Your window into the sense of entitlement of our financial betters

From a New York Times article on the TARP inspector general Neil Barofsky's scathing report on the decision to pay off AIG's creditors in full.

Just two days before the New York Fed paid A.I.G.’s partners 100 cents on the dollar to tear up their contracts with the insurance giant, one bank volunteered to take a modest haircut — but it never got the chance.

UBS, of Switzerland, alone offered to give a break to the New York Fed in the negotiations last November over how to keep A.I.G. from toppling and taking other banks down with it. It would have accepted 98 cents on the dollar.

But UBS’s good-faith gesture was quickly drowned out by Goldman Sachs and the top French bank regulator. They argued, with others, that it would be improper and perhaps even criminal to force A.I.G.’s trading partners to bear losses outside of bankruptcy court.

Those are some balls on display. First by UBS, agreeing to take 98 cents on the dollar instead of 100 cents and pretending it is some grand compromise when their assets were worth 40 cents on the dollar, and then by Goldman-Sachs, who claimed that it would be illegal if they didn't get all their money in full. Thankfully they all got every penny that was owed to them. Why? Because Tim Geithner knows how to treat his old bosses. Is there a position higher than Treasury Secretary we can put him in?

What's it that Taibbi said about Goldman-Sachs? "The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money"? He was being too kind.

Stay classy, Feds

Quick question: how do you stop the fucking peasants who deign to catch a glimpse of the unelected betters who cart dump trucks full of money to our financial betters on Wall Street? By changing them exorbitant sums of money for their pissant Freedom Of Information Act requests.

The Treasury Department wants more than $500,000 to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, a fee an attorney on the case suggested Tuesday might be one of the largest bills of its kind.

“I have not seen one that has been larger,” said Noah Wood, a Missouri attorney suing the government to comply with his nearly four-year-old FOIA request.

The Treasury Department, Wood said, is “downright telling us where we can stick it.”
...
Still, the government wants Wood to pay $522,886 for the records. The original tab was more than $26,000, but after some revisions in what Wood was seeking, the government upped the ante — even though not all information sought would be forthcoming, according to the bill (.pdf).

How else is the Treasury going to recoup all that money it handed out to banks? By asking them to pay it back? You're fucking out of your mind.

Sadly this man wasn't trying to get information about the bank bailouts. No, that would have been almost too perfect. No, the man in question was simply trying to get info about some sort of deal with the Libyans and unpaid monies. I think it involved plutonium and a fake bomb made out of pinball machine parts. But hey, you gotta appreciate any attempt the Treasury Department takes to make itself even more lovable than it already is. Half a mil for making copies. Time Geithner can't keep the lights on charging 3 cents a page like Kinko's. Stay classy, Treasury Department.

And for God's sake if Matt Taibbi ever makes an FOIA request to you, please try to charge him half a million. The world needs another one of his articles on the financial industry and needs it to be completely filled to brim with utter disdain and bile.