Rag Hand

According to the NYT, Wachovia, the nation’s fourth largest bank, is extending feelers to Citibank, Wells Fargo and Banco Santander of Spain in case the bailout comes too late.

Wachovia has a $120 billion portfolio of mortgages loaded with adjustable interest-rate loans that allow borrowers to skip part of their monthly payments, much of which it inherited from its ill-timed acquisition of Golden West, the big California lender, at the end of the housing boom in 2006.

In July, the bank hired Robert K. Steel, 56, a former vice chairman at Goldman Sachs, from the Treasury Department, where he worked with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., trying to resolve the mortgage market crisis. Mr. Steel vowed to keep Wachovia independent and sought to raise $5 billion in capital over the next year by selling noncore assets.

But the bank’s shares, which are down nearly 80 percent in the last year, plunged 27 percent Friday, to $10, as investors wondered about its health after the government’s seizure of Washington Mutual on Thursday.

A spokeswoman for Wachovia, Christie Phillips-Brown, said: “We are aggressively addressing our challenges and are working to strategically strengthen and manage capital and liquidity in this challenging environment.” The bank, she added, expects “that the Treasury plan under consideration by Congress is a constructive and important step toward restoring confidence and stability in our financial system.”

Cue Queen: ♫Another One Bites the Dust♪

I may be beating a dead horse but how can any financial institution buy so many bad loans?

I understand that they were packaged with other investments, but don’t these people ever consider just how bad it could be if something goes wrong?

The answer to that question is an emphatic NO!

All the movers and shakers care about is their bonus, their stock options and how today’s bottom line looks.

They are short sighted, greedy, bastards to whom investors and customers are no more than a means to an end…. Just numbers on a balance sheet.

Not that any of this would matter to someone all snugly wrapped in their golden parachute and gently cradled by other elitists who will make certain that nothing bad ever happens to them.

They steal our money, destroy our lives and continue to live in a world where being poor means you only own three million dollar houses instead of five.

——————————
Something else from today’s NYT:

The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a longtime proponent of deregulation, acknowledged on Friday that failures in a voluntary supervision program for Wall Street’s largest investment banks had contributed to the global financial crisis, and he abruptly shut the program down.

The S.E.C.’s oversight responsibilities will largely shift to the Federal Reserve, though the commission will continue to oversee the brokerage units of investment banks.

Also Friday, the S.E.C.’s inspector general released a report strongly criticizing the agency’s performance in monitoring Bear Stearns before it collapsed in March. Christopher Cox, the commission chairman, said he agreed that the oversight program was “fundamentally flawed from the beginning.”

“The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work,” he said in a statement.

Yeppers. This sort of brilliant insight is why he makes the big bucks.

Secretary of State Hank Paulson is pushing for a $700 billion bailout for bad lenders and the people being bailed out are crying for more.

$700 Billion… That’s $14 Billion more than we spent on the entire Vietnam war.

For that much money New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast could be completely rebuilt –3 1/2 times

In the 80s Reaganomics put this country in the worst shape since the great depression. This time around we not only have the same failed policy that serves only to make the rich richer. But we have deregulated banks -thanks to a bill signed by then President Bill Clinton- which means greed has been allowed to go unchecked, even to the point of economic implosion.

If you loan money to people who could not possibly repay the debt and you package it with other loans and sell it to someone else who in turn repackages it and sells it to someone else you still have a loan that cannot be repaid.

This is not rocket science. This is what used to pass for common sense. If someone is barely making their interest only payment there is no way in hell that they are going to be able to cope with the sudden doubling of their monthly outgo after the 5 or 7 year free ride.

The penalty for all this bad business is unemployment, failed businesses, repossessed houses, homeless families and fat cats staying fat.

The people responsible for this current disaster could not possibly empathize with someone who has trouble feeding their children. Their golden parachutes and the “old boy network” will assure them of a continuing comfortable life.
——————————————————–

Just an addition from an article in the NYT on the Feds take over of WaMu to make my point:

“Customers of WaMu, based in Seattle, are unlikely to be affected, although shareholders and some bondholders will be wiped out.”

“Mr. Fishman, who has been on the job for less than three weeks, is eligible for $11.6 million in cash severance and will get to keep his $7.5 million signing bonus.”

DALLAS — A Dallas County high school student said she was forced to remove her rosary before going to classes because the school considers it is a gang symbol.

