• If you are having problems logging in please use the Contact Us in the lower right hand corner of the forum page for assistance.

McSames Treasury Secretary

A

Anonymous

Guest
Phil Gramm - Why does he hate America?

Tuesday, July 15, 2008
ABC news has a story about super-rich American tax cheats who got caught avoiding taxes by setting up bogus shell companies in Liechtenstein.
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5378080

What’s interesting to me is that the the accounts were set up for the Americans by none other than the giant Swiss bank UBS. Hmmm. UBS, where have I heard that name before?

Maybe it was Phil Gramm, who before joining the McCain campaign as its “financial guru” was a lobbyist for UBS. You know, the same Phil Gramm who called America a “nation of whiners”. Not to mention that when he was a Senator he was responsible for the law that led to the Bear Stearns bailout and the current epidemic of mortgage foreclosures.

So, McCain’s main financial advisor is a lobbyist, who works for a foreign corporation, which helps greedy rich Americans break the law, while ruining the economy. Is this the kind of person you want in charge?

Shouldn’t the media be asking Gramm “Why do you hate America?”
 

Mike

Well-known member
Has McCain actually announced Gramm as his Treasury Secretary?

Has Gramm been confirmed by Congress as so? :roll:

If not, the Title above, "McSames Treasury Secretary", is a little off base?
 

hopalong

Well-known member
Mike said:
Has McCain actually announced Gramm as his Treasury Secretary?

Has Gramm been confirmed by Congress as so? :roll:

If not, the Title above, "McSames Treasury Secretary", is a little off base?

You expect anything from Oldtimer to be even close to base????
:D
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Mike said:
Has McCain actually announced Gramm as his Treasury Secretary?

Has Gramm been confirmed by Congress as so? :roll:

If not, the Title above, "McSames Treasury Secretary", is a little off base?

I watched McSame the other day on TV when he was asked if he was considering Gramm as his Treasury Secretary-- and McSame's answer was "he'd make a very fine one"...... :shock:

Enough said that he's using him as his #1 economic advisor...

Lou Dobbs and crew just tore McSames choice as economic advisor a new rear end tonite, because of the same reasoning...
 

hopalong

Well-known member
Oldtimer said:
Mike said:
Has McCain actually announced Gramm as his Treasury Secretary?

Has Gramm been confirmed by Congress as so? :roll:

If not, the Title above, "McSames Treasury Secretary", is a little off base?

I watched McSame the other day on TV when he was asked if he was considering Gramm as his Treasury Secretary-- and McSame's answer was "he'd make a very fine one"...... :shock:

Enough said that he's using him as his #1 economic advisor...

Lou Dobbs and crew just tore McSames choice as economic advisor a new rear end tonite, because of the same reasoning...

OH YEA that makes it official, yep sure thing yessir bank on it, buy odds in vegas, just cause OLDTIMER saw a link someplace while he was laying on his couch watching some tv program, all the tiime clicking on his laptop finding some link to bash some one :roll: :roll:
Gets old after awhile huh????????????????????????
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Our future Treasury Secretary? :shock: :???: :( Business as usual involving this bunch...McSame has a 30+ year M.O. of wallowing around with everyone involved in these mess's- going back to the Keating 5, then the coverup of his wifes drug addiction and drug thefts, up thru the Enron Scandal- and now his bestest buddy and the man he calls "the smartest economist he knows"- his current economic advisor and who McCain has said he will rely heavily on for his economic policy if he becomes President- has his bank deep in the doodoo in hiding rich elitists fortunes from US taxes...... :(
After his "its all in your heads gaffe" McCain when asked if he was still considering Gramm for an Administration post- replied to the effect "yeah as Ambassador to Belarus- but I'm not sure Minsk would like that"...
I can't believe McCain still keeps this crook around .....But birds of a feather flock together....
:(

Phil Gramm - Why does he hate America?

Tuesday, July 15, 2008
ABC news has a story about super-rich American tax cheats who got caught avoiding taxes by setting up bogus shell companies in Liechtenstein.
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5378080

What’s interesting to me is that the the accounts were set up for the Americans by none other than the giant Swiss bank UBS. Hmmm. UBS, where have I heard that name before?

Maybe it was Phil Gramm, who before joining the McCain campaign as its “financial guru” was a lobbyist for UBS. You know, the same Phil Gramm who called America a “nation of whiners”. Not to mention that when he was a Senator he was responsible for the law that led to the Bear Stearns bailout and the current epidemic of mortgage foreclosures.

