Obama Appointee Action on Student Loan Trusts Could Cause Massively Negative Ripple Effects
On his way out the door, former Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (then known as CFPB – Acting Director Mick Mulvaney changed it to BCFP this year to reflect its exact legal name) chief Richard Cordray signed off on a shockingly corrupt settlement agreement that could have widespread negative consequences for student loan borrowers and more broadly for consumer finance across the economy.
It was an enforcement action against the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts, a group of 15 Delaware trusts that hold about 800,000 student loans totaling $12 billion, of which $5 billion is presently in default. These are loans that were made by dozens of private banks and then aggregated by institutional investors and repackaged as securities.
Because these are private loans, enforcement actions against borrowers in default require individual lawsuits to be filed – and the trusts used an array of debt collection entities to bring thousands of such lawsuits. Many of these lawsuits filed by third party debt collection entities were bogus, taking action without proper documentation or in some cases taking action against people who did not actually owe anything. Some of the debt collectors have already been fined for their violations.
But under Cordray the BCFP went further, declaring the trusts themselves “covered persons” under the Consumer Financial Protection Act and brought an enforcement action against the trusts, even though they are passive entities that did not engage in any of the improper activities.
If that action stands, the well-established, low-risk mechanism of securitizing loans through trusts would become a legally fraught process. And that would cause a massively negative ripple effect.
“For future students and their parents, this Byzantine fight over securitized loans may prove costly,” Bloomberg reporter Shahien Nasiripour explained. “The threat of a government agency setting aside securities contracts based on student loan payments could lead hedge funds to devalue their holdings, and cause them to demand higher interest rates on future loans to compensate for the risk of unilateral government action.”
Worse, the fallout would not be contained to the student loan market. A robust securitization market helps keep interest rates down for mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards.
Unfortunately, the trusts themselves eagerly agreed to Cordray's power grab – because the hedge fund titan, Donald Uderitz, who bought up control of the trusts stood to benefit.
As Andrew Wilford explained, the BCFP “stepped in and made a deal with Uderitz to transfer servicing powers to Uderitz’s firm, VCG, in return for fines on some trustees and other servicing companies. The upshot for Uderitz and VCG is that Uderitz will make a killing off servicing and administering the debt.”
In effect, Uderitz "settled" with Cordray to use trust assets for his own company's benefit. Moreover, the use of trust assets to settle claims against debt collectors, who were all hired subject to contracts that held the collectors responsible for compliance violations – would undermine investor confidence and drive up the cost of capital and therefore interest rates for borrowers.
The litigation has played out slowly despite the fact it was settled. The trustees intervened and more recently the broader securitization industry filed an amicus brief based on concerns that their entire market could be disrupted.
Meanwhile, the trusts have been unable to even pay the lawyers Uderitz hired to represent them, with trustees blocking him internally. The lawyers claim to have over $3 million in unpaid legal fees, and the judge has ordered the trusts to obtain new representation.
All of which is a recipe for continued uncertainty in what has been and should be one of the lowest risk corners of the finance world.
It's been nearly a full year since the Cordray consent decree was announced in this case, and there is no reason for the uncertainty and confusion to continue into a second year. The BCFP should withdraw its claims and drop the lawsuit completely without prejudice. In doing so Acting Director Mick Mulvaney would be reversing another of Cordray's major missteps, and could then focus on holding the guilty parties – and only the guilty parties – responsible for improper collection tactics.
Phil Kerpen is head of American Commitment and a leading free-market policy analyst and advocate in Washington.
Decade after financial crisis
JPMorgan predicts next one’s coming soon
Published
time: 13 Sep, 2018 14:00
© Ole Spata
/ Global Look Press
With the 10th anniversary approaching of the catalyst for the last
major global stock market crash – the Lehman Brothers’ collapse – strategists
from JPMorgan are predicting the next financial crisis to strike in 2020.
Wall Street’s largest investment bank analyzed the causes of the
crash and measures taken by governments and central banks across the world to
stop the crisis in 2008, and found that the economy remains propped up by those
extraordinary steps.
According to the bank’s analysis, the next crisis will probably be
less painful, however, diminished financial market liquidity since the 2008
implosion is a “wildcard” that’s
tough to game out.
