This is an elaboration on Chuck;s notion that institutions who didn't take bailout money shouldn't face new disclosure requirements.
There are more ways to swill at the public trough than than to take TARP money directly. Here is one way. "Under one part of the plan, the FDIC will put up most of the money to create a new public corporation which will capitalize private funds to buy up sketchy loans. In the second part, hedge fund and private equity speculators will purchase older toxic bonds clogging bank balance sheets, which Treasury now calls by the delightful name, "legacy" assets. (Sorry, a legacy is a gold watch from Grandpa. This legacy is junk.) Under yet another part of the plan, hedge funds and private equity companies are expected to buy newly issued bonds from banks, so that banks resume normal lending. An alarming aspect of the plan is that private investment companies will manage the process on behalf of the government, despite the fact that government is providing most of the capital and insuring most of the risk. Basically, the Treasury is colluding with private speculators to create off-balance sheet entities, to offer new windfall profit opportunities and disguise the true degree of risk. If this all sounds vaguely familiar, Geithner's Treasury, with no sense of irony, is offering a reprise of the several abusive and opaque gimmicks that produced this crisis, a tour that winds back down Memory Lane, from AIG to Enron." <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/geithners-last-stand_b_177850.html > And what about all the companies that bought CDSs from AIG and buddies? They may have received no taxpayer money directly but nonetheless they couldn't survive with the bailout of their trading partners. Should the taxpayers have no say in compensation levels for the executives of those companies? As Robert Reich said, there must be some mechanism for limiting the pay of the executives of financial firms. It can be the market or it can be the government. Right now it's neither and that's the worst of both worlds. -- In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take. -Adlai Stevenson, statesman (1900-1965) _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
