It turns out that her husband, John Coale, is Palin’s husband is a senior figure in Sarah Pac:
Ironically, just last week, Van Susteren decried people thinking she’s “so close to the Palin family.” “The only way that I’ve met them is by interviewing them,” she said, never mentioning her husband’s relationship to Palin.
So not surprised.
If I’m reading Michael Hirsh right, the non financial products division part of AIG, the part that was supposed to be the well run real insurance company, may very well be insolvent too:
Thomas Gober, a former Mississippi state insurance examiner who has tracked fraud in the industry for 23 years and served previously as a consultant to the FBI and the Department of Justice, says he believes AIG’s supposedly solvent insurance business may be at least as troubled as its reckless financial-products unit. Far from being “healthy,” as state insurance regulators, ratings agencies and other experts have repeatedly described the insurance side, Gober calls it “a house of cards.” Citing numerous documents he has obtained from state insurance regulators and obscure data buried in AIG’s own 300-page annual reports, Gober argues that AIG’s 71 interlocking domestic U.S. insurance subsidiaries are in hock to each other to an astonishing degree.
Seriously, we need to start sending people to jail.
Word is that Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher has been tapped as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, which means that the head of the New Democrat Caucus, and a shill for the banking industry would be replaced in a special election.
The fact that this DINO in a safe Dem district would be out would be a very good thing.
Yeah, it does seem to be the day for dead pools.
In this case, we have AIG CEO saying tat Fed Chairman Bernanke and dhe Federal Reserve approved the bonuses some months ago.
While Bernanke is unfirable, I think that this is another nail in his reputation, and I think that we will start seeing increasing pressure for him to resign.
Well, notwithstanding the obvious, that Geithner is unwilling to do the tough things, and that he keeps coming back to the bad bank, but it may very well be the AIG bonus fiasco that does him in.
Ignoring the fact that Geithner was at the center of the first AIG bailout, we are now seeing the signs of panics with Treasury department pointing the finger at Senator Chris Dodd, despite the fact that it was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers who waged all out war against meaningful regulation of executive bonuses, and Dodd proposed strong regulations against excessive bonuses:
(4) a prohibition on such TARP recipient paying or accruing any bonus, retention award, or incentive compensation during the period that the obligation is outstanding to at least the 25 most highly-compensated employees, or such higher number as the Secretary may determine is in the public interest with respect to any TARP recipient;
What’s more, we are now seeing that the Washington Post editorial page, in the person of Harold Meyerson is now calling Geithner the bank’s bitch:
But Geithner’s indulgence of bankers’ indulgences is fast becoming the Obama administration’s Achilles’ heel. The AIG debacle is the latest in a series of bewildering Geithner decisions that threaten to undermine the administration’s efforts to restart the economy. So long as it’s Be Kind to Bankers Week at Treasury — and we’ve had eight straight such weeks since the president was inaugurated — American banking, and the economy it is supposed to serve, will remain paralyzed. The Geithner plan to restart the banks provides huge taxpayer subsidies to hedge funds, investment banks and private equity companies to buy the banks’ toxic assets without really having to assume the risk. That’s right — the same Wall Street wizards who got us into this mess, using the same securitization techniques that built mountains of debt within a shadow financial system that remains unregulated, are the saviors whom Geithner has anointed to extricate us — with our capital, not theirs — from the mess that they created.
It isn’t entirely fair: It was clear that this is what Timothy Geithner was when Obama first nominated him, so it is fair to say that Geithner’s policies are Obama’s policies.
One hopes that Obama dumps the policy, and Geithner (and Summers) shortly.
In the meantime, the Republicans are pulling their knives out with Representative Connie Mack (R-FL) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) are directly or indirectly calling for Geithner’s ouster.
I can’t believe that I am saying this, but Obama should listen to them.
Al Franken has filed paperwork with the election court for the Coleman campaign to reimburse them for court costs.
Seeing how Coleman has raised more money for his court challenge than he did for his campaign, I would really like to see the smarmy bastard soaked.
So, we saw a
0.4% increase in the consumer price index in February, which is the highest rate since July, even if that is just a 5% rate.
