European Debt Crisis

From Bloomberg News who had to go to court with the Fed and a consortium of banks in order to obtain the following story under the Freedom of Information Act.

Click on the photo below of Goldman Sachs' personal bag boys for the entire story.

Way super double highly recommended ... READ IT ... you need to understand this stuff.

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

What really irritates me about all of this is the fact that I could have gone and got that MBA, maybe a JD, moved to New York and become a thief, but noooooo.

From Charles Hugh Smith's fine site Of Two Minds.

Click the dominoes for the accomanying analysis.

As an aside, the Maastrict Treaty also known as the "Treaty Of The European Union" became effective on this date in 1993.

From John Maudlin's Frontline Weekly Newsletter.

A quote from Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowan taken from his speech to the Irish Parliment last Tuesday.

If this country and this parliament fails to make the necessary adjustments, then we put at risk the funding of the State after July of next year and what will happen then is that we will be faced with a situation where we will only be able to spend EUR 31 billion.

The State could not go on spending EUR 50 billion a year, when it was only taking in EUR 31 billion.

Being only able to spend EUR 31 billion would involve a serious adjustment in the level of (government) services that could be provided.

No responsible government, therefore, could contemplate that approach.' 

Ok, think this one through for just a second.

What the Prime Minister of Ireland just said here is that no responsible government could contemplate spending a sum of money equal to what it is taking in.

Aha!!!!!

See Jean Monnet'.