So, McCain’s main financial advisor is a lobbyist, who works for a foreign corporation, which helps greedy rich Americans break the law, while ruining the economy. Is this the kind of person you want in charge?

Shouldn’t the media be asking Gramm “Why do you hate America?”

The Senator and the Swiss Bank
Did Texas' Phil Gramm help undo UBS?



Jul 8, 2008 | Updated: 11:48 a.m. ET Jul 8, 2008

Former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm has emerged as the key behind-the-scenes economics/Wall Street guy for John McCain and is being touted as the treasury secretary in waiting. Since 2002, Gramm has been an executive with the U.S. operations of UBS, the giant Swiss Bank. An unintentionally hilarious interview with Gramm on the Wall Street Journal editorial page last week asserted that Gramm has "been a key instigator of some of the biggest money-making UBS deals of recent years." The interview was noteworthy not just for first-class butt-kissing, but for deliberately gliding over the avalanche of disasters in the past year that has turned UBS from a respected Swiss titan of discretion and risk management into a laughingstock. As this one-year chart shows, UBS's stock lost nearly 70 percent of its value and now stands at levels not seen since 2002, when Gramm signed up.

OK, the entire investment banking business in the past year has been an international clown show. Virtually every U.S. and European institution has been laid low by badly placed bets on subprime mortgages and forced into humiliating rounds of dilutive capital raising. Bear Stearns was clearly the worst. Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers have taken large hits. But among foreign institutions, none has fared worse in the United States than UBS. And its employees seem to have compounded their violations of common sense with violations of more serious laws.

UBS's investment banking unit made disastrous forays into subprime lending. Last December, having already announced a third-quarter loss, UBS raised about $13 billion to replenish its balance sheets, mostly from the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. In the fourth quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2008, it racked up Mont Blanc-sized losses on subprime debt of nearly $32 billion. In May, it sold about $15 billion worth of mortgage-related assets to the investment firm BlackRock—but only after it agreed to finance most of the purchase price. In June, UBS raised another $15.5 billion in a rights offering. The credit losses—some $38 billion so far, according to UBS—caused the bank to replace its chairman and install new leadership at its investment bank.

UBS was hardly alone in getting caught up in the global credit bubble, although its losses are truly impressive. But UBS has suffered further reputation damage. Late last month, the state of Massachusetts charged UBS with screwing over well-heeled customers who had purchased auction-rate securities. The mechanics of auction-rate securities—instruments that pay a slightly higher rate of interest than municipal bonds or cash deposits and were thought by many purchasers and brokers to be as safe as cash—are complicated. But the issue is relatively simple and familiar to anyone who has combed through the Spitzer Wall Street research settlement of 2003. UBS stands accused of selling retail brokerage customers products that turned out to be profitable for the bank's investment banking unit but caused the customers to suffer significant losses.

These charges, levied by a state regulator, are already causing reputation damage to UBS. (Dow Jones reported today that retail brokers are fleeing.) UBS's asset management business is likely to suffer further from an ongoing federal investigation, in which Bradley Birkenfeld, an American UBS private banker who was busted on tax-evasion charges, has plead guilty and is cooperating. Among the revelations so far: Birkenfeld helped a client bring in diamonds from abroad by stashing them in a tube of toothpaste.

The carnage at UBS is far from over. Last Friday, on July 4, when U.S. markets were conveniently closed, it announced preliminary second-quarter results, which indicated the possibility of further losses. Over the weekend, the Financial Times reported that UBS's write-downs could total another $7.5 billion. Evidently, traders read the news on the way in to work, as UBS's stock fell 7 percent in trading on Monday.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145011


Ex-UBS banker pleads guilty in tax case
By Joanna Chung in New York

Published: June 20 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 20 2008 03:00

A former UBS private banker yesterday pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired to help a US billionaire evade income taxes after agreeing to "co-operate fully" with prosecutors in the case.

"He's going to tell the government everything he knows about what was going on at UBS," said Danny Onorato, attorney for Bradley Birkenfeld.

Mr Birkenfeld, a US citizen living in Switzerland, said that he and others, including managers and bankers at the Swiss bank, enabled wealthy US clients to conceal their ownership of the assets held offshore by helping them create "nominee and sham entities", according to a court document accompanying his plea.

