Stock Market Crash Expected In 2008 To Be Worse Than 1929

[Soldier4Christ]

This is not going to help the economy in the least bit.

Union strikes Boeing: 27,000 walk out
Workers shut aircraft maker that holds key place in job market, economy

Workers at Boeing walked off the job on Saturday after nearly two days of around-the-clock talks failed to avert what could one of the nation's most disruptive strikes in more than a decade.

About 25,000 members of the International Association of Machinists in the Seattle area and another 2,250 in Oregon and Kansas started striking at 12:01 a.m. PT.

The company had offered union members raises over the next three years totaling 11% of current pay. Boeing also offered bonuses and pension improvements it said would give the typical worker about $34,000 in additional pay and benefits during that time.

"We are certainly disappointed," said Boeing spokesman Tim Healy. "We were certainly hopeful that members would look at that offer and the amount of money they would have in their pocket over the next three years, and that they would vote in their best interests."

But the union argues that contract changes demanded by the company would weaken job security and cause more work to be outsourced to contractors and suppliers, as well as drive up members' out-of-pocket health care costs.

"The details in the contract language is something we can't live with," said Connie Kelliher, a union spokeswoman. "We heard again and again from rank and file, 'The best pay and benefits are no good if you're not on the payroll tomorrow to collect them.' "

Workers voted 80% against the company's final offer on Wednesday and 87% in favor of a strike. They had been set to walk off the job early Thursday morning, but the union agreed to participate in two days of federally mediated talks at the request of Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire.

Talks took place at Walt Disney World in Florida, where the union was holding its regularly scheduled convention.

"If this company wants to talk, they have my number, they can reach me on the picket line," said a statement to members from Tom Wroblewski, the head of the bargaining team.

Boeing (BA, Fortune 500) said it would not try to assemble planes during the strike. Healy said the company stands ready to resume talks whenever the union is willing.

"Over the past two days, Boeing, the union and the federal mediator worked hard in pursuing good-faith explorations of options that could lead to an agreement," said Scott Carson, president and chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, on Friday. "Unfortunately, the differences were too great to close."
Dreamliner delivery at risk

The strike will push back delivery of the first of the fuel-efficient 787 Dreamliner jets, which are in strong demand by airlines struggling to deal with high fuel prices.

The Dreamliner, for which Boeing has taken about 900 orders from 58 airlines worldwide, is already two years behind its original delivery schedule. In April, Boeing was forced to push back its first delivery target until the third quarter of 2009.

The job action could cost Boeing an estimated $100 million a day in revenue and perhaps $7 million a day in net income, according to financial analysts. The company's revenue in the first half of the year was nearly $33 billion and net income was $2 billion.

Boeing has a history of rocky labor relations with its unionized workers, who struck three years ago for 28 days. The contract that ended that strike did not include many of the provisions the union had opposed, but it also did not include increases in base wages other than previously-negotiated cost-of-living adjustments.

That contract was reached at a time when airlines with about half of U.S. capacity were in bankruptcy protection and industry losses were continuing to mount.

Since then strong sales and production at Boeing have led to record profits at the aircraft maker.

The size of Boeing's unionized workforce has grown in the face of the strong demand, up by nearly half during the life of the contract. At a time when employers nationwide have trimmed more than 600,000 jobs from payrolls in the face of a weakening U.S. economy, Boeing is adding dozens of workers a day, according to the union.

Starting workers earn just under $9 an hour in base wages, according to Kelliher, the union spokeswoman. The typical Machinist at Boeing earns about $27 an hour, or $54,000 a year before benefits and overtime, according to the union. The most senior union members earn about $35 an hour, or just over $70,000 a year before benefits and overtime.

Exports of aircraft have become important to the U.S. economy, which as seen huge trade deficits that only recently started to retreat due to lower demand for imports by U.S. consumers and stronger demand for U.S. goods due partly to a weaker dollar.

In the first half of 2008, total U.S. civilian aircraft exports rose 14% to nearly $25 billion, and parts exports for those aircraft other than engines rose nearly 11% to more than $10 billion.

Last fall, the United Auto Workers union staged brief strikes at General Motors and Chrysler LLC over the companies' efforts to shift the responsibility for retiree health care costs to union-controlled trust funds rather than the companies' battered finances.

A strike by 87,000 workers at Verizon Communications in August 2000 failed to shut down the company. The last time that a strike larger than the walk-out at Boeing shut down a company's operations for an extended period was the 14-day strike at United Parcel Service by the Teamsters union in 1997.

[Soldier4Christ]

FDIC shutters Silver State Bank of Nevada
Son of presidential nominee John McCain was reportedly former board member; closing marks the 11th bank failure this year.

Regulators on Friday shut down Silver State Bank, saying the Nevada bank failed because of losses on soured loans, mainly in commercial real estate and land development.

It was the 11th failure this year of a federally insured bank.

Nevada regulators closed Silver State and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was appointed receiver of the bank, based in Henderson, Nev. It had $2 billion in assets and $1.7 billion in deposits as of June 30.

Andrew K. McCain, a son of Republican presidential nominee John McCain, sat on the boards of Silver State Bank and of its parent, Silver State Bancorp, starting in February but resigned in July citing "personal reasons," corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show. Andrew McCain also was a member of the bank's audit committee, responsible for oversight of the company's accounting.

The younger McCain, who is the chief financial officer of Hensley & Co., the beer distributorship of which Cindy McCain is chairwoman, is the Arizona senator's adopted son from his first marriage.

Andrew McCain's position on the Silver State board and departure were first reported Friday by The Wall Street Journal online.

Silver State Bank ran into difficulty because of a substantial amount of "poor-quality loans primarily related to real estate development" in southern Nevada and other distressed markets, FDIC spokesman David Barr said.

"When the housing market slowed down, people who bought raw land to build new homes didn't need that land so they couldn't do anything with it and repay their loans. So those loans went bad," Barr said.

Silver State Bancorp recently reported a net loss for the second quarter of $73.2 million, or $4.84 a share, compared with net profit of $6.2 million, or 44 cents a share, in the same period last year.

Construction and development loans have been the fastest-growing category of troubled loans for U.S. banks, and many banks have heavy concentrations of them in their lending portfolios, according to the FDIC. Some small banks are considered especially vulnerable. Delinquent loan payments and defaults by commercial and residential developers have surged to the highest levels since the early 1990s - the latter part of the savings and loan crisis.

The FDIC said Silver State Bank's insured deposits will be assumed by Nevada State Bank of Las Vegas. Its branches will reopen Monday as offices of Nevada State Bank in Nevada and National Bank of Arizona in Arizona.

The agency said depositors of Silver State Bank will continue to have full access to their deposits.

The 11 failures so far this year compare with three for all of 2007, and federal banking officials have said that more banks are in danger of collapse.

Silver State Bank has operated 13 branches in the greater Las Vegas area and four in the greater Phoenix-Scottsdale area of Arizona as well as loan offices in Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, California and Florida.

The FDIC estimated its resolution will cost the deposit insurance fund between $450 million and $550 million.

Regular deposit accounts are insured up to $100,000.

