What is Digg?151 Comments
- inactive, on 11/26/2008, -2/+83And Citigroup's largest shareholder is...
*drumroll*
SAUDI ARABIA!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup - eco57, on 11/26/2008, -1/+59We've gotta start closing this gaping bail-out spigot, both to preserve the currency and deter the reckless behavior. There has to be some pain felt by the perpetrators of this mess or it'll happen over and over again.
- cuecat, on 11/26/2008, -3/+54"In Bakersfield, Calif., a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.”
This has nothing to do with free markets, regulation, wall street, greed, etc. This is either fraud at every level of the loan process or total incompetence or both. - InvisibleInk, on 11/26/2008, -9/+46Citigroup aside, the Federal Reserve System is the real culprit and must be abolished. The housing bubble created by the Fed’s Keynesian boom and bust activities is a perfect example of why.
1. Government programs were enacted in order to convince banks to over extend themselves to consumers
2. Consumers were encouraged by artificially low interest rates to borrow more than they could afford
3. The resulting loans were then bundled up and sold to investors around the world
4. These investors, to guarantee their invested money should these bundles default, bought insurance to cover their bets
5. The unqualified, sub-prime consumer defaults on the loans they were encouraged to take
6. Insurance companies that provided insurance did not have enough money to cover the payments and had to ask for help from the Fed
7. Banks that held these bundles now have no income from these portfolios and are asking for help from the Fed
8. Banks can't lend out to companies since the banks income has halted
9. Those companies that only survive because of credit are calling to the Fed for help
10. So now government needs to encourage more borrowing by the consumers who cannot afford to make payments?
To paraphrase, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was Einstein who famously said that doing the same wrong things over and over and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity.
It is obvious that the Keynesian economics of interference in the markets is utterly discredited. In order to afford these bailouts the Fed just prints, like counterfeiters, hundreds of billions of dollars ands spreads the notes around in order to "encourage" banks to, at the very least, start loaning to worthy borrowers again. Idiocy. And while we're at it let's spark hyperinflation in order to "calm" and "encourage" bankers and speculators?
It is long past time to sweep away the entire Federal Reserve and its fiat currency system, and return to sound money based on commodities such as gold and silver. - inactive, on 11/26/2008, -1/+29So when does someone get (at least) a slap on the wrist for their failures?
- kemp34, on 11/26/2008, -1/+25In order to end our reliance on foreign oil, our wonderful elected officials have decided to stop using petroleum and instead move towards burning taxpayer cash.
I mean, it grows on trees, right? - kemp34, on 11/26/2008, -0/+20In America, circa 2008, failure is to be rewarded with hundreds of billions, if not trillions of taxpayer dollars. It is the new reward system that will lead to a grand 21st Century!
- TigerStar337, on 11/27/2008, -0/+18The person making the loan got a 3% commission. 3% of $720,000 = $21,600...hmmm, not bad for a day's work.
- heystoopid, on 11/26/2008, -0/+17It is one of the oldest stories in the book of who polices the policeman when he can't police himself all because greed destroys all rational thinking absolutely .
- sirdarksoul, on 11/27/2008, -1/+17When will we see bank execs hanging from every street light on Wall St?
- OriginalReplica, on 11/26/2008, -2/+17."...to preserve the currency"
To pay for all of this, the Fed is going to start "creating" a lot more dollars. Hundreds of billions of dollars. Now those dollars don't magically create new value, they steal value from every other dollar that is already out there. They steal value from every dollar in you checking account and every dollar in your paycheck. How? We call it inflation, it means that you same dollar now buys less, because part of it's value has been stolen, by the Fed, to pay for all of this. Of course "creating" money and inflation was how these banks made loans that where "leveraged" on the actual amount of capital they had. We are getting robbed several times over by the financial industry. - muckemuck, on 11/26/2008, -1/+15They made mistakes and yet were bailed out. GM made mistakes and.. ? will probably get bailed out. Ugh. We're rewarding idiots and crooks.
- kemp34, on 11/26/2008, -2/+15*****?
