Thursday, December 20, 2018

DOW COLLAPSES!

Fed attempt at calming markets fails

Wall Street plunge continues

By Nick Beams 
22 December 2018

Wall Street had another wild day yesterday with the Dow ending down by 415 points, after rising by almost 400 points in the opening hours of trading. The S&P 500 index fell by 2 percent and the NASDAQ was down by 2.99 percent, capping the worst week for Wall Street since October 2008.
The Dow lost 1655 points for the week, a decline of 6.8 percent, its worst percentage drop since the onset of the financial crisis a decade ago, the NASDAQ lost 8.3 percent for the week and is now 22 percent below its high last August and the S&P fell by 7 percent and is now down 17.8 percent from its high.
Both the S&P and the Dow are on track for their worst December performance since December 1931, amid the Great Depression.
Bloomberg published an article noting that currently 38 percent of stocks are trading at 52-week lows. Since 1984, there have only been eight days when a larger proportion of stocks traded at those levels. Two of them took place during the October 1987 crash, when the Dow fell 23 percent in a day, with the rest occurring in October and November 2008.
The brief rally was set off by an interview with New York Federal Reserve president John Williams with the business channel CNBC in which he said the Fed was going into 2019 with eyes “wide open” and was willing to reassess its outlook for the economy and by implication its monetary policy.
He had clearly been given a brief to calm the markets after their adverse reaction to Wednesday’s decision to lift interest rates by 0.25 percent and indicate that the Fed was taking note. He defended the rate rise, based on the assessment that the economy would continue to grow next year, but said the Fed was paying close attention to financial markets.
The effect of his reassurances lasted about two hours before the markets started to plunge again.
The rate hike was not the only aspect of monetary policy which impacted the markets. There was an adverse reaction to the statement by Fed chair Jerome Powell during his Wednesday press conference that the wind back of its asset holdings, acquired under the program of quantitative easing (QE) when the Fed entered the market to buy bonds, was on “auto pilot” and would continue at the rate of $50 billion per month.
Under QE, the Fed expanded its assets from around $800 billion to more than $4 trillion. The effect of this measure was to push up the price of bonds and lower interest rates—the two have an inverse relationship. The downward pressure on interest rates under QE fuelled the continuation of the very financial speculation which had led to the crisis of 2008, giving rise to the longest bull-run on the stock market in history.
While the Fed began to reverse its QE policy 15 months ago, similar operations were continued by other central banks. But now they are moving in the same direction, tightening credit conditions in global financial markets.
One of the fears on Wall Street is that its dirty secret is being exposed and that just as the wave of cheap money under QE provided a major boost for financial operations its reversal, or quantitative tightening (QT), is going to bring an unravelling. This is because growth in the global economy remains well below the level attained before the financial crisis and it cannot withstand a return to what were once considered to be “normal” financial conditions.
There are increasing signs that the global economy is slowing significantly and could be headed for a recession. The year began with claims that in 2017 the world economy had enjoyed “synchronised” growth and had experienced its best year since the financial crisis of 2008.
But prospects for a continuation of that trend proved to be short lived and the year has ended with significant slowdowns in both the German and Japanese economies. Another indicator of global trends is the fall in commodity prices, with oil leading the way, having fallen by 30 percent in the last two months.
For most of this year, the US has been something of an outlier from this trend, with corporations receiving a major boost as a result of the corporate tax cuts enacted by the Trump administration at the end of last year. Trump claimed this would be a boost to investment and jobs. But that claim has already been given the lie by the major job cuts and closures announced by General Motors and the fact that the increase in corporate profits has largely been used to finance share buybacks and boost dividends.
It is significant that what the Financial Times described as a “tsunami of money”—estimated to reach $1 trillion for the year—has failed to prevent what could be the worst year for stock markets since the global financial crisis.
Besides financial conditions, trade-war tensions are another key factor in the sell-off. This was illustrated yesterday when an interview with Trump’s White House trade adviser Peter Navarro led to a further market fall late in the day.
Navarro told the Japanese news agency, Nikkei, that it would be “very difficult” for the US and China to reach an agreement within the 90-day deadline agreed to by Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping at their meeting in Buenos Aires on December 1.
Navarro, one of the main anti-China hawks within the administration, said there could be “no half-measures” and China had to address all US demands, including claims of forced technology transfers, cyber spying on business networks, state-directed investments and tariff and non-tariff barriers. In short, there had to be a total capitulation by China before any deal could be reached.
Underlining the central issues motivating the most hawkish anti-China forces within the administration and the military and intelligence apparatuses that have stepped up their offensive against China in recent weeks, he said: “China is basically trying to steal the future of Japan, the US and Europe, by going after our technology.”
He called the “Made in China 2025” program—the centre of its plan for industrial and technological development—a “label for a Chinese strategy to achieve dominance in the industries of the future.”
While China has dropped references to the plan in recent times, “no one in Japan or the United States really believes that they have abandoned the goals of China 2025.”
Another significant aspect of the present market plunge is the way in which economic processes are intersecting with growing political turmoil both internationally—the Brexit crisis in the UK being one of the most prominent examples—and the ongoing and deepening conflicts within the US political establishment.
Both the impending government shutdown in the US, over Trump’s insistence that funding for a wall between the US and Mexico must be included in any settlement of the standoff with Congress, and the political firestorm set off by Trump’s announcement of a withdrawal of US troops from Syria and the consequent resignation of Defence Secretary James Mattis have played into the market plunge.
In the longer term, the market and political turmoil is the outcome of the breakdown of the global capitalist order which erupted in the form of the financial crisis of 2008. In the decade since, none of the contradictions that produced it have been resolved, they have simply metastasized to return in even more malignant forms.


Market meltdown: Fears of a slowing economy worsen ahead of market close as the Dow drops another 600 points, Nasdaq barely avoids bear market and oil prices plummet to lowest point in 16 months

