OR ONE COULD CALL IT THE CENTRAL BANKING TAKEOVER OF MOST OF THE WORLD. But first a cov-19 update and recent news, then to the money beast with its innumerable allies:
4-2 USA 216722/19617= 11% increase/day. https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-04-02-20-intl/index.html
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4-1 10 days for test results New Jersey-based Quest Diagnostics had about 160,000 coronavirus test orders waiting to be processed on March 25, which amounted to about half of the 320,000 total orders for the tests the company had received up to that date, according to Quest internal materials obtained by CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/01/politics/testing-backlog-coronavirus-quest-invs/index.html
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4-2 In a revision to its December 2015 guidance, the agency reduced the waiting period for men who have had sex with other men from 12 months to three months, acting without prior public comment in response to the national emergency declared March 13….The guidance also reduced from 12 to three months the waiting period for female donors who have had sex with men who had sex with men, as well as for donors with recent tattoos and piercings. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/2/fda-relaxes-donation-guidelines-gay-men-nations-bl/4-2
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3-27 US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has suspended its enforcement of environmental laws during the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, signaling to companies they will not face any sanction for polluting the air or water of Americans. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/27/trump-pollution-laws-epa-allows-companies-pollute-without-penalty-during-coronavirus
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3-12 US President Donald Trump has announced sweeping travel restrictions on 26 European countries in a bid to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
The ban applies to travellers from countries which are members of the Schengen border-free travel area. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51846923
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As of 1 March 2020 there were 984 confirmed cases and 73 recoveries in Lombardy.[69][81] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Italy
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3-18-2019 “Not one major Wall Street executive went to jail for destroying our economy in 2008 as a result of their greed, recklessness and illegal behavior. No. … They didn’t go to jail. They got a trillion-dollar bailout.”
On the question of whether or not anyone went to jail for crimes related to the crisis, Kessler (at WaPo) is right that one executive, Kareem Serageldin, did get sentenced to 30 months for offenses that could be construed as having contributed to the crash. That his case took place in 2013, well after reporters like Gretchen Morgensen, Louise Story and myself made noise about the conspicuous absence of prosecutions, is beside the point….Kessler concedes, “Sanders’s overall point is valid,” adding: Almost 900 executives went to jail for the savings and loan scandal in the 1980s, compared with just one person in the 2008 financial crisis.
From there he asks, “But did Wall Street get a $1 trillion bailout?” He ends up giving this assertion “Two Pinocchios.”…He then adds the automobile bailouts, the bailouts of AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and comes up with a $632 billion sum — still not $1 trillion. He insists this was not just a bailout of big companies, because “the American people” were also helped. “If these banks and other financial institutions had collapsed, many companies would have soon followed, leading to massive layoffs.”
Lastly, closer to the real point, Kessler disputes the numerous
studies showing the real bailout outlay was through the Fed, which
the Sanders campaign had said was anywhere from $7.7 trillion (the
number Bloomberg used in its coverage of secret Fed lending) to
$29 trillion (the number the Levy Institute at Bard College calculated, including guarantees and other forms of aid).
Kessler dumps on these numbers because a) Ben Bernanke once said they were “wildly inaccurate,” and b) because loans listed as different expenditures often represented the same loan simply rolled over. Under that standard, Kessler quotes the Government Accountability Office, which said “loans outstanding for the emergency period peaked at about $1 trillion in late 2008.”
This is basically the history of the bailouts as written in self-congratulatory tomes like Ben Bernanke’s The Courage To Act (revised, probably, from My Courage To Act) and Timothy Geithner’s Stress Test. It’s Wall Street’s one-sentence summary of the bailouts: they weren’t that big, but if they were, they were necessary, and made a profit, and even though they made us rich again, they were done for you, the ordinary person!…
However only a section of community banks get into the program. The Treasury Department invested in 707 banks, or about 10 percent of the industry. But 100 percent of the biggest banks were bailed out. As Bernanke told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, of the nation’s 13 largest banks, “12 were at the risk of failure within a week or two” of the initial bailout period, in late September and October of 2008. Every single one of those banks took huge bailout payments.
As Gretchen Morgenson pointed out when information about Fed bailout programs first became public, just six banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — were the recipients of 63 percent of the Fed’s average daily borrowing, representing about a half-trillion dollars at peak periods just for those firms….
Citigroup was borrowing $100 billion from the Fed at its peak, Morgan Stanley $107 billion. Fed money was used to broker Bank of America’s absorption of Merrill Lynch and help Wells Fargo buy up Wachovia, in addition to other mergers. At the end of all the rearranging, the 12 largest banks in the country — which had all contributed massively to the crisis and had maybe a week to live when the crash happened, as Bernanke testified — suddenly controlled 70 percent of all bank assets in the United States….
How about the Obama administration’s early-2010 decision to give Fannie and Freddie an unlimited credit line to buy mortgages? …— to be used as a “backdoor TARP” to “purchase toxic assets at inflated prices.” In other words, the government took over Fannie and Freddie and used the duo in a way private shareholders would never have allowed, as a landfill in which banks could dump bad assets at high prices….
How about non-prosecuting a company crime? Crafting settlements so automatic penalties for certain offenses like the revocation of bank charters don’t kick in? Then there was the too-common practice of letting offenders like HSBC make at least part of regulatory settlements related to crisis-era offenses tax-deductible. This forced all of us to pay for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of these settlements….
As I’ve written before, trying to compute the bailout is a fool’s errand because it was so all-encompassing. The government’s massive treasure-dump into the balance sheets of the top banks was a kind of merger - MATT TAIBBI https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/2008-financial-bailout-809731/
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