“The main attribute of the next crisis will be severe liquidity
disruptions resulting from these market developments since the last crisis,” the
reports says.
Changes to central bank policy are seen by JPMorgan analysts as a
risk to stocks, which by one measure have been in the longest bull market in
history since the bottom of the crisis.
JPMorgan’s Marko Kolanovic has previously concluded that the big
shift away from actively managed investing has escalated the danger of market
disruptions.
“The shift from active to passive asset management, and
specifically the decline of active value investors, reduces the ability of the
market to prevent and recover from large drawdowns,” said
JPMorgan’s Joyce Chang and Jan Loeys.
The bank estimates that actively managed accounts make up only
about one-third of equity assets under management, with active single-name
trading responsible for just 10 percent or so of trading volume.
JPMorgan referred to its hypothetical scenario as the “great liquidity crisis,” claiming
that the timing of when it could occur “will
largely be determined by the pace of central bank normalization, business cycle
dynamics, and various idiosyncratic events such as escalation of trade war
waged by the current US administration.”
World’s top 5 ‘most evil’
corporations
Published time: 3 Mar, 2018 05:55Edited time: 3 Mar, 2018 13:04
Jeff Bezos,
founder and chief executive officer of Amazon, poses as he stands atop a supply
truck during a photo opportunity at the premises of a shopping mall in the
southern Indian city of Bangalore © Abhishek N. Chinnappa / Reuters
Most companies become successful thanks to their stellar reputations.
But not always. RT Business scraped the bottom of the barrel to find the most
hated companies trending on the internet.
Monsanto
The company that needs no introduction, creator of DDT and Agent
Orange, Monsanto is one the world’s largest pesticide and GMO seed
manufacturers. It is known for being the first company to genetically modify a
seed to make it resistant to pesticides and herbicides. Monsanto’s herbicides
have been blamed for killing millions of crop acres, while its chemicals were added
to blacklists of products causing cancer and many other health problems.
Apple
Once the darling of Microsoft-hating gadget lovers, Apple more
recently has been accused of mistreating or underpaying their employees, hiding
money offshore, and not paying taxes. It has also been accused of violating
health or environmental legislation, and misusing its position where they have
a monopoly in the market. And, oh yes, deliberately slowing older iPhones and
overcharging for its products to boot.
Apple sued for deliberately slowing down older iPhones —
RT Business News
Nestle
The world's largest food and beverage company Nestle says it is
committed to enhancing quality of life and contributing to a healthier future.
However, it has been dragged through numerous scandals involving slave labor.
The multinational is one of the most boycotted corporations in the world, as
violations of labor rights have been reported at its factories in different
countries.
Philip Morris
The products of the American multinational cigarette and tobacco
manufacturing company are sold in over 180 countries outside the United States.
Philip Morris owns Marlboro, one of the world's biggest brands. Back in 1999,
Philip Morris courted officials of the Czech Republic by explaining how smoking
would in fact help their economy, due to the reduced healthcare costs from its
citizens dying early.
McDonald's
American fast-food company McDonald's was founded in 1940. The
company serves more customers each day than the entire population of Great
Britain, but has a long history of terrible labor practices. It has been
constantly under fire for serving unhealthy junk food, which contributes health
problems. Researchers have found that McDonald’s burgers cannot decompose on
their own.
McDonald’s becomes weed users’ highest-ranking fast food
joint — RT US News
Notable mentions of corporations not quite evil enough to make the
top list:
Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIESJPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton
British American Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google
Facebook
Amazon
Walmart
Ten years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers
15
September 2018
Ten years ago on this
day, the global capitalist system entered its most far-reaching and devastating
crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. A decade later none of the
contradictions which produced the financial crisis has been alleviated, much
less overcome. Moreover, the very policies carried out to prevent a total
meltdown of the financial system, involving the outlay of trillions of dollars
by the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks, have only created the
conditions for an even bigger disaster.
The immediate trigger
for the onset of the crisis was the decision by US financial authorities not to
bail out the 158-year-old investment bank Lehman Brothers and prevent its
bankruptcy. There is considerable evidence to suggest that this was a
deliberate decision by the Federal Reserve to create the necessary conditions
for what they knew would have to be a massive bailout, not just of a series of
banks but the entire financial system.