  • Stocks are on track for their worst month in a decade this December
  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped as much as 600 points on Thursday before rebounding slightly to a loss of just 460 point at 3pm Eastern 
  • The S&P 500 index fell 2.3 percent but is on track to close at 1.12 percent down 
  • The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite is now down 20 percent from August
  • The market swoon is coming even as the US economy is on track to expand this year at the fastest pace in more than a decade 
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped as much as 600 points on Thursday before rebounding slightly to a loss of just 460 point at 3pm Eastern, bringing its losses since Friday to more than 1,800 points.
The benchmark S&P 500 index fell 2.3 percent but is on track to close at 1.12 percent down. It has slumped 11 percent this month and is now 15 percent below the peak it reached in late September. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite did even worse, and is now down 20 percent from its record high in August.
After steady gains through the spring and summer, stocks have nosedived in the fall as investors worry that global economic growth is cooling off and that the US could slip into a recession in the next few years. Oil prices fell sharply again.
The market swoon is coming even as the US economy is on track to expand this year at the fastest pace in more than a decade. Markets tend to move, however, on what investors anticipate will happen well into the future, so it's not uncommon for stocks to sink even when the economy is humming along.
Right now, markets are concerned about the potential for a slowing economy and two threats that could make the situation worse: the ongoing trade dispute between the US and China, which has lasted most of this year and shows few signs of easing, and rising interest rates, which act as a brake on economic growth by making it more expensive for businesses and individuals to borrow money.
Stock prices are tumbling again Thursday as a series of big December plunges has stocks on track for their worst month in a decade. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped as much as 600 points on Thursday before rebounding slightly to a loss of just 460 point at 3pm Eastern, bringing its losses since Friday to more than 1,800 points
Stock prices are tumbling again Thursday as a series of big December plunges has stocks on track for their worst month in a decade. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped as much as 600 points on Thursday before rebounding slightly to a loss of just 460 point at 3pm Eastern, bringing its losses since Friday to more than 1,800 points
The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite dropped four percent shortly before 2.30pm Eastern but has bounced back to a smaller, yet still significant, 1.87 percent loss as of 3pm
The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite dropped four percent shortly before 2.30pm Eastern but has bounced back to a smaller, yet still significant, 1.87 percent loss as of 3pm
The selling in the last two days came after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the fourth time this year and signaled it was likely to continue raising rates next year, although at a slower rate than it previously forecast.
Scott Wren, senior global equity strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, said that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell didn't appear concerned about the state of the US economy, despite deepening worries among investors that growth could slow even more in 2019 and 2020. Wren said investors want to know that the Fed is keeping a close eye on the situation.
'He may be a little overconfident,' said Wren. 'The Fed needs to be paying attention to what's going on.'
Powell also acknowledged that the Fed's decisions are getting trickier because they need to be based on the most up-to-date figures on jobs, inflation, and economic growth. For the last three years the Fed told investors weeks in advance that it was almost certain to increase rates. But things are less certain now, and the market hates uncertainty.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the market's reaction to the Fed was 'completely overblown'.
Investors are responding to a weakening outlook for the US economy by selling stocks and buying ultra-safe US government bonds. The bond-buying has the effect of sending long-term bond yields lower, which reduces interest rates on mortgages and other kinds of long-term loans. That's generally good for the economy.
At the same time, the reduced bond yields can send a negative signal on the economy. The bond market has correctly predicted several previous US recessions by buying long-term bonds and sending yields down.
At 2.15pm Eastern time, the S&P 500 index was down 49 points to 2,456, its lowest since August 2017.
The Dow fell 518 points, or 2.2 percent to 22,718. The Nasdaq composite shed 168 points, or 2.5 percent, to 6,468.
The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies dropped another 34 points, or 2.6 percent, to 1,314.
Analysts at the New York Stock Exchange (above) and around the world are keeping an exhaustingly close eye on the markets one hour before close as the Dow has dropped 500 points, the Nasdaq is just 4 percent away from bear territory and oil prices have plummeted to their lowest point since August 2017
Analysts at the New York Stock Exchange (above) and around the world are keeping an exhaustingly close eye on the markets one hour before close as the Dow has dropped 500 points, the Nasdaq is just 4 percent away from bear territory and oil prices have plummeted to their lowest point since August 2017
Smaller company stocks have been crushed during the recent market slump because slower growth in the US will have an outsize effect on their profits. Relative to their size, they also tend to carry more debt than larger companies, which could be a problem in a slower economy with higher interest rates.
The Russell 2000 is down 24 percent from the peak it reached in late August and it's down 14 percent for the year to date. The S&P 500, which tracks larger companies, is down 8 percent.
The possibility of a partial shutdown of the federal government also loomed over the market on Thursday, as funding for the government runs out at midnight Friday. In general, shutdowns don't affect the U.S. economy or the market much unless they stretch out for several weeks, which would delay paychecks for federal employees.
Oil prices continued to retreat. They've dropped more than 40 percent since early October. Benchmark US crude fell 4.5 percent to $46.02 a barrel in New York. Brent crude, used to price international oils, slipped 4.8 percent to $54.50 a barrel in London.
Bond prices were mixed. The yield on the two-year Treasury stayed at 2.65 percent, while the yield on the 10-year note dipped to 2.76 percent from 2.77 percent.
The gap between those two yields has shrunk this year. When the 10-year yield falls below the two-year yield, investors call it an 'inverted yield curve.' That hasn't happened yet, but investors fear it will. Inversions are often taken as a sign a recession is coming, although it's not a perfect signal and when recessions do follow inversions in the yield curve, it can take a year or more.
'The bond market has been telling us something for about a year, and that is there's not going to be much inflation and there's not going to be a sustained surge in economic growth,' said Wren, of Wells Fargo.
In France, the CAC 40 lost 1.8 percent and Germany's DAX fell 1.4 percent. The British FTSE 100 slipped 0.8 percent. Indexes in Italy, Portugal and Spain took bigger losses.
Tokyo's Nikkei 225 lost 2.8 percent and Hong Kong's Hang Seng gave up 1 percent. Seoul's Kospi shed 0.9 percent.
As investors adjusted to the prospect of a weaker economy and lower long-term interest rates, the dollar fell to 110.90 yen from 112.36 yen. The euro rose to $1.1483 from $1.1368. The British pound rose to $1.2688 from $1.2621. That sent the price of gold higher, and it gained 0.9 percent to $1,267.9 an ounce. Silver rose 0.3 percent to $14.87 an ounce and copper, which is considered an indicator of economic growth, fell 0.7 percent to $2.70 a pound.


WILL THEIR CRONY BANKSTERS FINISH OFF AMERICA?

"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal 
report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that 
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale
of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of 
the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners 
and labor."  

"Overall, the reaction to the decision points to the underlying fragility of financial markets, which have become a house of cards as a result of the massive inflows of money from the Fed and other central banks, and are now extremely susceptible to even a small tightening in financial conditions."

The ruling corporate-financial oligarchy controls 
both parties and maintains its rule by alternating 
control of the political institutions—the White 
House, Congress, state houses, etc.—between 
them. The general population, consisting 
overwhelmingly of working people, is given the 
opportunity every two or four years to go to the 
polls and vote for one or the other of these 
capitalist parties. This is what is called 
“democracy.”


"A decade ago, as the financial crisis raged, America’s banks were in ruins. 
Lehman Brothers, the storied 158-year-old investment house, collapsed into 
bankruptcy in mid-September 2008. Six months earlier, Bear Stearns, its 
competitor, had required a government-engineered rescue to avert the same 
outcome. By October, two of the nation’s largest commercial banks, Citigroup 
and Bank of America, needed their own government-tailored bailouts to 
escape failure. Smaller but still-sizable banks, such as Washington Mutual 
and IndyMac, died."


CRIMINAL GLOBALIST BANKSTERS AND THE POLITICIANS THEY BOUGHT:
The Story of Goldman Sachs and Clinton, Obama and Trump corruption.
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores, and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s OBAMANOMICS TO SERVE THE RICH AND GLOBALIST BILLIONAIRES.


Fed Chief: 2018 Best Year 

Since Financial Crisis


Fed Chief Jerome Powell
Getty Images
 Washington, DC333
2:08

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell declared 2018 the “best year since the financial crisis” after revealing a late 2018 quarter percent rate hike Wednesday.

In a post-announcement press conference, Powell pointed to record low unemployment and low and stable inflation before explaining how the Fed has incorporated currents that have emerged since the September FMOC meeting. He noted a continually growing economy in line with expectations and adding jobs at a rate supporting a continued lowering of the unemployment rate.
“Wages have moved up for workers across a wide range of occupations, a welcomed development,” said Powell. “Inflation has remained low and stable, and is ending the year a bit more subdued than most had expected.”
“We will adjust monetary policy, as best we can, to keep the expansion on track, the labor market strong, and inflation near 2%,” he went on.
“If you look at 2018, as I mentioned, this is the best year since the financial crisis,” said Powell. “You have had growth well above trend. You got unemployment dropping. You got inflation moving up to 2%, and we also have a positive forecast, as I mentioned and in that context, we think this move was appropriate for what is a very healthy economy.”
The Fed chief went on to say policy could move to neutral as opposed to being accommodative. “It seems appropriate that it be neutral. We are now at the bottom end of range of estimates of neutral and that’s the basis upon which we made the decision,” he said. “I think we took on board, you know, the risks to that, and, you know, we’re certainly cognizant of them.”
The Fed announced it was raising the interest rate bracket a quarter percent, up to 2.25 to 2.50 percent on Wednesday afternoon. It was coupled with a reduction in predicted 2019 interest rate raises to just twice.
Michelle Moons is a White House Correspondent for Breitbart News — follow on Twitter @MichelleDiana and Facebook

EconomyPolitics2018Federal Reservefinancial crisisInterest RatesJerome Powellthe Fed


Overall, the reaction to the decision points to the underlying fragility of financial markets, which have become a house of cards as a result of the massive inflows of money from the Fed and other central banks, and are now extremely susceptible to even a small tightening in financial conditions.