Truth be told, I’m not sure if this is good news, reduced possibility of inflation, or a sign that the dollars that are flooding our economy are creating an inflation spiral.
In either case, we have another indicator that the real estate market is no where near a turn around, the bump in February building permits not withstandint: the Architecture Billings Index remains near a record low, and this is a leading indicator.
The spike in jump in mortgage applications does not really mean much, as it is primarily refi activity driven by low mortgage rates.
Internationally, we have a number of developments:
In energy, oil fell on the pessimistic report from the Federal reserve despite assurances of the House of Saud that OPEC will really follow the quota this time….really…for sure. (I don’t believe it either)
Finally, the news that the Fed is printing about a trillion more dollars pushed the dollar down.
At least that’s how I read their purchasing government debt and more mortgage backed securities: Printing money, about $1 trillion.
The markets appear to be loving this, but I’m more concerned about how gloomy the normally excessively cheerful Bernanke Fed is, in the first ‘graph.
Full Fed statement:
Release Date: March 18, 2009
For immediate releaseInformation received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in January indicates that the economy continues to contract. Job losses, declining equity and housing wealth, and tight credit conditions have weighed on consumer sentiment and spending. Weaker sales prospects and difficulties in obtaining credit have led businesses to cut back on inventories and fixed investment. U.S. exports have slumped as a number of major trading partners have also fallen into recession. Although the near-term economic outlook is weak, the Committee anticipates that policy actions to stabilize financial markets and institutions, together with fiscal and monetary stimulus, will contribute to a gradual resumption of sustainable economic growth.
In light of increasing economic slack here and abroad, the Committee expects that inflation will remain subdued. Moreover, the Committee sees some risk that inflation could persist for a time below rates that best foster economic growth and price stability in the longer term.
In these circumstances, the Federal Reserve will employ all available tools to promote economic recovery and to preserve price stability. The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and anticipates that economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period. To provide greater support to mortgage lending and housing markets, the Committee decided today to increase the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet further by purchasing up to an additional $750 billion of agency mortgage-backed securities, bringing its total purchases of these securities to up to $1.25 trillion this year, and to increase its purchases of agency debt this year by up to $100 billion to a total of up to $200 billion. Moreover, to help improve conditions in private credit markets, the Committee decided to purchase up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months. The Federal Reserve has launched the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to facilitate the extension of credit to households and small businesses and anticipates that the range of eligible collateral for this facility is likely to be expanded to include other financial assets. The Committee will continue to carefully monitor the size and composition of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet in light of evolving financial and economic developments.
Voting for the FOMC monetary policy action were: Ben S. Bernanke, Chairman; William C. Dudley, Vice Chairman; Elizabeth A. Duke; Charles L. Evans; Donald L. Kohn; Jeffrey M. Lacker; Dennis P. Lockhart; Daniel K. Tarullo; Kevin M. Warsh; and Janet L. Yellen.
Mark Ames just penned a post titled, “How To Find The Nearest AIG Financial Products Office , which has a picture of a murdered banker(actually from a Turkish terrorist attack), which appears to be a specific and deliberate incitement to violence.
I do not approve, even though it speaks to how a lot of us feel.
They don’t have the votes right now to get approval, as they cannot convince the opposition to vote for it, though they say that they will reintroduce it later.
I’m not sure if this is an outbreak of sanity, or if it is because there are concerns that Obama will drop or move the interceptor location, and that they will be left dealing with Russian blowback.
In a company that’s losing billions, and on top of the $80 million he got when he sold his hedge fund to Citi.
Make it stop, please.
She’s officially changed her primary residence to Florida, and as such she can declare an unlimited homestead on her $9.4 million home in Palm Beach.
This would protect this home against civil litigants, though I’m not sure what it would do against the Federal prosecutors who have already filed their intent to seize this home, though it clearly is now more difficult than their New York penthouse.
This is not surprising. What is surprising is that the Feds haven’t filed some sort of conspiracy charges over this, because if this were a drug case, they would have already done so.