Tabitha Ruiz, 16, said she was stopped at Seagoville High School after she went through a metal detector and told to take off her rosary.

“I was going through the metal detectors, and they looked at me and they saw the rosary and told me to take it off because it’s gang-related,” she said.

The Dallas Independent School District said in a statement that items that represent a gang are prohibited.

“Students are not allowed to wear logos or symbols that represent a gang,” DISD said. “Dallas police identified a rosary as a gang symbol.”

But Dallas police said a rosary is not considered a gang symbol.

Read the whole story here.

Just another case of incompetent bureaucrats justifying the actions of poorly trained security.

I went online to check my account with Wellsfargo. Ever since someone used my ATM card to buy gas in Georgia I’ve been keeping a close watch.

I also pay my credit card by using a transfer from my checking account. This way I don’t have to write a check and so far it’s free.

Today I looked at my balances and found I had a great deal more room on my card than I knew should be there. It turns out that after I gave them $5k towards my balance they upped my limit by $5 grand. Whether this was by design or coincidence I don’t know.

What I do know is that I got careless and dug myself a deep dark hole. But I pay my bill on time and always pay more than the minimum. –So ‘twould appear they still think I’m a good risk.

The only issue I have with this increase has to do with my basic nature. I saw the increase and immediately thought of a $4500 camera I want. I’m not going to buy it but the increased line of credit makes spending the $1700 on a lens I want but can’t justify sound a lot more viable.

It’s interesting to note that they never asked if I wanted the increase or told me they were going to do it.

It seems that we have become such a credit driven economy that we are expected be in debt our entire lives and the thought of someone turning down the increased credit is nearly inconceivable.

Read the entire post here at Upside Down World.

Pando:
On September 11, in the tropical Bolivian department of Pando, which borders Brazil and Peru, a thousand pro-Morales men, women and children were heading toward Cobija, the department’s capital to protest the right wing governor Leopoldo Fernández and his thugs’ takeover of the city and airport.

According to press reports and eye witness accounts, when the protesters arrived at a bridge seven kilometers outside the town of Porvenir, they were ambushed by assassins hired and trained by governor Fernández. Snipers in the tree tops shot down on the unarmed campesinos. Shirley Segovia, a Porvenir resident recalled to Bolpress, “We were killed like pigs, with machine guns, with rifles, with shotguns, with revolvers. The campesinos had only brought their teeth, clubs and sling shots, they didn’t bring rifles. After the first shots, some fled to the river Tahuamanu, but they were followed and shot at.” Others reported being tortured; days later the death toll rose to 30, with dozens wounded and over a hundred still missing. Roberto Tito, a farmer who was present at the conflict, said “This was a massacre of farmers, this is something that we should not allow.”

After the massacre, President Morales declared a state of siege in Pando, sent in the military, and by September 15 a tense peace had reportedly returned to the region. Morales also called for the arrest of Fernandez who fled across the border, into rural Brazil. [Update: Fernandez has since been arrested and taken to the Bolivian capital.]

US Influence in a Changing South America:
The current crisis in Bolivia and the ongoing diplomatic drama between the US and Latin America says a lot about the future of the region and its cooperative handling of economic and political questions. In an interview via email, Raúl Zibechi, a Uruguayan journalist, professor and political analyst who writes regularly for the Americas Program, said he believes the expulsion of US ambassadors, and the regional leaders’ response to the conflict in Bolivia, “is the manifestation of the fact that the USA can no longer impose its will on Latin America, and very concretely in South America.” He says there are two reasons for this change: “the birth of a regional power that seeks to be a global player, such as Brazil, a capitalist power but with different interests from the USA, and the existence of governments born of the heat of the resistance of social movements in countries that are large producers of hydrocarbons, as in Venezuela, Bolivia and perhaps Ecuador.”

Though the threat of a “civic coup d’etat” Morales spoke about in Santiago still looms, the Bolivian military is unlikely to back the government opposition
My favorite quote on this subject from a pragmatic member of the Bolivian Military:
“The only way the military would even remotely consider a coup, is if they took away most of our budget; at the core, we’re really a bunch of bureaucrats.”

When Fernandez took control of a large part of Bolivia’s petroleum production the US ambassador ran to visit him. –Considering the connections big-oil has with the current administration nobody should look surprised.

If you think the greedy warmongering bastards in the Whitehouse wouldn’t overthrow a government to get what they want you need to review your recent history.