Wikileaks: Banks were insolvent as of 2008. As in : broke.

[dixiegrrrrl]

Which a lot of us pretty much figured, back then.
And now.

Monday, 17 March 2008, 18:27
C O N F I D E N T I A L LONDON 000797
SIPDIS
NOFORN
SIPDIS
EO 12958 DECL: 03/17/2018
TAGS ECON, EFIN, UK
SUBJECT: BANKING CRISIS NOW ONE OF SOLVENCY NOT LIQUIDITY
SAYS BANK OF ENGLAND GOVERNOR

King suggested that the U.S., UK, Switzerland, and perhaps Japan might form a temporary new group to jointly develop an effort to bring together sources of capital to recapitalize all major banks. END SUMMARY

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/146196

[tridim]

1. Yet they still all took bonuses..

Record bonuses, year after year.

[msongs]

2. and still do and still will even their businesses collapse completely lol nt

[txlibdem]

17. And the top banks that were "too big to fail" are now EVEN LARGER than they were pre-crisis

Aint that just lovely! Saw that on the Ed Show.

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. I had a horrible terrible thought.

What would it take to get people's minds off the bank and foreclosure fraud?

Something big.
something VERY big.

Something we could blame on terrorists and/or N.Korea.

"Another Pearl Harbor"
and now we got Homeland Security telling us a nuke strike is survivable.

After Sept 2001, nothing surprises me anymore.

[Sonoman]

4. Nothing should surprise you.

No matter how scary and evil you may think may be out there, it is worse.

I have family and friends who operate at very high levels of finance and industry and all they care about - their very core, driving force - is power and money.

My cousin was - after Enron - the single biggest contributor to boosh and the GOP until this last election. Sit in a room with him for a few hours and you will have trouble sleeping for weeks.

We bang around on this site while they never stop.

Never, not for one moment.

Sonoman

[leveymg]

5. Your cousin has one thing going for him - he understands how FUBAR the US financial system is

He probably doesn't sleep very well, either. Even downing a $700 bottle of wine with dinner probably can't solve that.

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. Always nice to hear..I think... what others call paranoia is really....reality.

Confirmed: it IS as bad as some of us think it is.

Yikes!!!!

[jtuck004]

9. What I am afraid of is how little it would take. Dancing like the Stars

or American Idle, or a college football game.

Except for a few people on boards like this, a bit on the teevee, and a few people still making money
hand-over-fist in investment banks, I don't think it sunk into most people's heads enough to
stay. And when they do think about it they blame people with no money who could not possibly have
known enough to create those loans.

[girl gone mad]

7. Nothing has changed, they are still insolvent..

we said all along it was an insolvency crisis being treated as if it were a liquidity crisis, which means that the core issues were never resolved.

[dixiegrrrrl]

18. which means the core issues are still threatening us.

People are amazed at how long they can keep the ball in the air.

[ixion]

22. exactly...

several trillion dollars printed and borrowed later, the problem still exists, and in fact has been made worse by our reaction to it.

[pokercat999]

8. Since 200X (not sure of the year) banks in the US no longer

"mark to market". That is they mark their collateral such as real estate to the value it HAD when the loan was issued. Their collateral is now worth about 50-60% of loan value. The game the government is allowing them to play is extend and pretend. All in the hopes that real estate prices will recover but it may be 20 years or more before prices return to 2006/7 levels, if ever.

[bemildred]

10. Socialism for the rich, feudalism for the poor. nt

[txlibdem]

11. Yup. Never forget that Capitalism would have died 150 years ago but for raiding the public till

There have been dozens of crashes of the Capitalist System over the past 150 years. Another poster put up a link but I can't find it right now. The facts: Capitalism will always destroy itself, and needs constant influx of tax payer money and new exploitable labor in order to survive. Doesn't that sound like a vampire or a leech?!?

My advice: Kill Capitalism before it Kills Us All!

[bemildred]

12. That idea has been worked over many times.

The fundamental problem is exponential growth, which is ALWAYS infeasible in the long run, usually in the short run too, like a decade or two. So you get boom and bust economics instead of stability, which is like duh? what we see everyday.

[txlibdem]

13. So we're agreed: kill Capitalism before it kills us all

What say ye?

[bemildred]

14. I like hybrid economies.

Private enterprise for private persons, vigorous government regulation and intervention, progressive high taxation at the top of the profit curve, income redistribution, high taxation of large estates, severe curtailment of corporations, economic democracy, with a steady-state sustainable economy as the planning goal, with technological development as the primary "growth" driver. I am reluctant to get into wars over simple-minded economic dogmas like "Capitalism" as it is commonly used.

[txlibdem]

16. That's a good answer: you agree with 92% of the American public then

92 percent prefer Swedish model to US model when given a choice

Americans generally underestimate the degree of income inequality in the United States, and if given a choice, would distribute wealth in a similar way to the social democracies of Scandinavia, a new study finds.

For decades, polls have shown that a plurality of Americans -- around 40 percent -- consider themselves conservative, while only around 20 percent self-identify as liberals. But a new study from two noted economists casts doubt on what values lie beneath those political labels.

According to research (PDF) carried out by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University, and flagged by Paul Kedrosky at the Infectious Greed blog, 92 percent of Americans would choose to live in a society with far less income disparity than the US, choosing Sweden's model over that of the US.

What's more, the study's authors say that this applies to people of all income levels and all political leanings: The poor and the rich, Democrats and Republicans are all equally likely to choose the Swedish model.

But the study also found that respondents preferred Sweden's model over a model of perfect income equality for everyone, "suggesting that Americans prefer some inequality to perfect equality, but not to the degree currently present in the United States," the authors state.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/poll-wealth-distribution-similar-sweden/

Sweden has been a very stable Democracy and has much to recommend it. But --and a very big but it is-- they are suffering this Capitalist meltdown along with everyone else in the world. As long as you tie your economy to the Capitalist model you are subject to its whims and Big Bank ponzi schemes. Sweden had a collapse in the 1990's:

In the early 1990s, a massive Swedish real estate bubble burst, littering the Nordic economy with broken finance companies, failing businesses and jobless workers. It was the first systemic banking crisis in an industrialized country since the 1930s and it saw the Swedish economy actually shrink for three straight years

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-04-01-sweden-financial-crisis_N.htm

It's not simplistic to say "get rid of Capitalism." It's simplistic to think that you can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Everyone wants the "easy" way out. Nobody wants to actually work or expend any effort to get the world they would wish to live in. Well, dreaming and fantasy only get you so far. You have to vote for candidates like Bernie Sanders (a Socialist) and fight the moneyed power with every fiber of your being. That is how you make the world a better place for your children.

[bemildred]

20. Thank you. nt

[Lorien]

15. That's exactly it. nt

[howaboutme]

19. That means years of ILL-GOTTEN compensation

have illegally leveraged corrupt power.

They had ill-gotten wealth, then they had nothing, and thanks to corrupt politicians in both Parties and taxpayers they now have wealth and power again.

These banksters have had a long history of leveraging their perceived wealth into more wealth but more importantly leveraging it into political power. It has always been corrupt. It all comes down to the abundance of elite Harvard MBA's and bankster financiers and a penchant for ILL-GOTTEN power.

I'm a believer that the people should spend Christmas sharpening and polishing the pitchforks if only to allow the elite to think more about country interests than self interests.

[txlibdem]

21. Oh, I've got my pitchforks at the ready alright

But they are not polished. They are rusty and have dirt smears and germs all over them. That way the Capitalists will get tetanus and a disease, deserving nothing less.

[Matariki]

23. Now they are looking at any available pool of cash to pilfer - like Social Security

and European pensions.