Financial Crisis Hearings Are A Waste of Time

We have a new four letter commisson, the FCIC which stands for the Financial Crisis Investigation Commission.  Got it?  They are going to investigate the financial institutions and Wall Street.  Isn't that the job of law enforcement or more specifically the U.S. Attorney General's office along with the FBI?  I would think so if there were a real earnest effort to expose the multitude of crimes committed by those in some of our regulatory agencies, our Federal Reserve, some elements of the Presidents Cabinet (both past and present), Congress and perhaps even our previous Vice President.

One of my more favorite reporters, Paul Muolo, who writes for National Mortgage News and has authored several books on the banking crisis, recently wrote and asked the same questino in his recent weekly feature, "What We're Hearing".  Here is the excerpt from his column.

COMMENTARY: I'm starting to wonder whether these financial crisis hearings are turning out to be a total waste of time (and taxpayer money). The commission is calling witnesses (players in the crisis) to testify about how they screwed up. It's been almost two years now and these "players" (Dan Mudd, Charles Prince and regulator Jim Lockhart) have had plenty of time to come up with rationalizations about what went wrong. Rob Levin, a former executive at Fannie Mae, told the panel that the success of the private-label MBS market "threatened" the GSE and drove it into the arms of the alt-A market. In other words, if they didn't buy this crap their seller/servicers would've bolted for Wall Street. (Gee, that would've been awful.) And then Lockhart said FanFred encouraged poor underwriting standards by not aggressively forcing their seller/servicers to repurchase bad loans. (Note: FanFred certainly are not shy about buybacks now.) OK, if things were so bad, why did Lockhart, in the summer of 2008, say there would be no takeover of FanFred? What we're lacking in this crisis is a Washington hero, a regulator like Ed Gray (of the S&L crisis) who should have stood up to the power elite (in this case, FanFed, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street) and laid down the law or at least spilled his guts to the press. But we had none of this. In seems the days of Washington regulators having the guts to leak information to the press (ala the Pentagon Papers or Watergate) are long gone. I guess these government bureaucrats are too concerned about keeping their jobs or securing for themselves a golden parachute in the private sector. But make no mistake about it: we in the press don't break into offices and steal documents (e-mails). Someone needs to leak it to us. Feel free to leak away in the future and send me some confidential emails, a bank examination report, anything. Am I begging? OK. If you're concerned about being detected, mail it to me at 4401 Wilson Blvd./Suite 910/Arlington, VA 22203. (P.S. Don't waste my time with "imagined" crimes)...

It is funny that I wrote about the suspicious activity by Fannie/Freddie - Paul refers to them as FanFred - almost three years ago.  Back then everyone was saying and accusing mortgage brokers of "peddling" that terrible sub prime product.  If the industry had stayed to the FanFred programs - it was said - the country would not have been in the cirisis. 

Wrong, I was trying to tell everyone.  Fannie and Freddie were as involved in creating the mortgage meltdown and the ensuing economic crisis as were the other banksters on Wall Street.  Even then corruption was rampant at FanFred and when they were caught "cooking the books" they got a slap on the wrist and it was business as usual.  In other words "see no eveil, hear no evil speak no evil" but if evil rears its ugly head then just brush it under the rug so it can continue to fester but just out os sight.

This is waht this FCIC thing is all about.  The evil has surfaced.  Wow, we have been hearing about it for two years now in Congressional hearing after Congressonal hearing as well as on major television news and in major newspapers around the world. 

The FBI in 2007 said they were "investigating" 18 banks but to this day they never disclosed who they were and what the results were.  Maybe because the crooked banks were quickly absorbed into other crooked banks, making them Too Big To Fail thus Too Big to Touch.

The crime here is not the crimes that were committed by the banks, government, politicians et al, the crime here is the coverup of the greatest ponzi scheme and scam ever perpetrated on the people of the world.  It is the greatest cover up in the history of mankind and I fear the truth will not surface for perhaps a hundred years or more.

Please see my Feature column - Larry's Corner - included in my Daily News Links column at www.GoldmanSachs666.com.

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