Since I couldn't put it better myself, I thought I'd use Clive Crook's logic (yes, a financial reporter who's name's Crook ... who says there's no irony left?):
"Suppose Goldman Sachs were to comply with the Volcker rule by relinquishing its bank status (which it adopted after the crisis was upon us, with the authorities' blessing, to avail itself of the full range of assistance). When the next crisis comes round, would the Treasury be able to let Goldman fail? The Lehman experience answers the question. Lehman was not a commercial bank. If Goldman, having reverted to non-"bank" status, could not be allowed to fail, what would the Volcker rule have achieved?"
Precisely. Even as President Obama mouthed the terms of the so-called "Volcker Rule", the obvious uselessness of it, to anyone who followed the shenanigans at Treasury and the Fed during the denouement of Le Debacle could clearly see, it was nothing, did nothing, changed .... absolutely ... Nothing. As stated in the preceding paragraph, Goldman Sacks America was already a non-bank, they changed its status specifically so that they could inject taxpayer funds and put the American taxpayer and the US's Sovereign credit-rating at risk and then to underwrite the outsize bonuses and salaries that the executives at Goldman's had, yes, literally Sacked, leaving the Company without the necessary capital base to adequately cover their insatiable greed-driven speculative bets.
And now with a nod and a wink, the President stands in front of the country and purports to indemnify the system against a recurrence of the crisis by doing no more than putting us back to the situation where these sharks can again run free to maul and savage the financial system for their own aggrandizement while simultaneously debauching the very system on which their feeding frenzy depends. This is the height of cynicism, as it depends, not only on the government simply pretending it's doing something, but on the reliance on an utterly stupid electorate.
It does for the financial "industry" what stumblebum Benron Bernanke's doing over at the Fed for the housing industry: propping up a failed Ponzi scheme to re-energize profits so as to enhance federal revenues (all those bonuses are most assuredly NOT tax-deductible).
In Charles Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit", when called upon to paint the American Eagle and asked how he would do so, responds, "I should draw it like a bat for its short-sightedness, like a bantam for its bragging, like a magpie for its honesty, like a peacock for its vanity, like an ostrich for its putting its head in the mud and thinking nobody sees it....
....and like a phoenix for its power of springing from the ashes of its faults and vices and soaring up anew into the sky!"
But right now our Phoenix is teetering on the brink of insolvency, like so many other municipalities and States in the country, who also depended on constantly growing tax revenues from property owners who overpaid for houses they were assured would keep going up in price. Government on every level, as well as businesses, shamelessly betrayed the American people in order to pad their own pockets. This is the paradigm which Obama's desperately trying to resusitate. The only place tieing us to Volcker's Vagon will get us is Barrack to the Future.
Showing posts with label Goldman Sacks America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Goldman Sacks America. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Mr. Obama ....Tear Down this Wall St!
After seeing "Some Assembly Required"'s (http://ckm3.blogspot.com/) question asking, "Where did the money actually come from, if not from some poor guy on a production line, oil rig, drag line or tractor?", it was a plus to see Paul Krugman write at the end of his last op-ed piece: "Neither the administration, nor our political system in general, is ready to face up to the fact that we’ve become a society in which the big bucks go to bad actors, a society that lavishly rewards those who make us poorer."
Could it be that people are finally beginning to understand the scope of the betrayal and theft that's been perpetrated on us by a renegade, smug oligarchy of criminals with access to the highest echelons of the Federal government? Having read Joe Nocera's Sunday NYT column in which he cringingly grovels at the feet of high finance for having "saved us" from financial collapse, a collapse that they engineered, profited from, and the rubble of which they are unapologetically using to set the stage for the next debacle, siphoning yet another generation's savings into their bank accounts (hidden and stashed away in off-shore accounts), it seemed as though the nation had simply accepted their new state of utter impoverishment and conceded to banksters their freedom to confiscate every nickel the working class has ever saved, and call it "Earnings".
But in an economy, a nation, where ANYone gets paid less than 12 grand a year and the President of the country gets paid less than half a mill, the very idea that these charlatans who actually despise anything approaching real labor, have their billions of dollars of booty, gleaned from looting the economy, referred to as "earnings", there is something rotten to the very core.
And the rot has corroded the very foundation of the economy to such an extent that it gives the lie to any V, W, U, L, or sigmoid shape they wish to call this recession, and reveals it as the depression-sized event it truly is. But not for them....Goldman Sacks America precisely because they consider themselves above the State. The government is only there to serve their needs and keep the citizenry in line. As the Reagan government used the Church of Islam to further its Realpolitikal agenda in the Middle East and fight its fight against the godless commies, and then discarded them like a used tissue when they were no longer needed, so Goldman Sacks America has segued Capitalism to Capitolism, using jingoistic cries for "Freedom" whilst enslaving the polity in inescapable, unpayable debt, with the government as its armed deputized lackey.
