Category Archives: Wall St. Crime
Stock Market Coronavirus Crater Fear
The Dow cratered over 1,000 points on Monday. The stock market appears to have declared a Coronavirus pandemic.
Stock Market Coronavirus Crater
The girl in the picture isn’t any more real than the bull. They’re both statues. But she does have a name. It’s Fearless Girl.
Walk the Walk
Wall Street wasn’t an innocent bystander but Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner pin the blame for the financial meltdown on Fannie Mae in their book Reckless Endangerment. They say Fannie head, James Johnson figured out how to monetize the outfit’s government backing.
Under Johnson, an important Democratic operative, Fannie Mae became, Morgenson and Rosner say, “the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world.” Its power derived from the unstated certainty that the government would be ultimately liable for Fannie’s obligations. This assumption and other perquisites were subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worth an estimated $7 billion a year. They retained about a third of this.
Morgenson and Rosner report that in 1998, when Fannie Mae’s lending hit $1 trillion, its top officials began manipulating the company’s results to generate bonuses for themselves. That year Johnson’s $1.9 million bonus brought his compensation to $21 million. In nine years, Johnson received $100 million.
Fannie Mae’s political machine dispensed campaign contributions, gave jobs to friends and relatives of legislators, hired armies of lobbyists (even paying lobbyists not to lobby against it), paid academics who wrote papers validating the homeownership mania, and spread “charitable” contributions to housing advocates across the congressional map.
Bernie Madoff: Free at Age 220
At least you know where your money went if Bernie stole it.
