BIDENOMICS
WATCH JOE BIDEN'S BIGGEST PAYMASTERS AT BLACKROCK CASH IN ON BIDEN'S FORECLOSURE AMERICA!
He said Blackrock was “about as close to a government arm as you can be, without being the Federal Reserve.”
Blackrock’s close collaboration with the Fed and Treasury came at a crucial point in the development of a crisis in financial markets which began with the onset of the pandemic in March and fears in corporate circles over the response in the working class amid walkouts by workers insisting that safety measures be out in place.
According to the article, Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, the world’s biggest asset management firm, was “in frequent touch” with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Fed chair Jerome Powell “in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency programs were announced in late March.”
6 Million Face Evictions And F oreclosures As Rental Prices Rising To The Highest Level In Decades
THE RENTAL MARKET WILL BE THE NEXT LOOTING OF AMERICA!
RENTS GOING UP 3XS FASTER THAN LAST YEAR. WAIT UNTIL BIG RENT OWNS THE MARKET!
VIDEO
15 Biggest Threats to the US Economy
RENT SHOCK, PRICES GOING OUT OF CONTROL, 2022 ECONOMIC BLOODBATH COMING, BANKRUPTCY+HOMELESS STORM
There Is No Christmas For The Homeless This Year - LA Edition
Report: Global Investor Gobbling Up Single Family Homes in U.S. Pushing out First-Time Buyers, Driving Up Housing Costs
Middle-class suburban neighborhoods are being gobbled up by global investors, so enriching wealthy investors and turning would-be homeowners into lifetime, no-equity renters.
In Rutherford County, Georgia, the Washington Post reported on December 15, Rob Mitchell, the county property assessor, says nearly 1 in 10 homes there are now owned by a real estate investment trust, and that these investments are jacking up house prices.
These ventures are “equity-mining our community — removing generational wealth for an entire demographic of people,” said Mitchell, a Republican elected official. “For the average person starting out wanting to start their family, the choice is no longer: Can I purchase a house? It’s instead: Can I afford to rent a house?”
Under the headline, “Progress Residential reaps big profits from stressed American renters amid national affordability crisis,” the Post articles explains the phenomenon focusing on one suburb in Tennessee.
A map of a neighborhood in La Vergne, Tennessee, shows that an investment venture, Progressive Residential, owns 19 houses in one small suburban neighborhood, including nine in a row on one street. When the houses were built 15 years ago they sold for under $200,000, offering working class families a chance at home ownership.
Now some of those houses are renting for over $2,000 a month, revealing how global investors are outbidding families with cash purchases and driving up prices as a result.
“They’re preying on all these people,” Cindy Hicks, a hospital revenue specialist who lives in a Progress home near Tammy Sue Lane, said. Hicks said that when she was late paying rent, the company filed for an eviction and charged her a related fee of hundreds of dollars even after she said she caught up on the rent.
“There’s just no human decency,” said Victoria Bates, an Amazon warehouse worker who lives on Tammy Sue Lane with her husband and 10-year-old daughter. She said the company regularly failed to make repairs.
Behind Progress Residential is Pretium Partners, a New York-based investment firm whose business plan and investors are documented in the Pandora Papers, a massive database of offshore financial records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with the Post.
The Post reported on some of what it saw in the documents and also how the company pushing back on its reputation as a wealthy “landlord” of Americans:
The plan sought to exploit the 2008 U.S. housing crash, which forced millions of homeowners into foreclosure and left a glut of cheap houses for sale. The financiers’ plan called for buying up tens of thousands of these properties at depressed prices and renting them to families who had lost their homes or, because of tightened lending practices, could no longer qualify for a mortgage.
To raise money for the project, Pretium Partners sent confidential invitations to people wealthy enough to put up at least $2 million. Executives projected annualized returns of 15 to 20 percent, according to a 238-page solicitation to investors in 2012. In total, Pretium Partners raised more than $1 billion, and the resulting real estate venture became Progress Residential. The venture would “capitalize on the severe distress in the residential real estate market in the United States,” according to the pitch memo. The homes would be rented to families “who have been displaced by foreclosure or are otherwise unable to obtain financing despite being able to afford a home purchase.”