These entities were usually set up in tax haven jurisdictions, including Switzerland and Liechtenstein, a strategy responding to "the risk [of] losing the approximately $20bn of assets under management in the United States . . . which earned the bank approximately $200m per year in revenues," the document said.

Mr Birkenfeld said he and others also prepared false and misleading US tax forms and also advised US clients to place cash and valuables in Swiss safety deposit boxes and to purchase jewels, artwork and luxury items using the funds in their Swiss bank account while overseas, prosecutors said.

Mr Birkenfeld, who could face a maximum sentence of five years, turned whistleblower after an acrimonious parting with UBS in 2006.

According to the plea agreement filed in court, Mr Birkenfeld agreed to "co-operate fully" with the US government by providing truthful and complete testimony, producing documents, records and other evidence, and appearing at court proceedings in return for a recommendation of a lower prison sentence than the maximum.

UBS said yesterday it was treating these investigations with the "utmost seriousness" and would "appropriately and responsibly address and correct any issues raised in the investigations, including taking appropriate disciplinary action".

It added: "UBS will continue to work with US governmental authorities in an effort to achieve a satisfactory resolution of these matters."

Mr Birkenfeld was indicted in May, along with Mario Staggl, a Liechtenstein national, for his role in helping Igor Olenicoff, a real estate developer, evade paying taxes by helping to conceal $200m of assets. Mr Staggl is still at large. Mr Olenicoff has previously pleaded guilty to filing a false tax return.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b1a1a67c-3e62-11dd-b16d-0000779fd2ac.html
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
"culture of secrecy and deception"
That sounds like a page out of George Bush's book....

Interestingly Phil Gramm- who is McSames top campaign economic advisor and cochairman of his campaign - and been touted by the neocons as his Treasury Secretary--is the vice-chairman of UBS Investment Bank in charge of US operations...

Lawmakers: European Banks Aiding U.S. Tax Cheats

Thursday, July 17, 2008 11:30 AM


WASHINGTON — European bankers and some of their U.S. clients faced grilling by senators Thursday about offshore tax abuses that investigators believe are costing American taxpayers about $100 billion a year.

------------------------------------

The subcommittee report said "UBS Swiss bankers targeted U.S. clients, traveled across the country in search of wealthy individuals and aggressively marketed their services to U.S. taxpayers who might otherwise never have opened Swiss accounts."


It said the bank's practices resulted in billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money in undeclared accounts that were not disclosed to the IRS. The report said UBS has estimated that it has 1,000 declared accounts in Switzerland for U.S. clients against 19,000 undeclared, with a combined value of $17.9 billion.

While UBS did not technically violate U.S. reporting requirements under the 2001 "qualified intermediary program," it actively assisted clients in structuring their Swiss accounts to avoid disclosure responsibilities with the IRS and thus aided tax evasion, the report said.


In Liechtenstein, the report said the royal family's LGT Group contributed to a "culture of secrecy and deception" that enabled clients to "evade U.S. taxes, dodge creditors, and ignore court orders."

Full Article:
http://moneynews.newsmax.com/companies/congress_tax_havens/2008/07/17/113725.html
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Lou Dobbs is reporting that Gramm is now stepping down as McSames campaign co-chairman (for the second time :roll: ) .... Still not sure if he's going to remain as his "economic" advisor...

But as Dobbs said- McCain could do better going out and getting a High School student for economic advisor- that couldn't do as much harm as ex Senator Gramm has done to the US economy and the average Americans pocketbooks..... :(

Speculation on the news was that this came about because of his connection to this widening tax fraud scandals of his bank....
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Foreclosure Phil

NEWS: Years before Phil Gramm was a McCain campaign adviser and a lobbyist for a Swiss bank at the center of the housing credit crisis, he pulled a sly maneuver in the Senate that helped create today's subprime meltdown.

By David Corn

May 28, 2008


Who's to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He's been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That's right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure.

Gramm's long been a handmaiden to Big Finance. In the 1990s, as chairman of the Senate banking committee, he routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt's requests for more money to police Wall Street; during this period, the sec's workload shot up 80 percent, but its staff grew only 20 percent. Gramm also opposed an sec rule that would have prohibited accounting firms from getting too close to the companies they audited—at one point, according to Levitt's memoir, he warned the sec chairman that if the commission adopted the rule, its funding would be cut. And in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms—setting off a wave of merger mania.

