campaign contributors get the soft treatment, while mortgage bailout loaded with ...

Is America's crisis a just let it happen disaster .. you can start deciding if you haven't already .. the evidence is stockpiling by the day. Hate to say it, but I TOLD you so - just do a searchbox link on Goldman Sachs or Hank Paulson of this blog for MORE evidence!

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Crony-Capitalists Fiddle While Main Street Burns

Crashing Citigroup

By PAM MARTENS

The saga of how the top minds in Washington and on Wall Street have dealt with the deepening financial crisis in the U.S. would make a great Hollywood screenplay, except for this: it's absurdly unbelievable.

Storyline: The largest bank in the United States (by assets), Citigroup, is discovered to have stashed away over $80 Billion of Byzantine securities off its balance sheet in secretive Cayman Islands vehicles with an impenetrable curtain around them. Citigroup calls this black hole a Structured Investment Vehicle or SIV. Wall Street insiders call it a "sieve" that is linked to the breakdown in trading of debt instruments around the globe and the erosion of wealth in assets as diverse as stock prices to home values. Additionally, tens of billions of dollars in short term commercial paper backed by these and similar Alice in Wonderland assets are sitting in Mom and Pop money market funds at the largest financial institutions in America, with a AAA rating from our renown credit rating agencies.

Setting: Picture the Titanic shortly after it crashed into the iceberg. Imagine that its officers want to pretend to all its passengers and crew and investors that there is no serious damage because the giant floating Citi did not really hit an iceberg; it just hit a wall of worry. It will be able to right itself in no time at all as long as everyone remains calm. Even though the lavishly appointed ship is dangerously listing (stock price fading daily) it says it can stay afloat by an ingenious bailout plan. Everyone just needs to walk calmly to the dining room, collect a tea cup, and pitch in with the bailout.

This is effectively what the U.S. Treasury has anointed as a game plan: Citigroup, the gargantuan and troubled bank, will be bailed out by virtue of all of its smaller competitors chipping in some money to a SuperSIV, a kind of Big Daddy Black Hole whose details are apparently too scary to release to the public. These are the very same competitors who lost market share to Citigroup because Federal regulators allowed it to grow fat and sassy by playing dirty, including collecting massive fees for hiding debt for bankrupt Enron, WorldCom and Italian dairy giant, Parmalat.

Flash Forward: The Federal regulators are busy attempting to restore confidence on the slippery deck of the listing craft. The U.S. Mint has just released a bronze coin celebrating the newly elected (albeit reluctant) Chairman of Citigroup, Robert Rubin, for his days as U.S. Treasury Secretary. [2] No mention on the flip side of the coin that Rubin was one of the cheerleaders who helped win the repeal of the depression era, investor protection legislation called the Glass-Steagall Act. Without that repeal, Citigroup would not exist; nor would its current threat to the financial infrastructure of our country. No mention, either, that Rubin went from government service to Citigroup's board and has collected tens of millions in compensation for a job that did not involve a lot of sweat.

The small brass band on the deck of Citigroup has just been revved up to a big orchestra with Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, as Maestro. According to Bloomberg News, invitations have gone out to 16 financial institutions offering a personal, one-hour audience with Chairman Bernanke, ostensibly as the grand prize for chipping in to the SuperSIV bailout fund. (I'm visualizing a new commemorative bronze coin from the U.S. Mint that we can pass down to our children in lieu of a real currency with value. It would be inscribed: "The Shock and Awe of Crony-Capitalists: While We Were Looking for Foreign Threats in Mountainous Caves, Our Own Crony-Capitalists, In Broad Daylight and In Full View of Congress, Flew Our Largest Bank Into the World's Largest Economy and Crashed Both to Smithereens." )

Fade to Citigroup Set: Inside Citigroup, it's business as usual. The ousted CEO, Chuck Prince, who had to own up to approximately $17 billion in write downs and Cayman Islands' black holes, is receiving a bon voyage package that includes a performance bonus of $12.5 million, salary and stock holdings of $68 million, a $1.7 million pension, an office, car and driver for up to five years. And Citigroup, clueless as to what its own assets are really worth, is putting out research recommendations daily to investors, advising them what other companies are worth. On November 16, it said it particularly likes bank stocks (those entities with billions of dollars of Citigroup toxic waste in their money market funds).

