JP Morgan Chase now rates the probability of a recession in 2019 at one in three, compared with its assessment of between 8 and 27 percent a year ago.
"Wall Street billionaires are pushing a new plan to swipe the profits of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from U.S. taxpayers–and in the process revive the system of privatized-profits and public-risk that contributed to the severity of the Great Financial Crisis."
CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR
BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS TIGHTER WITH THE
PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON, OBAMA or TRUMP?
The Clinton White House
famously abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial
and investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall Street firms and led to major bank mergers that some
analysts say helped contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.
Bill and Hillary Clinton
raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial
firms, including Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from
speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.
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.
"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."
CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR BANKSTERS
AT GOLDMAN SACHS WHO IS TIGHTER
WITH THE PLUNDERING BANKSTERS?
CLINTON, OBAMA or TRUMP?
The Clinton White House famously abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial and investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall Street firms and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.
Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.
Global conditions fuel Wall Street
sell-off
22 November 2018
The wave of selling that hit Wall Street for the first two days of this week eased yesterday, as markets remained flat. It was significant, however, that gains made during the course of the day, which saw the Dow Jones index up by as much as 200 points, were lost by the close of trading.
The Dow shed a total of around 900 points on Monday and Tuesday, while the S&P 500 index dropped by 3.5 percent, with an 8.5 percent fall in the value of Apple, the world’s largest company by market value.
The market has been trending down since the start of October, led largely by high-tech stocks, the so-called Faangs—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google’s parent company Alphabet—but this week the sell-off widened.
One factor appears to be that while companies have reported higher earnings and sales so far this year, there are doubts about whether this will continue in 2019 as the impact of the Trump administration’s corporate and income tax cuts begins to wear off.
The fall in Apple, for example, has been triggered by cuts in the production of its three latest models, released in September, with the company saying it would no longer issue figures for individual unit sales. Companies that supply the tech giant have reported reduced orders for components in the new models.
Apple has fallen by more than 20 percent since
its high in October, losing $265 billion in
market value, more than the entire market
capitalisation of firms such as the drug
company Pfizer, the Wells Fargo bank and the
retail firm Procter and Gamble.
Overall, the Faangs have lost $1 trillion in market value since their October peaks, equivalent to almost half the value of the companies that make up London’s FTSE 100 index.
In another indication of the extent of the sell-off, the tech-heavy NASDAQ index has shed all the gains it made this year, a situation that is close to being replicated across the broader market.
While many causes are at work, the market turbulence is being fuelled by three broad global processes: signs of a slowing global economy after an upturn in 2017, the intensification of the trade war that centres on, but is not confined to, the conflict between the US and China, and tightening monetary conditions.
Last year, on the back of growth rate increases in a number of key global regions, the prospect was held out for “synchronised” world growth and a return to levels, if not reaching, then at least trending toward, those attained before the 2008 financial crisis. This has not eventuated. After a brief upturn, euro zone growth recorded its lowest level in the third quarter of 2018 for more than five years, with an actual contraction in the leading economy, Germany.
A further indicator of falling global demand and output is the fall in oil prices in recent weeks.
Following the 2008 crisis, the continued expansion of the Chinese economy, fuelled by government spending and a major expansion of credit, played a key role in propping up global capitalism, particularly commodity-exporting countries.
Now, China’s growth rates are down to their lowest levels since 2009, with little sign of any upturn as the government and financial authorities try to rein in debt growth. Financial markets have also fallen sharply, with the Shanghai Composite Index down 27 percent for the year.
While the Trump administration’s tariff measures have not yet had a major impact, the threat of their escalation hangs over the global economy. Senior US officials, such as US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, maintain that China must suffer more economic pain and bow to US demands.
Following the reports earlier this month that Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping had held a phone conversation on trade—after months of no communication between the two sides—and Trump’s tweets that he was hopeful of a deal, there was some guarded optimism of at least a limited agreement when the two met at the G20 summit at the end of next week.
The Financial Times reported yesterday that all eyes were now on the G20 meeting. “Combined with rising interest rates, clouds over global economic growth and political tensions elsewhere, investors are awaiting the meeting with a degree of trepidation,” it said.
Tai Hui, JP Morgan Asset Management’s chief Asia-Pacific market strategist, told the newspaper the divisions between the US and China revealed at the APEC meeting meant a “material breakthrough” on the trade tensions was “highly unlikely.”
The G20 summit preparations indicate the organisers expect that trade conflicts will dominate the agenda. In an effort to appease the US, the final communiqué’s initial draft omits a long-standing reference to resisting protectionism, while promising to “recognise the importance of the multilateral trading system” and work to “keep markets open and ensure a level playing field.”
If no agreement is reached to at least delay the planned tariff hikes, this will have a major market impact, especially on high-tech companies because of fears that an intensified trade war will adversely affect both their global supply chains and markets.
The third major factor in the market turmoil is rising interest rates and tightening conditions. The bull-run on Wall Street, which started in March 2009, when the market reached its low point after the financial crisis, is now the longest in history. It has been sustained principally by the supply of ultra-cheap money by the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks. The slogan during previous sell-offs has been “buy the dips,” based on the assumption that cheap credit would lead to an upturn.
But with the US Fed, together with the European Central Bank to a lesser extent, pulling back on cheap money policies, interest rates are starting to rise. According to an equity analyst cited by the Wall Street Journal, the “buy-the-dippers are getting concerned” and increasingly saying, “let’s sell everything.”
The Fed is expected to go ahead with a further 0.25 percent increase in its base rate when it meets next month and that expectation largely has been priced into market valuations. The key question will be whether, with official US unemployment rates at historic lows and fears that wages may start to rise, the Fed indicates that it will continue the rising-rate path next year.
If further rate rises coincide with a fall in revenues and profits as the Trump tax measures’ effect wears off, this could be the trigger for a recession. JP Morgan Chase now rates the probability of a recession in 2019 at one in three, compared with its assessment of between 8 and 27 percent a year ago.
Interest rate increases and tightening credit conditions are affecting the stock market already. Bloomberg reported that for “investors with a sense of history the most stomach-churning spectacle has been the deterioration of credit,” with a widening gap between the yield being demanded on corporate bonds and the return on US Treasuries.
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari, a long-time proponent of an easier monetary policy, has called for caution by the Fed. He told National Public Radio one of his concerns was that “if we preemptively raise interest rates, and it’s not in fact necessary, we might be the cause of ending the expansion,” thereby triggering the next recession.
If that were to occur, it would take place under uncharted conditions. No one knows what effect the unwinding of the historically unprecedented cheap money policies of the past decade could have both on financial markets and the economy as a whole.
What did the Wall Street banksters know that
took us so long to find out???
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.
