Quote of the day

Alan Greenspan was on the Hill today to blame everyone else for the complete meltdown of the financial industry and the global economy during a meeting of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. In between trying not to blame banks or financial giants for what happened and blaming homeowners and poor people, Big Al offered up this assessment of how fuckin' awesome he thinks he is.

Greenspan: When you've been in government for 20 years, as I have been, the issue of retrospective and figuring out what you should have done differently is a really futile activity... My experience has been, in the business I was in I was right 70 percent of the time, but I was wrong 30 percent of the time and there are an awful lot of mistakes in 21 years.

Angelides: Would you put this in the 30 percent category?

Greenspan: I don't know.

Gee, you're only awesome 3/4th's of the time? How "man of the people" of you. Just one question, are you counting that whole "failure to foresee any of the massive problems that contributed to the global financial apocalypse and in many ways contributing to and exacerbating the problems" as one problem within the 30% or as comprising the entire 30%? Because it was a pretty massive fuck-up that seems like it could hardly be contained in the latter, so it seems like you're sweeping the "greatest economic collapse since the Depression" into the single mistake category, like that time you called your secretary Jane instead of Jan.

I know you think 70% is good and you're being modest, but you need to stop thinking of it in baseball terms. Sure if you were on the Yankees and were hitting .700, we'd be enshrining you in the Hall as we speak. But, say, if you were at a Community College and you were getting 70% of things right, you'd be well on your way to failing to get that two year degree in air conditioning maintenance and repair. You're a low-C/high-D student. As the state of the economy shows, that might just be a generous estimate.

Picture of the day

From the New York Times and its article Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash, comes said floating, expanding islands of trash in the Pacific. Aint' my fault baby, I only pollute the Atlantic.

Complete asshole to testify today

AIG Debacle Not My Fault, Says Greenberg; Testifies Today

As Congress presses for answers on what went wrong at American International Group Inc. and what to do next, lawmakers are turning Thursday to the man who built the small insurer into a world-wide conglomerate.

Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg, 83 years old, is scheduled to appear before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. He plans to argue for slimming down the government's stake in AIG and pressuring trading partners that got huge payments as a result of the insurer's bailout to funnel some of that money back into AIG as an investment.
...
"I don't feel any responsibility at all" for AIG's problems, Mr. Greenberg said in the interview. "How can I be responsible for something that occurred when I'm not there?"
...
"Of course, I lost considerable net worth," said Mr. Greenberg, who also heads another firm, C.V. Starr & Co. "But I'm working. My life is not materially changed."

So you ran AIG for 38 years, but because the company didn't completely collapse until after you were removed for numerous scandals and illegal business practices, it is in no way your fault. Oh, you're a peach Hank. It would be completely unfortunate if you were to fall into a combine harvester. We'd lose so much.

Luckily he's going to testify in front of the the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today, so one of those lucky duckies gets to ask him if he's fucking high. Of course because this is America, his testimony is being protested by the Republican party who don't feel it's useful to talk to the guy who ran AIG for nearly four decades and AIG itself has already started sending out attack dossiers to try to discredit him. First thing AIG put on that list to make Greenberg seem incompetent and morally bankrupt: he worked for AIG for 4+ decades. That's some tough but fair criticism. The attack piece is called "the Greenberg Legacy" and dumps the entire AIGFP credit default swap mess at his feet. What it means is that they probably wont dot any I's with hearts or affix any smiley face stickers to whatever large bonus payment they haven't made to him yet.

All in all, it should be a good day. We either get substantive testimony about what happened or we get to see a dissembling cryptkeeper try to pretend he wasn't running AIG for four decades. Truth after it's too late to do anything or the comedy of outrage, it's all we have to look forward to anymore.

Thanks for the breaking news, science

Ladies, I'm sorry to tell you that science has gone out a proven something you probably already knew: men like boobies. Not only that, but a glimpse of them causes the part of our brain that is usually reserved for tool use and first-person action verbs. Action verbs! In an even creepier finding of the study, people who are classified as "hostile sexists" don't even register scantily clad women as humans with thoughts or intentions.

Bikinis Make Men See Women as Objects, Scans Confirm

Brain scans revealed that when men are shown pictures of scantily clad women, the region of the brain associated with tool use lights up.

