Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
In the World According to Shia LaBeouf
Soy Beans = Plastics 
rigorousintuition.ca - View topic - Here we go again...
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by MinM » Mon Feb 22, 2010 12:40 pm
Soy Beans = Plastics 
by MinM » Tue Feb 23, 2010 5:00 pm
Cherie_and_Euan_Blair_(-Red_Bull_Air_Race_2007_-London_-28July2007.jpg: Aidan Pedreschi)
Robert Harris's book The Ghost, tells the story of Adam Lang, a recently retired British Prime Minister, made unpopular by a war.
Roman Polanski’s film The Ghost Writer is based on The Ghost.
We can assume Lang is based on Tony Blair.
Lang, while on Martha's Vineyard, talks to a ghost writer who is writing his memoirs.
Lang does the work of the CIA.
Lang's executive assistant is also Lang's mistress.
Lang's wife Ruth, is CIA.
Does this mean that Tony Blair's wife is suspected of having been recruited by the CIA?
Tony Blair's wife is Cherie Blair, nee Booth.
Cherie was "the abandoned daughter of the drunken Tony... Brought up by her mother at her Catholic grandmother's house in Liverpool." (Cherie Blair - saint or sinner? - Telegraph)
Cherie went to Seafield convent school at the age of 11.
Reportedly, in her memoirs, Cherie provides an account of her complicated sex life, and reveals that, in the mid 1970s, she cheated on David Attwood by sleeping with two other men. (The Tribune, Chandigarh, India - World)
Tony Booth
Cherie Blair's father is the actor Tony Booth, who claims to be related to John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln.
Tony Booth worked at the United States Consulate in Liverpool.
Later he worked with the spooky Royal Corps of Signals.
Tony Booth was posted in the army to SHAPE in Paris.
Cherie studied law at the spooky London School of Economics.
She obtained a pupillage in the chambers of the 'spooky' Derry Irvine.
Tony Booth had many wives and partners.
Tony Booth, in his autobiography Stroll On, describes part of his life as "one long bacchanalia of hell raising and 'crumpeteering'" (John Rentoul - Tony Blair, Prime Minister, page 61)
Reportedly, when the CIA are looking for people whose minds they can control, they look for people with troubled childhoods.
Reportedly, many of the mind-control victims come from families linked to certain forms of Catholicism...
by semper occultus » Wed Feb 24, 2010 9:55 am
by MinM » Tue Apr 06, 2010 4:28 pm
while the wind kept blowing it right back. 
by JackRiddler » Tue Apr 06, 2010 8:19 pm
by MinM » Sun May 16, 2010 11:34 pm
by Hammer of Los » Mon May 17, 2010 5:04 am
BTW the subject matter depicted in the film made me wonder about the renewed effort to deport and prosecute Polanski.
by MinM » Sat Oct 22, 2011 9:23 am
This looks like a better take on Wall Street than the recent Stone flick. 
October 21, 2011
The timing is almost too good: a terrific Wall Street melodrama at the moment the Occupy Wall Street protests are building. We haven't seen the like since Three Mile Island had a near-meltdown a couple of days after The China Syndrome exploded into theaters. Now, Margin Call seems anything but marginal...
Margin Call is a different sort of big-business film than its best-known predecessor, Oliver Stone's Wall Street. Stone wanted to create a capitalist demon in Gordon Gekko, but ended up making him so charismatic that he became a role model. Despite the amounts of money bandied about, there's nothing in Margin Call to inspire anyone — except, of course, those fervent Wall Street occupiers. (Recommended)
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/21/141415405 ... all-street
Why Prosecutors Don't Go After Wall Street
When the energy giant Enron collapsed 10 years ago, top executives of the company faced criminal prosecution, and many served lengthy prison terms. In the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, hundreds of bankers went to jail.
But the financial meltdown of 2008 has yielded a very different outcome. In April, Louise Story co-wrote an article in the New York Times, which began: It is a question asked repeatedly across America: Why in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted? Answering such a question, the equivalent of determining why a dog did not bark, is anything but simple.
