The United States Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) is bailing out the billionaires again. This time the Fed is making certain that losses suffered by hedge funds are reversed. Hedge funds are not banks. They are private billionaire investment clubs which manage investments for clients and which cannot have more than 99 clients. This is why many hedge funds will not take on clients who are unwilling or unable to invest $10 million or more with them.
On March 16, 2020 the Wall Street Journal reported Hedge Funds Hit by Losses in “‘Basis Trade.’ A wide swath of hedge funds was hit by the recent unwinding of the so-called basis trade last week. The basis trade is a long-running investment that seeks to exploit pricing gaps between Treasury securities and futures.” This is a useless activity in which nothing is made, no services and no goods are produced.
The Journal went on, “The Federal Reserve rushed to repair disorderly trading conditions in the Treasury market last Thursday.” Translated, that means the Fed rushed in to make certain these billionaire investor Hedge Funds did not lose money. Not until 2008 did the Fed rush in to save billionaires from their stupid investment losses through banks and other forms of business, like hedge funds.
The Journal went on, “The Fed’s intervention Thursday and over the weekend ended up aiding Citadel and many (hedge) funds deploying the basis trade, said people familiar with the matter.” That means whatever the Fed did made certain rich folks did not lose money. Citadel manages about $30 billion for 99 or less clients.
Guess who works for Citadel. None other than Ben Bernanke, the former Chairman of the Fed, and the person who turned the Fed into a money laundering organization for billionaires back in 2008-09. The New York Times reported back in 2015, “For eight years, Ben S. Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman, was steward of the world’s largest economy. Now he has signed on to advise one of Wall Street’s biggest hedge funds. Mr. Bernanke will become a senior adviser to Citadel, the $25 billion hedge fund founded by the billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin. He will offer his analysis of global economic and financial issues to Citadel’s investment committees. He will also meet with Citadel’s investors around the globe. It is the latest and most prominent move by a Washington insider through the revolving door into the financial industry.”
“In an interview, Mr. Bernanke said he was sensitive to the public’s anxieties about the “revolving door” between Wall Street and Washington and chose to go to Citadel, in part, because it “is not regulated by the Federal Reserve and I won’t be doing lobbying of any sort.”
It is odd that this billionaire investor club and other hedge funds are getting bailed out by the Fed since the Fed does not regulate them. The Fed is simply printing up money by the billions and rescuing them and their clients from their losses. Why is the Federal Reserve ensuring that billionaire investor clubs do not lose money, and how does Bernanke’s employment depend on the Fed’s actions?
Hedge funds, like Citadel, do not make produce anything that you use, such as machines, food and water. They simply gamble with other people’s billions.
Why is it that when rich people make incredibly stupid investment decisions the government and or the Fed is always there to bail them out? The answer is we do not have a democracy. We have plutocracy in which the rich rule via both of their major political parties.
The billionaires reap the benefits of the financial markets when the markets are going up but do not have to share in the losses with the 99 percent when the markets are heading down.
Historically, the Fed was supposed to serve as a central bank by providing short term loans to banks when necessary and only if the needy banks had “good collateral.” Its job is also to keep inflation and unemployment low using interest rates, and buy U.S. debt when nobody else wants to buy them. That changed in 2008 when the bank under the direction of Ben Bernanke gave $26 trillion to twelve banks, four of them foreign. That is when the Fed became a money laundering criminal enterprise for the wealthy. For that report click The CoronaVirus Stimulus Bill: The Rich Get 5 Trillion, We Get Crumbs
The rich receive most of their income, from 2/3rds to 100 percent, via corporations, either through capital gains by the selling of shares or with dividends distributed to shareholders. So it should come as no surprise that the billionaires who control the Republican Party got what they wanted in the Federal stimulus bill while the billionaires who control the Democratic Party got theirs, as well. They got more than the bill itself.
The rich will receive $4.95 trillion from the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill. You read that right. The $2.2 trillion includes more than $450 billion for large corporations, allegedly in loans. The bill includes a proviso that the Federal Reserve can print up to ten times that amount and lend that $4.5 trillion with a nod and a wink to large corporations.
The combined profits of all US corporations in 2018 and 2019 were slightly over $4 trillion before taxes. The rich and their corporations, in other words, are getting more than two years’ worth of profits from the stimulus bill. This money will mainly go to the largest corporations, which means the money will go to a small number of corporations, pretty much the 100 to 150 largest. This means a massive stock market bubble is on the horizon fueled by the Fed, lies, political corruption, smoke and mirrors.