The previous March, the
Fed had organised a $30 billion rescue of Bear Stearns when it was taken over
by JP Morgan. But as the Fed’s own minutes from that time make clear the Bear
Stearns crisis was just the tip of a huge financial iceberg. The Fed noted that
“given the fragile conditions of the financial markets at the time” and the
“expected contagion” that would result from its demise it was necessary to
organise a bailout. As Fed chairman Ben Bernanke later testified, a sudden
failure would have led to a “chaotic unwinding” of positions in financial
markets. The bailout of Bear Stearns was not a solution but a holding operation
to try to buy time and prepare for what was coming.
While the demise of
Lehman was the initial trigger, the most significant event was the impending
bankruptcy, revealed just two days later, of the American insurance firm AIG,
which was at the centre of a system of complex financial products running into
trillions of dollars.
Due to the
interconnections of the global financial system, the crisis rapidly extended to
financial markets around the world, above all across the Atlantic to Europe where
the banks had been major investors in the arcane financial instruments that had
been developed around the US sub-prime home mortgage market, the collapse of
which provided the immediate trigger for the crisis.
The value of every
crisis, it has been rightly said, is that it reveals and starkly lays bare the
underlying socio-economic and political relations that are concealed in
“normal” times. The collapse of 2008 is no exception.
In the twenty years and
more preceding the crisis, particularly in the aftermath of the liquidation of
the Soviet Union in 1991, the bourgeoisie and its ideologists had proclaimed
not only the superiority of the capitalist “free market” but that it was the
only possible socio-economic form of organisation. Basing themselves on the
false identification of the Stalinist regime with socialism, they maintained
that its liquidation signified that Marxism was forever dead and buried. In
particular, Marx’s analysis of the fundamental and irresolvable contradictions
of the capitalist mode of production had proved to be false. According to the
central foundation for what passed for theoretical analysis, the so-called
“efficient markets hypothesis,” a financial meltdown was impossible because
with the development of advanced technologies all information had been priced
into decision making and so a financial collapse was impossible.
Rarely have the
nostrums of the bourgeoisie and its ideologists been so graphically exposed.
Two days after the
crisis erupted, President George W. Bush declared “this sucker’s going down.”
Later, the high priest of capitalism and its “free market,” the now bewildered
former head of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, testified to the US
Congress that he had been completely confounded because markets had failed to
behave according to his “model” and its assumptions.
The crisis also exposed
in full glare another of the central myths of the capitalist order—that the
state is somehow a neutral or independent organisation committed to regulating
social and economic affairs in the interests of society as a whole.
It confirmed another
central tenet of Marxism, expounded more than 170 years ago, that “the
executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common
affairs of the bourgeoisie.”
This was exemplified in
the naked class response to the financial meltdown. The plans, already
developed by the Fed and other authorities to cover the losses of the financial
elite, whose speculative and in many cases outright criminal activities had
sparked the crisis, were put into operation.
In the lead-up to the
presidential election of November 4, Wall Street swung its support behind
Obama—with the media promoting him as the candidate of “hope” and “change you
can believe in”—over McCain. The Democrats had committed themselves to the
bailout, securing the passage of the $700 billion TARP asset-purchasing program
through Congress. This massive increase in the national debt of the United
States was authorised with virtually no debate.
Of course, a new
political fiction was immediately advanced. It was necessary to bail out Wall
Street first, the public was told, in order to assist Main Street. However,
this lie was rapidly exposed. The crisis was the starting point for a massive
assault on the working class. While bankers and financial speculators continued
to receive their bonuses, millions of American families lost their homes. Tens
of millions were made unemployed.
In the following year,
the rescue operation organised by the Obama administration of Chrysler and
General Motors, with the active and full collaboration of the United Auto
Workers union, resulted in the development of new forms of exploitation, above
all through the two-tier wages system, paving the way for even more brutal
systems such as those pioneered by Amazon.