Sharp fall on Wall Street in response to Fed interest rate decision

In one of the most closely watched decisions for years, the US Federal Reserve Board lifted its base interest rate by 0.25 percentage points yesterday and indicated that it expects the number of rate rises next year to be reduced from three to two.
The decision, the fourth rise this year, puts the Fed’s target rate at between 2.25 and 2.50 percent. In a clear indication that it is easing rate rises, the Fed reduced what it considers to be the neutral rate—one that neither stimulates nor dampens the economy—from 3 percent to 2.8 percent.
However, these moves, described as a “dovish” rate hike, were not welcomed by Wall Street. Addicted to the provision of ultra-cheap money in the ten years since the global financial crisis, it fell sharply.
After rising by around 300 points at the start of the day, the Dow fell on the announcement of the rate increase and then dropped even further as Fed chairman Jerome Powell addressed a news conference. It fell by as much as 500 points at one stage, with traders reportedly yelling “Stop this guy talking.”
All indexes were down for the day. The Dow fell by 350 points, a drop of 1.5 percent, the S&P 500 index was off by 1.5 percent and the NASDAQ index was down by 2 percent. Following earlier sharp falls, the S&P 500 index has lost 9 percent so far this month. Both the Dow and the S&P have reached their lowest points for the year.
The decision to lift rates was generally expected with many market analysts observing that had the Fed not proceeded this would have sent a downbeat signal on the state of the economy and could have increased, not lessened, market turbulence.
It was preceded by a campaign to bring about a significant shift in the Fed’s policy. US president Donald Trump has regularly tweeted that he regards Fed tightening as “crazy” and “loco” and that Fed rate rises were jeopardising US economic growth.
He has now been joined by others. This week the Wall Street Journal published a major article by former hedge fund investor Stanley Druckenmiller and a former member of the Fed’s governing council, Kevin Warsh, calling for a halt to rate rises.
Their focus was not so much on the US but the state of global financial markets. They pointed to a reversal by global central banks of their 10-year policy of easing liquidity, starting at the beginning of October, noting that stock prices had commenced their fall at that time and “this is no coincidence.”
The world’s central banks, as part of their quantitative easing (QE) program, had amassed $11 trillion on their balance sheets. Two months ago this gave way to global tightening (QT) as central banks started to run down their balance sheets. While the Fed started this process 15 months ago, it had been offset until now by the asset purchases of other central banks. That situation had now ended.
The article warned that economic growth outside the US had decelerated over the past three months, global trade had slowed markedly, running at one-third lower than a year ago, and growth in important economies, like China, was significantly weaker. “No ocean is large enough to insulate the US economy from slowdowns abroad” and no forecasting model “adequately captures the spillovers and spillbacks from the US economy and the rest of the world.”
The two authors directed their principal focus not to the Fed’s base interest rate as such, but on the impact of the winding back of the Fed’s asset holdings, which stood at more than $4 trillion at their height. They said the Fed’s silence on this issue was “contributing to the tumult.”
“We were assured by policy makers that QE provided large benefits to the real economy. If so, won’t its reversal come with a cost? It can’t be all rainbows and unicorns.”
They concluded that the Fed could ill afford a major policy error and that it should cease, at least for now, “it’s double-barrelled blitz of higher interest rates and tighter liquidity.”
After publishing the article, the Wall Street Journal weighed in with an editorial emphasising its main points, in particular that the “larger argument for a pause is that the Fed is unwinding the largest experiment in modern history.”
“Central banks around the world are moving away from multi-trillion-dollar bond purchases and zero-interest rates, and they’re doing it without a road map. What is the ‘normal’ interest rate in this post-crisis world? We don’t know, and we doubt the Fed does either.”
Critics of the Fed decision directed attention to Powell’s remarks at his press conference that the Fed’s reduction of its balance sheet would take place at the rate of $50 billion per month. He indicated this was a pre-set agenda and the focus of the Fed’s monetary policy would be on setting the interest rate.
Responding to questions on Trump’s interventions, he said the Fed would not be deterred from carrying out its mandate. Insofar as market volatility was concerned, the Fed took this into account through its impact on the tightening of credit conditions which had been in evidence.
Powell said that global growth conditions were not what they were in 2017 when there was “synchronised” global growth and this had been replaced by “modest retracing.”
Significantly, the Fed expects growth in the US slow. Growth is predicted to be 3 percent in 2018 followed by a fall to 2.3 percent in 2019. Powell said there was an “angst about growth going forward.”
On the question of wages, which are always a crucial factor in Fed decisions, Powell said wage rises of around 3 percent were “welcome” and they had not given rise to increased inflation. Wage increases at present were now equivalent to the inflation rate of around 2 percent plus productivity growth of 1 percent. If that situation changes, however, then the Fed can be expected to take a more hawkish approach on rate rises.
Overall, the reaction to the decision points to the underlying fragility of financial markets, which have become a house of cards as a result of the massive inflows of money from the Fed and other central banks, and are now extremely susceptible to even a small tightening in financial conditions.

A closer look at American “democracy”

20 December 2018
A central theme of the hysteria over alleged “Russian meddling” in US politics is the sinister effort supposedly being mounted by Vladimir Putin “to undermine and manipulate our democracy” (in the words of Democratic Senator Mark Warner).
According to the narrative fabricated by the intelligence agencies and promoted by the Democratic Party and the corporate media over the past year and a half, Putin and his minions hacked the Democrats and stirred up social divisions and popular grievances to secure the election for Donald Trump, and they have been working ever since to destroy “our institutions.”
Their chosen field of battle is the internet, with Russian trolls and bots infecting the body politic by taking advantage of lax policing of social media by the giant tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter.
To defend democracy, the argument goes, these companies, working with the state, must silence oppositional viewpoints—above all left-wing, anti-war and socialist viewpoints—which are labeled “fake news,” and banish them from the internet. Nothing is said of the fact that this supposed defense of democracy is a violation of the basic canons of genuine democracy, guaranteed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution: freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
But what is this much vaunted “American democracy?” Let's take a closer look.

The two-party monopoly

In a vast and complex country with a population of 328 million people, consisting of many different nationalities, native tongues, religions and other demographics, spanning six time zones and thousands of miles, two political parties totally dominate the political system.
The ruling corporate-financial oligarchy controls 
both parties and maintains its rule by alternating 
control of the political institutions—the White 
House, Congress, state houses, etc.—between 
them. The general population, consisting 
overwhelmingly of working people, is given the 
opportunity every two or four years to go to the 
polls and vote for one or the other of these 
capitalist parties. This is what is called 
“democracy.”
The monopoly of the two big business parties is further entrenched by the absence of proportional representation, which it makes it impossible for third parties or independent candidates to obtain significant representation in Congress.

The role of corporate money

The entire political process—the selection of candidates, elections, the formulation of domestic and foreign policies—is dominated by corporate money. No one can seriously bid for high office unless he or she has the backing of sponsors from the ranks of the richest 1 percent—or 0.01 percent—of the population. The buying of elections and politicians is brazen and shameless.
Last month's midterm elections set a record for campaign spending in a non-presidential year—$5.2 billion—a 35 percent increase over 2014 and triple the amount spent 20 years ago, in 1998. The bulk of this flood of cash came from corporations and multi-millionaire donors.
In the vast majority of contests, the winner was determined by the size of his or her campaign war chest. Eighty-nine percent of House races and 84 percent of Senate races were won by the biggest spender.
Democratic candidates had a huge spending advantage over their Republican opponents, exposing the fraud of their attempt to posture as a party of the people. The securities and investment industry—Wall Street—favored Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 52 percent to 46 percent.
Elections are anything but a forum to openly and honestly discuss and debate the great issues facing the voters. The real issues—the preparation for new wars, deeper austerity and further attacks on democratic rights—are concealed behind a miasma of attack ads and mudslinging. The research firm PQ Media estimates that total political ad spending will reach $6.75 billion this year. In last month's elections, the number of congressional and gubernatorial ads rose 59 percent over the previous, 2014, midterm.
The setting of policy and passage of legislation is helped along by corporate bribes, euphemistically termed lobbying. In 2017 alone, corporations spent $3 billion to lobby the government.

Ballot access restrictions

A welter of arcane, arbitrary and anti-democratic requirements for gaining ballot status, which vary from state to state, block third parties from challenging the domination of the Democrats and Republicans. These include filing fees and nominating petition signature requirements in the tens of thousands in many states. Democratic officials routinely challenge the petitions of socialist and left-wing candidates who are likely to find support among young people and workers.

Media blackout of third party candidates

The corporate media systematically blacks out the campaigns of third party and independent candidates, especially left-wing and socialist candidates. The exception is candidates who are either themselves rich or who have the backing of wealthy patrons.
Third party candidates are generally excluded from nationally televised candidates’ debates.
In last month’s election, the Socialist Equality Party candidate for Congress in Michigan’s 12th Congressional District, Niles Niemuth, won broad support among workers, young people and students for his socialist program, but received virtually no press coverage.

Voting restrictions

Since the stolen election of 2000, when the Supreme Court shut down the counting of votes in Florida in order to hand the White House to the loser of the popular vote, George W. Bush, with virtually no opposition from the Democrats or the media, attacks on the right of workers and poor people to vote have mounted.
Thirty-three states have implemented voter identification laws, which, studies show, bar up to 6 percent of the population from voting. States have cut back early voting and absentee voting and shut down voting precincts in working class neighborhoods. A number of states impose a lifetime ban on voting by felons, even after they have done their time. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the enforcement mechanism of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, with no real opposition from the Democrats. The United States is one of the few countries that hold elections on a work day, making it more difficult for workers to cast a ballot.

Government of, by and for the rich

The two corporate parties have overseen a social counterrevolution, resulting in a staggering growth of social inequality. In tandem with this process, the oligarchic structure of society has increasingly found open expression in the political forms of rule. Alongside the erection of the infrastructure of a police state—mass surveillance, indefinite detention, the militarization of the police, Gestapo raids on workplaces and attacks on immigrants, the ascendancy of the military in political affairs, internet censorship—the personnel of government have increasingly been recruited from the rich and the super-rich.
More than half of the members of Congress are millionaires, as compared to just 1 percent of the American population. All the presidents for the past three decades—George H. W, Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama—have either been multi-millionaires going in or have cashed in on their presidencies to become multi-millionaires afterward. In the person of the multi-billionaire real estate speculator and con man Donald Trump, the financial oligarchy has directly taken occupancy of the White House.
In The State and Revolution, Vladimir Lenin wrote: “Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.”

