Banker Bailouts

Chart of the Day – Wall Street vs. Main Street

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Wall Street is counting its winnings from seven years of easy money.

The results represent a clear victory for Wall Street over Main Street, according to the team of Michael Hartnett, BofA’s chief investment strategist.

“Zero rates and asset purchases of central banks have, thus far, proved much more favorable to Wall Street, capitalists, shadow banks, ‘unicorns,’ and so on than it has for Main Street, workers, savers, banks and the jobs market,” the BofA team wrote.

– From the post: Bank of America Admits – Central Bank Policy Enriched Wall Street While “Steamrolling” Main Street

When I first started this website several years ago, part of my mission was to convince as many people as possible that we all have a common adversary, the U.S. status quo. Back then, the public was still largely confused. Still in financial shock from the crisis, many Americans hung onto hope that if they just kept their heads down and worked hard things would get better. Well they didn’t get better, and they aren’t going to.

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Welcome to the Recovery – 1 Out of 7 Americans (45.5 Million) Remain on Food Stamps

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The following article from the New York Times is shameful in many ways. While the paper is forced to cover the undeniable fact that real wages for the lowest income Americans have plunged during the so-called “economic recovery” over the past six years, it fails to actually pin blame on the undemocratic, oligarch institution most responsible for this humanitarian crisis: The Federal Reserve.

Of course, I and many others have been saying this for years, but now more than half a decade into what is supposed to be a recovery, people are finally being forced to admit what this really is —  large scale theft.

In fact, Ben Bernanke and his crew of upward wealth distributing academics have pulled off the greatest wealth heist in American history. In its wake we have been left with a hollowed out, asset striped Banana Republic. Thanks for playin’ Main Street. Or more accurately, thanks for being played.

– From the post: The Oligarch Recovery – Study Shows Real Wages Have Plunged for Low Income Workers During the “Recovery”

More than six years into Dear Leader’s glorious economic recovery, 45.5 million Americans, or one in seven, remain on food stamps.

I’d say that’s a problem, but I don’t want to be accused of “peddling economic fiction.”

From Bloomberg:

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America’s Road to Serfdom – 51% of Home Renters Are Over 40 Years Old

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Today’s story from the Associated Press perfectly illustrates how millions of Americans were reduced to neo-feudal serfs by the financial crisis, and how those who ruined the economy profited handsomely from the process.

While popular perception holds that debt-ridden, broke millennials are the ones driving the rental market, the truth is far more nuanced. As the AP reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The majority of U.S. renters are now older than 40, a fundamental shift over the past decade that reflects the lasting damage of the housing crash and an aging population.

This finding in a report released Wednesday by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies overturns the assumption that the rental boom is only the result of twenty-somethings flocking to hip urban centers. Single-family houses are a growing share of rentals. And affordability problems are mounting as rents rise faster than wages, while apartment construction increasingly targets tenants with six-figure incomes.

Nearly 51 percent of renters have celebrated their 40th birthday, according to the report’s analysis of Census Bureau data. That amounts to 22.4 million households. 

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Ralph Nader Destroys the Federal Reserve in Open Letter – Calls it “Out of Control, Private Government”

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When it comes to the Fed, Congress is mired in hypocrisy. The anti-regulation, de-regulation crowd on Capitol Hill shuts its mouth when it comes to the most powerful regulators of all – you and the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, Congress goes along with the out-of-control, private government of the Fed—unaccountable to the national legislature. Moreover, your massive monetary injections scarcely led to any jobs on the ground, other than stock and bond processors.

– Ralph Nader in his letter to Janet Yellen

Ralph Nader gets it. In fact, he get it so much that he published a book last year titled: Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.

Nevertheless, in case you need more proof of just how profoundly he understand how this neo-feudal gulag economy functions, read the following letter he wrote to Federal Reserve Chairwoman, Janet Yellen, on behalf of savers.

Here it is, in its full glory:

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A New Low – Hillary Clinton Claims 9/11 is the Reason She’s Owned by Wall Street

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That Hillary Clinton is owned by Wall Street is such an indisputable fact at this point, there’s no point in her even trying to squirm her way out of it. As such, it appears she took on a different tact at last night’s Democratic debate, straight out of the George W. Bush playbook. When asked about her Wall Street donors (her top career contributors are essentially all TBTF banks), she shamelessly replied:

CLINTON: So I represented New York, and I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy, and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.

You could almost hear her political minions plotting earlier in the day…

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“The Populist Upsurge is Real” – A Liberal College Professor Finds Common Ground with the Tea Party

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People are going to be pissed off no matter who wins this election and that is a very important social dynamic I believe is vastly under appreciated by the majority of mainstream pundits and analysts out there.  This is also very distinct from the environment that prevailed in 2008.  Four years ago, the financial markets were crashing and the economic future of America was circling the toilet bowl, yet a majority of Americans embraced the potential of a young, inexperienced biracial politician from Illinois who was saying all of the right things.  Despite the gigantic disappointment he has proven to be as President, there is no denying that he had all of the Democrats and most Independents under his spell on this day four years ago.