We've invited Louise Story here today to try and answer that question - why the dog didn't bark. Louise Story joined the New York Times in 2006. She covers Wall Street and finance and was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service...
In this horrific financial collapse, have there been criminal prosecutions?
Ms. LOUISE STORY (Reporter, New York Times): There really have been very few criminal prosecutions, and there has been no criminal prosecution of a senior executive from a major bank or financial company related to the financial crisis.
DAVIES: And what kind of other regulatory actions have occurred?
Ms. STORY: Well, you know, the Securities and Exchange Commission has brought some civil cases, though very few of them have named individuals who worked at the companies.
One case that did name an individual centered on Angelo Mozilo. You know, he was the chief executive of Countrywide, that giant mortgage company, and that case contains these emails where he was writing to other executives that he knew the mortgages that Countrywide was issuing were very toxic.
But he wasn't telling Countrywide investors in that, and he wasn't telling investors who were buying Countrywide's mortgage bonds. At the same time, he also was selling some of his own stock in Countrywide.
It's those sorts of accusations that have led some people to think there might have been a criminal case against Angelo Mozilo. However, it's been reported the Department of Justice is not pursuing one against Mozilo.
DAVIES: All right, I want to get to why there weren't more prosecutions, but let me just ask first, You know, some of these civil cases have resulted in settlements in the hundreds of millions, and some might look and say, well, that's a pretty painful punishment to inflict on these companies. What's your sense? How much of a corrective action are these civil suits, in which, you know, they get a whole lot of money?
Ms. STORY: Well, so for instance, the settlement with Goldman Sachs that the SEC entered into last summer was a pretty large one, $550 million, and you're right, some people would say that's a big punishment, $550 million.
But then, you know, other people would say: But Goldman Sachs makes that in about three weeks of trading. And remember these penalties are paid for by Goldman Sachs, ultimately by Goldman shareholders, not by the executives or the traders or the salespeople that actually individually played a role in what happened.
DAVIES: Right, and Lloyd Blankfein, who was the head of Goldman, who has been there since 2006, remains at the helm, right?
Ms. STORY: They're there, and they're also getting very large bonuses.
DAVIES: When there are these settlements, who gets the money?
Ms. STORY: So the settlements are set up differently. Sometimes, the money goes to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Often, the money goes to whoever was the victim of the crime in a sort of restitution. Sometimes it even goes to the shareholders of the company that committed the crime.
DAVIES: Now, let's take one case. You recently wrote about a suit brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York against Deutsche Bank. What are they accused of?
Ms. STORY: Well, so that was an interesting case, and it's still ongoing, but it's a case that involves the FHA Fund, which is a government fund that backs mortgages, kind of like Fannie and Freddie do. And what they found is that a unit the Deutsche Bank had acquired had been committing mortgage fraud, had been lying about the quality of these loans.
So that's certainly a case that you could say: Yeah, that may be something that's related to the financial crisis, lying about the quality of these loans that the government is backing and ultimately the taxpayer will have to pay for losses on. But again, there was no person named in this case. They only named Deutsche Bank, and they did not single out any of the individuals who took these actions.
And when you read the case, you read about all these different people making these lies. They're not named. And you wonder, well, why aren't they held accountable? ...
DAVIES: You've written that the FBI was, I believe, in 2008, about to get more active and assign more resources to look into mortgage securities fraud. What happened?
Ms. STORY: Well, you know, the FBI was pretty early in identifying the mortgage fraud problem. There was someone there in charge of their criminal division, Chris Swecker, who went on to TV as far back in 2005 and said mortgage fraud is a major problem. And by 2008, their criminal division did a big study has identified about two dozen parts of the country where they wanted to shift resources to look at mortgage and financial fraud. And I talked with the head of the criminal division from that period Ken Kaiser. He told me that they were going to look not only at mortgage fraud among consumers, but also at the role of the major financial companies, all the way out the mortgage pipeline. And they sent out a memo to reallocate resources. After they sent out the memo to all of their field offices, there was a call that came in from the Department of Justice telling them to rescind the memo...