- eastwood24, on 11/26/2008, -3/+16More like Chitigroup...zing
- kingofinternet, on 11/27/2008, -0/+13winning the pulitzer 3 times will do wonders for your job security
- cuecat, on 11/27/2008, -0/+11Hmm, I don't remember referring to the "CRA act" in my post. And I'm not referring to "low income mortgages" or "Spanish American descent".
I was referring to the quote from the article and the faulty "loan process" that would give a loan to a house he obviously couldn't afford. Maybe you hit the reply button on the wrong post. - quaxon, on 11/27/2008, -2/+13Why not just never pay back your citigroup credit cards. ***** em, if theyre gonna steal money from my taxes so their CEO's can still afford their private jets and monthly five-star retreats, im gonna take it back the only way possible. If everyone with citigroup credit cards stopped paying them as a form of protest i am sure it will bring these ***** down for good finally and real quick. And before you say its morally wrong or some *****, just think of it as the money they are stealing from you through taxes.
This isnt a "bailout" it's ***** extortion. A bailout would be to fire all the incompetent executives who bankrupted the companies in the first place (hell if i lost merely a thousand dollars for my company i'm sure to be fired, much less trillions) and do a massive re-organization and help the company get back on the right track. Not steal trillions in taxes to give to the same people who got us in this mess in the first place. I seriously don't know why people in general arent as pissed about this as they should be, and why they continued to support Obama after voting for it...***** americans... - dafragsta, on 11/27/2008, -0/+10You got it so right up until the end, and in a way, that was really only half wrong. You are right that the US is a junkie and the end result isn't pretty. The truth is that ALL THE WORLD is a junkie to fiat currency. It frees up commerce to operate at the speed of innovation and production and not at the speed of the collection of one or a very few MAGICAL raw resource out of many.
I bought into the Ron Paul angle and held to it for a while, but now I'm thinking things over. The world is addicted to capitalism and the truth is that gold isn't a viable standard on which to build a currency because it pretty much puts anyone who produces gold on a near metaphysical level economically. Why is gold or any other precious metal or gemstone and the hording thereof a suitable foundation to build an economy on? The logic is that they hold inherit value, but that's no different that stocks in publically traded companies. It's all a perceived value.
My point is that the economy has hit hard times and any correlation that skews positively for precious metals or other tangible high-value commodities is an illusion as much as fiat money. If it turns into Mad Max tomorrow, do you expect someone is going to trade their clean water and MREs for a handful of gold that won't feed them tomorrow, since the trade value of that gold is going to diminish as fast as the banking system and currency.
In the modern world, gold doesn't have honest to goodness value either. It's managed by a cartel not to dissimilar to the diamond trade. There is a more finite amount of gold, sure, but there isn't a demand that is really straining the supply either. In contrast, copper, because of it's commonplace use as a cheap and viable conductor has gradually grown in value because of it's strained supply and demand.
I digress. My point is that the junkie crash effects of overextending our resources won't be felt in banking, but in raw resource production, and I don't mean gold. I mean raw resources used to make the products we use every day that are strained much closer to their limits than gold or silver. I keep harping that the world community needs to plan a budget that equates to whole percentages of the Earth's GDP to explore space. There is a vast mount of natural resources on uninhabited planets and the prospect of gathering them isn't so bleak that it couldn't happen in the next hundred years. - MewTwo, on 11/27/2008, -1/+10Loafer-wearing, $3000 suitcase carrying... scheisters
- mksmothers, on 11/27/2008, -0/+9Let them fail. Stop stealing money from me to support a business model that failed.
- luteslinger, on 11/27/2008, -0/+9Failure? Wow, collect $150 billion from the U.S.tax payer plus $32 late fee penalties from honest customers, and they call that a failure. I'd hate to see how much they'd collect for a success.
- MewTwo, on 11/27/2008, -4/+13People who blame those people who got the loans are stupid and need to do their research. And they got dugg up!! ***** this website, you're all a bunch of ***** idiots.
