Jon Corzine and MF Global

Questions to ask Jon Corzine at the hearings this morning (if he doesn't take the fifth):

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/10-questions-for-jon-corzine/?hp

Joseph J. Cassano -- Crisis Panel Hears of Goldman Push for A.I.G. Cash - NYTimes.com

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

OK, we had Pod One of the Giant Sucking Squid in the examination room (of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission) the real one:  Joseph J. Cassano.  And CNBC missed it by not only not showing the whole thing but when it showed clips one could not know who was Cassano and who was the chairman of the commission, etc. They missed it because, unlike me, the reporters at CNBC do not know who the real focuses should be on. C-Span missed it.  Today's Gretchen Morgenson sort of missed it.  Cramer missed it last night -- no mention.

I was able to go onto cspan.org and get it.

Another pod of the Giant Sucking Squid, Goldman Sachs, was also in the room, casually draped over and into a federal chair.

And Cassano "got away," without even a flipped tie, from the Commission! and its excellent cross-examiner, creating a plausible parallel world in the mind of the chairman, the latter of whom appeared on all the nightly news shows -- at least one -- and put the blame on Goldman Sachs and said Cassano "had a point."

Cassano, who started with Michael Milken, now has taken part in destroying the financial world twice.

He not only keeps his hundreds of millions, he becomes the darling of the committee.

Read on Gretchen's story of this morning:

Crisis Panel Hears of Goldman Push for A.I.G. Cash - NYTimes.com: "But perhaps more revealing than the executives’ explanations was the release of 500 pages of documents by the panel, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, showing how Goldman’s aggressive and repeated demands for billions in cash from A.I.G. drove the insurer to the brink of failure in September 2008."

Vampire Squid Wrapped Around the Face of Humanity

The Great American Bubble Machine Rolling Stone Politics: "The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates."