If we don't say enought hese things, the'll revise history

joe
NY

While I am grateful for the article exposing Geithner's lackey at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, it is tiresome, after all this time, to continue reading lazy reporting by N.Y. Times journalists, still allowing people to foment myths, still incapable of connecting dots for their readers.
Mr. Dugan, that scoundrel of a Comptroller, is allowed to posit the argument, WITHOUT QUESTION, that the bailed-out big banks, unlike AIG, Fannie and Freddie, quickly repaid taxpayers with interest for the help they received.
That is a grossly misleading, despicable, flat-out lie, and anyone who has followed this crisis knows it.
The money we gave to AIG went straight onto the balance sheets of the banks. That money wasn't paid back. If we hadn't bailed out AIG, the CDS market would have collapsed and banks would have failed. If we hadn't allowed private investment banks to alchemically change their designation into bank holding companies, thus allowing them to borrow billions upon billions at 0% interest from the public till, they would have failed, as THEIR borrowing costs, LIKE GREECE, would have killed them. If the public hadn't taken ownership of TRILLIONS of mortgage-backed securities from many sources, including Fannie and Freddie, the worthless MBS's and CDO's on bank balance sheets would be even more toxic. The suspension of mark-to-market would not have been enough to prop up the lie of the Enron-style accounting the government allowed the big banks to engage in.
Lastly, the article included the following: "But, critics say, the O.C.C. does not take into account the pivotal role that banks played in stoking the appetite for risky mortgages by securitizing the loans."
This is not a critic's opinion, it is an incontrovertible fact. They created the market, they demanded the product from bank and non-bank lenders, they bought the ratings they needed to sell the junk securities, and then created a multi-trillion dollar insurance scam to cover the losses for the fire they were setting to the U.S. housing market. The big banks haven't paid back squat.