Posted on 04/22/2016 5:10:50 AM PDT by expat_panama
With all the fat-cat bashing from Hillary Clinton and her socialist foe Bernie Sanders, you’d think big banks have never stopped ripping off the poor, downtrodden consumer and are laughing all the way to their own bank vaults at Americans’ expense.
The banks, of course, still make money, though increasingly a lot less... ... once-massive industry of huge profit margins and immense power in political circles is in retreat....
...New regulations like Dodd-Frank, championed and imposed by President Obama and his minions, don’t let banks perform simple tasks...
...on top of the countless billions of dollars in settlements banks are still coughing up for alleged misdeeds that may or may not have happened years ago. Banks find it easier and cheaper to just shell out the cash than fight...
...Here in the nation’s welfare-state capital (New York City) finance jobs account for more than 20 percent of private-sector wages, and more than 11 percent of all jobs are in some way related to finance. Much the same goes for the state...
... less of this money is making its way to pay for the goodies our local pols love to hand out.
And things are likely to get worse. Even as the Dow has reached a record 18,000 plus, banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have announced disappointing earnings...
...Then there’s the impact on city and state finances. The economies of New York City and state may have rebounded from the worst of the Great Recession, but given the massive size of their budgets, city and state coffers are always just one small economic downturn away from a massive deficit. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
I don’t recall ever being ripped off by wall street. OTOH I get ripped off by the government every paycheck, every time I get an interest payment, and ever time I make a profit on anything.
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DUFUS! Getting “ripped off” by the gov’t IS getting ripped off by Wall Street ,, Wall Street is the FED and the FED owns the government. Time for you to wake up.
“I prescribe a couple of weeks of Zero Hedge to get you on the right path in understanding WTF is going on.”
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If you don’t agree with what gets posted on ZH ,, many times YEARS before it becomes mainstream “common knowledge” maybe you’d be interested in learning how Wall Street screwed everyone destroying property rights, the rule of law and land records ... even you must care about that.. https://livinglies.wordpress.com/
>> Zero interest rate
> This was caused by the government forcing the banks to make loans to people who had no chance or in many case even intent of paying them back
No it wasn’t, that was just the marginal stuff. It was caused by reckless easy money policies combined with wall-to-wall fraud. Look up Countrywide, Linda Green, robosigning, mortage-backed-securities fraud, and so on.
>> Zero interest rate
> This is set by the Feds
The Federal Reserve is OWNED (actually, not just metaphorically) by the Wall Street banks. It acts on behalf of those banks.
>>Purchased our representation in government away from us
>Come on now. EVERY industry does this.
Not to the extent that Wall Street does it. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Citibank, along with a host of other large banks, are top sources of donations to almost every legislator on the federal level.
I’m afraid I have the situation assessed accurately; I should know, as I’ve been studying it with fascination for years. The government doesn’t exist in a bubble, it answers to sources of large donations, and there is no bigger such source than the big banks.
Housing bubble
This was caused by the government forcing the banks to make loans to people who had no chance or in many case even intent of paying them back
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Not at all , you must be a Rush listener , he believes this too but he gets his info from his Palm Beach neighbor , Wylbur Ross , who is neck deep in the mortgage fraud , very few loans went to those inner-city areas... Wall Street found a way to corrupt the land title system with MERS which enabled them to play 3 card monty with the deeds and notes ,, keeping themselves in the middle with faked , never funded trusts and the associated agents of those faked trusts ,, separating the investors from the borrowers to control the information flow. The flood of Wall Street money with them able to get fake AAA ratings on the financial products they created just kept growing the bubble in a vicious circle... Now our land records are trashed , every foreclosure on a loan from 1999-2008 is filled with fraudulent documents and we are being screwed (not just those being foreclosed upon but those whose land records are messed up and who had to pay bubble prices due to the fraud https://cloudedtitlesblog.com/tag/dave-krieger/ ).
Yeah, those poor banks, they’re really taking it on the chin. Puh-leeze.
CptnObvious The poor don't even get a 1% interest rate
rstrahan Big Banks love millionares, big corporations, Wall Street... ... hit the small guy hardest.
thoughtomator money for the banks, no matter the consequences for middle-class
Sandars is a Marxist and what he really means by too big to live” is "death to the capitalists!" Yeah, so the dems are a bunch of blood thirsty class warfare Marxists, that's old news. What baffles me is why we got so much Marxist hatred right here on the FR.
