When GS Sneezes every GSE Eases: The Fed’s Enterprise-free Free Enterprise.

The repricing of assets that the Coronavirus is resulting in is the first shot in a continued volley of the private sector's pirating of the Public sphere.

While castigating  government to "Get government out of The WAY" the private sector has been on FIRE (Finance Insurance Real Estate), inflamed by an infusion of GSE-enabled (That "G" stand for Government. Easy to understand why you would lose sight of that fact, though, considering that any Government sponsored entity is most decidedly not enterprising) financial debauchery of the economy that has redistributed wealth at an unprecedented rate into the control of fewer and fewer hands (enabled by the Pentagon-developed, ie labor-funded, technologies of computers and the internet) with nothing but a rare voice of dissent ever raised about the rank hypocrisy and utter sense of despoiliation condoned by the US elites. Although you never see it nowadays, in the eighties there were quite a few writers who questioned the wisdom of using the savings of US labor to move American jobs overseas (a process in which the newly-released Capital Crime-Queen, Milken, was King). Financiers nowadays object to the very idea that Capital is the product of Labor, since the capital they used is a gift bestowed on them by the Capitol, so, with more than $4.5trillion of unmarketable liabilities sitting on their books,  21'st Century Capital exists mainly as a product of the Fed's magic Wand:

"We make money the new-fangled way: We suborn it."

As the virus sets aFIRE a blaze fed by commercial paper that’s been supported by GSE's for this entire century, never more blatantly and outrageously as now, when every person in the US has been forced to underwrite the risk of REIT's, for example: Renters paying higher taxes than their landlords courtesy of the GSE's of the Federal Government. Meanwhile Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the FHA gorge themselves on trillions and trillions of dollars of Risky paper. Banks lending at ridiculously low levels of interest that they would never in a million years have taken on such high liability, so they sloughed it off, at the behest of the Central Bank, in ever increasing amounts, onto the public sector while writing dividend checks to their investors for the rise in revenue the ginormous profits gleaned from extending loans for property that's been overvalued to nosebleed levels. Levels that have resulted in the most frequent buyers being corporations that suck up the all-but-interest-free loans, then, renting them out to the very people who are actually bearing the onus of Risk for those loans, in the forms of government purchases of all but a mere 3% of all real estate loans in America; and the last indignity of all, paying a tax rate of half that of their tenants who pay on income derived from actual labor, scant as that income may y be: labor pays a full third of their income to taxes, while dividend and interest income is taxed at ~15%, despite the fact that it was/is the government,  which means the public, that somehow non-existent society, not the "investor" THAT TOOK ALL THE RISK ON THE INSTRUMENTS THEY PURCHASED.
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That is the reason that Republicans are so set on maintaining the facade, "That this will never be a Socialist Country", Central rule suits their pocketbooks so much better.

Hence State-sponsored "Enterprises" assume all the risk of every bank in the country and then having the audacity to call it Free-Enterprise, while laughing right in our collective face, as GSE's create the worst of two worlds:

Unlike in a State Enterprise, where the State has responsibility, or in an actual Free Enterprise system, the way they like to wish you to believe the economy works, in GSE's no one’s responsible, while the taxpayers are saddled with the costs and risks, even as those costs increase the price of having a simple roof over your head to such an extent that a dwindling percentage of people in an economy boasting a GDP in excess of $20 Trillion can afford a place to live, while the FIRE industry pays the (it would be called bribes in any other country) people's representatives to maintain interest rates at next to nothing,  allowing the price to rise, with the renters paying even the low interest since they pay taxes that go up because the Owners of the building they live in can deduct those interest expenses from their own income taxes, shuffling that liability right onto their tenants.

