Citigroup, one of the world largest banking group need more than USD300 billion of US taxpayers money to bail them out, the US government have no choice, letting Citigroup meltdown could have been catastrophic.
An article by Eric Dash and Julie Creswell exposed how some of the country's best paid bankers were overrated dopes who had no idea what they were selling; or greedy cynics who did know and turned a blind eye.
The bank's executives were clueless about the reckless financial instruments they were creating, or were so ensnared by the cronyism between the bank's risk managers and risk takers that they had no interest in stopping it.
This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics.
Who are those who have benefited?
- People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years.
- People who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so.
- People who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so.
- People who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortune doing so; and
- People who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.
Citigroup was involved in, and made money from, almost every link in the chain. They are just assuming home prices would keep going up. How stupid!
In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of USD14,000 and no literacy in English, was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for USD720,000. Those subprime lenders don't even bother whether this guy has the ability to pay the monthly instalment and his credit worthiness!
GREED is written all over the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism.
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