Sam Bankman-Fried Fried For Fraud

The jury in the fraud trial of cryptocurrency king Sam Bankman-Fried took less than a day to return a guilty verdict on seven counts involving billions of dollars stolen from investors.

Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty on Thursday for his role in the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.

After 15 days of testimony and about four and a half hours of deliberations, jurors returned a verdict that found him guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy.

Bankman-Fried looked sunken as the verdict was read out. After the jury was released, he stood, head bowed and shaking as his lawyer spoke in his ear. A few feet behind him, his parents stood watching. As Bankman-Fried was escorted out of the room, he turned back and smiled at his parents. His father, Joe Bankman, put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. As their son left the room, Barbara Fried broke down in tears.

In remarks outside the Manhattan courthouse on Thursday, US Attorney Damian Williams lauded the jury’s verdict, saying the government has “no patience” for fraud and corruption.

“These players like Sam Bankman-Fried might be new, but this kind of fraud, this kind of corruption, is as old as time,” he said.

But Bankman-Fried’s attorney said they were “disappointed.”

“We respect the jury’s decision. But we are very disappointed with the result,” said lead defense attorney Mark Cohen in a statement. “Mr. Bankman Fried maintains his innocence and will continue to vigorously fight the charges against him.”

The sentencing hearing date will be March 28, 2024. He faces up to 110 years in prison.

Bankman-Fried was found guilty of stealing billions of dollars from accounts belonging to customers of his once-high-flying crypto exchange FTX. He was also found guilty of defrauding lenders to FTX’s sister company, the hedge fund Alameda Research, which held FTX customer funds in a bank account.

During his trial, Bankman-Fried said he learned in 2020 that FTX customer funds were held by Alameda but he did not take action to safeguard them.

When he later discovered in the fall of 2022 that Alameda owed $8 billion to FTX, no one was fired.

Other charges Bankman-Fried was found guilty of include defrauding investors in FTX and a money-laundering charge.

“Sam Bankman-Fried thought that he was above the law. Today’s verdict proves he was wrong,” said US Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a statement. “This case should send a clear message to anyone who tries to hide their crimes behind a shiny new thing they claim no one else is smart enough to understand: the Justice Department will hold you accountable.”

Sam here is facing decades in prison, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving little carbuncle of a man. It was a scheme from the start, and people lost tens, if not hundreds of billions in the collapse of his pyramid.

This is a guy who needs to be put in a box until the 22nd century. 

Holidaze: Eat The Rich

The 500 wealthiest billionaires on the planet gained $1.2 trillion in additional wealth in 2019, or an increase from 2018 of 25%, as the rest of us suffered.

The leveraging of a giant social-media presence, a catchy tune about a family of sharks and a burgeoning collection of junkyards are just a few of the curious ways that helped make 2019 a fertile year for fortunes to blossom around the world.

Kylie Jenner became the youngest self-made billionaire this year after her company, Kylie Cosmetics, signed an exclusive partnership with Ulta Beauty Inc. She then sold a 51% stake for $600 million.

It has been almost two months since the Washington Nationals captured their first World Series championship, but people around the world are still singing along to the baseball team’s adopted rallying cry: “Baby Shark, doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo.” The Korean family that helped popularize the viral earworm are now worth about $125 million.

Even car wrecks proved to be a treasure trove. Willis Johnson, the gold-chain-wearing Oklahoma native who founded Copart Inc., has amassed a $1.9 billion fortune by building a network of junkyards to sell damaged autos.

Read more: Junkyard billionaire thriving on auto wrecks expands empire

The emergence of atypical fortunes underscores just how much money the uber-rich accumulated in 2019.

And the richer they were at the start of the year, the richer they got. The world’s 500 wealthiest people tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index added $1.2 trillion, boosting their collective net worth 25% to $5.9 trillion.

It's unsustainable, of course.  25% yearly returns don't happen without massive economic depressions at some point.  But when we get there, the rich will be fine.  They always are.  The other 7.5 billion of us, not so much.

Last Call For Trump Trades Blows, Con't

As I keep saying, the one thing that would absolutely end Donald Trump in 2020 is an economic recession, and America got another market red alert today that indicates we're careening towards a nasty one right now.

Recession signals intensified Wednesday in the United States and in some of the world’s leading economies, as the damage from acrimonious trade wars is becoming increasingly apparent on multiple continents.