The working class will never achieve genuine democracy, nor succeed in defending the democratic gains it extracted in the course of more than a century of struggle against the capitalist class, so long as it remains an oppressed class, exploited by the corporate owners and their state apparatus. Democracy for the workers and oppressed, as opposed to the phony democracy of the rich, can be achieved only through the creation of organs of workers’ struggle and control and the building of a revolutionary leadership to overthrow the existing state, place power in the hands of the working class, expropriate the capitalists and establish a socialist economy based on social equality.


FROM THE MAGAZINE

Finance’s Lengthening Shadow

The growth of nonbank lending poses an increasing risk.
Economy, finance, and budgets
A decade ago, as the financial crisis raged, America’s banks were in ruins. Lehman Brothers, the storied 158-year-old investment house, collapsed into bankruptcy in mid-September 2008. Six months earlier, Bear Stearns, its competitor, had required a government-engineered rescue to avert the same outcome. By October, two of the nation’s largest commercial banks, Citigroup and Bank of America, needed their own government-tailored bailouts to escape failure. Smaller but still-sizable banks, such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac, died.
After the crisis, the goal was to make banks safer. The 2010 Dodd-Frank law, coupled with independent regulatory initiatives led by the Federal Reserve and other bank overseers, severely tightened banks’ ability to engage in speculative ventures, such as investing directly in hedge funds or buying and selling securities for short-term gain. The new regime made them hold more reserves, too, to backstop lending.
Yet the financial system isn’t just banks. Over the last ten years, a plethora of “nonbank” lenders, or “shadow banks”—ranging from publicly traded investment funds that purchase debt to private-equity firms loaning to companies for mergers or expansions—have expanded their presence in the financial system, and thus in the U.S. and global economies. Banks may have tighter lending standards today, but many of these other entities loosened them up. One consequence: despite a supposed crackdown on risky finance, American and global debt has climbed to an all-time high.
Banks remain hugely important, of course, but the potential for a sudden, 2008-like seizure in global credit markets increasingly lies beyond traditional banking. In 2008, government officials at least knew which institutions to rescue to avoid global economic paralysis. Next time, they may be chasing shadows.
The 2008 financial crisis vaporized 8.8 million American jobs, triggered 8 million house foreclosures, and still roils global politics. Many commentators blamed a proliferation of complex financial instruments as the primary reason for the meltdown. Notoriously, financiers had taken subprime “teaser”-rate mortgages and other low-quality loans and bundled them into opaque financial securities, such as “collateralized debt obligations,” which proved exceedingly hard for even sophisticated investors, such as the overseas banks that purchased many of them, to understand. When it turned out that some of the securities contained lots of defaulting loans—as Americans who never were financially secure enough to purchase homes struggled to pay housing debt—no one could figure out where, exactly, the bad debt was buried (many places, it turned out). Global panic ensued.
The “shadow-financing” industry played a role in the crisis, too. Many nonbank mortgage lenders had sold these bundled loans to banks, so as to make yet more bundled loans. But the locus of the 2008 crisis was traditional banks. Firms such as Citibank and Lehman had kept tens of billions of dollars of such debt and related derivative instruments on their books, and investors feared (correctly, in Lehman’s case) that future losses from these soured loans would force the institutions themselves into default, wiping out shareholders and costing bondholders money.
The ultimate cause of the crisis, however, wasn’t complex at all: a massive increase in debt, with too little capital behind it. Recall how a bank works. Like people, banks have assets and liabilities. For a person, a house or retirement account is an asset and the money he owes is a liability. A bank’s assets include the loans that it has made to customers—whether directly, in a mortgage, or indirectly, in purchasing a mortgage-backed bond. Loans and bonds are bank assets because, when all goes well, the bank collects money from them: the interest and principal that borrowers pay monthly on their mortgage, for example. A bank’s liabilities, by contrast, include the money it has borrowed from outside investors and depositors. When a customer keeps his money in the bank for safekeeping, he effectively lends it money; global investors who purchase a bank’s bonds are also lending to it. The goal, for firms as well as people, is for the worth of assets to exceed liabilities. A bank charges higher interest rates on the loans that it makes than the rates it pays to depositors and investors, so that it can turn a profit—again, when all goes well.
When the economy tanks, this system runs into two problems. First, a bank’s asset values start to fall as more people find themselves unable to pay off their mortgage or credit-card debt. Yet the bank still must repay its own debt. If the value of a bank’s assets sinks below its liabilities, the bank is effectively insolvent. To lessen this risk, regulators demand that banks hold some money in reserve: capital. Theoretically, a bank with capital equal to 10 percent of its assets could watch those assets decline in value by 10 percent without insolvency looming.
Yet investors would frown on such a thin margin, and that highlights the second problem: illiquidity. A bank might have sufficient capital to cover its losses, but if depositors and other lenders don’t agree, they may rush to take their money out—money that the bank can’t immediately provide because it has locked up the funds in long-term loans, including mortgages. During a liquidity “run,” solvent banks can turn to the Federal Reserve for emergency funding.
By 2008, bank capital levels had sunk to an all-time low; bank managers and their regulators, believing that risk could be perfectly monitored and controlled, were comfortable with the trend. By 2007, banks’ “leverage ratio”—the percentage of quality capital relative to their assets—was just 6 percent, well below the nearly 8 percent of a decade earlier. Since then, thanks to tougher rules, the leverage ratio has risen above 9 percent. Global capital ratios have risen, as well. Many analysts believe that capital requirements should be higher still, but the shift has made banks somewhat safer.
The government doesn’t mandate capital levels with the goal of keeping any particular bank safe. After all, private companies go out of business all the time, and investors in any private venture should be prepared to take that risk. The capital requirements are about keeping the economy safe. Banks tend to hold similar assets—various types of loans to people, businesses, or government. So when one bank gets into trouble, chances are that many others are suffering as well. A higher capital reserve lessens the chance of several banks veering toward insolvency simultaneously, which would drain the economy of credit. It was that threat—an abrupt shutdown of markets for all lending, to good borrowers and bad—that led Washington to bail out the financial industry (mostly the banks) in 2008.
But what if the financial industry, in creating credit, bypasses the banks? According to the global central banks and regulators who make up the international Financial Stability Board, this type of lending constitutes “shadow banking.” That’s an imprecise, overly ominous term, evoking Mafia dons writing loans to gamblers on betting slips and then kneecapping debtors who don’t pay the money back on time, but the practice is nothing so Tony Soprano-ish. The accountancy and consultancy firm Deloitte defines shadow banking, wonkily, as “a market-funded credit intermediation system involving maturity and/or liquidity transformation through securitization and secured-funding mechanisms. It exists at least partly outside of the traditional banking system and does not have government guarantees in the form of insurance or access to the central bank.”
“Shadow banking is nothing new, encompassing everything from corporate bond markets to payday lending.”
In plain English, “maturity and/or liquidity transformation” is exactly what a bank does: making a long-term loan, such as a mortgage, but funding it with short-term deposits or short-term bonds. Outside of a bank, the activity involves taking a mortgage or other kind of longer-term loan, bundling it with other loans, and selling it to investors—including pension funds, insurers, or corporations with large amounts of idle cash, like Apple—as securities that mature far more quickly than the loans they contain. The risks here are the same as at the banks, but with a twist: if people and companies can’t pay off the loans on the schedule that the lenders anticipated, all the investors risk losing money. Unlike small depositors at banks, shadow banks don’t have recourse to government deposit insurance. Nor can shadow-financing participants go to the Federal Reserve for emergency funding during a crisis—though, in many cases, they wouldn’t have to: pensioners and insurance policyholders generally don’t have the right to remove their money from pension funds and insurers overnight, as many bank investors do.
Understood broadly, shadow banking is nothing new, encompassing everything from corporate bond markets to payday lending. And much of it isn’t very shadowy; as a recent U.S. Treasury report noted, the government “prefers to transition to a different term, ‘market-based finance,’ ” because applying the term “shadow banking” to entities like insurance companies could “imply insufficient regulatory oversight,” when some such sectors (though not all) are highly regulated. It isn’t always easy to separate real banks from shadow banks, moreover. Just as before the financial crisis, banks continue to offer shadow investments, such as mortgage-backed securities or bundled corporate loans, and, conversely, banks also lend money to private-equity funds and other shadow lenders, so that they, in turn, can lend to companies.
Such market-based finance has its merits; sound reasons exist for why a pension-fund administrator doesn’t just deposit tens of billions of dollars at the bank, withdrawing the money over time to meet retirees’ needs. For people and institutions willing, and able, to take on more risk, market-based finance can offer higher interest rates—an especially important consideration when the government keeps official interest rates close to zero, as it did from 2008 to 2016. Shadow finance also offers competition for companies, people, and governments unable to borrow from banks cheaply, or whose needs—say, a multi-hundred-billion-dollar bond to buy another company—would be beyond the prudent coverage capacity of a single bank or even a group of banks.
Theoretically, bond markets and other market-based finance instruments make the financial system safer by diversifying risk. A bank holding a large concentration of loans to one company faces a major default risk. Dispersing that risk to dozens or hundreds of buyers in the global marketplace means—again, in theory—that in a default, lots of people and institutions will suffer a little pain, rather than one bank suffering a lot of pain.
But too much of a good thing is sometimes not so good, and, in this case, the extension of shadow banking threatens to reintroduce the risks that innovation was supposed to reduce. Recent growth in shadow banking isn’t serving to disperse risk or to tailor innovative products to meet borrowers’ needs. Two less promising reasons explain its expansion. One is to enable borrowers and lenders to skirt the rules—capital cushions—that constrain lending at banks. The other—after a decade of record-low, near-zero interest rates as Federal Reserve policy—is to allow borrowers and lenders to find investments that pay higher returns.
