USA Today:

NEW YORK (AP) – Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services has lowered its credit ratings for many of the world’s largest financial institutions, including the biggest banks in the U.S.

Bank of America and its main subsidiaries are among the institutions whose ratings fell at least one notch Tuesday, along with Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo.
S&P said the changes in 37 financial companies’ ratings reflect the firm’s new criteria for banks, and they incorporate shifts in the industry and the role of governments and central banks worldwide. The agency did not release its evaluation of each company but said it plans to discuss the changes during a conference call early Wednesday.
Bank of America’s issuer credit rating was cut to “A” from “A+,” while its Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch units and a series of related subsidiaries were cut to “A-” from “A.”
Ratings downgrades are never seen as positive, but this round may be particularly damaging for Bank of America.
Concern already was growing Tuesday about whether B of A has enough capital to withstand another downturn in the U.S. economy or further trouble in Europe, and the bank’s stock fell to a two-year low before the ratings announcement.
The Charlotte-based bank said in a recent regulatory filing that downgrades from S&P or Fitch Ratings, which also is reevaluating its ratings, “could likely have a material adverse effect on our liquidity” and cut off its access to credit markets.
It typically costs companies more to borrow when their credit ratings are cut, the same way a decline in a person’s credit scores drives up the interest rates that banks and credit cards will offer him.
Downgrades could hurt parts of the bank’s businesses where creditworthiness is critical, Bank of America said in a filing Nov. 3 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
A downgrade also could trigger provisions in derivative contracts that require B of A to put up more collateral, and it could terminate the contracts, resulting in losses and hurting the bank’s liquidity. The bank posted a $6.2 billion profit for the third quarter, mostly the result of accounting gains and the sale of a stake in a Chinese bank, but it was still moving toward a loss for the year as of Sept. 30.
S&P cut its rating on Citigroup Inc.’s credit to “A-” from “A”; a series of its subsidiaries also saw changes.
Goldman Sachs also was cut to “A-” from “A,” which triggered some downgrades for subsidiaries.
JPMorgan Chase’s rating also dropped to “A” from “A+,” but its Chase Bank unit was upgraded to “A+” from “AA-” and other subsidiaries also saw upticks.
Morgan Stanley’s rating slipped to “A-” from “A” and several of its units also got cut one notch.
Wells Fargo fell to “A+” from “AA-” which likewise triggered downgrades for several subsidiaries.
Top U.K. downgrades include Barclays, HSBC Holdings, Lloyds Banking Group and The Royal Bank of Scotland.
Ratings for several big European banks, including Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, ING Groep and Societe Generale were unchanged.
A handful of upgrades included S&P’s rating for Bank of New York Mellon Corp., which rose to “A+” from “AA-,” although some units were downgraded.

NY Times:

The Occupy Wall Street protesters and people sympathetic to their movement accused mainstream media outlets of playing down the first days of their protests in New York City in September.

But as the protests have spread to other cities in recent days, there has been a surge in media coverage on television, online and in print. And on Wednesday, for the first time, a national television news program moved itself to Lower Manhattan to cover the protests at length.

The program was that of Tamron Hall, the 2 p.m. anchor on MSNBC. Standing beside Zuccotti Park, the focal point of the Occupy Wall Street protests, Ms. Hall said that “protests are being held and planned right now in more than 50 cities.” On the screen were videos of earlier protests in New York, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles.

There are no immediate plans for other programs on MSNBC to broadcast from the protest site. Still, the presence of Ms. Hall attests to the growing amount of media attention that the protests are garnering.

While there were reporters at the park on Sept. 17, the first day of the occupation, there are many more now.

There were only a smattering of mentions of the protests on television in the first week, and some of those mentions — like the first one on Current TV’s “Countdown,” the liberal program anchored by Keith Olbermann — were about the lack of media coverage.

Television regulars like Michael Moore helped spur some coverage in late September. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that the protests represented a small sliver of the national news hole last week: the economy accounted for 14 percent of news coverage, and Occupy Wall Street accounted for about 12 percent of that economic coverage.

Arrests of protesters on two consecutive Saturdays, Sept. 24 and Oct. 1, generated much more coverage, including reports on nightly newscasts. By the time the protests entered a third workweek on Monday, all of the network morning news shows were discussing them.

“In a matter of weeks, Occupy Wall Street has grown from a small group of protesters squatting in New York’s Zuccotti Park to a national movement,” Mr. Olbermann said on his program Tuesday night. “Support from organized labor and progressive groups is increasing by the day, while the protesters — who were once sneered at by most national media and The New York Times — are now part of the testimony on Capitol Hill, part of the conversation on the campaign trail, and part of the calculations on Wall Street.”

