A court ruling the Merrill Lynch folks won’t like:
A New York state judge ruled Wednesday afternoon that New York’s attorney general could disclose the names of executives at Merrill Lynch who received 2008 bonuses ahead of Bank of America’s acquisition of the brokerage firm, rejecting arguments that the information was a trade secret.
***Mr. Cuomo praised the ruling. “Today’s decision in the Bank of America case is a victory for taxpayers,” he said in a statement. “Let the sun shine in. Justice Fried’s decision will now lift the shroud of secrecy surrounding the $3.6 billion in premature bonuses Merrill Lynch rushed out in early December. Taxpayers demand and deserve transparency and now they will finally get it.”
Merrill employees were collectively given billions of dollars in bonuses shortly before its sale to Bank of America closed. Around the same time, Bank of America learned that Merrill’s fourth-quarter loss would be much larger than expected, and the shortfall forced Bank of America’s to go to the government to seek more financial aid.
We’ll see how that plays out.
Keith
John McCain’s Twitter page will tell me how to feel about this issue.
Libby
Love it. Of course they’ll appeal and it will be tied up in court forever. But it’s nice to see them squirm a bit.
Comrade Stuck
Plaster their mugs on cans of Rat Poison.
Libby
On completely off topic note, I’m surprised that there aren’t more people in the Balloon Juice basketball pool.
It’s not too late to join.
(Please forgive the blogwhore. I’m too lazy to dig out the direct link from my taunting post).
Comrade Darkness
AIG’s bonuses were an odd one to finally push public opinion over the edge. Much bigger piles of steaming crap need to be showcased now that the smell is getting unbearable to Joe and the Sixpack.
Kirk Spencer
"As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list–I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed–who never would be missed!"
[edit – trying to get multiple blockquotes sucks.]
Libby
As long as I’m here, can I also tell you that I would hang out here more often but there’s some script that’s been running since the last upgrade that causes the page to take forever to load, no matter what browser I use. And I mean it hangs up every time I refresh, which I have to do to see new comments.
Eventually I run out of patience with it so I don’t hang around as much as I’d like to.
Martin
I’ve got a bad feeling that some real ugliness will come out of these lists. I have to say I’ve never seen public sentiment wound this tight against a group of people before.
demkat620
Anonymity is part of the reason they did it.
They thought they would get the money and then nobody would know.
wingnuts to iraq
Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
-Woody Guthrie
JL
@Comrade Stuck: I believe in openness but that is going a tad far.
guest
@Libby:
is that why every other attempt fails to post? i was starting to think it was an editorial statement.
Rick Taylor
I found this quote at the end of a Washington Post article which supports something I said earlier.
schrodinger's cat
We need some pet pics and a Tunch update to take our mind off AIG and its epic fail.
guest
@Comrade Stuck:
i was hoping for america’s most wanted.
guest
@Libby:
is that why it takes more than one attempt to try to get comments to post?
Brian J
I don’t really understand why, absent some knowledge of the laws that nobody else seems to have or the impression that nobody would stand up to these people, so many on the right seem to act like this stuff was inevitable. Perhaps it was, because of either cowardness or laziness, but it’s like a law in science. If it can be changed, why can’t we change it?
Laura W
@Libby:
So what’s up with the Yahoo Tourney Pick site? I’ve tried to get on so many times to make my picks and it pretends to load until next Tuesday, whilst never truly loading. "Transferring data from amch.questionmarket.com."
Just finally got in to do round one picks and now can’t get onto the next page. Frustrating.
Comrade Stuck
@JL:
That’s because you’re a nice person.
MikeJ
Tunch wrote down $35 billion in tuna futures right after closing. He’ll be testifying Friday in front of a joint session of the Senate Banking and Fisheries committees.
JL
Sullivan has a post mentioning that Rush and Hannity think that the bonuses are fair. He wonders what Beck is thinking. Anyone want to watch tonight and see if Beck cries again?
Comrade Stuck
Beck is busy building his Personal Destruction Device, just in case.
Xenos
The argument seems to be that because the US is investing so much into bailing out AIG, that we should protect our investment by retaining the executives currently in charge.
This shows how the Democrats have screwed up the frame here: we are not bailing out AIG, we are bailing out all the insurance customers who were defrauded by AIG. The money is passing straight through AIG to those customers, and the crooks who sold policies and then pocketed the premiums are the last ones who should still be working there.
Rommie
The Senate Banking and Fisheries committee is holding a joint session in Nationals Park? It’s about the only venue that could accommodate Tunch…
But seriously, an open session allowing the public to throw Hams and Eggs at these Ham ‘n Eggers isn’t such a bad idea. Oh, they can ask questions too if they wish.
gwangung
That includes a fair number of banks in Europe and funds run by foreign governments. I suspect that’s what’s making things so ticklish around AIG.
demkat620
Yes, Tunch please.