There were about $20 million in uninsured deposits held in roughly 500 accounts at Silver State that potentially exceeded the insurance limit, the FDIC said.

Concern has been growing over the solvency of some banks amid the housing slump and the steep slide in the mortgage market. The pressures of tighter credit, tumbling home prices and rising foreclosures have been battering many banks, large and small, across the nation.

The largest bank failure by far this year has been that of savings and loan IndyMac Bank, which was seized by regulators on July 11 with about $32 billion in assets and deposits of $19 billion.

The seizure of Pasadena, Calif.-based IndyMac, which was the largest regulated thrift to fail in the United States, prompted hundreds of angry customers to line up for hours in Southern California to demand their money. IndyMac also was the second-largest financial institution to close in U.S. history, after Continental Illinois National Bank in 1984.

The FDIC has been operating the bank, now called IndyMac Federal Bank, under a conservatorship.

The FDIC plans to raise insurance premiums paid by banks and thrifts to replenish its reserve fund after paying out billions of dollars to depositors at IndyMac. The fund, currently at $45 billion, is expected to take a hit from IndyMac of $4 billion to $8 billion.

Federal officials expect turbulence in the banking industry to continue well into next year, and more banks to appear on the FDIC's internal list of troubled institutions.

Of the 8,500 or so FDIC-insured banks in the country, 117 were considered to be in trouble in the second quarter -- the highest level in about five years and up from 90 in the first quarter. The agency doesn't disclose the banks' names.

[Soldier4Christ]

U.S. government takes control
of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac
Teetering mortgage giants hold interest
in almost half of American mortgages

The Bush administration’s seizure of troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is potentially a $200 billion bet that it will help reverse a prolonged housing and credit crisis.

The historic move announced Sunday won support from both presidential campaigns, but private analysts worried that it may not be enough to stabilize the slumping housing market given the glut of vacant homes for sale, rising foreclosures, rising unemployment and weak consumer confidence.

Officials announced that both giant institutions were being placed in a government conservatorship, a move that could end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said allowing the companies to fail would have extracted a far higher price on consumers by driving up the cost of home loans and all other types of borrowing because the failures would “create great turmoil in our financial markets here at home and around the globe.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com predicted that 30-year mortgage rates, currently averaging 6.35 percent nationwide, could dip to close to 5.5 percent. That’s because investors will be more willing to buy the debt issued by Fannie and Freddie — and at lower rates — since the federal government is now explicitly standing behind that debt.

“Effectively, the federal government has now become the nation’s mortgage lender,” he said. “This takes a major financial threat off the table.”

Futures on all major stock indexes rose about 2 percent in electronic trading Sunday night, another sign of investor relief about the takeover plan

The companies, which together own or guarantee about $5 trillion in home loans, about half the nation’s total, have lost $14 billion in the last year and are likely to pile up billions more in losses until the housing market begins to recover.

The Treasury Department said it was prepared to put up as much as $100 billion over time in each of the companies if needed to keep them from going broke, in exchange for senior preferred stock. Treasury will immediately be issued $1 billion of such stock from each company, which will pay 10 percent interest. Further purchases of preferred stock will be triggered if quarterly audits find that the companies’ capital cushion is below prudent standards.

The government, which will receive warrants representing ownership stakes of 79.9 percent in each company, is hoping that its moves will reassure nervous investors that they can continue to buy the debt of the two companies.

“Allowing the companies to fail or further deteriorate would damage our home mortgage market, and could weaken other credit markets that are unrelated directly to housing,” President Bush said in a statement released Sunday afternoon. “Americans should be confident that the actions taken today will strengthen our ability to weather the housing correction and are critical to returning the economy to stronger sustained growth.”

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama issued a statement agreeing that some form of intervention was necessary, and promised, “I will be reviewing the details of the Treasury plan and monitoring its impact to determine whether it achieves the key benchmarks I believe are necessary to address this crisis.”

Republican presidential nominee John McCain also voiced support while his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, said that Fannie and Freddie “have gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers. The McCain-Palin administration will make them smaller and smarter and more effective for homeowners who need help.”

The conservatorship will be run by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the new agency created by Congress this summer to regulate Fannie and Freddie, a move taken at the same time that Congress greatly expanded the power of the Treasury Department to make loans to the two companies and purchase their stock.

The executives and board of directors of both institutions are being replaced. Herb Allison, the former head of the TIAA-CREF retirement investment fund, was selected to head Fannie Mae, and David Moffett, a former vice chairman of US Bancorp, was picked to head Freddie Mac.

Paulson was careful not to blame Daniel Mudd, the outgoing CEO of Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac’s departing CEO Richard Syron for the companies’ current problems. While both men are being removed as the top executives, they have been asked to remain for an unspecified period to help with the transition.

Fannie and Freddie both purchase home loans from banks and then repackage those loans as mortgage-backed securities which they either hold on their own books or sell to investors around the globe. This process provides banks with more money to make more home loans, greatly expanding home ownership.

The impact of the government takeover on existing common and preferred shares, which have slumped in value in the last year, will depend on how investors react to Paulson’s assertion that they must absorb the cost of further losses first. Under the plan, dividends on both common and preferred stock would be eliminated, saving about $2 billion a year.

After the Treasury Department’s announcement, credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded Fannie and Freddie’s preferred stock to junk-bond status, but reaffirmed the U.S. government’s triple-A rating.

The Federal Reserve and other federal banking regulators said in a joint statement Sunday that “a limited number of smaller institutions” have significant holdings of common or preferred stock shares in Fannie and Freddie, and that regulators were “prepared to work with these institutions to develop capital-restoration plans.”

The Fed released a letter from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to James Lockhart, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, in which the Fed chief said he concurred in Lockhart’s decision to take control of Fannie and Freddie saying the action “will help ensure the safe and sound operation of the enterprises.”

Analysts were split on how much the takeover could eventually cost taxpayers although they all agreed the up-front costs will be substantial, possibly hitting $100 billion as the Treasury is called upon to bolster the capital cushions at both institutions.

However, if the plan does the trick of stabilizing the housing market and home prices stop falling and rebound, then the assets of both Fannie and Freddie should rise in value and the government should be able to sell off the companies and recoup its investments.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

But it could take a long time to work through that process given all the headwinds facing housing at the moment from the plunge in home prices to soaring defaults on mortgages which are dumping more homes on an already glutted market. The weak economy has pushed unemployment to a five-year high of 6.1 percent, further reducing demand for homes.

“I think the government will end up having to put in far more money then they are planning right now (given all the problems facing housing) but the important thing is the agencies have been taken over by the government,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at California State University Channel Islands. “That means there will be less panic in financial markets.”

Under government control, the companies will be allowed to expand their support for the mortgage market over the next year by boosting their holdings of mortgage securities they hold on their books from a combined $1.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion. Starting in 2010, though, they are required to drop their holdings by 10 percent annually until they reach a combined $500 billion.

In addition, officials said the Treasury Department plans to purchase $5 billion in mortgage-backed securities issued by the two companies later this month, the first of a series of purchases planned by the government in an effort to bolster for these securities, which was badly shaken a year ago when the credit crisis first erupted with soaring defaults on subprime mortgages.

Paulson said that it would be up to Congress and the next president to figure out the two companies’ ultimate structure and the conflicting goals they operated under — maximizing returns for shareholders while also being required to facilitate home buying for low- and moderate-income Americans.

“There is a consensus today ... that they cannot continue in their current form,” he said.

Members of Congress will be watching in the coming months to see how the takeover works, but more housing legislation appears unlikely until next year given the few weeks remaining both Congress quits to hit the campaign trail.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. said the intervention was sparked by worries within the Bush administration that foreign governments would stop holding Fannie and Freddie’s debt. “This was the prudent course to take,” he said.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., announced his committee would hold hearings on the takeover to address a number of unanswered questions so that the American people will know “if this unprecedented proposal will help keep mortgages affordable, stabilize the markets and protect taxpayer interests.”

Lockhart said that all lobbying activities of both companies would stop immediately. Both companies over the years made extensive efforts to lobby members of Congress in an effort to keep the benefits they enjoyed as government-sponsored enterprises.

Sunday’s actions followed a series of meetings Paulson had with Bush and other top administration economic officials with Bush relying heavily on the judgment of Paulson, who was the head of investment giant Goldman Sachs before he joined the Cabinet in 2006.

“It is really an assent to Hank’s direction, guidance and judgment,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss behind-the-scenes deliberations.

[Soldier4Christ]

OPEC considers cutting oil production
Reduction unthinkable just a few weeks ago

With oil prices off nearly 30 percent from their highs of almost $150 a barrel, OPEC oil ministers are considering what was unthinkable just a few weeks ago -- cutting back output to prop up the price of crude.

No one is predicting much of a cutback -- if any at all. Still, such a move would not even have been thought of with oil prices setting record after record back in July.

But the bull run appears to have paused, if not ended, which means a new look at options for Tuesday's meeting of the 13 ministers at OPEC's Vienna headquarters.

Since crude surged to a record $147.27 a barrel on July 11, it has tumbled by over $40, or more than 27 percent. Back then, OPEC's main concern was pushing back against arguments from the U.S. and other key consumers that an output increase was needed to end rocketing prices. Oil ministers insisted there was adequate supply to meet demand, and blamed speculators and a weak U.S. dollar for crude's stellar rise.

But now, the greenback has strengthened, world demand has decreased due to creaky economies, traders' appetites for commodities have cooled -- and suddenly the market appears to have turned bearish. Oil markets, however, will also be keeping a close eye on Hurricane Ike, which on Sunday was an extremely dangerous Category 3 storm projected to move into the oil-producing Gulf of Mexico after passing over Cuba.

Light, sweet crude for October delivery fell $1.66 to settle at $106.23 a barrel Friday on the New York Mercantile Exchange -- its lowest close since early April.

The downward spiral has led to calls from OPEC price hawk Iran -- the group's second-largest producer -- to reduce output from the nearly 30.5 million barrels a day being pumped last month by the organization's members.

Not far behind is Venezuela. While moderating recent demands for immediate output cuts, Venezuelan Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez has drawn the line at $100 per barrel of oil. Anything below that should serve as a wake-up call for OPEC to tighten the spigots, he says -- sentiment that is shared by other OPEC members.

Still, a major cutback is unlikely without Saudi compliance, and the Saudis -- de-facto OPEC policy setters who are now producing nearly a third of total OPEC output -- have given no hint they favor that option. Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi has instead talked about a floor of $80 as the red line for action.

OPEC has reason to be cautious.

Despite their precipitous fall, prices remain 14 percent higher this year than in 2007, and a barrel of benchmark crude still fetches four times what it did five years ago.

Any OPEC move Tuesday to pare back output would result in a howl of protest from the U.S. and other major consumers, and give a larger platform to Republican presidential candidate John McCain and Barack Obama, his Democratic counterpart, to call for reduced dependence on foreign oil.

Additionally, OPEC understands that high prices drive down demand and will likely try to find a balance between high profits and a price that the market can accept.

In a forecast last month, OPEC predicted that the world's forecast appetite for oil for this year overall will have fallen by 30,000 barrels a day and noted that world demand growth next year will be "the lowest since 2002." And on Wednesday, the U.S Energy Administration reported a 3.5 percent drop for products including gasoline and other oil-based products compared with last year.

Such factors have led some experts to predict OPEC would opt for no change.

"The ministers will hold the status quo (although) there is going to be the usual jawboning from the usual suspects" for a cutback, said oil analyst and trader Stephen Schork. Even now, "oil is by no means cheap and that is certainly adding a lot of pressure to the (world's) economies -- the smarter ones, the Saudis, the Qataris the Kuwaitis are aware of this."

Others think that OPEC, which accounts for about 40 percent of world oil production, will compromise between doing nothing -- thereby chancing a further erosion in prices -- and slashing boldly -- thereby risking skyrocketing prices and an ensuing fallback in demand.

That middle way would mean agreeing to pare away at overproduction without reducing the overall output quota of 27.3 million barrels a day set in November for the 12 OPEC members under production limits.

Energy analyst Catherine Hunter of Global Insight estimates overproduction at between 600,000 and 800,000 barrels a day and says this is the likely "first target of cuts." And because most of the extra production comes from Saudi wells, such a move could be easily accepted by most OPEC members.

"Ultimately, OPEC wants to know what the market will bear," she wrote in a recent analysis, adding that with the world's developed economies expected to perform poorly -- and a resulting overspill to East Asian markets -- "the answer may well be, not much."

Chip Hodge, portfolio manager with MFC Global Investment Management, also thinks that if OPEC issues a call for cuts it will be in overproduction, adding the organization has little additional wiggle room.

"Oil prices are still higher than where they were a year ago," he said. "They just don't have much to complain about."

[Soldier4Christ]

Will government bailouts spell end of dollar?


We have seen, in the dead of night, three major government bailouts in the last year, none of which had more than a few days' positive effect on the markets. Each was done by powerful men in powerful places in the wee, small hours. At the end of the next day, a few were made rich while the many were handed the bill.

First there was Bear Stearns. Then IndyMac bank. Fannie and Freddie followed rapidly. All engineered on Sundays while the markets were closed.

How many more bailouts have to occur before someone asks the questions no one wants to ask? Is this a systemic problem and where does it end?

It is no surprise to those of us who warned about the drunken credit binge on Wall Street that the day of reckoning would come. What we never anticipated was the reward in store for the gluttons who caused the damage.

          

Bear Stearns was sold to JPMorgan on March 17; billions of equity was transferred to the balance sheet of one of the top five banks in America while the liabilities were guaranteed by the government (a.k.a. the taxpayers). Through the use of very complicated devices the government moved to save the system. The executives of Bear walked away with bonuses and severance packages. Disaster temporarily averted.

On July 11, IndyMac was taken over by the government due to a "run on the bank" which depleted deposits literally overnight. With $100 million leaving each day, the feds had no option other than to shut the doors. The $52 billion FDIC rescue fund was tapped for $4 billion-$8 billion to pay off depositors and 4,000 employees lost their jobs overnight as IndyMac became runnerup to the largest bank collapse in history (Continental Bank in 1984). Net result: The banking system is saved for the time being.