Look guys, only an idiot Marxist thinks you make the 'little guy' bigger by cutting down the big guys. Think, if being around rich people was a bad idea then imagine moving to say, Botswana where all your neighbors are poor --I'm sure they'd just love to swap w/ you.
Finally, y'all got to realize that prices are not set my capitalist exploiters or their evil gov't oligarchy Federal Reserve. 99% of all money loaned in the U.S. is w/ interest rates set by the free market --agreed upon by both the loaner and the borrower. Another fact is that even more dollars are being loaned out in free markets outside the U.S. where the evil capitalist Federal Reserve does not even exist.
Interest rates are low because inflation's low. When inflation comes back up so will interest rates. This is how it's been for hundreds of years and we need to deal w/ it.
Make that more like "YEARS AND YEARS --and more like never". When a typical Marxist is asked why believe Krazy Karl even when none of his predictions have ever come to pass. they usually say that the fact that none have happened yet just proves how very very farsighted Marx really was.
Reality never impresses a true believer.
> Look guys, only an idiot Marxist thinks you make the ‘little guy’ bigger by cutting down the big guys.
Nobody is saying that. We’re saying, that caught red-handed, the big guys need to be brought to justice. Equal justice under law, not “down with The Man”, is the principle here.
>Finally, y’all got to realize that prices are not set my capitalist exploiters or their evil gov’t oligarchy Federal Reserve. 99% of all money loaned in the U.S. is w/ interest rates set by the free market —agreed upon by both the loaner and the borrower.
False. The Federal Reserve is a central planning institution that sets the price of money. This price flows through to all the loan agreements downstream, modifying those rates accordingly.
> Another fact is that even more dollars are being loaned out in free markets outside the U.S. where the evil capitalist Federal Reserve does not even exist.
Name one free market, besides the black market, in the context of a currency with a centrally planned interest rate.
> Interest rates are low because inflation’s low. When inflation comes back up so will interest rates. This is how it’s been for hundreds of years and we need to deal w/ it.
Only the official inflation rate is low, and what that rate is is again determined by the very same central planners that set the interest rates. This has not been like this for “hundreds of years” - the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. During that time, the US dollar has lost 98% of its value. During the hundred years before that, the US dollar lost ZERO value. (As the phrase goes, “you figga it out!”)
Actual inflation is running well beyond that, which you would know if you bought your own groceries and clothes, or paid rent - food, clothing and shelter costs are far outpacing the official rate of inflation.
And then there’s health care inflation, which has been so obscene for so long that unless you are subsidized or independently wealthy you can’t afford it.
We agree on the corruption, we just don’t agree on the source of it.
Look up all the worst politicians you can think of on http:/opensecrets.org and check out who gives them the most money
It will provide you with all the evidence necessary to satisfy you that Wall Street and the lobbyists they employ (which you will see in the list with the names of law firms) are the primary sources of campaign donations across the political spectrum.
That's not only true but it's a reality that society's lived w/ for centuries. As a civil engineer we ran into it all the time w/ old buildings that presented a hazard to their next door neighbors and the consequence has to be either confiscating the structure or demanding a lot of remedial work. That, plus rewriting the building codes.
Bernanke said the same thing back in '08 and everyone agreed. fwiw, all the TARP funds were paid back w/ interest. What's never got paid back was the GM bailout. I'd be tempted to whine that the capitalists pay their debts and it's the laborists who cheat, steal and exploit but on the Planet Earth we need both labor and capital together and only an idiot wants a conflict.
You said it all brilliantly.. no need for me to answer specific replies to my posts.. Without the rule of law we will continue to sink into becoming a banana republic.
A free market doesn’t have TARP funds at all. It doesn’t have government bailouts.
Had the free market been allowed to work, none of these big banks would exist today and we wouldn’t have this problem. The market verdict on all of them was that they were failed institutions. The government propped up these failed institutions.
And TARP just scratches the surface. The Fed’s balance sheet has expanded to $4 trillion absorbing bad loans off the books of these banks.