Men were also more likely to associate images of sexualized women with first-person action verbs such as "I push, I grasp, I handle," said lead researcher Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton University.

And in a "shocking" finding, Fiske noted, some of the men studied showed no activity in the part of the brain that usually responds when a person ponders another's intentions.

This means that these men see women "as sexually inviting, but they are not thinking about their minds," Fiske said. "The lack of activation in this social cognition area is really odd, because it hardly ever happens."

Yeah...uh...about that...uh.....sorry. Yeah, on behalf of men as a gender, sorry. In fairness, it's only some men....and Sean, not all or even most. Our brains make us do it...or the patriarchy, I'm not totally sure on this one. Or, judging by the NG headline, the bikinis themselves make us do it, because clothing is self-aware and has power over thought now. It has something to do with patterns, fabric material, particles, tachyons, and mind control. Bikinis are evidently Skynet.

Again, sorry, and if you...IT'S ALL SEAN'S FAULT!!! I TOLD HIM NOT TO OBJECTIFY WOMEN IN THE MEDIA AND SOCIETY BUT HE DID ANYWAY!!! *sound of running, frantic opening of car door, car engine starting, and screeching tires*

It's not my fault: Madoff edition

THE SEC WATCHDOG WHO MISSED MADOFF

The Securities and Exchange Commission's New York watchdog, under fire for failing to uncover Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme - despite a dead-on tip by a whistleblower - yesterday tearfully defended herself, arguing that she and the agency did the best job possible.

"Why are you taking a mid-level staff person and making me responsible for the failure of the American economy?" an upset Meaghan Cheung, with eyes tearing up, told The Post.

"I worked very hard for 10 years to make a career, and a reputation, and that has been destroyed in a month," said Cheung, who was the SEC's branch chief of the New York enforcement division during that unit's earlier probe of Madoff's brokerage business.

The 37-year-old has been singled out by whistleblower Harry Markopolos as the woman who failed to detect the scam despite his lengthy warnings. It was Cheung who signed off on a 2006 SEC investigation that effectively gave Madoff the all clear.

First off, you are a Branch Chief. That's not mid-level. Secondly, you received extremely specific warnings about the exact type of scheme Madoff was running and you failed to even come anywhere close to finding out what happened, in fact you said everything was on the level. Ponzi schemes are possibly the easiest fraud schemes to figure out and bust. The fraud behind a Ponzi scheme is that they don't have the amount of money or holdings that they say they do. Whether or not they are telling the truth is a matter of you looking at what they claim they hold and then going to the custodian/banks who are holding all that money/filthy lucre and seeing if the numbers match up. You couldn't even do that.

Boo hoo, you fucked up horrifically. Of course your career should take a drubbing. Despite a detailed map, flashlight, and a sherpa, you couldn't hack it up the mountain. Maybe you're an idiot, maybe you didn't want to take on the guy who was buddy-buddy with everyone important in the financial industry, including the SEC. Either way you told everyone the guy who defrauded people for $50 billion was squeaky clean, despite him running one of the oldest, most obvious, and most easily verifiable scams in the books. You didn't notice any of this, but it wasn't your fault. Thanks for taking responsibility and showing so much dignity, somewhere there's a four year old who's embarrassed for you.

Alberto Gonzales to whine about people hating him

Gonzales Defends Role in Antiterror Policies

Alberto Gonzales, who has kept a low profile since resigning as attorney general nearly 16 months ago, said he is writing a book to set the record straight about his controversial tenure as a senior official in the Bush administration.

Mr. Gonzales has been portrayed by critics both as unqualified for his position and instrumental in laying the groundwork for the administration's "war on terror." He was pilloried by Congress in a manner not usually directed toward cabinet officials.

"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" he said during an interview Tuesday, offering his most extensive comments since leaving government.

Where should I start, Alberto? There was that whole attorney firing scandal where you axed people that wouldn't engage in politically motivated prosecutions and investigations. There was that thing where you politicized the Justice Department by going on a concerted effort to hire Republicans and pass over and fire Democrats. That whole thing about not serving subpoenas and essentially aiding and abetting every attempt by the Bush Administration to avoid contact with the law. There was the whole thing about the war on terror and your recommendations and legal opinions on torture that were reprehensible. There was your stunning performances in front of Congressional questioning where you seemed unable to answer or understand basic questions and brazenly lied your way through the others. The surveillance program, eavesdropping without warrants, torture, Goodling, Yoo, am I forgetting anything?