GLOBALIST FOR BANKSTERS, THE SUPER RICH and OPEN BORDERS
ADVOCATES TO FINISH OFF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/09/barack-obama-and-his-muslim-style.html
“Democrats Move Towards ‘Oligarchical Socialism,’ Says Forecaster Joel Kotkin.”
BARACK OBAMA POSITIONS MARK ZUCKERBERG of FAKEBOOK to be his global controller of propaganda for the Obama bankster-funded third term for life.
http://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2018/09/fakebooks-mark-zuckerberg-will-be.html
“They knew Obama was an unqualified crook; yet they promoted him. They knew Obama was a train wreck waiting to happen; yet they made him president, to the great injury of America and the world. They understood he was only a figurehead, an egomaniac, and a liar; yet they made him king, doing great harm to our republic (perhaps irreparable.)” ALLAN ERICKSON
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).
Stocks Crushed: Dow Falls 550 Points, Retail and Tech Wrecked
1:03
The major U.S. stock indexes plummeted on Tuesday morning, giving up all of their gains for the year.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 585 points. The S&P 500 dived 2 percent. The Nasdaq Composite, heavily loaded with tech stocks, dropped 2.5 percent. All three indexes are now flat or negative for 2018.
Retail and tech stocks were some of worst performers in early trading. Target fell by more than 10 percent after reporting quarterly earnings that disappointed investors. Apple shares fell by nearly 4 percent. Google’s Alphabet shares dropped by 1.4 percent. Amazon’s were off by 2.3 percent. Twitter shares sank 3.5 percent.
Facebook shares, which have sold off sharply in recent days, actually rose a half of a percentage point in the first hour of trading.
Homebuilder Sentiment
Unexpectedly Crashes to
Lowest Level in Two Years
Unexpectedly Crashes to
Lowest Level in Two Years
2:01
This is not a test of the emergency broadcast system. The housing market just sent up the clearest distress signal since the Federal Reserve began raising rates.
Sentiment among homebuilders dropped 8 points in November to 60 in the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index. Economists had expected it to remain unchanged at 68.
The November reading is the lowest since August 2016, when the economy appeared to hit an air-pocket prior to the election of Donald Trump. Last year, the index was at 69 in November and headed toward its December high point of 74.
The problem is affordability. Rising interest rates combined with high home prices have put new homes out of reach for many Americans.
The current sales component of the homebuilder’s index fell 7 points to 67. The expectations for sales compnent crashed 10 points. Buyer traffic dived 8 points to 45, deep into negative territory in the index where scores above 50 indicate expansion.
Mortgage rates have gone up a full percentage point over the last 12 months, thanks largely to the Federal Reserve’s policy of raising its overnight target and shrinking its balance sheet of government debt and government-sponsored mortgage bonds.
Homebuilding has a large impact on the economy because it employs workers in a variety of trades and new home purchases tend to drive sales of everything from home appliances to electronics and even cars.
By region, the South and West, often the harbingers of housing nationwide, were both sharply lower at 65. The Midwest and Northeast at 52 were both also sharply lower.
The index reading was so low that many wondered if it was a misprint or simply an anomaly. This week will feature an array of housing data that should clarify if the NAHB index properly read the housing market.
YOU CAN SEPARATE THE CLINTONS, THE OBOMBS AND SWAMP KEEER TRUMP FROM THEIR CRONY PLUNDERING BANKSTERS!
"In remarks unprecedented for a former central banker, Yellen told the newspaper that the lessons of the financial crash of 2008 were being forgotten as banks were pushing to water down regulations that had been put in place since then."
Former Fed chair warns of new financial crisis
By Nick Beams
26 October 2018
In the midst of increasing volatility on global financial markets, the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, has pointed to a potential source of major instability with “systemic risks.”
In an interview with the Financial Times to be
published today, Yellen said there had been a
“huge deterioration” in the standards of bank
lending to corporations as a result of moves
to lessen regulation.
published today, Yellen said there had been a
“huge deterioration” in the standards of bank
lending to corporations as a result of moves
to lessen regulation.
Her focus of concern is so-called leveraged loans which are provided to companies with weaker credit ratings—a market which amounts to $1.3 trillion in the US.
“I am worried about the systemic risks associated with these loans,” she said. “There has been a huge deterioration in standards; covenants have been loosened in leveraged lending.”
In remarks unprecedented for a former central banker, Yellen told the newspaper that the lessons of the financial crash of 2008 were being forgotten as banks were pushing to water down regulations that had been put in place since then.
“There are a lot of weaknesses in the system, and instead of looking to remedy those weaknesses I feel things have turned in a very deregulatory direction.”
Yellen’s remarks echo views expressed during the meeting of the Fed’s Open Market Committee at its last meeting in September. According to the minutes published earlier this month: “Some participants commented about the continued growth in leveraged loans, the loosening of terms and standards on these loans, or the growth of this activity in the nonbank sector as reasons to be mindful of vulnerabilities and possible risks to financial stability.”
The Fed had pointed to the rise of leveraged loans to highly indebted companies in previous meetings. But the September meeting was the first time such loans had been mentioned as a possible risk to financial stability.
These warnings were underscored in remarks made by Todd Vermilyea, the Fed’s head of risk and surveillance, at a finance industry conference in New York on Wednesday. He said there could be “weaknesses in risk management.”
While the conference was closed to the
press, the Wall Street Journal reported that
“Vermilyea’s remarks were spurred by
emerging trends that he said would threaten
the safety and soundness of the biggest
banks.” The article cited Morgan Stanley,
Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse as being
among firms “that have recently participated
in deals that exceeded what the Fed
previously deemed appropriate.”
press, the Wall Street Journal reported that
“Vermilyea’s remarks were spurred by
emerging trends that he said would threaten
the safety and soundness of the biggest
banks.” The article cited Morgan Stanley,
Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse as being
among firms “that have recently participated
in deals that exceeded what the Fed
previously deemed appropriate.”
One of the key risks associated with leveraged loans is that they are repackaged into collateralised loan obligations (CLOs) that are bought and sold by investors—a similar process to that which occurred in the sub-prime mortgage market which set off the financial meltdown ten years ago when a crisis in one, relatively small area of the market, spread throughout the system.
In September, the Bank for International Settlements pointed to the possible consequences of a similar downturn in the leveraged loans sector.
It said that because mutual funds are a major buyer of CLOs, “mark-to-market losses could spur fund redemptions, induce fire sales and further depress prices. These dynamics may affect not only investors holding these loans but also the broader economy by blocking the flow of funds to the leveraged credit market.”
In other words, because of the interconnected nature of the operations of the banks, corporations and investment funds, a major loss or downturn in one area could rapidly spread throughout the global financial system.