Back to the Scene on the Titanic. We have thousands of opulently clad people pouring tea cups of opaque, muddy water from the giant craft when someone wants to know why the Captain isn't there helping out. (The original captain, Sandy Weill, left early in the voyage via a lifeboat loaded with lots of provisions, a rolodex of criminal defense lawyers, and approximately a billion dollars.) It turns out that the new bronze coin captain, Robert Rubin, is not on deck bailing water because he has better things to oversee. He's watching his dangerously listing ship load aboard a bunch of hapless, new passengers from a small ship that came alongside. That's right. Citigroup, barely able to keep its own head above water, pay its dividend, shore up its capital, and regain the confidence of shareholders, has joined with other investors to spend $6.3 Billion on a British water company, Kelda Group Plc. [3]

And while underwater Citigroup buys water, what, you might ask, is Congress doing about the millions of struggling homeowners across America who were tricked into land-mind mortgages by predatory lenders like Citigroup's CitiFinancial and are facing imminent foreclosures on their homes. [4] [5] Congress is also fiddling rather than bringing strong legislative action against its biggest campaign contributors.

Like I said, it's just too preposterous for a movie; but it's the tragic new reality of Crony-Capitalist-Owned America.

Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years; she has no securities position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article. She writes on public interest issues from New Hampshire.

[1] More on Citigroup and troubled money market funds from CounterPunch.

[2] Bronze coin from U.S. Mint in honor of Robert Rubin.

[3] Citigroup, underwater, buys water.

[4] Congressional testimony on how CitiFinancial skewered the American dream of home ownership.

[5] Read an affidavit filed with the Federal Trade Commission by a former Assistant Manager of CitiFinancial on how she and colleagues targeted the uneducated, inarticulate, minority, very old, very young or very gullible.

More on the subprime crisis!! Video link

Five-year mortgage rate freeze looms

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER and ALAN ZIBEL, Associated Press Writers Wed Dec 5, 5:16 PM ET

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has hammered out an agreement to freeze interest rates for certain subprime mortgages for five years to combat a soaring tide of foreclosures, congressional aides said Wednesday.

The aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the details have not yet been released, said the five-year moratorium represented a compromise between desires by banking regulators for a longer time frame of up to seven years and mortgage industry arguments that the freeze should last only one or two years.

Another person familiar with the matter said the rate-freeze plan would apply to borrowers with loans made at the start of 2005 through July 30 of this year with rates that are scheduled to rise between Jan. 1, 2008, and July 31, 2010.

The administration said President Bush will speak on the agreement at the White House on Thursday and the Treasury Department announced that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson would hold a joint news conference Thursday afternoon with mortgage industry officials.

Treasury also announced there would be a technical briefing to explain more of the proposal's details.

Paulson, who has been leading the effort to craft a plan, said on Monday that the program would only be available for owner-occupied homes — to ensure the break is not given to real estate speculators.

The plan emerged from talks between Paulson and other banking regulators and banks, mortgage investors and consumer groups trying to address an avalanche of foreclosures feared as an estimated 2 million subprime mortgages reset from lower introductory rates to higher rates.

In many cases, the higher rates will boost monthly payments by as much as 30 percent, making it very difficult for many people to keep current with their loans.

The plan is aimed at homeowners who are making payments on time at lower introductory mortgage rates but cannot afford a higher adjusted rate.

Through October, there were about 1.8 million foreclosure filings nationwide, compared with about 1.3 million in all of 2006, according to Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac Inc. With home loan defaults still rising, the trend is expected to worsen next year.

