Not Too Big To Sue

by JASmius

See if you can follow the logic of this progression:

1) The Carter Regime enacts the Community Reinvestment Program to assist minorities in gaining access to home mortgage loans they allegedly wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain;

2) The Clinton Regime [Noticing a pattern here?] amends the CRP to require banks to lower their lending standards in order to guarantee minorities (and others) access to mortgages they can't afford;

3) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both packed full of Donk operatives by the Clinton Regime, both inflate the resulting "sub-prime" mortgage lending market into an ever-burgeoning speculative bubble and take those risky mortgages and securitize them, spreading that risk throughout the U.S. financial system, while being shielded from repeated Bush Administration and GOP congressional oversight attempts by Chris "Countrywide" Dodd and Barney "Slurpy" Frank.

This, in a nutshell, was the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb.

4) The DFLB ever-so-conveniently detonates, creating the Panic of 2008 and cratering the U.S. economy, seven weeks before the 2008 presidential election, while George W. Bush is still in the White House. Unsurprisingly, sixty-eight million voters, conditioned by the major media to hate Bush anyway, blame him and the GOP for the cataclysm, and elect "the other guy," Barack Hussein Obama, functionally sight unseen, also courtesy of the major media.

5) The Donk Congress, dragging along the waning lame-duck Bushies, create the Trouble Asset Relief Program, essentially monetizing the flaming wreckage and fascizing the banking sector by "encouraging" "too big to fail" banks to slurp up smaller banks with government-"provided" funding.

6) The Donk Super-Congress smothers this dramatically more concentrated financial sector in the regulatory chains of....Dodd-Frank, leaving their "too big to fail" "clients" virtually no room to breathe.

This is the most incredible, and successful, politicoeconomic conspiracy in American history, yielding a two-year reign of terror that has pushed America to the brink of collapse and, in Winston Churcill's famous turn of phrase, "the abyss of a new Dark Age".

7) And now comes the inevitable end game:

In a sweeping move, the government on Friday sued 17 financial firms, including the largest U.S. banks, for selling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac billions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities that turned toxic when the housing market collapsed.

Among the 17 targeted by the lawsuits were Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JP Morgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs.

The lawsuits were filed Friday by the Federal Housing Finance Agency which oversees Fannie and Freddie, the two agencies that buy mortgages loans and mortgage securities issued by the lenders.

The total price tag for the securities bought by Fannie and Freddie affected by the lawsuits: $196 billion.

The government didn't provide a dollar amount of how much it seeks in damages. It said that it wants to have the purchases of the securities canceled, be compensated for lost principal and interest payments as well as attorney fees and costs. The lawsuits allege the financial firms broke federal and state laws with the sales.

Um, no; the financial firms were COMPLYING with the federal law that forced them to throw out generations of sound banking practices in the name of "social justice," while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were spreading the resulting contagion throughout the financial sector and the larger economy beyond.

In other words, a double-cross, and punishing the victims. Not unlike a rapist whose day job is being District Attorney in charge of prosecuting rape victims as "prostitutes".

Somehow, I can't see this exercise in ideological anti-capitalist malevolence could have ended any other way.

Or maybe the Obama Regime is just pissed because their former Wall Street bankrollers have switched back to supporting the GOP. Kind of a "How dare they betray us after we double-crossed them!" dynamic.

Either way, this predatory move hardly fits with the heavily touted White House "hard pivot" to "jobs":

Bank of America might lay off up to 30,000 people in the coming years, according to a report in the Charlotte Observer.

That means it could cut over 10% of its 288,000 employees worldwide, making BofA the bank with the most brutal layoff plans we've heard yet, second only to HSBC's plans to layoff 30,000 of its 300,000 strong workforce.

Sources familiar with the firm announced the mass layoffs soon after the FHFA filed a huge lawsuit against Bank of America over $30.85 billion in losses on mortgage securities.*

The unfinalized plans are to cut over 10,000 and up to 30,000 employees in the next few years.

The reason for them is simple.

The massive cuts are partly to make up for what are expected to be huge lawsuit-related losses over the firm's and Countrywide's role in the mortgage crisis. Bank of America bough Countrywide, the country's largest mortgage lender, in 2008.

Boy, there's nothing quite like Obamunist loyalty and gratitude, huh?

I guess Red Barry will be putting all these newest pink-slip recipients to work with the shovels his regulatory capos used to bludgeon their former employers to death. How much you wanna bet that the "shovel-ready projects" to which they'll be assigned will be digging their own - and our - economic graves?

[cross-posted @ Hard Starboard]