They said a black man would be President when pigs fly....
Only 100 days in office and BAM!!
.....Swine Flu.
Dozens of AIG Bonuses Topped $1 Million
But 11 Recipients No Longer at Firm,Troubled insurance giant American International Group paid bonuses of $1 million or more to 73 employees, including 11 who no longer work for the company, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday.
Cuomo subpoenaed information from AIG on Monday to determine whether the payments made over the past weekend constitute fraud under state law. Contracts written last March guaranteed employees 100 percent of their 2007 bonus amounts for 2008, "despite obvious signs that 2008 performance would be disastrous in comparison to the year before,"
American International Group, the giant insurance company that has received some $170 billion in a government bailout since last September, has come under fire for bonuses paid to some of its employees.
President Barack Obama and Washington lawmakers have blasted AIG for paying more than $160 million in bonuses to employees of its Financial Products division, the unit primarily responsible for the meltdown that led to a federal bailout of the company, while the company has received billions in taxpayer bailout funds.
Cuomo said AIG mailed the retention bonus checks Friday.
In a letter Tuesday to Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, Cuomo outlined the bonus and contract information and asked the panel to take up the issue at a hearing scheduled for Wednesday.
"AIG also claims that retention of individuals at Financial Products was vital to unwinding the subsidiary's business," Cuomo wrote. But AIG has been unwilling to provide their names, despite his subpoena for the list, making it impossible to test that claim, Cuomo said. He said his office will do "everything necessary" to get the information.
The company and some federal regulators have said it was obligated by contract to make the payments. Cuomo said the bonuses might have been fraudulent if AIG officials knew the company couldn't afford them.Cuomo said that despite their contracts, Financial Products employees agreed to take 2009 salaries of $1 in exchange for receiving their retention bonus packages. He said the fact AIG could negotiate the terms of the payments "flies in the face of AIG's assertion" that it had no choice but to make the contractual bonus payments.
"You could argue if the taxpayers didn't bail out AIG, those contracts wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on," he said Monday.
There was no immediate AIG comment following Cuomo's disclosure Tuesday of the bonus amounts.
According to the attorney general's office, the top individual bonus was more than $6.4 million, and the top seven received more than $4 million each.Come visit our International Bullshit Store!
Health care overhaul may cost about $1.5 trillion
Still, the potential costs are raising concerns among Republicans and some Democrats as Congress prepares to draft next year's budget. "We shouldn't just be throwing more money on top of the present system, because the present system is so wasteful," said Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee.
The health care plan Obama offered as a candidate would have cost nearly $1.2 trillion over ten years, according to a detailed estimate last fall by the Lewin Group, a leading consulting and policy analysis firm. The campaign plan would not have covered all the uninsured, as most Democrats in Congress want to do. But it is a starting point for lawmakers.
John Sheils, a senior vice president of the Lewin Group, said about $1.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion would be a credible estimate for a plan that commits the nation to covering all its citizens. That would amount to around 4 percent of projected health care costs over the next 10 years, he added.
The cost of covering the uninsured is "a difficult hurdle to get over," Sheils said in an interview.
"I don't know where the rest of the money is going to come from," he added.
Some of the leading advocates of coverage for all are using cost estimates of around $1.5 trillion.
"Honestly...we can't do it for the $634 billion the president put in the reserve fund," John Rother, public policy director for AARP told an insurance industry meeting in Washington last week.
"In all likelihood, it will be over $1 trillion," he added, citing his own estimate of $1.5 trillion.
Economist Len Nichols, who heads the health policy project at the New America Foundation, said he calculates that guaranteeing coverage will cost $125 billion to $150 billion a year, when fully phased in.
Nichols said the Obama administration is not being "cagy" but "strategic" in refusing to be pinned down on an estimate. Taxpayers will get a better idea when congressional committees try to draft legislation later this year. "Until that gets revealed by the Congress, it would be highly premature for the president to assert that sort of number," Nichols said.
White House budget director Peter Orszag told the House Budget Committee earlier this month that the president's $634 billion fund is "likely to be the majority of the cost." Roughly half of the money would come from spending cuts, and the other half from tax increases.
But whether the $634 billion represents 50 percent, 60 percent, or 70 percent of the cost "will depend on the details of whatever is finally done...as we move through the legislative process," Orszag added.
The overall cost matters because the expansion of health coverage is meant to be a permanent reform. That means future generations will have to bear the cost.
"We are dealing with huge numbers," said David Walker, a former U.S. comptroller general and now head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a group that promotes fiscal responsibility. "We need to have a much better sense of what we are talking about doing, and whether or not it's affordable and sustainable over time."
The costs could force the administration and Congress to make unpopular decisions on where to cut the nation's $2.4 trillion health care tab.
