I cannot find the categorisation of Super Pac money on that website, just the data I already mentioned and references to
individual contributors. At any rate, the total amount received by Obama was $715 mio and it seems that the majority of finance industry contributions went to Romney. They've bet on the wrong horse in this election it seems.
Regarding your NY Times article about JPMorgan, it seems the case is currently before the court. It's one thing for a newspaper to highlight details of court documents, but another for the prosecution to actually prove them. I would suggest we wait for the result.
From the same article:
NY Times wrote:Dexia’s lawsuit is part of a broad assault on Wall Street for its role in the 2008 financial crisis, as prosecutors, regulators and private investors take aim at mortgage-related securities. New York’s attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, sued JPMorgan last year over investments created by Bear Stearns between 2005 and 2007.
Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, has criticized prosecutors for attacking JPMorgan because of what Bear Stearns did. Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in October, Mr. Dimon said the bank did the federal government “a favor” by rescuing the flailing firm in 2008.
The legal onslaught has been costly. In November, JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank, agreed to pay $296.9 million to settle claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bear Stearns had misled mortgage investors by hiding some delinquent loans. JPMorgan did not admit or deny wrongdoing.
Unless you are claiming that the lawsuits by prosecutors and regulators are a smokescreen and won't lead to any convictions because Wall Street has Obama in their pockets, I'd say the above shows that they are certainly trying. And while there may well have been fraudulent behaviour (which I think is likely), proving it is always difficult.
As for TARP:
Boston Globe wrote:The financial results of individual TARP investments — gains and losses — have been all over the map.
Money invested in banks, as a group, have already earned a modest profit if you include interest, dividends, and stock warrants. The Treasury is auctioning off most of its remaining bank investments, but that won’t amount to big dollars. Big institutions repaid loans quickly and accounted for the bulk of the government’s profit. Those big banks chafed at business restrictions that came with the money — especially limits on what top managers could be paid. “The executive pay restrictions had an unintended consequence in that they really encouraged managers at large banks to pay back early and that’s how we made a profit,” said Linus Wilson of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who has written extensively on the impact of TARP.
The government will surely lose money on its auto industry investments. GM may end up costing $15 billion. Chrysler was a much smaller loser, costing about $3 billion. But the biggest surprise in the the TARP portfolio turned out to be AIG. The Treasury and Federal Reserve had committed a combined $182 billion to prop up the insurer and ended up making a profit that works out to about 3 percent a year. Of course, government officials signed off on other financial crisis management plans above and beyond TARP. The bailout of mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac amounted to $187.5 billion and the final cost will be sky high.
So it's Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the auto industry that will really cost Americans, with the former two being the by far most expensive items. And for the subprime mortgage disasters of these two agencies lawmakers have to take a substantial part of the blame. Not because they were lobbied by the financial industry, but because ensuring homeownership was a desirable social policy. Later they were also used in an attempt to prevent/stem recession:
NY Times wrote:Shortly after he became chief executive, Mr. Mudd traveled to the California offices of Angelo R. Mozilo, the head of Countrywide Financial, then the nation’s largest mortgage lender. Fannie had a longstanding and lucrative relationship with Countrywide, which sold more loans to Fannie than anyone else. But at that meeting, Mr. Mozilo, a butcher’s son who had almost single-handedly built Countrywide into a financial powerhouse, threatened to upend their partnership unless Fannie started buying Countrywide’s riskier loans. Mr. Mozilo, who did not return telephone calls seeking comment, told Mr. Mudd that Countrywide had other options. For example, Wall Street had recently jumped into the market for risky mortgages. Firms like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs had started bundling home loans and selling them to investors — bypassing Fannie and dealing with Countrywide directly. “You’re becoming irrelevant,” Mr. Mozilo told Mr. Mudd, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting who requested anonymity because the talks were confidential. In the previous year, Fannie had already lost 56 percent of its loan-reselling business to Wall Street and other competitors. “You need us more than we need you,” Mr. Mozilo said, “and if you don’t take these loans, you’ll find you can lose much more.” Then Mr. Mozilo offered everyone a breath mint.
Investors were also pressuring Mr. Mudd to take greater risks. On one occasion, a hedge fund manager telephoned a senior Fannie executive to complain that the company was not taking enough gambles in chasing profits. “Are you stupid or blind?” the investor roared, according to someone who heard the call, but requested anonymity. “Your job is to make me money!”
Capitol Hill bore down on Mr. Mudd as well. The same year he took the top position, regulators sharply increased Fannie’s affordable-housing goals. Democratic lawmakers demanded that the company buy more loans that had been made to low-income and minority homebuyers. “When homes are doubling in price in every six years and incomes are increasing by a mere one percent per year, Fannie’s mission is of paramount importance,” Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, lectured Mr. Mudd at a Congressional hearing in 2006. “In fact, Fannie and Freddie can do more, a lot more.”
But Fannie’s computer systems could not fully analyze many of the risky loans that customers, investors and lawmakers wanted Mr. Mudd to buy. Many of them — like balloon-rate mortgages or mortgages that did not require paperwork — were so new that dangerous bets could not be identified, according to company executives. Even so, Fannie began buying huge numbers of riskier loans. In one meeting, according to two people present, Mr. Mudd told employees to “get aggressive on risk-taking, or get out of the company.” In the interview, Mr. Mudd said he did not recall that conversation and that he always stressed taking only prudent risks. Employees, however, say they got a different message. “Everybody understood that we were now buying loans that we would have previously rejected, and that the models were telling us that we were charging way too little,” said a former senior Fannie executive. “But our mandate was to stay relevant and to serve low-income borrowers. So that’s what we did.” Between 2005 and 2007, the company’s acquisitions of mortgages with down payments of less than 10 percent almost tripled. As the market for risky loans soared to $1 trillion, Fannie expanded in white-hot real estate areas like California and Florida.
[...]
In the middle of last year it became clear that millions of borrowers would stop paying their mortgages. For Fannie, this raised the terrifying prospect of paying billions of dollars to honor its guarantees. Had Fannie been a private entity, its comeuppance might have happened a year ago. But the White House, Wall Street and Capitol Hill were more concerned about the trillions of dollars in other loans that were poisoning financial institutions and banks. Lawmakers, particularly Democrats, leaned on Fannie and Freddie to buy and hold those troubled debts, hoping that removing them from the system would help the economy recover. The companies, eager to regain market share and buy what they thought were undervalued loans, rushed to comply.
The White House also pitched in. James B. Lockhart, the chief regulator of Fannie and Freddie, adjusted the companies’ lending standards so they could purchase as much as $40 billion in new subprime loans. Some in Congress praised the move. “I’m not worried about Fannie and Freddie’s health, I’m worried that they won’t do enough to help out the economy,” the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, said at the time. “That’s why I’ve supported them all these years — so that they can help at a time like this.”
- By wat0n
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