War On You: Breaking Alternative News

“The truth is, through criminal neglect and competence, the people at the
top of these firms chose to look away, to take more risk, to enrich themselves
and to put shareholders and indeed, the country itself and the country’s
economy at risk.  It is truly not only a shame, it is a crime”  – 60 Minutes

Forget the blame game, forget the justified rants of anger. US taxpayers were asked to risk $700 Billion for a Wall Street bailout that may not even work – but do they really know why?

The rest of the world has been swept up in this crisis, with citizens all over the world afraid their banks are going to shut down – but do they really know why?

I’ll get to the why in a second.

In the meantime, as the world sweats, CEO’s at Lehman, Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie, Freddie, etc., etc. each walked away with tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and stock.  Lehman CEO, Richard Fuld, himself walked away with $480,000,000 (yes, 480 million) since 2000. That equates to $60,000,000 per year for a guy that drove Lehman into bankruptcy and significantly contributed to the current crisis.

Yes, Fuld “feels horrible about what happened” but I suspect $480,000,000 goes a long way towards treatment of his horror.

Other CEO’s that feel horrible:

Stanley O’Neal, Merrill Lynch’s former CEO, took home compensation with an estimated value of $145.2 million from 1997 to 2007, according to Equilar. Sorry, forgot to add that he received a $161-million retirement package when he was ousted in October.

Kerry Killinger, who last month lost his job as CEO of the failing Washington Mutual, took home pay valued at $98 million, Equilar said.

THE WHY

They all did it by selling garbage they knew would not pay – and then selling insurance against the garbage that they knew they could not cover.  To avoid regulation, they didn’t call it “insurance”, they called it a “credit default swap”.

How big is the market for credit default swaps? $50 – 60 TRILLION dollars.  We can’t be sure because it is an unregulated market.

In short, they were smart enough to create a $50 Trillion industry and call it something that would escape regulation – but they couldn’t see the implosion coming?

How about this – they just ignored it for as long as they could collect $60,000,000 per year and then F$%K everybody else when it all collapsed because “I got paid”.

Thanks to Paul Kedrosky, who found this fantastic 60 Minutes segment that you absolutely need to watch.  In case you never thought about it, had any doubts as to Wall Street’s guilt, or simply needed the hard evidence/info necessary to back up your claims, this is the video to watch. A great use of 12 minutes of your time.

UPDATE: One small but juicy piece of good news is that Richard Fuld was knocked out cold at a gym by one hell of a pissed off investor. One punch and out.

Regards,