evanmorris.com
From the daily archives: Saturday, October 18, 2008
Hint to the subprime high-rollers, the hedge fund hucksters and the cigar-bar Machiavellis: past a certain point (like, say, two weeks ago), a Romanov Effect kicks in and the peasants start perusing MapQuest for driving directions to Greenwich.
(Straight up 95, comrades, first exit north of the CT state line. Via con dios.)
Financial workers at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year – despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.
Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government’s cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed.
Pay plans for bankers have been disclosed in recent corporate statements. Pressure on the US firms to review preparations for annual bonuses increased yesterday when Germany’s Deutsche Bank said many of its leading traders would join Josef Ackermann, its chief executive, in waiving millions of euros in annual payouts.
The sums that continue to be spent by Wall Street firms on payroll, payoffs and, most controversially, bonuses appear to bear no relation to the losses incurred by investors in the banks. Shares in Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have declined by more than 45% since the start of the year. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley have fallen by more than 60%. JP MorganChase fell 6.4% and Lehman Brothers has collapsed.
At one point last week the Morgan Stanley $10.7bn pay pot for the year to date was greater than the entire stock market value of the business. In effect, staff, on receiving their remuneration, could club together and buy the bank.
more: Wall Street bankers in line for $70bn payout | Business | The Guardian.
And what the hell happened to your car, man?
Slimeball racist doesn’t want to appear on camera, but gives a candid interview and lets the local news use his name, give his address, and even show a handy map of where he lives. Now that’s news you can use.
BTW, how come nobody noticed that there’s a Star of David scrawled on the effigy’s head?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbbcVNOMqSk[/youtube]
Barack Obama attracted 100,000 people at a Saturday rally here, his biggest crowd ever at a U.S. event.
The crowd assembled under the Gateway Arch on a sunny Saturday afternoon to hear Obama speak about taxes and slam the Republicans on economic issues.
Lt. Samuel Dotson of the St. Louis Police Department confirmed the number of attendees piled into the grassy lawn by the Mississippi River.
Washington Wire – WSJ.com : Obama Rally Draws 100,000 in Missouri
How hard is anyone looking for the creeps who defrauded these people?
I asked Kim Richardson, who is 59 and lives in a modest ranch house in Rocky Mount, N.C., what she would do if a hearing next month goes against her and she loses her home to foreclosure.
After a long pause, she said, in a voice faint from worry, “I don’t know. I’ll be out on the street, I guess. I don’t have anywhere to go.”
Ms. Richardson, who lives on a pair of monthly disability checks, lies awake night after night, unable to fend off the frightening homeless scenarios that dominate her thoughts. “I never believed that anything like this could ever, ever happen to me,” she said.
If you believe Ms. Richardson’s account, and I do, she was fast-talked into a mortgage that would have been impossible to pay off with her fixed income. Foreclosure would have seemed inevitable. But Ms. Richardson and her current lawyer, Carlene McNulty of Raleigh, N.C., said the figures that would have made it obvious to Ms. Richardson that she couldn’t afford the mortgage were deliberately concealed.
While the news media have been focusing on the banks, brokerage houses and mega-millionaires being buffeted by the ill winds of the financial crisis, the millions of lower- and middle-income Americans sinking toward the protracted hell of destitution are getting very little attention.
Older Americans are taking a particularly wicked hit. Analysts at AARP have found that “Americans age 50 and over represent about 28 percent of all delinquencies and foreclosures in the current crisis.”
Losing a home to foreclosure is a disaster for anyone. It’s a catastrophe for older people. The AARP Public Policy Institute, in a recent report, poignantly explained: “For Americans age 50 and over, losing a house represents a loss from which there is limited time to recover, and for some, a recovery may be impossible given their age and limited incomes.”
When Ms. Richardson bought her house in December 2005, she tried to make it clear that she could not afford monthly payments much higher than $500. Fine, she was told. She closed the deal with the understanding that she had a fixed-rate mortgage with monthly payments of $537. Prudent and skeptical, she tried to find out if there were any economic bombs hidden in the confusing mass of paperwork that she was confronted with.
“I had all these stacks of papers at the closing,” she told me, “and they were just passing papers back and forth to me, back and forth, telling me to sign. And I kept saying, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute.’ ”
She was assured that nothing untoward was going on.
Ms. Richardson did not have a fixed-rate mortgage. Her monthly payment rose, and rose again, eventually passing $800, which she could not pay. There was also a balloon payment provision hidden in the welter of documents, along with other obligations that would not emerge until Ms. Richardson was waist-high in economic quicksand.
read the rest: Op-Ed Columnist – Climbing Down the Ladder – NYTimes.com.
today’s moodcat
