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Re:Mastercard and Visa: what are they good for? by tptacek on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:00PM (#1979626)
Here's a starting point: Visa was created by Bank of America. Surprise, the card processors aren't big fans of Wikileaks right now.
Re:Mastercard and Visa: what are they good for? by kenjackson on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:03PM (#1979639)
Honestly, I don't know what that means. Was BoA's name in some of the leaks?
Re:Mastercard and Visa: what are they good for? by olivolive on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:17PM (#1979703)
WikiLeaks has said that their next leak is from a major US bank, and they'll be releasing it early next year.

There's some guessing that it's BofA, because a year ago he said:

"At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives"

Re:Mastercard and Visa: what are they good for? by tptacek on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:13PM (#1979689)
They are widely believed to be the target of the next major WL dump.
Re:Mastercard and Visa: what are they good for? by kenjackson on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:25PM (#1979736)
Oh, wow. He seriously needs to dump that info. IMO, this would be more important than the state dept cables, and more justified.
Re:Mastercard and Visa: what are they good for? by tptacek on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:45PM (#1979814)
Or, he doesn't need to bother, because it's going to show once again a bunch of stuff that we very much don't like but very much already know: that Countrywide came as close to the line as possible, overstepping it regularly, in pushing subprime residential mortgages to people who couldn't possibly afford them, and then pushed the ratings agencies hard to help get those mortgages packaged into deceptive AAA-rated MBS's --- all of which would be (a) horrible, (b) unlikely to be cleanly prosecuted as a crime, and (c) not a revelation.

Read Joe Nocera; one of Countrywide's biggest competitors, Ameriquest, was literally handing out methamphetamine to its dealers to keep them awake to push bullshit second and third cash-out refi mortgages. Those shitheads owned the Rangers stadium and were eventually sold to Citigroup.

By not actually illuminating the issue, WL could instead split whatever opposition to the played-out mortgage fraud issue into WL-supporters and WL-opponents who will synthesize new opinions about banking regulation based on emotions; in otherwords, the process and the leak will become the story, not the lack of oversight and regulation that allowed the events being leaked to happen.

Or not.