Stock market to rally if Brown wins....

[Maksim 1,504]

btw, folks.... sorry, i cannot open any more swiss UBS accounts. lol.

[DirtyDigz 1,812]

...What people fail to realize is that the government ended up making billions on the bailout, as each of those banks was paying 8% interest on the bailout funds. Government got their money back, as well as interest....

 

Are you counting the pass-throughs that went to Goldman as a result of the AIG bailout/paying for CDS at 100%? What about the myriad of low/no cost lending facilities and backstops by the Federal Reserve and FDIC?

 

To refresh your memory:

 

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/10-ways-say-no-banks-have-not-paid-back-their-debt-taxpayer

 

So, running down the list, the banks paid back TARP. That's a +, but....

 

1. What was the value for bank charter, to get cheap access to the Fed's funds? did they pay back this value yet? No!

2. How about the payment of interest on the banks' excess reserves at the Fed. Have the banks repaid that yet? No!

3. The Fed and the Treasury have purchased hundreds of billions of dollars of Agency debt, Agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and related securities through Treasury purchase programs. Have the banks paid back the capital behind those purchases yet? No!

4. How about the Term Auction Facility? Has the capital behind the benefits of that program been paid back? No!

5. Then there is the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF), has this been paid back? No!

6. Do you remember the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF)? Have the funds behind that been paid back? No!

7. What about the PPIP? No!

8. Hey, there's the Foreign Exchange Swap programs (the currency swap lines, that saved not only our banks but out banks facing counterparties who were short on dollars), has that been paid back? No!

9. There's the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF), have the funds behind that been paid back? No!

10. Most importantly, the opportunity cost of ZIRP, which hurts those who do not speculate (or have not speculated) with near free money! How do you pay that back to grandma and her .017% CDs?

 

How do you repay the synthetic bid that the Fed has created under MBS that has rescued the banks from balance sheet purgatory (for now)? How about the accounting fantasy football game that was authorized by FASB last year that has lost fundamental investors who actually count vast sums of money? Then there is those FDIC bond guarantees... Oops, I went way past 1 reasons, didn't I?

 

I can rant on, but if I haven't driven the point home by now, I probably never will. So as you read about Goldman's earnings beat on weaker revenue, consider the advantages that they have, that they didn't pay back, that smaller businesses such mine simply don't have access to.

 

Where's the discount window for the taxpayers, eh? Who pays for the hit if all that agency debt and MBS on the Fed's balance sheet don't perform? The taxpayers.

[Guest]

every one should check out FAZ if this bank slide continues.

 

And I know this for a fact. But you need to keep your eye on this one...not for the faint of heart.

 

Last year, this one allowed me to buy alot of 'goodies'

 

Good luck!

[DirtyDigz 1,812]

every one should check out FAZ if this bank slide continues.

 

And I know this for a fact. But you need to keep your eye on this one...not for the faint of heart.

 

Last year, this one allowed me to buy alot of 'goodies'

 

Good luck!

 

Hello fellow 3X leveraged ETF player! Made a lot trading in FAZ today!

 

FAS/FAZ and the other triple bull/bear pairs (TNA/TZA, BGU/BGZ, TYP/TYH etc.) are good if you're in them for quick moves, but double and triple leverage ETF's are *NOT* 'buy-and-holds'. The re-balancing they do at the end of each day will drain away value over weeks/months unless the market continually moves in your favor.

[Caine 147]

Half the things I read in this thread make me feel like i'm trying to read chinese.... :oops:

[Maksim 1,504]

...What people fail to realize is that the government ended up making billions on the bailout, as each of those banks was paying 8% interest on the bailout funds. Government got their money back, as well as interest....

 

Are you counting the pass-throughs that went to Goldman as a result of the AIG bailout/paying for CDS at 100%? What about the myriad of low/no cost lending facilities and backstops by the Federal Reserve and FDIC?

 

To refresh your memory:

 

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/10-ways-say-no-banks-have-not-paid-back-their-debt-taxpayer

 

So, running down the list, the banks paid back TARP. That's a +, but....

 

1. What was the value for bank charter, to get cheap access to the Fed's funds? did they pay back this value yet? No!

2. How about the payment of interest on the banks' excess reserves at the Fed. Have the banks repaid that yet? No!

3. The Fed and the Treasury have purchased hundreds of billions of dollars of Agency debt, Agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and related securities through Treasury purchase programs. Have the banks paid back the capital behind those purchases yet? No!

