$400 Billion in Lehman Assets ‘lost’

Virtually overnight, nearly $400 billion in assets with Lehman Brothers were ‘lost’ weeks before last week’s global financial debacle.

Story from Bloomberg here . Conspiract story here .

What do this mean? Is Lehman the only commercial enterprise where assets are disappearing just before bailouts are being rewarded like treats for Pavlovian dogs?

This kind of a story begs a lot of questions.

For example, before governments are handing over cash left, right and centre to failing banks and investment houses, are they at least doing / requiring full audits to ensure that the money of the public is not going into a giant sinkhole?

And if governments are investing / buying up banks across the globe, will they retain the same rights as shareholders, including dividend payments, voting for management, and so on?  Will they be bought out at market rates later when the market is, presumably, higher?

My guess is no to all of the above.  This is knee-jerk reaction at its best and it likely won’t solve the financial crisis because there are still many out there who are bleeding the system dry and will continue to do so even more quickly now that governments have – without public support – invested taxpayer cash-flow into this system.

What has happened over the last weekend is beyond criminal.  The international financial market has now become a system by which financial powerhouses have full and unfettered access to our savings, our tax payments and all of the things that we should be getting from our governments, like roads, daycares and good health care systems.

All of our wants will not be accounted for again by our governments as long as they get dragges into this mess because our governments have turned their backs on us in favour of a bunch of people that couldn’t pick a basket of apples without eating a dozen first.

For more on the anti-democratic nature of capitalism, read this article by Noam Chomsky .