The world of market-based finance has indeed grown. Between 2002 and 2007, the eve of the financial crisis, the world’s nonbank financial assets increased from $30 trillion to $60 trillion, or 124 percent of GDP. Now these assets, at $160 trillion, constitute 148 percent of GDP. Back then, such assets made up about a quarter of the world’s financial assets; today, they account for nearly half (48 percent), reports the Financial Stability Board (FSB).
Within this pool of nonbank assets, the FSB has devised a “narrower” measure of shadow banking that identifies the types of companies likely to pose the most systemic risk to the economy—those most susceptible, that is, to sudden, bank-like liquidity or solvency panics. The FSB believes that pension funds and insurance companies could largely withstand short-term market downturns, so it doesn’t include them in this riskier category. That leaves $45 trillion in narrow shadow institutions and investments, a full 72 percent of it held in instruments “with features that make them susceptible to runs.” That’s up from $28 trillion in 2010—or from 66 percent to 73 percent of GDP.
Of that $45 trillion market, the U.S. has the largest portion: $14 trillion. (Though, as the FSB explains, separation by jurisdiction may be misleading; Chinese investment vehicles, for example, have sold hundreds of billions of dollars in credit products to local investors to spend on property abroad, affecting Western asset prices.) Compared with this $14 trillion figure, American commercial banks’ assets are worth just shy of $17 trillion, up from about $12 trillion right before the financial crisis. Banks as well as nonbank lenders have grown, in other words, but the banks have done so under far stricter oversight.
An analysis of one particular area of shadow financing shows the potential for a new type of chaos. A decade ago, an “exchange-traded fund,” or ETF, was mostly a vehicle to help people and institutions invest in stocks. An investor wanting to invest in a stock portfolio but without enough resources to buy, say, 100 shares apiece in several different companies, could purchase shares in an ETF that made such investments. These stock-backed ETFs carried risk, of course: if the stock market went down, the value of the ETF tracking the stocks would go down, too. But an investor likely could sell the fund quickly; the ETF was liquid because the underlying stocks were liquid.
Over the past decade, though, a new creature has emerged: bond-based ETFs. A bond ETF works the same way as a stock ETF: an investor interested in purchasing debt securities but without the financial resources to buy individual bonds—usually requiring several thousand dollars of outlay at once—can purchase shares in a fund that invests in these bonds. Since 2005, bond ETFs have grown from negligible to a market just shy of $800 billion—nearly 10 percent of the value of the U.S. corporate bond market.
These bond ETFs are riskier, in at least one way, than stock ETFs. Some bond ETFs, of course, invest solely in high-quality federal, municipal, and corporate debt—bonds highly unlikely to default in droves. Default, though, isn’t the only risk: suddenly higher global interest rates could cause bond funds to lose value (as new bonds, with the higher interest rates, would be more attractive). And with the exception of federal-government debt, even the highest-quality bonds aren’t as liquid as stocks; they have maturities ranging anywhere from hours remaining to 100 years.
Investors in bond-based ETFs, then, face a much bigger “liquidity” and “maturity” mismatch risk. If the investors want to sell their ETF shares in a hurry, the fund managers might not be able to sell the underlying bonds quickly to repay them, particularly in a tense market. That’s especially true, since bond markets are even less liquid than they were pre–financial crisis. Because of new regulations on “market making,” banks will be highly unlikely to buy bonds in a declining market to make a buck later, after the panic subsides.
(ALBERTO MENA)
Alook at a related type of debt-based ETF raises even bigger mismatch concerns. “In 2017, investors poured $11.5 billion into U.S. mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that invest in high-yield bank loans,” notes Douglas J. Peebles, chief investment officer of fixed-income—bonds—at the AllianceBernstein investment outfit. A high-yield bank loan is one that carries particular risk, such as a loan to a company with a poor credit rating or to a company borrowing money to merge with another firm or to expand; the “yield” refers to the higher interest rate required to compensate for this risk. Rather than keep this loan on its books, the bank is selling it, in these cases, to the exchange-traded funds that are a rising component of shadow banking.
This new demand has induced lending that otherwise wouldn’t exist—in many cases, for good reason. “The quality of today’s bank loans has declined,” Peebles observes, because “strong demand has been promoting lax lending and sketchy supply. . . . Companies know that high demand means they can borrow at favorable rates.” Further, says Peebles, “first-time, lower-rated issuers”—companies without a good track record of repaying debt—are responsible for the recent boom in loan borrowers, from fewer than 300 institutions in 2007 to closer to 900 today. The number of bank-loan ETFs (and similar “open-ended” funds) expanded from just two in 1992 to 250 in June 2018.
Peebles worries as well about the extra risk that this financing mechanism poses to investors. “In the past, banks viewed the loans as investments that would stay on their balance sheets,” he explains, but now that banks sell them to ETFs, “most investors today own high-yield bank loans through mutual funds or ETFs, highly liquid instruments. . . . But the underlying bank loan market is less liquid than the high-yield bond market,” with trades “tak[ing] weeks to settle.” He warns: “When the tide turns, strategies like these are bound to run into trouble.”
The peril to the economy isn’t just that current investors could lose money in a crisis, though big drops in asset markets typically lead people to curtail consumer spending, deepening a recession. The bigger danger is a repeat of 2008: fear of losses on existing investments might lead shadow-market lenders to cut off credit to all potential new borrowers, even worthy ones. Banks, because they’re dependent on shadow banks to buy their loans, would be unlikely to fill the vacuum. “Although non-bank credit can act as a substitute for bank credit when banks curtail the extension of credit, non-bank and bank credit can also move in lockstep, potentially amplifying credit booms and busts,” says the FSB. The porous borders between the supposedly riskier parts of the nonbank financial markets—ETFs—and the less risky ones also could work against a fast recovery in a crisis. Thanks to recent regulatory changes, insurance companies, for example, are set to become big purchasers of bond ETF shares.
Worsening this hazard, just as with the collateralized debt securities of the financial meltdown, many bond-based ETFs contain similar securities. Such duplication could eradicate the diversification benefit that the economy supposedly gets from dispersing risk. Contagion would be accelerated by the fact that debt-based ETFs, like stock-based ETFs, must “price” themselves continuously during the day, according to perceived future losses; this, in effect, introduces the risk of stock-market-style volatility into long-term bond markets. (Bond-based mutual funds, of course, have existed for decades, but they did not trade like stocks and thus did not feature this particular risk.) Via the plunging price of collateralized debt obligations, we saw, in 2008, what happened to the availability of long-term credit when exposed to the pricing signals of an equity-style crash, but those collateralized debt obligations traded far less frequently than bond ETFs do today. Bond ETFs may be more efficient, yes, in reflecting any given day’s value; that supposed benefit could also allow a panic to spread more rapidly.
During the last global panic, the answer to getting credit flowing again—so that companies could perform critical tasks, such as meeting payrolls, before revenue from sales came in—was to provide extraordinary government support to the large banks. But even if one believes that such bailouts are a sensible approach to financial crises—a highly tenuous position—how would the government provide longer-term support to hundreds of individual funds, to ensure that the broader market keeps functioning for credit-card and longer-term corporate debt? This would greatly expand the government safety net over supposedly risk-embracing financial markets—by even more than it was expanded a decade ago.
“When both regular banks and shadow banks are tapped out, we may need shadow-shadow finance to take up the slack.”
Unwise lending also harms borrowers. Private-equity firms, too, are increasingly lending companies money, instead of just buying those firms outright, their older model. As the Financial Times recently reported, private-equity funds—or, more accurately, their related private-credit funds—have more than $150 billion in money available for investment. They make loans that banks won’t, or can’t, make, though this is leading banks to take greater risks to compete. “It’s been great for borrowers,” says Richard Farley, chair of law firm Kramer Levin’s leveraged-finance group, as “there are deals that would not be financed,” or would not be financed on such favorable terms.
Competition is usually healthy, and risky finance can spark innovation that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. But easy lending can also make economic cycles more violent. Even in boom years, excess debt can plunge firms that otherwise might muddle through a recession deep into crisis, or even cause them to fail, adding to layoffs and consumer-spending cutbacks. We can see this happening already, as the Financial Times reports, with bankrupt firms like Charming Charlie, an accessories store that expanded too fast; Six Month Smiles, an orthodontic concern; and Southern Technical Institute, a for-profit technical college.
The numbers are troubling. The expansion of shadow banking has unquestionably brought a pileup of debt. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a trade group, estimates that U.S. bond markets, overall, have swollen from $31 trillion to nearly $42 trillion since 2008. Federal government borrowing accounts for a lot of that, but not close to all of it. The corporate-bond market, for example, went from $5.5 trillion to $9.1 trillion over the same decade. Corporations, in other words, owe almost twice as much today in bond obligations as they did a decade ago. That’s sure to make it harder for some, at least, to recover from any future downturn.
There are policy approaches to resolving these debt issues. An unpopular idea would be to treat markets that act like banks, as banks—requiring ETFs, say, to hold the same capital cushions and adhere to the same prudence standards as banks. In the end, though, the bigger problem is cultural and political. What we’re seeing, more than a decade after the financial crisis, results from the government’s mixed signals about financial markets. On the one hand, the U.S. government, along with its global counterparts, realized in 2008 that debt had reached unsustainable levels; that’s partly why it sharply raised bank capital requirements. On the other hand, the government recognized that the economy is critically dependent on debt. Absent large increases in workers’ pay, consumer and corporate debt slowdowns would stall the economy’s until-recently modest growth. That’s why the U.S. and other Western governments have kept interest rates so low, for so long.
Thus, we find ourselves with safer banks but scarier shadows. Global debt levels are now $247 trillion, or 318 percent, of world GDP, according to the Institute of International Finance, up from $142 trillion owed in 2007, or 269 percent of GDP. When both regular banks and shadow banks are tapped out, we may have to invent shadow-shadow finance to take up the slack.
Nicole Gelinas is a City Journal contributing editor, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street—and Washington.

