Column #1 for new political column

Here is my fist Column for a new summer series.  If you know of a newspaper that needs this kind of liberal work, please have them contact me.

Over the years, I have written quite a few Letters and columns about the real cause of our fianacial crisis of ten years ago, but the editor with whom I was working insisted that his readers would not understand my points.  I think he underestimated his readers, and I think it is information that should be known by all Americans.  The polirtical leaders of America created a fiscal siuation which was doomed to gigantic failure, could be blamed on poor people, and would reap trilions of dollars for about 2,500 investors and money managrs. 

There is certainly a real problem with the fact that this information has been withheld from us, but we should not be surprised.  How was this scheme created?  It started with Alan Greenspan, and attachemtn to Ayn Rand.  Here is what Greensan wrote about her“…Ayn Rand became a stabilizing force in my life. It hadn't taken long for us to have a meeting of the minds -- mostly my mind meeting hers -- and in the fifties and early sixties I became a regular at the weekly gatherings at her apartment. She was a wholly original thinker, sharply analytical, strong-willed, highly principled, and very insistent on rationality as the highest value…”  Greenspan would beomce the advocate for lives based of greed and selfishness, an dhis only caveat was that rational humans would not hurt themselves or their societies.  To a large degree, this is the point upon which Greespan’s name as the founder of the 2008 Financial meltdown.

Greenspan did everything he could to advocate and create a “regulation free” world for America financial corporations.

The climax came in 1998-1999, when the Glass Steagal Act was repealed.  Savings funds could now be combined with investment funds, and used for whatever the financiers wanted.  The major vehicle in these plans was the creation of Credit Default Swaps or Swap Bonds.  They were insurance but no really, so they had no regulation and have none today.  The CDS were designed to reward Swap buyers a prize if the assets backing their “swaps” lost value.  Does this sound difficult.  It is, and I might be explaining it badly.

The bottom line is that CDS holders would and still are being paid $30 for every dollar in a sub-prime mortage that go into foreclosure.  At the height of this scheme, 62 trillion dollars was invested in these Swaps.   When a $200,000 sub-primed mortage home gos into foreclosure. the CDS inversters receive six million dollars.  This is why there were offices thoroughout America who were creatuing fraudulant mortgages.  This is why one hundred mortages were written, and the hedge funds knew that most would go into foreclosure—amd 95 million of then did.  It is difficjult to get a real eastimate of the triallions of dollars that AIG paid out on these “Swaps”, and i veleive that the amount was 35-55 Trillion dollars. 

Further, eveyone who had bought the stocks backed by these mortgages lost every dollar that they invested.  I have read that the Hewlit Packard Foundation dropped from 12 billion dollars to 8 billion dollars.  Universities, colleges, pension funds, and all the other instituions that were not told that the whole scheme was the largest theft in the history of the world.