We are a week removed from every Attorney General in America, save Oklahoma, “agreeing” to a landmark “settlement” on a raft of fraud-related issues, with all the attendant assurances on the financial compensation and the tight liability release and the stiff enforcement monitoring. And a week later, there is no piece of paper to point to as the settlement. It was all an agreement in principle.

“Clean, safe, and too cheap to meter.” This sunny tagline from the early days of atomic energy has more recently become a quickest way to sum up how dark and dismal its prospects are today–as in, nuclear power has proven itself to be unclean, unsafe, and prohibitively expensive. “Clean, safe and too cheap to meter” now sounds less like boastful marketing, and more like a schoolyard taunt.

The numbers of ways nuclear power plants have betrayed their Madison Avenue mantra has pretty much been the backbeat of this column for nearly ten months now, and 2012 keeps up the cadence.

Perhaps we should begin with an offering from Goldman Sachs he covered closely, the Abacus deal, for which Goldman was fined. Mr. Cohan, please explain whether you believe Goldman was guilty of unethical or illegal activity in the sale of Abacus. Ultimately, I hope we get your views on why there have been no convictions, and why.

A report by Bloomberg reveals that the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner (at the New York Fed) secretly loaned over seven trillions dollars to arguably insolvent banks and financial institutions to keep them afloat, while concealing the scope of the lending from Congress and even member of the Treasury Department charged with allocating TARP bailouts.

The judge stated flatly that the penalty against the back, $95 million, is 1/7 of the level of the investor losses on the deal. “So the net effect of this is that you’re only returning a small fraction of what the investors lost, yes,” he said.

Bank of America has a right to dump risks onto other people if it helps exercise its right to make a profit.

The big question for banks like Peter Orszag’s Citigroup then becomes “what do we do with all that property?” For them, these are “non-performing assets” that have value but produce no revenue and in fact will even cost them money to maintain like mowing the lawn, paying the taxes, etc. Repairs and such make them even more expensive to hold.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner forcefully denied the claim in a book by Ron Suskind that he ignored a request from the President to work up a plan to dissolve Citigroup. He further added that the entire theme of the book, about infighting in the White House over economic policy issues, bears “no resemblance to reality.”

It really is incredible to see such a concerted effort to rewrite history in front of our faces. There is not much ambiguity in the story of the housing bubble. The private financial sector went nuts. They made a fortune issuing bad and often fraudulent loans which they could quickly resell in the secondary market. The big actors in the junk market were the private issuers like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Lehman Brothers. However, George Will and Co. are determined to blame this disaster on government “compassion” for low-income families.

In The Monster, Michael Hudson gives us a detailed account of the how Roland Arnall created Ameriquest and made it into the giant of subprime lending. In the process the book implicates the major Wall Street firms, most importantly Lehman, who eagerly packaged junk loans into mortgage backed securities and more complicated instruments. He also notes the corruption of the three major credit rating agencies, who received big fees for giving these assets investment grade stamps. The list of aiders and abettors includes Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, California Governors Grey Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even the community group ACORN.