 

 

 

Maxine Wants Revenge



"La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froide" (“revenge is a dish best served cold”) is an oft-cited proverb from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, published in 1782. A good line in a book or play, but a mentality that should have no place in the business of public policy. Such is not the case.
Last month an elected representative publicly stated that revenge is a part of her motivation and agenda when Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) told a constituent gathering in Los Angeles that she is “going to do to you what you did to us.”  The “you” Waters was referring to are players in the mortgage and banking industry. The odd twist here is that Waters is planning revenge on institutions for doing what she herself instructed them to do.
Waters, who was easily re-elected in the 2018 midterms with nearly 76% of votes cast, represents California’s 43rd congressional district which includes much of south-central Los Angeles. She appears poised to chair the House Financial Services Committee when Democrats assume control of the House of Representatives in January.
In a speech at The Proud Bird, a historic restaurant in L.A., Waters made clear her intentions upon assuming the chairmanship:
"I have not forgotten you foreclosed on our houses. I have not forgotten that you undermined our community. I have not forgotten that you sold us those exotic products, had us sign on the line for junk and for mess we could not afford. …What am I going to do you? What I’m going to do you is fair, I’m going to do to you what you did to us!”
A sitting House representative threatening U.S. businesses with retribution is remarkable enough, but retribution for what?
Apart from the dismissal of personal responsibility inherent in the idea that people were somehow forced into purchasing something they couldn’t afford, of note here is how the situation came about in the first place; how citizens of Waters’ community found themselves able to qualify for mortgages that were beyond their financial means. Making such loans is not in a lending institution’s best interests, so why would one do it? The institutions did it because Maxine Waters, among others, forced them to.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s a small cadre of House Democrats, most prominently Waters and Barney Frank (D-MA), worked in cahoots with then-CEO of Fannie Mae,Franklin Raines, to loosen mortgage lending standards and practices for the purpose of making homeownership a reality for a greater number of economically disadvantaged Americans. (Raines was subsequently embroiled in a scandal at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that resulted in him having to pay a record $24.7 million settlement.)
At the time Waters heaped praise upon banks and lending institutions for allowing people to sign on the line for loans they could not afford, saying in aSeptember 2003 hearing of the House Committee on Financial Services:
"Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and in particular at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines. Everything in the 1992 act has worked just fine. In fact, the GSEs have exceeded their housing goals. What we need to do today is to focus on the regulator, and this must be done in a manner so as not to impede their affordable housing mission, a mission that has seen innovation flourish from desktop underwriting to 100 percent loans.”
In later comments during the hearing, Waters made clear the true mission for Fannie and Freddie that Democrats had in mind, which was finding ways to get minorities into mortgaged houses even if they could not meet qualification requirements for standard loans, such as the ability to bring a down payment to the closing transaction or to borrow an amount in excess of typical underwriting limits.
“Since the inception of goals from 1993 to 2002, loans to African-Americans increased 219 percent and loans to Hispanics increased 244 percent, while loans to non-minorities increased 62 percent. Additionally, in 2001, 43.1 percent of Fannie Mae’s single-family business served low-and moderate-income borrowers….”
Congressional and public records alike show that at the time Waters was a staunch opponent of anything resembling more oversight of lenders or lending practices; thus, more and more loans were made to those least able to pay them back and most likely to default on them.
And default they have, which brings the story full circle to last month when Waters vowed revenge on those banks and lenders that have “done this” to her constituent communities. Sadly, many in those communities believe it. They believe the reason they lost their homes is because when they fell behind on payments and were foreclosed upon, it was because those big banks forced them to take out a loan they couldn’t afford -- without realizing that their congressional representative forced those banks to lend them the money in the first place.
As for Waters’ accusation of banking having done this “to us,” at last check there have been no foreclosure proceedings brought against her $4.69 million, 8-bedroom, 5-bathroom, 6,100-square-foot West Hollywood mansion.



THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOYS & GIRLS IN CONGRESS GATHER ROUND TO UNLEASH THE WHOLESALE LOOTING OF THEIR BANKSTER PAYMASTERS EVEN MORE….
BOTTOMLESS BAILOUTS AROUND THE CORNER WAITING!

After eight years of the Dodd-Frank bank “reform,” the American financial oligarchy exercises its dictatorship over society and the government more firmly than ever. This unaccountable elite will not tolerate even the most minimal limits on its ability to plunder the economy for its own personal gain.

  

“Democrats Move Towards ‘Oligarchical 

Socialism,’ Says Forecaster Joel Kotkin.”


NO POL IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS THAN 

BARACK OBAMA, AND HE DID IT BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE. What 

did the Wall Street banksters know that took us so long to find out???


"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."  

 Obama, of course, covered up his own role, depicting his presidency as eight years of heroic efforts to repair the damage caused by the 2008 financial crash. At the end of those eight years, however, Wall Street and the financial oligarchy were fully recovered, enjoying record wealth, while working people were poorer than before, a widening social chasm that made possible the election of the billionaire con man and Demagogue in November 2016.

“The response of the administration was to rush to the defense of the banks. Even before coming to power, Obama expressed his unconditional support for the bailouts, which he subsequently expanded. He assembled an administration 
dominated by the interests of finance capital, symbolized by economic adviser Lawrence Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.”

Trump criticized Dimon in 2013 for supposedly contributing to the country’s economic downturn. “I’m not Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion to settle a case and then pays $11 billion to settle a case and who I think is the worst banker in the United States,” he told reporters.

10 years after the 

financial crisis, 

Americans are divided on security of U.S. economic system


A decade after the 2008 financial crisis, the public is about evenly split on whether the U.S. economic system is more secure today than it was then. About half of Americans (48%) say the system is more secure today than it was before the 2008 crisis, while roughly as many (46%) say it is no more secure.
Opinions have changed since 2015 and 2013, when majorities said the economic system was no more secure than it had been prior to the crisis (63% in both years), according to the new survey, conducted Sept. 18-24 among 1,754 adults.
Republicans are now far more likely to view the system as more secure than they were during Barack Obama’s presidency. Three years ago, just 22% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the economic system was more secure than before the crisis. Today, the share saying the same has increased 48 percentage points to 70%.
Views among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have moved in the opposite direction. Today, Democrats are less confident that the economy is more secure than it was before the 2008 financial crisis: Just a third say the economy is more secure – a drop of 13 percentage points from 2015 (46%).
Meanwhile, the public’s views of current economic conditions – and the trajectory of the U.S. economy over the next year – have changed little since March.
About half of Americans (51%) now rate the national economy as excellent or good, among the most positive measures in nearly two decades.
As has been the case since Donald Trump took office, Republicans are far more positive than Democrats about economic conditions: 73% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say economic conditions are excellent or good while just 35% of Democrats and Democratic leaners agree.
Partisans also are divided in their expectations for the economy. Republicans (57%) are much more likely than Democrats (12%) to say they expect the national economy to get better in the next year. Partisan differences in opinions about the economy – current and future – are about as wide as they were in March.
Similarly, there has been little recent change in Americans’ views of their own financial situations. About half (49%) say their finances are in excellent or good shape.
Partisan differences in people’s assessments of their personal finances, which were modest during most of Obama’s presidency, have increased since then.
A majority of Republicans (61%) say their personal financial situation is excellent or good, compared with about four-in-ten Democrats and Democratic leaners (41%).
Most Americans remain optimistic about their personal financial future. Almost seven-in-ten adults (68%) expect their financial situation to improve some or a lot over the next year. Republicans (79%) more than Democrats (59%) are optimistic about their finances getting better next year.
Note: See full topline results and methodology here (PDF). 