Among those who profited from America’s housing crash, according to the documents, was a Cayman Islands trust funded by one of Canada’s most powerful political donors, Stephen Bronfman, an heir to the billion-dollar Seagram spirits fortune. Another was Vikrant Bhargava, who co-founded an online gambling company that debuted on the London Stock Exchange valued at $8.5 billion. Pretium made legal arrangements so such foreign investors would have limited exposure to U.S. taxes, according to tax experts.
In a statement, Progress Residential defended itself, including the treatment of tenants and said that its rents and fees “are in line with industry standards and market rates.”
“All of our entities conduct business according to the highest ethical and legal standards,” the company said.
Pretium said in the Post report that it treats tenants fairly and responds to their complaints in a timely manner. The company said that the tenants who are at “very small portion of its 200,000 residents.”
“Pretium is dedicated to being a part of the solution to our nation’s housing crisis through unparalleled efforts to support our residents and communities,” the company said.
Breitbart News has reported on similar efforts to eliminate single family homes in other American cities, including in Maryland.
One third of Montgomery County, Maryland, is made up of single family home neighborhoods where families have porches and yards for gathering. But if the Thrive Montgomery 2050 plan is put into place by the Montgomery County City Council by the end of the year, residents could see those neighborhoods transformed with the introduction of multi-unit housing.
Oakland also is moving toward the forced diversity of middle class neighborhoods. Oakland’s Vice Mayor, Rebecca Kaplan, recently introduced a resolution to direct the city’s administration and planning department to study how it can place four-plexs in otherwise single-family home neighborhoods.
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KAMALA HARRIS - I CAN CON THEM! I'M A LAWYER, IT'S WHAT I HAVE DONE MY ENTIRE BRIBES SUCKING LEGAL CAREER!
https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/09/kamala-harrs-i-can-con-them-im-lawyer.html
All of this is, if we can be permitted to use Biden’s catchphrase, “malarkey.” Harris has already proven herself as a trusted servant of the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class. The Wall Street Journal wrote last week that Wall Street financers had breathed a “sigh of relief” at Biden’s pick of Harris. Industry publication American Banker noted that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry professionals and their most trusted law firms.
There is something fitting in the selection of Harris to co-lead the Democrats’ ticket. The response of the Democrats to the mass multi-racial and multi-ethnic protests against police violence that erupted earlier this year was to divert them into the politics of racial division, using the reactionary and false claim that what was involved was a conflict between “white America” and “black America,” rather than a conflict between the working class and capitalism.
THE LOOTING OF AMERICA
KAMALA HARRIS AND HER GOLDMAN SACHS BANKSTER STEVEN MNUCHIN
A tidy corrupt partnership
https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-looting-of-america-kamala-harris.html
She also declined to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered over a thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank. (OneWest donated $6,500 to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated $2,000 to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
SEE CHUCK SCHUMER SLOBBER OVER BLACKROCK
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=19
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
BIDEN, LIKE THE CLINTON CRIME DUAL AND THE OBOMB, IS TOTALLY OWNED BY BIG BANKSTERS. THE BIGGEST OF THEM ALL IS BLACKROCK. NO BANKSTER PUMPED MORE INTO BIDEN THAN BLACKROCK.
World’s largest asset management firm was “front and center” of Fed’s Wall Street bailout
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
According to the article, Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, the world’s biggest asset management firm, was “in frequent touch” with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Fed chair Jerome Powell “in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency programs were announced in late March.”
The extent of the collaboration is revealed in new emails obtain by the newspaper together with information that has been previously made public.
In one newly obtained email, Fink refers to planning for the rescue measures as “the project” that he and the Fed were “working on together.”
As the article notes, “America’s top economic officials were in constant contact with a Wall Street executive whose firm stood to benefit financially from the rescue,” showing “how intertwined Blackrock has become with the federal government.”