In effect, both the Democratic and the Republican members of the US congress decided to save their rich owners by giving them trillions of dollars, most of which will go to the top 1 percent. Then they throw crumbs to the rest of us and their corporate media dutifully failed to report this. Huffington Post and The American Prospect and a few others did report it.
Now, yes, some of you will say, but these are loans. The corporations need to pay the loans back. Wrong! In the future, Fed officials will tell you the loans have been repaid, or the loans were never made, but those will be lies, just like when Fed officials told us the $26 trillions it loaned out to twelve banks during the Great Recession was all paid back by 2011.
That $26 trillion bailout was top secret. Nobody was going to be told about it except the recipients, banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan/Chase. Then United States House members Ron Paul and Alan Grayson pushed through a bill authorizing the first and only audit of the Fed. The non-partisan General Accounting Office uncovered the $26 trillion bailout. Otherwise, we were never going to be told of it.
The entire U.S. banking industry in the four years from 2008 through 2011 earned $158 billion pre-tax dollars. The $158 billion represents less than 7/10ths of 1 percent of $26 trillion. Obviously, the banks could not have returned the money. It was mathematically impossible. Then Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke after the audit proceeded to lie when he claimed the money had been paid back, and this was mostly ignored by the corporate media.
So you know what’s going to happen. Major corporations will receive close to $5 trillion that they will never need to return, and will never pay taxes on since Fed officials will lie and either say, “They paid it back,” or “They never borrowed the money.” Don’t expect another audit for 100 years. (There has only been one audit of the Fed in its 100+ years of existence, and that is how the $26 trillion bailout was discovered. Click this link for that story.)
0.01 percent of the U.S. population will receive nearly $5 trillion. That money will be used for dividends, CEO compensation, share buybacks in the future (since they are limited with this bill), and just about anything the billionaires want. That’s why they pay the big bucks in the form of campaign contributions to politicians and spend billions of dollars on lobbyists.
In the meantime, a large portion of us 314,685,000 citizens will share $1.75 trillion (about $5500 each on average) to help keep the economy afloat while the roughly 300,000 richest of parasites share $5 trillion, which comes out to a little over $16.6 million each.
That should tell you how corrupt our democracy and both major political parties have become. You should also be aware that with the $26 trillion bank bailout the Fed went from being a central bank to a money-laundering machine for the banks and their rich shareholders. With the new bailout, the Fed has been given permission by the Federal government via both major political parties to be a money launderer for the rich and the rest of their money-making corporations. In other words, the Fed has been a criminal enterprise for the rich by violating U.S. money-laundering laws since 2008.
For more on this from the American Prospect, click the following link.
The United States Federal Reserve Bank issued a report in September 2017 showing that the top 1 percent of US income earners now own almost twice as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of Americans. Notice the corporate media did not cover this report. They did not want us to know this stuff.
Anyway, wealth is defined as assets, such as stocks, bonds, futures options, houses, cars, clothes, trinkets and such.
The graph above is straight from the Federal Reserve Bulletin. Notice the bottom 90 percent have seen their wealth drop from nearly 38 percent of the total wealth in 1989 to 23 percent today, a 40 percent drop. Meanwhile, the 1 percent has seen their wealth grow from just under 30 percent in 1989 to 38.6 percent today. The 1 percent also own more wealth than those people among the 90 to 99 percent, but just barely.
The reason the 1 percent has gained so much wealth while the 90 percent has lost it is that the rich are stealing it from everybody else via their corruption of both major political parties, and such corrupt politicians as Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, Paul Ryan, and Ron Wyden.
In the same report, Federal Reserve researchers discovered the rich stole a record-high 23.8% of the overall US created income in 2016 (See graph below), up from 8 percent in 1980. However, the current figure appears to be understated. At least one report shows the rich are stealing 37+ percent of the total income produced in the United States. The Fed’s report showed the bottom 90% of families now make less than half of the country’s income. That figure slipped to 49.7% in 2016, down by more than 20% since 1992 (It is likely the drop is greater according to another study).
