Friday, January , 2009
(Cont'd from above)...

Jim:     Anyone who studied AIG, as we did on Mad Money, would have known that it was just a gigantic black hole… one that now has the people of the United States on the hook for about $180 billion dollars… billion… and I think that number will go much, much higher… it was a much worse deal for you… then the Lehman Brothers deal would have ever been… and yet Lehman was catastrophic for the system. Now, if I knew if AIG was much more costly than Lehman… much more dangerous to the taxpayer.. doing my own research… how could they, they government, not known what I had known. If they had watched the show.. where I talked about AIG’s hideous exposure, night after night, they would have known… Then again if they had listened to me in August of 2007, when I allegedly went nuts talking about around the corner Armageddon… well then maybe we would be happy as clams now… instead of fry clams, or maybe like bad calamari.

If the U.S. had done the same illegal deal with Lehman, that it did a couple of days later with AIG… we would never have gotten into the fix we are in… everything started with that… its before Lehman and after Lehman… ask anyone in the business… it is BL and AL… Lehman Brothers, the destruction of Lehman, the collapse of Lehman, has led to catastrophic results in all markets around the world… it is the single biggest cause for almost everything bad that has happened since… and they will not own it.

In fact, there could have been a multitude of buyers if the government had offered the kinds of deals that it has been doing every since the Lehman debacle… but I guess everything is okay, because dissemble man Hand Paulson says… they couldn’t find a buyer… and didn’t have the legal authority… that is outrageous.

What really did happen here?…. I think the Treasury designate Tim Geithner, and Hank Paulson, were actually worried about moral hazard… they were more worried about moral hazard than the real economic hazard that would happen if you let Lehman perish… I say how quaint… they were worried about how it would look if they bailed out the fat cat…. well, now we see the destruction about how worrying about looks is… funny… you haven’t heard that term moral hazard since Lehman have you?…. nope… every since the government euthanizes Lehman, we have been in the fight of our financial lives… like Jessie Ventura in the Predator, who said, ain’t got time to bleed.

The U.S. government ain‘t got time to worry about moral hazard…. lets be honest… there has been pretty much no authority for pretty much everything that the Fed and the Treasury has done … particularly since Lehman… because of the repercussions of Lehman were so awful… that they have no choice to throw out the play book, the rule book, anything… What do I want?… it is time for Paulson & Geithner to come clean and say look we blew it… it was the worst mistake that we have made in years… it was our smooth hauling tariff… it was a failure of creativity and a failure of imagination….and we failed the American people… but no, no… no humility from these two… they continue with the disassembly, there was no buyer… let me ask you… is there anything the U.S. won’t buy at this point.

Here is a memo to Hank Paulson, you told Congress that you told TARP to help the mortgage market… instead you wrote blank checks to the banks… you told us that there was nothing to do to help Lehman… yet the next day you bought the worst of the worst… the unfathomable AIG… which is by the way writing billions of dollars in checks of our money to European banks… because AIG was on the hook to them, as I have said over and over again… and the government didn’t listen.. not that anyone in the government would cop to those checks to going over to Europe… and you are getting away with this scot free you guys…you are even being kudoed… a lot of pat on the back…thank you so much… congratulatory plaudits…you should have been given the ax…you are not getting those plaudits from my turf… as someone who sees the truth about what you promised… and the truth of Lehman… I know that Hank Paulson should be ashamed. Own up Mr. Paulson… be virtuous in your exit… show some humility… own the mistakes and the misstatements before people see them as lies… you fooled Congress… you fooled the people… you fooled the press… but you haven’t fooled me...

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