Feeding The Fat Cats

It's reassuring to hear Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will do the difficult things if they need doing like slamming the door on an empty barn if necessary.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the federal government might remove top bank executives or board members if "exceptional" assistance is required to keep the banks operating in the future.

You have to wonder what this kid thinks is "exceptional" when AIG has snaged $173 B bailout bucks and Citigroup $45 B with a $306 B guarantee. Can we say Disconnected Timmy boy?

Tim just can't get it, any reasonible person would sh!t can the assholes right now.

Elizabeth Warren, chief watchdog of America's $700bn (£472bn) bank bailout plan, will this week call for the removal of top executives from Citigroup, AIG and other institutions that have received government funds in a damning report that will question the administration's approach to saving the financial system from collapse.

Actually Warren is being too polite, she should throw their fat cat cans in the can, it's a safe bet that you would'nt have to rattel too many cages too hard for some sh!t to fall out. Look ma, hands.

The former chief financial officer at General Re Corp. was sentenced yesterday to 18 months in federal prison for her role in an accounting fraud scandal that artificially propped up the stock price of insurer American International Group Inc. (AIG)

Elizabeth Monrad, 52, of New Canaan was also fined $250,000 for her role in the case, which authorities say cost AIG shareholders more than $500 million.

Ms Monrad begged Mr. Droney for a lenient sentence, and several family members and friends testified about her community involvement and generosity in sponsoring needy children in Appalachia and Sri Lanka.

Why not let the fattest cats like Pandit and Thain beg for the same. But Warren is just warming up.

Warren also believes there are "dangers inherent" in the approach taken by treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who she says has offered "open-ended subsidies" to some of the world's biggest financial institutions without adequately weighing potential pitfalls. "We want to ensure that the treasury gives the public an alternative approach," she said, adding that she was worried that banks would not recover while they were being fed subsidies. "When are they going to say, enough?" she said.

They don't know and they don't care, Geithner is point man on a Sherman's march through the taxpayer to save the bankers and their bonusess, they are single mindely selfish and don't even try to hide it.

She said she did not want to be too hard on Geithner but that he must address the issues in the report. "The very notion that anyone would infuse money into a financially troubled entity without demanding changes in management is preposterous."

So too is the notion of a painless recovery, Warren

''..., is also set to call for shareholders in those institutions to be "wiped out". "It is crucial for these things to happen," she said. "Japan tried to avoid them and just offered subsidy with little or no consequences for management or equity investors, and this is why Japan suffered a lost decade." She declined to give more detail but confirmed that she would refer to insurance group AIG, which has received $173bn in bailout money, and banking giant Citigroup, which has had $45bn in funds and more than $316bn of loan guarantees.

She's right on on that one too, Japan's over micro-managed economy has drifted into and out of recession for more than twenty years and has just now gone into depression, there's no free lunch, it's just a matter of who pays.

The Obama administration is now ordering General Motors Corp.'s creditors to make sacrifices to save the ailing automaker. Yet bondholders of financial companies such as Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. so far have been mostly left off the hook, even though the government has given the banks billions of dollars in bailout money.

Many those bondholders, in fact, are still profiting from their investments so long as they haven't had to sell, while the rest of us deal with vanishing wealth.

"The sum total of the policy responses to this crisis has been to defend the bondholders of distressed financial institutions at the public expense," said John Hussman, who runs an investment firm in Ellicott City, Md.

Make that bondholders and counterparties, bigshots both. If history is any guide then things are looking rough for taxpayers and shareholders both as Warren notes that equity investors are always wiped out.