The U.S. stock market tumbled to its worst day of the year on Wednesday, after a reliable predictor of looming recessions flashed for the first time since the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 800 points, or about 3 percent, and has lost close to 7 percent over the past three weeks.

Two of the world’s largest economies, Germany and the United Kingdom, appear to be contracting even as the latter forges ahead with plans to leave the European Union. Growth also has slowed in China, which is in a bitter trade feud with the United States. Meanwhile, Argentina’s stock market fell nearly 50 percent earlier this week after its incumbent president was defeated by a left-wing opponent.

Whether the events presage an economic calamity or just an alarming spasm are unclear. But unlike during the Great Recession, global leaders are not working in unison to confront mounting problems and arrest the slowdown. Instead, they are increasingly at one another’s throats.

And President Trump has responded by both claiming the economy is still thriving while dramatically ramping up his attacks on Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome H. Powell, seeking to deflect blame.

Wednesday’s sharp sell-off was caused by an unusual development in the bond market, called an “inverted yield curve,” that often foreshadows a recession.

For the first time since the run-up to the Great Recession, the yields — or returns — on short-term U.S. bonds eclipsed those of long-term bonds. Normally, the government needs to pay out higher rates to attract investors for its long-term bonds. But with so many losing confidence in the near-term prospects of the economy and rushing to buy longer-term bonds, the U.S. government now is paying more to attract buyers to its 2-year bond than its 10-year note.

That inverted yield curve usually precedes a recession by about a year, which would be lethal to Trump's reelection prospects if that holds true.  I say "usually" because the yield curve first inverted in December 2005 before the Great Recession, and it basically took two years for that to happen.

We'll see what happens, but with the Trump regime running things, I would expect that massive recession sooner rather than later.

Last Call For Trump Street

Wall Street corporate Democratic donors are horrified at this year's crop of presidential candidates, and apparently if Dems don't lay off the "Socialism" soon, those billions are going to just have to go to Trump for a second term.

One night in early April, roughly 20 of the Democratic Party’s highest-profile donors from the financial industry sat down over dinner to discuss how exactly they were feeling about the 2020 presidential race. For the most part, it wasn’t great.

Convened by two veterans of liberal fund-raising — investors Steven Rattner and Blair Effron — the group had no hard-and-fast agenda except to share notes on the overflowing field of candidates. The crowd of Democratic heavyweights, including Clinton-administration Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs and Citi alum Robert Rubin, former ambassador to France Jane Hartley, and venture capitalist Deven Parekh, knew most of the contenders well. But coming to some kind of consensus, picking a plausible candidate they felt they could all live with and throw their considerable money behind — that was a far-fetched proposition.
“There’s tremendous fear,” said one banker who was there. The candidates who had long cultivated relationships with Wall Street — such as Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand — were struggling to gain traction and had grown more hostile to finance as their party had, too. Joe Biden, leading in early polls, had a comforting history in the Obama White House and a reputation as an Establishment Democrat but had never, until a few months ago, maintained any meaningful relationship with Wall Street, hadn’t even announced his candidacy yet, and struck many bankers as a dubious bet to beat Donald Trump. Nearly everyone else in the field, the financiers felt, was being pulled leftward by Bernie Sanders (the preposterously well-funded contender they considered too crazy to even imagine in the White House) and Elizabeth Warren (less crazy, Democrats on Wall Street think, and way more competent). “She would torture them,” one banker told me. “Warren strikes fear in their hearts,” explained a New York executive close to banking leaders from both parties — so much fear that such investors often speak of the U.S. senator from Massachusetts, a former law professor and consumer advocate, as a co-front-runner with Sanders. “How do we come up with an alternative?” asked one person at the dinner.

There were a few options, none perfect. Beto O’Rourke had recently launched his campaign, and his congressional record was essentially a centrist-shaped blank slate. Pete Buttigieg was a McKinsey alum who came from the Rust Belt but talked like a Silicon Valley exec or an Obama Treasury official, but no one, yet, took him seriously.

