Arizona: Part

Crandall thinks some public testimony is inappropriate

by David Safier

One of the people who testified at Wednesday's House task force on tuition tax credits and STOs was Ann-Eve Pedersen, one of the Tucsonans who have worked hard to uncover information about misuse of tuition tax credit funds and are trying to reform the system.

I talked with Pedersen this morning about her testimony. She read from a written statement, she told me. When she got to the part about Sen. Steve Yarbrough's STO, which looks a whole lot like a government-funded goldmine for the senator, Republican Rep. Rich Crandall interrupted. He cautioned her that Yarbrough's STO was not the focus of the hearing.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

McClatchy News continues its investigative report on Goldman Sachs with part 4 of the series Why did blue-chip Goldman take a walk on subprime's wild side?:

Goldman Sachs was one of the last Wall Street giants to enter the subprime lending world, but when it did, it quickly climbed into bed with profligate, highflying firms — companies such as New Century Financial Corp.

In at least nine deals from 2002 to 2007, Goldman sold bonds backed by more than $5 billion of New Century's mortgages, one even after the California lender's underwriting criteria all but disintegrated and a cash squeeze paralyzed its operation.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

McClatchy News continues its investigative report on Goldman Sachs with part 3 of the series Goldman left foreign investors holding the subprime bag:

Inside the thick Goldman Sachs investment circular were the details of a secret, $2 billion deal channeled through a Caribbean tax haven.

The Sept. 26, 2006, document offered sophisticated U.S. and European investors an opportunity to buy into a pool of supposedly high-grade bonds backed by residential, commercial and student loans. The transaction was registered through a shell company in the Cayman Islands.

Few of the potential investors knew it, but the ratings of many of the mortgage securities hid their true risks and, in some cases, Goldman's descriptions exaggerated their quality.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I have written in this space before that I consider the giant Wall Street investment banks that nearly destroyed our economy to be nothing more than Ponzi schemes, a Casino Royale for unregulated speculative investments of no hard asset value, fueled by the greed of unscrupulous investors. To paraphrase Don Henley from a New York Minute, if I were in charge, "somebody's going to emergency, somebody's going to jail."

Much has been made of the Bernard Madoff and Robert Stanford investigations into their Ponzi schemes. But these guys were small fish compared to what the giant Wall Street investment banks did, and are still doing today using taxpayer TARP money.