Secret Congress. Secret. Wall Street Government.

Now, Congress has the constitutional authority to meet in secret - excluding press and public - whenever they deem necessary. According to Congressional Research Service, since 1830, the House has met in secret four times: 1979, 1980, 1983, and 2008. The report: Secret Sessions of the House and Senate: Authority, Confidentiality, and Frequency.

However, does the U.S. Constitution grant authority to Wall Street and top government officials to conceal pertinent information from Congress and the public?  Well, obviously it doesn't matter because that's what's happening.

The documents show how top US government officials willfully concealed from Congress and the public the true extent of the 2008-'09 bailouts that enriched the few and enhanced the interests of giant Wall Streets firms. Here’s what came out as the result of Bloomberg's investigation:

The secret Wall Street bailouts totaled $7.77 trillion, 10 times more than the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) officially passed by Congress in 2008.

Knowledge of the secret bailout funds was not shared with Congress even while it was drafting and debating legislation to break up the big banks.

The secret loans financed bank mergers so that the largest banks could grow even larger. The money also allowed banks to step up their lobbying efforts.

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Bankster Back Door Bailouts Explained

Girl Bear: "What about the Goldman Sachs? Did they buy another bank?"
Boy Bear: "Because when you already own the U.S. government, you don't need to buy any more banks."

Boy Bear: "Actually, the Goldman Sachs probably profited from the failure of the AIGs".
Girl Bear: "How could someone profit from the downfall of one of their biggest clients?"
Boy Bear: "Because while the Goldman Sachs was loaning money to the AIGs, it was also making a secret bet that they would go under."
Girl Bear: "My god! Is this some kind of science fiction movie? Like the Star Wars?"

Girl Bear: "Are any of the bailouts going on today?"
Boy Bear: "Yes, the Ben Bernanke keeps the short term rate at zero."
Girl Bear: "How is that a bailout?"
Boy Bear: "Low rates means the banks have to pay the American very little interest in their savings accounts?"
Girl Bear: "That is very nice gift from the American people to the banks."
BoyBear: "Yes."
Girl Bear: "And to show their gratitude, did the banks stop their foreclosures?"
Boy Bear: "No".
Girl Bear: "Did they give them mortgages?"
Boy Bear: "No".
Girl Bear: "Did they do anything at all?"
Boy Bear: "Yes, they increased the monthly fees on all bank accounts."
Girl Bear: "That does not sound like the gratitude, that sounds like the screwing over of the American people."

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Sacrificing Real People to Boost an Illusion.

Despite Warren Buffet's huge $5 billion vote of "confidence" in Bank of America, the "too big to fail" institution is slashing 30,000 jobs - after it's already cut 6,000 jobs - in an effort to reverse a crisis of confidence in its investors. It's the single largest job reduction by a US company this year, since the post office cut 30,000 jobs, last year, since General Motors cut 47,000 jobs in 2009. The cuts which effect Bank of America's consumer businesses represent 10% of South Carolina's work force.  This year, when the real unemployment rate is over 20%.

Not to mention the poverty rate in America is rapidly increasing, especially for children under 18. And middle class wealth is falling. 

The government draws the line of poverety at an income of $22,314 a year for a family of four and $11,139 for an individual.  Oh, and Merck is also cutting 13,000 jobs. So, boosting investor confidence? In what? The only thing I can think of is that the uber rich' will continue to get uber uber rich. Because that's the only segment of the population that is benefitting.

Of course, this is nothing new. Banks and corporations often slash jobs in order to boost confidence, boost their bottom line, and whether we want to face it or not, boost the profits in order to line the already lined pockets of the powers behind these institutions. The results - the rich getting richer by the day - prove that this is true.

But isn't there something inherently wrong with a system that sacrifices its people, real people, for an illusion? For excessive profit? To maintain institutions that are too big to fail? Because, after all, confidence is not real. Confidence is often misleading and not congruent with reality, and that often leads to delusion and deception. In fact, over-confidence inflated the housing bubbles that burst in 2008, bringing our economy to its knees. And don't kid yourself, there are a few more bubbles yet to burst. Still, we're willing to sacrifice real people in order to create the illusion that everything is just fine...when, everyday, it seems, it gets worse and worse.

