The moment of truth is drawing near:another bailout will be required both in US and UK. This is the moment to stand and fight: we cannot go along with another bailout. There is a clear alternative: put the banks through bankruptcy! This is the only sensible solution as well as a great moment of revolutionary change. It would mark end of the system put in place with the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694 and the Federal Reserve in 1913. It would mark the end of the rule of finance and the epoch of perpetual war, colonialism and destruction. It would be the end of empire and the beginning of a world community of sovereign nation states. It would mark the refoundation or transformation of global institutions such as the UN. and the potential for a new direction for humanity.
It was only last April that Bank of America Corp. was making fools out of the doomsayers who had called for its nationalization a year earlier. Taxpayers had gotten their bailout cash back. Investors who bought its shares at the bottom were making a killing. Government leaders lauded the company’s rescues, both of them, as a great success.
THE TIMING couldn’t have been better for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which held its first public hearings on January 13-14.
With their top employees set to enjoy huge bonuses thanks to taxpayer bailouts, the CEOs of the country’s big banks should have been in the hot seat for their role in the financial panic of 2008. The Obama administration’s proposed levy on banks seemingly would have upped the pressure, too.
Idiocy is usually described as “endlessly repeating the same process, hoping for a different result”. Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden et al are straining at the leash to get the Bailout Ball rolling once again. The stabilization of the financial sector, as elusive as it has been so far, has become the Holy Grail of Economic salvation. That makes $8.5 Trillion worth of trying and $0 of result. The Knights of the Oval Table are gathered to plan their mission as their beleaguered subjects are trying to batter down the castle gates. It’s no small wonder that Geithner wants to get the money out the door as soon as the end of this week.
“We make money the old fashioned way. We print it.”
– Art Rolnick, Chief Economist for the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank
The $700 billion that was arm-twisted from Congress by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in October was evidently just the camel’s nose under the tent. According to a November 24 Bloomberg report, the Paulson/Bernanke team is now prepared to pay $7.76 trillion to rescue the financial system.[1] Prepared to pay how? Congress has not raised its debt ceiling to anywhere near that level; but the approval of Congress, which originally voted down the controversial $700 billion bailout, is apparently no longer necessary. The door has been opened, and the Treasury Secretary and Fed Chairman feel they can now pledge whatever they want. Perhaps they are inching up a zero at a time just to see what the public’s tolerance is for unrepayable debt. The new sum – $7.76 trillion – represents $25,000 for every citizen in the country, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year; yet it’s not clear that a mere half of our net worth will rescue the financial system. One bankrupt bank after another has been bailed out with public money, in a futile effort to prevent a collapse of a massive multi-trillion dollar derivatives pyramid created by the banks.[2] But according to the Comptroller of the Currency, U.S. commercial banks now carry over $180 trillion in derivatives on their books. The public is liable to be bankrupted before this mess is resolved. Read the rest of this entry »
“Doesn’t this seem like lunacy to you? The consequences of it are unbelievably bad in terms of public intrusion into the private sector. Is anybody thinking there? It’s too late, it’s not going to make any difference, and it’s aggravating as hell when there’s a better idea and you can’t even get it in play.” Former Treasury Secretary John O’Neill in an October 1 interview with Bloomberg on the bank bailout plan Read the rest of this entry »
For nearly a year, we have been asking ourselves why the investors and foreign banks that bought up hundreds of billions of dollars of worthless mortgage-backed securities (MBS) from US investment banks have not taken legal action against these same banks or initiated a boycott of US financial products to prevent more people from getting ripped off? Read the rest of this entry »
The Congressman’s Dilemma
by Christopher Hayes The Nation
So in light of the news of House Republicans loudly and suddenly bailing out on the bailout, a few things to keep in mind to make sense of the political terrain. Read the rest of this entry »
The Danger of Wall Street Blackmailing Us Back Into a Bad Bill
By Ian Welsh Khabrein
The Western media are upping up the volume and markets are rallying (and disregarding market fundamentals) to blackmail congress into voting for the bailout. A battle has been won but the war is not over. There is a danger that we have been lulled into a false sense of security. Protests should continue
What was causing the panicked “must pass bill now” gasps from Senators and the Treasury was not the various bank failures. They have been pretty orderly and no one who failed wasn’t expected to fail. Instead the problem was that banks aren’t lending to each other. This isn’t because they fear that other banks won’t repay if they fail, in every case when a bank has failed, the Fed has made sure that banks with outstanding interbank loans got their money back. So this isn’t a question of systemic risk causing fear. Read the rest of this entry »
In These New Times 