Yellen also drew attention to the fact that much of the debt held by the banks is repackaged and then sold on to other investors.
“You are supposed to realise from the crisis, it is not just a question of what banks do that imperils themselves, it is what they do that can create risks to the entire financial system. That lesson to me seems to have been lost.”
Yellen warned that if there was a “downturn in the economy, there are a lot of firms that will go bankrupt, I think, because of this debt. It would probably worsen a downturn.”
Since the coming to power of the Trump
administration, even the limited regulations
introduced after the financial crash have
been wound back together with the
appointment of what the Financial
Times called a “phalanx of regulators with
softer-touch agendas.”
administration, even the limited regulations
introduced after the financial crash have
been wound back together with the
appointment of what the Financial
Times called a “phalanx of regulators with
softer-touch agendas.”
“When I see what is happening politically with lobbying and the pushback on the regulators and the priorities of some of the regulators, I am really concerned we are on the verge of forgetting about the financial crisis and the need for stronger regulation,” Yellen said.
The Bank of England (BoE) has also warned of the rise of leveraged loans, which it defines as those made to a company whose debt is more than four times its earnings before interest and tax deductions. In the US, the ratio is more than five and a half times the loans, with the proportion even higher in Europe.
Moreover, according to the BoE, some 80 percent of these loans are “covenant-lite,” that is, they do not have the protections that were previously demanded for lending to riskier companies. Before the financial crisis only a quarter of such loans fell into the “covenant-lite” category.
One of the main driving forces behind the rise of leveraged loans has been their use by private equity investors, which use their already indebted companies to raise even more money to fund mergers and acquisitions. That is, the money is not used to finance productive activity but for speculation.
The latest Financial Policy Committee report of the BoE said that the global leveraged market was growing at a faster rate than the US subprime market in 2006. It said that, as with the subprime market, underwriting standards had been weakened and because of the “significant uncertainty” surrounding the ultimate investors in the collateralised loan obligations it was not clear who would bear the costs of any losses or whether they would have the capacity to absorb them.
The ratings agency Moody’s has also warned of the dangers posed by the rise of leveraged loans. Last August, Moody’s senior vice-president Christina Padgett warned that a combination of “aggressive financial policies”—the willingness of investors to take greater risks as they searched for profits—“deteriorating debt cushions,” and a greater number of “less credit worthy firms” seeking loans was “creating credit risks that foreshadow an extended and meaningful default cycle once the current expansion ends.”
In other words, an economic downturn would see a string of bankruptcies. When that warning was issued, just two months ago, it appeared that the US economy was still powering ahead. But the outlook has significantly changed since then, with warnings that the so-called “synchronised” upturn in the global economy is moving in the opposite direction—fears of which are a significant factor in the gyrations on the US stock market since it reached its high earlier this month.
The warnings by Yellen and major financial
institutions point to the undeniable fact that
ten years after the global financial crisis, none
of the contradictions of the global economy
and financial system have been resolved.
Indeed the very measures enacted by the Fed
and other central banks in propping the
system through the injection of trillions of
dollars have only created the conditions for an
even bigger disaster.
institutions point to the undeniable fact that
ten years after the global financial crisis, none
of the contradictions of the global economy
and financial system have been resolved.
Indeed the very measures enacted by the Fed
and other central banks in propping the
system through the injection of trillions of
dollars have only created the conditions for an
even bigger disaster.
The bitter experiences of the past decade have already revealed what the response of the ruling elites will be. There will be no reforms but rather a stepped up assault on the social position of the working class enforced by the development of ever more authoritarian forms of rule.
Wall Street volatile as global economy becomes “fragile”
Volatility has continued on Wall Street following two days of major falls last week. The Dow Jones index shot up by more than 500 points on Tuesday, followed by a more than 300-point decline during Wednesday before recovering to finish 80 points down.
Yesterday, after a global sell-off, the Dow finished down by 327 points, after dropping 470 points during the course of the day. In what was described as a “jittery session,” the S&P 500 was down 1.4 percent, its largest fall in a week, and has now experienced a decline in 10 out of the 14 trading sessions this month.
The immediate volatility is being driven by two conflicting tendencies. On the one hand, US markets are being pushed down by the further expected increases in the Federal Reserve’s base interest rate and the general tightening of monetary conditions expressed in the rise of the rate on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury bond, which is now hovering around 3.2 percent. Monetary conditions are also being made more restrictive by the Fed’s reduction of its assets holdings by $50 billion per month as part of its program to reduce its balance sheet. Its previous quantitative easing program saw Fed assets expand from less than $1 trillion to $4.5 trillion.
On the other hand, share prices are being boosted by the rise in profits being reported by banks and major companies. There is also an expectation that US growth will continue and that, while asset valuations may be “stretched,” there is still some way for the market to run and gains to be reaped.
The underlying instability and fears of a major sell-off were underscored by further comments by US President Donald Trump following his denunciation of the Fed’s interest rate rises as “crazy” and “loco” during last week’s sell-off. In an interview with the Fox Business News Network, he repeated his assertion that the Fed was raising interest rates too fast and described the central bank’s actions as “my biggest threat.”
Nominally adhering to the independence of the Fed, Trump said he had not spoken to its chairman Jerome Powell, whom he appointed last year. But he was “not happy” with what Powell was doing, “because it’s going too fast.” Powell, he asserted, was “being extremely conservative, to use a nice term.”
Former Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen weighed into the debate, saying she agreed with the Fed’s present policies and that there was a danger of the economy overheating. She said the present growth rate of 3 percent was “terrific” but cast doubt on whether it was sustainable in the longer term. The Fed would need to be “skilful and lucky” to achieve a soft landing after 2019.
It is a significant observation when a former Fed chief remarks that US growth needs “luck” to continue.
The minutes from the Fed’s interest-rate setting Open Market Committee of September 25-26, released on Wednesday, indicated that the central bank is still on course for another interest rate rise in December, with some participants wanting to tighten policy still further.
The minutes noted that some members thought it would be necessary to “temporarily raise the federal funds rate above their assessments of its longer-run level in order to reduce the risk of a sustained overshooting of the Committee’s two percent inflation objective or the risk posed by significant financial imbalances.”
The chief concern is not with inflation per se but whether the lowering of the unemployment rate and labour shortages lead to a significant push for increased wages, which the Fed is determined to suppress.
Market volatility is also being fuelled by the worsening global economic outlook resulting from the rise in US interest rates, the increasing value of the dollar, and the escalation of trade tensions between the US, China and other countries.
The dollar’s rising value has a major impact on emerging markets because it increases the real level of dollar-denominated loans, making the repayment of the interest and principal more expensive. The Financial Times has described the situation facing emerging markets as “ugly,” noting that the JPMorgan Chase EM currency index has fallen by 12 percent since April. Stock markets have also been hit, with the MSCI Emerging Markets Index down by more than 16 percent in the same period.