Kamala Harris was a favorite of many in the room. The U.S. senator from California now describes herself as a populist and highlighted a past confrontation with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon over foreclosures in her pre-campaign book, but in 2012, as California’s attorney general, she passed on prosecuting OneWest and its CEO, Steven Mnuchin. In this cycle, she has been the Democrat perhaps most active in seeking Wall Street money (Citi vice-chairman Ray McGuire and Pine Street partner Brian Mathis are helping with her Wall Street outreach, and she recently headlined a fund-raiser hosted by LionTree CEO Aryeh Bourkoff) and occasionally its advice (BlackRock’s Michael Pyle, an Obama-administration alum, is advising her on economics). “People are generally in search of a candidate who has the right set of views, has the right character, but also can win,” Rattner told me later. “Right now, it is very hard to see who checks all three boxes.”

There was no agreement. By evening’s end, multiple donors walked away planning to write checks to three or four or five candidates — hoping they stay relatively moderate — rather than going all in on any one. Among the committed Democrats on Wall Street, this wait-and-see, as-long-as-it’s-not-Bernie-or-Elizabeth posture has become the norm. “This is like venture investing. You really don’t know who’s going to break out, but your hope is you have a good portfolio and that one of these investments breaks out,” Bruce Heyman, a former Goldman managing director and ambassador to Canada, told me.

Of course, these longtime donors are more committed to the Democrats than the average guy on Wall Street. Two years ago, Trump seemed noxious enough that Democrats (reasonably) hoped to continue growing their considerable advantage over Republicans in the New York finance set. But one GOP-driven tax cut and one leftward shift in the Democratic Party later, a worried handful of bankers is considering turning that story on its head. “They’re too far left! They’re too far left!” said Alex Sanchez, CEO of the Florida Bankers Association. “I mean, honestly, if it’s Bernie versus Trump, I have no fucking idea what I’m going to do,” one Democratic hedge funder told me. “Maybe I won’t vote.”

Democratic donors aren’t especially worried about policy; few have sussed out where candidates stand on Dodd-Frank or the carried-interest tax loophole, and few believe that, aside from Sanders or Warren, any contenders are likely to make an aggressive new push for regulation as president. What agitates them instead is — in a replay of the alienation they felt during the Obama presidency thanks to a few stray “fat cats” comments — how Democratic rhetoric threatens their sense of status. No moment crystallized the new reality more than when former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper — a centrist candidate who was a prominent business owner in Denver before entering politics — refused to even call himself a capitalist in a Morning Joe interview in March.

Before Trump won, Hillary Clinton had outraised him by a margin of more than four to one among the financial crowd, which had long regarded him as a pariah because of his shady record and bankruptcies. Now? “The anti-corporate, anti–Wall Street direction of the Democratic Party is driving Democrats into the Trump camp, which is, in most cases, the last place they want to be,” said Kathryn Wylde, CEO of the Partnership for New York City, the business group that counts among its members all of the city’s major financial institutions. “The fact that he’s raised as much money as he has is a reflection of how many Democrats are holding their nose and supporting him because they feel demonized by the Democrats.” In mid-April, Trump’s team revealed it had raised over $30 million in the first quarter of 2019, slightly more than the top two Democratic candidates combined. If you add up all the Democrats’ dollars, the challengers are way ahead — but among donors, and indeed among the candidates themselves, the perception remains that the president is accumulating a real edge. Meanwhile, Goldman released its 2020 outlook: Trump, the firm concluded, now has a “narrow advantage.” Even Paul Singer, the GOP hedge-fund magnate who backed efforts to defeat Trump in 2016 — and who funds the Washington Free Beacon, which first paid for the anti-Trump research that later became “the dossier” — stopped by a small Trump fund-raising roundtable in New York late last year. “Well, we must be doing well now that Paul’s here,” Trump said.

“Wall Street for Trump is the reverse Bradley effect,” said hedge-fund manager Anthony Scaramucci, the Republican fund-raiser who (very) briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director, referring to the theory that voters overstate their support for nonwhite candidates in polls. “They all secretly love him, but because of their clients and the polarity, they don’t want to say it out loud.”

Over coffee recently in midtown, an investment pro with a long history in Democratic politics described the struggle to resist the unexpected pull of Trump. “What matters more?” he asked, looking up at me. “My social values or my paycheck?”

This story makes Liz Warren look like the person Wall Street is most afraid of, and Harris the least.  That's very good for Warren in my book, not so good for Harris.

The real problem is Wall Street wants to keep him. 

Maybe we don't need Wall Street?

Just an idea, Dems.

Last Call For Rats Fleeing The Ship

It's clear that Republicans definitely don't like being in the minority in the House, and we're already seeing outright resignations as GOP lawmakers start securing private sector jobs.  First out the door after just being re-elected: Pennsylvania Republican Tom Marino.