Then, there is the problem that if Bank of America collapses, there may not be enough money in the FDIC to cover the losses that will occur. That's right. Bank of America just might collapse the FDIC. In August, the FDIC rejected Bank of America's mortgage accord because it doesn't have enough money information to evaluate the settlement.

And I thought this was interesting. Adulos Huxley, from zerohedge posted a Goldman Sachs Case Study that may or may not predict

Buffett branding is just a first line of defense in the rescue plan.

9/15/2008 | GS=$131 | Lehman Bros files for Ch. 11

9/16/2008 | GS=$129 | AIG bailed out

9/23/2008 | GS=$121 | Buffett buys $5B of GS @ $115/share (under market)

10/3/2008 | GS=$124 | TARP made into law

10/28/2008 | GS=$91 | US Treasury buys $10B of GS @ $122.9/share (over market)

11/21/2008 | GS=$47.41 | low

11/24/2008 | GS=$65 | QE 1 begins; Fed buys MBS

For Banksters of America, we can expect same order of bailouts about a month apart with BAC falling 20-30% each interval:

8/25/2011 Buffett (private deal)

9/23/2011 US Treasury (federal)

10/28/2011 QE 3 (international overlord)

It does make one wonder why such a savvy investor like Buffet would invest $5 billion into what appears to be a powderkeg of debt.

Links:

Bankrate.com
Poverty Call to Conscience Tour

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James Bond on Crack?

I've always envisioned God as a Louie B. Mayer type, the world, His MGM studios. Only in God's studio, the "stars" have the freedom to improvise. There are no scripts...or at least, the stars are unaware, if they should exist.

Anyway, once upon a time, billions of years ago, God was feeling lonely and bored so he created the world and populated it with all sorts of organisms, from simple to the most complex. These multifaceted organisms entertained him for a while; however, something was missing...an emotional richness, a certain kind of creative intelligence...a paradoxical complexity that these creations seemed to lack. Not to say He didn't love these things, He most certainly did, but they were a little too predictable...too sensible.

Then, while perched upon a a celestial body of hot gases, it came to Him.

"I'll create a form of life in my own image. I will etch each one with my signature, and give this being a mind and the full spectrum of emotions all his or her own. This entity will be conscious of its own existence, conscious of its own mortality, and unlike anything I've ever created, this being will have the ability to transcend its instincts, if he so chooses, either to ascend to a higher plane of existence, or descend to lower planes.

This will most assuredly produce a great mix of irony, drama, tragedy,  and unfortunately, sometimes, horror. But the saving grace in this mix will be joy, the triumph of this creation's spirit, and of course, comedy, albeit, sometimes very dark comedy."

Well, it worked.  Today, His "studio" makes MGM look like preschool Barbie Doll productions.  Between the greedy power-grabbing control-freak elitist psychopathic thugs at the top - who create and/or support $700 billion government bailout programs for their friends, the banksters,  crazy-assed puppet dictators around the globe, Federal Reserve trillion dollar giveaways to globalist billionaires, Department of Defense trillion dollar shortages, underwear bombers, shoe bombers - and the sheeple people at the bottom (the middle is fading fast), too enthralled by the lives of freaky celebrities to pay attention, the show would be hilarious, if not so tragic.

What's the latest in this everlasting episode of "James Bond on Crack?" 

“Precious Treasure Holiday Company” What's this? You guessed it. An undercover porn site hosted by Homeland Security. I mean, what else could it be, right?

In an aggressive bid to entice prospective “sex tourists,” the Department of Homeland Security last year launched an undercover web site that purported to arrange trips from the U.S. to Canada, where clients could engage in sexual activity with minors, The Smoking Gun has learned.

What is it they say about cockroaches? For every one you see, there are thousands.

Then, we have Nano-Hummingbird, , the bird-drone with a $4 million price tag that can fly forward, backward, sideways, and it can even hover in mid-air.

The next time you enjoy the sight of a hummingbird in a garden, you might want to look twice–because it could be the government’s new avian-inspired drone. Dubbed “Nano Hummingbird,” this camera-toting, remote-controlled surveillance tool is the latest gadget to fly out the doors of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency).