This was them doing this to us. Citigroup and the gang. Don't blame your comrades for becoming prey to the predatory lending. If you don't know what the problem was, how are you going to fix it and make sure it never happens again? If you're on digg and like me and a member of the middle class you need to be angry. Because they're trying to destroy us.
Yes, tgc, those ***** dividing up and selling those bundles of mortgages knew it was *****. It was "planned" that they'd be making millions of dollars a year. THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO DO THAT. But that mother ***** Greenspan claimed that they would "regulate themselves." His own theory contradicts itself, but I won't waste my time explaining it now.
Don't take my word for it. LOOK IT UP
AND FYI the biggest problem IS NOT FREDDY AND FANNIE it's the CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS done internally. DO YOUR RESEARCH. - tgc1, on 11/27/2008, -1/+9Like i've been saying. It's kind of obvious this entire fiasco was planned.
- rootsm3, on 11/27/2008, -2/+10I want to see blood. Or a papercut. Maybe just a headache or a phone call to their mothers, but SOMETHING!!
- ogbar, on 11/27/2008, -1/+8Ron who?
- winterus, on 11/27/2008, -0/+7Umm no, what would happen is that the gold/silver price would rise sharply. There can't be "too little" of something, each piece of the metal would just represent more value.
- cli006, on 11/27/2008, -2/+9Citigroup was already bailed out once by Abu Dhabi, he owns 8 billion stake in the company! UAE tries to purchase Miami ports and how do people respond? Fear. UAE bails out Citigroup? They're greeted with cheers and relief. What a weird double standard.
- dalittle, on 11/27/2008, -1/+8Never throw good money after bad. Would anyone give a drunk more alcohol if they wanted them to get better?
- inactive, on 11/27/2008, -0/+7Al-Waleed bin Talal
the end of 1990 he bought 4.9% of Citicorp’s existing common shares for $207m ($12.46 per share)—the most that he could without being legally obliged to declare his interest. In February 1991, as American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia were preparing for war with Iraq, the prince spent $590m buying new preferred shares, convertible into common shares at $16 each. This amounted to a further 10% of Citicorp and took his stake to 14.9%.[2]
Later, he also made large investments in AOL, Apple Inc., Worldcom, Motorola, News Corporation Ltd and other technology and media companies
Al-Walid is not part of the ruling executive within the House of Saud and has generally kept out of politics. However, he has recently started to make overt political statements in his press releases and interviews. His views can be seen as critical of Saudi traditionalism, proposing reforms to elections, women's rights and the economy. He has also openly criticized operation of the state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco. He is vocal about women's rights and hired the first female airline pilot in Saudi Arabia, Hanadi Hindi.
He has also taken a notable pro-American stance, backed up by his $10 million financing of American study programmes at the American University in Cairo. - Olfster, on 11/27/2008, -0/+6FRAUD!!! How long is it going to take for our representatives and states attorneys to go after every person involved in this chain, from the mortgage broker looking the other way to pocket their back-end cash from the bank, to the people who fraudulently filled out the applications. The information is all there. Located in every county in every state in the U.S. Filed with the county clerks office. The banks, the brokers, and the people that lied on their applications need to be brought to justice, and at the very least given a stiff fine for their actions, we all know there isn't enough jail cells.
- inactive, on 11/27/2008, -0/+6He also said compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. That being said the money owed can never ever be paid back because of the very nature of interest, there's more money owed then there is in total.
- inactive, on 11/27/2008, -2/+8The deflation-like effects we're seeing at the moment:
A. Can't last. And
B. Are probably a result of a combination of lower velocity in USD combined with manipulation of precious metals markets done with the intent to hide/delay the effects of hyperinflation. Also, other nations' (fiat) currencies are run even ***** than the US dollar, just as other nations' banks were even more leveraged than US banks, so there's a bit of truth in the "flight to quality" stories, but it's better described as a "flight to less-*****." Note also the ease of getting PAPER PROMISES of future gold and/or silver vs the relative difficulty, worldwide, of going to the local coin shop and getting a decent deal on an actual, physical gold/silver bar/coin. Again, a sign of distortion the Cavutos of this world (and not just him) are ignoring. Watch tomorrow for some fireworks if COMEX fails to deliver.
