Hillary Clinton's Hidden Big Business Agenda Exposed

Investors Busniness Daily ^ | 10/12/2015 | Editorial

[expat_panama]

Regulation: You can bet all the contenders at Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate will say they're the toughest on big business. What they won't say is their own policies favor big business, big time.

Bernie Sanders, the self-described socialist who's been attracting big crowds and gaining ground on Hillary Clinton in polls, gave a glimpse of this over the weekend, telling "Meet the Press" how he plans to compare "my consistency and my willingness to stand up to Wall Street corporations, big corporations, with the Secretary."

Clinton, meanwhile, has been moving rapidly leftward to shore up support among the party's increasingly hard-left base, opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and the Keystone XL pipeline and proposing to break up Wall Street banks, raise the minimum wage, etc.

Despite all this anti-corporate rhetoric, the fact is that Sanders and Clinton will be the best friends big business could ever hope for, since their regulatory agenda will invariably help big, established businesses at the expense of small, entrepreneurial competitors.

That, after all, is their legacy in the banking and health care industries.

Both Sanders and Clinton are big boosters of the Dodd-Frank financial reform. But a recent Harvard study found that the massive regulatory scheme that it imposed has hurt small community banks the most.

The researchers found that community banks' share of assets declined in the second quarter ...

[snip]

A recent paper from George Mason University's Mercatus Center said, "Regulation has a negative effect on new firm creation and employment growth." The 24% increase in federal regulations from 1998 through 2011 cut new firm entry by 1.2%.

Clinton, Sanders and the rest of the Democratic Party like to talk a good populist game. But in the real world, their policies are corporatism at its worst.

[expat_panama]

Related story (from Political Calculations 

Dividends: U.S. Economy Back in Contraction in September 2015

 

According the S&P's Monthly Dividend Report (Excel spreadsheet), the U.S. economy is once again experiencing contractionary economic forces.

At 43, September 2015's total reported by Standard and Poor is over double what was recorded by our two primary sources for real time dividend cut announcements, Seeking Alpha's Market Currents (filtered for dividends) and the WSJ's Dividend Declarations, which we use to generate our near-real time cumulative dividend cuts by day of quarter chart, which confirms that the U.S. economy took a turn for the worse in September 2015, but for the third quarter of 2015 overall, only indicates that the U.S. economy experienced recessionary, rather than contractionary, conditions.

Although our near real time sources for announced dividend cuts would appear to have missed half of the firms cutting dividends in September 2015, it does provide a large enough sample to give an indication of the kinds of firms that came under the most distress during September.

• Oil industry-related firms
• Interest rate sensitive firms (such as mortgage REITs)
• Education industry-related firms

,...

[snip]

 

 

[expat_panama]

Happy 'Friday-the-Thirteenth' on a Tuesday!  Yesterday's stocks saw some weak increases in even weaker trade and likewise for metals.  More of the same today according to futures traders, metals +0.05% and stocks "unchanged".  Treasury Budget gets reported today, and here's some reading for over breakfast:

Does Rush Of Deals Signal The End of the Bull? - Andrew Ross Sorkin, NYT
Weak Sector Stock Rally Says Bear Rally - Wallace Witkowski, MarketWatch
What's Good for ETFs Is Bad for Mutual Funds - William Baldwin, Forbes
A Nobel Prize Win For a Skeptical Optimist - John Cassidy, The New Yorker
There Is No Global Recession w/o the U.S. - David Rosenberg, National Post

[smartyaz]

[expat_panama]

excellent quote.

[rfreedom4u]

Excellent post!

[smartyaz]

In 1971, Allen wrote with Larry Abraham a book titled None Dare Call It Conspiracy . Exploding onto the American political scene in March 1972, it sold more than four million copies during the 1972 presidential campaign opposing Nixon and U.S. Senator George S. McGovern.

In this book, Allen and Abraham assert that the modern political and economic systems in most developed nations are the result of a sweeping conspiracy by the Establishment’s power elite, for which he also uses the term Insiders. According to the authors, these Insiders use elements of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to forward their socialist/communist agenda:

Establish an income tax system as a means of extorting money from the common man;

Establish a central bank, deceptively named so that people will think it is part of the government;

Have this bank be the holder of the national debt;

Run the national debt, and the interest thereon, sky high through wars (or any sort of deficit spending), starting with World War I.

READ HIS BOOK, IT’S FREE AT THE LINK!

http://www.kamron.com/Downloads/none%20dare%20call%20it%20conspiracy.pdf

[expat_panama]

Usually when I see the word ‘conspiracy’ I reach for the tin-foil. This time what I thot about was the fact that while Nixon’s been characterized as some kind of right winger we have to remember than he not only signed OSHA but he took it upon himself to attempt controlling inflation by fiat and he set about regulating all prices throughout the entire economy.

Insane.

[citizen]

Nixon created the EPA, “opened up” China. He was way more progressive than popularly portrayed by the lefty media. They know they have a winner in coloring the impeached & convicted President of Watergate as a far-right conservative.

[citizen]

Wow, Rosenberg is telling us that things are pretty dang good!!!
He’s probably a Krugman disciple.

[citizen]

‘Fed Fatigue’ Has Set In
“The markets are taking a breather from basing every move on the latest rhetoric out of the Federal Reserve regarding the timing of the first interest rate hike in nearly a decade.”
http://www.foxbusiness.com/economy-policy/2015/10/13/fed-fatigue-has-set-in/?intcmp=bigtopmarketfeatures

The Obama regime and FED have messed things up so badly, I don’t know if we will ever get back to markets that move on rational supply/demand/P-ER/dividends/earnings/etc metrics.

[expat_panama]

The Obama regime and FED have messed things up so badly...

--and the FED w/o Obama has done a pretty good job; but as far as 'Fed fatigue' goes the problem may be all the nonsense the Fed-bashers have been complaining about w/ regards to alleged 'secrecy'.  The real problem may be that the Fed's just too darn open and it needs a much lower profile.  From Investor's dot com:

'You don't tell the markets anything. You just implement policy — slowly and smoothly." That was the communication policy of late Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin (1906-1998), as recalled by finance professor Lewis Spellman of the University of Texas at Austin.

Spellman, who worked at the Fed during the Johnson administration, remembers Martin vividly and believes that Martin is the most successful Fed chairman in history. One measure of success is longevity. Martin was the longest-serving Fed chairman, holding office during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations (1951-1970).

Few Americans had heard of William Martin back then, and that's how he wanted it. He deliberated on monetary policy in private, issued a statement and went home. He let the markets figure out the intent of the Fed's moves without spoon-feeding them additional thoughts or wandering off on academic lectures.

According to Professor Spellman, Chairman Martin understood that trying to manipulate the financial press and markets is a losing game.

How the communications policy of our Fed has changed, and not for the better. In one recent week alone, more than 15 different Fed officials were making speeches on the economy and monetary policy.

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-viewpoint/100615-774311-fed-chairman-janet-yellen-talks-too-much.htm#ixzz3oTkaMJHs
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[Maybe I need to post this article as a separate thread....]

[abb]

The man just now asked:

“What’s your number?”
“Excuse me?”
“The amount of money you would need to be able to walk away from it all and just live happily-ever-after. See, I find that everyone has a number and it’s usually an exact number, so what is yours?”
“More.”