“Phil Angelides, former Chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, is at it again. He sent me a second email on April 18, 2016, calling for individual crisis-era bankers/Wall Street to be prosecuted…
…His main line of reasoning is as follows: “The great commission I chaired found significant numbers of defective mortgage loans and the Department of Justice (DOJ) used this evidence to obtain $40 billion in fines from major financial institutions, so there has to be bankers who committed crimes. There just has to be and I don’t understand how they haven’t been prosecuted. I want them prosecuted!”
Think about this point: If Mr. Angelides had chaired an independent and unbiased financial crisis commission, why would he five years later still be calling for the heads of banking and Wall Street executives? Wouldn’t that ruin any claims you could make about being objective and independent? I think so. So why is he doing it? I think it’s because the truth is emerging about his highly partisan committee and the real root-causes of the crisis, and the truth isn’t making him look very good. (I also think he might be looking for a job in a Clinton or Bernie administration.)
Read my two blog postings today, from two of Mr. Angelides fellow commissioners: Mr. Douglas Holtz-Eakin (April 27, 2016 – Statement 1165) and Mr. Peter J. Wallison (April 27, 2016 – Statement 1164). They both make clear that Mr. Angelides was a terrible and politically-biased Chairman and that the majority report was nothing more than a liberal Democrat-white wash. That’s why EVERY Republican (four of the ten commissioners) dissented to the majority report and why they wrote two dissenting and far more accurate reports on the crisis. Here is what Mr. Holtz-Eakin said about the FCIC Mr. Angelides chaired:
“After all, taken at face value, it (The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission) utterly failed in its mission to provide the American public with a clear consensus explanation for what caused the crisis…The real agenda was to deal with the politics of the financial crisis. The Democrats wanted the narrative for the cause of the financial crisis to be that greedy bankers rigged the game in Washington and imposed this crisis on the American people for their own benefit. It remains the prevailing view to this day. It is completely wrong, but it still has a phenomenal amount of resonance with the American people.”
In regards to the $40 billion in settlements, I would note that the government has the awesome power to coerce the Too Big to Fail Banks/Wall Street, whose liabilities and mortgages are mostly guaranteed by the government, to say almost anything they want. That doesn’t make it true. Truth is determined in a court of law, where the facts in dispute are determined and applied to the law. The government settled because they didn’t want the truth to come out in court, where they likely would have lost. In regards to Mr. Angelides claims about defective mortgages, I have blogged a lot about that subject, about it being a false, Red Herring. Here is one blog posting you should read that I believe powerfully refutes this claim:
Finally, it’s a little nasty, but I have come to believe that Mr. Angelides is really a nasty man, whose sole goal is to further is liberal political career (at the expense of his fellow Americans knowing the truth about the financial crisis) so here goes…it’s true. California’s public pension programs are causing an emerging financial catastrophe for our state and local governments and will result in massively higher taxes for its citizens and/or reduced public services and Mr. Angelides as a former State Treasurer sat on CalPERS board for years and did nothing. Even today, one of his cronies runs CalPERS. When I read the online Sacrament Bee article Mr. Angelides wrote below, I confess that I loved this readers comment: “Phil Angelides should count his blessings that the FBI didn’t put him in jail for the way he mismanaged CalPERS.”, Rick LaBonte”, Mike Perry, former Chairman and CEO, IndyMac Bank, and fifth-generation Californian
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