Thus must the Socialist nature of the American economy be denied by a Populist president as he presides over the largest transfer of Labor's earnings to these bastions of Socialism. GSE's are merely a vehicle to disguise the unparalled propping up of every failing sector in the American economy:

The failing Airline industry
The failing Fossil Fuel industries (Trillions poured into ground: The SPR is a boondoggle to rape the taxpayer so as to pay dividend to shareholders in fossil fuel behemoths who can ignore risk because the fracturing industry can lose me than 189billion dollars over a decade, yet continue to pump and dump into the SPR
The failing housing sector (No GSE's, No housing ssector)
The Failing Automotive Industry (Nothing says oversold markets as well as 7-year, 0% loans)
The failing manufacturing sector,
The failing agricultural industry (Billions upon billions in never-ending subsidies without which there is no farming sector)

All of these are to all intents and purposes GSE's:

 No government: no Enterprise.

The virus has merely made manifest what was already true: as Obama said, ”We paid for that bridge”, WE funded that Airport, We were taxed, but never asked, to pay for those now-empty, failing sports arenas, GPS satellites, internet, Interstate Highway system.

None of these Corporate concerns, like the tourist traps of Europe, would be able to exist without the flood of money pouring in from outside their purview. By floating loans to emerging markets, loans that must be paid back in dollars, while simultaneously undermining those economies via "America First", tariff Wars and "Free" Trade agreements, which much like your credit card agreements, are honored until the big bully US decides to abrogate them,  with much the same logic the credit card issuers use to inform you that without reason, warning or morality, they can raise the rate of interest charged for what you have already bought anytime by any amount they deem necessary.

One headline today that seems especially distorted screams that "Saudi Arabia plans to flood the market by increasing its crude oil production from below 10 million bpd currently to 12.3 mil bpd" (Note that they call it "crude oil", we can make no such claim about the product produced by the US shale industry). The disastrous USA strategy of "America First", means that in times of crisis, unlike after 9/11, it has left itself bereft of allies in any real sense. Having informed the world that we intend to rip off as many of their assets as we can for as little as possible, threatening them with drone assassinations, fire bombings, pre-emptive wars, proxy wars, illegal tariffs, illegal torture, illegal sanctions, illegal renditions, unilateral abrogations of any treaty we have decided has become inconvenient, and nuclear "strategic" bombing or threats thereof, any goodwill built up between us and other countries of the world, not being able to put a monetary value on it, is now considered worthless and consequently ridiculed, along with well, pretty much anyone resisting these atavistic impulses. We have thus reduced our coinage to filthy lucre, having convinced ourselves that nothing else matters. To care what the ramifications our actions have on other nations is now considered to be just this side of treason. They are therefore hardly likely to offer any aid to such an entity, all the more so should some other, more trustworthy, country have a similar need.

All while we have, for decades now, based our entire geopolitical strategy and economy on precisely what the Saudi’s are being ballyhooed for doing:

"Flooding the market by increasing USA (crude) oil production from below 10 million bpd currently to over 12.3 mil bpd".

With no end in sight.

 Somehow the article failed to mention that that's almost the exact amount of bpd's the USA has dumped on the oil market since President Plump took office, ratcheting up production in an oil-saturated world by increasing the oil rig count exponentially. Despite US oil being the costliest to produce with the exception of the Canadian tar sands. All the while flaring such an egregious amount of  natural gas in the process that it could supply the electrical demand for a non-existent second nation (albeit smaller than the USA, at the same time, it would be far larger than our largest State).

Meaning that in the course of a few scant years, it is as though a fully-formed modern nation has risen from the Sea and immediately started contributing to the already burgeoning amounts of CO2 being vented into the atmosphere, in like amounts as a major industrial State. And with the added bonus that despite that enormous surge in CO2 production, not a single hungry mouth will be fed, not a single person clothed, nor was a single house built, nor extra mile driven by that ballooning of additional CO2 and its attendant amount of water vapor, (the 2'nd most potent GHG), and other associated gases, into the troposphere. All taking  place even as Exxon and other fossil fuel companies justify the continued mining and burning of  coal to market to undeveloped countries as being necessary so as to pull them out of poverty. Yet we flare, in our rush for a quick fix from our profits of doom, Profits which, because they go to a thin slice of the public, that slice that needs the money the least, gets put, regardless of risk, into the stock market, there being no alternative, thanks to the merry gandering of the Fed's punchbowl.

