Does Obama's Bank Bailout Fund = Perpetual Financial Fraud?

[WhiskeyGirl]

The Obama administration is calling its proposed $90 billion bank tax the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee, and its salesman is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Who ends up paying this tax?  It sounds like a VAT tax on some banks, paid for by Main Street.  If banks do bad things in the future, why not send their leaders and those who come up with and implement the bad ideas to jail?

“Never again should the government bail out a bank or watch the economy implode,” Biden said. “This is a big deal, at a time that matters that we get it right, that we get the shady credit default swaps under control and put things on the level again. What people are upset about is that they don't think things are on the level.”

What is the motivation to get the "shady credit default swaps under control"  when Obama is creating a perpetual bailout fund?

Why not send these folks to jail?  Instead of bailout out Greece why not let them have the bankers?

Why is it that none of the bankers have been send to jail?

Why haven't the INDIVIDUAL bankers been held accountable for their actions and deal making?

Unlike much of the other reporting on the proposed bank tax, the above-cited Reuters story also mentions that the Obama tax plan is actually aimed at reviving the global bank tax proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and G-20 leaders. Again from Reuters:

Proposals for a global bank levy ran into stiff resistance at meetings of the International Monetary Fund and Group of 20 last month. Geithner's testimony showed the U.S. administration is still pushing on with some form of charge....

He said Treasury was working with other governments that were considering a similar fee but didn't identify them. The International Monetary Fund proposed a coordinated global bank levy to pay for future bailouts but some governments, including Canada, were vehemently opposed.

The Obama administration is pressing ahead with its own plan, which Geithner said it is trying to design "in a way that improves the chances that other governments will adopt similar measures."

more here - http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/economy/commentary-mainmenu-43/3490-is-obamas-bank-tax-a-prelude-to-a-global-tax

Why should Main Street in any nation or state pay for a perpetual bankers bailout fund?

Why aren't these bankers and those that make the bad deals, and gamble away all our futures losing their freedom and 'wealth'?

[WhiskeyGirl]

Friends helping friends?

Ignoring the Elephant in the Bailout
May 10, 2010, 4:46 am

From Gretchen Morgenson’s latest Fair Game column:

If you blinked, you might have missed the ugly first-quarter report last week from Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giant that, along with its sister Fannie Mae, soldiers on as one of the financial world’s biggest wards of the state.

Freddie — already propped up with $52 billion in taxpayer funds used to rescue the company from its own mistakes — recorded a loss of $6.7 billion and said it would require an additional $10.6 billion from taxpayers to shore up its financial position.

Mr. Baker’s concern that Freddie may be racking up losses by overpaying for mortgages derives from his suspicion that the government might be encouraging it to do so as a way to bolster the operations of mortgage lenders.

That would make Fannie’s and Freddie’s mortgage-buying yet another backdoor bailout of the nation’s banks, Mr. Baker said, and could explain the government’s reluctance to include them in the reform efforts now being so hotly debated in Washington.

“If they are deliberately paying too much for mortgages to support the banks,” Mr. Baker said, “the government wants them to be in a position to keep doing that, and that would mean not doing anything about their status until further down the road.”

It’s no surprise that the government doesn’t want to acknowledge the soaring taxpayer costs associated with these mortgage zombies. The truth about Fannie and Freddie has always been hard to come by in Washington, and huge piles of money seem to circulate silently around both firms.

More here - http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/ignoring-the-elephant-in-the-bailout/?src=busln

Kicking another can into the future?

Main Street continuing to bailout Wall Street?  Fraud mortgages?  Liar loans?

[WhiskeyGirl]

"It’s Time for the Big Banks to Spin Off their Craps Tables"

Last week’s “flash crash,” which sent stocks plummeting 1,000 points in an afternoon, was just the latest indicator that the U.S. financial system is still spinning out of control and desperately in need of new rules.

Right now, the largest banks, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley control over 90 percent of the swaps market. Their activities do nothing to build the real economy, but are key to inflating Wall Street’s outsized salaries. Goldman has not only been caught betting against America on the collapse of the housing market, it was also caught betting on the collapse of a trucking firm that employed 30,000 Americans. Goldman has peddled its toxic dreck to cities and towns  around the world who have enough troubles and really do not need to be conned and impoverished by Wall Street behemoths. Now Greece is in flames and some U.S. banks and their destructive swaps and indices may be playing a role in that evolving tragedy.

And Obama want's a perpetual bailout fund?  A new bank tax?

more here - http://www.prwatch.org/node/9049

Instead of bailouts, why aren't these folks in jail?  Why don't they lose their fortunes?  Homes?  Jobs?