> Rod Speed
gmail.com> wrote>> Immortalist
yahoo.com> wrote>>> ...NOMI PRINS: The bailout of AIG is an example of the government
>>> having to step in and clean up a mess. It is not so much that
>>> subprime mortgages fell and that caused some losses to AIG. AIG was
>>> acting not simply as an insurance company; it was acting as a
>>> speculative investment bank/hedge fund, as was Bear Stearns, as was
>>> Lehman Brothers, as is what will become Bank of America/Merrill
>>> Lynch. So you have a situation where it's bailing out not just the
>>> money, but taking on the risk of items it cannot even begin to
>>> understand, because if it had understood them, this would never
>>> have gotten to the point to which it has gotten.
>>> AMY GOODMAN: How did it get to this point? How did it go beyond insurance?
>>> NOMI PRINS: In AIG and in Lehman and with Merrill and every other
>>> company on Wall Street that has faltered or is faltering, it's about
>>> taking on too much leverage and borrowing to take on the risk and
>>> borrowing again and borrowing again, twenty-five to thirty times the
>>> amount of capital, the amount of money that they had to basically
>>> back the borrowing that they were doing. Human regular borrowers
>>> cannot do this. This is something that is an item only of the
>>> banking industry.
>>> And not only was all that borrowing happening, but there was no
>>> transparency to the Fed, to the SEC, to the Treasury, to anyone who
>>> would have even bothered to look as to how much of a catastrophe was
>>> being created, so that when anything fell, whether it was the
>>> subprime mortgage or whether it was a credit complex security, it
>>> was all below a pile of immense interlocked, incestuous borrowing,
>>> and that's what is bringing down the entire banking system.
>> How odd that you didnt warn of that before it happened.
> Many did, including me right here .....
No you didnt on the sub prime loans being the problem.
> no one was listening, and if they were they utterly ignored it. From the President down to you.
No prez gives a flying red fuck about you.