Fast forward to 2012 and the county isn’t “divided” as mainstream media talking heads like to say.  The country is pissed off.  Genuine and legitimate frustration permeates the land from sea to shining sea and rightly so.

– From my 2012 pre-election article: The Seventy Percent

Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. I know of the man mainly from his frequent appearances on CNBC when I used to watch the channel (I’m proud to say I haven’t tuned in, even for five minutes, for several years now). He was always held up as the token “liberal,” who was more than eager to spar with CNBC’s endless parade of crony capitalist heroes and “socialism for the rich” supporting statists. During my post Wall Street years, I have from time to time come across his musings, but none have struck me like the insightful post he published three days ago.

The post is titled, What I Learned on My Red State Book Tour, and it’s an extremely important that all Americans read it. Here are a few excepts:

I’ve just returned from three weeks in “red” America.

It was ostensibly a book tour but I wanted to talk with conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers.

I intended to put into practice what I tell my students – that the best way to learn is to talk with people who disagree you. I wanted to learn from red America, and hoped they’d also learn a bit from me (and perhaps also buy my book).

But something odd happened. It turned out that many of the conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers I met agreed with much of what I had to say, and I agreed with them.

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The Deterioration of America’s Corporate Balance Sheet

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I don’t comment frequently on the state of financial markets these days, but the following article from Bloomberg really grabbed my attention.

It relates to interest coverage ratios across corporate America, and quite frankly, I was stunned to see how badly balance sheets have deteriorated during the recent pitiful cyclical economic rebound which I have dubbed the oligarch recovery.

From Bloomberg:

It’s more expensive for even the most creditworthy companies to borrow or refinance even as the Fed has kept its benchmark at near-zero the last seven years. Companies have loaded up on debt. They owe more in interest than they ever have, while their ability to service what they owe, a metric called interest coverage, is at its lowest since 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. 

Think about how terrifying this is for a moment. 2009 represented the nadir of a devastating economic and financial collapse. Earnings had plunged, and as you might expect, interest coverage fell into the gutter. This was a cyclical low, and so that sort of thing should be expected.

See:

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The reason the current situation is so concerning, is because we aren’t in the nadir of an economic cycle at the moment. In contrast, we are constantly told how good things are going for the U.S. economy. All the while, the Fed funds rate is still stuck at near zero, with clueless central planners completely terrified to raise it a mere 25 basis points. Despite all this, the interest coverage ratio is near the 2009 low. Can you imagine what it’s going to look like when the next economic downturn really gets going?

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When it Really Mattered, Ben Bernanke Coddled, Protected & Bailed Out Financial Criminals

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Most of you will have seen Ben Bernanke’s recent crocodile tears regarding how he wished more individuals were held responsible, for you know, destroying the American middle class and handing over the nation to a handful of criminal oligarchs.

As David Dayen notes, he is completely full of shit. As usual.

From the Intercept:

Former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke joined practically everyone in America by saying in his new memoir, The Courage to Act, that more Wall Street executives should have gone to jail for criminal misconduct that led to the financial crisis.

“It would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything what went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm,” he wrote.

Unlike practically everyone else in America, however, Bernanke was in a pretty good position to actually facilitate criminal misconduct proceedings, if he wanted to see them so badly — as  head of the nation’s most powerful bank supervisory agency from 2006 to 2014.

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Welcome to the Recovery – Homelessness Amongst Students Doubles Since Before the Recession

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How’s that recovery going for you? That’s what I thought.

Here’s the latest data point from the ongoing oligarch crime spree shamelessly marketed to the masses as an “economic recovery.”

From Five-Thirty-Eight:

The number of homeless students in the country’s classrooms has more than doubled since before the recession, according to recently released federal data. That’s an alarming trend, but a new report offers some hope: At least part of the increase, the authors say, is not because more students have become homeless, but because states have gotten better at identifying homeless students.

Here’s a visual representation of America’s Banana Republic neo-feualism for those of you so inclined:

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Welcome to the Recovery – Two Out of Five American Children Experience Poverty

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The last seven years of American history will be remembered for the unprecedented oligarch crime scene that it is. Branding what has occurred during the Obama administration an “economic recovery,” represents little more than a vicious assault on human intelligence.

I’ve spent a lot of time on these pages proving this to be the case, and have even dubbed it the “oligarch recovery” (see links at the end). Here’s the latest proof.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Childhood poverty is far more prevalent than annual figures suggest, a new paper says, with nearly two in every five U.S. children spending at least one year in poverty before they turn 18 years old.

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