Rep. Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican, announced Thursday he'll resign from Congress to pursue a private sector job, after just starting his fifth term in Congress. 

"As of January 23, 2019, I am officially stepping down from Congress," Marino said in a statement. "Having spent over two decades serving the public, I have chosen to take a position in the private sector where I can use both my legal and business experience to create jobs around the nation." 

Marino thanked his constituents, saying serving in Congress was "one of the greatest honors of my life" and was "confident that the area will continue to thrive." 

Marino won 66% of the vote in November and his district covers a wide swath of northern and central Pennsylvania. 

He was an early Trump supporter among congressional Republicans. He was nominated to be the president's Drug Czar but withdrew after a joint CBS "60 Minutes" and Washington Post report revealed he took nearly $100,000 from pharmaceutical lobbyists.

I guarantee you that Marino will land on his feet with a big pharma lobbyist job somewhere...and nobody will bat an eyelash.

Sears No Bucks

Sears, one of America's greatest retail legends, most notable for its commitment to serve black customers through the era of Jim Crow with its mail catalog, was facing imminent liquidation this morning, but this afternoon it appears to have been spared heading for history's scrap heap.

Sears was facing the possibility of shutting down, until it reached an 11th-hour deal Tuesday to stay open, at least for now. 

After two long delays at a morning hearing in bankruptcy court, attorneys for Sears announced it had accepted a revised bid from a hedge fund controlled by Eddie Lampert, the chairman and former CEO of Sears. The deal would keep 425 of the stores open. 

Lampert's $4.4 billion offer does not complete the sale, but rather starts an auction that is due to be completed on January 14. It is still possible that those wishing to shutdown the company will bid more for the assets than Lampert is offering. 

Judge Robert Drain still needs to approve the agreement, but called the deal "a good development." 

It gives Sears a chance to survive, which appeared to be slipping way heading into the hearing. 

Lampert submitted a bid on December 28 and Sears had until Friday to accept it, but the company didn't comment before Tuesday's hearing. That's because attorneys were working feverishly to get it done. 

The deal was reached after days of "virtually round-the-clock negotiations," Sears attorney Ray Schrock told the court. 

The talks continued into Tuesday. A hearing planned for 10 a.m. didn't actually get underway until after 1 p.m. because attorneys were huddled to discuss details of the bid. 

In the end, greed wrecked Sears, it will eventually be pillaged, and 50,000 jobs and 125 years of history will sacrificed on the altar of Wall Street.  JC Penney's is almost certainly next.

The Trump Slump

I've been warning that Donald Trump's merry band of dumbasses would eventually tank the economy, and it looks like we're well into that scenario now with the major markets down 15% or more just this month on top of a continuing government shutdown, not to mention the live grenade of pulling out of Syria and firing Defense Secretary Mattis.

Now Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin is trying to clean up the mess by very loudly yelling through a bullhorn that the economy is perfectly fine, which as you can imagine is having the completely opposite effect on Wall Street.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin startled financial analysts, bankers and economists on Sunday by issuing an unusual statement declaring that the nation’s six largest banks had ample credit to extend to American businesses and households.

Mnuchin made the statement on Twitter after calling the leaders of the six banks, seeking to address an issue that had attracted little concern ahead of the treasury secretary’s tweet.

The statement came hours before Asian markets were set to open and following a sharp sell-off that made last week the worst for U.S. markets in a decade. President Trump has been furious at the sell-off, and efforts by Mnuchin to inspire confidence in the market have so far failed.

Several analysts said Sunday night that his outreach to the banks and subsequent statement were likely to backfire and drive even more concern.

“Panic feeds panic and this looks like panic in the administration,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton. “Suggesting you might know something that no one else is worried about creates more unease.”

There are many components in the economy and financial markets, and they don’t always move in tandem. For example, a sliding stock market does not necessarily mean there are problems in the banking system, and there can be problems in the banking system that aren’t reflected in the stock market’s performance.

In Mnuchin’s statement, which was posted while he was vacationing in Mexico for the holidays, the Treasury chief said the executives told him “they have ample liquidity available for lending to consumer, business markets, and all other market operations." Mnuchin said the executives added “that they have not experienced any clearance or margin issues and that the markets continue to function properly.”

