Explicit Costs of the I-Banker Bailout exceeding Iraq War

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This is really just a pointer to "Looting the Vaults at the Central Banks" in the RGE Monitor. It's Nouriel Roubini's site, but it's someone else writing.

The way to rob a central bank efficiently is to be a bank executive so skilled in financial engineering that I take my bank to the edge of extinction. I can then swap all my unpriceable, illiquid, engineered credit instruments for good central bank cash and Treasuries. That’s larceny without risk, making the central bank a complicit partner in the looting of its vaults, and earning gratitude and bonuses instead of audits and indictments.

Since the credit crisis was first diagnosed last fall, the Federal Reserve has advanced more cash and Treasuries than the entire five year cost of the Iraq war – over $400 billion. It has plundered more than half its holdings of US Treasuries, taking impaired asset-backed securities collateral in their place. It has overseen the devaluation of the dollar to third world levels of instability and inflation. And all of this debasement has as its objective the re-financing of those bank and shadow-bank executives who have so looted their own institutions that they hold the global financial system hostage to their incompetence, malpractice and greed. Without consultation or review, the Federal Reserve was able to chuck out decades of transparency and accountability in favour of secret facilities, secret loans favouring secret beneficiaries of secret largesse.

So, that's happening. Look, if we can't stop this, I don't see the point in Democracy.