The elevated stock market values in the US stand in contrast to the rest of the world. While the S&P 500 index is up more than 4 percent for the year, the Stoxx Europe 600 index has experienced a 6.2 percent decline, Japan’s Nikkei 225 is down by 0.9 percent and the Shanghai Composite has fallen by 23 percent.
Trade tensions are continuing to rise. There was a sharp exchange at a World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting on Tuesday between the US representative Dennis Shea and his Chinese counterpart Zhang Xiangchen.
Shea demanded that the WTO confront China’s alleged trade abuses and remove its rights as a developing economy. Zhang countered that “no one can be singled out” and that efforts to undermine the basic principles of the organisation had to be opposed. But Shea insisted that the world body target China.
“Adequately responding to the challenges of non-market economies is nothing less than an existential matter for this institution,” Shea said.
This is a thinly-veiled threat that unless the WTO takes action over what the US calls China’s “market-distorting” policies, including subsidies for state-backed industries and its alleged acquisition of high-tech knowledge through forced technology transfers or outright theft, it will withdraw from the body.
The US has already significantly undermined the WTO by blocking the appointment of members to its appellate body, which has the final say on trade disputes. The Trump administration has refused for more than a year to consider new appointments because it says former members went beyond their mandate and took an “activist approach” detrimental to the US. The administration’s actions have reduced the normally seven-member body to just three and if the present stand-off continues it will not be able to function past December next year.
As part of its trade war against China, the US has been seeking to bring its “strategic allies” into its camp by opening up negotiations with them on bilateral trade deals. These moves, including the recently-concluded US Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) and agreements with the European Union and Japan for one-on-one negotiations, have been accompanied by threats of auto tariffs of up to 25 percent.
In addition, the USMCA contained what the US side characterised as a “poison pill.” If either of the other partners entered a free trade agreement with a “non-market” economy, namely China, the US could withdraw. US trade officials have made it clear they want to see this provision included in other bilateral deals.
Negotiations with Europe, agreed on at a meeting between Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker in July, have already produced conflict.
In talks on Wednesday each side accused the other of undermining the July agreement. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said of his EU counterpart Cecilia Malmstrom that it was “as though she was at a different meeting from the one that we attended.”
Ross said the purpose of the meeting was to get “near-term deliverables including both tariff relief and standards.” Trump’s “patience was not unlimited.”
Malmstrom said the EU had asked several times for a “scoping exercise”—the prelude to a full-scale trade deal—but the US had failed to respond. “So far,” she stated, “the US has not shown any big interest there, so the ball is in their court.”
Ross said the contention that the US was slowing things down was “simply inaccurate.” The US ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, was even more blunt and implicitly raised the threat that auto tariffs could be put back on the agenda.
“If the president sees more quotes like the one that came out today his patience will come to an end,” Sondland said, attacking the “complete intransigence” of the EU and warning that any attempt to “wait out” Trump’s term as president was a “futile exercise.”
Warning that politics was putting the “skids under the bull market,” Financial Times economics commentator Martin Wolf wrote on Wednesday that, as the recent IMF meeting had made clear, reasons for concern “abound.” Above all, the “struggle between old and new superpowers” could “change everything.”
Wolf noted that the valuation of risky assets was “stretched” and just a small shift in global financial conditions could damage not only emerging markets. Wolf said the aggregate debt in countries “with systemically important financial sectors now stands at $167 trillion, or over 250 percent of aggregate gross domestic product,” compared with 210 percent in 2008.
The global economy and financial systems are “fragile,” Wolf concluded. “These are dangerous times—far more so than many now recognise. The IMF’s warnings are timely, but predictably understated. Our world is being turned upside down. The idea that the economy will motor on regardless while this happens is a fantasy.”
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS:
STILL SUCKING THE BLOOD OUT OF AMERICA
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules America.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
OBAMANOMICS TO SERVE BANKSTERS
AND GLOBAL BILLIONAIRES
"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."
CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS TIGHTER WITH THE PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON, OBAMA or TRUMP?
The Clinton White House famously abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial and investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall Street firms and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.
Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.
Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome of the rabid self – a whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.
It may well be true that Donald Trump has made his greatest contribution to the nation before even taking office: the political destruction of Hillary Clinton and her infinitely corrupt machine. J.R. Dunn
"Hillary will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."
CHELSEA CLINTON IS SAVING THE PLANET WITH SHORTER SHOWERS, PRIVATE JETS
October 26, 2018
Don't you care about the planet?
While you wallow lasciviously in your shower for a whole 5 minutes or 600 seconds, the noble heroes of the Left are sacrificing their shower time to save the planet.
Here's a heartbreaking interview with Chelsea Clinton, possible presidential candidate in 2024.
Q. What changes have you made in the past five years in your family life to be environmentally conscious?A. I’ve always recycled and used smart light bulbs and tried to take short showers. The things that seem small are the things that if we all did would make a profound impact.
And the really small things, like taking smaller private jets.
Chelsea Clinton opted to travel to a “clean energy” roundtable in this week in a private jet to campaign on behalf of her mother Hillary Clinton.Clinton first attended two events in Greenville, North Carolina, stopping by a campaign office and then going to an event at East Carolina University to discuss college affordability.After her two events in Greenville, Clinton was scheduled to attend a “clean energy roundtable” in Asheville, which is about a 5-hour drive away. But instead of driving or flying on a commercial plane, Clinton opted to a take a private jet. The NTK Network posted a tracking video that shows Clinton boarding the private jet on Wednesday.
It's important that we do everything we can to save the planet from the Flying Global Warming Monster. Like flying shorter flights while taking shorter showers on board those private jets.
Also, in huge news, Chelsea Clinton once again mentioned that she might mull running for office if someone steps down, or retires, or everyone in the Democrat Party dies leaving them with no choice but Chelsea Clinton.
THE GRIFTERS: HILLARY, BILLARY and
CHELSEA… global looters!
"But there is no doubt in my mind that the
Clintons, thoroughly practiced grifters that
they are, as well as their increasingly shady
daughter, will not hesitate to use
such classified information as they may be
able to access for personal and political
enrichment. They've been doing it
for decades, and they're not about to stop
now." RUSS VAUGHN
Clintons, thoroughly practiced grifters that
they are, as well as their increasingly shady
daughter, will not hesitate to use
such classified information as they may be
able to access for personal and political
enrichment. They've been doing it
for decades, and they're not about to stop
now." RUSS VAUGHN
Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome of the rabid self – a whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.