Let's talk about one of these cases that's gotten a lot attention. This is the young guy at Goldman Sachs, Fabrice Tourre...
Ms. STORY: Yeah.
DAVE DAVIES: Has the nickname Fabulous Fab. Tell us what he is accused of.
Ms. STORY: Fabrice Tourre was a relatively junior salesman at Goldman Sachs in the unit that marketed what turned out to be some of the most toxic mortgage-securities they created. And when the case was brought against Goldman Sachs by the SEC last year, he was the only individual accused of wrongdoing. And he is accused of not telling investors who would buy these securities that they weren't designed in part by another investor, John Paulson. He's a prominent hedge fund manager, who was betting against these very same securities. So John Paulson was negative on housing and he wanted these securities to do poorly. He was betting against them. But yet he got to help design them. And the SEC says that Fabrice and Goldman Sachs should have told the investors who were positively betting on those securities that that other person who was negative on them had had an input on how they were created.
DAVIES: Now one of the things that's interesting about the Fabrice Tourre case is that you've written that a lot of folks believe there were plenty of people at Goldman who knew about and were involved in this activity but he just happened to be the one who had I guess that the most indiscreet females, right?
Ms. STORY: Absolutely. I mean as far back as 2009, when my colleague Gretchen Morgenson and I were writing about these Abacus securities, we were told by a lot of current and former Goldman people that there were a large team of people involved. And, in fact, since then many Goldman employees have told us they were so surprised that only Fabrice was named. Fabrice, of course, himself thinks it's a little odd he was the only one named. And we recently obtained the replies - the private reply that Fabrice sent to the SEC trying to convince them that he should not be the only one named. And in that Wells reply, he laid out all kinds of people, about six or seven other people who were just as involved in all of the activities as he was.
DAVIES: And one of the fascinating pieces of this story is that you got that via a discarded laptop. Is this right?
Ms. STORY: That's right. So Fabrice had thrown out his laptop in 2006 in a garbage area and it was found by someone who gave it to a friend and that friend eventually realized last year that she had Fabrice's old laptop because his name was in the media. And so she gave us a copy of some of the materials on the laptop and what we found to be newsworthy and interesting was this private reply that Fabrice and his lawyers had filed to the SEC trying to convince them that there were many other parties at Goldman who were equally involved in the deal at the center of that case...
Ms. STORY: Well, Congress had a lot of power, particularly in the fall of 2008 when they bailed out the banks, they could have demanded practically anything in exchange for that money but they actually demanded almost nothing. And that was because Hank Paulson, who was the Treasury secretary at that time, was afraid the banks wouldn't take the money if there were strings attached. But in retrospect, a lot of financial experts say now it's clear the banks were so at risk.
Even Goldman Sachs was borrowing money from the Federal Reserve through a private, kind of secret transaction that only came out recently. And so these financial experts say it's very likely the banks would've taken money with whatever strings came attached. And that might have been a way to hold the industry accountable, would have been to really impose major changes back then when they were begging on the taxpayers' door.
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137789065 ... all-street
by MinM » Thu Feb 02, 2012 1:30 pm
Why Prosecutors Don't Go After Wall Street
Ms. STORY: Well, Congress had a lot of power, particularly in the fall of 2008 when they bailed out the banks, they could have demanded practically anything in exchange for that money but they actually demanded almost nothing. And that was because Hank Paulson, who was the Treasury secretary at that time, was afraid the banks wouldn't take the money if there were strings attached. But in retrospect, a lot of financial experts say now it's clear the banks were so at risk.
Even Goldman Sachs was borrowing money from the Federal Reserve through a private, kind of secret transaction that only came out recently. And so these financial experts say it's very likely the banks would've taken money with whatever strings came attached. And that might have been a way to hold the industry accountable, would have been to really impose major changes back then when they were begging on the taxpayers' door.
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137789065 ... all-street
February 02, 2012
Who Really Rescued the Big Three?
