Tom Ferguson: ''How Wall Street Hustles America’s Cities and States Out of Billions''

ya gotta read this.........long past time to put these crooks in jail.........From Naked Capitalism

''Its starting point will be familiar to anyone who recalls the debate over financial “reform” of the last few years. In the bad old days of pre-2008 deregulated finance, bankers started pedaling hot new “structured finance” products that they claimed were perfect for the needs of clients who had thrived for decades using cheaper, plain vanilla bonds and loans. The new marvels – swaps and other forms of so-called “derivatives” whose values changed as other securities they referenced fluctuated in value – were often complex and frequently not priced in any actual market. Their buyers thus had difficulty understanding how they really worked or how they might be hurt by purchasing them.

In many documented cases, buyers also had only faint ideas about how profitable these products were to the houses selling them. One befuddled Pennsylvania school board, for example, diffidently quizzed J.P. Morgan Chase: “The school-board official knew they were getting $750,000 for entering into a ‘swaption’ with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. They wanted to know what was in it for the bank. They wanted to know the price. They seem like reasonable requests. ‘I can’t quantify that to you,’ the banker told them. ‘It is not a typical underwriting and I can’t quantify that for you and there’s no way that I can be specific on that.’”''

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