Propaganda From Neel Kashkari On The End Of TARP
CNBC Video: PIMCO's Neel Kashkari on Squawk Box yesterday -- Oct. 4, 2010
And make sure you hear this from last week:
---
Kashkari hasn't missed a beat. He might be pimping Treasuries for PIMCO, but his Wall Street bailout sales pitch hasn't lost any shine. The fear-mongering is never far from the surface. More vague allusion to super-galactic devastation and destruction that was avoided through righteous and swift Treasury action.
Kashkari is the embodiment of Washington political capture. Among the insights shared:
- Treasury was acting without a map and guessing at every step along the way; they were deeply unsure themselves whether their solutions would work to stem the crisis.
Comment: throwing trillions of borrowed money at every leaky financial faucet is an excellent fail-safe plan, unless of course you're around when the bill is due. And just to make sure there aren't any further problems, put extreme pressure on FASB to change the accounting rules to encourage fantasy mark-ups. Then create a taxpayer-funded program, PPIP, to buy toxic assets at inflated prices, which will allow even more mis-marking of asset values on bank balance sheets, as 'the market' is deemed to have spoken with a new, higher price.
- Goldman Sachs doesn't run the government it just looks that way. It's simply that the type of people who work at Goldman also are the types who find public service rewarding.
- Now the fear-mongering that was so prevalent during the crisis. It could have been so much worse. The 25% unemployment peak of the Great Depression might have been surpassed (U6 is getting close actually). Your ATM would not have functioned. Blood in the streets, military police on every block, pestilence, war and death.
- Each and every one of us needs to say a prayer tonight thanking the Heavens for Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner. That without their strong leadership we might still be lost at sea. Though I'm in currently lost in a haze of bullshite without an exit, I'm pretty sure I heard him say that we are so fortunate to have Ben Bernanke at the helm of our glorious (debt-laden, dollar-dropping) vessel.
Give me a freaking break. There was a right way to stabilize the system in the Fall of 2008 and an irresponsible way: where incentives wouldn't change, new regulation would be forgotten, and the guilty would remain in power.
The responsible path would also have included fair taxpayer terms for all components of a rescue given to any financial institution --this means compensation for FDIC debt guarantees, AIG back-door payments, and Federal Reserve asset dumping of unknown proportion -- collateral swaps with the Fed where toxic assets are traded for Treasuries at par.
In the case of Goldman Sachs (GS), and it wasn't just Goldman, there were also scores of European Banks who exploited regulatory construct (they broke the law) and used AIG to insure their way out of capital requirements -- yet like Goldman they were paid at par for their contracts, (Lehman counterparties got 11 cents and Chrysler's got 29 cents for comparison), and they were not asked to surrender any shares to the government in exchange.
No matter how you dice it, that's a lousy deal for someone, and just so happens that someone does not work on Wall Street.
#
Video: Joe Kernen interviews Kashkari -- From earlier this Summer
Read this useless garbage from former AIG CEO Greenberg (Oct. 4):
Then there's this story from this morning:
Further reading:
---
Screenshot
Oct 5, 2010 at 5:12 AM
Reader Comments (12)
http://dailybail.com/home/tale-of-the-tarp-two-years-later-how-the-elite-media-perpetu.html
http://dailybail.com/home/it-never-ends-check-out-this-disgusting-piece-of-tarp-apolog.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/banks-may-need-new-bailout-warns-thinktank-2097047.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39503057/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/
Story from oct. 4...
http://www.cnbc.com/id/39499044
New story...
http://www.cnbc.com/id/39510382
"I don't have a number to give you, but I do think that the additional purchases, although we don't have precise numbers, have the ability to ease financial conditions," Bernanke said.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/39508176
From a bernanke speech monday....
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39510258/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/
More on the bernanke speech...
http://www.cnbc.com/id/39509373
This is hilarious...raises target on citi from $3.50 to $4...
Here we have a guy who admits (as DB points out) that he panicked and had no idea what the hell he was doing, and yet, Becky Quick is falling all over herself to get him to tell viewers how bad the 2nd Great Depression would have been had they not done what they did. Now, if they didn't know what the hell they were doing back then, how in God's name do they know what would have happened had they NOT panicked and did what they did? If they were clueless back then, they can't be friggin' Nostradamus now. Stupid journalists.
WHACK!
truth be told...this write up is borrowed from an earlier story i wrote on kashkari months ago...nothing had changed so i just brought it forward into this story...saved me the headaches of reliving it...it's also why some of the embedded links are older...and don't refer to our recent reporting on tarp...