The reason why the billionaires are getting wealthier and the rest of us are becoming poorer is because of such things as trade agreements via political corruption, privatization scams, tax cuts for the rich, unrestricted campaign finance donations, mandatory testing of public school students K-12, student loans, Federal Reserve and US government rescue of mortgage-backed bondholders by the tens of trillions of dollars (See The $26 Trillion Dollar Bailout to Save the 1 Percent, a totally corrupt corporate wing of the US Supreme Court (John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Anthony Kennedy), etc…. Corruption in US politics have not been this bad since the Gilded Age, and this is how the rich are getting richer by stealing from the rest of us.
Millions of US jobs have been exported since 1992, thanks to trade treaties negotiated to ensure US corporations can export jobs to low wage nations, as well as create jobs in these poverty-wage nations rather than here. The difference between the old higher US wages and the new lower extreme poverty wages in Mexico (where the minimum wage is $4.70 a day), China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and elsewhere goes straight into the already fat wallets of the well-to-do parasites of the millionaire and billionaire classes.
The job losers (the producers) might get unemployment insurance if they are lucky. The rich take their stolen loot and purchase wealth, such as stocks and bonds. The job losers often have to sell their assets to cover their expenses as they search for new jobs that typically pay less than what they once earned.
This is a nice income and wealth redistribution scam that every Democratic and Republican senator and member of the House of Representatives know very well. Every president since and including Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama have known this scam.
The billionaires continued their war against the 99 percent when the US Senate passed their tax cut for the rich and their corporations. And so the war continues against the 99.5 percent. This is class warfare at its most one-sided.
The Federal Reserve raised its key interest rate by 0.25% on Wednesday. The corporate news media, both liberal and conservative, claimed this signified the Fed’s confidence in the improving U.S. economy. There may be some truth to this, but maybe not.
Anybody with any knowledge of US business cycles can see our current business expansion is nearly over, which makes this a poor time to raise borrowing rates. See The Coming Recession Is Going to be a Big One–Johnhively.Wordpress.com. The current expansion is 91 months old this month, which makes it the fourth longest on record. In February 2017 it will become the third longest in US history. All the variables indicate we’ll be hitting a recession sometime before or by June 2017.
Maybe Fed officials decided to deflate the stock market and housing bubbles the US economy is in the thrall of. The US economy has been powered by a series of federally created or federally condoned bubbles since the 1980s, which is radically different from the US economy of 1933-1981. The US economy will be suffering from a massive hangover when this next recession hits, which is why it will in many ways be far worse than the last recession.
Rising rates will affect millions of Americans, including home buyers, savers and investors by increasing the cost of which they borrow. In other words, trillions of dollars are going to be redistributed from the 99 percent to rich bank shareholders and bondholders. It’ll cost you more to borrow, and the difference between the old rate and the new rate goes straight into the pockets of the rich.
Income and wealth have been massively redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent by a series of deliberate federal government actions over the last thirty-five years. This is why interest rates have been historically low over the last eight years, and had been getting progressively lower since 1981. The demand for goods and services by the 99 percent is largely dependent on the ability to borrow to a much greater extent than earlier decades.
This is also means the Fed will have to enact negative interest rates to help bolster the economy during the next recession, which is currently the case in Europe.
Change in the form of a shift of political power from the billionaires to the middle class will finally come because of this next recession as millions more people vote via their wallets and take to the streets.
Fed officials raised its target for short-term interest rates by 0.25 percentage points to a range of 0.50% and 0.75%.
The Federal Reserve Bank is expected to raise interest rates tomorrow. It will most likely be a mild increase of 1/4 to 1/2 percent.
The US and world economies are heading for a recession worse than the last one, and it should begin by June 2017, give or take a few months. Then President Donald Trump will get the blame, as well as the Republican US senate and the Republican US House of Representatives.
The Republicans will blame the Federal Reserve. Blame the recession and its dire impacts on the effects of Reaganomics, which has been a long-term policy of redistributing income from the 99 to the 1 percent (I doubt Reagan intended it that way). That decreased the demand for goods and services on the part of the 99 percent, and has led to a series of bubble economies for the United States since the 1980s.
The result has been the weakest economic growth in US history under President George W. Bush. The job gains under Bush numbered less than 1.4 million jobs total, with declining real wage growth. Things have been quite a bit better under President Obama. However, the job growth numbers under Obama are far worse than any other president since and including Jimmy Carter, with the exception, of course, of Bush.
