PARIS-A week-long trial starting Monday in the alleged insider-trading case involving European Aerospace Defence & Space Co. could have deep repercussions at the parent company of plane maker Airbus as well as on the authority of France's stock-market watchdog Autorité des Marches Financiers.

The case began in June 2006, when EADS disclosed that its program to develop the A380 double-decker aircraft was plagued with delays and cost overruns, sending its shares down 26% in one day. The A380 woes led to upheaval at the Franco-German aerospace company, which was torn apart by nationalistic rivalries. A management shuffle ensued.

The EADS stock fall also led the AMF to look into whether some company shareholders and executives knew about the A380 problems ahead of the June announcement and particularly when they had sold shares or exercised stock options in November 2005 and March 2006.

Following a three-year investigation, the AMF's sanction committee, which has an administrative jurisdiction, is trying 17 individuals, and two EADS founding shareholders-French media group Lagardère SCA and German automaker Daimler AG-on charges of insider trading.

[...].

EADS, which faces charges of having been too slow in disclosing the A380 woes, has said it provided investors with timely and accurate information.

As millions of Americans struggle to hold on to their homes, Wall Street has found a way to make money from the mortgage mess.

Investment funds are buying billions of dollars' worth of home loans, discounted from the loans' original value. Then, in what might seem an act of charity, the funds are helping homeowners by reducing the size of the loans.

But as part of these deals, the mortgages are being refinanced through lenders that work with government agencies like the Federal Housing Administration. This enables the funds to pocket sizable profits by reselling new, government-insured loans to other federal agencies, which then bundle the mortgages into securities for sale to investors.

While homeowners save money, the arrangement shifts nearly all the risk for the loans to the federal government -- and, ultimately, taxpayers -- at a time when Americans are falling behind on their mortgage payments in record numbers.

For instance, a fund might offer to pay $40 million for a $100 million block of mortgages from a bank in distress. Then the fund could arrange to have some of those loans refinanced into mortgages backed by an agency like the F.H.A. and then sold to an agency like Ginnie Mae. The trick is to persuade the homeowners to refinance those mortgages, by offering to reduce the amounts the homeowners owe.

Dec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government in October, expects to pay $14 million in taxes worldwide for 2008 compared with $6 billion in 2007.

The company's effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent, New York-based Goldman Sachs said today in a statement. The firm reported a $2.3 billion profit for the year after paying $10.9 billion in employee compensation and benefits.

Goldman Sachs, which today reported its first quarterly loss since going public in 1999, lowered its rate with more tax credits as a percentage of earnings and because of "changes in geographic earnings mix," the company said.

The rate decline looks "a little extreme," said Robert Willens, president and chief executive officer of tax and accounting advisory firm Robert Willens LLC.

"I was definitely taken aback," Willens said. "Clearly they have taken steps to ensure that a lot of their income is earned in lower-tax jurisdictions."

In October the FDIC held a large auction of properties it had acquired as a result of failed banks in Georgia. I thought this was an interesting story and wrote about it before the auction took place. It was my intention to write about it again after the results of the auction were released. No such luck. The FDIC has decided to keep us in the dark on this one. The following is an email I got from JP King, the auction house who ran the Georgia auction:

"Unfortunately, FDIC has prohibited us from releasing any information regarding the auction. We've been trying to get them to let us release the results, but they have denied our requests. We aren't allowed to release any details."

I would have thought that the results of a pubic auction of properties owned by FDIC would have to be publicly disclosed. So why is the FDIC trying to cover this up?

The answer is that the REO problem for the D.C. lenders and the FDIC is reaching a crisis level. In spite of every effort to avoid foreclosures the fact is that the number of properties owned by the Feds is rising on a daily basis.

There are approximately 55 million mortgages outstanding today. At least 10% will/have gone into default before this is over. Of those half will result in foreclosure. These numbers create an estimate of the Federal share of REO at about 1.5 mm homes. Depending on unemployment and the economy going forward that number could be much higher. Before this is over the Feds could own up to 5% of all residential RE.

Banks are not lending despite the massive quantitative easing. They are fat with reserves, paying huge bonuses again, and obviously doing something with their money other than providing funds for the commercial activity of the nation.

Excess Reserves are an accounting function. The banks themselves do not reduce their reserves significantly through lending in the aggregate, but seek to minimize the opportunity cost of reserves. But it is symptomatic in the sense that the lack of reserves is most definitely NOT an issue with lending.

No one can deny with any credibility that if the Federal Reserve reduced their payment on reserves to zero, or even a negative, that lending activity would not increase. And yet they do not. Why?

Because the first priority of the Fed is the health of the banking system itself, and not the national economy and the availability of credit to non-banking institutions. They are seeking to drive commercial entities out of secure savings to risk investment again, but providing a safe harbor for the banks while they are doing it, while attempting to maintain the appearance of financial system solvency.

The critical, unspoken factor is that the US banking system is not yet healthy, is not sound, is not well capitalized despite the record expansion in the monetary base and its specific direction to the banks themselves. They have simply not taken the writedown necessary to make themselves financially sound, because they do not wish to take the hit to earnings, salaries, stock options and bonuses.

The inadequacy of the foundation of US monetary and financial policy has never before stood so starkly revealed.  The policy has no concern for any but the banks.  And the people are getting pissed.  Few of them have any money to invest anyway, are going to hang on to what they have and are not going to invest it in a rigged system run by thieves.

We have to have a Government and a financial system that serves more than just the interests of the big banks. It is not that the existing system is immoral, which it clearly is, but that it is massively dysfunctional as well. I fear that event risk has never been higher.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

5. False Belief System: Earlier this year, the Dow had dropped over 5,000 points in 6 months. One of the collective fallacies our culture operates under is the delusion that the market is some kind of astute forecasting machine. It is not -- it represents the collective wisdom of 10 million panicked monkeys. That millions of slightly clever, pants wearing primates can combine their collective ignorance, their intellectual foibles, biases and false beliefs somehow into something resembling intelligence was one of the false beliefs of the era. Unfortunately, this is a condition the monkeys are prone towards (Witch burning, bloodletting, organized religion, etc.).