Well well well.
"Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Even as Ben S. Bernanke cuts borrowing costs to 50-year lows, taxpayers will likely be paying ever increasing interest rates on U.S. debt.
The next president may find foreign investors, the biggest creditors to the U.S., unable to absorb a growing supply of Treasury bonds as the financial crisis prompts nations to invest in their own banks and currencies. That would drive up yields just as a widening budget deficit pushes borrowing needs to a record $2 trillion, according to estimates by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wrightson ICAP LLC. "
Exactly.
Oh, as for the magnitude of this?
"The Treasury will announce its quarterly borrowing needs on Nov. 5. The U.S. may sell a net $388 billion of bills, notes and bonds this quarter, up from $178.4 billion last quarter and $33.4 billion in the same period of 2007, according to a quarterly survey by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association released Oct. 31. "
Ten times last year's levels.
And what sort of nonsense went on that led to this? Let's take just a few examples:
"Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- UBS AG, Switzerland's largest bank, faces dozens of claims in the U.S. from clients who bought ``100 percent principal protected notes'' issued by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. that are now almost worthless. "
Principal protected eh? Even the name sounds fraudulent.
But really, when you get down to it, the bottom line is what I wrote about in The Ticker yesterday with regards to fraud in mortgages; here's another, cited directly from The Forum:
"I was in the mortgage business for 23 years. Eight of those years were at Freddie, as an underwriter, Quality Controller/Internal Audit and Senior External Auditor. From 1995 to 2006 I was a Senior Level Contract Underwriter. I worked for GE, PMI, Radian, MGIC and United Guaranty. As a contractor, I worked in Crestar, Countrywide, First Magnus, Wells Fargo, Bank NY, Bank United, Bank Of America. I have been out of work for 2.5 years because I was "blacklisted". I moved from company to company because I just didn't decline the loans, I proved the fraud. My managers would say such comments as, "you cant call them liars", "I can get any property appraised", "We do not decline loans here", "We don't use the word (fraud) here". Unlike Ms. Cooper, I made copies of all the files, hundreds of them. The last 1.5 months I was at Magnus in 2005, I only underwrote 46 loans, each of them fraud from cover to cover. I declined each one of them. And I have a copy of each one of them to prove it.
It did not stop there. After being out of the business for 2.5 years, my home has been written on repeatedly. I was put on the "no fly list" and every rumor from A-Z has been said of me.
I even have e-mails from these people, in "electronic" format. I would send their BS e-mails from my work to my home machine. Each one a "Master Card" moment, "Priceless"."
Oh Mr. FBI man! How about it folks? How about it CONgress? How about it Mr. Bernanke? How about it Mr. Lockhart? How about it State Attorney Generals? How about it Mr. PRESIDENT?
Fraud of this sort wasn't an afterthought folks. It, and suppressing those who tried to stop it, as this poster alleges, was an inherent and necessary component in blowing the housing bubble.
That is, fraud was the entire point of the housing bubble, and the theft of literally trillions of dollars of phantom wealth from Americans was the intentional result, leaving them nothing other than debt.
No fraud, no bubble, because there is no possible way to get the lending velocity necessary to crank up valuations like this without the fraud.
The bubble could not have happened without the fraud just as the Internet bubble could not have happened without the fraud during those years.
I personally witnessed the fraud in virtually every firm around me during The Internet Bubble. I saw it daily. I saw the knowingly-false projections and claims by firms, both public and private.
This is the key item that every man, woman and child in this nation needs to understand - your "home price appreciation" was not driven by market forces or "animal spirits", it was driven by fraud and outright deception.
Whether you were personally involved in it or not is not material - your home did not go up in "value" as a consequence of demographics, as a consequence of speculation, or as a consequence of "mistakes."
It went up in value because there was a conscious decision made to rip people off and approve loans that the lenders knew were fraudulent.
The lenders knew it, the regulators knew it, Congress knew it, Treasury knew it and The Fed knew it.
All willfully and intentionally ignored, and in many cases actively encouraged, that fraud.
This is key to the entire mess, because once you understand this then you understand the utter futility of attempting to "protect" American home values.
There is no way to keep values above parity - again, above 3-3.5x incomes on a median basis - without robbing someone, and attempting to do so by using taxpayer money is the worst sort of ripoff you can imagine, because society is harmed twice - first by depressing home affordability, thereby screwing everyone who would otherwise be able to buy, and then again by taxing everyone in the attempt, further depressing affordability.
All of these schemes and artifices are undertaken for one and only one purpose - to avoid having to call out in public what really happened and the long list of both private and government actors who have been complicit in these criminal acts.
Never in the history of mankind has fraud been a public good, or served the public interest.
Never in the history of mankind has covering up fraud served a public interest.
Our politicians and others in power are desperately trying to keep you from understanding the truth about what happened during these years, because they are, quite simply, trying to save their own necks.
How many stories do we need in the media, how many people do we need to come forward before the lid is finally removed from this sordid den of vipers, and all who conspired to rob you of not only your home but your financial futures as well are dragged out into the public square and courtrooms across this nation where they can and will meet their proper and just reward for their conduct?
How far down does the stock market need to go? 40%? 50%? Or 90%, as happened in the 1930s?
How many millions of Americans need to lose their homes?
How many jobs must be lost? Yours?
That, my friends, is up to you.
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