And, let's not forget "Big Brother" drone who can see inside houses.

It seems that there's just no escape from 'Big Brother' seeing into our lives.

Now police in Miami, Florida, have unveiled their latest crime-fighting tool that is literally an 'eye in the sky'.

Oh, and no need to worry about TARP funds, the TARP police are on the job. That is, after they get upgrades to their fleet of police cars.

Huh? You mean the mild-mannered auditors who mind the taxpayer money in the $700-plus billion TARP program? What do they need police car upgrades for?

It may come as a surprise to people in the financial industry — it certainly did to me — but TARP's inspector general (SIGTARP) is not just a financial watchdog. Under its outgoing leader, Neil Barofsky, it has quietly built itself into a full-fledged financial law enforcement agency.

Yes, just what we need, another law enforcement outfit to run amok.

Which brings us to Project Gunrunner. The ATF operation that allowed thousands of weapons to be purchased by gun smugglers in the US, taken to Mexico, and you guessed it...sold to drug-cartel thugs. Not all of ATF agents approved, however.  They begged their superiors to shut this operation down, but were blatantly ignored.

Well, of course, the United States was, and probably still is a major arming source of the Mexican drug cartel. If the US wanted to end the slaughter right across the border, it would've been stopped long ago.  But, like it or not, we, the people depend on the "war on drugs" industry to fuel our economy.

Not to mention, the drug kingpin of kingpins is none other than the  Department of Justice. But that's a story for another day.

BTW, where was the mainstream media on this?  Senator Charles Grassley sent letters to the ATF as early as Jan. 27.

More proof that James Bond's on crack links:

FBI Intelligence Bulletin: Symbols and Logos Used by Pedophiles to Identify Sexual Preferences

Welfare State: Handouts Make Up One-Third of U.S. Wages

Department of Homelad Security Concludes They Have Authority to Monitor Political Activities of Advocacy Groups

Secret FBI, CIA Documents and Sex Video Tapes Found At Egypt’s Terror Police Headquarters

Secret CIA spy gadgets go public

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Reform Passes But Six Banks With More than $9 Trillion in Assets Still Dominate

After an economic crisis that pushed the banking industry to the brink of collapse, froze credit markets, and led to $700 billion in taxpayer bailouts, the toughest set of market rules since the Great Depression will soon become law, with Senate passage of the legislation hours ago. The bill will promote financial stability by improving accountability and transparency in the financial system, improve oversight, bolster consumer protection, and reform the derivatives market, amongst other things. Sounds pretty good so far, right?

Well, when you consider President Obama's 90-page white paper that he proposed back in June 2009 grew to a 2,300-page bill due to the addition of lobbied provisions that no doubt diluted the Bank Act considerably, one has to wonder if the bill tackles the rot at the very core of our financial system. The overhaul won’t shrink banks deemed too big to fail, and it leaves intact a financial industry dominated by six banks with more than $9 trillion of combined assets.

Yet, at the end of the day, essentially nothing in the entire legislation will reduce the potential for massive system risk as we head into the next credit cycle. -- Simon Johnson

While the reform has now been passed, it leaves plenty of unanswered questions:

“Although we agree that there needs to be careful consideration and application of the legislation, the outcome in the short run seems to be that banks continue to conserve capital and maintain excess levels of liquidity while they await the final rules. This could have the effect of dampening economic growth and delaying the economic recovery, until there is a clearer picture of where some of these major issues will shake out,” CreditSights says.

Moreover, it is not convinced that the bill does enough to correct the problems in the financial industry that led to the crisis in the first place. CreditSights argues that the bill doesn’t do enough to improve the credit risk assessment process, and does not address the frequent power imbalance between the front office exposure originators/traders and the back-office risk managers. It also worries that the new oversight bodies are comprised of regulators and central bankers who missed the red flags leading up to the crisis in the first place.

Raters and regulators must be independent of, and possess the authority needed to gain the respect of the banksters, otherwise financial reform is meaningless.

The deregulation of the last 30 years has all but destroyed the the banking reforms and size caps on the banks imposed in the 1930s. However, The Kanjorski Amendment , part of the Dodd-Frank bill gives federal regulators the right and the responsibility to limit big banks and break them up if and when they pose a “grave risk” to financial stability.

