The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has released their final report and to no one's surprise it's a mealy-mouthed white wash to reduce real accountability of many facts already known. Read it here. Basically the report rehashes a lot of information already discovered as the causes of Financial Armageddon. Case in point is Goldman Sachs obtaining $2.9 billion through the AIG bail out.

Goldman Sachs collected $2.9 billion from the American International Group as payout on a speculative trade it placed for the benefit of its own account, receiving the bulk of those funds after AIG received an enormous taxpayer rescue,

The report does drive home the overriding message Financial Armageddon didn't have to happen. It was a direct result of fictional derivatives, deregulation and a host of other financial lobbyists' wish lists which were granted absolute in the last 30 years.

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism who has been following every nitty gritty detail since day one:

You have to be blind, dumb, or maliciously misleading to miss the contribution of Wall Street to the housing bubble and the financial crisis.

By Numerian posted by Michael Collins

Note: this is a cross-post from The Realignment Project.

Introduction:

Recently, the Senate attempted for the second time to pass a small jobs bill. The American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act of 2010 – which would provide for an extension of Unemployment Insurance, COBRA health insurance subsidies, $24 billion in aid to states’ Medicaid programs to prevent deficit-driven layoffs, partially paid for through closing loopholes that benefit the wealthy – already passed the House three months ago, but is stalled in the Senate. The fact that the bill failed with 56 senators voting in the affirmative not only sharpens the ironies of the anti-democratic nature of the Senate, but also shows that we’re stuck in the middle of a full-blown austerity craze.

Hence Senator Hatch’s call for the unemployed to be drugs tested - for Unemployment Insurance that they have paid for through years and years of contributions – and even supposedly liberal Senators like Dianne Feinstein suggesting that “people just don’t go back to work at all” if UI eligibility is extended beyond 99 weeks. On the simplest level, this is insanity – there are about thirty million unemployed (including both official and unofficial) and only three million job openings. Drugs tested or not, the 27 million left over don’t have a choice of whether to go back to work.

Unfortunately, to paraphrase Keynes, politics can stay irrational longer than the unemployed can stay solvent. Austerity is in full political swing, and unlikely to improve, except in the improbable scenario that Congress remains Democratic in the midterm elections and the Senate Democratic Caucus follows through on their threats to reform the filibuster. A public policy that can only work in optimal circumstances isn’t worth much, though, and there are still ways to move forward on jobs despite being lumbered by irrational budget-neutral burdens.

The January 2010 SIGTARP report is released and if anything it's a validation of this sites many observations to date on TARP.

Despite the fact that the explicit goal of the Capital Purchase Program (“CPP”) was to increase financing to U.S. businesses and consumers, lending continues to decrease, month after month, and the TARP program designed specifically to address small-business lending — announced in March 2009 — has still not been implemented by Treasury.

Notwithstanding the fact that preserving home ownership and promoting jobs were explicit purposes of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (“EESA”), the statute that created TARP, nearly 16 months later, home foreclosures remain at record levels, the TARP foreclosure prevention program has only permanently modified a small fraction of eligible mortgages, and unemployment is the highest it has been in a generation.

SIGTARP notes that we are nowhere with financial reforms.