The Deal That Saved Detroit and Banned Strikes
by Laura Flanders
President Obama is, as AP puts it, “wearing his decision to rescue General Motors and Chrysler three years ago as a badge of honor” on his reelection campaign. It saved jobs and working communities, brought the US auto industry back from the brink. In January, U.S. auto sales were up eleven percent over a year ago, and a proud president was cooing to the college students of Ann Arbor, Michigan:
“The American auto industry was on the verge of collapse and some politicians were willing to let it just die. We said no… We believe in the workers of this state.”
You’re going to be hearing a lot about the deal that saved Detroit in the next few months, not least because likely opponent Mitt Romney was against it. Then Governor Romney wrote in the fall of 2008 that if the big three auto companies received a bailout “we can kiss the American auto industry goodbye.” Romney bad; Obama good; Big Three back. The Deal with Detroit story is gold dust for Democrats. Reality is a bit more complicated.
For one thing, it was Republican President Bush, not the Democrats’ Barack Obama, who originally decided not to stand by as the auto makers died. The deal saved an industry – US cars are still being made in the US — but it came at such a high price that in many ways it’s a whole new industry. The American auto industry that built middle class lives as well as cars — that one we kissed good-bye, and it may be a while before we see it back again.
To review: in the fall of 2008, President George W Bush announced a $17.billion loan, split into $13.4 billion at once and another $4 billion in February. The billions for Detroit were tied tight with all the string that had not been attached to the trillions simply given away to Wall St. The Treasury never forced the financial industry to hand over majority shareholder control in exchange for access to the Troubled Asset Relief Program. No CEO of AIG or Bank of America or Well Fargo had to shrink a wage or skimp on a pension. (Far from it, the Government Accountability Office found that the “standard agreement between Treasury and the participating institutions does not require that these institutions track or report how they plan to use, or do use, their capital investments.”)
Big bucks for the Big Three, by contrast, came with all sorts of ties – mostly around the neck of the United Auto Workers and their members. When the deal was finally worked out, under Obama’s “Car Tsar” (a man with zero manufacturing experience but oodles of admiration from NY developer Steve Rattner and Lawrence Summers) the worker’s concessions amounted to a slash in all-in labor costs from around $76 per worker-hour in 2006 to just over $50. Abandoning decades of principle, the UAW approved a two-tier wage structure in which new hires start at t$14/hr — roughly half the pay and benefits of more senior line workers. To top things off, Treasury demanded — just one more teeny thing – a strike ban. The pièce de no résistance! Under the government’s agreement with the companies, any strike by workers is grounds for forfeiting the loan...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/02/ ... d-strikes/
by MinM » Wed Feb 29, 2012 2:41 pm
Michael Douglas Tackles Greed for F.B.I.
By BEN PROTESS and AZAM AHMED | New York Times – Tue, Feb 28, 2012 11:30 AM EST
Gordon Gekko is cooperating with the F.B.I.
No, there's not another big-budget Oliver Stone follow-up to "Wall Street" in the works. Instead, Michael Douglas, who played the financier in the 1987 movie and the sequel, is now starring in a straight-to-television video for the Federal Bureau of Investigation meant to root out insider trading - the same crime that brought down the high-flying Mr. Gekko.
A one-minute spot that points out that illicit trading is, in fact, illegal might not seem a priority. But the new video - now showing on CNBC and Bloomberg Television - is part of the government's broader initiative aimed at drawing cooperating witnesses and tipsters from Wall Street...
Mr. Douglas, 67, who two decades ago said Gordon Gekko was the best role he ever had, obliged. The actor, who recently underwent treatment for throat cancer, felt he needed to set the record straight about insider trading, Mr. Chaves said.
In the wake of the popularity of the first "Wall Street," Mr. Douglas would receive high-fives and handshakes from real-life traders and bankers when he walked the streets of Manhattan. The Wall Streeters loved Mr. Gekko, who declares in the film that "greed, for lack of a better word, is good."
But the outpouring of love for such a character befuddled Mr. Douglas, who won a best-actor Academy Award for his role in the first Wall Street film.
