Gee they have been at the center of every destruction of an economy for the last one-hundred years.
One wonders why they had such a glowing reputation, huh?
Not anymore.
Scum shit!
"Wall Street’s game of risk with Greece" by Richard Parker | May 1, 2010
THIS WEEK the US Senate finally started getting around to changing the rules that led to Wall Street’s disastrous meltdown two years ago. But debate over the so-called Dodd bill is gridlocked, even though no one thinks the bill is strong enough to stop
I didn't expect that it would.
Why would when they slaves and tools write the things and then the MSM misreport and misinform?
Meanwhile, as Washington bickers, Europe is starting to burn. A once-small budget crisis in Greece is metastasizing so quickly that it’s now threatening to plunge not just Europe but America and the world back toward the global fiasco we faced two years ago....
Enter Wall Street. After two years of nearly unlimited government bailouts but no government reregulation, briefly sobered Wall Street speculators were ready to start partying again. Last year, amid 10 percent unemployment and millions of home foreclosures, banks and hedge funds booked record profits and paid out record bonuses. And they made such fortunes by doing, it turns out, the same sort of trading-floor gambling that nearly destroyed them and us in 2008.
Well, not them. They made $$$ on both sides.
That's the world hates them scum shits.
As 2010 began, the Street’s “best and brightest’’ saw what suddenly looked like a new source of even easier money, playing what insiders like to call “The Headline Risk Game’’ on little Greece.
Here’s how it works: Greece’s recovery, like our own, still looks pretty shaky — but, for Headline Risk players, that’s an opportunity to bet against their recovery, then pounce when the inevitable bump in the recovery road appears. Their payoff comes as weaker investors rush out of the market for bonds, leaving Greece unable to borrow — and potentially forced to default. (Default, for Headline Risk players, can promise even bigger profits.)
Thus the rising yields and interest rates.
BANKS are NO ONES FRIENDS, readers.
THEY ONLY CARE ABOUT THEMSELVES!
Greece’s bump came last week....
Speculators who had quietly been buying credit default swaps — bets that panic would inevitably follow any bad news — made millions overnight.
States in the United States also did that with their transportation systems!
Related: Massachusetts Democrats Keep Making the Same Mistakes
UBS Cuts Massachusetts a Break
The f***ing bankers have their greedy mitts into any debt imaginable!
Yup, THAT IS WHERE YOUR TAX MONEY is GOING!!!
Not for ROADS, BRIDGES, SCHOOLS, WATER SYSTEMS, HEALTH CARE, or ANY of the OTHER THINGS YOU WANT, Bay-Stater!
It is GOING to BANKS, FAVORED CORPORATIONS, and LOOTING LEGISLATORS!!!
And the SAME is TRUE in GREECE! INCREASED TAXES and REDUCED SERVICES so they can PAY BANKERS who F***ED 'EM!!!!!!!!
Never mind that the new deficit figure turned out to be a small and rather routine adjustment. Greece’s borrowings costs suddenly soared to 19 to 20 percent — and costs for Portugal, Spain, and other weak economies soared with them. Now there’s a crisis over whether the euro zone itself will survive. In little more than four months, in other words, what had been little Greece’s deficit headache is today threatening to pull down Europe itself.
After we were told they already had fixed it.
How can that be?
And whose fault is it?
Is it really Wall Street’s — and Washington’s?
BOTH!!!
Of course, WALL STREET OWNS WASHINGTON!
Central to Wall Street’s 2008 nose dive were the billions wagered in credit default swaps — the cheap derivatives-based bets with lottery-size payoffs that speculators had placed on US homeowners. Today exactly the same sort of swap bets are what Wall Street has placed against Greece....
We used to know how dangerous such unregulated betting could be. Until the late 1990s, you couldn’t place those sorts of bets on housing or government bonds. Thanks to deregulation efforts led by advocates such as Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and Ben Bernanke suddenly you could — and many did.