4. How about the Term Auction Facility? Has the capital behind the benefits of that program been paid back? No!

5. Then there is the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF), has this been paid back? No!

6. Do you remember the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF)? Have the funds behind that been paid back? No!

7. What about the PPIP? No!

8. Hey, there's the Foreign Exchange Swap programs (the currency swap lines, that saved not only our banks but out banks facing counterparties who were short on dollars), has that been paid back? No!

9. There's the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF), have the funds behind that been paid back? No!

10. Most importantly, the opportunity cost of ZIRP, which hurts those who do not speculate (or have not speculated) with near free money! How do you pay that back to grandma and her .017% CDs?

 

How do you repay the synthetic bid that the Fed has created under MBS that has rescued the banks from balance sheet purgatory (for now)? How about the accounting fantasy football game that was authorized by FASB last year that has lost fundamental investors who actually count vast sums of money? Then there is those FDIC bond guarantees... Oops, I went way past 1 reasons, didn't I?

 

I can rant on, but if I haven't driven the point home by now, I probably never will. So as you read about Goldman's earnings beat on weaker revenue, consider the advantages that they have, that they didn't pay back, that smaller businesses such mine simply don't have access to.

 

Where's the discount window for the taxpayers, eh? Who pays for the hit if all that agency debt and MBS on the Fed's balance sheet don't perform? The taxpayers.

 

I dont agree that banks are evil. They had access to capital.... yes, they needed it, and in many cases, were shoved the money. They corrected it. No one knows what of what money has been paid back, but the fed did not lose any money on the loans given to the banks, with the exception of GM. lol.

 

Banks are NOT Evil. Stuff happened, yes, but most of the money support has been flowing into Fannie/Freddie. Not other banks. Where the government did come in, they made out quite well.

 

Btw, yes on the FAS/FAZ, but in the end, they are not worth long term keeping, as it was stated, they are based on daily move. When the market was straight down, they made a ton of money, but on the recovery, they couldnt keep up. Many amateurs got hurt on these.

 

Hell, take a look at the 2x plays. UYG even. It went $70's down to $2, and with all the major recoveries in financials, it is only at $5.

 

Same with the inverse plays, where dumb-asses were buying them at the $245 level and now at $25.

 

Fear or Greed.... that is what will aways drive the markets. In the mean time, as they say... bulls and bears will make money, pigs will get slaughtered. At the end of the day, Wall St. will always make money. If Wall St. suffers, everyone else will suffer to.

[DirtyDigz 1,812]

I dont agree that banks are evil. They had access to capital.... yes, they needed it, and in many cases, were shoved the money. They corrected it. No one knows what of what money has been paid back, but the fed did not lose any money on the loans given to the banks, with the exception of GM. lol.

 

I'm not saying the banks are "evil", however you want to define that, but they sure aren't blameless, either.

 

In the housing bubble peak years, they either overtly committed, or were complicit with, fraud on a large scale with the underwriting of mortgages and/or packaging into mortgage backed securities. They failed to do sound underwriting such as verifying of income and sound appraisals because they knew they could pass the mortgage off onto some other bagholder before it blew up. MBS's are still detonating in the hands of investors around the world. How much damage has been done to pension funds in the US alone?

 

How do you feel about Goldman Sachs selling MBS's to customers on one side of the office, and then taking huge bets against the performance of those same securities on the other side? Is taking taxpayer provided liquidity and using it to finance speculation such as leasing oil tankers to hold oil offshore in the hopes of driving oil prices up in the public interest?

 

How many of the big banks are truly solvent right now? Are you sure? Do you know for certain how much bad debt that they've got in off balance sheet vehicles and/or marked at par when it's not optimally performing? Why is it that we seem to have had such ineffectual regulators and lax accounting standards until recently?

 

Fear or Greed.... that is what will aways drive the markets. In the mean time, as they say... bulls and bears will make money, pigs will get slaughtered. At the end of the day, Wall St. will always make money. If Wall St. suffers, everyone else will suffer to.

 

I don't have a problem with Wall St. making money in of itself; I do have a problem when they are able to privatize their profits while at the same time socializing their losses and effectively "capturing" their regulators.