But Gramm's most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. "Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it," says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history.

It's not exactly like Gramm hid his handiwork—far from it. The balding and bespectacled Texan strode onto the Senate floor to hail the act's inclusion into the must-pass budget package. But only an expert, or a lobbyist, could have followed what Gramm was saying. The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the sec nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps—and would thus "protect financial institutions from overregulation" and "position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century."

It didn't quite work out that way. For starters, the legislation contained a provision—lobbied for by Enron, a generous contributor to Gramm—that exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight, allowing Enron to run rampant, wreck the California electricity market, and cost consumers billions before it collapsed. (For Gramm, Enron was a family affair. Eight years earlier, his wife, Wendy Gramm, as cftc chairwoman, had pushed through a rule excluding Enron's energy futures contracts from government oversight. Wendy later joined the Houston-based company's board, and in the following years her Enron salary and stock income brought between $915,000 and $1.8 million into the Gramm household.)

But the Enron loophole was small potatoes compared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash. Credit default swaps are essentially insurance policies covering the losses on securities in the event of a default. Financial institutions buy them to protect themselves if an investment they hold goes south. It's like bookies trading bets, with banks and hedge funds gambling on whether an investment (say, a pile of subprime mortgages bundled into a security) will succeed or fail. Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm's bill—which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers—a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed.

In essence, Wall Street's biggest players (which, thanks to Gramm's earlier banking deregulation efforts, now incorporated everything from your checking account to your pension fund) ran a secret casino. "Tens of trillions of dollars of transactions were done in the dark," says University of San Diego law professor Frank Partnoy, an expert on financial markets and derivatives. "No one had a picture of where the risks were flowing." Betting on the risk of any given transaction became more important—and more lucrative—than the transactions themselves, Partnoy notes: "So there was more betting on the riskiest subprime mortgages than there were actual mortgages." Banks and hedge funds, notes Michael Greenberger, who directed the cftc's division of trading and markets in the late 1990s, "were betting the subprimes would pay off and they would not need the capital to support their bets."

These unregulated swaps have been at "the heart of the subprime meltdown," says Greenberger. "I happen to think Gramm did not know what he was doing. I don't think a member in Congress had read the 262-page bill or had thought of the cataclysm it would cause." In 1998, Greenberger's division at the cftc proposed applying regulations to the burgeoning derivatives market. But, he says, "all hell broke loose. The lobbyists for major commercial banks and investment banks and hedge funds went wild. They all wanted to be trading without the government looking over their shoulder."

Now, belatedly, the feds are swooping in—but not to regulate the industry, only to bail it out, as they did in engineering the March takeover of investment banking giant Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase, fearing the firm's collapse could trigger a dominoes-like crash of the entire credit derivatives market.

No one in Washington apologizes for anything, so it's no surprise that Gramm has failed to issue any mea culpa. Post-Enron, says Greenberger, the senator even called him to say, "You're going around saying this was my fault—and it's not my fault. I didn't intend this."

Whether or not Gramm had bothered to ponder the potential downsides of his commodities legislation, having helped set off an industry free-for-all, he reaped the rewards. In 2003, he left the Senate to take a highly lucrative job at ubs, Switzerland's largest bank, which had been able to acquire investment house PaineWebber due to his banking deregulation bill. He would soon be lobbying Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury Department for ubs on banking and mortgage matters. There was a moment of poetic justice when ubs became one of the subprime crisis' top losers, writing down $37 billion as of this spring—an amount equal to its previous four years of profits combined. In a report explaining how it had managed to mess up so grandly, ubs noted that two-thirds of its losses were the fault of collateralized debt obligations—securities backed largely by subprime instruments—and that credit default swaps had been "key to the growth" of its out-of-control cdo business. (Gramm declined to comment for this article.)

Gramm's record as a reckless deregulator has not affected his rating as a Republican economic expert. Sen. John McCain has relied on him for policy advice, especially, according to the campaign, on housing matters. The two have been buddies ever since they served together in the House in the 1980s; in 1996, McCain chaired Gramm's flop of a presidential campaign. (Gramm spent $21 million and earned only 10 delegates during the gop primaries.) In 2005, McCain told a Wall Street Journal columnist that Gramm was his economic guru. Two years later, Gramm wrote a piece for the Journal extolling McCain as a modern-day Abraham Lincoln, and he's hailed McCain's love of tax cuts and free trade. Media accounts have identified Gramm as a contender for the top slot at the Treasury Department if McCain reaches the White House. "If McCain gets in," frets Lynn Turner, a former chief sec accountant, "we'll have more of the same deregulatory mess. I like John McCain, but given what I know about Phil Gramm, I wouldn't vote for McCain."

