As the 2008 banking crisis unfolded, a lot of secret decisions were made that essentially boiled down to this: The bankers did not want to absorb the losses that resulted from their decisions. The name of the game was who is going to eat the losses? And the early target, as always, was taxpayers.
Central banks, such as the European Central Bank (ECB), rewrote long-standing rules on bonds and debt by unilaterally declaring their holdings of newly acquired Greek debt senior to other Greek debt – a major no-no in the world of debt law – and much was conducted in secret, behind closed doors, Because, frankly, if the content of those conversations were known, it would have been revealed to have been deeply embarrassing and possibly illegal.
A case in point just arose this week with this rather stunning secret recording of Irish ‘negotiations’ over the fate of Anglo-Irish Bank and its enormous losses:
Inside Anglo: the secret recordings
June 24, 2013
TAPE RECORDINGS from inside doomed Anglo Irish Bank reveal for the first time how the bank's top executives lied to the Government about the true extent of losses at the institution.
The astonishing tapes show senior manager John Bowe, who had been involved in negotiations with the Central Bank, laughing and joking as he tells another senior manager, Peter Fitzgerald, how Anglo was luring the State into giving it billions of euro.
The audio recordings are from the bank's own internal telephone system and date from the heart of the financial crisis that brought the State to its knees in September 2008.
Anglo itself was within days of complete meltdown – and in the years ahead would eat up €30bn of taxpayer money. Mr Bowe speaks about how the State had been asked for €7bn to bail out Anglo – but Anglo's negotiators knew all along this was not enough to save the bank.
The plan was that once the State began the flow of money, it would be unable to stop.
by cmartenson 
