UPDATE IV: AIG "was made a political scapegoat by Fed and Treasury officials and a backdoor vehicle for bailing out the world’s biggest banks, whose bailout came with much sweeter terms."
Read the Washington Post, Court tells government it was wrong to seize AIG, but awards no money to billionaire ex-CEO.
You may remember, the bank's were paid 100 cents on the dollar for worthless CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), resulting in a $14 billion payment to the Treasury Secretary's former company.
The worthless CDOs were then dumped in a special fund named Maiden Lane III, an inside joke on the American people. ("The name Maiden Lane was taken from a street which runs beside New York Federal Reserve in Manhattan.") (The NY Federal reserve keeps a backdoor that opens on the street, "through which it can sneak people" into and out of the fed building.)
UPDATE III: "Instead of embracing the orthodoxy of bank bailouts, austerity, and low inflation, Iceland did just the opposite. And even though its economy was hammered by the banking crisis perhaps harder than any other in the world, its labor didn't deteriorate all that much, and it had a great recovery. . .
[C]ompare it with the United States:
How did Iceland pull it off?
Let the banks go bust . . .
Executives of the country's most important bank were prosecuted as criminals. . .
Reject austerity . . .
Devalue and accept inflation . . .
Impose temporary capital controls . . ."
Read Vox, Iceland put bankers in jail rather than bailing them out — and it worked.
While in the U.S., we bailed out the Banksters, and now they are suing us.
"Americans were angry when Wall Street’s greedy and risky behavior triggered a global financial crisis in 2008. They were angrier still when the government had to borrow and spend hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest banks and the insurance company AIG. They were outraged when they found out that executives at those enterprises were continuing to receive big salaries and bonuses.
So just imagine how outrageous it would be if some Wall Street sharpies went to court to argue that they didn’t benefit enough from the bailouts and that taxpayers should pay them tens of billions of dollars more.
In fact, they did. And, according to legal observers, they just might prevail."
Read the Washington Post, We bailed you out, and now you want what!?!
UPDATE II: In 2006, securities lawyer warned JPMorgan Chase of "'massive criminal securities fraud' in the bank's mortgage operations. . .
[Since then, the bank and the U.S. government have tried to silence her. She has been prevented from talking] "by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up."
Read Rolling Stone, The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare.
UPDATE: "Have you heard the latest about how bad the richest of the rich have it these days? It is reason to fear the wrath of the .01 percent!"
Read The New York Times, Plutocrats Feeling Persecuted, which discusses "the rise of a small but powerful group of what can only be called sociopaths."
The question: How many Banksters were prosecuted?
Read the Washington Post, This is a complete list of Wall Street CEOs prosecuted for their role in the financial crisis.
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