The US economy is very much like a heroin junkie. He just got another dose recently, so everything SEEMS ok, but continue on this path only if you want to see the final result of addiction, which isn't pretty. - RobTyree, on 11/27/2008, -4/+10singularityv ,
Gold, as well as other precious metals, have been "money" for 5000 years. Even our own almost worthless dollar was partially backed by gold until 1971. It is the absolutely ridiculous notion that money should be some ethereal thing with no objective value that is the fallacy. During the first 130 years of our country's history we experienced almost no inflation - in fact, the value of our currency soared. We had tremendous growth (the industrial revolution), but the value of money did not change significantly - it could not, because it was tied to how much gold was on hand at Fort Knox. Since the introduction of the Fed in the very early 1900's, we've experienced rampant inflation - by most reports, it's somewhere in the region of 5000% - in other words, what used to cost $0.02 now costs about a dollar.
So, if you choose to bury your head in the sand and ignore history, be my guest. Me, I'll keep buying gold - it's still exceptionally cheap right now, according to my numbers.
If you truly want to understand what is going on with our economy today, I'd suggest you burn that Keynesian textbook from which you are regurgitating ideas and start reading some Murray Rothbard, F.A. Hayek, or even one of Peter Schiff's books.
Finally, if everyone else had listened to us "Paultards" and Ron Paul were our next president, we'd be on the road to fixing this disaster. He's on the record years ago predicting exactly these problems. Up until 6 or 8 months ago, you couldn't get a candidate on either side to even acknowledge there was a storm coming - it was all sunshine and rainbows.
With the decision our country has made in this election, I fear we are headed for something that will make the Great Depression look like the "good old days". I guess that's the double-edged sword of democracy at work - the people end up with exactly the type of government they deserve. - BESTenemy, on 11/27/2008, -0/+6Money being a "concept" measuring relative worth of products would not be a problem if people got paid in product and only had to convert it to money for the purpose of exchange. The problem is that wages are paid in fiat. While prices fluctuate, the wages don't always follow, or there is a significant lag between price inflation and wage price spiral.
If we were all paid in commodities (or in commodity based money), we'd not be discussing this. - Rantus, on 06/11/2009, -0/+6Hear hear.
Let the banks roll down the hill right into the ***** they created. They're useless parasites that don't ceate anything anymore, they simple hold people hostage and extort business with ridiculous interest rates. Let them all go belly up and clean house.
The only companies we should be "bailing out" in some sense are manufacturers of tangible goods that can't produce anymore because of the mess the banks have created.
Say whatever you want but Citigroup gets 300 billion by waving its hand in the air but everybody wants GM to go bankrupt because they're asking for a 25 billion LOAN? Come on. That whole situation is about union busting and all the ***** misinformation that is being spread about the UAW and worker's productivity and wages.
The banks are what is really dragging the economy into the toilet, not the manufacturers, and if we bankrupt the manufacturers there will be no way out of this mess. If GM wants the money then they should get it but all sitting high level management should have to step down, plain and simple. If they really cared about the company then they would do it, if all they care about is their careers then let them go into bankruptcy, but don't blame the workers for this mess. How are they responsible for this? Upper management at the big 3 are all dinosaurs anyway. - RobTyree, on 11/27/2008, -0/+6cekk99,
How can you not see that it is the bailouts you support that create the moral hazard that enables these people to take unreasonable risks? As long as the government continues to proivide handou.. err... bailouts to those who roll the dice and get burned, the irresponsibility will continue. Why not, when there is no fear of loss or real risk involved?
I agree that we have lost our moral compass in this country, but Obama's plans will take us further down the rabbit hole. It's regulation, oversight, and government interference that are the root of this mess, in the form of the Fed and Fannie/Freddie. More regulation and government interference isn't the solution - it's the problem. - StopTheLie, on 11/27/2008, -0/+6CitiGroup = Rockefeller. Rockefeller = One of the architects of the "system" that makes this crap possible.
