This is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen about the financial crisis. What Wall Street got away with will blow your mind. “Inside Job” is a must see film. Incidentally, I didn’t realize until the other day that this film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature earlier this year. I never watch the Oscars so I didn’t realize that. But they made a good choice.

This video cracks me up. Listen to this Irishman give a frank assessment of the economic crisis. He blames greedy “arseholes” and “wankin bankers.”

WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE

Here is an excellent documentary by the BBC on the downfall of Lehman Brothers. The failure of the oldest investment bank on Wall Street touched off the banking crisis that crippled economies around the world. All the major players involved in the lead up to and eventual bankruptcy are involved, with the exception of arrogant Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld. Fuld started working at Lehman Brothers as an intern while in college, and after graduation was hired by the firm. He worked his way up the ladder and became CEO in 1994. Lehman Brothers stock was worth around $8 a share when he took over before its demise was trading at more than $80 per share. The huge increase in share price and record profits for the firm and its shareholders was misleading. Under Fuld’s tutelage the firm had become heavily invested in commercial and residential real estate. They became the largest holder of risky credit default swaps in the US. Fuld authorized Lehman to take huge risks using leverage that exceeded 40 to 1, the highest on Wall Street.

Nothing Lehman did was illegal or even unique among Wall Street firms. But as is often the case, greed is eventually what brought everything crashing down. Profits at any cost became a way of life at Lehman. Things were good for so long that people who should have known better forgot what it felt like to lose. Nobody stopped to think what might happen if the housing market one day stopped going up and the markets crashed. Lehman Brothers was so overextended and over-leveraged that it didn’t take much to tip it over the cliff.

In the BBC report, Lehman employees claim Dick Fuld was like a God within the company and in the business community at large. He didn’t even speak to low level employees. When someone would say good morning he would not respond. If you rode the elevator with him you did not speak. It is precisely that kind of attitude and arrogance that can only spell disaster for an organization. It means the leader has lost touch. It means he’s not thinking rationally anymore. It means he’s bought into his own hype. A man who thinks he can never be wrong usually is.

Probably, the slickest and most shrewd individual in this entire episode would have to be Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain. He’s a Gordon Gecko-esque character who could see two moves ahead of his rivals. When you watch the show you’ll see why.

When the Federal Reserve bailed out Wall Street to the tune of $3.3 trillion, a huge percentage of that went to rescue foreign banks.

Foreign banks were among the biggest beneficiaries of the $3,300bn in emergency credit provided by the Federal Reserve during the crisis, according to new data on the extraordinary efforts of the US authorities to save the global financial system.

…banks such as Barclays of the UK, Switzerland’s UBS and Dexia of Belgium borrowed billions of dollars at favourable terms from US authorities may further anger critics already enraged about the Fed’s rescue of Wall Street.

“We’re talking about huge sums of money going to bail out large foreign banks,” said Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont. “Has the Federal Reserve of the United States become the central bank of the world?”

I’ll be honest, I don’t have a firm enough understanding of the bailouts to know what the appropriate level of outrage should be. It seems like a reasonable argument that it was impossible to save the US financial sector without saving the rest of the world’s given the close ties. And it does look like we really are getting that money back with interest. Bailing out the financial sector may actually turn a profit for the US government. Of course we’ll just piss it all away on reparations Pigford II, ObamaCare, and phony green jobs.

I just don’t like the secretive nature with which the Federal Reserve operates. Who the f*ck are they to borrow money we don’t have to bailout a bank in some other country? I don’t remember voting on that. In fact, I don’t even remember a discussion about it. These people are running around in the middle of the night doing whatever the hell they want.

This entire episode reeks on so many levels.

The financial regulation bill our so-called “post-racial president” is pushing contains ethnic and gender quotas.

You really have to admire the chutzpah that president Obama displays time and again when talking about fiscal matters.

He said the following during a town hall meeting in New Mexico:

“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

Holders of U.S. debt will eventually “get tired” of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. “It will have a dampening effect on our economy.”

What he neglects to mention as usual is that he is the reason we keep borrowing from China and mortgaging our children’s future.

Obama loves to talk about the deficits he inherited, but his only solution to Bush’s out-of-control spending and record deficits has been even more spending and ever larger deficits.

Obama’s spending in his first 100 days in office dwarfs all of Bush’s spending for his entire two terms.

So maybe the president should take some of his own advice.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says those who blame California’s fiscal crisis on illegal aliens are bigoted and wrong.

I don’t think illegal aliens are the main cause of California’s economic troubles, but they’re certainly a significant player in it.

Arnold is either just playing politics or he’s an idiot.

If only someone would tell this exact thing to Barack Obama:

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the U.S. government has decided to buy stakes in nine of the nation’s largest banks.

The U.S. government is expected to take stakes in nine of the nation’s top financial institutions as part of a new plan to restore confidence to the battered U.S. banking system, a far-reaching effort that puts the government’s guarantee behind the basic plumbing of financial markets.

This move comes on the heels of the British government’s decision to buy stakes in their countries largest banks.

It’s official. Former President Jimmy Carter has finally lost it. The guy who literally destroyed our economy to the point that people were lining up at soup kitchens is slamming President Bush over the economy.

Former President Jimmy Carter said on Friday the “atrocious economic policies” of the Bush administration had caused the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Carter told reporters on a stopover in Brussels that “profligate spending,” massive borrowing and dramatic tax cuts since President George W. Bush took office in 2001 were behind the market turmoil and economic crisis.

“I think it’s because of the atrocious economic policies of the Bush administration,” said the 84-year-old Democrat, who served in the White House from 1977-1981 during a period of high inflation and energy crisis.

Like he was during his four years as President and every subsequent year since, Carter is just wrong. Tax cuts didn’t have a thing to with it nor did “profligate spending.” Instead it was cowardly democrats like him who caused this mess. Guys like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who fought tooth and nail to keep any new regulations on Fannie and Freddie from passing.

I hate to belabor the point, because it seems like I’m always talking about Jimmy Carter. There is nobody on this planet less qualified to give advice about anything besides peanut farming than Jimmy Carter. He was absolutely the worst president in modern history. His economic policies were an absolute disaster as was his foreign policy.

This is the guy who stopped backing the Shah which led to the coup in Iran that we’re still dealing with today. He allowed the Iranians to hold U.S. citizens hostage for 444 days and humiliate us in front of the world.

It took Reagan 8 years to heal the damage caused by Carter’s brief tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

-Chris Jones