Fannie and Freddie were seized by regulators Sunday after weeks of speculation that both were suffering losses far beyond their ability to cover. Voices like Bill Gross from PIMCO, with $800 billion in bonds, made clear their intention to stop buying bonds unless the Treasury acted to provide an implicit guarantee for all Fannie and Freddie obligations.

By Monday morning, Gross and his firm are $8 billion richer and the American taxpayers take on potentially $200 billion-$700 billion in losses. I guess the slogan "E pluribus unum" took on a whole new meaning as 300 million of us (the many) united, involuntarily, to give PIMCO (the one) a whole lot of money.

This is not unusual. The market rallied 300 points only to give it back the next day. But Fannie and Freddie did not fail – in the technical sense.

Is the system broken? And if so, who benefits as a result? Did Paulson and Gross identify a weakness and capitalize on it?

If the problems we are now witnessing are systemic and can potentially develop into a far worse crisis than anyone expected, what level of loss should the public be responsible for? Should we the people be on the hook for an unlimited amount of liability while not participating in any of the reward? At its face that seems very unfair, but as I was told at an early age, life is not always fair.

There is an even bigger question in all of this. How many commercial banks, investment banks and mortgage guarantors can the government take over before we as a country are forced to create money to meet all the obligations represented by these takeovers? It is not as if the government has surpluses from which to draw all the needed capital to meet these obligations. We will have to borrow or print it.

What if General Motors, Ford and Boeing need to be bailed out? What about airlines, drug companies, insurance companies ... shall I go on? We cannot and should not adopt a bailout mentality without first considering the long-term ramifications for the country as a whole.

Currently we are running about a $500 billion dollar annual budget deficit. This will be added to the national debt which currently stands at $9.6 trillion. Will we just run the national debt to $15 trillion, $20 trillion? And that doesn't even take into account the off-budget debt, reflected in future Medicare and Social Security obligations, which now exceeds $50 trillion. At what point will the U.S. dollar have any value if we can never pay any of it back?

The U.S. dollar has always been the currency the world turns to when there is trouble. The dollar has always represented safety, but can it maintain that trust if we just continue to print, borrow and move dollars around from balance sheet to balance sheet ad infinitum?

I have asked a number of questions so at this point it is appropriate to offer some answers.

We cannot continue employing the broken business model our current financial system represents. It doesn't work. We cannot leverage, inflate and deflate forever. There comes a day of reckoning when people will not tolerate the abuse of a system to enrich a few while decimating many.

I see vulnerability in America that must be addressed and time is of the essence.

For the first time in the post-World War II era, the American dollar is susceptible to competition from a currency based in an identifiable and universally accepted value. A currency that cannot be created out of thin air. Is such a currency available? Not yet. But you know the old saying, "Necessity is the mother of invention."

Right now the world has three very strong and prosperous countries competing on the world stage with huge amounts of capital, natural resources and gold that could easily, if they so chose, create a currency much like Europe did in the euro. But this time it could be backed with oil and gold.

Russia, China and the Arab nations are sitting on an enormous amount of oil, gold and U.S. dollars. What if those nations forged agreements (much like NATO, WTO, etc.) and offered an "ARC" dollar fully backed by gold or oil? (The holder of the currency could actually exchange the currency for a specified amount of gold or oil.)

A note is a promise to pay. For years in America a Federal Reserve Note (currency) was a promise to pay gold and silver at the Treasury. Today it is a note to pay debt. Debt that is exploding and can apparently be wiped away by the Fed overnight or, worse yet, transferred to the backs of American workers in the form of tax on future labor. But what if a group of nations offered a currency that had no recurring liability attached to it but actual "money" in the form of the ultimate currency (gold) or the ultimate natural resource (oil)?

In the past I would have viewed such a prospect as preposterous. Today it may well become a reality. Currently talks are under way with the Gulf Monetary Authority for just such a system.

If we think the government is capable of bailing everything and everyone out of every financial mess that may occur then we are fools. And perhaps we are being viewed as such by very hostile nations that would welcome the deterioration of our position on the world stage and would not flinch at our total demise.

In short, we have fattened our hearts in the day of slaughter and now is the time to acknowledge and accept that each of us is solely responsible for our own future. Not the government. The time of discussing the problems has come and gone. Now is the time to devise a plan and put it into action.

With gold and silver trading at levels 10 percent below stupid, it is time to put 10-20 percent of total assets into tangibles. Understand that the only answer to avoiding a meltdown is either a new currency or runaway inflation. To quote Harry Shultz, "If Bush bails them all out, the die will be cast for inflation unseen in the West since 1923 Germany. If no bail:1929. Gold helps you out either way."

You can either ignore the obvious or act upon it.

Ignorance is produced in ignoring the facts. It makes one ignorant. Acting upon the facts makes one wise, which is wisdom. This will be a time when many will prefer to deny what they see around them and hope against hope that the system will fix itself.

It will not.

The best analogy I can give is a person (the system) having a massive heart attack, a heart attack resulting from years of abuse of the victim's own body. He is rushed to the hospital where the doctors (the Fed) work feverishly to save his life. They are successful and the patient lives. The doctors then sit the patient down and explain that while they saved his life, without major lifestyle changes the patient will have another heart attack and die. He must immediately stop smoking, eliminate fatty foods and exercise daily. The patient refuses.

Thus is our system. This is not the first crisis. It will not be the last. The system is not willing to do what is necessary to get better.

[Soldier4Christ]

Black Monday! Mortgage crisis tumbles market 500 points 
Lehman Brothers bankrupt as drop is biggest since 9/11

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 504.48 points today, the biggest single-day drop since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and closed under 11,000 at 10,917.51 as Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, the nation's fourth largest investment bank, filed for bankruptcy amid worries about the health of other key financial institutions.

The last time Dow Jones plummeted so precipitously was Sept. 17, 2001, the first day Wall Street markets opened following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Lehman Brothers' failure was a key to the drop. A Bank of America plan to acquire Lehman fell apart when the Federal Reserve backed off issuing a guarantee to finance the acquisition, similar to the guarantee the Fed had issued to induce J.P. Morgan Chase to purchase bankrupt Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns in March.

Lehman, a 158-year-old firm that survived the railroad bankruptcies of the 1980s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, lost 94 percent of its market value this year and was forced into Chapter 11 after Barclays Plc and Bank of America broke off acquisition talks yesterday.

Uncertainly reigned for its tens of thousands of workers.

But Lehman was not the only company causing alarm. In a separate deal, Bank of America moved to acquire 94-year-old Merrill Lynch for $50 billion in a deal to give the nation's largest bank Merrill Lynch's premier retail investment banking network.

Bank of America's chief executive Ken Lewis said the acquisition involves "every nook and cranny of the financial system, from credit cards and auto loans to bond and stock underwriting, capital markets, and advisory companies," according to the Wall Street Journal.

In January, Bank of America acquired troubled mortgage company Countrywide Financial Corp. for $4 billion.

And in yet a third financial crisis today, the Federal Reserve has asked Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase to make $70 billion-$75 billion in loans available to AIG, the nation's largest insurer, as state and federal officials scrambled to help the company come up with as much as $40 billion to help prevent a downgrading of its credit rating, an outcome that could prove fatal to the firm, according to the Wall Street Journal.

New York Gov. David Paterson confirmed that state officials are working with AIG on a plan that would allow the firm to borrow $20 billion against the assets of the firm.

As WordNetDaily's "Red Alert" subscription newsletter reported yesterday, financial markets remain uncertain how many of the nation's largest financial institutions are facing possible bankruptcy over losses in their mortgage-related portfolios.

Washington Mutual's board also fired Kerry Killinger, the bank's chairman, after 18 years of expansion from a sleepy West Coast savings and loan to the nation's largest thrift with an aggressive but poorly managed real estate financing arm.

Washington Mutual, headquartered in Seattle, has approximately $180 billion of mortgage-related loans, with a potential loss of $9 billion to $14 billion this year.

Since the collapse of the sub-prime home-loan market last year, the world's largest banks and brokerage firms have reported more than $510 billion of write-downs and credit losses on securities tied to mortgages, according to Bloomberg.

Today's shock waves that undercut Lehman, Merrill Lynch, AIG and Washington Mutual have left Wall Street experts uncertain whether the bottom of the mortgage crisis had yet been reached.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said yesterday the country is mired in a "once-in-a-century" financial crisis that is now more than likely to spark a recession, according to an Associated Press report.

In an interview with CNBC, Wilbur Ross, chairman and chief executive of W. L. Ross & Co., said he sees possibly as many as a thousand bank closures in the coming months.

Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama took the Lehman bankruptcy as a political opportunity, charging that the upheaval on Wall Street was "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression" and blamed the financial woes on Republican Party economic policies supported by his Republican opponent Sen. John McCain.

McCain countered with a statement that the Wall Street turmoil underscores the need to overhaul "the outdated and ineffective patchwork quilt of regulatory oversight in Washington."

"It is essential for us to make sure that the U.S. remains the pre-eminent financial market of the world," said a statement issued by his presidential campaign. "This will be a highest priority of my administration. In order to do this, major reform must be made in Washington and on Wall Street."

[Soldier4Christ]

Who's next to fall
from Wall Street?
Insurance company AIG struggles for survival
as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch 'disappear'

Insurer American International Group Inc struggled for survival a day after a financial tsunami swept away investment bank Lehman Brothers and forced the sale of rival Merrill Lynch in the biggest financial industry shake-up since the Great Depression.

AIG scrambled for a financial lifeline on Monday after investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc failed to find a rescuer and Merrill Lynch & Co Inc agreed to be taken over by Bank of America Corp.

The U.S. Federal Reserve has hired investment bank Morgan Stanley to review options for AIG -- which has lost some 92 percent of its value so far this year -- a person familiar with the situation said Monday.

AIG's precipitous stock decline has led ratings agencies to threaten downgrades that could force it to post more collateral and nullify insurance contracts, possibly setting in motion a chain reaction that could threaten its survival.

In an ominous sign, two ratings agencies went ahead with downgrades after the market closed on Monday.

"AIG seems to be the next guy on the chopping block," said Tom Sowanick, chief investment officer at Clearbrook Financial LLC in Princeton, New Jersey.

Again seeking a private solution to Wall Street's woes, the Fed had asked JPMorgan Chase & Co and Goldman Sachs Group Inc to explore arranging $70 billion to $75 billion in loans to support AIG, among other financing options, another person familiar with the situation said.

Fearing a financial meltdown, the U.S. presidential candidates sparred Monday over who could best restore the system's health, with Republican John McCain pledging reform and Democrat Barack Obama saying hands-off Republican policies were the problem. 

U.S. stocks tumbled across the board, with the Dow Jones industrial average dropping 504 points as Wall Street had its worst day since markets reopened after the September 11 attacks.

There was speculation that Wall Street's worsening meltdown could prompt the Fed to act.

U.S. short-term interest rate futures rose sharply Monday, reflecting the higher prospects for a rate cut at or before Tuesday's Federal Reserve policy meeting.

And there were signs of widening macroeconomic shockwaves that could see a worsening of the credit crunch that has already threatened to worsen the housing downturn at the root of Wall Street's troubles.

"Capital markets have been quite difficult, and this is just going to make it more so," General Motors Corp President and Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson told the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit.

Darkening one of the few bright spots from the weekend's mayhem, Bank of America -- which would surpass Citigroup Inc as the country's largest bank by assets with the planned takeover of Merrill -- saw its shares plunge.

"The concern for Bank of America is the debt that they are acquiring," said Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald & Co in San Francisco.

"Secondly, is it too big of a purchase? They are dealing with Countrywide right now. Did they need to be dealing with this as well? There's some concern they might have bit more than they could chew."

Late on Sunday, the Fed said for the first time it would accept stock in exchange for cash loans and 10 of the world's top banks agreed to establish a $70 billion emergency fund, with any one of them able to tap up to one-third of that. But the market shrugged off those moves.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 4.4 percent, while the Standard & Poor's 500 Index lost 4.7 percent.

Lehman shares fell 95 percent to 18 cents, even as the once proud bank moved to sell 100 percent of its investment management unit and had a potential list of buyers, including private equity firms Bain Capital, Hellman & Friedman and Clayton Dubilier & Rice.

The events signaled a seismic shift in Wall Street's power structure, with big-name investment banks biting the dust and major banks with large deposit bases surviving.

"It's a return to pure capitalism, the survival of the fittest. The government can't and won't bail everybody out," said Justin Urquhart Stewart, investment director at 7 Investment Management in London.

"Investors will now retreat to the trustworthy banks, though that's not a phrase that trips off the tongue easily nowadays."

'SHELL-SHOCKED'

Scores of Lehman employees showed up at dawn at the company's New York headquarters, many dressed casually. Most carried duffel bags and suitcases, as if they were planning to pack up and leave.

Merrill workers were also uncertain about their future.

New York Gov. David Paterson said Wall Street might lay off 40,000 workers in a worst-case scenario.

"Everybody has been shell-shocked," a Merrill trader said on his way into the headquarters building. "Nobody thought we'd be bought by Bank of America in a million years. At least we won't be bankrupt. It should be a interesting day at work."

AIG could be the next U.S. financial giant to run into serious trouble.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who shocked many on Wall Street by insisting there would be no taxpayer funds to help Lehman, said at a news briefing there were private-sector talks under way in New York on AIG that had nothing to do with any government bridge loan.

"What's going on in New York is a private sector effort, again, focused on dealing with an important issue that's, I think, important that the financial system work on right now, and there's not more I can say than that," he said.

The state of New York, where AIG is based, did its best to bolster the stricken insurer with a complex asset swap giving it a $20 billion lifeline, but its longer-term rescue depended on additional funding.

The cost to insure the debt of AIG also surged on Monday. AIG's credit default swaps jumped to 33.5 percent of the sum insured paid upfront, plus annual premiums of 5 percent for five years, from 13 percent upfront on Friday, according to Markit Intraday.

In a move likely to drive that cost up further on Tuesday, Fitch Ratings downgraded AIG's debt to "A" from "AA-" and A.M. Best cut its financial strength rating.