Mnuchin telling everyone there are no banking liquidity problems when the problem is confidence in Trump's collapsing regime is a bit like trying to assure a jumbo jet full of nervous flyers that all the parachutes are in working order, when if you've flown on a commercial airliner ever, you know damn well there's never parachutes on the plane.

Also, the number three engine just caught fire.

Today is going to be an interesting day.

[EDIT] Dow closed down 600 points in shortened Christmas Eve trading.  Now off 4000 points for the month of December.

This is 2008 all over again.

Running Government Like A Business, Con't

Meanwhile, while people are complaining about who Barack Obama takes a post-presidential vacation with these days as proof that the Dems are all about Wall Street, corporate America and the one percent are making it very clear who they want to remain in power.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) on Friday announced it raised $41.5 million in the first three months of 2017, its strongest-ever total for the first quarter following a presidential race. 

“Our record-setting fundraising pace has been fueled by grassroots enthusiasm for President Trump and the Republican Party,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said in a statement. 

“The RNC is in a strong position to make an impact in key races in 2017 and 2018 as we plan to take a leading role in preserving our congressional majorities and prepare to reelect President Trump in 2020.”

The RNC said it brought in $12.2 million in March, breaking its record for biggest haul in the March after a presidential race. The committee has $41.4 million total cash on hand. 

RNC Finance Chairman Steve Wynn said the robust totals are proof voters approve of Trump leading GOP majorities in both chambers of Congress. 

“Americans across the country are expressing their belief that their best chance for a better life in our country is with continued Republican control of the House, Senate and the White House under President Trump,” he said.

Spending millions to make billions is always a good investment as the Trump regime continues to leave hundreds of key executive branch positions vacant ranging from dozens of US attorneys to hundreds of State Department employees to scores of regulatory agency positions.

And with nobody minding the store, corporate America can happily keep on breaking all the laws it wants to knowing they'll never be enforced.  They're willing to pay millions to keep it that way, too.

So far it's working great.  Just ask the RNC.

The Fabulous Fed Fail Follies

ProPublica and This American Life have teamed up for a pretty depressing story of former Federal Reserve examiner Carmen Segarra.  Her job in 2011 and 2012 was to take a look at infamous banking giant Goldman Sachs and figure out why the Fed missed their involvement in the subprime mortgage meltdown.

She was fired for doing her job, and the recordings she made were devastating.  Her boss, Columbia University finance professor David Beim was brought in to figure out what went wrong.  New York Fed President William Dudley, who brought both Beim and Segarra in, wanted answers.  He just didn't want to do anything with those answers.

As ProPublica reported last year, Segarra sued the New York Fed and her bosses, claiming she was retaliated against for refusing to back down from a negative finding about Goldman Sachs. A judge threw out the case this year without ruling on the merits, saying the facts didn't fit the statute under which she sued. 

At the bottom of a document filed in the case, however, her lawyer disclosed a stunning fact: Segarra had made a series of audio recordings while at the New York Fed. Worried about what she was witnessing, Segarra wanted a record in case events were disputed. So she had purchased a tiny recorder at the Spy Store and began capturing what took place at Goldman and with her bosses. 

Segarra ultimately recorded about 46 hours of meetings and conversations with her colleagues. Many of these events document key moments leading to her firing. But against the backdrop of the Beim report, they also offer an intimate study of the New York Fed's culture at a pivotal moment in its effort to become a more forceful financial supervisor. Fed deliberations, confidential by regulation, rarely become public. 

The recordings make clear that some of the cultural obstacles Beim outlined in his report persisted almost three years after he handed his report to Dudley. They portray a New York Fed that is at times reluctant to push hard against Goldman and struggling to define its authority while integrating Segarra and a new corps of expert examiners into a reorganized supervisory scheme. 

Segarra became a polarizing personality inside the New York Fed — and a problem for her bosses — in part because she was too outspoken and direct about the issues she saw at both Goldman and the Fed. Some colleagues found her abrasive and complained. Her unwillingness to conform set her on a collision course with higher-ups at the New York Fed and, ultimately, led to her undoing.

Segarra was fired for not being nice enough to the Masters of the Universe.  Oh, but it gets worse, as the recordings show Segarra was at a meeting where fellow investigator Michael Silva recounted the infamous day the financial system "broke the buck" during Lehman Brothers' last death throes.