Only two US business expansions have lasted longer than 100 months. The third longest expansion began under President Ronald Reagan and lasted 92 months. Including this month, the current expansion is 91 months. That means by next June it will have lasted 98 months. Given the weaknesses of the current US economy, we most likely won’t make it much longer than June.
The Federal Reserve will likely raise interest rates tomorrow and hasten the coming of the next recession by a month or two.
Comedian John Oliver mocked Jill Stein’s idea that the US Federal Reserve Bank could free student’s from student loan debt by buying up all the student loans and forgiving the debts.
In fact, the Federal Reserve could do exactly that. The Federal Reserve engaged in quantitative easing a few years ago. Quantitative easing was a Fed determined policy in which the Fed purchased trillions of dollars of completely valueless mortgage backed bonds (along with treasury bills) from rich folks at face value.
In other words, if the rich folks bought bonds valued at $100 which had since become valueless, then the Fed bought the bonds at $100. Nice scam huh? But only if you’re rich, and student borrowers are not, so don’t expect the Fed to do anything about their plight.
It’s true as Oliver pointed out, not even the US president can tell the Fed chief what to do. but the US president recommends and appoints the Federal Reserve chief, and negotiations between the two could convince the Fed to purchase all student loan debt, including the student loan backed bonds the rich folks enslave the borrowers with.
Let’s face it, the folks running the Federal Reserve can do anything they like because nobody is in position to hold them responsible for their actions (See video above). In that respect, the Fed is just like any Wall Street bank. So, during the economic meltdown of 2007-12, the Fed mysteriously lost $9 trillion (See The Fed Lost $9 Trillion! Not Likely! JohnHively.Wordpress.com), gave away $26 trillion to the rich folks (Breakdown of the $26 trillion Bailout-JohnHively.wordpress.com), and they created trillions of dollars out of air in order to buy worthless bonds from rich people; but the Fed cannot do the same with student loan borrowers? Nonsense!
We need a central bank of all the people, not just the rich ones, and this can be accomplished through legislation.
Here are the 10 major components to Sanders’ Wall Street reforms.
1. End Too-Big-to-Fail
The underlying logic of this federal policy is that the biggest banks cannot fail and shut down, even if they make terrible investments or wreak great harm to the economy, because the U.S. economy and millions of ordinary people would become financially destitute. Sanders said this “scheme … is nothing more than a free insurance policy for Wall Street.” Compared to before the crash of 2008, the biggest banks in the country are larger than ever, he said, adding, “if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.”
The truth is that the big banks are not too big to fail. When Lehman Brothers died, not one member of the 99.9 percent was impacted in the slightest. However, the super rich have a massive financial stake in the banks, and they would lose their shirts if the banks were allowed to fail. Using the “too big to fail” slogan means that the banks don’t need to be responsible for their bad decisions, and bad bets, and bad investments, and why should they? Especially when the banksters know the government or the Federal Reserve will bail them out instantly.
“In 2008, the taxpayers of this country bailed out Wall Street because we were told they were ‘too big to fail,’” Sanders said. “Yet, today, three out of the four largest financial institutions [JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo] are nearly 80 percent bigger than before we bailed them out. Incredibly, the six largest banks in this country issue more than two-thirds of all credit cards and more than 35 percent of all mortgages. They control more than 95 percent of all financial derivatives and hold more than 40 percent of all bank deposits. Their assets are equivalent to nearly 60 percent of our GDP. Enough is enough!”
Sanders concluded, “A handful of huge financial institutions simply have too much economic and political power over this country. If Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican trust-buster, were alive today, he would say, break ‘em up. And he would be right.”
2. The above is why we need to Break Up the Biggest Banks
If elected, Sanders said he would direct the Treasury Department to compile a list of the institutions “whose failure would pose a catastrophic risk to the U.S. economy without a taxpayer bailout.” Using the power of executive authority, he would break up these institutions. “Within one year, my administration will break these institutions up so that they no longer pose a grave threat to the economy as authorized under Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank Act.”
3. Pass a 21st-Century Glass-Steagall Act
This Depression-era law, which was repealed by Congress under President Bill Clinton, prevented commercial banks from investing in risky and arcane financial instruments, such as bundled home loans during the housing market bubble that predated the 2008 financial market collapse. Now investment and commercial banks are merged, and the government couldn’t bail out homeowners, such as FDR did. Had they done so, homeowners would have renegotiated lower home prices that reflected reality. But the Obama regime couldn’t do that because an 8 percent decline in home prices effectively rendered the tens of trillions of dollars in home mortgaged backed bonds valueless. Instead, the government bailed out the banks, and the Federal Reserve bailed out the banks. But they really weren’t bailing out the banks; they were bailing out rich investors.
