate the Greeks. It’s that other element – privatization of state assets – that is the tell here. This is the real extraction from the Greeks, the real shock doctrine scheme at work here. Greece essentially must sell the family silver – their ports, their state-run water supply systems, their utility company, their telephone company – to get out of the mess created largely by the financial crisis and the Great Recession.

Our elected officials have basically set up a political system that legalizes and facilitates bribery. And our failure to deal with that has created the most successful business model of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: maximize your profits by making bigger and badder loans that precipitate a “crisis” when they go belly up (which you fuel with a massive PR campaign), then you squeeze the government to make you whole.

After a drawn out battle to liberate the records of the Fed’s discount window lending, they’ve finally been released.

Hard to believe that a repeating loop pushed breathlessly by FoxNews turned out to be complete BS.

The wealthy are up in arms about your refusal to bear all the sacrifice…yet again.

You may not know that there’s a new round of stress tests for the banks on the horizon. The Federal Reserve announced these stress tests late last year, designed to determine whether the banks could handle another downturn. The last stress tests were plagued by actual bargaining between the administrators of the tests and the banks to get them to a relatively healthy position. They simply weren’t a real assessment of the health of the banks. Similarly, these tests probably won’t include any contingency for mass putbacks of soured mortgages by investors, for example. Therefore, these stress tests won’t be entirely legitimate either.

A Congressional hearing last week detailed how JPMorgan Chase illegally foreclosed on service members while they served on active duty overseas, in violation of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. They also charged mortgage interest rates above the cap for active-duty military personnel.

The big bank went out of their way to fix the problem yesterday, knowing that abusing service members could get you in big trouble in this country, and lead to further scrutiny of their abusive practices.

Oh my. If Amy Walters, George Will, and Major Garrett agree that Tea Party Republicans need to grow up before they wreck the US economy, maybe there’s hope . . . but not much. Follow the logic if you can.