[on edit]I should have read the fine print more carefully, she, “applied for the tax exemption Sept. 18 and received it Jan. 12, according to the appraiser’s office.”
The scandal broke on December 10, which implies that someone behind the change in residence knew that the house of cards was collapsing, and made the move to save the house.
Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) looks to have caved, and its moving to significantly weaken mark to market accounting.
This is very bad news in the long term, and, because, “would be able to apply the revised rule to their first-quarter financial statements,” we are going to see a bunch of very rosy results from the banking sector, but this will all be lies.
This is a bad move.
I don’t deny that the Pope has a right to make statements on what he considers to be moral issues, but when he flat out lies about public health issues, as when he said that condoms would make the African AIDS epidemic worse, he needs to shut the f$#@ up.
It’s wrong, and clueless, and deliberately so.
For once, I agree with Senator Jim Grassley (R-IA):
The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them (is) if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.
He later backed off his suicide comment, which was an exaggeration for the purpose of emphasis, but “Have you no shame,” has already been said about Joseph McCarthy.
Still, I thought that it was funny.
Credit card defaults have hit a 20 year high, which implies to me that the unemployment numbers when they come out are going to show further contraction.
Housing Starts were up 22% from January in February, though the headline on the link, “U.S. Housing Starts Rebound,” is simply nonsensical, as Barry Ritholtz notes, single family building remained flat, it was people building multi-residential properties, and even with the gain, the number is down 50% year over year.
Calculated Risk’s Credit Crisis Indicators are showing modest improvement, though they all remain at troubling levels.
In energy, oil hit a new high for the year, approaching nearly $50/bbl, and in currency, they dollar was down only marginally.
One of the better Congressional freshmen is Alan Grayson (D-FL), and he is now using the term amputate with regard to AIG:
Grayson joined fellow Democrats as well as Republicans in blasting AIG for its refusal to give up hundreds of millions of dollars in bonus payments. He painted the government’s choice as a stark one, using the metaphor of treating a wound versus amputating a limb.
“It’s not clear to me at all that we’re taking the correct approach by allowing AIG to continue to operate, regardless of who owns it,” Grayson told me. “At this point, ownership is becoming an amorphous concern when comes to a company that borrows millions and millions without any prospect of paying it back. … Do we continue to allow the bleeding or not?”
Note that I am not suggesting that the distinguished gentleman from Florida reads my blog, merely that my suggestion of amputating diseased banks is something that other people are coming to independently.
The banking system has more than zombie banks. It has gangrenous limbs that will continue to poison the rest of the body until removed.
By the “T” word, I mean that they used the word torture to describe the treatment of detainees by the CIA:
The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.
The report, an account alleging physical and psychological brutality inside CIA “black site” prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
(emphasis mine)
When do we either start prosecutions, or turn them over the Hague?
Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry was removed by former president Musharraf because he was seen as non-corrupt and independent of the executive, and current Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari reneged on his promise to reinstate him because he was afraid that he would investigate his own personal corruption, and that he would likely overturn the ban on rival opposition leader Nawaz Sharif.
Well, with a massive protest converging on the capital, Islamabad, and police unwilling to enforce his ban on the protest in many places, Zardari has backed down and will reinstate Chaudhry.
This is good news for Pakistan on a number of levels, it reinforces the rule of law, it is a step away from dictatorship, and it reinforces the concept of an independent judiciary.
It looks like they are seeking to seize the bulk of his and his wife’s assets through civil forfeiture:
The government said in a court filing yesterday that it intends to seize assets including the Madoffs’ $7 million Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan and homes in Montauk, New York, Palm Beach, Florida, and France. Prosecutors will also seek $17 million in cash and $45 million in bonds in accounts in Ruth Madoff’s name, Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin said.
Ruth Madoff was Bernie Madoff’s bookkeeper for 3 decades, and her assets were at one point or another his assets: he transferred them to her to protect them, so this action is appropriate.
Note that they are going after what appears to be everything, including the piano and silverware.
It’s all proceeds of a criminal activity, and it will serve to deter people like Mr. Madoff if they know that transfer of assets will not protect his family.