Ah, The Game Is Afoot!

shell game Courtesy of Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker

Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve argued yesterday that identifying the financial institutions that benefited from its emergency loans would harm the companies and render the central bank’s planned appeal of a court ruling moot.

"Harm the companies" eh? You mean reveal that they are and have been insolvent, and The Fed has been engaged in covering them up?

“What has the Fed got to hide?” said Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who sponsored a bill to require the Fed to submit to an audit by the Government Accountability Office. “The time has come for the Fed to stop stonewalling and hand this information over to the public,” he said in an e-mail.

The Fed is hiding the insolvency of banks. They, along with their handmaidens in Congress (which is where you work Mr. Sanders) even went further and twisted the arm of FASB to legalize intentional accounting distortions that I argue amount to fraud.

The truth of what has been done keeps peeking around the corner in the form of bank failures and FDIC deposit insurance fund losses, with the latest charade being Colonial Bank that was carrying assets thirty seven percent above where its acquiring bank believes is a reasonable mark on the day prior to being taken over, and which in the FDIC’s last published release was considered "well-capitalized!"

These losses and the costs of this cover-up are being forcibly extracted from The American People literally at gunpoint through the issuance of hundreds of billions of Treasury Debt which we, our children and grandchildren will have to repay – a staggering total that the CBO and Obama Administration now admit will total nine trillion dollars over the next ten years.

“Experience in the banking industry has shown that when customers and market participants hear negative rumors about a bank, negative consequences inevitably flow,” Norman Nelson, vice president and general counsel for the group, said in the document.

Experience in the banking industry has shown that when you countenance false and inflated marks on assets losses inevitably flow (to the taxpayer) and the longer and more-involved the conspiracy to cover up these losses continues, the worse they are.

We did this in the 1980s with the S&Ls. Now the banking industry and Federal Reserve have the gall to try to defend an identical outrage in the courts.

May Judge Preska deny the motion for a stay.

Photo courtesy of Chris Martenson.com