SEC may limit disclosure on AIG until 2018
Reuters reporter Matthew Goldstein has this breaking story:
It could take until November 2018 to get the full story behind the U.S. bailout of insurance giant American International Group because of an action taken last year by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In May, the SEC approved a request by AIG to keep secret an exhibit to a year-old regulatory filing that includes some of the details on the most controversial aspect of the AIG bailout: the funneling of tens of billions of dollars to big banks like Societe Generale, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch.
The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, in granting AIG’s request for confidential treatment, said the "excluded information" will not be made public until Nov. 25, 2018, according to a copy of the agency’s May 22 order.
The SEC said the insurer had demonstrated the information in the exhibit, called Schedule A, "qualifies as confidential commercial or financial information."
The expiration date for the SEC order falls on the 10th anniversary of Federal Reserve of New York’s decision to provide emergency financing to an entity set up to specifically acquire some $60 billion in collateralized debt obligations from 16 banks in the United States and Europe.
Look, here’s what’s going on: Government officials wanted to prevent damage to big-to-fail institutions like Citigroup, AIG or Goldman Sachs after the Lehman collapse. As a result, they did any- and everything they could to do so.
- That meant bullying a CEO into a merger as in the Bank of America case.
- That meant loaning banks trillions at low rates against dodgy collateral and then refusing to reveal to whom and against what the money was lent in the case of the Fed.
- That meant giving banks $350 billion in TARP funds to all banks generally to hide the distress of specific institutions like Citigroup.
- That meant covering up the free back door handouts and demanding private companies comply with the cover-up in the AIG case.
- That meant making a dodgy settlement with Bank of America for alleged improprieties in disclosure to shareholders in the case of the SEC.
- That meant letting Citigroup off the hook for a multi-billion dollar tax bill when repaying TARP funds in the case of the IRS.
- That meant changing or re-interpreting accounting provisions that would create large writedowns.
I could go on. There are 100 other ways this whole charade has been concocted. Should we be surprised at yet another revelation of this sort? Folks, this is how your government now does business – the corruption, the collusion, and connivance is more brazen, more open and more unapologetic than ever.
Source
SEC order helps maintain AIG bailout mystery – Matthew Goldstein, Reuters
“Folks, this is how your government now does business – the corruption, the collusion, and connivance is more brazen, more open and more unapologetic than ever.”
Quite a bill of particulars, Ed, and I’ll bet it doesn’t even scratch the surface. They steal us blind, lie us into wars, torture people, and, as you say, all unapologetically. I was watching the McLaughlin report on PBS last Friday night and there was the resident Nazi, Monica Crowley, openly called for the waterboarding of the Panty Bomber. Such advocacy would only be possible on government supported media if all moral restraint in the culture generally had disintegrated. I’ve written McLaughlin telling him that if this two-bit Ilse Koch isn’t off the set but quick, I’m through with his show.
We have no recourse left but demonstrations and strikes if we are to rid ourselves of the vermin that govern us. The franchise and elections offer us no hope whatsoever. As the employment picture continues to dim as, in my view, it inevitably must, the conditions for publically expressed outrage become increasingly realizable. One day it will all spill over and the Geithners and Summers of this era will be entertaining representatives of the peoples’ security apparatus at two o’clock in the morning. Then perhaps we’ll see just how transparent the SEC can become.
Someone else made a very telling statement on a post saying that Geithner will get off as long as the economy skates along. They used Nixon and Watergate as an analogy. No one gave a damn about Watergate until the economy relapsed into recession in 1973. Then, all of a sudden people cared.
The Haitian people have been hammered with an enormous natural disaster with upwards of 500,000 feared dead, some estimate. Humanitarian aid in this case is an obligation by any standard of human decency. The very fact that some are likely to seek limititations on expenditures for Haiti owing to fear of “higher deficits” when we have close to 250,000 combat troops together with countless accompanying bloodsuckers in contracting services engaged in aggressive war in Iraq and Af/Pak is an absolute outrage. Yet there will be such fears expressed, trust me. With every insanity like this we get closer to a peoples’ response.