"The Lehman Report: Is It Time for a Special Prosecutor?"

[WhiskeyGirl]

After a slow start, commentators and media outlets are finally cottoning onto the implications of a devastating new report on the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Andrew Ross Sorkin, my fellow chronicler of the financial crisis and frequent co-panelist, has a good column in today’s Times which takes to task the regulators who ignored, or possibly even condoned, the accounting shenanigans that Lehman was getting up to during its final months. Meanwhile, Eliot Spitzer and Bill Black, two lawyers who know a lot about Wall Street wrongdoing, are calling on Congress to launch its own inquiry into the matter. If I am right, this is only the beginning.

An alternative, and probably less wise, course of action would be to appoint a special prosecutor to probe Wall Street wrongdoing. From Whitewater to Scootergate, we have witnessed a series of these investigations degenerate into fishing expeditions, with the original reason for setting them up getting lost. Having spent large sums of money and seen themselves written up in the newspapers, the independent prosecutors become loath to fold their tents without at least one headline-grabbing finding. Unless somebody comes up with a credible reason why the Justice Department can’t be trusted to do the job by itself, I think the best course of action would be to launch a normal federal investigation under a veteran government prosecutor and see where, if anywhere, it leads. Anything less would insult the public and leave the Administration open to the charge that it is pursuing white-collar crime less vigorously than the Bush Administration, which, for all its sins, did aggressively go after Ken Lay, Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Kozlowski, and other rogue C.E.O.s.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2010/03/the-lehman-report.html#ixzz0iXjnsDvC

[WhiskeyGirl]

“The ideas of economists… are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.” — John Maynard Keynes

How much more evidence of a financial coup and the THEFT of TRILLIONS of DOLLARS do we need before the media and our politicians do something, anything, to restore a rule of law in this nation? What is it going to take?

About four months ago, I reached a breaking point and wrote an angry post calling out the media, even Independent online media, for their lack of intensive coverage on the THEFT of TRILLIONS of OUR DOLLARS. I just can’t understand how this has not been the number one story every second of every day?

And now comes the devastating Lehman Brothers bankruptcy report/indictment, which, once again, proves the all-out fraudulent activities that led to the THEFT of TRILLIONS of OUR DOLLARS. Over the past few days, I have skimmed through the over 2000 page report/indictment of Lehman Brothers, Ernst & Young, the Wall Street elite, Federal Reserve and US government. You would think, just maybe, that this report would finally set off major alarm bells within the mainstream media and Washington. Finally, we will get the wall-to-wall coverage this deserves, right? . . . Ah . . . nope! Some coverage, yes, but not nearly enough. It has been only a few days since the report was released and the coverage is already dropping off into the cesspool of “reporting” that masquerades as modern “journalism.”

How Lehman, With The Fed’s Complicity, Created Another Illegal Precedent In Abusing The Primary Dealer Credit Facility

Five months ago, Zero Hedge observed the nuances of the Federal Reserve’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) and concluded that this artificial liquidity boosting construct was nothing more than yet another scam to allow banks to extract ever more money from taxpayers, with the complicit blessing of the Federal Reserve Board Of New York (as the original piece also provided an in-depth discussion of the triparty repo market which is now a parallel to the buzzword of the day in the form of Lehman’s “Repo 105″ off balance sheet contraption, it should serve as a useful refresher course to anyone who wishes to understand why while Repo 105 with its $50 billion in liability contingency may have been an issue, the true Repo market, with over $3 trillion of likely just as toxic assets, is where the real pain in the future will come from). The PDCF would allow assets of declining and even inexistent value to be pledged as collateral, thus making sure that taxpayer cash was funneled into sham institutions holding predominantly toxic assets, and whose viability was and is limited, yet still is backed by the Fed, which to this day continues to pour our money into them. Today, with a tip from the NYT’s Eric Dash, we demonstrate just how grossly negligent the Federal Reserve was when it came to Lehman’s abuse of the PDCF, and how the trail of slime of Lehman’s increasingly obvious manipulation of its books goes to the very top of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and its then governor - a very much complicit Tim Geithner. [read more]

more here- http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=17957