As a thriving bank exec and presidential adviser, Gramm has defied a prime economic principle: Bad products are driven out of the market. In John McCain, he has gained an important customer, so his stock has gone up in value. And there's no telling when the Gramm bubble will burst.


David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington, D.C. bureau chief.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/foreclosure-phil.html
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
hotdryplace said:
Guys, has OLDTIMER always been this much of a ranting class warfare MARXIST tool?

Are Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson Marxist? -- because they have been sitting in front of Congress for the last week asking for the regulations, oversight, and transparency that Phil Gramm got removed for his special interest banker/K street buddies profiteering put back on- in hopes of keeping anymore of these crash's from occurring...

Even they and most Republicans on the Hill now recognize that unpoliced, unregulated capitalism does not work- and that when allowed breeds greed, corruption, and deceptive actions which caused much of this entire mess we are in- from the banking to the housing to the energy crisis....
 

Mike

Well-known member
hotdryplace said:
Guys, has OLDTIMER always been this much of a ranting class warfare MARXIST tool?

He has steadily gotten more senile the past few years, even though I have always suspected him of being a closet liberal.. :roll:
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
E.J. Dionne: Reconsidering regulation: The quietest big '08 story
The fundamental economic debate in this country has shifted this year.

By E.J. DIONNE JR.

Last update: July 13, 2008 - 4:28 PM


Since the Reagan years, free market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to "grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is "protectionism."

The old script is in rewrite. "We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation," Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.

He notes that in 1999 when Congress replaced the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act with a looser set of banking rules, "we let investment banks get into a much wider range of activities without regulation." This helped create the subprime mortgage mess and the cascading calamity in banking.

While Frank is a liberal, the same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yet in a speech on Tuesday, Bernanke sounded like a born-again New Dealer in calling for "a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers."

Bernanke said the Fed needed more authority to get inside "the structure and workings of financial markets" because "recent experience has clearly illustrated the importance, for the purpose of promoting financial stability, of having detailed information about money markets and the activities of borrowers and lenders in those markets." Sure sounds like Big Government to me.

This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early '80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free market notions. What's becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.

What's striking is that conservatives who revere capitalism are offering their own criticisms of the way the system is working. Irwin Stelzer, director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies at the Hudson Institute, says the subprime crisis arose in part because lenders quickly sold their mortgages to others and bore no risk if the loans went bad.

"You have to have the person who's writing the risk bearing the risk," he says. "That means a whole host of regulations. There's no way around that."


While some conservatives now worry about the social and economic impact of growing inequalities, Stelzer isn't one of them. But he is highly critical of "the process that produces inequality."

"I don't like three of your friends on a board voting you a zillion dollars," Stelzer, who is also a business consultant, told me. "A cozy boardroom back-scratching operation offends me." He argues that "the preservation of the capitalist system" requires finding new ways of "linking compensation to performance."

In the campaign so far, John McCain has been clinging to the old economic orthodoxy while Barack Obama has proposed a modestly more active role for government. But the economic assumptions are changing faster than the rhetoric of the campaign. "Reality has broken in," says Frank. And none too soon.

E.J. Dionne's column is distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group.

Full article:
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/24538504.html?page=1&c=y

Even Bush's own SEC head and the banks are asking for more rules to close up some of the loopholes McSames annointed economic guru got removed for the benefit of his cronies, his Exxon connected wife, and himself......


Former SEC Head Pitt Wants Broader Short-Selling Rules

Monday, July 21, 2008 3:42 PM

Article Font Size



NEW YORK -- Emergency action by regulators to rein in abusive short-selling in some large financial firms should be expanded to include the stocks of all public companies, a former top markets watchdog said on Monday.

Former Securities and Exchange Chairman Harvey Pitt said the SEC's emergency order that went into effect on Monday would help in "restoring legitimacy" to short-selling activity but should go even further.


"It's something that is very good of the SEC to have done," he told Reuters in an interview. "They can't do it across the board without going through formal rule making, but I do believe that they need to expedite that."

