Considering the only time a senator had to take the floor to filibuster was when Reid made fellow Democrat Dodd do it on FISA (no Republican ever has to really filibuster) I fully expect Bernie Sanders’ hold to be ignored. He’s not a Republican, so he doesn’t count. As for Republicans joining in, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Bunning is on Banking, and he’s the only Senator to vote against Bernanke’s confirmation last time. DeMint has been on the warpath too.

Corker, OTOH, wants to give him a foot massage.

Good job. My recollection is John Reed unceremoniously ushered Jamie Dimon out of Citicorp for his uncovered & highly leveraged bets. In these times that alone probably qualifies Dimon as Bernanke’s replacement.
ps. There’s nothing Dodd can do or say to surprise those who’ve been paying attention.

Does that make Bunning the strongest candidate to be the Republican who will also place a hold?

OT – but, just letting you know my sister and I will do one of the phone bank shifts. Just picking the date. Thank you for setting it in place.

Typo [I think]:

$678 from Securities & Investment,

Did he really only get $700 from these clowns? Or are there some other numbers, plus a comma, to follow?

Corker, OTOH, wants to give him a foot massage.

Or perhaps he’s been consulting Dick Morris on the joys of toe sucking.

Funny how Reid gets a spine after he gets some cash. Forget Viagra for a politician Dem or GOP Cash is it!

The joys of aged extra Toe Cheese? The joys of toe cheese after drinking a pitcher of Garlic Lemonade and walking a mile with 2 pairs of socks on? The Joys of Toe Cheese after a week of not changing your socks.

When people get sick of politicians its this stuff that turns them off.

If we do get an audit of the Fed well I wonder who else they gave money to besides the banks? Or did the unaccounted for money really go to the banks, its just the banks did not want to report that they really were in that big of trouble?
Of course Friends of Bush did they get some of this unaccounted for cash?
Just what is Helicopter Ben hiding? Any Bets Ben commits suicide before any audit of the Fed Happens?

Will Reid and Dodd opt for transparency, or will they cover for the Fed, and the bankers–like JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon–who run it?

Rhetorical Q.

I must say I enjoyed Bunning’s every word. A once-in-a-lifetime event.

The original rationale for hiding who got what was that such knowledge might further damage already weak banks. But as has been pointed out by many others besides me, so many banks, even the TBTF, I should say especially the TBTF that there is no longer any particular stigma associated with such deals.

The real dirt is that a lot of the repos the Fed took on were for assets whose real value was far below the face value at which the repo was executed. That is the very definition of a fraud.

The banks are INSOLVENT, still!

Nomi Prins – former managing director of Goldman Sachs and head of the international analytics group at Bear Stearns in London – is saying the same thing that financial bloggers have been saying: The giant banks are manipulating their books to make themselves look profitable.

In fact, Prins says that this might be worse than the fraud which occurred at Enron:

Enron was the financial scandal that kicked off the decade: a giant energy trading company that appeared to be doing brilliantly—until we finally noticed that it wasn’t. It’s largely been forgotten given the wreckage that followed, and that’s too bad: we may be repeating those mistakes, on a far larger scale.

Specifically, as the largest Wall Street banks return to profitability—in some cases, breaking records—they say everything is rosy. They’re lining up to pay back their TARP money and asking Washington to back off. But why are they doing so well? Remember that Enron got away with their illegalities so long because their financials were so complicated that not even the analysts paid to monitor the Houston-based trading giant could cogently explain how they were making so much money.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/former-managing-director-goldman-sachs-accounting-fraud-too-big-fails-may-be-worse-enron

fuckno posted this link in epuland on last thread. Scroll down for the text. Worse than Enron.

Good. Glad you posted it upstairs.

Shielded..well done..cut and dried..put a fork in it..now we eat it up.
sad sad sad..

… and the slugs are now stating healthcare reform cost for 20 years as a lump in order to make it seem like its as big as the gift handed to the financial sector thieves.

I’d like to see someone in the media screaming about this fraudulent propaganda.

Yes, I read it yesterday. Prins is talking about how commercial and speculative activities remain entangled in banks’ financial statements. I also saw an article recently that pointed to the fact that while banks were reporting profits their reserves to cover losses were being drawn down so that if you took this draw down into account the banks had not profits but substantial losses. They have also been allowed to mark down their liabilities as the same time they have been exempted from marking their assets to market value. In other words, the bank books, their balance sheets, are garbage. And this has all been sanctioned and allowed by the Fed and Treasury.

Who were the geniuses sitting on the self-same committees during the Enron debacle, and what did they do to fix the problems, what are they doing now?

Dodds, solicitations for money in my mailbox are falling on deaf ears.

Jon Walker has a fresh cross-post ready: “Snowe, Lincoln, And Landrieu Push To Eliminate State Insurance Regulation”

It’s worth taking a look at Ron Paul’s End the Fed, if only to remind ourselves of the differences between what we want to accomplish by calling for an audit of the Fed and what allies-on-an-issue want to accomplish.