“Secretary Clinton says that Glass-Steagall would not have prevented the financial crisis because shadow banks like AIG and Lehman Brothers, not big commercial banks, were the real culprits,” Sanders said. “Secretary Clinton is wrong. Shadow banks did gamble recklessly, but where did that money come from? It came from the federally insured bank deposits of big commercial banks—something that would have been banned under the Glass-Steagall Act.”
Moreover, Sanders said his work as a senator revealed that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department “provided more than $16 trillion in short-term, low-interest loans to every major financial institution in the country” to stop the global economy from imploding after the 2008 crash. “Secretary Clinton says we just need to impose a few more fees and regulations on the financial industry. I disagree.”
4. End Too-Big-to-Jail
Sanders said that the government needs to run Wall Street, not the other way around, which he said is the reality today. He said that “equal justice under the law” means that banking and finance executives whose reckless gambles damaged people’s lives must face real criminal penalties including prison.
“The average American sees kids being arrested and sometimes even jailed for possessing marijuana or other minor crimes,” Sanders said. “But when it comes to Wall Street executives, some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in this country, whose illegal behavior caused pain and suffering for millions—somehow, nothing happens to them. No police record. No jail time. No justice.”
He noted that “not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy” and that “will change under my administration.”
What Sanders doesn’t mention is that large banks also have been caught engaging in drug money laundering for the Mexican banks. The US government has fined the banks, but never indicted any bank officers, not even when the banks have been caught committing this crime time and again.
5. Criminalize Wall Street’s Business Model
One of Sanders’ most incisive comments concerned Wall Street’s ways of doing business, which he said are based on intentionally ripping off average Americans and engaging in all kinds of unethical and illegal behaviors. He said the government must do more to penalize companies that routinely rip off the public and richly reward the executives overseeing that process.
“The reality is that fraud is the business model on Wall Street,” Sanders said. “It is not the exception to the rule. It is the rule. And in a weak regulatory climate the likelihood is that Wall Street gets away with a lot more illegal behavior than we know of. How many times have we heard the myth that what Wall Street did may have been wrong but it wasn’t illegal? Let me help shatter that myth today.”
Sanders read from a dozen business page headlines to underscore that the banks most Americans use have been fined $204 billion since 2009 for malfeasance. “And that takes place in a weak regulatory climate,” he said. “And, when I say that the business model of Wall Street is fraud, that is not just Bernie Sanders talking. That is what financial executives told the University of Notre Dame in a study on the ethics of the financial services industry last year.”
Sanders said he would appoint regulators who are not afraid to tackle this caldron of corruption. “I will nominate and appoint people with a track record of standing up to power, rather than those who have made millions defending Wall Street CEOs. Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks will not be represented in my administration,” like they will be in a Clinton, Trump, or any other Republican administration.
6. Tax the Casino Culture
Sanders said one of the keys of reforming Wall Street was ending its culture of financial speculation. He said he would do that by imposing a transaction tax aimed at high-speed, high-volume traders who are not investing “in the job-creating economy.” Those funds would then be used for cutting the cost of higher education. This was something first proposed in The Rigged Game: Corporate America and a People Betrayed.
“We will use the revenue from this tax to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. During the financial crisis, the middle class of this country bailed out Wall Street. Now, it’s Wall Street’s turn to help the middle class.”
7. Reform the Financial Rating Agencies
Sander’s notes that the ratings agencies committed fraud when it came to rating mortgage backed bonds. If the investment banks didn’t like the ratings of the liar loans they were purchasing from, say, Country Wide, then they simply went to a different ratings agency. For the ratings agencies, it’s either fraud or bust. This must end.
8. Cap Credit Card Interest and ATM Fees
Sanders doesn’t mention that just as there are tens of trillions of dollars of mortgage backed bonds issued by Wall Street Investment firms, such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, the credit card debt backed bond market is a billion dollar industry. Capping interest rates charged by banks and credit card companies, and curtailing some of their fees, will bring the full might of an enraged banking/investing industry down around Sanders neck because what he proposes will undercut the value of credit card backed bonds, which is a trillion dollar plus industry. Sanders proposals might even send the value of the bonds to zero, which would be a good thing for the 99 percent, but a bad thing for the idle rich and their unearned income stolen from the 99 percent.