It may well be true that Donald Trump has made his greatest contribution to the nation before even taking office: the political destruction of Hillary Clinton and her infinitely corrupt machine. J.R. Dunn
"Hillary will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."
HILLARY & BILLARY: The Evita and Juan Peron of Wall Street
Their Looting of the Poor of Haiti IS FINALLY OVER
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in
the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political
machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of
a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the
Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes. The basic
components of the operation are lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street and Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign contributions, and donations to the
ostensibly philanthropic Clinton Foundation.”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in
the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political
machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of
a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the
Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes. The basic
components of the operation are lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street and Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign contributions, and donations to the
ostensibly philanthropic Clinton Foundation.”
Carney: Hedge Funds Are Manuevering to Loot Fannie and Freddie from the U.S Taxpayer
9:02
Wall Street billionaires are pushing a new plan to swipe the profits of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from U.S. taxpayers–and in the process revive the system of privatized-profits and public-risk that contributed to the severity of the Great Financial Crisis.
Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity group, and the hedge fund Paulson & Co, run by Trump Wall Street supporter John Paulson, last year reportedly hired the investment bank Moelis & Co. to develop proposals to overhaul the two agencies. Blackstone is headed by Stephen Schwarzman, an adviser to President Donald Trump who reportedly has pushed the president to soften his stance on China. The plan went nowhere, in large part because it was dead on arrival in the House Financial Services committee, then run by conservative Republican stalwart and Fannie-Freddie critic Jeb Hensarling.
Hensarling, however, chose not to run for re-election and the chair of the committee will now be occupied by leftwing Democrat Maxine Waters of California. One of the tactics employed by those sympathetic to the Moelis plan has been to claim, without evidence, that government control of Fannie and Freddie somehow benefits the big banks. Wells Fargo, the California based megabank and a frequent target of Waters’ criticism, is often singled out, despite the fact that the bank has played little to no role in the long-running debate over what do to with Fannie and Freddie.
The divided Congress is also seen as an opening for the Trump administration to take action on its own, since it appears unlikely serious housing reform legislation will pass the Democratic House and the Republican Senate. The Trump administration is expected to at least implicitly reveal its plans for Fannie and Freddie when it nominates a successor to current FHFA Director Mel Watt sometime in the next few weeks.
In early November, Moelis once again put forth its plan with some minor changes. The hope is that the change in power dynamics on Capitol Hill may create an opening for the hedge funds to seize control of Fannie and Freddie by ending their conservatorships and obligations to pay dividends to the U.S. Treasury. This would deliver a huge windfall to hedge funds that snapped up junior preferred stock and common stock of the companies that remained outstanding even after they collapsed and needed to be rescued with hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds.
Lobbyists and political operators have been pushing the plan on Capitol Hill and inside the Trump administration. It has garnered support among some Treasury Department officials, including very high-ranking advisers to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Most of the officials who have taken a favorable view of the Moelis plan have close ties to Wall Street firms themselves.
Even before he took office, Mnuchin sent the share prices of the two companies soaring when his comments following the election were seen as a promise to privatize Fannie and Freddie by releasing them from government control. He later walked back those comments, making it clear that he was offering no such promise. This year, Mnuchin said that he expects Congress to enact housing finance reform in 2019 and that the administration could take action on its own if Congress does not act. Some inside the Trump administration fear that could wind up as a push to adopt the Moelis plan.
Mick Mulvaney, the White House’s budget director and the acting head of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, is also viewed as a potential ally of those pushing the Moelis plan. As a Congressman, Mulvaney sponsored a bill that offered “a bonanza for hedge funds seeking to cash in on their investments in Fannie Mae Mae and Freddie Mac—but the cost to taxpayers would [have been] steep.” That bill died on Capitol Hill for lack of support.
When Fannie and Freddie needed to be bailed out in 2008, the U.S. Treasury agreed to fund them in exchange for senior preferred stock and warrants to buy just short of 80 percent of the common stock. Originally, the senior preferred stock paid a 10 percent dividend and the companies agreed to pay a commitment fee on the undrawn backstop. But the companies struggled to pay this dividend for years and were forced to draw down on the Treasury’s backstop, diminishing the amount available to them should they run into financial trouble again.
Eventually, the two companies took a combined $187 billion from the government and Treasury promised to supply up to a total of $400 billion. Both the original bailout and the ongoing backstop remain outstanding.
In 2012, Treasury struck an agreement with the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has been the conservator for the companies since 2008, to change the dividend from a fixed to a floating rate and cancel the dividend. Under this arrange, they pay a dividend equal to their positive net worth minus a small capital cushion. In quarters when the companies do badly, they pay no dividend at all. When profits roll in, the companies can pay more than the original 10 percent. And, of course, when they find themselves with a negative net worth, they can still draw on the backstop.
Government support for Fannie and Freddie went way beyond these equity investments. The Treasury and Federal Reserve have made huge purchases of the debt securities of the two companies. Treasury purchased $220 billion of Fannie and Freddie’s debt and the Fed purchased $172 billion. Through its quantitative easing program, the Fed has purchased a whopping $3.2 trillion of Fannie and Freddie backed securities, making the central bank by far the biggest customer of their mortgage bonds. These purchases are unique–the Fed and Treasury do not purchase the debt of any other private companies–and undermine the notion that these are essentially private companies under government control.
In the ten years since it became a ward of the state, Fannie Mae has taken in $119.8 billion of bailout funds, including $3.7 billion in 2017. It has paid $171.8 billion in dividends to Treasury, an average of $17.8 billion per year. But this average conceals the fact that the dividends are now far lower than they were in the early years of the post-crisis recovery. Over the last four-quarters, Fannie has paid around $5.5 billion–less than half of what it would have owed under the original 10 percent dividend.
The numbers for Freddie Mac, Fannie’s smaller sibling, tell a similar story: $71.6 billion in draws from the Treasury and around $114 billion in dividends paid. In the last four quarters, however, Freddie has paid just $3.8 billion. Like Fannie, that is less than half of what would have been due under the original 10 percent dividend.
Because these are dividends on an equity investment, the payments do not reduce the balance of bailout funds outstanding–just as dividends ordinary companies pay on their stock do not reduce the amount of their outstanding stock.
The new arrangement was challenged by hedge funds and other investors in the junior preferred and common stock, who argued that it treated them unfairly because they were cut off from the profits of the company. The government pointed out that the arrangement was authorized by a 2008 law. What’s more, the companies had only survived because of the hundreds of billions of bailout dollars supplied by the Treasury. As the only risk-taking suppliers of capital to the firms since the collapse, the taxpayers had a right to the upside, the government argued.
Federal courts at the district court and appeals court level have all agreed that the so-called net worth sweep is lawful. Although new cases continue to be filed and investors still are fighting in some courts, it increasingly appears as if their hoped-for legal channel to a windfall has been foreclosed.