All that enterprise-free Free Enterprise has accelerated climate change unconscionably and left us poorer ... although that was the intention all along, it was us, the USA, not them, OPEC producers, it would, in little more than a decade, leave without energy-generating capacity (nothing is free, all money comes at a price. Yet this supposedly hyper-capitalist society insists on using that word ad nauseum). Now all that value that your children could have leveraged to fire electric power plants has gone up in acrid smoke. It's all been incinerated. For nothing. Yet without heating a single home, never firing a single kiln, nor electifying as much as a single microwave oven or server farm. Pffft! Who cares? As the stock market ascent that has been waved in the face of the world like a Red flag in the face of a bull market, that ascension has been buoyed by the DOE’s exultant release of “Freedom Molecules” into an atmosphere already besotted with them. Is it really so surprising that said market now tanks to below the value it boasted when the Trumpelstiltskin took office?

And now we are pulling all that oil our of the ground all over the country, flaring ever more copious quantities of valuable natural gas than ever, while the public pays an enormous price in energy, infrastructure, waste-heat and pollution, to truck it, rail it, pipe it, shale it, with no other intention than to pour it into another hole in the ground, in another part of the country, right in to the SPR. A hole in the ground that in the future we will need, should we ever care to use it, to truck it, rail it, pipe it, bail it, to whatever location there's demand for it.

 And yet the headline screams:

Saudi Arabia plans to flood the market by increasing its crude oil production from below 10 million bpd currently to 12.3 mil bpd!??!?

Hah! Liar!

The USA has based the expansion of its Fraud-riddled economy (remember, similar to 9/11, after the financial crisis that brought on a global depression, caused by the USA shuffling their toxic waste to the rest of the globe, the USA never bothered to fire anybody, or even chastise anyone, much less change the way in which they do business. A depression which btw, the Capitalist world relied heavily on Communist China to pull it out of). And, despite the Herculean efforts of Elizabeth Warren, still nothing has basically changed. Ever since the so-called Reagan-Revolution ripped those solar panels right off the White House roof, the US has had no other response to the myriad crises around the globe that it’s criminal behavior has spawned other than to double down, to ignore risk even more assiduously, lavish ever-increasing amounts of its precious treasure on its failing military, and rig the international system even into a more rickety mousetrap. One  sclerotic with corruption and creaking from papered-over weaknesses from the shuffling of the burden of Risk onto the public using ever-increasing levels of Black Pools, shadowy banking, opaque derivatives, insider trading scams, IPO’d confidence schemes and pump 'n dump stock offerings. An enticing smorgasbord of 3-card Monte games to play tricks with.

There's now more Risk, unknowingly borne by those who can least afford it, than there was before the financial crisis, or should I say before the 2008 financial crisis, since, with Trumpelstiltskin's declaration that, "This is not a financial crisis", it's eminently clear that this is going to be worse than the 2008 financial crisis. Because before that crisis, brought on, not surprisingly by the GW administration whose policies Trumpelstiltskin has used as a template for his own, the banks had drank a good portion of their own Kool -Aid. This time, in order to assume all that Corporate risk in your name, the GSE we call the Fed has lavished the bankers with free cash, bankers who are now little more than paper shufflers: To paraphrase Absolutely Fabulous' Edina Monsoon, "You can drop the attitude, you only work as a sop".

Now on a point unrelated to GSE'd Greed.