U.S. bank shares tumbled in the wake of the Lehman news, with Washington Mutual Inc down 27 percent and Wachovia Corp losing 25 percent. Morgan Stanley was down 13.5 percent, and Citigroup lost 15 percent.

Even Goldman Sachs, Wall Street's No. 1 investment bank which is set to report quarterly earnings on Tuesday, saw a 12 percent drop in its shares.

Merrill shares rose as much as 33 percent to $22.68 before closing at $17.06, up a penny on the New York Stock Exchange. The Bank of America offer was worth $29 a share when it was announced, almost $12 above Merrill's closing price on Friday.

Lehman's bankruptcy petition followed three days of talks between various bank CEOs and regulators at the Fed's fortress- like building in lower Manhattan.

[Soldier4Christ]

Wall Street plunges despite AIG bailout
Commerce Department reports drop in new home construction

Wall Street plunged again Wednesday, with anxieties about the financial system still running high after the government bailed out insurer American International Group Inc. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped about 300 points.

The Federal Reserve is giving a two-year, $85 billion loan to AIG in exchange for a nearly 80 percent stake in the company after it lost billions in the risky business of insuring against bond defaults. Wall Street had feared that the conglomerate, which has its tentacles in various financial services industries around the world, would follow the investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. into bankruptcy. The ramifications of the world’s largest insurer going under likely would have far surpassed the demise of Lehman.

“People are scared to death,” said Bill Stone, chief investment strategist for PNC Wealth Management. “Who would have imagined that AIG would have gotten into this position?”
Story continues below ↓advertisement

He said the fear gripping the market reflects investors’ concerns that AIG wasn’t able to find a lifeline in the private sector and that Wall Street is now fretting about what other institutions could falter.

The two independent Wall Street investment banks left standing — Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley — remain under scrutiny, as does Washington Mutual Inc., the country’s largest thrift bank. Morgan Stanley revealed its quarterly earnings early late Tuesday, posting a better-than-expected 7 percent slide in fiscal third-quarter profit. It insisted that it is surviving the credit crisis that has ravaged many of its peers.

Lehman filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday, and by late Tuesday had sold its North American investment banking and trading operations to Barclays, Britain’s third-largest bank, for the bargain price of $250 million. Over the weekend, Merrill Lynch, the world’s largest brokerage, sold itself in a last-ditch effort to avoid failure to Bank of America Corp.

In midafternoon trading, the Dow fell 299.79, or 2.71 percent, to 10,759.23 after earlier being down nearly 400. After a nosedive Monday, the index is down more than 5 percent on the week, and has fallen more than 23 percent since reaching a record close of 14,164.53 on Oct. 9 last year.

Broader stock indicators also plunged. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index dropped 44.94, or 3.70 percent, to 1,168.66, while the Nasdaq composite index fell 89.10, or 4.04 percent, to 2,118.80.

The stock market is likely to see heavy back-and-forth movement as traders continue to assess the flood of news that has poured in over the past several days.

On Monday, the Dow lost 504 points, the largest tumble since its drop following the September 2001 terror attacks. On Tuesday, it rose 141 points, after the Fed decided to leave interest rates unchanged.

“It’s still uncertain ground we’re treading. We just have to move on a daily basis,” said Jack A. Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank.

The government took other measures Tuesday to help alleviate the turmoil in the markets. The Treasury said it will start selling bonds for the Fed to aid it with its lending efforts, while the Securities and Exchange Commission said it will strictly prohibit naked short-selling starting Thursday.

Short-selling is when traders borrow shares of a stock they expect to fall and sell them — if the stock does indeed fall, the traders buy the cheaper shares to cover the borrowed ones and profit from the difference. Naked short-selling occurs when sellers don’t actually borrow the shares before selling them; it’s a practice some say is partially responsible for the huge drop in the shares of investment banks like Lehman, Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns Cos., which JPMorgan Chase & Co. bought earlier this year.

Bond prices wavered Wednesday. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, slipped to 3.41 percent from 3.43 percent late Tuesday. The dollar was lower against other major currencies.

Gold prices surged as nervous traders sought safety. Gold jumped $86.30, or 11 percent, to $866.80 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Crude oil rebounded $4.74 to $95.89 a barrel on the Nymex after the government reported a drop in domestic crude and gas inventories. Oil dropped by about $10 a barrel on Monday and Tuesday amid concerns that economic weakness will hurt demand.
Story continues below ↓advertisement

Among financial names getting hit, Goldman Sachs fell $32.25, or 24 percent, to $100.76 and Morgan Stanley fell $10.70, or 37 percent, to $18.

“People are afraid of the unknown and they don’t know what’s on the books of these companies,” said Joe Saluzzi, co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading. “The first reaction in a situation like this is to sell.”

Saluzzi noted that surging gold prices and other measures of investors jitters indicate that anxiety is building.

  News moving the markets
Fed steps in to rescue ailing insurer AIG
Barclays grabs key Lehman assets
Housing construction falls to 17-year low
  Price of oil rebounds after two-day tumble
Morgan Stanley weighing possible merger

“There is a lot more fear today than there was on Monday and Tuesday,” he said.

Indeed, the Chicago Board Options Exchange’s volatility index, known as the VIX, and often referred to as the “fear index,” jumped 12 percent Wednesday.

Saluzzi is somewhat optimistic that the nervousness could be nearing a crescendo, which could squeeze out more investors and then clear the way for a snapback rally.

But the woes of the financial sector could also exacerbate problems facing other parts of the economy, given that individuals and businesses rely on the nation’s money centers.

[Soldier4Christ]

Federal bank insurance fund dwindling
Could be forced to tap tax dollars through Treasury Department loan

Banks are not the only ones struggling in the growing financial crisis. The fund established to insure their deposits is also feeling the pinch, and the taxpayer may be the lender of last resort.
ADVERTISEMENT

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., whose insurance fund has slipped below the minimum target level set by Congress, could be forced to tap tax dollars through a Treasury Department loan if Washington Mutual Inc., the nation's largest thrift, or another struggling rival fails, economists and industry analysts said Tuesday.

Treasury has already come to the rescue of several corporate victims of the housing and credit crunches. The government took over mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and helped finance the sale of investment bank Bear Stearns to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

Eleven federally insured banks and thrifts have failed this year, including Pasadena, Calif.-based IndyMac Bank, by far the largest shut down by regulators.

Additional failures of large banks or savings and loans companies seem likely, and that could overwhelm the FDIC's insurance fund, said Brian Bethune, U.S. economist at consulting firm Global Insight.

"We've got a ... retail bank run forming in this country," said Christopher Whalen, senior vice president and managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Monday that the country's commercial banking system "is safe and sound" and that "the American people can be very, very confident about their accounts in our banking system." FDIC officials also have said 98 percent of U.S. banks still meet regulators' standards for adequate capital.

But fear is growing on Main Street as well as Wall Street about the likelihood of multiple bank failures and the strain that would put on the FDIC.

The fund, which is marking its 75th anniversary this year with a "Face Your Finances" campaign, is at $45.2 billion — the lowest level since 2003. At the same time, the number of troubled banks is at a five-year high.