So, while regulators can be very effective in curbing the abuses that led us to the brink of financial collapse in 2008, they must have the power to instill the fear of severe consequences should the banksters step out of line.

“The key lesson of the last decade is that financial regulators must use their powers, rather than coddle industry interests.” --Representative Paul Kanjorski,

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Follow-the-Money and Be-on-the Alert Links

ProPublica should be a must-read for every American. It is an independent, non-profit newsroom that really and truly produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Their work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” They do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

Investigative journalism is at risk. Many news organizations have increasingly come to see it as a luxury. Today’s investigative reporters lack resources: Time and budget constraints are curbing the ability of journalists not specifically designated “investigative” to do this kind of reporting in addition to their regular beats. This is therefore a moment when new models are necessary to carry forward some of the great work of journalism in the public interest that is such an integral part of self-government, and thus an important bulwark of our democracy.

The business crisis in publishing and — not unrelated — the revolution in publishing technology are having a number of wide-ranging effects. Among these are that the creation of original journalism in the public interest, and particularly the form that has come to be known as “investigative reporting,” is being squeezed down, and in some cases out.

Here is an investigation everyone should read:

In the Loop: Pay Day Lenders Extensive, Expensive Ties to Washington Power Players. Charging interest rates as high as 400% to mostly the working-class, Pay-day lenders' "connections in the capital make clear that the industry has quietly -- and in a remarkably short time -- enmeshed itself into a network of Washington influence-peddlers skilled at putting a favorable sheen on a host of corporate causes."

Links to monitor:

Bailout Watch - is a collaborative effort to research, investigate, and analyze the federal government's bailout activities and publish resources and data for policymakers, the media, and interested citizens. Bailout Watch draws upon the expertise and resources of the partner organizations to identify specific data that should be disclosed (and made available in an online, indexed, searchable format), research and investigate government decision-making processes related to the bailout, and provide analysis and commentary about the effectiveness of different bailout programs.

Change Tracker - ProPublica has set up a page, with a feed, that monitors any changes to whitehouse.gov, recovery.gov, and financialstability.gov. Whenever there’s a change to any page on these sites, it’s noted in the feed. You can then view the old and new versions of the page side by side, with the changes highlighted.

Eye on Bailout Money

* A complete list of where the money's going, from AIG to the smallest community bank
* A map that charts all the bailed-out companies
* A timeline of major bailout events
* A running total of how much of the TARP bailout money has been committed
* Graphical breakdowns and plain language descriptions of the Treasury Department's bailout programs without confusing government acronyms
* A list of the banks that have returned the bailout money
* A snapshot of how mortgage servicers are performing in the foreclosure prevention program.
* The latest on the bailout from our blog and our links to the best bailout reporting

The Missing Memos ProPublica memo depository of the missing memos regarding legalities involving detainees, rendition, eavesdropping, using the military within the US, and free speech.

Open the Government is concerned that our government keeps from the American public information that we need to make our families safe, secure our country and strengthen democracy, a broad-based set of organizations formed OpenTheGovernment.org.

Side by Side Health Care Bills compare the Senate version of the health care reform bill with what it will look like with the House's changes.

Subsidyscope’s Financial Bailout Project. pulls together data on the financial institutions that are receiving benefits from the various federal programs so users can understand how and where taxpayer dollars are being spent.

It happened once:

“Army Surveillance of Civilians” (1972) - A Documentary Analysis” by the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate

“The following report by the Subcommittee staff analyzes certain computer print-outs and publications generated in the course of the Army’s domestic intelligence program.”

“The overwhelming majority of the reports pertain to the peaceful activites of nonviolent citizens lawfully exercising their constitutional rights of speech, press, religion, association, and petition.”

“These files confirm what we learned first from former intelligence agents – that Army intelligence, in the name of preparedness and security, had developed a massive system for monitoring virtually all political protest in the United States. In doing so, it was not content with observing at arms length; Army agents repeatedly infiltrated civilian groups. Moreover, the information they reported was not confined to acts or plans for violence, but included much private information about peoples’ finances, psychiatric records, and sex lives.”

