fancy logo catchy tagline

Your credit bill contract 1980 vs 2010.

Follow The Complexity Machine at The Big Picture.

From WSJ:

All of the information the bank agreed to publish online is already publicly disclosed elsewhere, the bank said, but Mr. Liu said a full accounting of the bank’s political activities is very difficult for the general public or the company’s shareholders to find.

“True disclosure requires a form that is readily and easily accessible in a comprehensive manner,” said Mr. Liu, arguing that the bank’s decision to post the summary in one place on its Web site greatly increases transparency.

New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, a trustee at the city’s largest pension fund, lauded the agreement.

“The Supreme Court’s decision has created a new reality for how campaigns are run and, by extension, how money influences our government,” he said. “Companies need to be fully accountable to shareholders about all of their political expenditures.”

He is correct. It is far more important than all the other important issues we must resolve combined.

Speech from Senator Kaufman of Delaware:

Without drawing hard lines that reduce size and complexity, large financial institutions will continue to speculate confidently, knowing that they will eventually be funded by the taxpayer if necessary…

And what response do I hear when I raise this rather obvious question? That we have moved beyond the old frameworks, that the eggs are too scrambled, that the financial industry has become too sophisticated and modernized and that it was not this or that piece of deregulation that caused the crisis in the first place.

Mind you, this is a financial crisis that necessitated a $2.5 trillion bailout. And that amount includes neither the many trillions of dollars more that were committed as guarantees for toxic debt nor the de facto bailout that banks received through the Federal Reserve’s easing of monetary policy.

Hat tip The Baseline Scenario.

The title of this post came from a comment at The Big Picture. The Big Picture.

Actually – you should pull all your money from all your accounts to pay off all your debt first – then demand the banksters to be honest with their accounting, etc before you even consider giving them your money again.

The Lehman Bros Chapter 11 filing, all 2200 pages, are now publicly available. View the entire Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Chapter 11 Proceedings Examiner’s Report

More good info on the recently released report at:

Naked Capitalism

More you should do – educate yourself!

This could only be from the WSJ:

Defenders say CDS buyers often are the smart money who can sniff out problems of, say, a country or company and bet on its decline. They shouldn’t be flogged for good investing sense, they say.

“It’s like blaming a thermometer for the temperature outside,” says Brian Yelvington, director of fixed-income research at Knight Libertas LLC, a Greenwich, Conn., trading firm.

Check out the Links at NakedCapitalism.com for more good reads.

From Calculated Risk:

Why wasn’t action taken earlier to tighten lending standards? Was Greenspan concerned about the “widespread” innovation in the mortgage industry (automated underwriting, reliance on FICO scores instead of the 3 Cs – creditworthiness, capacity, and collateral, agency issues with the widespread use of independent mortgage brokers, expanded securitization, non-traditional mortgage products, etc.)?

From WSJ:

The hearing will focus on the explosion of subprime mortgages, and the complex securitizations that Wall Street engineered from those loans…

Citigroup Inc. officials also will testify. Citigroup was a big player at all levels of the subprime securitization chain, and the commission is expected to examine the company’s activities as a case study of what went wrong.

From a Sunlight Foundation email:

ADVISORY: CONGRESSMAN STEVE ISRAEL TO INTRODUCE LANDMARK TRANSPARENCY LEGISLATION

WASHINGTON, DC – During Sunshine Week next week, Congressman Steve Israel (NY-02) will introduce The Public Online Information Act (POIA), a banner piece of legislation to require that all public government-held information be available to all Americans online. Congressman Israel will announce his plans for POIA at the press conference next TUESDAY, March 16, 2010 at the United States Capitol. Congressman Israel will be joined by Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation and Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum.

Who: Congressman Steve Israel (NY-02), Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation and Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum

What: Press Conference to announce the Public Online Information Act (POIA)

Where: The House Triangle, located in the grassy triangle on the House side of the U.S. Capitol’s East Front

When: TUESDAY, March 16, 2010 at 1:30 p.m.

Joshua Rosner on Securitization from Roosevelt Institute on Vimeo.

Hat tip to Rortybomb, who organzied MMbM, for the link.

Let’s do this:

MMbM + FCF = Financial Reform campaign we need.

Watch the acceptance speech for the Oscar for Best Original Score.
View the acceptance speech & more for the Oscar for Best Original Score.

I had people that I worked with all through my life who always told me what you’re doing is not a waste of time.

Learn more about Michael Giacchino.

My creativity had to find an outlet somehow.