This was the other side
of a Wall Street bailout—a massive restructuring of class relations in line
with the edict of Obama’s one-time chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to “never let a
serious crisis go to waste” because it provides “an opportunity to do things
you think you could not do before.”
The same class response
was in evidence elsewhere. After the initial effects of the crisis had been
overcome, the European bourgeoisie initiated an austerity drive forcing up
youth unemployment to record levels. In Britain workers have endured a
sustained decline in real wages not seen in more than a century.
The most egregious
expression of this class logic has been seen in Greece with the imposition of
poverty levels last seen in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The numerous
bailout operations were never aimed at “rescuing” the Greek economy and its
population but directed to extracting the resources to repay the major banks
and financial institutions.
The crisis revealed the
real nature of bourgeois democracy. The euro zone and the European Union were
exposed as nothing more than a mechanism for the dictatorship of European
finance capital. As one of the chief enforcers of its diktats, the former
German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, declared, in the face of popular
opposition, “elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy.”
As the working class in
every country confronts stagnant and declining wages, falling living standards,
the scrapping of secure employment and attacks on social services, leading to
mounting health and other problems, innumerable reports and data chart the
development of a global system in which wealth is siphoned up the income scale.
According to the latest
Wealth-X World Ultra Wealth Report some 255,810 “ultra-high net worth”
individuals, with a minimum of $30 million in wealth, now collectively own
$31.5 trillion, more than the bottom 80 percent of the world’s
population—comprising 5.6 billion people. Overall the wealth of this cohort
increased by 16.3 percent in 2016–17, rising by 13.1 percent in North America,
13.5 percent in Europe and 26.7 percent in Asia.
The full significance
of the bailouts of the financial system and the subsequent provision of
trillions of dollars is clear. It has brought about the institutionalisation of
a process, developing over the preceding decades, where the financial system,
with the stock market at its centre, functions as a mechanism for the transfer
of wealth to the heights of society.
In its analysis of the
financial crisis, the World Socialist Web Site insisted from
the outset that this was not a conjunctural development, from which there would
be a “recovery,” but a breakdown of the entire capitalist mode of production.
That analysis has been
completely confirmed. While a total financial meltdown was prevented, the
diseases of the profit system that gave rise to the crisis have not been
overcome. Rather, they have metastasised and mutated into new and even more
malignant forms.
The actions of the US
Federal Reserve and other major central banks in pumping trillions of dollars
into the financial system in order to “rescue” it, and to enable the
continuation of the very forms of speculation that led to the crisis, have only
created the conditions for a new disaster in which the central banks themselves
will be directly involved.
This fact of economic
and financial life can even be seen in the comments by bourgeois analysts and
pundits on the occasion of the upcoming anniversary. While they generally
maintain that the financial system has been “strengthened” since 2008—a
completely worthless assertion given that it was held to be strong in the lead
up to the crash and any warnings of growing risks were dismissed as “Luddite”
by such luminaries as former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers—no one
dares to proclaim that the underlying problems have been resolved.
Rather, taking heed
from the warning of JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon that while the trigger for the
next crisis will not be the same as the last but “there will be another
crisis”, they nervously scan the horizon for signs of where it might strike.
Some analysts point to
the rise in global debt, which is now running at 217 percent of gross domestic
product, an increase of 40 percentage points since 2007, contrary to all
expectations that, since debt was a major cause of the 2008 crisis, some
deleveraging would have occurred.
Others single out the
mounting problems in so-called emerging markets facing repayments on
dollar-denominated loans, a source of speculation when interest rates were at
record lows but which now present major refinancing problems as interest rates
have started to rise.
The seemingly
unstoppable rise of stock markets, fuelled by the provision of ultra-cheap
money by the Fed and other central banks, is also an issue of concern. The
increased use of passive investment funds tied to global indexes via computer
trading systems tends to reinforce downswings as has been seen in a series of
“flash crashes” such as that of last February when Wall Street fell by as much
as 1,600 points in intraday trading.
The greatest source of
anxiety, although it is not mentioned so much publicly, is the resurgence of
the working class and the push for increased wages. To the extent it is
discussed publicly, this fear, manifested in stock market falls generated by
news of relatively small wage increases, is generally couched in terms of
“political tensions” caused by increased social inequality.
