The numbers tell us America is in decline... if not outright collapse.
I say "the numbers tell us" because I've become very sensitive to the impact this kind of statement has on people. When I warned about the impending bankruptcy of General Motors in 2006 and 2007, readers actually blamed me for the company's problems – as if my warnings to the public were the real problem, rather than GM's $400 billion in debt.
The claim was absurd. But the resentment my work engendered was real.
So please... before you read this issue, which makes several arresting claims about the future of our country... understand I am only writing about the facts as I find them today. I am only drawing conclusions based on the situation as it stands. I am not saying that these conditions can't improve. Or that they won't improve.
The truth is, I am optimistic. I believe our country is heading into a crisis. But I also believe that... sooner or later... Americans will make the right choices and put our country back on sound footing.
(....)
Americans know, in their bones, that something terrible is happening. Maybe you can't articulate it. Maybe you don't have the statistics to understand exactly what's going on. But my bet is, you think about it a lot.
For me, a poignant moment of recognition came this month.
Bloomberg news published an article based on confidential sources about how Henry Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs and the Republican U.S. Treasury secretary during the financial crisis, held a secret meeting with the top 20 hedge-fund managers in New York City in late July 2008. This was about two weeks after he testified to Congress that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were "well-capitalized."
I knew for a fact that what Paulson told Congress wasn't true. I wrote my entire June 2008 newsletter detailing exactly why Fannie and Freddie certainly had billions in losses that they had not yet revealed to investors – $500 billion in losses, at least. There was no question in my mind, both companies were insolvent – "zeros," as I explained.
And yet, in front of Congress, the U.S. Treasury secretary was saying exactly the opposite. Either I was a liar... or he was.
Then... only a few days later... what did Paulson tell those hedge-fund managers?
He told them the same thing I had written in my newsletter. He told them the opposite of what he'd said publicly to Congress. He told these billionaire investors that Fannie and Freddie were a disaster... They would require an enormous, multibillion-dollar bailout... The U.S. government would have to take them over... And their shareholders would be completely wiped out.
Here you had a high-government official, explicitly lying to Congress (and by extension, the general public), while giving the real facts to a group of people who represented the financial interests of the world's wealthiest folks. The story didn't come to the public's attention for two years.
This was the most outrageous example of graft and corruption I have ever seen. Certainly it involves more billions of dollars in misappropriated value than any other similar story I can recall. These managers had the risk-free ability to make tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions, by using derivatives to capitalize on what they knew was the imminent collapse of the world's largest mortgage bank. Who picked up the tab? You know perfectly well. It was you and me, the taxpayers.
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