Having failed in court, the hedge funds and other investors are turning to the political branches in hopes of achieving their windfall. Many proposals have emerged to reform housing finance over the years, some better than others but none securing enough support on Capitol Hill to become law.
The Moelis plan stands out as a strikingly bold grab for control of the companies and their profits. It calls for the dividend payments to the Treasury to cease so that the companies can rebuild capital. Shockingly, it also calls for the cancellation of the senior preferred stock altogether–with no compensation for the past risk and future profits currently due to taxpayers. It is as if a company proposed to do a stock buyback by proposing to cancel its shares rather than purchasing them for cash.
This would be an unprecedented giveaway, more akin to government-authorized looting than a “housing finance reform” plan. Even calling it “corporate welfare” would be too generous because the beneficiaries wouldn’t be the companies, which have been prospering under the current arrangement. The beneficiaries would be the owners of the shares of the company, which would receive a massive promotion in the capital structure in exchange for nothing. This is something new–hedge fund welfare.
Taxpayers would surrender an asset–the senior preferred stock–that is expected to return hundreds of billions of dollars, reducing deficits and tax-burdens, over the next decade. And in return they would get nothing except perhaps the gratitude of billionaires. Under the Moelis plan, the government would just deem the entire bailout as fully paid-off–as if it were an ordinary mortgage loan a homeowner could prepay when he wanted to move rather than a $400 billion guarantee of two companies originally created by the U.S. government.
Hedge funds argue that the companies should be released from their obligations to pay dividends because they have paid more than their original bailout. But they should know better: when investors purchase a stock or make a loan, it is not in the hope of getting paid back what was invested. It’s in the hope of making a decent financial return. Why shouldn’t taxpayers earn the profits made possible by their investment? None of the junior preferreds or common shares represent new capital injected into the companies since they entered conservatorship. It’s one-hundred percent taxpayer capital backing them. What’s more, the internal rate of return on the funds invested by the taxpayers has been quite small considering the amount of time that has passed.
This argument that has been rejected by federal judges as well as the Trump Justice Department. It would mark a dramatic change in direction if the Trump administration were to embrace it now.
In any case, the senior preferred stock remains a valuable and outstanding asset that legally belongs to the U.S. Treasury. Giving it away for nothing should be a nonstarter for President Donald Trump, who touted his ability to get the American people better deals.
ONLY THE OBOMBS AND CRIME DUAL OF HILLARY AND BILLARY HAVE SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS THAN MAD MAXINE
"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."
Maxine Waters Unfit to Chair House Financial Services Committee
Considering her record and documented history of poor ethical and moral fitness, it’s outrageous that Maxine Waters is up for chair of the ultra-powerful House Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the country’s banking system, economy, housing, and insurance.
With Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, come January the 14-term California congresswoman is expected to head the committee, which also has jurisdiction over monetary policy, international finance, and efforts to combat terrorist financing.
Throughout her storied political career, Waters
has been embroiled in numerous
controversies, including abusing her power to
enrich family members, getting a communist
dictator to harbor a cop-murdering Black
Panther fugitive still wanted by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and accusing
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of
selling crack cocaine in black neighborhoods.
A few months ago, the 80-year-old Democrat from Los Angeles encouraged violence against Trump administration cabinet members. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they are not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters said at a summer rally in Los Angeles. Judicial Watch filed a House ethics complaint against Waters for encouraging violence against Trump Cabinet members.
Among her most corrupt acts as a federal legislator is steering millions of federal bailout dollars to her husband’s failing bank, OneUnited. Waters allocated $12 million to the Massachusetts bank in which she and her board member husband held shares. OneUnited subsequently got shut down by the government and American taxpayers got stiffed for the millions.
Judicial Watch investigated the scandal and obtained documents from the U.S. Treasury related to the controversial bailout. The famously remiss House Ethics Committee, which is charged with investigating and punishing corrupt lawmakers like Waters, found that she committed no wrongdoing. The panel bought Waters’ absurd story that she allocated the money as part of her longtime work to promote opportunity for minority-owned businesses and lending in underserved communities even though her husband’s bank was located thousands of miles away from the south Los Angeles neighborhoods she represents in Congress.
The reality is that without intervention by Waters OneUnited was an extremely unlikely candidate for a government bailout through the disastrous Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The Treasury Department warned that it would only provide bailout funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending and OneUnited clearly didn’t meet that criteria.
Documents uncovered by Judicial Watch detail the deplorable financial condition of OneUnited at the time of the government cash infusion. The records also show that, prior to the bailout, the bank received a “less than satisfactory rating.” Incredibly, after that scandal Waters was chosen by her colleagues to hold a ranking position on the House Financial Services Committee she will soon chair. The only consequence for blowing $12 million on her husband’s failing bank was a slap on the hand to Waters’ chief of staff (her grandson) for violating House standards of conduct to help OneUnited.
Waters, who represents some of Los Angeles’ poorest inner-city neighborhoods, has also helped family members make more than $1 million through business ventures with companies and causes that she has helped, according to her hometown newspaper. While she and her relatives get richer (she lives in a $4.5 million Los Angeles mansion), her constituents get poorer.
The congresswoman was also embroiled in a fundraising scandal for skirting federal election rules with a shady gimmick that allows unlimited donations from certain contributors. Instead of raising most of her campaign funds from individuals or political action committees, Waters sells her endorsement to other politicians and political causes for as much as $45,000 a pop.
It wouldn’t be right to part without also noting some of Waters’ international accolades. She has made worldwide headlines for her frequent trips to communist Cuba to visit her convicted cop-assassin friend, Joanne Chesimard, who appears on the FBI’s most wanted list and is also known by her Black Panther name of Assata Shakur.
Chesimard was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted by a jury of the 1979 murder of a New Jersey State Trooper. With the help of fellow cult members, she escaped from jail and fled to Cuba. Outraged U.S. lawmakers insisted she be extradited but Waters always stood by her side, likening the cop-assassin to civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
In fact, Waters wrote Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro a letter to assure him that she was not part of the group of U.S. legislators who voted for a resolution to extradite the cop murderer. Waters told Castro that she opposed extradition because Chesimard was “politically persecuted” in the U.S. and simply seeking political asylum in Havana, where she still lives.
In the 1980s Waters accused the CIA of selling crack cocaine to blacks in her south-central Los Angeles district to raise millions of dollars to support clandestine operations in Latin America, including a guerrilla army. During the infamous 1992 Los Angeles riots the congresswoman repeatedly excused the violent behavior that ironically destroyed the areas she represents in the House. She dismissed the severe beating of a white truck driver by saying the anger in her district was righteous. She also excused looters who stole from stores by saying they were simply mothers capitalizing on an opportunity to take some milk, bread, and shoes.