A further expression of
the ongoing and deepening breakdown of the capitalist order is the disintegration
of all the geo-political structures and relationships that have constituted the
framework within which the movements of capitalist economy and finance have
flowed throughout the post-war period.
In the wake of the 2008
crisis, the leaders of the G20 gathered in April 2009, in the midst of a
collapse in world trade taking place at a faster rate than in 1930. They
pledged to never again go down the road of the protectionist tariff policies
that had played such a disastrous role in the Great Depression and had worked
to create the conditions for the outbreak of World War II, just ten years after
the Wall Street crash of October 1929.
That commitment lies in
tatters as the Trump administration, seeking to counter the economic decline of
the US so graphically revealed in the 2008 collapse, embarks on ever widening
trade war measures.
The principal target,
at least to this point, is China. But the Trump administration has designated
the European Union as an economic “foe,” and has already implemented trade war
measures against it, with more in the pipeline.
The G7, the grouping of
major capitalist powers set up in the wake of the world recession of 1974–75
and the end of the post-war boom to try to regulate the affairs of world
capitalism, exists in name only following the acrimonious split at its meeting
last June with the US decision to impose tariffs against its nominal “strategic
allies.”
World war has not yet
broken out. But there are innumerable flashpoints—in the Middle East, in
Eastern Europe, in North East Asia and in the South China Sea to cite just some
examples—where a conflict could erupt between nuclear-armed powers. The impetus
for a new global conflagration is the drive by US imperialism to counter its
economic decline by asserting its dominance over the Eurasian landmass at the
expense of its enemies and allies alike.
It is of enormous
significance that the civil war that has erupted in the American state
apparatus between the state and military-intelligence apparatus, whose
mouthpiece is the Democratic Party, and the Trump administration is over how
this objective should be accomplished; that is, whether the American drive
should be directed in the first instance against Russia or China. At the same
time, all the major powers are boosting their military budgets in preparation
for the escalation of military conflicts.
The political system in
every country is beset by deep crisis. The very rapidity of the crisis is
accentuating the contradictions between the objective dangers and the level of
class consciousness. The chief obstacle to achieving the necessary alignment of
working class consciousness with the objective reality of capitalist crisis on
a world scale remains the reactionary political role of the old bureaucratised
labour and trade union organisations, abetted by the various pseudo-left
tendencies, in suppressing the class struggle. But the conditions are
developing for these shackles to be broken.
In the founding program
of the Fourth International, Leon Trotsky wrote: “The orientation of the mass
is determined first by the objective conditions of decaying capitalism, and
second, by the treacherous policies of the old workers’ organisations. Of these
factors, the first, of course, is the decisive one: the laws of history are
stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus.”
That perspective is now
being confirmed in the resurgence of the class struggle internationally, above
all in the centre of world capitalism, the United States.
Conscious of their
profound weakness in the face of such a movement, and fully aware of its
revolutionary implications, the ruling classes in every country have been
developing ever-more authoritarian forms of rule.
Their greatest fear is
the development of political consciousness, that is, the understanding in wider
sections of the working class, and above all the youth, of its real situation,
that its enemy is the entire capitalist system. Above all, the ruling elites
fear the development of a revolutionary socialist movement, based on the
principles and program of the Fourth International. This is why the World
Socialist Web Site is the central target of internet censorship. It
is also the reason for the escalation of attacks by the German coalition
government on the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, the German section of the
International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
But the efforts to
suppress the work of the International Committee will fail. The renewal of
class struggle will provide new forces for the development of the working of
the ICFI throughout the world.
The meltdown of 2008
demonstrated above all that the working class confronts a global crisis. The
crisis can therefore be resolved only on a global scale through the unification
of the working class across national borders and barriers on the basis of an
international socialist program for the reconstruction of society to meet human
need and not profit.
Nick Beams
Who Can
We Blame For The Great Recession?
|
This year
marks the tenth anniversary of the “Great Recession” and the media are trying
to determine if we have learned anything from it. The Queen visited the London
School of Economics after the “Great Recession” to ask her chief economists why
they hadn’t seen this disaster coming. They told her they would get back to her
with an answer. Later, they wrote her a letter saying that the best
economic theory asserts that recessions are random events and they had
successfully predicted that no one can predict recessions.
