I can’t believe it’s come to this:
After disclosure of $7.7 trillion bailout, decided to “˜come completely clean’
Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke disclosed today that as of 2008, the U.S. has belonged to Goldman Sachs.
Of course, China owns $1.1 trillion of U.S. debt and Japan owns another $900 billion. But that is just a drop in the bucket compared to the $7.7 trillion the Fed gave the major banks and Wall Street financial firms to keep them afloat at the end of 2008.
Previously, a figure of $700 billion was thought of as the entire bailout, but a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed the true nature of the giveaway to the financial industry.
” Once we realized we’d never get it back,” Bernanke said, ” we decided to just hand over the deed as well. We wanted to come completely clean on this, so you know we are not hiding anything else.”
Matt: I believe the investors should file class action lawsuits against the trustees for conflict of interest. Trustees are supposed to represent the interests of the investors, but they turn over foreclosure responsibilities to their servicers whose interests are adverse to the investors. Investors would benefit by principal reduction and modification; servicers lose money if they modify and make oodles of money if they foreclose. If investors sue as a class to forbid trustees from making agreements with servicers that conflict with the intersts of the investors, foreclosures could come to a halt and modifications would increase. ? Why aren’t Freddie & Fannie pushing for this?
Thankfully, Hank Paulson showed us the way in. Without his leadership, we would not have had the chance to become wholly owned. Does Goldman Sachs have any plan to expand?
It’s actually double that, around $17 trillion in bail outs.