“The size of these and other data banks confirms that the Army’s domestic intelligence operations did not begin with the Newark and Detroit riots of 1967. The events of that summer only expanded activities which had been going on, in varying degrees of intensity, since 1940, and which has its roots as far back as World War I.”

Maplight illuminating maps of all types

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Goldman Sachs Takes Advantage of Taxpayers Underpinning Financial System

Goldman's big profits and megabonuses, came as the US federal budget deficit hit $1.4 trillion - the highest since 1945. However that doesn't seem to concern Lloyd Blankfein - who, in 2007, when the economy was melting down, as chairman of Goldman Sachs, was paid a bonus of $67.9 million, and whose bonus this year could top that number - spoke at a Fortune magazine breakfast a few weeks ago, and he said, re. accepting TARP funds:

“If I had known it was as pregnant with this kind of potential for backlash, then of course I would have really not have liked it.”

These huge payouts, almost 50% of Goldman's revenue, would not be possible without the billions of dollars from taxpayers that have propped up the financial system. In addition, as George Soros said, "Banks are actually getting hidden subsidies of enormous amounts because of their ability to borrow at effectively zero, and buy 10-year government bonds at 3.5 per cent. So those earnings are not the achievement of risk-takers. These are gifts, hidden gifts, from the Government, so I don't think those monies should be used to pay bonuses."

Oh, and speaking of getting paid for nothing, Goldman Sachs continues to get paid for swaps on redeemed bonds.

New Jersey taxpayers are sending almost $1 million a month to a partnership run by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for protection against rising interest costs on bonds that the state redeemed more than a year ago.

How much longer should we allow these superbanks to feed off the American public?
As long as we allow the existence of financial institutions that are too big to fail, the banks will continue to suck the life out of each and every one of us.

There are people who want to change things, for instance, Paul Volcker, who wants to break up the giant banks, so why isn't President Obama listening to Paul Volcker?

"People say I'm old-fashioned and banks can no longer be separated from nonbank activity. That argument brought us to where we are today." -- Paul Volcker

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If Big Banks Are Terrorists, It's Even More Important We Don't Give In.

In an attempt to explain why the government needed to bail out the troubled banks, President Obama said that AIG is like a suicide bomber.

“We had to step in, it was the right thing to do, even though it is infuriating. The same is true with AIG. It was the right thing to do to step in. Here’s the problem. It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.

While that may be true, it is the policy of the United States not to give in to terrorism. We've already eased their fingers off the trigger. At this point, as we enter the second or third phase of the bailout, it's important that we, the people take a stand and tell the financial sector that they do not run this country. We can start by standing up to Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America.

Take Goldman Sachs, who wants to pay back the $10 billion it borrowed from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Sounds like a good thing, right?

Wrong, according to former International Monetary Fund chief economist, Simon Johnson, currently Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management, in addition to senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, co-founder of BaselineScenario.com, and a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers

Initially, the government wanted to carefully manage the flow of information regarding the results of the stress tests that Obama ordered on 19 banks, because any time that kind of sensitive information is revealed, the risk of destabilizing the markets becomes much greater, and increases the pressure on rival banks, who are not ready to pay back TARP funds, by undermining their business models and hindering thier ability to raise capital, possibly putting them in a position of needing more TARP money.

Goldman Sachs, by announcing that they plan to pay back the TARP money, contingent upon the results of the stress test, sent a strong signal that they were going to ace it. This, of course would greatly tilt the playing field to Goldman Sachs' advantage, something we don't want at a time when "too big to fail" is something we are trying to discourage, especially considering that big financial players are even bigger now that Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. have been eliminated.

Goldman Sachs still receives government assistance created last Fall when the crisis came to a head, that take several forms - access to credit from the Federal Reserve made possible by government allowing them to change legal forms in the midst of the crisis; government (FDIC) backing or guarantee of loans; $13 billion dollars that they received through the AIG bailout, due to thier counter party status to AIG that Goldman will never have to pay back, etc. At the same time that Goldman Sachs receives the continuing support of the government, by paying the TARP money back, Goldman Sachs can remove all the constraints set by the government, including the restrictions on executive pay, the very thing that contributed to the current finanical meltdown.