The link to One Voice For Choice in the side colum of Firedoglake goes here rather than here, the latter being where I think it’s supposed to be going.

Also, it only shows up at Firedoglake, and not in the side column for FDL Action or the other FDL blogs. Please consider going through the FDL blogs and adding it in the side column for all of them.

There are no events within 100 miles of me. I can arrange for a meeting room in a public library, but my home’s a bit too small for a gathering. In the mean time, I will sign up to do what I can and will donate $ to the effort.

I need a quick update on the Eshoo/Hagan lobbyist-written biologics legislation. Anyone know where it’s heading?

Well, after Enron they did Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) on accounting practices. But when it came to reining in executive comp, the reform effort stalled out. The proliferation of derivatives and off balance sheet entities ended up running circles around SOX. Also the deregulation mania of the Bush years meant that even ordinary fraud was allowed to flourish essentially without limit.

The Fed is an unConstitutional entity run by the banks for the banks and yet supposed to function for the public good. I know my own thinking on the Fed has changed radically as I both have learned more about its structure, history, and of course its recent activities.

Can anyone explain in one or two sentences what Goldman claims would have happened to Goldman if it had not been paid 100 cents on the dollar on the credit default swaps by AIG?

Thanks for doing this, Jane. Admirable joining of hands across the line on a common interest.

You need to look at the timeline. AIG was in the process of being taken over by the government with GS the only bank at the table. Lehman went south the nest day. The AIG deal was announced the next day after that in part to fight a panic. The next weekend the Fed accepted GS’ application to become a bankholding company and get access to government credit lines.

So you need to look at this within the perspective of the Lehman collapse. If Lehman had not collapsed and AIG had not paid par on the GS swaps then Goldman would have lost $6-$7 billion or more, been down rated, lost its non-governmental credit lines, and been toast. As it was, the AIG bailout was structured to protect, GS. The Fed and Treasury blew Lehman so GS needed to be saved again by converting it in name to a bankholding company. And then it got its Christmas present of the AIG payout at par. So for a bunch of fuckups who would have gone bankrupt without it, this was a win, win, win. GS are not the smartest guys in the room. They are the best connected.

Ten Reasons Bernanke Should Hit the Road

by Nomi Prins

1) His view of what constitutes “transparency” is dubious. About 300 members of Congress have thrown their support behind Ron Paul’s HR1207 Audit the Fed bill, which would further inspect the Fed’s clandestine love affair with the big banks. But Bernanke has told Congress that providing too much detail about what the Fed did for the banks would be “counterproductive.” Thus, the man who wrote in a pre-emptive Washington Post op-ed that “In its making of monetary policy, the Fed is highly transparent” doesn’t feel the same way about its Wall Street Welfare strategy.

2) He’s managed to raise more anti-Fed sentiment than any other Fed leader. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) put a hold on Bernanke’s confirmation Wednesday, meaning it would take 60 senators to override Sanders to confirm Bernanke, instead of a simple majority. The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Christopher Dodd (D-CT), has called for stripping the Federal Reserve of its supervisory powers. “StopBailoutBen” petitions litter the Internet. Many other Washingtonians have called for a reduction in the Fed’s powers, even as others, notably President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, want to pile it on thicker.

3) Bernanke didn’t have a clue or a prevention strategy during the buildup to the second biggest financial crisis in U.S. history. Despite being a noted scholar of the first Great Depression, he missed the rapid increase in foreclosures during 2006 and 2007, the $14 trillion subprime-related toxic asset bubble, $2 trillion buildup of collateralized debt obligations, extreme leverage buildup that laced past mega-profits, labyrinth of off-book bank games, and every credit derivatives issue.

etc.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-02/ten-reasons-bernanke-should-hit-the-road/

Bernanke: Why are we still listening to this guy?

2005 CNBC on bubbles and fundamentals – no more Democrat lapdancers, plse!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ79Pt2GNJo

Will Reid and Dodd opt for transparency, or will they cover for the Fed, and the bankers–like JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon–who run it?

That’s a tough one. What did Reid and Dodd [and Bush and Obama and Geithner and Paulson] do when faced with the economic crisis? Did they pursue what was in the best interest of all of us, or did they cave in to the bankers on Wall Street?

If we can decide on that maybe it will be easier to speculate on their Fed strategy.

Dodd has been in it with Paulson Geithner and Bernanke, so ofcourse He will do what He can to protect them.

Some were fooled by Dodd on Healthcare think what he did with that made up for his mistakes in the past. He should have been replaced long a go.

If any of these Senators say or do one thing we like, we forget how totally useless they really are and forgive them.

well said. It’s a strategic con game of give and take that we should not allow ourselves to be fooled by.

Screw you, Democrats. What the hell is going on? This is a bipartisan hold in the sense that Republicans + some other party is putting on the hold. But it’s NOT a Democrat putting on the hold. Sanders is an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats. This “bipartisan” is Republican + Independent, not Republican + Democrat. Screw you, Democrats. I am getting really sick of none of them EVER standing up for anything.