You are the standard by which we will measure bad Attorney General's now. Gonzales-esque or 'at least he isn't as bad as Gonzales" will be what we say. You are near universally reviled for your tenure. Must we be subjected to your whining book about how we're all just dumb rubes who don't understand why we needed to torture, spy illegally on Americans, and have our Justice Department hire only Republicans and act as a political arm of the White House? Grow up, accept responsibility and have the courtesy to go away and not subject us to 300 pages of "Waaaaaaaa!". Pretend Karl Rove told you to clam up.

The only thing worse than the Bush Administration is all the books from people in the Administration talking about how the entire country just misunderstood everything Bush did. We didn't.

the Bushies think they know where it all went wrong

The impending end of our 8 year odyssey into the depths of the imperial criminal Presidency of Emperor George W. Bonaparte has caused many former loyalists to reflect on where it all went wrong. While the more bitter of us would say "when he took the oath of office the first time" these scholars, aiders, and abetters have decided to take a different path. They have chosen a moment where they thought it all went pear shaped. Not 9/11 or the months the administration spent ignoring intel on terrorism and 9/11, not the war in Iraq, not declaring victory in Iraq before the war was over, not politicizing every aspect of government, not out CIA agents because their husbands point out inconvenient facts, not stonewalling every investigation and pardoning buddies that get convicted, not putting sugar in the economy's gastank then setting it on fire in the middle of a busy intersection, no they have chosen Katrina as the place where the Bush Presidency went wrong.

Hurricane Katrina not only pulverized the Gulf Coast in 2005, it knocked the bully pulpit out from under President George W. Bush, according to two former advisers who spoke candidly about the political impact of the government's poor handling of the natural disaster.

"Katrina to me was the tipping point," said Matthew Dowd, Bush's pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. "The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn't matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn't matter. P.R.? It didn't matter. Travel? It didn't matter."

Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director and later counselor to the president, said: "Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin."

Sorry Dan, there have been many more nails in the ensuing years, judging by his abysmal numbers. The economy nail might be so large that they just drop it on the coffin, reducing it into splintery shards. But Katrina isn't where it all went wrong guys, it's just where people realized "Oh shit, he really doesn't give a fuck or know or care or anything" and moved him from the "just a shitty President" category into the "worst President ever/may be actively trying to destroy the country" column. People knew he was bad before, hell it took 9/11 to pull him out of the 40% approval rating range, Katrina is just where they realized he doesn't how to do anything and started to actively hate him for it. Katrina didn't sidetrack some roaring success of a Presidency, it just opened everyone's eyes. Meditate on that, Dan.

Who could have foreseen?: SEC Oversight edition

SEC Didn't Act on Madoff Tips

The Securities and Exchange Commission learned about what it describes as one of the largest securities frauds in history when Bernard L. Madoff volunteered his confession, raising questions about the agency's ability to police the financial marketplace.

The SEC had the authority to investigate Madoff's investment business, which managed billions of dollars for wealthy investors and philanthropies. Financial analysts raised concerns about Madoff's practices repeatedly over the past decade, including a 1999 letter to the SEC that accused Madoff of running a Ponzi scheme. But the agency did not conduct even a routine examination of the investment business until last week.

Bang up job SEC, really top shelf work. Who even needs you around overseeing everything, the market will just police itself. No need to act on tips explicitly explaining the exact type of fraud Madoff was engaged in, why he's a respected businessman, is friends with all the people in charge, and has a "good reputation". That means he's on the level.

Thankfully we have dedicated public servants like former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt to tell us all that it isn't his fault and to shut up and go away already. "The SEC going back to its formation, and the Justice Department going back to its formation, are never adequate to crime at its time. It's simplistic to look back and say that this was the SEC's fault." Really? Ponzi schemes are so complex that that the SEC is behind the curve? I was under the impression that they were one of the simplest things to investigate, all you have to do is ask for proof that their holdings are what they claim they are. The Washington Post is under this assumption too.

I bet I'm wrong though. This was a mistake of too smart criminals and probably too much regulation, not totally negligent and non-existent oversight. Who could have foreseen this ever happening?