Should this ethically and morally challenged individual, who has repeatedly displayed behavior unbecoming of a federal lawmaker, be at the helm of an influential congressional committee that oversees the financial sector?
With Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, come January the 14-term California congresswoman is expected to head the committee, which also has jurisdiction over monetary policy, international finance, and efforts to combat terrorist financing.
Throughout her storied political career, Waters
has been embroiled in numerous
controversies, including abusing her power to
enrich family members, getting a communist
dictator to harbor a cop-murdering Black
Panther fugitive still wanted by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and accusing
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of
selling crack cocaine in black neighborhoods.
A few months ago, the 80-year-old Democrat from Los Angeles encouraged violence against Trump administration cabinet members. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they are not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters said at a summer rally in Los Angeles. Judicial Watch filed a House ethics complaint against Waters for encouraging violence against Trump Cabinet members.
Among her most corrupt acts as a federal legislator is steering millions of federal bailout dollars to her husband’s failing bank, OneUnited. Waters allocated $12 million to the Massachusetts bank in which she and her board member husband held shares. OneUnited subsequently got shut down by the government and American taxpayers got stiffed for the millions.
Judicial Watch investigated the scandal and obtained documents from the U.S. Treasury related to the controversial bailout. The famously remiss House Ethics Committee, which is charged with investigating and punishing corrupt lawmakers like Waters, found that she committed no wrongdoing. The panel bought Waters’ absurd story that she allocated the money as part of her longtime work to promote opportunity for minority-owned businesses and lending in underserved communities even though her husband’s bank was located thousands of miles away from the south Los Angeles neighborhoods she represents in Congress.
The reality is that without intervention by Waters OneUnited was an extremely unlikely candidate for a government bailout through the disastrous Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The Treasury Department warned that it would only provide bailout funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending and OneUnited clearly didn’t meet that criteria.
Documents uncovered by Judicial Watch detail the deplorable financial condition of OneUnited at the time of the government cash infusion. The records also show that, prior to the bailout, the bank received a “less than satisfactory rating.” Incredibly, after that scandal Waters was chosen by her colleagues to hold a ranking position on the House Financial Services Committee she will soon chair. The only consequence for blowing $12 million on her husband’s failing bank was a slap on the hand to Waters’ chief of staff (her grandson) for violating House standards of conduct to help OneUnited.
Waters, who represents some of Los Angeles’ poorest inner-city neighborhoods, has also helped family members make more than $1 million through business ventures with companies and causes that she has helped, according to her hometown newspaper. While she and her relatives get richer (she lives in a $4.5 million Los Angeles mansion), her constituents get poorer.
The congresswoman was also embroiled in a fundraising scandal for skirting federal election rules with a shady gimmick that allows unlimited donations from certain contributors. Instead of raising most of her campaign funds from individuals or political action committees, Waters sells her endorsement to other politicians and political causes for as much as $45,000 a pop.
It wouldn’t be right to part without also noting some of Waters’ international accolades. She has made worldwide headlines for her frequent trips to communist Cuba to visit her convicted cop-assassin friend, Joanne Chesimard, who appears on the FBI’s most wanted list and is also known by her Black Panther name of Assata Shakur.
Chesimard was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted by a jury of the 1979 murder of a New Jersey State Trooper. With the help of fellow cult members, she escaped from jail and fled to Cuba. Outraged U.S. lawmakers insisted she be extradited but Waters always stood by her side, likening the cop-assassin to civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
In fact, Waters wrote Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro a letter to assure him that she was not part of the group of U.S. legislators who voted for a resolution to extradite the cop murderer. Waters told Castro that she opposed extradition because Chesimard was “politically persecuted” in the U.S. and simply seeking political asylum in Havana, where she still lives.
In the 1980s Waters accused the CIA of selling crack cocaine to blacks in her south-central Los Angeles district to raise millions of dollars to support clandestine operations in Latin America, including a guerrilla army. During the infamous 1992 Los Angeles riots the congresswoman repeatedly excused the violent behavior that ironically destroyed the areas she represents in the House. She dismissed the severe beating of a white truck driver by saying the anger in her district was righteous. She also excused looters who stole from stores by saying they were simply mothers capitalizing on an opportunity to take some milk, bread, and shoes.
Should this ethically and morally challenged individual, who has repeatedly displayed behavior unbecoming of a federal lawmaker, be at the helm of an influential congressional committee that oversees the financial sector?
MAXINE WATERS USES NAZIS TACTICS TO HARASS TRUMP…. But where was her big mouth when Obama and the Clinton were sucking in bribes and looting the poor of Haiti, or operating a fraudulent slush fund charity????
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY FORMER ATTORNEY GEN ERIC HOLDER POSES WITH HITLER PRAISING LEADER OF RACIST, HOMOPHOBIC, ANTI-SEMITIC HATE MONGER LOUIS Farrakhan.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
MAXINE WATERS, LOUIS FARRAKHAN, ERIC HOLDER and BARACK OBAMA – RACIST, VIOLENT HATE MONGERS!
Rep. Maxine Waters is fine with Farrakhan. And the left is fine with Waters. Eric Holder recently posed with Farrakhan. DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
DEMOCRAT PARTY CORRUPTION
"This is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are extravagantly wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the downside of the invasion of millions of migrants, the crime or the financial burden. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
Democrat Corruption is a Clear and Present Danger to America
On November 6, it seemed the Republicans might hold their majority in the Senate and in the House. Sadly, they lost their majority in the House. The mystery is why so many Democrat candidates who are so obviously ethically challenged won in races that should not have even been close.
How and why do Democrats continue to vote for unqualified, dishonest candidates? Elizabeth Warren is a proven liar, a cheat who claimed Native American heritage in order to get a job at Harvard. Her baby, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was her plan to wield control over all bank and non-bank institutions without Congressional interference. In short, she is a
Andrew Gillum, the left's choice to be Governor of Florida, is the failed mayor of Tallahassee. He remains under FBI investigation for corruption. Given the information about that investigation that has been released, he appears yet another greedy and corrupt Democrat pol in the Hillary Clinton mold. The stability of Tallahassee declined catastrophically under his leadership; crime and murder rose drastically.
Gillum sold out his city for money, and cries racism when confronted with his crimes. He should never have been the candidate for the Governor of Florida but the left cares only about race and power, not ethics or honor. For progressives, race trumps everything else, even character. If Gillum wins after the cheating Broward County is infamous for, Florida will suffer the slings and arrows that are inevitable under politicians like Gillum. Why was this race even close? Have half the nation's voters scuttled any semblance of traditional values in order to win? Yes.