Mr. Douglas wondered why he was being thanked, according to Mr. Chaves, who quoted him as saying: "I'm a criminal in the movie. Don't they realize that?"
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/michael-d ... 10546.html
by MinM » Fri Mar 02, 2012 1:02 pm
Chasen became known in Hollywood for her PR work on such films as On Golden Pond, and the second film in the Oliver Stone/Michael Douglas Wall Street movie franchise, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. She was pushing for Oscar recognition for Douglas in his role as the money hungry, risk averse character Gordon Gekko...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronni_Chasen
...Robert Harris, whose new financial thriller The Fear Index cracks USA TODAY's Top 150 at No. 99, is already working on the screenplay for the movie version. He also wrote the script for 2010's The Ghost Writer, from his novel The Ghost.
Harris was feted in New York on publication day last week at a party hosted by The Daily Beast/Newsweek editor-in-chef Tina Brown and her husband, Harold Evans. The British novelist tells USA TODAY that Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum) will direct the 20th Century Fox production. "No cast yet," says Harris, adding that if all goes well, filming on The Fear Index will begin in about a year.
http://books.usatoday.com/bookbuzz/post ... -/623301/1
by MinM » Thu Mar 22, 2012 9:01 am
by MinM » Mon Apr 30, 2012 6:54 pm
Friday, April 27, 2012
Frontline’s Astonishing Whitewash of the Crisis
Several of my savviest readers wrote expressing disappointment and consternation with the Frontline series on the crisis, “Money, Power, and Wall Street.” The first two parts of the four part series have been released, and it’s probably safe to say that this program is far enough along to be beyond redemption.
It’s a recitation of conventional wisdom, with just enough focus on some of the numerous things the banks and the authorities did wrong so as to make it seem daring for mainstream TV. But anyone who has been on this beat will find the first two segments cringe-making (one advantage I had was that of reading the transcripts, which makes it much easier to parse the construction). Despite the obligatory shots of Occupy Wall Street protestors, displaced homeowners, and stymied officials, much of the story line is remarkably bank-friendly.
The first segment is particularly troubling. It heavily cribs from the Gillian Tett book Fool’s Gold, which to be blunt was not very well received by reviewers. Fool’s Gold discussed the development of the credit default swaps market from the perspective of JP Morgan executives and staffers, with the result that it verged on hagiography. Oh, those great, intrepid, innovative bankers who just wanted to make the world better, and maybe make a buck or two in the process.
The book at least explained that the reason for the creation of the CDS was to solve a rather big problem for JP Morgan, that it was carrying a ton of loan risk and could use a way to lay it off (the broadcast, by contrast, made it sound like this was a market just waiting to happen, as opposed to one JP Morgan, and later its competitors, cultivated).
And no one clearly explains that CDS, as currently used, are certain to produce periodic blowups of undercapitalized guarantors (the monolines and AIG are prototypical). Tett and pretty much everyone in the segment perpetuates the industry PR that CDS are derivatives. A derivative is an instrument whose price “derives” from an actively traded underlying instrument. CDS, by contrast, are the economic equivalent of unregulated insurance contracts. The pernicious feature of CDS is that the CDS protection writers (the guarantors) aren’t regulated for capital adequacy, the way other insurers are. They instead are required to post collateral to reflect the current value of the contract. But that is no guarantee that the CDS protection writer will be able to pay out. When a default or other credit event occurs, the price of the CDS spikes up, and the guarantor may not be able to make good on the new, higher collateral posting. And requiring CDS protection writers to put up enough margin to allow for “jump to default” risk would make the product uneconomical.
But none of this is explained. Tellingly, there are clips of Brooksley Born, but no mention of her failed effort to regulate CDS. It is instead presented as a benign product that JP Morgan understood (did they sponsor this broadcast? Blythe Masters gets a big promo) and no one else did...
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/ ... risis.html
by MinM » Wed Jun 12, 2013 3:30 pm
MinM » Mon Feb 22, 2010 11:40 am wrote:
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
In the World According to Shia LaBeouf
rigorousintuition.ca - View topic - Here we go again...
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