The Finance Industry Has Fleeced the Government Throughout the History of the Republic

Present discussions of the mortgage mess are lapsing into an unreal world. Advocates of the $700 bailout are now rounding up a choir of voices to proclaim that the problem is simply a lack of liquidity. This kind of problem, we are told, can be solved “cleanly” (that is, with no Congressional add-ons to protect anyone except the major Bush Administration campaign contributors) by the Federal reserve “pumping credit” into the system by buying securities that have no market when “liquidity dries up.”

What is wrong with this picture? The reality is that there is much too much liquidity in the system. That is why the yield on U.S. Treasury bills has fallen to just 0.16 percent – just one sixth of one percent! This is what happens when there is a flight to safety. By liquid investors. Many of which are now fleeing abroad, as shown by the dollar’s 3% plunge against the euro yesterday (Monday, Sept. 22).

The question that the media avoid asking is what people are trying to be safe from? The answer should be obvious to anyone who has been reading about the junk mortgage problem. Investors – especially in Germany, whose banks have been badly burned – are seeking to be safe from fraud and misrepresentation. U.S. banks and firms have lost the trust of large institutional investors here and abroad, because of year after year of misrepresentation as to the quality of the mortgages and other debts they were selling. This is Enron-style accounting with an exclamation point – fraud on an unparalleled scale.

How many tears should we shed for the victims? The Wall Street firms and banks stuck with junk mortgages are in the position of fences who believed that they had bought bona fide stolen money (“fallen off a truck”) from a bank-robbing gang, only to find that the bills they bought are counterfeit – with their serial numbers registered with the T-men to make spending the loot difficult. Their problem now is how to get this junk off their hands. The answer is to strike a deal with the T-men themselves, who helped them rob the bank in the first place.

There is a long pedigree for this kind of behavior. And it always seems to involve a partnership between kleptocratic insiders and the Treasury. Today’s twist is that the banksters have lined up complicit accomplices from the accounting industry and bond-rating companies as well. The gang’s all here.

In view of the mass media these days calling Henry Paulson the most powerful Treasury Secretary since Alexander Hamilton, I think it is relevant to look at two leading acts of Mr. Hamilton that represent remarkable precursors of Mr. Paulson’s present $800 billion “cash for trash” deal with the Bush Administration’s major Wall Street campaign contributors.

The two most appropriate parallels are the government’s redemption of “continentals” – paper money issued by the colonies during the Revolutionary War – and the Yazoo land grants. During the Revolution, states had issued paper currency to pay the troops and meet other basic expenses. These paper notes had depreciated, hence the term “not worth a continental” (not least because of large-scale counterfeiting by the British to cause economic disruption here). In the crisis, men with hard cash went around buying continentals at a great discount. In one of the most notorious and debated acts of the Constitutional  Convention, the new United States Government redeemed this depreciated paper currency at par.

It was like the Treasury today buying junk mortgages at face value. But it is in the ensuing Yazoo scandal that we find a perfect combination of financial and real estate fraud on a magnitude that helped establish some of America’s great founding fortunes, creating dynastic wealth that has survived down to the present day.