Fannie Mae and 'Freddie Maxine'

https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/stephen-moore/fannie-mae-and-freddie-maxine

 By Stephen Moore | November 13, 2018 | 8:43 AM EST
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California appears a lock to become the next chairman of the House's powerful Financial Services Committee. Waters is pledging to be a diligent watchdog for mom and pop investors, and recently told a crowd that when it comes to the big banks, investment houses and insurance companies, "We are going to do to them what they did to us." I'm not going to cry too many tears for Wall Street since they poured money behind the Democrats in these midterm elections. You get what you pay for.
But here we go again asking the fox to guard the henhouse.
Back during he the financial crisis of 2008 to 2009, which wiped out trillions of dollars of the wealth and retirement savings of middle-class families, we put the two major arsonists in charge of putting out the fire. Former Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts were the co-sponsors of the infamous Dodd-Frank regulations. Readers will recall that good old Barney resisted every attempt to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and said he wanted to "roll the dice" on the housing market. That worked out well.
Meanwhile, Dodd took graft payments in the form of low-interest loans from Countrywide, while greasing the skids for the housing lenders in these years. Instead of going to jail or at least being dishonorably discharged from Congress, he wrote the Dodd-Frank bill to regulate the banks.
Enter Maxine Waters. Back in 2009, I had a run-in with "Mad Maxine," as she is called on Capitol Hill. The two of us appeared together on HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher," and when she pontificated about the misdeeds of the housing lobby, I confronted her on the money she took from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac PACs for her campaign.
Here is how the conversation went:
MAHER: Don't you think Wall Street needs regulation? That's where the problem is: that there was no regulation.
MOORE: Well, let's talk about regulation. One of the biggest institutions that have failed this year was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This is an institution that your friends, the Democrats, in fact, you, Congresswoman Waters, did not want to regulate. You said it wasn't broke five years ago at a congressional hearing, and you took $15,000 of campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie.
WATERS: No, I didn't.
MOORE: Yeah, you did. It's in the FEC (Federal Election Commission) records.
WATERS: No, it's not.
MOORE: And so did Barney Frank. And so did Chris Dodd.
WATERS: That is a lie, and I challenge you to find $15,000 that I took from Fannie PAC.
I have to confess that Waters is very persuasive. I feared when the show was over that I had gotten my numbers wrong and that I had falsely charged the congresswoman of corruption. But several fact-checking groups looked it up, and sure enough, I was right. She took $15,000 from the PAC and another $17,000, all told.
I was also right about her statements during a 2004 congressional hearing when she said:
"Through nearly a dozen hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something (Fannie and Freddie) that wasn't broke. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin Raines."
We learned the hard way just four years later; this was all a fraudulent claim to avoid oversight of her campaign contributors. Imagine if a Republican had said these things.
She took in more than $100,000 from Wall Street this year as well. None of this is illegal, but it calls into question her shakedown tactics. First, she threatens to put their head in a noose as chairman of the Financial Services Committee — as she is getting them to pony up campaign contributions. Pay to play? You decide.
Waters has had run-ins with the House Ethics Committee because of fundraising tactics and insider wheeling and dealing. Back during the financial crisis, she was suspected of helping arrange meetings with Treasury Department officials and getting bailout money for OneUnited, a troubled bank that her family owned major stock holdings in. She beat the rap of corruption, but it sure smelled bad.
So will Maxine Waters be the crusading financial protector of our 401k plans and save America from the next financial bubble? Well, there will certainly be lots of harassment and shakedowns. But don't count on her steering us clear of Wall Street excesses. If history is any guide, Mad Maxine will be way too busy raising money from the people she is now in charge of regulating.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy."



The global banking system has historically played both sides of major conflicts through war financing, and drawing out the battles by providing funds beyond what each country could have otherwise spent.

Why Banks Love War & the War Economy
 By Stephen Moore | November 13, 2018 | 8:43 AM EST
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California appears a lock to become the next chairman of the House's powerful Financial Services Committee. Waters is pledging to be a diligent watchdog for mom and pop investors, and recently told a crowd that when it comes to the big banks, investment houses and insurance companies, "We are going to do to them what they did to us." I'm not going to cry too many tears for Wall Street since they poured money behind the Democrats in these midterm elections. You get what you pay for.
But here we go again asking the fox to guard the henhouse.
Back during he the financial crisis of 2008 to 2009, which wiped out trillions of dollars of the wealth and retirement savings of middle-class families, we put the two major arsonists in charge of putting out the fire. Former Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts were the co-sponsors of the infamous Dodd-Frank regulations. Readers will recall that good old Barney resisted every attempt to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and said he wanted to "roll the dice" on the housing market. That worked out well.
Meanwhile, Dodd took graft payments in the form of low-interest loans from Countrywide, while greasing the skids for the housing lenders in these years. Instead of going to jail or at least being dishonorably discharged from Congress, he wrote the Dodd-Frank bill to regulate the banks.
Enter Maxine Waters. Back in 2009, I had a run-in with "Mad Maxine," as she is called on Capitol Hill. The two of us appeared together on HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher," and when she pontificated about the misdeeds of the housing lobby, I confronted her on the money she took from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac PACs for her campaign.
Here is how the conversation went:
MAHER: Don't you think Wall Street needs regulation? That's where the problem is: that there was no regulation.
MOORE: Well, let's talk about regulation. One of the biggest institutions that have failed this year was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This is an institution that your friends, the Democrats, in fact, you, Congresswoman Waters, did not want to regulate. You said it wasn't broke five years ago at a congressional hearing, and you took $15,000 of campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie.
WATERS: No, I didn't.
MOORE: Yeah, you did. It's in the FEC (Federal Election Commission) records.
WATERS: No, it's not.
MOORE: And so did Barney Frank. And so did Chris Dodd.
WATERS: That is a lie, and I challenge you to find $15,000 that I took from Fannie PAC.
I have to confess that Waters is very persuasive. I feared when the show was over that I had gotten my numbers wrong and that I had falsely charged the congresswoman of corruption. But several fact-checking groups looked it up, and sure enough, I was right. She took $15,000 from the PAC and another $17,000, all told.
I was also right about her statements during a 2004 congressional hearing when she said:
"Through nearly a dozen hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something (Fannie and Freddie) that wasn't broke. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin Raines."
We learned the hard way just four years later; this was all a fraudulent claim to avoid oversight of her campaign contributors. Imagine if a Republican had said these things.
She took in more than $100,000 from Wall Street this year as well. None of this is illegal, but it calls into question her shakedown tactics. First, she threatens to put their head in a noose as chairman of the Financial Services Committee — as she is getting them to pony up campaign contributions. Pay to play? You decide.
Waters has had run-ins with the House Ethics Committee because of fundraising tactics and insider wheeling and dealing. Back during the financial crisis, she was suspected of helping arrange meetings with Treasury Department officials and getting bailout money for OneUnited, a troubled bank that her family owned major stock holdings in. She beat the rap of corruption, but it sure smelled bad.
So will Maxine Waters be the crusading financial protector of our 401k plans and save America from the next financial bubble? Well, there will certainly be lots of harassment and shakedowns. But don't count on her steering us clear of Wall Street excesses. If history is any guide, Mad Maxine will be way too busy raising money from the people she is now in charge of regulating.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy."

*

“A series of recent polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular disgust with capitalism and support for socialism. In May of 2017, in a survey conducted by the Union of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said they would participate in a “large-scale uprising.” Nine out of 10 agreed with the statement, “Banks and money rule the world.”

White House report on socialism

The specter of Marx haunts the 

 

American ruling class


Last month, the Council of Economic Advisers, an agency of the Trump White House, released an extraordinary report titled “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.” The report begins with the statement: “Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse. Detailed policy proposals from self-declared socialists are gaining support in Congress and among much of the younger electorate.”

The very fact that the US government 
officially acknowledges a growth of popular 
support for socialism, particularly among the 
nation’s youth, testifies to vast changes taking
place in the political consciousness of the 
working class and the terror this is striking 
within the ruling elite. America is, after all, a 
country where anti-communism was for the 
greater part of a century a state-sponsored 
secular religion. No ruling class has so 
ruthlessly sought to exclude socialist politics 
from political discourse as the American ruling
class.

The 70-page document is itself an inane right-wing screed. It seeks to discredit socialism by identifying it with capitalist countries such as Venezuela that have expanded state ownership of parts of the economy while protecting private ownership of the banks, and, with the post-2008 collapse of oil and other commodity prices, increasingly attacked the living standards of the working class.

