My wife reads murder mysteries for their intrigue, but they have nothing on this series. The COP's first story was replete with the fascinating details of conflicts of interest between agents of the government and Wall Street, and billions of taxpayer dollars handed over to wealthy people, while others without friends in the government were losing their homes and jobs. I have been really looking forward to the next story in the series, and this one doesn't disappoint.
You will get to read about billions of dollars of taxpayer money given to wealthy people OUTSIDE the United States. Imagine if you will the families and the community the money comes from, where the mom (who loves her child) makes $9.25 an hour in a job with some fairly crappy health insurance (that she considers herself lucky to have). Her son sometimes cries on Friday after leaving school, knowing that he will not be able to eat again till the school opens their food program on Monday. (He would have used food stamps, but those were taken away to pay teachers and firefighters). This while our Congress and two different Administrations began or exapanded this program to make sure that people who could spend millions of dollars per year and never run out of money through 3 lifetimes were made whole. People on Wall Street continue to pocket billions of dollars in bonuses from taxes taken out of the checks of people who work with the kid's mom.
Now I know you have to imagine the connections outside of who GETS the money, since the authors don't really go into detail about who WORKED FOR the money. Probably because it would slow the story down too much. But for the astute reader who knows how real that little family is, and where this story intersects with their life, this is gripping drama.
For your reading pleasure,
The financial crisis that peaked in 2008 began in the United States one mortgage at a
time. Millions of people, attracted by the prospect of homeownership or refinancing and low
initial rates, signed mortgages that they could afford only so long as home prices continued to
rise. The mortgages were bundled, chopped into fractional ownership, sold and re-sold, and used
as the basis for huge financial bets. When the housing market collapsed, many borrowers faced
foreclosure, and many investors faced huge losses.
In an earlier era, a mortgage crisis that began in a few regions in the United States might
have ended there as well. But by 2008, the global financial system had become deeply
internationalized and interconnected. Mortgages signed in Florida, California, and Arizona were
securitized, repackaged, and sold to banks and other investors in Europe, Asia, and around the
world. At the same time, other countries were experiencing their own housing booms fueled by
new financial products. The result was a truly global financial crisis.
... The danger was amplified by the high leverage created by
layers of financial products based on the same underlying assets and by the fact that banks
around the world depended on overnight access to funding in dollar-denominated markets.
When short-term lenders began to question the ability of banks to repay their obligations,
markets froze, and the international financial system verged on chaos.
Faced with the possible collapse of their most important financial institutions, many
national governments intervened. One of the main components of the U.S. response was the
$700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), which pumped capital into financial
institutions, guaranteed billions of dollars in debt and troubled assets, and directly purchased
assets. The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve offered further support by allowing banks to
borrow cheaply from the government and by guaranteeing selected pools of assets. Other
nations‟ interventions used the same basic set of policy tools, but with a key difference: While
the United States attempted to stabilize the system by flooding money into as many banks as
possible – including those that had significant overseas operations – most other nations targeted
their efforts more narrowly toward institutions that in many cases had no major U.S. operations.
As a result, it appears likely that America‟s financial rescue had a much greater impact
internationally than other nations‟ programs had on the United States.
...
You can read the rest of this report
here... <- ~2 MB PDF
A list of other repports from the COP are
here...
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