Still,
George Packer, a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine since 2003, thinks he
knows more than the LSE academics. He wrote the following in the August 27 print issue:
"It was caused by reckless lending practices, Wall Street greed,
outright fraud, lax government oversight in the George W. Bush years, and
deregulation of the financial sector in the Bill Clinton years. The deepest
source, going back decades, was rising inequality. In good times and bad, no
matter which party held power, the squeezed middle class sank ever further into
debt...
"In February, 2009, with the
economy losing seven hundred thousand jobs a month, Congress passed a stimulus
bill—a nearly trillion-dollar package of tax cuts, aid to states, and
infrastructure spending, considered essential by economists of every
persuasion—with the support of just three Republican senators and not a single
Republican member of the House."
Typically,
journalists will defer to an expert on matters in which they aren’t trained,
which is most subjects. But Packer didn’t bother to ask an economist as the
Queen did. Had he done so, he would have received the same answer from
mainstream economists – recessions are random events and can’t be predicted. If
economists knew the causes of recessions they could predict them when they see
the causes present.
So where
did Packer get his “causes” for the latest recession? In the classic movie
Casablanca, the corrupt and lazy policeman Renault is “shocked” to find
gambling going on at Rick’s place and orders the others to round up the “usual
suspects.” That’s what Packer does. People have blamed greedy businessmen and
bankers for crises for centuries. Since the rise of socialism they added
capitalism and the politicians who support it. The only new suspect in the
socialist line up is inequality, even though inequality has varied little since
1900 and is near its record low since then.
Had
Packer consulted the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, he
wouldn’t have received much help. Keep in mind that mainstream economists think
recessions are random events. After the storm subsides, they can identify
likely contributors for the latest disaster, but those differ with each
recession. Recently
Chicago Booth queried experts for the top contributing factors of the latest
recession. The top answer was flawed regulations,
followed by underestimating risk and mortgage fraud.
The
“flawed regulations” excuse assumes that bitter bureaucrats who write the
regulations are wiser than the actual bankers and ignores the fact that banking
is one of the most regulated industries. One analyst described the recent
recession as the perfect storm of regulations so massive no one group could
understand them all and many of them working against other regulations.
Blaming
“underestimated risk” is good Monday morning quarterbacking. Everyone has 20/20
hindsight, or 50/50 as quarterback Cam Newton said. The same economists don’t
explain why banks that took similar risks didn’t fail or why what seems risky
now didn’t seem so risky in 2007. As for fraud, the amount was negligible and
is always there; why did it contribute to a recession this time? Sadly, the
correct answer to what caused the Great Recession– “Loose monetary policy” –
came in next to last among Chicago Booth’s experts.
Perspective
is vital. A magnifying glass can make a lady bug look terrifying. Let’s pull
back and put the latest recession in a broader context. There have been 47
recessions/depressions since the birth of the nation. Before the Great
Depression economists called crises “depressions” and since then they are
“recessions.” They’re the same thing; economists thought “recession” was less
scary.
Recessions
before the Great Depression were mild compared to it. It took the Federal
Reserve and the US government working together trying to “rescue” us to plunge
the country into history’s worst economic disaster. Journalists like Packer
have convinced people that the Great Recession of 2008 was second only to the
Great Depression, but if we combine the recessions of 1981 and 1982, separated
only by a technicality and six months, that recession would have been worse.
The Fed did not reduce interest rates after that recession because it was still
battling the inflation it has caused in the 1970s, yet the economy bounced back
and recovery lasted almost a decade.
I want to
drive home the fact that the three worst recessions in our history assaulted us
after the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
The best
explanation of the causes of recessions, because it enjoys the greatest
empirical support, is the Austrian business-cycle theory, or ABCT. Ludwig von
Mises and Friedrich Hayek are most famous for refining and expounding it, but
the English economists of the Manchester school were the first to write about
it. They discovered that expansions of the money supply through low interest
rates motivated businesses to borrow and invest at a rapid rate. That launches
an unsustainable boom because businesses are trying to deploy more capital
goods than exist. Banks raise rates to rein in galloping inflation and the boom
turns to dust.