The SEC last week announced an emergency measure applying to stocks of 17 Wall Street firms, as well as U.S. housing finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a way to curb manipulative short selling. The emergency action can last up to 30 days.


The commission's move has drawn complaints, including from the banking industry, which wants the protections extended to all banking companies. The SEC has said it will consider rules to address short-selling issues across the entire stock market.


"Any cut less than the whole is going to be perceived ultimately as arbitrary," said Pitt, now head of financial consultant Kalorama Partners in Washington. "My own view is they couldn't do all of the public companies in one fell swoop. They made what appears to me to be a reasonable cut, and hopefully they will expand it across the board just as quickly as they are able to do it."


Short sellers borrow shares they think are poised to drop in price and then sell them, hoping the stock will fall and can be repurchased at a profit. A "naked" short occurs when an investor sells stock that has not yet been borrowed.


Under the emergency rule, a short seller must borrow the securities before executing the short sale. It also requires the investor to deliver the securities on the settlement date.


Pitt, who was SEC chairman from 2001 to 2003, said that after the September 11, 2001 attacks roiled financial markets, many companies urged the commission to outlaw short selling entirely. But he said the practice is ultimately helpful to ensuring markets run properly.


"Short selling provides extra liquidity in the market," he said. "The goal isn't to prevent short selling. The goal is to make sure that people who sell short will have the means to settle their trades when they are supposed to be settled."

http://moneynews.newsmax.com/headlines/short_selling/2008/07/21/114873.html
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
I don't want anyone to miss this part of one of the previous articles...This is McCains longtime crony- who he annointed as his economy expert, and chairman of his campaign- and who most Repubs believe he will choose for Treasury Secretary on his cabinet if elected....
McSame represents more of the snidely cronyist corruption and lobbyist run government/White House that has almost bankrupt this country....


It's not exactly like Gramm hid his handiwork—far from it. The balding and bespectacled Texan strode onto the Senate floor to hail the act's inclusion into the must-pass budget package. But only an expert, or a lobbyist, could have followed what Gramm was saying. The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the sec nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps—and would thus "protect financial institutions from overregulation" and "position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century."

It didn't quite work out that way. For starters, the legislation contained a provision—lobbied for by Enron, a generous contributor to Gramm—that exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight, allowing Enron to run rampant, wreck the California electricity market, and cost consumers billions before it collapsed. (For Gramm, Enron was a family affair. Eight years earlier, his wife, Wendy Gramm, as cftc chairwoman, had pushed through a rule excluding Enron's energy futures contracts from government oversight. Wendy later joined the Houston-based company's board, and in the following years her Enron salary and stock income brought between $915,000 and $1.8 million into the Gramm household.)
 

hotdryplace

Active member
CLOSET LIBERAL??? ..... between the endless paranoid ravings of OT, fff, nonothing and Mogal, I can only picture these guys as old members of the Weathermen for the last 30 years hiding out in the wastes of northeast Montana, the far backwoods of bc, and mo., 23/7 glaring at their computer screens, feverishly pounding at the keyboard, moving the mouse at near the speed of light, only occasionally looking up to share a moment of adulation at the Obama poster taped over a time faded Che poster taped over an even more time faded Mao over Ho Joe Vlad Karl... and glancing fearfully (perhaps hopefully) out the window and down the road expecting those FBI trademark black Suburbans any year now to once again bring relevence to their lives.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE oldtimer

BURN BABY BURN fff

REVOLUTION nonothing
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
hotdry- You didn't answer my question on whether you think Bernanke and Paulson are Marxists... :???: :wink: :lol:

Again- you can't deny or even attack the message-- so you have to attack the messengers....This crooked neocon Republicanism has put you folks that follow the (R) cult in between the rock and the hardspot....What used to be a proud and what I thought of honest law and order organization was thrown to the dogs by this new neocon thinking...

The sad thing is that this corruption and all these crooks that have been allowed to run unpoliced to almost wreck our economy- are going to mean starting in 09 the Dems will have almost free run in D.C.- and they will not only react to what the people are saying and asking- but they will overreact... :shock:

Always happens- thats what occurred to get too much of the regulations taken off- overreaction by the Repubs to several years control/regulation by the Dems... :shock:

But I think the statement made by the young lady in her article is quite true:

What's becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.
 
Top