As the vitriol toward CHIna gets ramped up to slough the blame from those more deserving of our derision, it would be well to remember that it wasn't just Larry Summers, or that so-called Conscience of a Liberal ensconced at the NYT, Paula Krugman, who thought that the citizens of the USA shouldn't have to chew on the air-borne effluence created by the industrial processes that were creating the cornucopia of goodies to supply The Affluent Society (That was when we still hadn't destroyed the concept of public goods, so could still use the word "Society". A word which , together with the phrase, "We're all in this together", I've heard more in the last ten days than in the last ten years).

The argument used to justify the job losses and the destruction of the middle-class that such a major investment of workers' savings along with the largest technology transfer in the history of the world, (technology also paid for by the R&D conducted by the DOD ... ie tax dollars from US labor) dollars that they were Milken from labor so as to invest, not on the US workers that had made them their fortunes, but to take those dollars OUT of the Capitalist USA and Invest them in the Workers State of Communist China, a nation that was in the grip of a Communist totalitarian regime at at time when those same American workers were uncomplainingly relinquishing a large part of their paychecks in order to create a torrent of dollars that flowed to the Pentagon so as to "fight Communism".

All while claiming that Capitalism is King.

Not a trumpet sounded the weakest of toots to ask why is it  the Capitalist system would crack like fracked shale without Chinese markets? The reason that was given was that the HEATHCARE system in the USA was so onerously expensive that, as the workers aged, they would demand more and more services from it as a result of decades of breathing in the toxic soup produced by the untrammeled production of consumer goods (the US was on the wrong side of peak oil by then, yet needed to continue to pay for growing quantities of imported oil to incinerate: a full fifth of total world combustion which, having moved most manufacturing production offshore, you would have thought would have alleviated that ... it didn't, thanks to the information Superhighway and SUV's, which eventually would suck up just as much fossil fuel, and spit out just as much CO2, as the relocated industries previously had).

The upshot of which is that it is precisely for what China is now being accused of, not having an adequate Healthcare system, that was the reason that US Multinational firms moved all those toxic industries there in the first  place: to deliberately poison their citizens to produce manufactures to satisfy American demand, but in a country where they’d not need to worry about the poisoning of those workers and the inflated healthcare costs associated with hat chronic, deliberate undermining of the health of an entire country. That's why they moved them to a Communist country, no modern Democratically elected leader could sell such a cynical bargain to its educated polity. Or was it that hippie rostrum to, "Work for the collapse of the system from within", by creating an aged population that would succumb to the toxicity of their toxic Cities as soon as an influenza potent enough raised its ugly corona.

The idea was inspired by England, (that Monarchy in the garb of a Democracy, its Parliament/PM lacking legitimacy unless/until the Queen gives them her divine Royal blessing). After the 1952 cloud of death that descended onto London,  4,000 people died as a direct result of the smog and 100,000 more were made ill by the smog's effects on the human respiratory tract. Most of the victims were either very young or elderly, or had pre-existing respiratory problems (sound familiar). More recent research suggests that the total number of fatalities may have been considerably greater, one paper suggesting about 6,000 more died in the following months as a result of the toxic air created by the combustion of tons of coal.

Sensitivity analysis reveals that only an extremely severe influenza epidemic could account for the majority of the excess deaths for this time period. Such an epidemic would be on the order of twice the case-fatality rate and quadruple the incidence (Similar to the numbers in China) observed in a general medical practice during the winter of 1953:

"These results underscore the need for diligence regarding extremely high air pollution."

Hence our plan to re-source all the nation's heaviest polluting industries to a Communist country: it was to fight Communism by using the leaders of the Communist  Party (who had no compunction about admitting it was to make them rich) to use chemical poisoning that would be capable of producing mass destruction events on their own population.  

No matter from who what where or how this virus sprang, the evidence from 1952 suggests that both the virility at its outbreak, and its suddenness of cessation, have at least as much to do with the ready availability of breathable air that resulted from the cessation of industrial activity and the slowdown in the combustion of COAL, (the same culprit as in the 1952 London massive death toll: More people than died in the bombing of New York City's World Trade Center), as with the quarantining of the millions of people in their homes. (to add fuel to the fire, or carcinogenic particle to their lungs, the US cigarette companies (also GSE’s) then started to move their advertising and sales campaigns to the REd Menace across the ocean. They were simultaneously receiving subsidies from that Free Enterprise Champion, the US Federal government, now armed with the irrefutable knowledge that smoking tobacco products endangers not only the smokers themselves, but the people around them. 

