Masters of the Universe category archive

Bank no more on these masters of the universe. All gone.

Truman Bank, St. Louis, Missouri

The owners of a modest home near Twentynine Palms lost their cherished possessions after a bank mistakenly foreclosed their residence.

A crew broke into Alvin and Pat Tjosaas’ desert home and took everything after being directed by Wells Fargo to secure the structure.

The couple, however, didn’t have a mortgage on the home.

Via Atrios, who points out that, if you or I did this, we’d be in jail, whereas banksters are different from you and me.

Back from a hiatus, it’s bank failures!

First Commercial Bank, Bloomington, Minnesota

Via Dick Destiny.

In the Guardian, Aditya Chakrabortty examines the myth of the WEALTH-CREATOR™ (his spelling, not mine), who, he points out, is a wealth extractor–a taker, not a maker. Read it.

What’s grating is the Tory comeback: their designation of those with money as heroic individuals who not only created their own wealth but will generate jobs and money for the rest of us. The British right aren’t alone in doing this: last week’s Republican convention in Florida was practically dedicated to attacking a perfectly reasonable observation by Obama that individual prosperity always rests on others – from families and teachers to roads and bridges and public works. No delegate’s speech was complete without a preamble about how “we built it” – “it” being their own prosperity. Five years after the wealth creators in finance drove the economy into a crisis that still drags on, the old cant is back: what’s good for the rich is good for the rest of us.

Yet the elite’s main ability is in making money for themselves. Just look at Mitt Romney, whose claim to the presidency is that he is part of this blessed group of wealth creators.

Before moving into politics, Romney’s game was private equity: buying up companies, loading them up with debt and stripping out their workers and costs, then selling them. It may have been rough and it may been bloody, but the Republican knows how to run a business and therefore how to steer an economy. Except that a study by the Wall Street Journal found that of 77 firms Romney’s private equity firm Bain Capital invested in between 1984 and 1999 when he ran the company, 22% ended up filing for bankruptcy protection or shut up shop (although some ran into trouble after Bain was no longer involved and others recovered following reorganisation). Another 8% came to so much grief that Bain lost all its money. The bulk of its returns came from a handful of lucky bets.

Via BartCop.

The voyage to AOL land continues.

Facebook Inc. (FB) fell to a record low, losing almost half its value since an initial public offering in May, after the lifting of restrictions on share sales by its biggest investors.

Shares in the world’s largest social-networking service fell 4.1 percent to $19.05 at the close in New York yesterday. Facebook had dropped to as low as $19, after the number of shares available for trading increased 60 percent two days ago.

I saw in Readers Digest that there’s a new term to describe a stock that opens with great hype and, like Humpty-Dumpty, falls from the hypes:

Zucked.

Via C&L.

Hollow hype comes back to haunt:

Facebook Inc. (FB)’s stock plunge has robbed Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) of much of the potential gain they could unlock as soon as this week, when a ban on sales of insiders’ shares begins to lift.

(snip)

Investors including Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Accel Partners, which together control more than 200 million shares in the owner of the largest social network, can begin selling them on Aug. 16 for the first time since the May 17 initial public offering, according to a regulatory filing. It’s the first in a wave of lockup expirations in the coming months that will quadruple the number of shares that can be traded.

The story goes on to point out that Facebook’s stock plunge is the worst among all large IPOs on record.

The Boston Globe’s Michael Kranish tries to figure out how Mitt flipped his IRA to total gazillions. Apparently it was funneled all quite legally into poker chips for Bain’s Wall Street poker nights.

A snippet:

Romney has not provided details about how his IRA grew so large. But Romney associates with direct knowledge about the matter said Bain Capital partners used their IRAs as a pool of investment money, enabling them to make personal investments in Bain deals, many of which earned spectacular returns. Much as a lower-dollar investor might pick mutual funds for an IRA, the Bain partners could make side investments in the firm’s deals and then watch as their retirement funds grew.

Via Raw Story.

Oh, look! No Georgia bank failed this week!

Only one, and it was in Illinois.

Waukegan Savings Bank, Waukegan, Illinois

The money never existed.

The “analysts” (and not just California’s–almost everyone’s) were blinded by the hype.

The state’s (California–ed.) Legislative Analyst’s Office said Wednesday that “hundreds of millions” of dollars in assumed tax revenues may never materialize due to the continued slide in Facebook’s stock price.

Facebook, the next AOL.

Banking continues to reach new heights of FAIL, starting with (surprise, surprise) another Georgia bank:

Jasper Banking Company, Jasper, Georgia

The Guardian is keeping a running total of Mitt the Flip’s diplomatic triumphs on the other side of the Big Pond.

Really, no one could have predicted(TM).

Image via Balloon Juice.