says it all, Their lights are on but no ones home............
Submitted by rcwhalen on 06/10/2012 13:36 -0400
Over the weekend, I met with John Titus, Executive Producer of the new documentary film "Bailout: The Dukes of Moral Hazard," which tells the story of individual Americans affected by the financial bust. Myself, Yves Smith and other members of the blogerati are featured in the film.
We talked about why the film seems to connect with people at a viseral level. Our conclusion is that the clarity and hilarity comes from the choice of our late friend John Fox as narrator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fox_(comedian)
The next screening of "Bailout" will be in Philadelphia later this month:
http://usabailout.com/content/screening-philadelphia-june-20-and-june-23
The subject matter of "Bailout" had to pass through the keen, irreverant perspective that John Fox, a veteran television writer and later stand up commedian, brought to all of his work. When the man who opened for Rodney Dangerfield for eight years tells you about the subprime crisis, it somehow makes sense.
But even though Bailout Director Sean Patrick Fahey vividly presents the impact of the crisis on home owners, there is another part of the story that remains untold, namely the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses borne by investors. Incredibly, the vast majority of the losses on residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS) and toxic derivatives like collateralized debt obligations (CDO) have been left on the table.
Consumer and legal advocates, and politicians, focus most of their attention on the impact of the crisis on home owners and communities. No surprise since this is where the heat is politically. Likewise for the media, back to the point about John Fox in the role of interlocutor, the most easily understood and conveyed part of the crisis is found in the world of consumer real estate and foreclosures. Talking about the role of a trustee in an RMBS trust quickly causes the eyes to glaze, but that same complexity and unattractiveness creates vast opportunities for fraud.
I had an interesting conversation last week with a several consumer advocates who also understand the world of loan servicing in an
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-06-10/its-all-about-fraud-silence-buy-side?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+zerohedge%2Ffeed+%28zero+hedge+-+on+a+long+enough+timeline%2C+the+survival+rate+for+everyone+drops+to+zero%29
Ask yourself a question: Just why did BAC have to buy Countrywide? Was the driver of that transaction merely that BAC was the warehouse lender to Countrywide? Or was the issue more complex, namely that the target had billions of dollars in ficiticious assets on its balance sheet, bogus securities that were in some cases used as collateral in repurchase transactions. It can be argued that BAC's warehouse for Countrywide was the engine for vast fraud.
Likewise with Lehman Brothers, nobody could buy the firm in its totality because nobody could or would attest to the assets, on or off balance sheet. There was literally nobody who could or would sign off on representations and warranties needed to sell the company. And the proverbial bodies were then burried in bankruptcy without the benefit of a receiver, allowing former CEO Dick Fuld and his cohorts to walk away without any criminal sanctions for what seem like obvious, dliberate acts of accounting and securities fraud.
With Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, JPM CEO Jamie Dimin likewise provided the cover to keep these two rancid situtations under wraps and away from close scrutiny. Recall when during the last US presidential campaign, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) famously said that we would go through the subprime mess "loan by loan?" That was the end of John McCain's presidential run as far as Wall Street was concerned, says one industry insider.
President Obama, by comparison, has been very accommodating to the TBTF banks and their agenda to hide the ball when it comes to systemic securities fraud on Wall Street. Remember we are talking about loss rates about 50% for production from Bear Stearns, for example, yet none of the responsible parties in the creation of these toxic securities have been indicted.
LOT MORE,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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