Sanders says banks and credit card companies must stop “from ripping off the American people by charging sky-high interest rates and outrageous fees. It is unacceptable that Americans are paying a $4 or $5 fee each time they go to the ATM. It is unacceptable that millions of Americans are paying credit card interest rates of 20 or 30 percent.”
Sanders wants interest rates “capped at no more than 15 percent for borrowed money. He also said ATM fees should be capped at $2. “People should not have to pay a 10 percent fee for withdrawing $40 of their own money out of an ATM. Big banks need to stop acting like loan sharks and start acting like responsible lenders.”
9. Let the USPS Offer Banking
The post office’s money order service could be greatly expanded “to give Americans affordable banking options,” Sanders said. “The reality is that, unbelievably, millions of low-income Americans live in communities where there are no normal banking services.”
“Today, if you live in a low-income community and you need to cash a check or get a loan to pay for a car repair or a medical emergency, where do you go?” he asked. “You go to a payday lender who could charge an interest rate of more than 300 percent and trap you into a vicious cycle of debt. That is unacceptable.”
10. Reform the Federal Reserve
Sanders said this arcame institution that regulates the flow of the U.S. currency and interest rates charges to banks must be reformed so that its primary purpose is serving the public, not private bankers. “When Wall Street was on the verge of collapse, the Federal Reserve acted with a fierce sense of urgency to save the financial system,” he said. “We need the Fed to act with the same boldness to combat unemployment and low wages.” What Sanders doesn’t mention is that the Federal Reserve is a private bank, and not a government agency. It’s primary goal is to ensure that the big banks are solvent and their profits and stock prices are rising, even at the expense of the American people.
“It is unacceptable that the Federal Reserve has been hijacked by the very bankers it is in charge of regulating,” Sanders said. “I think the American people would be shocked to learn that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, served on the board of the New York Fed at the same time that his bank received a $391 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve. That is a clear conflict of interest that I would ban as president. When I am elected, the foxes will no longer be guarding the henhouse at the Fed.”
As striking as Sanders’ reforms sound, he said they were unlikely to be sufficient to ensure that American capitalist excesses do not harm the country again.
“No president, not Bernie Sanders or anyone else, can effectively address the economic crises facing the working families of this country alone,” he said. “The truth is that Wall Street, corporate America, the corporate media and wealthy campaign donors are just too powerful.”
But Sanders said that new rules of the financial game could be written and that government could force Wall Street to follow them.
“Yes, we can make our economy work for all Americans,” he said. “And so my message to you today is straightforward: If elected president, I will rein in Wall Street so they can’t crash our economy again. Will they like me? No. Will they begin to play by the rules if I’m president? You better believe it.”
Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen announced Wednesday, December 16 that the Fed will raise short term interest rates by .25 percent. That means interest rates are going to rise for the 99 percent; from 15 to 17 percent on credit cards, for example. Home mortgage rates, car loans, home equity credit lines, and student loans, among other loans, are going to rise. Home mortgage loans will rise from about 3 percent to roughly 5 percent.
Yet there are no signs of an inflationary spiral, which would in theory spur the Fed into raising rates, which is one of its falsely stated goals. Then there’s high (but not too high) employment, another cherished and false goal of the Fed. For the last six years the US economy has been creating less jobs every year (and with declining wages) than occurred under that alleged dreadful president, Jimmy Carter, whose four years as president also included rising real wages. Carter did this with an economy and population about half of today’s economy.
Preliminary indications are that the US is headed toward a recession deeper and longer than the last one, and we should arrive there somewhere between seven and seventeen months from now. The Fed’s actions exacerbate these indications by redistributing income from the 99 to the 1 percent, curtailing demand, and hurting the economy, such as a US durable goods sector that is clearly in recession. So what gives? What is the Fed up to?
Despite false statements to the contrary, the Fed actually has pretty much followed only two goals throughout its history, and its latest move is a classic example of this. One goal is to protect the profits and share prices of the big banks, and number two is to protect wealthy investors from their own bad investment decisions. Everybody else is expendable when the Fed undertakes its responsibilities. In other words, the 99 percent is expendable, and often the victims, of the Fed’s actions on behalf of its unstated goals, which is to financially protect the rich.