After watching, you should be curious about this.

Failure is an option, but fear is not.

Let me think. NO!

At Bloomberg about the UK/Dutch push to get Icelanders to pay them back for Iceland’s banks being idiots with risk:

The bill obliges the island to take on $5.3 billion, or 45 percent of last year’s economic output, in loans from the U.K. and the Netherlands to compensate the two countries for depositor losses stemming from the collapse of Landsbanki Islands hf more than a year ago.

Iceland’s credit rating has been downgraded to junk which will make it extremely expensive and difficult to refinance their debt.
In a wonderfully revengeful type possibly related note – the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative is still alive.

From a recent article in the Sunday Business Post Online:

Iceland has, in the last two years, watched its entire banking sector disappear and its economy pulled into a deep recession.

In trying to understand the causes of the collapse, it has become clear that, not only was it a case of corruption and misapplication of trust, but also a lack of government transparency and a legally-crippled media.

Iceland is in a prime situation – due to the crash – to reconsider where it wants to stand in the coming decades.

Due in part to the nature of the collapse here, it is important for Iceland to take the moral high ground.

Previously here:

Iceland could become the Switzerland of bits.

From HuffPo article entitled Systemic Denial by Larry Lessig:

I was keen to hear just what the strategy was to restore us to some sort of financial sanity. How could we avoid it again? Yet through the course of the morning, I was struck by two very different and very depressing points.

The first is that things are actually much worse than anyone ever talks about….

But the second point was even worse. Expert after expert spoke as if the problems we faced were simple math errors…

This is a profound denial. The gambling on Wall Street was not caused by the equivalent of errors in arithmetic. It was caused by a corruption of the system by which we regulate those markets. No true theorist of free markets — and certainly none of the heroes of even the libertarian right — believe that infrastructure markets like financial systems can be left free of any regulation, including the regulation of rules against fraud.

Which is why I’m working on this.

FixCongressFirst.org.
MakeMarketsBeMarkets.org.

From Bloomberg’s Business Week:

“I’ve asked people to think about this, to mull it over, have staffs get back, give us their reaction to these things,” Dodd told reporters after the Washington meeting. “There is no agreement.”

From Bloomberg:

Customers would face higher borrowing rates and other charges, employees might receive less pay, and investors will face lower stock prices, the CBO said.

The agency said the fee would slightly lower the supply of credit and strengthen the competitive position of smaller banks. The fee would probably not have a measurable impact on U.S. economic growth.

The CCH Financial Crisis News Center posts articles about the financial crisis.

About the site:

The CCH Financial Crisis News Center is intended to provide the legal community and others with news and links to vital information on the current financial crisis. Maintained by a staff of attorney-editors, this site helps visitors track ongoing developments in this wide-ranging crisis and the multiple responses from lawmakers and regulatory agencies.

From Walters Kluwer.

Bank Digest
Walters Kluwer CCH Financial Crisis News Center – Forum Explores Causes of the Financial Crisis
The Huffingpost – Questions For Mr. Pandit
OregonLive.com – THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION HOLDS A FORUM TO EXPLORE THE CAUSES OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS, DAY 1 – Part 6
[This is a transcript. Not sure where the other parts are!]

From Craig Mod broken into sections:

Contents

* Good riddance
* Defined by content
* The universal container
* Books we make
* Specimen table
* Recommendations
* Discussion

And yes, the iPad is big part of the article. Coming April 3rd.

But really, what are we shedding tears over?

We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback…

With the iPad we finally have a platform for consuming rich-content in digital form. What does that mean?

Hat tip Daring Fireball.

Graphic from Sunlight Foundation.

From their article A Brief History of Senate Reconciliation Votes

The process has been used 22 times since 1974. More often than not, these bills have been vehicles for large reforms in the tax code, health care and other social programs from education to welfare.

What do you mean how it will happen? He will grow a pair and push it through to make it happen. Damn it.

We all gotta grow some nuts for the gipper to help him make it happen. Damn it.
Remember – you’re speech is free.

From Politico:

The small donors who are the targets of direct marketing are described under the heading “Visceral Giving.” Their motivations are listed as “fear;” “Extreme negative feelings toward existing Administration;” and “Reactionary.”

Major donors, by contrast, are treated in a column headed “Calculated Giving.”

Their motivations include: “Peer to Peer Pressure”; “access”; and “Ego-Driven.”

You would think people would be more terrified of the unregulated $600T CDS market that eclipses global GDP of $60T.