Silva had been in the room with Geithner in September 2008 during a seminal moment of the financial crisis. Shares in a large money market fund – the Reserve Primary Fund – had fallen below the standard price of $1, "breaking the buck" and threatening to touch off a run by investors. The investment firm Lehman Brothers had entered bankruptcy, and the financial system appeared in danger of collapse. 

In Segarra's recordings, Silva tells his team how, at least initially, no one in the war room at the New York Fed knew how to respond. He went into the bathroom, sick to his stomach, and vomited. 

"I never want to get close to that moment again, but maybe I'm too close to that moment," Silva told his New York Fed team at Goldman Sachs in a meeting one day.
Despite his years at the New York Fed, Silva was new to the institution's supervisory side. He had never been an examiner or participated as part of a team inside a regulated bank until being appointed to lead the team at Goldman Sachs. Silva prefaced his financial crisis anecdote by saying the team needed to understand his motivations, "so you can perhaps push back on these things."

The Fed tried to convince big trading houses like Goldman Sachs to step up and backstop the system back then. They laughed.

In the recordings, Silva then offered a second anecdote. This one involved the moments before the Lehman bankruptcy.

Silva related how the top bankers in the nation were asked to contribute money to save Lehman. He described his disappointment when Goldman executives initially balked. Silva acknowledged that it might have been a hard sell to shareholders, but added that "if Goldman had stepped up with a big number, that would have encouraged the others." 

"It was extraordinarily disappointing to me that they weren't thinking as Americans," Silva says in the recording. "Those two things are very powerful experiences that, I will admit, influence my thinking."

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner had to drag the big banks like Goldman Sachs kicking and screaming before they would help, and they made huge profits when they did.  The story goes on to detail several more recordings Segarra made, and the intense pressure Segarra was under to drop anything that might embarrass Goldman Sachs.

Pointing the finger at Eric Holder for failing to prosecute is one thing, but Tim Geithner, William Dudley, and the Fed completely dropped the ball on this mess.  It never should have happened.

Last Call

I don't always agree with Chris Hayes, but he's dead right about NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo and why he's the last Democrat I would vote for in 2016.  Politicker:

Mr. Hayes blasted Mr. Cuomo’s “putative reason” for endorsing two Republican senators–their support for same sex marriage legislation–by asking why he declined to support a Democratic challenger in a race where the pro-gay marriage Republican had already been defeated in a primary. He also criticized the governor for not working to stop Democratic Senator-elect Simcha Felder from caucusing with the GOP, as Mr. Felder’s move may end up being decisive in helping the Republicans hold onto their majority, depending on one race that’s still too-close-to-call and more possible Democratic defections.

“Despite the fact that he’s the leader of the Democratic Party in the state, and wishes someday to be the Democratic nominee for President, Cuomo has refused to intervene with Felder, saying he won’t insert himself into the controversy,” My. Hayes argued. “Watching all this unfold, one can’t help but suspect Andrew Cuomo actually does not want a Democratic majority in the State Senate because a Republican majority gives him more of an opportunity to burnish his bipartisan compromiser bona fides before launching his presidential campaign. And much, much, much more insidiously, we suspect he doesn’t want a Democratic majority because said majority stands ready to pass a whole raft of incredibly important, ground-breaking progressive legislation, including public financing for elections, marijuana decriminalization and a minimum wage hike, among others. The governor says he favors all those policies, but in this case, he sure is not acting like it. We’re almost entirely sure that very soon Andrew Cuomo will be coming before many of the people watching this show, asking for your support in a Democratic primary race to be the next president. You should remember this remarkably cynical display when he does.”

Now that's pretty damn hardcore for Chris Hayes, practically displaying bloody brass knuckles and a promise to get them even messier.  But he's absolutely right.  If New York state got serious about progressive legislation, particularly monitoring Wall Street, it would be a massive victory for liberalism as a whole int he United States.  Let's not forget, Cuomo as the state's Attorney General ran on a platform of doing just that.  When he was easily elected two years ago, he promised to get tough on Wall Street.  What happened was Cuomo finding himself saying "Oh well, sorry guys, Republicans are stopping me from getting this legislation" and then helicoptering off to the Hamptons.

Cuomo basically didn't lift a finger to help NY Senate Dems regain control of the state's upper chamber, because then he'd have to be the bad guy.  Chris Hayes has him pegged 100%.

So no, Andrew Cuomo is by no means a good guy.  Should he take a crack at 2016, he needs to be sent home unless he comes around.