Yeah, the SAME ASSHOLES NOW DECRYING SUCH BEHAVIOR, blah, blah, blah, blah!
Taxpayers now realize that housing is no place for those sorts of bets — but neither are Greece’s bonds, or the bonds of other small countries that are struggling to recover from the Wall Street tsunami that hit them as well as us in 2008.
GAMBLING is NEVER a GOOD IDEA -- or so I was raised to believe.
Right now all eyes are focused on Berlin, and the prospect of a new round of European support for Athens. Hopefully the package will come — quickly — though it clearly won’t arrive without great political agony in European capitals.
Here’s the rub for Americans. Had Washington closed off credit default swaps — and similar derivatives-based betting— from this sort of pernicious gaming of global financial systems, this appalling risk of European meltdown could have been avoided. By letting Wall Street work the same magic on Greece that it did on US homeowners, we’ve not only worsened the inevitable pain for millions of ordinary Greeks, but the prospects of our own quick recovery as well....
WHAT RECOVERY?!!
Also see: Greece Fire Spreading
Let's hope it spreads up the banker's arms and fries their faces.
And now it has EVERYONE ELSE WORRIED and with GOOD REASON!
"Greek economic crisis brings pangs of worry around world" By Nelson D. Schwartz and Eric Dash, New York Times | May 9, 2010
NEW YORK — The fear that began in Athens, raced through Europe, and finally shook the stock market in the United States is now affecting the broader global economy, from the ability of Asian corporations to raise money to the outlook for money-market funds where American savers park their cash.
Be prepared for that pension to take another dive -- if there was anything left.
What was once a local worry about the debt burden of one of Europe’s smallest economies has quickly gone global.
And yet the EU pukes are saying Greece is unique, sigh.
Already, jittery investors have forced Brazil to scale back bond sales as interest rates soared and caused currencies in Asia like the Korean won to decrease....
The increased global anxiety threatens to slow the recovery in the United States, where job growth has finally picked up after the deepest recession since the Great Depression. It could also inhibit consumer spending as stock portfolios shrink and loans are harder to come by.
In addition, some American companies are facing higher costs to finance their debt, while big exporters are seeing their edge over European competitors shrink as the dollar strengthens. Riskier assets, like stocks, are suddenly out of favor, while cash has streamed into the safest of all investments, gold.
“It’s not just a European problem — it’s the US, Japan, and the UK right now,’’ said Ian Kelson, a bond fund manager in London with
The crisis is so perilous for Europe that the leaders of the 16 countries that use the euro worked into the early morning yesterday on a proposal to create a so-called stabilization mechanism intended to reassure the markets....
Beyond Europe, the crisis has sent waves of fear through global stock exchanges.
Good!
LET THEM FEEL the FEAR for a while!!!!
A decade ago, it took more than a year for the chain reaction that began with the devaluation of the Thai currency to spread beyond Asia to Russia, which defaulted on its debt, and eventually triggered the near-collapse of a giant American hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management.
This crisis, by contrast, seemed to ricochet from country to country in seconds, as traders simultaneously abandoned everything from Portuguese bonds to American blue chips. On Wall Street Thursday afternoon, televised images of rioting in Athens to protest austerity measures only amplified the anxiety as the stock marked briefly plunged nearly 1,000 points.
That is because the FED was sending a MESSAGE to the CONGRESS about the AUDIT in the financial regs bill.
“Up until last week there was this confidence that nothing could upset the apple cart as long as the economy and jobs growth was positive,’’ said William Gross, managing director of the Pimco Group, the giant bond management firm. “Now, fear is back in play.’’
While the immediate cause of the worries is Greece’s ballooning budget deficit and the risk that other fragile countries like Spain and Portugal might default, it also exposed deeper fears that government borrowing in bigger nations such as Britain, Germany, and even the United States is unsustainable.
No debt is sustainable since the amount of debt owed is more than the available money supply.
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