It identifies socialism with proposals for mild social reform such as “Medicare for all,” raised and increasingly abandoned by a section of the Democratic Party. It cites Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher to promote the virtues of “economic freedom,” i.e., the unrestrained operation of the capitalist market, and to denounce all social reforms, business regulations, tax increases or anything else that impinges on the oligarchy’s self-enrichment.

The report’s arguments and themes find expression in the fascistic campaign speeches of Donald Trump, who routinely and absurdly attacks the Democrats as socialists and accuses them of seeking to turn America into another “socialist” Venezuela.

What has prompted this effort to blackguard socialism?

A series of recent polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular disgust with capitalism and support for socialism. In May of 2017, in a survey conducted by the Union of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said they would participate in a “large-scale uprising.” Nine out of 10 agreed with the statement, “Banks and money rule the world.”

Last November, a poll conducted by YouGov showed that 51 percent of Americans between the ages of 21 and 29 would prefer to live in a socialist or communist country than in a capitalist country.
In August of this year, a Gallup poll found that for the first time 
since the organization began tracking the figure, fewer than half 
of Americans aged 18–29 had a positive view of capitalism, while
more than half had a positive view of socialism. The 
percentage of young people viewing 
capitalism positively fell from 68 percent 
in 2010 to 45 percent this year, a 23-
percentage point drop in just eight years.

This surge in interest in socialism is bound up with a resurgence of class struggle in the US and internationally. In the United States, the number of major strikes so far this year, 21, is triple the number in 2017. The ruling class was particularly terrified by the teachers’ walkouts earlier this year because the biggest strikes were organized by rank-and-file educators in a rebellion against the unions, reflecting the weakening grip of the pro-corporate organizations that have suppressed the class struggle for decades.
The growth of the class struggle is an objective process that is driven by the global crisis of capitalism, which finds its most acute social and political expression in the center of world capitalism—the United States. It is the class struggle that provides the key to the fight for genuine socialism.

Masses of workers and youth are being driven into struggle and politically radicalized by decades of uninterrupted war and the staggering growth of social inequality. This process has accelerated during the 10 years since the Wall Street crash of 2008. The Obama years saw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in history, the escalation of the wars begun under Bush and their spread to Libya, Syria and Yemen, and the intensification of mass surveillance, attacks on immigrants and other police state measures.

This paved the way for the elevation of Trump, the personification of the criminality and backwardness of the ruling oligarchy.
Under conditions where the typical CEO in the US now makes in a single day almost as much as the average worker makes in an entire year, and the net worth of the 400 wealthiest Americans has doubled over the past decade, the working class is looking for a radical alternative to the status quo. As the Socialist Equality Party wrote in its program eight years ago, “The Breakdown of Capitalism and the Fight for Socialism in the United States”:
The change in objective conditions, however, will lead American workers to change their minds. The reality of capitalism will provide workers with many reasons to fight for a fundamental and revolutionary change in the economic organization of society.
The response of the ruling class is two-fold. First, the abandonment of bourgeois democratic forms of rule and the turn toward dictatorship. The run-up to the midterm elections has revealed the advanced stage of these preparations, with Trump’s fascistic attacks on immigrants, deployment of troops to the border, threats to gun down unarmed men, women and children seeking asylum, and his pledge to overturn the 14th Amendment establishing birthright citizenship.
That this has evoked no serious opposition from the Democrats and the media makes clear that the entire ruling class is united around a turn to authoritarianism. Indeed, the Democrats are spearheading the drive to censor the internet in order to silence left-wing and socialist opposition.
The second response is to promote phony socialists such as Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and other pseudo-left organizations in order to confuse the working class and channel its opposition back behind the Democratic Party.
In 2018, with Sanders totally integrated into the Democratic Party leadership, this role has been largely delegated to the DSA, which functions as an arm of the Democrats. Two DSA members, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Rashida Tlaib in Detroit, are likely to win seats in the House of Representatives as candidates of the Democratic Party.
The closer they come to taking office, the more they seek to distance themselves from their supposed socialist affiliation. Ocasio-Cortez, for example, joined Sanders in eulogizing the recently deceased war-monger John McCain, refused to answer when asked if she opposed the US wars in the Middle East, and dropped her campaign call for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

OBAMA: SERVANT OF THE 1%


Richest one percent controls nearly half of global wealth


The richest one percent of the world’s population now controls 48.2 percent of global wealth, up from 46 percent last year.




Supreme Court Considers Who Bears Responsibility for Security Fraud

December 3, 2018 Updated: December 3, 2018
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An investment banker who sent deceptive emails dramatically overstating the financial health of a failing clean energy company shouldn’t be held responsible for securities fraud because he was only following his supervisor’s directions, the man’s attorney told a skeptical Supreme Court.
U.S. securities laws forbid those offering securities for sale from making false statements or participating in fraudulent schemes. Whether a person who merely passes the bad information along is legally liable is at issue in this case.
The company, Waste2Energy Holdings Inc. of Neptune Beach, Florida, founded in 2007, went out of business in 2013 after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company had hoped to develop technology to convert waste into energy but failed to do so.
In 2009 Francis V. Lorenzo, then the director of investment banking at the brokerage Charles Vista LLC, emailed prospective investors offering for sale $15 million in debentures secured only by W2E’s earning capacity.
The emails indicated that W2E had $10 million in assets and purchase orders north of $40 million, and that the brokerage was willing to raise money to repay investors if needed.
But at the time the emails were sent, the company had already acknowledged that an audit had determined its assets were worth much less than $1 million.
Lorenzo’s boss and the brokers settled the claims the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought but Lorenzo refused. An SEC administrative law judge found Lorenzo’s superior drafted the emails but that Lorenzo had nonetheless broken the law by sending them because they contained false information about W2E’s financial situation.
The SEC banished Lorenzo from the securities industry for life and imposed a $15,000 civil penalty.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against Lorenzo in 2017, finding that he participated in a scheme to defraud investors by sending the misleading emails even though he was not deemed to have made the untrue statements himself.
Lorenzo disagreed with the circuit court and the Supreme Court decided June 18 to hear his appeal. He argues that at most he may have aided and abetted a fraudulent scheme as a “secondary” violator of securities laws.
Borrowing language from the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 2011 case, Janus Capital Group Inc. v. First Derivative Traders, Lorenzo argued that because he did not have “ultimate authority over the statement, including its content and whether and how to communicate it,” he cannot be held liable under Rule 10-5(b) of the Securities Exchange Act. The rule forbids fraudulent schemes or devices, making false statements, and engaging in fraud that harms investors.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who sat on the circuit court panel at the time, dissented from its majority opinion, writing that Lorenzo hadn’t violated securities laws. “How could [petitioner] have intentionally deceived the clients when he did not draft the emails, did not think about the contents of the emails, and sent the emails only at his boss’s direction?”
Kavanaugh recused himself from the Supreme Court case, leaving the other eight justices to participate in oral arguments Dec. 3.

Justices Have Doubts

During those oral arguments, Lorenzo’s attorney, Robert Heim, said that sending the email was not an inherently deceptive act. Justice Neil Gorsuch appeared to agree that Lorenzo was not the author of the false statements in the emails.
But Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito, and Sonia Sotomayor seemed to disagree with Heim.
Ginsburg asked Heim why it wasn’t “inherently deceptive to send a succession of untruths?”
“Lorenzo is essentially a conduit,” Heim replied. “He’s somebody that’s transmitting statements … on behalf of another … simply sending an e-mail is not enough to transform Frank Lorenzo into a primary violator from, perhaps, somebody who gave substantial assistance.
The language of the statutes and the rules make “a clear distinction between statements and … conduct.”
Alito asked why Lorenzo’s behavior wouldn’t “fall squarely” within the language of the rule used by the SEC.
Sotomayor was just as blunt, telling Heim: “I’m having a problem from the beginning. Once you concede … that you’re not challenging that your client acted with an intent to deceive or defraud, that you aren’t challenging the D.C. Circuit’s conclusion to that effect? Is that correct?”
Heim replied, “Yes, Your Honor.”
Sotomayor continued: “I don’t understand, once you concede that mental state, and he has the act of putting together the email and encouraging customers to call him with questions, not to call his boss with questions, how could that standing alone give away your case?
“That makes him both the maker of a false statement, but it’s also engaging in an act, practice, or course of conduct which operates or would operate as a fraud or deceit.”
The Trump administration argues the treatment Lorenzo received at the hands of the SEC was just.

“I don’t think you’re likely to see a … more 

egregious fraud than this,” Christopher Michel, 

assistant to the solicitor general, told the justices.

CRIMINAL GLOBALIST BANKSTERS AND THE POLITICIANS THEY BOUGHT:

The Story of Goldman Sachs and Clinton, Obama and Trump corruption.
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores, and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s OBAMANOMICS TO SERVE THE RICH AND GLOBALIST BILLIONAIRES.