Banks
don’t control interest rates today as they did in the past. That’s the Federal
Reserve’s job. The Fed generally reduces interest rates or expands the money
supply through “quantitative easing,” or buying bonds from banks, in order to
force an economy in the ditch to climb out. The recovery from the Great
Recession remained on its feet for so long because the Fed’s policy of paying
interest on reserves at banks soaked up much of the new money it created out of
thin air. Also, much
of the money went overseas to buy imports or as investments.
The
lesson – don’t ask medical advice from your plumber or economics from a
journalist. And if you ask an economist, make sure he follows the Austrian
school.
OBAMA
and HIS BANKS: THEIR PROFITS, CRIMES and LOOTING SOAR
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.”
“Attorney General Eric Holder's
tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.”
DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
Why the swamp has little to fear
By Rick Hayes
The
midterm elections will either halt or hasten the current soft coup whose aim is
to overthrow a legally elected President now being conducted by the
swamp. And if the history of Washington, D.C. corruption is
any indication of what will happen after the midterms, the swamp will survive
regardless of its coup's success or failure. But the efforts to
expose the treasonous plot will fade away into the dustbin of political history
after being seen as just another waste of time and taxpayer
money. The seemingly endless parade of corruption scandals and
mind-numbing criminal activity will go on unabated and continue to escalate to
unimaginable heights because of an inescapable fact of human nature.
In a Forbes 2015 article entitled "The Big Bank
Bailout," author Mike Collins mentions several ways to prevent another
housing bubble crisis from destroying the world economy when he writes,
"But perhaps the best solution is to make the CEOs and top managers of the
banks criminally liable for breaking these rules so that they fear going to
jail. These people are not afraid to do it again so if you can’t put
some real fear in their heads, they will do it again."
What Collins has honed in on is accountability and punishment,
the very things lacking in today's dealings with the swamp. Just as
the major banking institutions will soon, if not already, re-enter into risky,
corrupt, and illegal lending practices because there was not a
"smidgen" of accountability for the trillions of dollars they lost in
the housing bubble catastrophe, so too will the past and presently unknown
criminals within the IRS, FBI, and DOJ continue to thumb their noses at the
law.
What
the American people have been subjected to over the past 18 months since
President Trump took office is a series of crimes that have been painstakingly
unearthed but little else. "Earth-shattering,"
"bombshell," and "constitutional crisis" are just some of
the words and phrases used by media outlets to describe the newest update
regarding the many ongoing investigations. These words are meant to
shock the audience but no longer have the impact they once did because of their
overuse and because of the likely lack of any substantive
outcome. What Americans have seen are trials without consequences,
clear proof of guilt with no punishment. Draining the swamp without any
repercussions to the swamp creatures inside is like going on a diet but eating
the same foods.
Americans
witnessed no accountability regarding exhaustive investigations into the deadly
circumstances surrounding the swamp's gun-walking campaign named Fast and
Furious, a program where U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and hundreds of
innocent Mexican citizens were killed with guns the government sold to
criminals. The swamp continued on its power mission and attempted
the deceitful confiscation of America's health care with Obamacare, whose real
aim was a redistribution of the nation's wealth. After little
pushback and the passage of Obamacare, Americans witnessed Benghazi
in 2012, and when nothing was accomplished over the investigations of that
tragedy, the swamp trampled on the rights of conservatives in what became known
as the IRS scandal of 2013. Nothing was done about
that. And on and on, with the swamp committing one bigger and bolder
crime after the next with impunity.
So
we have arrived at the doorstep of the Russian collusion investigation farce by
first traveling through the swamp of unsolved crimes perpetrated inside the
Obama administration. With the passage of time, swamp-dwellers like Eric
Holder and Lois Lerner,
knee-deep in the mud with congressional contempt charges, continue to be
financially enriched and will slowly be forgotten, while more recognizable
swamp royalty like Hillary Clinton get to run for president.
Until Americans see guilty members within the United States
government wearing orange jumpsuits and serving time, the investigations and
congressional hearings are mere sideshow spectacles to appease the masses.