Gee whiz, those darn "incompetent" people have managed to "bungle their way" into billions of dollars of ill-gotten gains again. Shucks.
"If those who benefit from this backward system aren’t failing on purpose, they ought to be." http://MeetTheSystem.org - heystoopid, on 11/26/2008, -0/+5Blame it on Gordon Gecko ?
- Olfster, on 11/27/2008, -0/+5I think Citi bank should have been forced to sell off into pieces after receiving bail out money. Why does the top people running this company get to stay. Because some Saudi prince likes them. More of a reason to get rid of them. Ugggggggg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- skinturtle, on 11/27/2008, -0/+5you know what? Every financial institution uses that same line..."If we collaspe....you're all gonna pay!"
Bailing out is not gonna help anyone. - ninjaturtles1, on 11/27/2008, -4/+9WOW this crap is going to make the Great Depression look like nothing.....
- compulsive1, on 11/28/2008, -0/+5Yes, this is all fine and dandy, but it only works if money is tied to actual economic reality. If money existed only to cover transactions we would not have credit default swaps whose value is a multiple of the world's economic output.
You have hedge funds for example with billions of dollars "credit cards" that bet incredible sums of money every day- money that they can't cover when things go bust. The huge sums of money that are then needed to bail them out have to come from the money pool you described- based on real goods and services - in form of taxes on those transactions.
Financiers that play with monopoly money and expect to be bailed out with real earned money are simply parasites in the purest meaning of the word. But don't expect anything to change, because they have power to buy and sell anyone including presidents. Want proof? Just look who was and will be running the show in Washington at the highest government level. From Bear Stearn's and City Group execs to director of the Fed. These people will protect the status quo at all costs. - MewTwo, on 11/27/2008, -0/+5They are VERY VERY VERY efficient with burning taxpayer cash too. EXTREMELY efficient.
- Dumbledorito, on 11/27/2008, -0/+5Wait, wait, I just got all the literature and booze I needed to come close to believing the conspiracy that this whole thing was supposed to destroy the US Dollar so the "Amero" would become the official coin of North America.
And now THIS is what I'm supposed to believe? I don't have time to keep up with everything I'm supposed to think is REALLY going on! - Olfster, on 11/27/2008, -0/+5I keep asking the same question. The information needed to find the guilty people in this fiasco is all there. It just needs to be gone through. For some reason they just do not want to touch it.
- inactive, on 11/27/2008, -4/+9This is the second time in my lifetime these same Citidiots have gotten a bailout. First was when they were stupid enough to make loans to Mexicans who had no plan of paying them back. They deserved to die then, but they had bought enough politicians to be saved. Same is true this time.
(Media-spin: Duh....It's gotta be the libertarians' fault! We've had such "free" markets under Bush, after all, so libertarians MUST have been secretly in power instead of statist Republicans! Hey, I know! Let's blame Ron Paul, since the Federal Reserve obviously has nothing to do with this criminality!!) - dissolutionman, on 11/28/2008, -0/+4That's Milton Friedman, moron.
- dizturbd2, on 11/27/2008, -1/+5I sure am glad that I raised my allowances to 8 on my W-4 and do not intend to file my taxes, again. I can barely afford to bail out my family from this economic crisis...i sure as hell am not helping the gov't bail out these irresponsible ***** with MY payroll.
- kd1s, on 11/27/2008, -0/+4Greed and stupidity are synonymous. They all knew exactly what they were doing but greed precluded them from worrying about the obscene amounts of money they were going to reap.
- TigerStar337, on 11/27/2008, -0/+4Toyota pays it's workers $20 - $25 an hour depending on which plant they work at. For unskilled labor, this is a good wage. Walmart, an American company, pays $6 an hour.
Go USA! The USA is #1 in making war and spending more money than it has. USA #1! -
Show 51 - 100 of 154 discussions
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is