The proximity of the main Occupy Wall Street protest to the newsrooms of television networks and national newspapers may have helped draw coverage. Erin Burnett, a new anchor for CNN, visited the park, interviewed protesters and showed one of the interviews on her program with a heavy dose of sarcasm on Monday night.

In a separate segment, Ms. Burnett told one of her guests, “I was in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution, and this lacked the intensity, to say the least.”

Others seem to disagree.

When Nick Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, visited the park on Sept. 29, he wrote on Twitter, “I’ve just been interviewing people at the Occupy Wall Street protests. Reminds me of Tahrir Square.” Mr. Kristof, too, was in Egypt during the revolution there, and he said he saw similarities in the “social media savvy, carnival mood and deep sense of frustration & disenfranchisement” of both crowds.

Dylan Ratigan, an afternoon MSNBC anchor who rails against what he calls financial and governmental corruption, has spent time at the park each day since Sept. 30, and spoke with Ms. Hall on her show on Wednesday. He sent an e-mail to fellow journalists on Tuesday that read, “If you haven’t been down to Zuccotti Park I highly recommend it. Not to simply get crowd shots, but to actually meet and talk with some of these people who are of all kinds, ages and economic standings.”

This is why our economy is in the toilet. This is why we need to get our debt spending under control. This is why we have to vote all the incumbents (both parties: Dems and Reps) out of office. They have all failed the American people. We could have literally divided the half billion dollars among all the taxpayers and made better use of it by spending it right back into the local economy.

USA Today:

White House officials on Wednesday defended a decision to award a now-bankrupt solar energy firm a $535 million loan as House Republicans released Obama administration e-mails suggesting that the loan was rushed despite deep internal skepticism about the government investment.

Excerpts of administration e-mails released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee from late August and September 2009 show that White House officials were anxious about the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) timeline for finalizing a loan to Fremont, Calif.-based Solyndra. Vice President Biden was traveling to California when Solyndra was scheduled to hold a groundbreaking on their new facility, and the White House wanted Biden to attend to tout the project as an example of President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus putting America back to work, the e-mails suggest.
Just days before the groundbreaking, the OMB staff wrote in an e-mail that the Solyndra deal should be “notched down” because of a lack of firm performance data on the company’s solar panels and a “weakening world market prices for solar generally.”
“We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews and have the approval set the date for the announcement rather than the other way around,” said one e-mail from an unnamed OMB aide to Biden’s office.
The groundbreaking went on as planned, with Biden, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu and California’s then-governor, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, in attendance.
Obama later visited Solyndra and hailed it as a green energy company that would help lead America’s economic recovery.
Things hardly turned out so rosy. Last month, Solyndra announced it was laying off its 1,100 workers, and it filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 6. Two days after the bankruptcy filing, FBI agents raided the company’s headquarters.
The White House said that the e-mail exchange only showed urgency about a scheduling decision and that the Bush administration initially pursued loaning the money to Solyndra. The Obama administration dispatched senior OMB and Energy officials to a House hearing to defend the White House’s evaluation of Solyndra.
“It’s a disappointing outcome but it comes with the terrain of backing innovative technology,” OMB Deputy Director Jeffrey Zients said.
Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., noted that Solyndra’s financial troubles became clear just six months after the loan closed when an independent auditor noted “recurring losses from operations” and “negative cash flows.” Stearns, who chairs the House subcommittee on investigations and oversight, said Energy Department correspondence indicated Solyndra was a model for companies that should get stimulus-backed loans.
If so, Stearns said, he is “very concerned” about where the rest of the $10 billion that the Energy Department has left to spend before the Sept. 30 deadline is going.
Committee Republicans have implied the administration failed to conduct due diligence on Solyndra because a major company investor was a foundation controlled by the family of Tulsa billionaire and Obama fundraiser George Kaiser. However, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and others say other private investors in Solyndra included Madrone Capital Partners, a venture capital firm tied to the GOP-leaning Walton family, the founders of Wal-Mart.

The reason why banks do this is to manipulate numbers and show they are profitable. They cut their biggest expense which is human resources. It fixes the book short term but hurts the company in the long run since they will not be able to grow. This is not a true profit but just a smoke and mirrors trick.