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair has not ruled out the possibility of going to the Treasury for a short-term loan at some point. But she has said she does not expect the FDIC to take the more drastic action of using a separate $30 billion credit line with Treasury — something that has never been done.

The FDIC's fund is currently below the minimum set by Congress in a 2006 law. The failure of IndyMac Bank in July cost $8.9 billion.

Next month, Bair plans to propose increasing the premiums paid by banks and thrifts to replenish the fund. That plan is likely to be approved by the FDIC board, which consists of her, Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, Thrift Supervision Director John Reich and two other officials.

Bair also is considering a system in which banks with riskier portfolios would be charged higher premiums, raising the possibility those costs could be passed on to consumers.

A Washington Mutual failure would dwarf the largest bank collapse in U.S. history — Continental Illinois National Bank in 1984, with $33.6 billion in assets.

By comparison, WaMu and its subsidiaries had assets of $309.73 billion as of June 30 and IndyMac had $32 billion when it shut down.

Arthur Murton, director of the FDIC's insurance and research division, said that when large institutions have failed in recent years, the hit to the fund has been about 5 to 10 percent of the company's assets.

Standard & Poor's Ratings Service late Monday cut its counterparty credit rating on WaMu to junk, action that followed downgrades by both Moody's and Fitch last week. Concern about the Seattle-based thrift, which has significant exposure to risky mortgage securities and other assets, has grown in recent weeks, and the company's stock price has plummeted.

WaMu responded Monday by saying that it did not expect the S&P downgrade to have a material impact on its borrowings, collateral or margin requirements. The bank said its capital at the end of the third quarter on Sept. 30 is expected to be "significantly above" required levels and that its outlook for expected credit losses is unchanged.

Some analyst estimates put the cost of a WaMu failure to the FDIC at more than $20 billion, but other experts say it is very difficult to predict. Unknown, for example, is the amount of advances that institutions may have taken from one of the regional banks in the Federal Home Loan Bank system. Banks and thrifts have significantly increased their requests for advances, or loans, from the 12 regional home loan banks since the mortgage crisis began last year.

These amounts aren't publicly disclosed but must be repaid if a bank or thrift fails, notes Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics.

If the FDIC doesn't have enough cash to cover the initial costs of a bank or thrift failure, one option would be short-term loans from the Treasury. That last happened in 1991-92, during the last part of the savings and loan crisis, when the FDIC borrowed $15.1 billion from the Treasury and repaid it with interest about a year later.

Based on projections of possible scenarios of bank failures, "between the (insurance) fund that we have now and our ability to draw on the resources of the industry ... we do have the resources" needed, Murton said Tuesday.

Though short-term borrowing from Treasury for working capital may be possible, he said, tapping the long-term credit line is unlikely.

But Whalen said the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and Congress should "immediately devise" and announce a plan to backstop the FDIC with up to $500 billion in borrowing authority to meet cash needs for closing or selling failed banks.

"While the FDIC already has a credit line in place and this figure may seem excessive — and hopefully it is — the idea here is to overshoot the actual number to reinforce public confidence," Whalen wrote in a note to clients. "Simply having Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson or Ben Bernanke making hopeful statements is inadequate. Like it says in the movies: 'Show us the money.'"

Before Congress passed the law overhauling deposit insurance in 2006, about 90 percent of all insured banks and thrifts — considered to have adequate capital and to be well managed — paid no premiums to the FDIC. Today, all of them do.

There were 117 banks and thrifts considered to be in trouble in the second quarter, the highest level since 2003, according to FDIC data released last month. The agency doesn't disclose the names of institutions on its internal list of troubled banks. On average, 13 percent of banks that make the list fail. Total assets of troubled banks tripled in the second quarter to $78 billion, and $32 billion of that coming from IndyMac Bank.

Last month, Bair called those results "pretty dismal," but said they were not surprising given the housing slump, a worsening economy, and disruptions in financial and credit markets. "More banks will come on the (troubled) list as credit problems worsen," he said. "Assets of problem institutions also will continue to rise."

[HisDaughter]

Is the US economic crisis leading to a New Global Monetary Order?

Prophecy News Watch
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

National solutions have been enough to stem the financial-sector crisis so far, ECB Governing Council member Mario Draghi said in a Berlin speech Thursday, but they may not be enough if things get worse.

“Policies are taking a variety of shapes that can be grouped within two broad categories: emergency and structural responses,” said Mr. Draghi, who also heads Italy’s central bank. “Until now, the first remained typically national since each crisis was unique to the financial structure of the country and so were the remedies.

However, if the crisis were to become systemic - and the past weekend has shown just how sudden and dramatic the turn of events can be — I believe that an internationally coordinated effort will be necessary.”

Mr. Draghi’s words have international heft, since he chairs the Financial Stability Forum — a group of global regulators and central bankers working on solutions for preventing the next blowup. He indicated the framework of the global financial system is undergoing a gut check: “A resilient infrastructure is one that is capable of withstanding the effects of the failure of a large financial institution. As we speak, this objective is being tested by reality.”

Overall, he said, the global banking system has enough capital to meet its needs “under reasonable scenarios.”

He offered no prediction about whether market conditions would continue to be “reasonable” but did say banks will need to raise “at least once again the amount of capital raised since the crisis began.” Mr. Draghi’s estimate of that amount, according to a person familiar with the matter, is $350 billion.

[Barbara]

Amen, grammyluv,

We saw Tony Blair on FOX this morning. He's teaching a Global Religion and Monetary Systems here in the US at Yale University. Kinda got my husband and I to do this  !

I believe this is leading to just what you say - a new Global Monetary Order and the One World Religion.

Things are happpening fast!

Also very interested in that FDIC article, Pastor Roger - there's a false sense of security right now but there are ominous atorms churning underneath that calm!!!

[Soldier4Christ]

Obama adviser spun Enron-like accounting scandal
Former Fannie Mae CEO to repay millions in bonuses, stock options

Former Clinton administration budget adviser and current Obama housing adviser Franklin Raines perpetrated an Enron-like accounting scandal as chief executive officer of Fannie Mae, resulting in his receiving millions in compensation over a six-year period.

Raines and two other top Fannie Mae executives agreed to pay $24.7 million, including a $2 million fine, to settle a civil lawsuit filed in December 2006. It accused Raines and the two other executives of manipulating Fannie Mae earnings, allowing executives to pocket hundreds of millions in bonuses from 1998 to 2004, according to the Associated Press.

The AP also reported Raines was forced to give up Fannie Mae stock options valued at $15.6 million as part of the settlement.

As recently as July 17, the Washington Post ran a profile piece on Raines claiming he "has been quietly constructing a new life for himself," in which Raines takes "calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters."

Prior to the settlement, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, known as OFHEO, the government regulator that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, had sought $100 million against Raines and the other two executives, plus restitution totaling more than $115 million in bonus money tied to the accounting scheme manipulation.

Fannie Mae separately paid a $400 million civil fine in a settlement with OFHEO and the Securities and Exchange Commission in an agreement to make top-to-bottom changes in its accounting procedures to avoid future Raines-like accounting manipulation scandals.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's top account accused Fannie Mae under Raines' leadership of misstating earnings for three and a half years, leading to an estimated $9 billion earnings restatement that wiped out 40 percent of Fannie Mae's profits from 2001-2004, according to Business Week.

