Friday, December 30, 2011, 11:54 pm, by Adam

[Every year, friend-of-the-site David Collum writes a detailed "Year in Review" synopsis full of keen perspective and plenty of wit. This year's is no exception. Moreover, he has graciously selected CM.com as the site where it will be published in full. It's quite longer than our usual posts, but by any measure, 2011 offered an over-abundance of 'business as unusual' developments to summarize. We hope you enjoy David's colorful observations and insights, which are very much his own. -- cheers, Adam]

Look what they've done to my song, Ma.

—Melanie—

I cannot get that refrain out of my head as I watch the markets. This year the Devils brought us a wealth of nauseating and irritating stories that made you want to hurl (both lunch and laptop.) Here are some of the highlights. Others worthy of elaboration have been allocated their own subsections.

In an op-ed, Joe Nocera (author of a book bearing the title of this section) noted that one guy is in jail as a result of the entire mortgage fiasco: he lied on a liar's loan. By contrast, Gary Cohn, COO of Goldman Sachs testified to Congress under oath that Goldman went to the discount window only once, for a nominal sum when in reality Goldman went multiple times. I had occasion to ask Joe if Gary would get charged. "No." Apparently, perjury in Congress is only a crime if you are lying about baseball.

Thanks to Steve Kroft's 60 Minutes episode we found out that Congress can legally trade on all forms of insider information [5]. (It helps if you write the laws.) The frothy mix of money and politics is simply too awesome to overcome. Congress shirked its stated job of providing leadership by refusing to make even nominal budget cuts. They set up a super committee to make the cuts (and to give the lobbyists a much more focused target for their money cannons.) They failed too. I am sure the money cannons worked.

The NY Bank-Mellon (and, by the cockroach model, many more banks) got caught after a multi-decade crime spree involving back-dating of Forex trades of pension funds—that would be us folks—scalping 0.3% on every trade. I am sure they will be fined pennies on the dollar and not forced to admit guilt.

We found out this year that the SEC destroyed 18,000 files of fraud cases over many years because they were deemed "inactive", including those emanating from the Madoff case [6]. The magnitude of this blunder, a generous term for absolute corruption, can only be appreciated when you realize that all fraud cases at the SEC are inactive. David Einhorn's book (Fooling Some of the People; vide infra) includes horrifying tales of SEC corruption. I imagine Markopoulos' book about Madoff is the Bible on the subject.

There was a brief glimmer of hope. Standard and Poors grew a spine and downgraded US sovereign debt. I am not sure what rating you give to sovereign debt in which the authorities have explicitly stated that they intend to deracinate creditors with inflation, but it certainly is not AAA. Of course, the CEO of S&P was promptly fired, and, in a delicious irony, was replaced by the COO of the completely insolvent Citibank.

In a wondrous moment in journalism, Bloomberg pried over 20,000 documents from the Federal Reserve using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The Federal Reserve fought the suit, but then agreed to "cooperate" with the Supreme Court's decision. How magnanimous. There emerged a cottage industry to dig nuggets from this treasure trove. We discovered, for example, that most of the $800 billion of Quantitative Easing II, money reputed to boost the US economy, went straight to European megabanks. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone described how a few hundred million found its way into the pockets of the wives of two Morgan Stanley executives to purchase distressed assets and shoes. The system sprang into action after Bloomberg’s score and initiated legislation that will allow the Fed to deny a document exists in an FOIA lawsuit if it should prove inconvenient. I guess that's the FODA (Freedom of Denial Act).

I thought I could get through a year without taking a whack at Alan Greenspan, but I couldn't let this one go. The Maestro announced that we should burn down houses to alleviate the supply problem. He seems to have forgotten what historians have written about Federally sponsored food destruction programs during the Depression to prop up prices as people went hungry. This clown destroyed lives. Could somebody at least put a sock in his face?

I try to stay non-partisan, but the White House deserves a little scorn. White House pressure to give solar cell company Solyndra $535 million dollars backfired when they went bankrupt. I remember seeing Obama's speeches and thinking that they were shameless infomercials. I must admit that I like having an intelligent president who formulates full sentences in real time, yet distrusted him from the start for a simple reason: Nobody comes from the Chicago political machine uncorrupted. Once elected, he filled his cabinet with establishment thugs. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel then left to become mayor of Chicago and was replaced with the infamous mayor Daley's son. You can’t make this stuff up.

Hank "The Hammer" Paulson has done a credible job of looking like a good guy, despite his nickname and Goldman roots. There's no way that an environmentalist and avid bird watcher could be ruthless, right? We found out, however, that Hank had tipped off a bunch of ex-Goldman hedge fund managers about what the Fed and Treasury would be doing. Of course, Hank let guys like Buffett and Gross help design bailouts and then front run them, but a bunch of hedge fund managers? They don’t even have Congressional appointments.

I would be remiss by not noting that the investment bankers got a few IPO scalps. It's nothing like the glory days, but they came out with Groupon (flush), Pandora (unobtainium-induced flush), and Zynga (nouveau flush). Buyers of GM and AIG, the newest GSEs, got pummeled with 50% losses this year. You should not buy what Wall Street sells.

Forget Bin Laden, we got Rajaratnam! What a score for the authorities—a big-time hedge fund manager making money off leaked secrets. To top it off, he's a foreigner, so we get a xenophobia boost. And now for the rest of the story. The guy who leaked the information—the guy who should be credited with a massive breach of trust—was Gupta. He's a foreigner too so why did Gupta get a pass? He works for Goldman (golf clap). One can only wonder how many more breaches of trust can occur before we simply run out of trust.

Paul Krugman knows how to make friends and influence people. He incessantly pleads for another $5 trillion dollars. Please let it go. A 2002 op-ed resurfaced in which Krugman had called for Greenspan to create a housing bubble [7]. OK. It's not a crime to be wrong (or a buffoon), but somehow they keep publishing his drivel. Krugman also suggested:

If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. [8]

Jeepers Paul: Put down the bong. This box-office-ready variant of Bastiat's "broken window fallacy" illustrates what a complete Keynesian boob he is. He also waxed philosophically about how the East Coast earthquake in August could have stimulated the economy if only it had done more damage. Why think small? How about global thermonuclear war or an extinction-event asteroid? The earthquake quote is rumored to be a fake, but how would you know? Since socks come in pairs, put one in his face too.

Buffett Takes a Bath

You should thank God [for bank bailouts]…Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else,

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