The plan represents an about-face for Paulson, who until recently had insisted the mortgage crisis could be handled on a case-by-case basis. However, he and other administration officials became convinced the tide of foreclosures threatened by the mortgage resets represented such a severe threat that a more sweeping approach was needed. They opted for a proposal that was along the lines of a plan put forward in October by Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Paulson and other federal regulators began holding talks with some of the country's biggest mortgage lenders, mortgage service companies, investors who hold mortgage-backed securities and nonprofit groups that provide counseling for at-risk homeowners.

Under the typical subprime loan — those offered to borrowers with spotty credit histories — the rates for the first two years were at levels around 7 percent to 9 percent. But after two years, those rates were scheduled to reset to levels around 9 percent to 11 percent.

For a typical $1,200 monthly mortgage payment, the reset could add another $350 to the monthly payment, greatly raising the risks of loan defaults by homeowners struggling with the current payment.

The wave of mortgage foreclosures threatened to make the most severe slump in housing even worse by dumping more foreclosed properties onto an already glutted market, further depressing home prices and shaking consumer confidence.

The deepening housing slump has already roiled financial markets, starting in August, as investors grew increasingly concerned about billions of dollars of losses being suffered by banks, hedge funds and other investors.

The administration plan is designed to deal with the crisis by letting subprime borrowers who are living in their homes and are current on their payments to avoid a costly reset for five years. The hope is that by that time the housing downturn will have stabilized, clearing out the glut of unsold homes and halting the steep slide in prices that is hitting many parts of the country.

With sales and prices once again rising, the expectation is that homeowners will be able to renegotiate their current adjustable rate mortgages into a more affordable fixed-rate plan.

The housing crisis has become an issue in the presidential race with Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards putting forward their own proposals this week that would go further than the administration.

Clinton said her own proposal that would impose a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures and freeze the rates for five years or until they had been converted to fixed-rate loans was a better approach that would help more people.

"Although the administration is finally giving the foreclosure crisis the attention it deserves, it seems that President Bush is going to give struggling homeowners far less than they need," she said in a statement.

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com, called the administration plan a good first step, but said the government eventually will have to go further given the problem's size and the threat to the economy.

"This is the most serious housing downturn we have seen in the post World War II period," Zandi said. "It is a threat to the broader economy. The risks of a recession are very high."

Some Four Corners are available for purchase from the ABC. Contact ABC Content Sales for more information.

Video On Demand: "Mortgage Meltdown" Last month an unfamiliar expression appeared in the Australia media. A "subprime mortgage crisis" was unfolding in the United States. Homeowners across America were defaulting on loan payments and economists warned of major financial fallout occurring anywhere from Paris to Beijing to Melbourne. But why should a foreclosure in Cleveland affect a hedge fund in Sydney? As Four Corners reports, Australia, along with the rest of the world is at risk of a virulent economic virus thanks to financial globalisation where everything is interconnected through a sophisticated form of pass the parcel. And even more alarmingly, no-one knows just how bad it might get. In "Mortgage Meltdown" Paul Barry reports on the fallout from the US subprime mortgage crisis and asks what impact it will have on Australia. Watch the program in full, plus extended interviews.
	Mortgage Meltdown - Watch the full version of Paul Barry's report "Mortgage Meltdown", originally broadcast on 17 September, 2007. Length 44' 08". [Windows Dialup] [Windows Broadband]
	Professor Robert Shiller - Watch an extended interview with Professor Robert Shiller, Professor of Economics, Yale University.Length: 13'44" [Windows Dialup] [Windows Broadband]
	Satyajit Das - Watch an extended interview with Satyajit Das, expert on hedge funds and credit markets. Length: 10'50" [Windows Dialup] [Windows Broadband]
	Mark Seiffert - Watch an extended interview with Mark Seiffert, housing activist, Cleveland, Ohio. Length: 5'36" [Windows Dialup] [Windows Broadband]