Central to the Raines accounting scandal was a strategy to "cook the books" of Fannie Mae to show the type of earnings that would trigger hundreds of millions of bonuses to Raines and other key Fannie Mae executives.

When the scandal surfaced, Raines resigned from Fannie Mae in December 2004, with a $19 million severance package, according to the Associated Press.

The Raines scandal surfaced in 2004 when charges Fannie Mae accounting manager Roger Barnes had been making since 1999 surfaced. He said Fannie Mae had been manipulating its earnings through "cookie jar" accounting to justify payment of hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to top executives.

In his 26-page testimony before OFHEA, Barnes detailed multiple Fannie Mae deviations for Generally Accepted Accounting Practices, or GAAP, and his repeated efforts to bring these irregularities to a wide range of Fannie Mae managers and executives, all without positive result.

Barnes said he left Fannie Mae in October 2003 because he felt "forced out" once it excluded him from working on the OFHEA investigation.

"As a result of Fannie Mae's refusals to take the concerns I had raised about financial and accounting practices seriously, and the retaliation I faced for raising these concerns, I had no choice but to separate from the Company in October 2003," Barnes said on page 25 of his written Oct. 6, 2004, testimony to the Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government Sponsored Enterprises of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services.

Still, the OFHEA report on the Raines scandal cited Barnes 34 times in the first 80 pages of its 200-page report.

Barnes, an African American, reportedly received a $1 million settlement after threatening a whistleblower lawsuit citing racial discrimination, according to USA Today.

[Soldier4Christ]

12th bank failure of the year announced
Regulators close down Ameribank Inc., a West Virginia-based-bank with total assets of $115 million.

Ameribank Inc. was shut down on Friday by the Office of the Thrift Supervision, making it the 12th bank this year to go under.

The Northfork, West Virginia bank had total assets of $115 million and total deposits of $102 million, according to a statement on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Web site.

The FDIC was named receiver and announced that it entered into purchase and assumption agreements with Pioneer Community Bank, Inc., Iaeger, West Virginia, and the Citizens Savings Bank, Martins Ferry, Ohio, to take over all of Ameribank's deposits.

Ameribank has five branches located in West Virginia and three branches located in Ohio. Branches in West Virginia will reopen on Monday and Ohio branches will reopen on Saturday.

All customer accounts were automatically transferred to the two new banks and the full amount of their deposits will automatically be insured, the FDIC said.

Customers of the banks can still access their money over the weekend by writing checks or using ATM or debit cards, according to the statement by the FDIC.
A year of bank failures

This year 12 banks have been forced to close their doors. In July IndyMac was closed down marking the largest collapse of an FDIC-insured institution since 1984. The Pasadena, Calif.-based bank failed because it backed risky home loans. With the special Alt-A home loan that IndyMac offered, a home buyer had to show little evidence of income and assets.

When IndyMac was shut down, it had assets of $32 billion and deposits of $19 billion. While the FDIC protected most of IndyMac customer's assets, some customers lost some of their deposits.

The FDIC insures the assets held by the 8,451 institutions with a total of $13.4 trillion.

[Soldier4Christ]

U.S. to bail out foreign banks?
'They have the same impact on the American people as any other institution'

In a change from the original proposal sent to Capitol Hill, foreign-based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury Department’s mortgage bailout, according to the fine print of an administration statement Saturday night.

The theory, according to a participant in the negotiations, is that if the goal is to solve a liquidity crisis, it makes no sense to exclude banks that do a lot of lending in the United States.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson confirmed the change on ABC's "This Week," telling George Stephanopoulos that coverage of foreign-based banks is "a distinction without a difference to the American people."

"If a financial institution has business operations in the United States, hires people in the United States, if they are clogged with illiquid assets, they have the same impact on the American people as any other institution," Paulson said.

"That's a distinction without a difference to the American people. The key here is protecting the system. ... We have a global financial system, and we are talking very aggressively with other countries around the world and encouraging them to do similar things, and I believe a number of them will. But, remember, this is about protecting the American people and protecting the taxpayers. and the American people don't care who owns the financial institution. If the financial institution in this country has problems, it'll have the same impact whether it's the U.S. or foreign."

The legislative outline that went to Capitol Hill at 1:30 a.m. Saturday had said that an eligible financial institution had to have “its headquarters in the United States.” That would exclude foreign-based institutions with big U.S. operations, such as Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS.

But a Treasury “Fact Sheet” released at 7:15 Saturday night sought to give the administration more flexibility, with an expanded definition that could include all of those banks: “Participating financial institutions must have significant operations in the U.S., unless the Secretary makes a determination, in consultation with the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, that broader eligibility is necessary to effectively stabilize financial markets.”

The major change in the suggested eligibility requirements is the biggest change that Treasury publicly made after a day of briefings and conversations with Capitol Hill, and is likely the first of many.

Aspects of the $700 billion, two-year proposal that are still under negotiation include what, if anything, will be added to the administration’s simple but sweeping proposal. And the parliamentary route, such as what committees or hearings might be involved, has not been finalized.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has a hearing scheduled for Wednesday that is likely to focus on the proposal.

Under what congressional officials called a likely scenario, the measure could go to the House floor on Thursday, with passage expected the same day.

The Senate could take the package up as soon as Friday and send it to President Bush for his signature, although the Senate schedule is less predictable and had not been determined.

Officials expect passage by huge margins in both chambers because  Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have told congressional leaders the country’s financial stability depends on it.

House Democrats plan to insist on adding protections for homeowners facing foreclosure. They also want to add a measure to help homeowners facing bankruptcy and an executive compensation restriction designed to prevent golden parachutes for the heads of troubled institutions.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who was supportive of the bailout concept in a statement released Friday, believes that “whatever gets done in Congress has to protect Main Street,” senior adviser Stephanie Cutter said on MSNBC on Saturday.

On “Fox News Sunday,” Paulson told Chris Wallace that he would resist the Democrats' desired limits on executive compensation.

"If we design it so it's punitive and institutions aren't going to participate, this won't work the way we need it to work," Paulson said. "Let's talk executive salaries: There have been excesses there. I agree with the American people. Pay should be for performance, not for failure. We've got work to do in that regard. We need to do that work. But we need this system to work. And so reforms need to come afterwards. My whole objective with the plan we have is to give us the maximum ability to make it work.”

And the secretary told NBC’s Tom Brokaw on “Meet the Press” that he doesn’t want new regulations simultaneously: “That's not doable to do that immediately. But we very much need new regulations.”

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) told Stephanopoulos on ABC: “If we’re going to spend taxpayer money to get rid of bad debt in these places, what is the reciprocal obligation … from the firms? … I think there’s going to be a strong interest to deal with the Main Street aspects.”

Appearing with him, House Republican Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio retorted: “We’ve already dealt with that, when we had the housing bill last summer. I didn’t vote for it, because it’s $300 billion bailout for scam artists and speculators and others around the housing industry. But there are a lot of tools in there to help the Federal Housing Administration deal with the foreclosure problem that’s out there. We need to rise above partisan politics … and deal with this as adults.”