Then there is Robert Menendez, the credibly accused pedophile senator of New Jersey. He should be in prison but was saved by one juror in his corruption trial with whom he partied after his win on November 6. Who votes for a man like this? There is plenty of proof that he took bribes from a wealthy client for numerous favors, trips to the Dominican Republic for sex with underage girls being one of them. But New Jersey just re-elected this man. They too have lost all sense of right vs. wrong.
Stacey Abrams, the still grasping gubernatorial contender in Georgia, is a hard-left, anti-capitalist, anti-Second Amendment candidate. She owes about $200K in credit card debt and wants to run Georgia? She too is corrupt and incompetent. She is also willing to cheat to win. Are Georgians ignorant of her many, many negatives? If they are, they voted for her anyway. Again, skin color trumps everything.
The left ignores fine men like John James, who ran for the House in Michigan against Debbie Stabenow. The left ignored Eddie Edwards who ran in New Hampshire. Both men are conservative African Americans. The American left today pretends such candidates do not exist. They have ignored fine people like James and Edwards as they have always ignored brilliant men like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Jason Riley, and Larry Elder. They revile the brilliant Clarence Thomas. They don't like to be reminded of men like Frederick Douglass or Booker T. Washington. Neither of them, like Sowell, Steele, Williams and Elder ever promoted the idea that African Americans were or would be perennial victims. Each of them advocated for quite the opposite, for self-reliance and independence.
This notion of personal responsibility is anathema to today's left; they need and promote subservience and dependency among their flock of reliable but uninformed voters. This is why they encourage the immigration of so many millions of illegal migrants. They assume they will be able to win for them the right to vote. Judging by the number of them who likely voted in the midterms, their plan is succeeding.
This is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are extravagantly wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the downside of the invasion of millions of migrants, the crime or the financial burden. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us.
Then there is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the thoroughly-ignorant-of-everything candidate who won her district by 80%! This young woman knows nothing about how any government works, let alone ours. She is hopelessly uniformed; she knows even less about US history or the Constitution. She is clueless about the economy. When asked how she would pay for all the give-away programs she touts, she replied that that was a "puzzling question"! "You just pay for it" she answers. She has no idea; no idea about anything. She thinks she will be "inaugurated" to the House! Most fourth graders know more than she does about US history. And yet she is already thinking about running for President! This is a wholesale indictment of our politicized, dumbed-down system of education. Many of her constituents are immigrants; we are obviously not educating them at all. They voted for all the free stuff -- college, medical care, basic income, housing, that Ocasio-Cortez has promised to deliver. This is what socialist Democrats dream about: perpetual power over a populace too ignorant to rebel. American as founded is at grave risk.
In addition to ODasio-Cortez, Gillum, Ilhan Omar, Abrams, Sinema, who very likely cheated to take the Arizona Senate seat, there is Linda Sanchez. Kirsten Gillibrand is a Hillary clone; she only cares about her own political power. She speaks like a small child but is also considering a run for the presidency. She was best pals with Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein until they were politically inconvenient. Amy Klobuchar, who embraced the vicious and obviously false allegations against Judge Kavanagh, was re-elected! Like every other Democrat member of the judiciary committee, she knew those accusations were false, without a shred of corroboration, but her constituents re-elected her! Who are these voters? How do they reconcile voting for people willing to destroy a fine man for political purposes? She is exactly who every Democrat member of that committee is, who every member of the Democrat Party is: nothing more than power-hungry political operatives out to ruin any and all opponents by any means necessary. They are a clear and present danger to American as founded.
Young people are no longer taught the truth of American history. They are not taught the truth of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism is acceptable, even promoted, by the Democrats. They embrace Linda Sarsour and Louis Farrakhan without shame. Young people don't know that communism killed over a hundred million people in the twentieth century. Their calculated-by-leftists ignorance is destroying our country. They try to sell the idea that gender is not a factor of biology! They attempt to convince young people that climate change is man-made (a travesty) and that global warming causes wild fires (a lie). Having control over academia, they have willfully brainwashed students for nearly two generations. Unless your children are a strong-willed, independent thinkers, do not send them to college!
How and why the American left has devolved into the kind of party one finds in a banana republic is a mystery. That our media is so anxious to promote their corrupt candidates and the low-brow tactics they employ is a tragedy. Do they do it because they can no longer win by promulgating their Orwellian vision of a socialist state, mandated equality of outcome? Perhaps. They will never sell socialism to enough sentient Americans to win. They need millions of uninformed voters to succeed.
We must not let them cheat their way to power over the rest of us. Their ongoing vote fraud must be stopped and the Democrats need to take a look at themselves and at what they have become. It's not a pretty picture. What they have become threatens to destroy the greatest nation on the planet and they are doing it on purpose. They have nothing but contempt for the US as founded and for those of us who love this country.
Fannie Mae and 'Freddie Maxine'
https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/stephen-moore/fannie-mae-and-freddie-maxine
BARACK OBAMA, LA RAZA FASCISM and the CULTURE of DEM CORRUPTION
They Destroyed Our Country
“They knew Obama was an unqualified crook; yet they promoted him. They knew Obama was a train wreck waiting to happen; yet they made him president, to the great injury of America and the world. They understood he was only a figurehead, an egomaniac, and a liar; yet they made him king, doing great harm to our republic (perhaps irreparable.)”
'Incompetent' and 'liar' among most frequently used words to describe the president: Pew Research Center
The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.
CRONY CAPITALISM ...the rise of Barack Obama and the fall of America!
OBAMA'S ASSAULT ON AMERICA -WHY WALL STREET, ILLEGALS, CRIMINAL BANKSTERS and the 1% LOVE HIM, AND THE MIDDLE CLASS GETS THE SHAFT TO PAY FOR HIS CRONY CAPITALISM
CEO pay is higher than ever, as is the chasm separating the rich and super-rich from everyone else. The incomes of the top 1 percent grew more than 11 percent between 2009 and 2011—the first two years of the Obama “recovery”—while the incomes of the bottom 99 percent actually shrank.
Meanwhile, Obama is pressing forward with his proposal, outlined in his budget for the next fiscal year, to slash $400 billion from Medicare and $130 billion from Social Security… AS WELL AS WIDER OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, NO LEGAL NEED APPLY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
In the July/August version of the Atlantic, columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration.”
“The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero.”
Peter Beinart, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Haaretz, and former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed “costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.”
llustration by Lincoln Agnew*
The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.
Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles.In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?
There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.
But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today.
What’s Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
What’s Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’ incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”
The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete. And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against each other.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.
Writing last year in American Sociological Review, Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants. Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting people who have entered the country illegally.
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
Fannie Mae and 'Freddie Maxine'
https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/stephen-moore/fannie-mae-and-freddie-maxine
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."
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