The very nature of these compensantion schemes encouraged and greatly rewarded the risk taking that brought our financial system to the brink of disaster.

In Simon Johnson's article "The Quiet Coup" in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Johnson explains that in order to improve our economy, we must break the power of the financial oligarchy that is blocking reform. If we do not break this power structure, and allow the financial sector to take back its authority America could face a crisis that in Johnson's words, "could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression — because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big."

"We face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support." - Simon Johnson

If we've learned anything from this financial crisis, it should be that big business is only interested in bigger business, nothing else, therefore we should ask Goldman Sachs, "What's in it for you, and what do we have to lose?" The answer is: everything... to both questions.

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Does TARP + TALF = SCAM?

Back in November, I blogged that Henry Paulson's "the sky is falling" reaction in September was staged (In this crash for cash scheme, the criminals targeted innocent taxpayers) in order to panic we the people and Congress, so that he could shove Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) down our throats with no provisions to pay taxpayers back, and even more importantly, no limits or penalties on top executives - can't forget the three-page Paulson Doctrine declaring him ruler of the universe.

“Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day, another couple of thousand the second day, and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no.” -- Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman

When Senator James Inhofe was asked who was issuing the warnings of a depression and marital law prior to the bailout being passed, Inhofe responded:

“That’s Henry Paulson. We had a conference call early on, it was on a Friday I think – a week and half before the vote on Oct. 1. So it would have been the middle … what was it – the 19th of September, we had a conference call. In this conference call – and I guess there’s no reason for me not to repeat what he said, but he said – he painted this picture you just described. He said, ‘This is serious. This is the most serious thing that we faced. He said the crisis would be far worse than the great depression if Congress didn’t authorize the bill to buy out toxic debt, a proposal which he abandoned the day after he got the money."

On February 20, Dean Baker posted, Did Ben Bernanke pull the TARP over our Eyes? in his blog, Beat the Press and stated the "reason" for this urgency:

One of the important factors behind the urgency was the claim that even healthy non-financial companies (e.g. Verizon or Boeing) could not borrow in commercial paper markets to get the credit they needed to meet their payrolls and pay their other bills. Ben Bernanke contributed to this view when he answered a question at a press conference:

"I see the financial markets as already quite fragile. The credit markets aren't working. Corporations aren't able to finance themselves through commercial paper."

The weekend after Congress passed the TARP, Bernanke announced that the Fed would begin to directly buy the commercial paper of non-financial corporations.

Baker then provides new evidence that the September panic might have been nothing more than an act

At a speech at the Press Club this week, Bernanke was asked why he waited until after the TARP was approved before he began buying up commercial paper of non-financial corporations. He responded:

"Well, look at the calendar. The financial crisis intensified in mid-September and got worse to the point where there was a huge global financial crisis in early October. During that interim, Congress passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which includes the TARP. And that TARP, the money there was very useful in helping to stabilize the banking system in early October. There was this critical moment. I think it was about the 14th of October, following a G7 meeting here in Washington, where not The United States but countries around the world took very strong actions in terms of capital, in terms of guarantees and other actions to try to stabilize the world banking
system.

It was during this period that the commercial paper market and the money markets, money market mutual funds showed the worst stress. It was in those 18 weeks that that stress appeared and those markets began to dysfunction. And we can't set these programs up immediately. It takes a bit of time to get them structured legally and to arrange for the market terms and to work with market participants and so on. But we got it going actually quite quickly. It's been now more than three months since the commercial paper facility has been functioning. And it seems to have had notable impact on both commercial paper rates and on the terms of finance available."

Now, in addition to TARP, another four-lettered acronym can be added to the effort to thaw out credit and restore lending: TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility). The idea behind TALF is that "lenders using the TALF would be willing to retain more of the risk associated with loans on their own books to get deals done. That should help ensure that lenders make better-quality loans in the future, because they will be liable for most of the losses."

However, according to Simon Johnson, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, TALF will provide "government subsidies to investors like hedge funds. Investors who borrow from the Fed could enjoy annual returns of 20 percent or more."

Is Tim Geithner, Henry Paulson 2.0? As Mike Whitney says, “a Trojan Horse for the banking oligarchs”?

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