And so in this most recent Fed action, the Fed is doing its first duty; increasing the earnings and share prices of the big banks at the expense of the 99 percent, which makes it seem, quite accurately, that the relationship between the Fed/Big Banks and the 99 percent is akin to parasites unto their hosts.
Your higher credit payments are going toward greater bank profits, which will provide rising dividends to rich shareholders. Share prices might and should rise, at least in the short term. This is pure income redistribution, and the corporate propaganda network wants you to believe the Fed’s increase in interest rates is to stabilize the economy, or limit non-existent inflationary pressures, or who knows what. But the last thing the corporate press wants you to know is that more of your income is being redistributed by the US Federal Reserve Bank to the rich via higher bank profits, rising shares, and soaring dividends. The rich are going to get richer, and you are going to be more poor.
The ten biggest US banks have many things in common, and one of them is declining share prices since last summer. Clearly, the Fed’s action is intended to reverse the decline.
The ten biggest US banks are:
1 JP Morgan Chase
2. Bank of America
3. Citigroup
4. Wells Fargo
5. US Bancorp
6. Bank of New York Mellon Corporation
7. PNC Bank
8. Capital One
9. HSBC North America Holdings
10. TD Bank US Holding Company
The governors of the Federal Reserve Bank voted to keep interest rates at historic lows in their September 17, 2015 meeting. The bank has not raised interest rates in nearly a decade. Lucky us, or maybe unlucky us.
Chairwoman Janet Yellen cited a number of reasons why the bank decided to keep rates low. She mentioned, for example, the weakness of manufacturing in China.
However, she didn’t mention that nearly 50 percent of US manufacturing is done in China, which, quite naturally, indicates a slowing down of US outsourced manufacturing, which certainly impacts the US. Like a good politician, she also did not mention that the evil US trade deficit is fueled by US manufacturers exporting jobs overseas, like Microsoft, Apple, Nike and Adidas. These and hundreds of other companies manufacture their products in China and elsewhere, and export their stuff to the US.
This is precisely and the only reason why the US has a trade deficit. The US trade deficit, in other words, is with US job exporters, not with China, Pakistan, Mexico or elsewhere.
Anyway, keeping interest rates low was a good thing for the US economy. Typically, the Fed waits to raise interest rates until just after the US economy begins to slide into recession.
That process begins when US corporations see a slowdown in their earnings growth, in the aggregate. These businesses begin to lay people off, which jacks up their profits. Perhaps the folks running the Fed take this as some sort of sacred signal that everything is all right. However, laying enough people off throughout the economy ignites recessions in the process of jacking up those profits, because the demand for goods and services slackens, jobs and profits decline, and a recession begins even while corporate earnings expand.
This is why I mentioned the slowdown of Chinese manufacturing, which in all likelihood, represents something of a slowdown of US manufacturing abroad. Profit growth has been shaky the last two years, though still growing in fits and spurts with sudden quarterly declines followed by rapid growth.
In other words, the US and world economies are still quite weak, especially since the rich have stolen 95 percent of all income growth in the US since 2009, an historic high by a wide margin. This has meant sluggish US and world economic growth since the more money the 1 percent steal in the US and elsewhere, the weaker the demand for goods and services by the 99 percent.
Yellen has the brains to understand all of this. This is likely why the Fed has kept interest rates at historic lows for years. To maintain their standards of living, the 99 percent had to keep borrowing because they haven’t gotten a raise in 35 years on average and in real terms. Raise interest rates and the demand for goods and services begins to die.
Raising interest rates will likely be the straw that sends the world economy into the monstrous fangs of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. This crisis may already be in its early less visible stages.
Not a single world leader has learned the lesson from the last Recession. The current US economic expansion is fueled by the same artificially created housing and stock market bubbles as the last recession. Wall Street executives are calling the economic shots in the White House, on Capital Hill and the US Supreme Court. That’s why nobody who could do anything did squat about the corrupt forces that brought about last recession, and now the bill is coming due.
The last recession was the worst since the Great Depression. The next one, as I have pointed out in my book, The Rigged Game: Corporate America and a People Betrayed, will be far more hideous.
The federal government will be forced to expand the deficit, and instead of having 48 million people permanently on food stamps, the US will have 60 to 100 million, unless the madness of redistributing income from the 99 to the 1 percent via job exporting trade treaties, unsustainable and illogical immigration policies (both legal and illegal, HB1 visas), and privatization scams.