But the "resilience" of an economy in which the output of more than 300 million souls is siphoned into the pockets of a few score of depraved megalomaniacs, each vieing for the position of Master of the Universe, was only as elastic as the wealth it had accumulated. Once that had been plundered, from pension plans (well, what they thought were their pensions) and used to build an entire economy of peasant workers a continent away, completely terrorized by their own government, where it was free to foul the air and poison the rivers, Capitolism needed a source of suckers to buy the goods the newly "productive" slave labor was churning out ... and Washington was happy to oblige.
As Benron Bernanke was so kind to explain last week, the Fed is free from the influence of Congress or the wishes of the majority, but, as befits a Capitolist economy, it is not free from Executive pressure or Wall St. machinations. Thus we had a Fed Chairman, Greedspan, cheerleading the extraction of equity built up over a lifetime in people's houses, and being "monetized" for the enrichment of his cohorts on the street while he kept interest rates at such a low level that this newly available cash was called "free money". Thus did Capitolism deliver to the free-for-all market the proceeds from the sweat of the brow "from some poor guy on a production line, oil rig, drag line or tractor", i.e., from the productive economy, into the pick-pockets of the band of ransacking, charlatans of the unproductive, government-supported, smarmy, human debris that make up stoneWall St.
....Mr. Obama.....tear down this Wall St.
Could it be that people are finally beginning to understand the scope of the betrayal and theft that's been perpetrated on us by a renegade, smug oligarchy of criminals with access to the highest echelons of the Federal government? Having read Joe Nocera's Sunday NYT column in which he cringingly grovels at the feet of high finance for having "saved us" from financial collapse, a collapse that they engineered, profited from, and the rubble of which they are unapologetically using to set the stage for the next debacle, siphoning yet another generation's savings into their bank accounts (hidden and stashed away in off-shore accounts), it seemed as though the nation had simply accepted their new state of utter impoverishment and conceded to banksters their freedom to confiscate every nickel the working class has ever saved, and call it "Earnings".
But in an economy, a nation, where ANYone gets paid less than 12 grand a year and the President of the country gets paid less than half a mill, the very idea that these charlatans who actually despise anything approaching real labor, have their billions of dollars of booty, gleaned from looting the economy, referred to as "earnings", there is something rotten to the very core.
And the rot has corroded the very foundation of the economy to such an extent that it gives the lie to any V, W, U, L, or sigmoid shape they wish to call this recession, and reveals it as the depression-sized event it truly is. But not for them....Goldman Sacks America precisely because they consider themselves above the State. The government is only there to serve their needs and keep the citizenry in line. As the Reagan government used the Church of Islam to further its Realpolitikal agenda in the Middle East and fight its fight against the godless commies, and then discarded them like a used tissue when they were no longer needed, so Goldman Sacks America has segued Capitalism to Capitolism, using jingoistic cries for "Freedom" whilst enslaving the polity in inescapable, unpayable debt, with the government as its armed deputized lackey.
But the "resilience" of an economy in which the output of more than 300 million souls is siphoned into the pockets of a few score of depraved megalomaniacs, each vieing for the position of Master of the Universe, was only as elastic as the wealth it had accumulated. Once that had been plundered, from pension plans (well, what they thought were their pensions) and used to build an entire economy of peasant workers a continent away, completely terrorized by their own government, where it was free to foul the air and poison the rivers, Capitolism needed a source of suckers to buy the goods the newly "productive" slave labor was churning out ... and Washington was happy to oblige.
As Benron Bernanke was so kind to explain last week, the Fed is free from the influence of Congress or the wishes of the majority, but, as befits a Capitolist economy, it is not free from Executive pressure or Wall St. machinations. Thus we had a Fed Chairman, Greedspan, cheerleading the extraction of equity built up over a lifetime in people's houses, and being "monetized" for the enrichment of his cohorts on the street while he kept interest rates at such a low level that this newly available cash was called "free money". Thus did Capitolism deliver to the free-for-all market the proceeds from the sweat of the brow "from some poor guy on a production line, oil rig, drag line or tractor", i.e., from the productive economy, into the pick-pockets of the band of ransacking, charlatans of the unproductive, government-supported, smarmy, human debris that make up stoneWall St.
....Mr. Obama.....tear down this Wall St.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Someone Needs to Clean Big Ben's Clock.
Per today's Washington Post article, BernBanke argued before the House Financial Services Committee that the Fed's actions helped prevent a global economic calamity, and he promised an exit strategy to head off fears of inflation. Somehow he forgot to mention that it was the Fed's (specifically Bernanke's) "fears of inflation" that ratcheted up interest rates to a level that brought on the biggest depression in the world in the first place. Quarter after quarter, in baby steps, to give the market time to unwind their over-leveraged positions and enhance the profitability of the crash, the Bernanke Fed, in order to fight off the specter of inflation, made inevitable by the Greenspan put, and put a little bit of teeth into the Bush Treasury's "strong dollar" stance, while US exports continued to dwindle and banks continued to swindle, brought the financial system to its knees.
The BernBanke pincer play was to trap the ARMageddon buyers of low-cost ninja loans into extortionate, hi-interest home payments, using the same strategy so successfully used on the current generation of college loan recipients, car buyers, and credit card users: trap 'em and sap 'em. One problem with this strategy was, of course, that the States have their own laws, one of which is the non-recourse nature of home loans in most states (something many home buyers themselves were unaware of).
