The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks by Feds and Spitzer charges are intimately linked.

Follow the money and timeline.

From Greg Palast website:

March 14th, 2008

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.

How? Follow the money.

The press has swallowed Wall Street’s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn’t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That’s blaming the victim.

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and its variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chunk of these ‘sub-prime.’

In March 2008, Fed released $200bn as credit crisis hit hard and Carlyle Capitol was bailed out. Carlyle Capitol is a affiliate to Carlyle Group. From Timesonline UK website:
Sources said that the present crisis was triggered by cash-strapped banks starting to get tough with their hedge fund clients by making margin calls on loans and drastically raising interest rate payments overnight. The move has pushed the funds into the panic-selling of assets, mostly AAA-rated US mortgage securities, and several are thought to be on the brink of collapse. One of them, Carlyle Capital Corporation (CCC), said yesterday that overnight it had received “substantial additional margin calls” linked to its souring investments in US mortgages. And Carlyle fund's $21.7 billion in assets were exclusively in AAA mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, traditionally considered secure and conservative investments, which it was using as collateral against its loans.

Here was Spitzer's piece on predatory lending practices on the Washington Post:

Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime --How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers Feb 14 2008 By Eliot Spitzer

Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders... Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers. Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government