Much of this can be reversed simply by amending income redistribution schemes known as international trade agreements, limiting immigration by restricting the flow of people moving into the USA at least until wages begin to rise, enforcing current immigration laws, and putting a halt and reversing many privatization follies.
All three of these policies have stolen jobs from American citizens, while enriching the politically and financially affluent in the process, all at the expense of people who produce goods and services.
Of course, that is precisely what the corrupt US government (all three branches), and both corrupt major political parties, have been driven to do by the money unleashed in the political markets since and because of the Reagan tax cuts for the rich.
The ultimate end game of Reaganomics is coming to its ugly conclusion.
This morning, Wall Street Congressman John Boehner introduced Fast Track Authority into the US House of Representatives, which passed 218-208. 190 Republicans and 28 Democrats voted for this scam; 50 Republicans and 158 Democrats voted against it. Eight members did not vote.
Now the measure will return to the US senate as a stand alone piece of legislation, where Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden is chomping at the bit to vote for it on behalf of Wall Street billionaires, and against the interests and wishes of the vast majority of Oregonians, which he was elected to represent.
Fast Track Authority will allow for the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the largest income and political power redistribution scam in world history. Previously, Fast Track had to pass with the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act (TAA), which was geared to help the hundreds of thousands of workers, and perhaps millions, whose jobs will be exported with TPP.
We know from leaked documents the TPP will:
* give incentives for US corporations to export millions of US jobs. The Federal Reserve estimates that 28 million US jobs were exported between 1990 and 2010. Wyden wants to increase this number. Jobs are the biggest US export product. Wyden likes this.
* will increase US income and wealth inequality. The 1 percent have already taken 95 percent of all income growth in the United States since 2009. Currently, the 1 percent are stealing 36+ percent of all income produced in the USA, compared to only 8 percent in 1980. International trade scams and other federal legislation have brought inequality about. For example, when the above jobs were exported, the difference between the old higher US wages and the new lower wages will go straight into the pockets of the 1 percent via higher corporate profits, rising dividends and surging share prices. Wyden is a principle architect of this inequality.
* Those lost jobs will no longer be paying the taxes for our infrastructure, K-12 education, higher education (tuition and fees will go up), social safety nets, schools, fire, police, public transportation, social security taxes, but those lost jobs will push the stock markets higher.
* will effectively eliminate your voting rights on local and state issues since it will unconstitutionally grant investors of the 0.01 percent special privileges to challenge labeling and health and safety local laws and regulations of the 99 percent, which most people call voter suppression, but in this case it should be called voter elimination.
* will raise pharmaceutical prices by extending patents forcing the 99 percent to pay more for big pharma’s products.
* will override Wall Street regulations, as if the mostly ineffective US regulations inhibit Wall Street profits and illegal activities.
* will increase the US trade deficit. The largest fourteen trade deficits in world history have been the last fourteen US trade deficits. It’s either absolute insanity or absolutely corrupt to desire increasing the trade deficit. Yet, Wyden and other Wall Street Democrats have saliva running down their jowls thinking about voting for Fast Track and the TPP. Think corruption, not insanity.
Stunningly, Democrats such as Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden support doing all of the above to the American people. And these things are only a few things we know about. Why are these negotiations so secret? US Senator Elizabeth Warren says it best below.
As for Fast Track Authority, if passed by congress, it will mean there be limited debate in congress when the TPP comes up for a vote. Fast track will also prohibit any amendments to the TPP and eliminate any means to filibuster it in the senate. In other words, fast track rigs the political and economic game against the 99 percent and for the 1 percent.
Save your democracy. Stop the corporate takeover of your nation. Call your senators and tell them to vote against Fast Track Authority. Click on the following link to find the phone number and email addresses of your senators; Contact your senators .
The Rigged Game: Corporate America and A People Betrayed
The Rigged Game: Corporate America and a People Betrayed
Wall Street is up to no good, and has been since 1980, when it took over the Republican Party, and then the Democratic Party in 1994. Income has been massively redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent via legislative scam after scam, from tax cuts for the rich to international income redistribution schemes falsely labeled as trade agreements. In The Rigged Game, John Hively exposes how this has all come about starting with a revolutionary, but simple reality, all recessions begin in the financial markets.
John Hively's Blog: News and Analysis of the War Against the Middle Class 