Now that our same government has decided to crack down on their fraudulent practices, one of the major banks announce they will cut more jobs.  This is after they suckered in Warren Buffett into a $5 billion private investment.  Seriously, if the bank is simply insolvent, the FDIC needs to step in and liquidate this bank.  The odd part is the bank executives are all still getting paid million of dollar compensations even though the company is laying off troops of employees.  Yes, people who are invested in BofA deserve a haircut and should be forced to take losses.

RTTNews:

Financial giant Bank of America Corp. (BAC: News ), which is struggling with souring mortgage losses, is in talks to cut roughly 40,000 positions over a period of years as part of its initiatives for cost cutting, known as Project New BAC, reports said Friday, citing people familiar with the plans.

Job cuts may total about 10 percent of the bank’s total employee count of 288,000 in the next two to three years. Chief Executive Brian Moynihan reportedly said that the bank will cut assets as well, to make it easier to manage. He is expected to discuss the details of restructuring on Monday at a conference held by Barclays Capital in New York or during the bank’s next earnings conference call in October.

Moynihan recently had said that its time to simplify and streamline the organization, and make sure business processes are relevant with a smaller, more focused company.

It was reported earlier that the officials had set a preliminary goal of cutting expenses by 20 percent in consumer banking.

On September 6, Bank of America announced reshuffling and restructuring its operations management, and appointed David Darnell and Tom Montag to the newly-created positions of co-chief operating officers. The Bank said the first phase of change is nearing conclusion and expects significant expense reductions as a result. The reorganization is expected to align the bank’s operating units with its three core customer groups: individuals, companies, and institutional investors.

The bank’s Project New BAC was started in April 2011 with the primary objective of alignment of leaders with customer groups and simplifying the organization.

BAC closed Thursday’s regular trading session at $7.20, down $0.28 or 3.74 percent. In pre-market activity, shares are currently trading at $7.27, up $0.07 or 0.97 percent.

Now that our same government has decided to crack down on their fraudulent practices, one of the major banks announce they will cut more jobs.  This is after they suckered in Warren Buffett into a $5 billion private investment.  Seriously, if the bank is simply insolvent, the FDIC needs to step in and liquidate this bank.  The odd part is the bank executives are all still getting paid million of dollar compensations even though the company is laying off troops of employees.

MarketWatch:
If it is true, it would be another sign of desperation. The Charlotte Observer reports that Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) could lay-off 30,000 people over several years.

The bank has come under new pressure as the government announced a suit against 17 financial firms which it claims misrepresented the risk of mortgage-back securities they sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The total losses from these was $200 billion. The possibility that the government can recoup of all that is unknown.

Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) has been rumored to need over $100 billion in new capital. There have also been rumors that the firm could be taken over by JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM) or another large American bank. B of A has attacked these as false, but its share price has done little to allay fears. The stock fell to $6.01 three weeks ago. Warren Buffett invested $5 billion in the bank which cause share to rally. Subsequent bad news pushed shares, which had recovered to $8.39, back to $7.25. The stock’s 52-week high is $15.31.

Bank of America can continue to deny it will need to raise large sums of money, an act which would nearly wipe out common shareholders. The firm’s stock says many investors have bet otherwise

Now, a few years after the fact after our corrupt politicians bailed out their lobby heavy “friends”, the US regulator has decided to sue the major banks.  I say get it done.  We need to get our money back, and if these companies fail in the process, so be it.  They don’t deserve to stay in business if they can’t pay their bills.  These are the same bailed out banks that are foreclosing on Americans everyday and use deceptive practices in loan modifications and predatory lending.

LA Times:

The Federal Housing Finance Agency suits, which are expected to be filed in the coming days in federal court, are aimed at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, among others, according to three individuals briefed on the matter.

The suits stem from subpoenas the finance agency issued to banks a year ago. If the case is not filed Friday, they said, it will come Tuesday, shortly before a deadline expires for the housing agency to file claims.

The suits will argue the banks, which assembled the mortgages and marketed them as securities to investors, failed to perform the due diligence required under securities law and missed evidence that borrowers’ incomes were inflated or falsified. When many borrowers were unable to pay their mortgages, the securities backed by the mortgages quickly lost value.

Fannie and Freddie lost more than $30 billion, in part as a result of the deals, losses that were borne mostly by taxpayers.

In July, the agency filed suit against UBS, another major mortgage securitizer, seeking to recover at least $900 million, and the individuals with knowledge of the case said the new litigation would be similar in scope.

Private holders of mortgage securities are already trying to force the big banks to buy back tens of billions in soured mortgage-backed bonds, but this federal effort is a new chapter in a huge legal fight that has alarmed investors in bank shares. In this case, rather than demanding that the banks buy back the original loans, the finance agency is seeking reimbursement for losses on the securities held by Fannie and Freddie.

The impending litigation underscores how almost exactly three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of a financial crisis caused in large part by subprime lending, the legal fallout is mounting.

Besides the angry investors, 50 state attorneys general are in the final stages of negotiating a settlement to address abuses by the largest mortgage servicers, including Bank of America, JPMorgan and Citigroup. The attorneys general, as well as federal officials, are pressing the banks to pay at least $20 billion in that case, with much of the money earmarked to reduce mortgages of homeowners facing foreclosure.

And last month, the insurance giant American International Group filed a $10 billion suit against Bank of America, accusing the bank and its Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch units of misrepresenting the quality of mortgages that backed the securities A.I.G. bought.

Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan all declined to comment. Frank Kelly, a spokesman for Deutsche Bank, said, “We can’t comment on a suit that we haven’t seen and hasn’t been filed yet.”

But privately, financial service industry executives argue that the losses on the mortgage-backed securities were caused by a broader downturn in the economy and the housing market, not by how the mortgages were originated or packaged into securities. In addition, they contend that investors like A.I.G. as well as Fannie and Freddie were sophisticated and knew the securities were not without risk.

Investors fear that if banks are forced to pay out billions of dollars for mortgages that later defaulted, it could sap earnings for years and contribute to further losses across the financial services industry, which has only recently regained its footing.

Bank officials also counter that further legal attacks on them will only delay the recovery in the housing market, which remains moribund, hurting the broader economy. Other experts warned that a series of adverse settlements costing the banks billions raises other risks, even if suits have legal merit.

The housing finance agency was created in 2008 and assigned to oversee the hemorrhaging government-backed mortgage companies, a process known as conservatorship.

I remember when Bill Maher and Jon Stewart used to bash Bush. During the first year of Obama’s term, they use to say give Obama time (like most Obamabots), but now they know he is just as incompetent as Bush or maybe even worse. I think he was recently called Jimmy Carter 2.0.  Both comedians now know their presidential pick is a failure and now acknowledge it is OK to make fun of him like most of our corrupt politicians (see video below).

My biggest disappointment in his administration is his criticism on Bush and his abusive spending that got us into this bad recession. Yet, President Obama has taken it upon himself to be as fiscally irresponsible and has made it a goal to wastefully outspend his predecessor. The new 3 stooges Obama, Geithner, and Bernanke are no different than the original stooges Bush, Paulson and Bernanke.

Even though transparency has been a continued theme preached by President Obama and his administration, we continue to see the actions from deliberate planning out of public sight. I am specifically talking about the numerous FRAUD bailouts that reward companies for failing, the outlandish budgets that continue to increase the federal deficit which further harms our economy, and manipulated stress tests that have negotiated results by the banks to show them in a better light. Simply put, President Obama is just the democrat version of President Bush.

Did you fall in love with Obama? Why??

Huffington Post

I truly believe that I speak for so many young progressives that would be proponents for peace, clean food and water, and a government that actually helps and cares for its citizens.

After 8 years of GWB and the lies about WMDs, 9-11, Monsanto, Iraq…etc…anyone coming from the other party looked like a better choice. I was somehow still under the illusion that the Democratic Party would work for the people and not corporate/banking/defense industry interests.

I cried when Obama won. I really thought it was a new dawn for the US and the world as a whole. I was so ashamed of the Bush administration… all the violence and greed just made me ashamed to be from the US. Somehow though I still thought that there was a difference between the two parties.

I have to thank Mr. Obama for waking me up to this truth. When he showed support for Monsanto and big agribusiness, the continued (and escalated) warmongering, and even the continued selling-out of the American taxpayer to the Federal Reserve, the lightbulb went off in my head — they are all simply employees.

On the other hand, Dr. Ron Paul seems to be the only candidate that is talking about the big pink elephant in the room. The money wasted on war, the fact that our nation has been sold to international banks, and that the federal government is becoming a monster overtaking state autonomy.

I never would have thought that the day would come where I would actually consider voting for someone else than a democrat. I want the world to be clean and healthy paradise planet for the next generations and for those that are living here now. I want the freedom to be able to buy clean food and drink unfluoridated water. I feel that its not asking too much, but the current administration continues to take away these rights.

Ron Paul seems to be the only option, and the furthered bashing of him by the mainstream media shows that they see him as a threat. I seriously hope that his time will come in 2012.

Peace and Prosperity to the US and EVERY person on the planet! Here is to sanity in 2012.