OK. This just made me sick to my stomach. You know all those billions of dollars that the government has been throwing at AIG. Well AIG has been turning around and handing it off to other financial institutions - by the billions!
- $13 billion went to Goldman Sachs
- $12 billion went to Soc Gen
- $12 billion went to Deutsche Bank
- $9 billion went to Barclays
- $7 billion went to Merrill Lynch
- $5 billion went to Bank of America
- etc. for a total of $93 billion
But regardless, the Fed was using AIG to launder government money! Much of the money went to foreign banks! No wonder the Fed tried to keep it secret. I just wonder what forced them to reveal this information publicly and how much more they are hiding.
Just recently Goldman Sachs said they wanted to pay back the money from the TARP so they could get out from under any government restrictions on their operations. Now we find out that in addition to the billions that they received directly from the TARP, they also received an extra $13 billion of laundered money from AIG. And no doubt they have no intention of paying that money back. Do you see why this makes me ill just to think about it. This is a massive criminal fraud that is being perpetrated on the American public! Fed Chairman Bernanke should be fired for this!
I would say that I'm not surprised, if it weren't for the huge sums involved. In fact I'm shocked. Will this be the straw that finally breaks the camel's back and results in the American people demanding that all the TARP funds be returned and that all of these corporate crooks go to jail? How is Geithner going to respond to this when as the former head of the New York Fed he is one of the perpetrators of this crime?
This is corruption at a scale that was unimaginable to me. I feel so naive. And remember that Treasury Secretary Paulson is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. I was so right when I wrote those articles months ago calling him a Wall St. gangsta. I had no idea how right I was. How much other corruption like this is going on that we still don't know about. This demands an investigation on a massive scale. But as I have said before don't expect Congress to come to the rescue. They are just as much a part of this scandal as the Fed and the Wall St. banksters.
And don't forget that Obama's biggest campaign contributor was Goldman Sachs employees. Still I can't see that the American people are going to remain silent while this is going on. Congress will have to do something. They will have to put on a show of going after the guilty while covering their own butts. This could get interesting. The finger pointing will begin in earnest. Everyone pointing the finger at everyone else while covering their butts.
I've said from the beginning that this whole bailout was just a way of preserving Wall Street's gigantic Ponzi scheme. This was before the Madoff scandal broke. Back then when I talked about a Ponzi scheme, most people were unfamiliar with the term. Well now that you know what it is, think about how this bubble was created and how it burst. That is exactly what a Ponzi scheme looks like. A huge increase in assets followed by a sudden collapse. Why? Because the assets never existed in the first place except on paper. Because the whole thing was a fraud; a confidence game.
Now don't you wish you had called your congresspeople and demanded that they vote against the bailout like I suggested? The only ones benefiting from the bailout are the billionaire bankers. The rest of us are getting screwed by layoffs and foreclosures. It's time to stop saving the billionaires and lock them up instead.
P.S. I know the cartoon image depicted at the top of the article is off topic since it relates to Defense department spending. Still I think it is appropriate because of the finger pointing and the hand in the cookie jar. The general discourse about the financial crisis does not commonly include terms like corruption, bribes, kickbacks but I think it should. Some people are getting fat and rich while the taxpayer is being stuck with the bill. Just think of Bernanke on 60 Minutes pointing the finger at AIG while he was trying to keep his money laundering activities secret.
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