You can move from New York City to Colorado, but it seems you can never escape the all encompassing tentacles of Wall Street parasitism and theft. I recently covered a similar situation back in March in my piece Wall Street: $474 Million, Detroit: 0. In both cases it seems clear that public officials had no idea what they were getting into and there was a great deal of irresponsibility, but that is beside the point. It’d be one thing to say these communities should suffer the consequences of their actions if Wall Street had to as well, but we all know that isn’t the case. So it is highly immoral and culturally destructive to say it’s ok that Wall Street gets bailed out from all their mistakes and then is able to turn around and impose austerity on everyone else. That’s the way America works today and we can thank Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama for that reality. We must never forget the enablers in chief of all of this. Oh, and did I mention that the $216 million paid by Denver represents two-thirds of annual teaching expenses? USA! USA!
From Bloomberg:
Wall Street banks collected $215.6 million that Denver’s public schools paid to unwind swaps and sell bonds since the district began borrowing to cut pension costs in 2008. That sum is about two-thirds of annual teaching expenses.
The district paid $146.6 million last month to banks, including RBC Capital Markets LLC, Wells Fargo Securities LLC and Bank of America Corp., to end interest-rate swaps as part of a second attempt to restructure a 2008 borrowing, bond documents show. The April 17 deal sold as the district’s property-tax rate has risen 26 percent in two years to fund education.
Municipal borrowers from Detroit’s utilities to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have paid billions of dollars to banks to end privately negotiated interest-rate bets sold as hedges. The Federal Reserve’s policy of holding its benchmark borrowing rate near zero since 2008 has turned many of the swaps into wrong-way bets.
The Federal Reserve works for Wall Street. Period, end of story.
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With real incomes stagnant and the cost of everything from food, school tuition and healthcare premiums skyrocketing for millions of Americans, it appears that borrowing against one’s home is once again a key source for consumption, if not survival, for the nearly extinct socio-economic demographic known as the middle-class.