Blackrock’s close collaboration with the Fed and Treasury came at a crucial point in the development of a crisis in financial markets which began with the onset of the pandemic in March and fears in corporate circles over the response in the working class amid walkouts by workers insisting that safety measures be out in place.
The Fed responded to the initial turbulence in the markets by cutting interest rates. But these measures proved to be insufficient and the potential for a major meltdown in the markets emerged in the week ending March 20 when the $21 trillion US Treasury bond market—the bedrock of the US and global financial system—froze.
Instead of providing a “safe haven” for investors it moved to the centre of the crisis as Treasuries were sold off and no buyers could be found as the sell-off extended to all areas of the financial system.
Faced with a disaster when the markets re-opened, Mnuchin, Powell and Fink were engaged in a series of discussions over the weekend of March 21–22 to devise a rescue package. According to the Times report, Mnuchin spoke to Fink five times over the two days, more than anyone else, other than Powell with whom he spoke nine times.
One of the most significant features of the rescue measures announced on Monday March 23 was the decision by the Fed, for the first time ever, to buy corporate bonds which, as the Times noted, “were becoming nearly impossible to sell as investors sprinted to convert their holdings to cash.”
Blackrock had already closely collaborated with the Fed developing its response to the 2008 financial crisis was thereby set to play a key role in the March intervention.
The article pointed out that, while Blackrock signed a non-disclosure agreement on March 22 restricting officials from sharing information about the upcoming measures, the way in which the rescue package was devised “mattered to Blackrock.”
The decision of the Fed to buy corporate bonds and provide an underpinning for the market was significant and involved two key areas of Blackrock’s operations. One of the ways it makes profit is by managing money for clients charging a preset fee. But assets under management were contracting as investors went for cash and its business model was under threat.
Blackrock is also a major player in the short-term debt markets which were coming “under intense stress” as investors moved their holdings to cash.
Electronic Traded Funds (ETFs), which track market indexes but which trade like a stock, were also severely impacted.
In the words of the Times article: “Corporate bonds were difficult to trade and near impossible to issue in mid-March 2020. Prices on some high-grade corporate ETFs, including one of Blackrock’s, were out of whack relative to the value of the underlying assets.”
As Gregg Gelenzis, associate director for economic policy at the Center for American Progress told the Times: “This was the first time that ETFs came under stress in a really systemic way.”
In the rescue package the Fed committed itself to buying already existing debt as well as new bonds and also decided it would purchase ETFs with the result that the “bond market and fund recovery was nearly instant.”
As the Times article notes, while practically all of Wall Street benefited from the Fed’s intervention, and other financial firms were “consulted” apart from Blackrock “no other company was as front and center.”
The closeness of the relationship between Blackrock and the financial and economic arms of the state, the US Treasury and the Fed, were highlighted in a comment by William Birdthistle, of the Chicago-Kent College of Law and the author of a book on funds, cited in the article.
He said Blackrock was “about as close to a government arm as you can be, without being the Federal Reserve.”
The Fed makes every effort to cover up that relationship in order to try to preserve the fiction that it is not beholden to Wall Street and operates as an independent public authority concerned above all with the state of the economy and the welfare of the population.
The Times article recalled a news conference in July 2020 in which Powell was asked about the discussions with Fink.
“I can’t recall exactly what those conversations were,” he said, “but they would have been about what he is seeing in the market and things like that.
He said there were not “very many” conversations and that the Blackrock chief was “typically trying to make sure that we are getting good service from the company he founded the leads.”
Powell’s claim that, in the midst of the most significant crisis since the meltdown of 2008—with a potential to go even further, as the freeze in the Treasury market showed—he could not recall those conversations simply does not pass muster.
The value of every crisis, it has been rightly said, is that it reveals the real relations that are obscured and covered over in “normal” times.
And that is the case here. The economic arms of the capitalist state are not some independent authority but function every day in the interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy, servicing its needs and interests above all else.
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