These facts are all well-know, and they were all well known in the eighties when the USA was on a rabid anti-Communist roll. While the Bush/Reagan junta raised the taxes on all Americans by doubling both the Federal deficit and the National Debt, knowing full well, per advise from Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman, that they would be long gone (well, they thought they would be, Bush Sr. got his comeuppance), theysuggested the same mindset to the Communist Party leadership in Beijing, wherein they would be made rich by industrialization, all while looking as though they were doing it for the people ... those same people that would have their miserable lives miserably shortened by chronic inhalation of known carcinogens and respiratory tract irritants. But, hey! Their lives would be improved until then, right? And by then we'll be out of power. A devil's bargain indeed. 

So now it's a Chinese virus? Because it comes from CHInuh, you say? That same China we set up to be in this exact situation, eerily echoing what happened in London in 1952? With the People's De-public'd made vulnerable to a ... let's see, how did they put it? ...  an extremely severe influenza epidemic.

And you then have the shameless heartlessness to blame the Chinese people for our own lack of preparedness when they sounded the alarm, LOUDLY, months ago? An alarm we chose to not only ignore, but, using Davos as a platform, assured the world that there was no problem, nothing to see here folks.

That's not just gall, that's Evil incarnate.

While back in the USSA , health insurance is only available to those who have jobs: and come the end of this month, millions and millions less of those people will have jobs, so that there will be that many more people without health insurance ... yet all of whom would still have health insurance if the first priority of our then-newly-inaugurated Furor hadn't to make sure that they wouldn't have health insurance in exactly this scenario. (Think about that. Then do you see how easy it is to believe that the increase in Chinese mortality from toxic fumes was an integral part of the America’s War on Communism? How else can one reconcile  the rabid-anti-Communism of the Reagan/Bush years, years spent fulminating against Communism and years spent funding and arming the mujahadeen's War against godless Communism? What other reason could they have had for investing billions upon billions of dollars garnished from the savings of US Labor to enable the rise to Power of THE major Communist State and the deliberate ballooning of that Communist nation's GDP by gutting our own, throwing millions of workers onto the street?) Also, Read that Larry Summers' memo he wrote while at the World Bank: The Economic argument for making their citizens sick to satisfy the consumer demand of your own is unassailable, he said.

Thus was the Economic War-mart created.

And now, because there are millions and millions less paying into it now, Health Insurance costs of those still employed are set to increase dramatically. That's how insurance works. So that first priority of the Trump administration, to push millions off the insurance rolls by gutting the ACA, and calling it an "Accomplishment", will likely result in raising the health insurance costs of all those well-heeled employees who whined about how expensive Obamacare was. Well, they may be about to find out just how expensive health insurance can get. Yet you can bet they'll be screaming for Federal assistance as soon as those rising prices (disguised as paycuts, more 'n likely) pinch too hard. But don't feel too sorry for them, at least their insurance is subsidized by the Federal Government, as it's taken out of pre-tax earnings. If your job doesn't extend coverage to you,  resulting in your having to provide it yourself, you must pay, as gig workers are already well aware, for it with after-tax dollars, so it costs ~ 33% more than those employed in the Corporate sector ... and that's on top of the higher rates charged to those outside of Corporate tax plans.

No matter.
No job?
You don't matter.

Over and over, I heard from well-off  Democrats I was dumbfounded to find out had voted for Trumpelstiltkin, a bankrupt Wheel of misFortune they imagined could spin gold from straw dogs, told me they wanted "Change".

Well Baby, Change is just what you've now been handed. Just be sure to wash your hands after touching it.