"Nobody disputes the fact that there's going to be some startup costs," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. "But to have credibility in terms of going to the public, you've got to show you are making some savings in the existing system."
A lot is riding on Geithner's shoulders. He was supposed to be President Obama's golden boy, the 'smart' Cabinet pick that most economists praised. He was tapped along with his mentor Lawrence Summers to rescue the economy.
But hearing pundits on Cable TV news stopping just short of calling for Geithner's head, you could be forgiven for thinking Geithner is a hopeless wreck, "missing in action."
To make things worse, Geithner was lampooned by "Saturday Night Live" last weekend. It portrayed Geithner as a clueless technocrat fielding ideas for a bank rescue plan from random callers on a phone hotline.
To be fair, Geithner gave a fuller accounting of himself and his ideas in an hour-long interview on PBS’ “Charlie Rose” a few days later. The thoughtful man sitting across the table from Rose seems a far cry from the dithering caricature being pilloried in the media.
"There is a pack mentality and so the current flavor is to blame Geithner and that's unfortunate. He can't be as bad as everyone is saying right now," Vincent Reinhart, a former chief economist of the Federal Reserve's rate-setting Open Market Committee, tells McClatchy Newspapers. "When was the last the time a Treasury secretary was part of an 'SNL' skit?"
But the SNL skit is symptomatic of real fears. Some argue that Geithner isn't doing enough to calm investors and prop up banks. Others argue that he’s been too weak on banks and should temporarily nationalize more of them. But the main criticism is that he's just not being fast enough.
David M. Smick’s op-ed this week for the Washington Post, "Tim Geithner’s Black Hole," puts many of these complaints in a more sobering perspective. He argues that the secretary is facing a near impossible task, one that involves huge political risks tied to the toxic assets conundrum.
Remember toxic assets, those alphabet-soup thingamajigs tied to bad mortgages? The same nasty little things that vaporized Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers?
Smick, one of the first analysts to bore down on this problem in a fresh new manner, says the complex insurance contracts on AIG’s books still comprise a financial black hole that could swallow the whole world economy:
The theory holds that dismantling a big bank could unravel this paper market, with catastrophic global financial consequences. Or not. Nobody knows, because the market for these unregulated financial derivatives, amounting potentially to over $40 trillion (by comparison, global gross domestic product is now not much more than $60 trillion), is the financial equivalent of uncharted waters.
Given the mess on Geithner's hands, columnists like Newsweek's Michael Hirsch are calling for a little more patience. As Hirsh reports, Geithner hopes to remove these toxic assets through a mix of public and private funds. Details to that plan are reportedly close to being unveiled.
Treasury Plan Could Cost $1 Trillion
The Obama administration's latest attempt to tackle the banking crisis and get loans flowing to families and businesses will create a new government entity, the Public-Private Investment Program, to help purchase as much as $1 trillion in toxic assets on banks' books.
The new effort, to be unveiled Monday, will be followed the next day with release of the administration's broad framework for overhauling the financial system to ensure that the current crisis — the worst in seven decades — is not repeated.
A key part of that regulatory framework will give the government new resolution authority to take over troubled institutions that would pose a threat to the entire financial system if they failed.
Administration officials believe this new power will save taxpayers money and avoid the type of controversy that erupted last week when insurance giant American International Group paid employees of its troubled financial products unit $165 million in bonuses even though the company had received more than $170 billion in support from the federal government.
Under the new powers being sought by the administration, the treasury secretary could only seize a firm with the agreement of the president and the Federal Reserve.
Once in the equivalent of a conservatorship, the treasury secretary would have the power to limit payments to creditors and to break contracts governing executive compensation, a power that was lacking in the AIG case.
The plan on toxic assets will use the resources of the $700 billion bank bailout fund, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
The initiative will seek to entice private investors, including big hedge funds, to participate by offering billions of dollars in low-interest loans to finance the purchases. The government will share the risks if the assets fall further in price.
When Geithner released the initial outlines of the administration's overhaul of the bank rescue program on Feb. 10, the markets took a nosedive. The Dow Jones industrial average plunged by 380 points as investors expressed disappointment about a lack of details.
Christina Romer, head of the Council of Economic Advisers, said Sunday that it's important for investors to know that the administration is bringing a full array of programs to confront the problem.
"I don't think Wall Street is expecting the silver bullet," she said on CNN's "State of the Union." "This is one more piece. It's a crucial piece to get these toxic assets off, but it is just part of it and there will be more to come."
But private economists said investors may still have doubts about whether the government has adequate resources to properly fund the plan and whether private investors will be attracted to participate, especially after last week's uproar concerning the AIG bonuses, which has added to the anti-Wall Street feelings in the country.
