Black People : Wall st, new con/ Nothing from Nothing leaves $$omething!!!

Ankhur

Well-Known Member
REGISTERED MEMBER
Oct 4, 2009
14,325
2,956
Brooklyn
Occupation
owner of various real estate concerns
Lining Up for the Wall Street Gravy Train

By Mike Whitney

December 31, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- British economist John Maynard Keynes, believed in capitalism, but he was also sharply critical of its structural flaws. He summed it up succinctly like this:

"Our analysis shows... that long-run development is not inherent in the capitalist economy. Thus, specific 'development factors' are required to sustain a long-run upward movement."

What Keynes was alluding to is the fact that mature capitalist economies tend towards stagnation. What happens, is that the rate of return on investment begins to dwindle as overcapacity builds. That causes declining profits which lead to belt-tightening, rising unemployment and falling demand. As investment drops off further, growth slows correspondingly and the economy dips into a protracted slump. This corrosive stagnation is the challenge that all advanced capitalist economies face. The solution--as Keynes notes--lies in "specific development factors", which in today's terms means "financial innovations".

Financial innovation, like derivatives contracts and securitization, have created vast new opportunities for investment and profitmaking. This complex netherworld of highly-leveraged debt-instruments and off-balance sheet operations, constitutes a shadow economy where the process of capital accumulation persists despite pervasive inertia in the underlying economy. This is why the Fed and the Treasury have been doing their best to stitch the system back together without changing its basic structure. The same is true of Congress, which has gone to great lengths to preserve the profit-generating instruments which brought the global financial system to the brink of disaster. This is from the Wall Street Journal:

"Lobbying by Wall Street has blunted efforts to step up regulation on derivatives trading by carving out exceptions or leaving the status quo in place. Derivatives took blame for some of the worst debacles of the financial crisis. But a year after regulators and critics began calling for an overhaul in the way they are traded, some efforts have been shelved and others have been watered down.

The two main issues concerning regulators were trading and clearing of swaps, which allow investors to bet on or hedge movements in currencies, interest rates and many other things. Swaps generally trade privately, leaving competitors and regulators in the dark about the scope of their risks. In November 2008, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee proposed forcing all derivatives trading onto exchanges, where their prices could be publicly disclosed and margin requirements imposed to insure that participants could make good on their market bets.

But a financial-overhaul bill passed by the House of Representatives on Dec. 11 watered down or eliminated these requirements. The measure still allows for voice brokering and allows dealers to use alternatives to public exchanges." ("How Overhauling Derivatives Died" Randall Smith and Sarah Lynch, WSJ)

"Voice brokering" is Wall Street parlance for making a deal over the phone. It makes a joke out of the anemic regulations passed into law by congressmen who are essentially agents of Wall Street.

The bottom line is that financial institutions will not be forced to trade trillions of dollars of derivatives on public exchanges where margin requirements would protect taxpayers against potential losses. Instead, Congress has given Wall Street the green light to continue selling products that are insufficiently capitalized so they can keep raking in gigantic profits. That means it's only a matter of time before another one of the financial giants keels over from its bad bets. It will be AIG all over again.

But derivatives are just part of the problem. The real issue is a financial model that doesn't really work and offers no tangible benefit to society. In its present form, the system--with its exotic OTC markets, its off-book SIVs and SPEs, and its opaque Dark Pools and High Frequency Trading-- is more snake oil than high finance. It does not "efficiently allocate capital to productive activity" as advertised, but--more often than not--diverts it away from production altogether into paper claims on all manner of financial exotica. So called "innovations" have had less to do with increasing the overall vitality of the economy or improving living standards than they do with circumventing regulations to enhance earnings by maximizing leverage. Deregulation has utterly transformed the system; creating a financial Frankenstein that hides its activities off public exchanges, that transfers the risk of losses onto the taxpayer, and that requires explicit government guarantees just to attract investment. It's a mug's game where only a small group of high-stakes speculators come up winners.

The same is true of the Fed's emergency lending programs. They're just another swindle wrapped in fancy public relations ribbon. Ostensibly, the facilities are supposed to provide cheap capital in exchange for dodgy collateral. But that's not a loan; it's a subsidy, and it helps to obscure the true, market price of the assets. As systemic regulator, the Fed has every right to provide liquidity during times of market stress or turbulence. But it does not have the right to help financial institutions conceal their losses by paying exorbitant prices for downgraded junk bonds. That's picking winners and losers, which is far beyond the Fed's mandate.

Quantitative easing (QE) is another Fed boondoggle. The program has been hyped as a way to get the banks to increase lending to businesses and consumers by creating over $1 trillion of excess bank reserves. But instead of increasing lending, QE does the exact opposite; it creates generous incentives for not lending. The banks who qualify have been taking the Fed's zero-rate reserves and exchanging them for safe, 10-year Treasury bonds which yield 3.5%. What a deal! Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has promised to maintain this policy for "an extended period" which means the banks will continue to reap the benefits of this stealth bailout for the foreseeable future.

This is the real reason the banks aren't lending, because the Fed is paying them not to. It's not a matter of creditworthy applicants. It's a matter of hopelessly mangled monetary policy. The ongoing credit contraction can be blamed on one man alone; Ben Bernanke.

Even though QE is mainly a backdoor way to recapitalize the banks; some lending has continued, although not to consumers and businesses. So where has the money gone? Here's part of the answer from the Wall Street Journal:

"Former Salvadoran finance minister Manuel Hinds points out in the latest issue of International Finance that banks have indeed been shirking on their day job of transforming increased deposits into increased private-sector credit. But they haven't quit entirely. In fact, they've funneled significant new funds into nonbank financial institutions—which have not lent them on. What's happening is that U.S. banks have been behaving exactly like developing country banks during earlier crises, such as Indonesian banks in the late 1990s—raising lending to their worst borrowers to keep them alive, lest the banks themselves collapse from their borrowers' defaults.


For U.S. banks, these zombie borrowers are their affiliated financial entities set up to manage so-called off-balance-sheet activities—such as the famous SIVs (structured investment vehicles) created by Citigroup and others during the boom. Thus, the massive fiscal and monetary bailouts of the banks have served to worsen the credit misallocation that led to the general economic collapse in 2008." ("Prepare for a Keynesian Hangover", Ben Steill, Wall Street Journal)

So the banks are not only taking depositors money and using it in high-risk derivatives transactions and currency "carry trades", they're also propping up the long daisy-chain of insolvent creditors whose default could domino Lehman-like through the entire financial system. Funny how the media skips little tidbits like this when they give their rosy evening roundup.

And then there's this; on Christmas Eve, the Treasury Dept announced that it would lift existing caps on the mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two GSE's will no longer be limited to a ceiling of $200 billion in losses each. Although, the Treasury's action looks like it was designed to support the housing market, the real beneficiaries are the banks whose balance sheets are coming under greater pressure from the relentless uptick in foreclosures. It is widely believed that Treasury is laying the groundwork for a major revision of the Obama's mortgage modification program which has, so far, been a dismal failure. If the critics are right, the administration is planning to slash the principle on millions of mortgages sometime in 2010, thus shifting the sizable losses onto the US taxpayer. Otherwise, the banks will face potential losses on another 4 million foreclosures in the next year alone. (according to Credit Suisse)

Economist Dean Baker says that the Treasury's surprise announcement is an indication that Fannie and Freddie may have paid too much for the mortgage-backed securities they bought back in 2008 when the GSE's were used as a dumping ground for distressed bank assets. Here's Baker:

"This would mean that they were paying too much for mortgages and mortgage-backed securities bought from banks after the financial meltdown was already in full swing. This was the original purpose of the TARP program. Of course, TARP came with at least some restrictions and disclosure requirements. If Fannie and Freddie are overpaying for mortgages, then there are no conditions whatsoever put on the banks that get the money." (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Just a four Letter Word, Dean Baker, Huffington Post)

The Treasury's action is tantamount to another stealth bailout by industry reps working within the Obama administration. All policymaking seems to revolve around two fundamental tenets: Increase the profit potential for the big Wall Street banks, and crimp the flow of credit to the real economy to increase privatization, crush the labor movement, and reduce the population to third world poverty. That's Neoliberalism in a nutshell and, apparently, Obama's economic dogma. In fact, as economist L. Randall Wray points out, Obama's new health care bill is just more of the same; another ginormous handout to Wall Street disguised as public policy. Here's Wray:

"There is a huge untapped market of some 50 million people who are not paying insurance premiums—and the number grows every year because employers drop coverage and people can’t afford premiums. Solution? Health insurance “reform” that requires everyone to turn over their pay to Wall Street. Can’t afford the premiums? That is OK—Uncle Sam will kick in a few hundred billion to help out the insurers. Of course, do not expect more health care or better health outcomes because that has nothing to do with “reform” …

full article:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24295.htm
 
What the corporate media won't tell you!!

Les LeopoldAuthor, "The Looting of America"
Posted: January 4, 2010 12:47 PM

The Miracle on Wall Street that the Media Won't Cover


Share Comments 26 "All told, the half dozen biggest banks have already made more than $50 billion in the first three quarters, and are on track to deliver a year of hefty profits -- and bonuses -- that could rival those of the boom years.

The banking industry has throttled back lending for the last 15 months, draining more than $3 trillion of credit from the economy." New York Times, January 1, 2010



Help me out here. I was taught that banks take in money from savers and lend it out to firms and individuals who need capital for investments: S = I, the more savings, the more investment in the real economy.

But our largest financial institutions have decided that's a ridiculous way to make money. First the borrower might not pay you back. (Especially when you do things like make loans to mortgage companies who made loans to dead people, which is the kind of thing that Wall Street was doing to super inflate their last investment bubble.) Therefore it makes more sense to hold on to the money than to lend it out. Second, you just can't make all that much money from plain old lending. There are more lucrative ways to put your capital to work.

So Wall Street is having a near record year in profits (and soon in bonuses as well). But they aren't making loans. So how are they making all that money?

New York Times reporters Graham Bowley and Eric Dash tell us that the money comes from "the ebullient stock and bond markets, which generated billions in trading revenue last year for Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street giants." What does that mean?

Good luck finding an answer in the New York Times or in any other major journal. The established media, one after the other, just assumes that it is possible to make tens of billions of dollars in a matter of months through "trading revenue." Even Paul Krugman, the best of the bunch, never bothers to ask how that works. They never question whether or not our economy gains or suffers from that activity. They never question whether it is legitimate or just a sophisticated con game. They never ask whether it poses severe risks for the American economy and for tax payers who seem to be the piggy bank of last (not to mention first) resort for Wall Street.

Instead, everyone seems to agree that you can make money hand over fist "through trading activities" and that's ok even if we don't know how it's done, even if the real economy is an absolute mess. I mean take a look around you: State budgets are being slashed, mortgages foreclosed, millions unemployed, but if you're a Wall Street bank you can make billions upon billions through legitimate "trading activities?"

How is that possible?

Let me level with you: I haven't gotten it entirely figured out yet (but I will as I put together my next book). But here is my theory. The financial sector has turned into a vast financial bubble machine, semi-detached from the real economy. Bubbles aren't an accident emerging from otherwise normal financial activity. Bubbles have become the very essence of modern finance. The latest asset bubble is being inflated with no-interest and low-interest Fed money and guarantees. Within that expanding bubble, large banks can leverage bets worth hundreds of billions of dollars into financial markets and compete with each other to make "trading" profits. And as long as the bubble is expanding, there are no losers on the other side of those trades ... except for us suckers in the real economy who ultimately, and inevitably, will pay the costs when the bubble bursts.

It's a different world within that bubble and there's a reason so many of our most ambitious college graduates want to go there. Financial corporations can earn money without creating real economic value. You can get paid ludicrous sums that have no connection with pay scales in the real economy. (A trader "earns" 100 times as much as the best neurosurgeon?) With your loose change you can hire all the lobbyists you want to make sure that regulators don't mess with your serious money. And as the bubble grows and grows, your firm can grow larger and larger so that it can't possibly be allowed to fail.

This problem is much, much larger than perfidy of any one bank. You bust up Goldman Sachs and the bubble would still go on. (Although, I grant you, we'd feel better.) You pretend we can eliminate central banks and return to the gold standard, and the bubble would go on. It won't stop -- it can't stop -- until we redesign the financial sector from the bottom up.

We are fond of saying that the financial sector should serve the real economy and not the other way around. But we're really some place new. In our brave new billionaire bailout society, the core of the financial sector -- the big banks -- definitely no longer serves the real economy. There's a one-way valve between the sectors: money from the real economy goes through to Wall Street, but doesn't come back out. It operates under its own rules using cheap federal money and guarantees.

I sure hope I'm wrong. I hope journalists and economists will set me straight about how Wall Street is making all those "trading" profits without lending money during the worst years since the Great Depression. But so far, none have even tried.

Why is the answer important? We can't rebuild our rotting financial structures until we know how they work. Passing around PR spin about "trading profits" only promotes the illusion that the financial bubble does something useful for the real world that


full article;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/the-miracle-on-wall-stree_b_410572.html
 

Donate

Support destee.com, the oldest, most respectful, online black community in the world - PayPal or CashApp

Latest profile posts

HODEE wrote on Etophil's profile.
Welcome to Destee
@Etophil
Destee wrote on SleezyBigSlim's profile.
Hi @SleezyBigSlim ... Welcome Welcome Welcome ... :flowers: ... please make yourself at home ... :swings:
Back
Top