Laura W
@Laura W: Never mind. The trick is to just stop the incessant, so-called "loading" and refresh. It turns over eventually, and doesn’t even lose your data, miraculously.
TR
Step one: Release the list.
Step two: Release the hounds.
Dennis-SGMM
A riot is an ugly thing and I think that it is just about time we had one.
-Inspector Kemp, "Young Frankenstein."
Maybe spending the rest of their lives in fear of being shot in the back of the head by someone whose life they ruined will serve to caution future Masters of the Universe.
MikeJ
New GOP talking points out: BBC America says people are "tired of the anger."
Mike
The middle class is finally waking up. It’s bigger than the AIG fiasco.
People are realizing just how brutally they’ve been raped over the
past few decades, all the while being admonished by their betters
not to indulge in "class warfare".
Libby
@Laura W: I haven’t had any trouble making my picks. It’s only this page and a couple of other blogs that take forever to load for me. And I’ve been using my ancient desktop.
Of course I made the picks yesterday morning. It may be there’s a lot of traffic for people trying to get in at the last minute.
passerby
@Libby:
Well, Libby, I just tried to join in and after creating a yahoo account and signing in, I just don’t know what they want from me. Color me too stoopid to play.
I pick Memphis to win.
Libby
@JL: I saw something yesterday where Beck is defending the bonuses. I believe it may have been on Think Progress. Sorry I didn’t keep the link, but there is video of it. Probably could find it on youtube.
Xenos
@Mike: Indeed. All that internalized anger that middle-class Americans have been choking on could be very suddenly and dangerously externalized. My grandfather was nearly killed in the General Strike in San Francisco in 1934 when rioters blocked streets, flipped over cars, and set them on fire. The reaction involved vigilantism, lynchings, and machine-gun mounted trucks patrolling the streets and mounting raids on union offices.
Good old days, maybe coming soon to a neighborhood near you…
Comrade Stuck
@passerby:
click on "create a new bracket"
Libby
@passerby: I had trouble figuring it out too. Once you join the pool, you click on your name on the list I think and it should bring up the brackets with the team names on them. I kind of forget what I did, but if you keep clicking on stuff, eventually you’ll get the bracket with the names. Then you just start at the outside and pick who you think will win. Then you pick the next round of winners, going to the right on the bracket.
Be careful to keep going all the way to the middle. I had to keep going back because I missed some. It’s hard to see once you get to the final four.
There are tabs at the top of the bracket form for each division so you can go back and add stuff or change stuff. It’s kind of fun once you get it to work.
JL
I found this on The Big Picture..(Barry’s site)
When a fireman sees a house on fire, he sounds an alarm, dons his turnout gear, bravely rescues the occupants and puts out the fire.
When an investment banker sees a house on fire, he quietly sells the burning house short, uses the proceeds to buy a larger house for himself and, when someone suggests that his taxes be raised to help the homeless, he rails against the dangers of socialism.
Libby
@guest: I’m a computer dummy. I have no idea what the hang up is but it’s been driving me crazy since the upgrade. I miss hanging out here but I can’t deal with all the waiting every time I click.
JL
@JL: Sorry John about the joke.. I didn’t catch soc.i.a.lism.
Stooleo
I know that everybody at BJ has a pretty good understanding the chicanery (fraud) that the titans of Wall Street have done upon the American people, but I was trying to explain it to my wife last night who despises politics in general. Here’s how it went.
Me: So, you know that 401k that you have been putting money into for the last 10 years.
Wife: Yeah,
Me: So the guys on Wall Street have been using that money to place bets on questionable investments.
Wife: Okay…
Me: Also, they were able to leverage that money at a 30:1 ratio.
Wife: 30:1.. that seems kinda high.
Me: Yep. So when they lost the bets, guess who really lost.
Wife: They were using my money to capitalize their crappy investments? (eyes slowly widening).
Wife: But everything I read, said that a nice index fund was a great way to save for retirement, and they used that for those crazy credit default swaps?
Me: Yep, would have been better in a savings account at the bank.
Wife: Or we could have invested it at Mason and Spade.
Me: Huh?
Wife: Bury it the back yard..
Me: Or that too.
sigh….
BethanyAnne
@JL: Heh, indeedy…
J. Michael Neal
Keep in mind that that top management has been changed at AIG. Liddy joined back in September. The Financial Products division got a new head last March. The people who drove the company off a cliff aren’t still in charge.
Dan
We oughta put the "lynch" back in Merrill Lynch.
NoahVail
@Laura W:
I use OpenDNS to fix issues like yours.
http://www.opendns.com/solutions/homenetwork/
I support networks at car dealerships and use OpenDNS to keep crap domains like amch.questionmarket.com off my network. That’s because they’re one of the ad providers that has malware in their ad rotation.
It would solve this problem for you and probably a few others you may not have noticed. BTW, it’s a fully free service.
Good Luck
Noah