Don't mean to make your New Year's hangover any worse, but here's an interesting tidbit from Bloomberg on the Barny Frank Democratic backed finance ‘reform’ bill. Bloomberg reporter David Reilly read the 1,279 page bill. The money bullet point in his reporting:
Instead, it supports the biggest banks. It authorizes Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes. So much for "no-more-bailouts" talk. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into markets this time around. The size of the fund makes the bribes in the Senate’s health-care bill look minuscule.
That is how too big to fail is addressed in this bill!
That $4 trillion looting of the Treasury would automatically be done without having to go to Congress to authorize a bailout! Just bend over fellow citizens and take it in the a** the next time the banksters crash they system.
Well at least they've attached some dental floss thick strings to the bill that would have to be snapped before the banksters loot the Treasury.
-- Oh, hold on, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Secretary can’t authorize these funds unless "there is at least a 99 percent likelihood that all funds and interest will be paid back." Too bad the same models used to foresee the housing meltdown probably will be used to predict this likelihood as well.
Hmmmmmmm with Treasury Secretary’s like Tiny Tim and Hank Paulson, I’m sure they will absolutely assure us the funds will be paid back.
And more grotesqueness:
-- The bill also allows the government, in a crisis, to back financial firms’ debts. Bondholders can sleep easy -- there are more bailouts to come.
No haircuts for the bondholders, the citizens would once again get bent over. Remember, this monstrosity passed out of the Democratic controlled committee.
The bigger the criminals the bigger the table stakes.
Talk about a civilization ending case of moral hazard. The banksters will know they’ve got a $4 trillion automatic backstop from the U.S. Treasury. Take bigger risks – sure, why not. The unwashed peasants won’t be able to do jack shit about it. We just lay the debt on them, and when the debt load becomes too much we foreclose on the hapless bastards! And our trading desks can short the dollar to the gates of financial Armageddon – har, har, har! That's how WE banksters do God's work!
And the bill leaves enough loopholes concerning derivatives that a financial meltdown could happen any time in the future. Mega $trillions of derivatives - in the range of $300 trillion plus, and are still be traded in dark markets by five big banks - JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley - doing 80% of the trades.
The systemic risk fuse was never put out and is ready to ignite the next financial crisis at any time!
As I’ve linked before this is a good rant of what went down the last time, and what will likely go down in the future:
But the truth is that we are witnessing a nation whose policy is being run so special interests can profit at unprecedented levels while the standard of living of the populace inevitably declines to accommodate the transfer of wealth. It is completely deliberate, and not a bit of it is accidental. The smartest guys in the financial world didn't all just get stupid and blow it - that's a facile cover story being propagated by the captured press. They knew exactly what they were doing, they crashed the system to profit at levels it would normally take 50 years of stability to see, and they could give a rat's ass whether you work at Burger King during your retirement as a result.
They win. You lose.
That's why you keep hearing about how the heads of the big banks are morons, and how outraged everyone is that they kept their jobs, etc. They aren't morons. They, and their buds in hedge funds and trading desks, made trillions from being "morons." And the reason they are declared idiots over and over, is because there's no prosecuting a guy for being a retard. The smartest guys in the room always pretend to be fools when the prosecutor is around, however they don't have to worry - they long ago bought off the establishment, including the regulators and prosecutors. Nobody but a few token outsider fall guys will see any prosecution - like Countrywide's CEO. But not the head of BofA or Goldman or JP Morgan. They got away with it. And they now are so rich they will never be touched.
Welcome to the Banana Republic of America, brought to you by 300 rich white guys on Wall Street. Game over.
http://thesanitycheck.com/...
I don’t know if Mussolini really said it, but the quote attributed to him sure rings true: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"
Kill Bill II?
Link to the Bloomberg article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/...