Bailout, Rescue Plan, Stimulus Package, Toxic Assets, Subprime Mortgage Crisis and Bad Banks are just a few of the buzz words the financial media has filtered to the American public over the last year.  On a daily basis CNBC, CNN, FOXNews, and many other media outlets continue to tell us about the “unprecedented” financial times in which we are living and what may have caused this disaster.  There is something that they left out that may very well be a huge part of the entire financial disaster: the PORTAL Alliance.

The PORTAL Alliance is “an open, industry-wide platform for the offering, trading and centralization of information in privately placed 144A Securities.”  The founding members of the PORTAL Alliance include:

• Bank of America – BAC – down 86.65%
• Barclays Capital – BCS – down 84.31%
• Citi – C – down 89.89%
• Credit Suisse – CS – down 53.42%
• Deutsche Bank – DB – down 75.87%
• Goldman Sachs – GS – down 54.77%
• JP Morgan – JPM – down 38.1%
• Merril Lynch – bought out by BAC
• Morgan Stanley – MS – down 57.57%
• UBS – UBS – down 73.03%
• Wachovia Securities – WB – down 86.37%

Does anyone else find this list to be the who’s who of financial fall outs on Wall Street?  What makes this even more interesting is the fact that this “open platform of trading” was created in November of 2007.  To help illustrate how poorly this group of institutions has performed over the period of time since the inception of the PORTAL Alliance, the stock performance of each security is listed.

NASDAQ’s Chief Executive Bob Greifeld made the statement “We’ll have great growth stats in the years to come with respect to the volume of trading.”  Well, Bob, little did you know that the opposite would happen.  Is it possible that creating this alliance to trade $100 million investable assets amongst themselves is a large part of this economic crisis?  Why has there been no media coverage on this topic?

We will dive deeper into this subject in the days ahead…

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NASDAQ in February of 2000

Please use Subprime Blogger to get your interest rate forecast.  With interest rates being very volatile over the last few years, make sure to get your up-t0-date forecast today!

Was Obama funded by Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac?  Please notice that the video is dated 2005. Since that speech, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have lost approximately 97% of their value. Do you know who the presidential candidate who is the number two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae? How about the candidate who has taken advice from the former CEO of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines. Mr. Raines, who happens to be African American, did nothing more than lose $90 million and run the company into the ground. That presidential candidate is not John McCain; it is Barack Obama.

The top recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Campaign contributions from 1989-2008 is as follows:

Christoper Dodd – Democrat, CT – $133,900

John Kerry – Democrat, MA – $111,000

Barack Obama – Democrat, IL – $105,894

To quote “Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn Out the Light,”

“This financial crisis was completely preventable.  The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … The Democratic Party.  The part that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.”

On a side note, I am neither part of the Republican or Democratic party but I find this very interesting. What do you think about this issue?

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