Central banks, bailouts, fractional reserve banking, unprosecuted fraud - none of these things are compatible with free markets.
If you are not outraged by what the Federal Reserve has done, then either you don’t really believe in free markets, or you are ignorant of the details. The latter condition can be cured by education.
Nobody is saying that.
Exactly, and y'all should know more than to post stuff biased to push what we'd normally expect form an IdjutMrxst.
Like the idea that the loony leftist war on banks is ok because we need "justice" (aka "righteous wrathful vengeance") upon those greedy exploiting banks that caused the '08 suffering of the masses that totally missed the bankers. Sure, we all know that the '08 mess was caused in no small part by this same loony leftist push forcing the evil banks to loan to minorities that could never pay back. Add to that how the GM union pork was a huge taxpayer loss while the TARP wasn't.
...Federal Reserve ...sets the price of money...
We have to know it's rediculous to imagine that the FR somehow forces all of us w/ banks (both domestic or foreign) to loan and borrow against our will.
Name one free market, besides the black market, in the context of a currency with a centrally planned interest rate.
Ah, you got me there. Sure I know that I get to pick and choose who I do business with and what transactions I participate in, but if you're not willing or able to imagine my doing so I'm realizing now that this convo is really never going to get anywhere.
Been fun tho...
Trump on Dodd Frank (Varney on October 20, 2015. It's a whole bunch of very interesting stuff. At the 4:44 mark Trump talks about banks large and small:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee-tiYf0iyU
Bankers’ opinions on Trump:
http://www.americanbanker.com/news/law-regulation/how-would-banks-handle-a-trump-nomination-1079603-1.html
>Should the Big Banks be busted up? If Standard Oil, etc warranted breakup, so do the Big Banks.
Prefer the bust-up of *big* GOVT, personally.
The only way *big* XYZ gets big, is because of govt (Fascism+)/legal monopolies. TBTF is a govt construct. Frank/Dodd, govt. Only AT&T/Comcast is a govt...
Put govt back into its rightful size and role and, w/out the taxpayers as guinea-pigs/banks, you’d see a resizing.
> Exactly, and y’all should know more than to post stuff biased to push what we’d normally expect form an IdjutMrxst.
This is you imposing your emotional biases on a conversation. The matter concerns the Rule of Law and free markets.
> We have to know it’s rediculous to imagine that the FR somehow forces all of us w/ banks (both domestic or foreign) to loan and borrow against our will.
These matters affect you profoundly whether you choose to interact with them or not. They affect the price of everything and distort and destroy the free market.
> Ah, you got me there. Sure I know that I get to pick and choose who I do business with and what transactions I participate in, but if you’re not willing or able to imagine my doing so I’m realizing now that this convo is really never going to get anywhere.
I can name two markets you have no choice to participate in, auto insurance and health insurance. Depending on your circumstances, a whole host of other unwanted business relationships may be forced upon you by the government.
As long as you transact business in US dollars, the nature and abuse of the currency is not only your business, but has an enormous effect on every economic aspect of your life.
True, and a free market doesn't provide judges and courts to enforce contracts, money is not coined and regulated from some online vendomat, lots of things governments do that free markets need and can't do. Same the other way around too (like creating jobs and wealth). We need to agree that markets need governments and that our debate is not whether governments serve and support markets but how.
A free market does require courts to enforce contracts, and it also requires laws against fraud and coercion.
Free markets and anarcho-capitalism are not the same thing at all.
Free markets could handle the issue of currency just fine. It’s government requiring payment of taxes in a specific currency which has locked us into using the US dollar, but it doesn’t need to be that way.
Markets do not at all need governments to coin money or to regulate the price thereof. I believe that, left to its own devices, a free market would choose silver and gold as superior forms of money.
They would definitely not choose a currency which is constantly debased and which could be created in endless amounts at a keystroke by a party accountable to no one for its actions.
That's been said before on the FR and it's so extreme it usually ends the chat.
Thing is that we're now talking stuff that ether requires amending the U.S. Constitution or maybe that anarchy you just said you don't want. I mean, you're saying you don't like what everyone else has wanted for centuries and you're not saying what you do want. This makes your statement useless as it is.
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