So as the market for new loans got saturated and the profit-outlook of the ilks of Goldman Sacks America started to dwindle, the interest payments from all those it had suckered into loans that they would never, ever, be able to pay off would increase, offsetting the decline in those hefty securitisation fees from a declining new loan volume.
The fly in the ointment of this plan, was (is) of course, inflation. And since the Fed has long since stopped putting even a pretense of functioning for the overall economy, and operates under the sole mandate of providing profitability without risk to the entire banking sector while shifting the risk onto the backs of the rest of us, inflation was the only thing the BernBanke Fed concerned itself with, the rest of the economy could follow the "Free Market" mantra and fall right into the toilet: that's for the politicos to hash out. BernBanke's only job was to provide a smooth road for easy profits for all his friends and supporters who got him the job in the first place. In that respect, nothing has changed, and nothing will.
So, far from "the Fed's actions helped prevent a global economic calamity", the Fed's actions are precisely what caused the global economic meltdown. But, like the journalist who sat close-lipped while Cheney's daughter defended her father's legacy of "Keeping this country free from attack for 8 years", rewriting history in a single phrase, that just happened to be a blatant, ridiculous lie, we sit transfixed while this leftover from the most criminal administration in US history does the same. Big Ben's time is up. Like Condoleeza Rice, stating that "We never discussed planes flying into buildings", even though terrorists had already attacked the WTC with car bombs and there was a movie out in which the very scenario of a plane being commandeered to fly into the White House had played in movie theaters across America, Benron can whine that he never saw the largest financial collapse EVER coming, despite his $200,000.00 paycheck to do precisely that, and still expect to keep his job. Meanwhile, because of his complicity millions of people who were doing their jobs perfectly well will never have another one.
But Big Ben's got one of them thar big gub'ment jobs. He'll never have to worry about accountability; that's just for us private economy stooges. We who don't understand the complex world of high finance. Not that he does either, by his own admission, but it's only in the private sector that competence is monitored, measured, reviewed and employees are constantly threatened, cajoled, and peremptorily dismissed for the slightest misstep. Nope. He's got one of those public sector jobs that's paid for by the very private sector all those public sector employees disdain, because we have to actually (ooowww, gross) produce something. So Benron BernBanke can relax: he's safe. But as long as he is safe, the rest of us are in ever-growing peril: Someone Needs to Clean Big Ben's Clock.
The BernBanke pincer play was to trap the ARMageddon buyers of low-cost ninja loans into extortionate, hi-interest home payments, using the same strategy so successfully used on the current generation of college loan recipients, car buyers, and credit card users: trap 'em and sap 'em. One problem with this strategy was, of course, that the States have their own laws, one of which is the non-recourse nature of home loans in most states (something many home buyers themselves were unaware of).
So as the market for new loans got saturated and the profit-outlook of the ilks of Goldman Sacks America started to dwindle, the interest payments from all those it had suckered into loans that they would never, ever, be able to pay off would increase, offsetting the decline in those hefty securitisation fees from a declining new loan volume.
The fly in the ointment of this plan, was (is) of course, inflation. And since the Fed has long since stopped putting even a pretense of functioning for the overall economy, and operates under the sole mandate of providing profitability without risk to the entire banking sector while shifting the risk onto the backs of the rest of us, inflation was the only thing the BernBanke Fed concerned itself with, the rest of the economy could follow the "Free Market" mantra and fall right into the toilet: that's for the politicos to hash out. BernBanke's only job was to provide a smooth road for easy profits for all his friends and supporters who got him the job in the first place. In that respect, nothing has changed, and nothing will.
So, far from "the Fed's actions helped prevent a global economic calamity", the Fed's actions are precisely what caused the global economic meltdown. But, like the journalist who sat close-lipped while Cheney's daughter defended her father's legacy of "Keeping this country free from attack for 8 years", rewriting history in a single phrase, that just happened to be a blatant, ridiculous lie, we sit transfixed while this leftover from the most criminal administration in US history does the same. Big Ben's time is up. Like Condoleeza Rice, stating that "We never discussed planes flying into buildings", even though terrorists had already attacked the WTC with car bombs and there was a movie out in which the very scenario of a plane being commandeered to fly into the White House had played in movie theaters across America, Benron can whine that he never saw the largest financial collapse EVER coming, despite his $200,000.00 paycheck to do precisely that, and still expect to keep his job. Meanwhile, because of his complicity millions of people who were doing their jobs perfectly well will never have another one.
But Big Ben's got one of them thar big gub'ment jobs. He'll never have to worry about accountability; that's just for us private economy stooges. We who don't understand the complex world of high finance. Not that he does either, by his own admission, but it's only in the private sector that competence is monitored, measured, reviewed and employees are constantly threatened, cajoled, and peremptorily dismissed for the slightest misstep. Nope. He's got one of those public sector jobs that's paid for by the very private sector all those public sector employees disdain, because we have to actually (ooowww, gross) produce something. So Benron BernBanke can relax: he's safe. But as long as he is safe, the rest of us are in ever-growing peril: Someone Needs to Clean Big Ben's Clock.
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