Romer said the new toxic asset program would utilize around $100 billion from the $700 billion bailout fund, leaving the fund close to being tapped out.
Mark Zandi, an economist at Moody's Economy.com, estimated that the government will need an additional $400 billion to adequately deal with the toxic asset problem, seen by many analysts as key to finally resolving the banking crisis.
Zandi said the administration has no choice but to rely heavily on government resources because of the urgency of getting soured real estate loans and troubled asset-backed securities off the books of banks so that they can resume more normal lending to consumers and businesses.
"This is a start and we will see how far it goes, but I believe they will have to go back to Congress for more money," he said.
The Public-Private Investment Program that will be created was viewed as performing the same functions — selling bonds to finance purchases of bad assets — as a similar organization did for the Resolution Trust Corp., which was created to dispose of bad real estate assets in the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s.
According to administration and industry officials, the toxic asset program will have three major parts:
_A public-private partnership to back private investors' purchases of bad assets, with government support coming from the $700 billion bailout fund. The government would match private investors dollar for dollar and share any profits equally.
_Expansion of a recently launched Fed program that provides loans for investors to buy securities backed by consumer debt as a way to increase the availability of auto loans, student loans and credit card debt. Under Geithner's plan for the toxic assets, that $1 trillion program would be expanded to support purchases of toxic assets.
_Use of the FDIC, which insures bank deposits, to support purchases of toxic assets, tapping into this agency's expertise in closing down failed banks and disposing of bad assets.
Some industry officials said hedge funds and other big investors are likely to be more leery of accepting the government's enticements to purchase these assets, fearing tighter government restraints in such areas as executive compensation.
Administration officials, however, insisted Sunday that a distinction needed to be made between companies getting heavy support from the bailout programs and investors who are being asked to help dispose of troubled assets.
Romer said the partnership with the private sector will help ensure that the government doesn't overpay for the toxic assets that it will be purchasing.
"This isn't just another handout to banks," she said on CNN. "We very much have the taxpayers' interest in mind."
The administration's revamped program for toxic assets is the latest in a string of banking initiatives which have also included efforts to deal with mortgage foreclosures, boost lending to small businesses and unfreeze the market for many types of consumer loans.
In addition, the nation's 19 biggest banks are undergoing intensive examinations by regulators that are due to be completed by the end of April to determine whether they have sufficient capital reserves to withstand an even more severe recession. Those that do not will be able to get more support from the government.
The overhaul of financial regulation will be revealed by Geithner in testimony he is scheduled to give Tuesday and Thursday before the House Financial Services Committee.
In addition to the expanded authority to seize big institutions that pose a risk to the entire system, the administration is also expected to offer more general proposals on limiting excesses seen in executive compensation in recent years, where the rewards prodded extreme risk-taking.
The regulatory plan is also expected to include a major change that gives the Federal Reserve more powers to oversee systemic risks to the entire financial system.
The administration is working to unveil its proposed regulatory changes in advance of a meeting of the Group of 20 economic leaders, which Obama will attend on April 2 in London. European nations have complained that lax financial regulations in the United States set the stage for the current financial crisis.
WHO IS JACK SCHITT?
For some time many of us have wondered just who is Jack Schitt?
We find ourselves at a loss when someone says, 'You don't know Jack Schitt!'.
Well, thanks to my genealogy efforts, you can now respond in an intellectual way.Jack Schitt is the only son of Awe Schitt. Awe Schitt, the fertilizer> >magnate, married O. Schitt, the owner of Needeep N. Schitt, Inc. They had one son, Jack. In turn, Jack Schitt married Noe Schitt.
The deeply religious couple produced six children: Holie Schitt,Giva Schitt, Fulla Schitt, Bull Schitt, and the twins Deep Schitt and Dip Schitt. Against her parents' objections, Deep Schitt married Dumb Schitt,a high school dropout. After being married 15 years, Jack and Noe Schitt divorced. Noe Schitt later married Ted Sherlock, and because her kids were living with them, she wanted to keep her previous name. She was then known as Noe Schitt Sherlock. Meanwhile, Dip Schitt married Loda Schitt, and they produced a son with a rather nervous disposition named Chicken Schitt.Two of the other six children, Fulla Schitt and Giva Schitt,were inseparable throughout childhood and subsequently married the Happens brothers in a dual ceremony.The wedding announcement in the newspaper announced the Schitt-Happens nuptials.Bull Schitt, the prodigal son, left home to tour the world. He recently returned from Italy with his new Italian bride, Pisa Schitt.Now when someone says, 'You don't know Jack Schitt,' you can correctthem. Sincerely,Crock O. Schitt NOTE:
