21-10-2013, 08:04 AM
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 84%"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 60%"]
[/TD]
[TD="width: 40%"]10/20/13[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD="width: 16%"]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
Everything else is chump change, and the Kabuki theater, good-cop,bad-cop routine taking place in Washington right now is one we haveseen before, with only one ending.
The debt ceiling gets raised, and American solvency will be furtherweakened, as a blame game is played out to the music of inanegibberish over how the debacle affects each party's prospects inthe next election.
What will never be written about in the mainstream media is theelephant in the room. The script is carefully designed to keepattention off the real money, the ongoing bail-outs to the bank andfinancial services industry.
Former Special Inspector General for TARP Programs Neil Barofsky,whom journalist Glenn Greenwald once called"easily...one of the most impressive and courageous politicalofficials in Washington," in congressional hearings in 2010unveiled a breathtaking possible projected costto the taxpayers of $23 trillion for the bank and financialservices bail-outs, all told, should "worst-case scenarios...cometo pass in a variety of federal programs."
Barofsky is a former federal prosecutor and now a professor of lawat NYU who famously butted heads withSecretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, and the rest of thefinancial political establishment. Needless to say he was forcedout of his job.
"TARP is just the best known program in an array of more than 30overseen by Treasury Department and Federal Reserve that have paidout or put aside money to bail out financial firms and inject moneyinto the markets," says Mother JonesMagazine, which goes on to list of bewildering array of loansand loan guarantees, most of which will never, and can never, bepaid back.
Just as important as the Kabuki theater is the carefully nurturedillusion that the bank bail-outs got paid back. These usually referonly to TARP, and even that didn't get paidback.
Even the low figures for the total cost of the bail-outs,$12 trillion to $14trillion, are three times the size of an entire US budget. Themoney gets paid out month after month, well-hidden in the mostarcane, inaccessible reaches of the US budget.
It is not easy to find, and it is not meant to be.
Most people associate a figure of $700 billion to the bail-outs,but that is only TARP. Bloomberg News notes:"it turns out that that $700 billion is just a small part of a muchlarger pool of money that has gone into propping up our nation'sfinancial system. And most of that taxpayer money hasn't had muchpublic scrutiny at all."
How did the US taxpayer get on the hook for such unimaginableamounts, which, in current dollars, is morethan all the wars the US has ever fought, the Moon landings,and the New Deal, combined? It's not that hard conceptually. Thinkof going to Vegas with your grandmother's money and losing it all.Now you are "too big to fail." But, so enormous is your greed, youdon't just want back what you rolled into town with in your moneybelt. You want what you were up for awhile at the roulette table.That could be anything.
These sums mean the US taxpayer will be in hock for generations,and that is the entire point. Since now we owe the bankers' debts,all other programs, from military to welfare, are squeezed againstthis, and it never disappears. We can pay them today, or we can paythem tomorrow. But we are going to keep paying them, and raisingthe debt ceiling to do it. If we don't they crash the economy, toshow they are "too big to fail."
Worse, if that can be imagined, the bail-outs only made the problemworse.
Barofsky wrote in Bloomberg News:
"The top banks are 23 percent larger than they were before thecrisis. They now hold more than $8.5 trillion in assets, theequivalent of 56 percent of gross domestic product, up from 43percent just five years ago. The risk in our banking system isremarkably concentrated in these banks, which now control 52percent of all industry assets, up from 17 percent four decadesago. There is broad recognition that Dodd-Frank hasn't solved theproblem it was meant to address -- the power and influence of banksdeemed too big to fail."
Barofsky told Gawker.com:
"The incentives are all still in place for the TBTF banks toaccumulate dangerous amounts of risk in the quest for short-termprofits with the assurance that if their bets do not pay off, they(and most importantly from the perspective of market discipline)and their counterparties/creditors) [sic] will be bailed out by thegov't. Combine that with a lack of accountability forbad/fraudulent behavior, and you have a toxic cocktail that willbring about another crisis. Regulatory reform did nothing to changethose incentives."
Bloomberg News' Bob Ivrey in fact reportsthat, as of as late as May of this year, investors were back inVegas and happily doubling down on the big money tables, andbetting on more bail-outs, and the "too big to fail" strategy.
In other words, as Barofsky told an online audience at Gawker.comin a free-wheeling exchange withparticipants: "We're pretty f*cked."
There is another solution, tried to fortuitous effect in Iceland.The government took ever the banks, minimized the pain, andstarted arresting the bankerswho caused the problem, instead of bailing themout. Recent reports show Iceland outperforming the rest of theEU and its economy buzzing along nicely.
Barofsky wrote in Bloomberg: "The American people should berevolted by a financial system that rewards failure and protectsthose who drove it to the point of collapse and will undoubtedly doso again."
So cynical is the "budget crisis," manufactured by both parties,that World War II veterans who stormed Normandy have been made intopawns at war memorials.
The choice for America is clear. Either wake up, and knock thepoliticians of both parties' heads together next year at the ballotbox, or consign ourselves to Barosfky's F-bomb analysis.
Neil Barofsky is author of the book "Bailout:How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing WallStreet."
[TR]
[TD="width: 84%"]
Ongoing bank bailouts make mockery of budget talks
By Ralph Lopez [TABLE="width: 100%"][TR]
[TD="width: 60%"]
[/TD]
[TD="width: 40%"]10/20/13[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD="width: 16%"]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
Everything else is chump change, and the Kabuki theater, good-cop,bad-cop routine taking place in Washington right now is one we haveseen before, with only one ending.
The debt ceiling gets raised, and American solvency will be furtherweakened, as a blame game is played out to the music of inanegibberish over how the debacle affects each party's prospects inthe next election.
What will never be written about in the mainstream media is theelephant in the room. The script is carefully designed to keepattention off the real money, the ongoing bail-outs to the bank andfinancial services industry.
Former Special Inspector General for TARP Programs Neil Barofsky,whom journalist Glenn Greenwald once called"easily...one of the most impressive and courageous politicalofficials in Washington," in congressional hearings in 2010unveiled a breathtaking possible projected costto the taxpayers of $23 trillion for the bank and financialservices bail-outs, all told, should "worst-case scenarios...cometo pass in a variety of federal programs."
Barofsky is a former federal prosecutor and now a professor of lawat NYU who famously butted heads withSecretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, and the rest of thefinancial political establishment. Needless to say he was forcedout of his job.
"TARP is just the best known program in an array of more than 30overseen by Treasury Department and Federal Reserve that have paidout or put aside money to bail out financial firms and inject moneyinto the markets," says Mother JonesMagazine, which goes on to list of bewildering array of loansand loan guarantees, most of which will never, and can never, bepaid back.
Just as important as the Kabuki theater is the carefully nurturedillusion that the bank bail-outs got paid back. These usually referonly to TARP, and even that didn't get paidback.
Even the low figures for the total cost of the bail-outs,$12 trillion to $14trillion, are three times the size of an entire US budget. Themoney gets paid out month after month, well-hidden in the mostarcane, inaccessible reaches of the US budget.
It is not easy to find, and it is not meant to be.
Most people associate a figure of $700 billion to the bail-outs,but that is only TARP. Bloomberg News notes:"it turns out that that $700 billion is just a small part of a muchlarger pool of money that has gone into propping up our nation'sfinancial system. And most of that taxpayer money hasn't had muchpublic scrutiny at all."
How did the US taxpayer get on the hook for such unimaginableamounts, which, in current dollars, is morethan all the wars the US has ever fought, the Moon landings,and the New Deal, combined? It's not that hard conceptually. Thinkof going to Vegas with your grandmother's money and losing it all.Now you are "too big to fail." But, so enormous is your greed, youdon't just want back what you rolled into town with in your moneybelt. You want what you were up for awhile at the roulette table.That could be anything.
These sums mean the US taxpayer will be in hock for generations,and that is the entire point. Since now we owe the bankers' debts,all other programs, from military to welfare, are squeezed againstthis, and it never disappears. We can pay them today, or we can paythem tomorrow. But we are going to keep paying them, and raisingthe debt ceiling to do it. If we don't they crash the economy, toshow they are "too big to fail."
Worse, if that can be imagined, the bail-outs only made the problemworse.
Barofsky wrote in Bloomberg News:
"The top banks are 23 percent larger than they were before thecrisis. They now hold more than $8.5 trillion in assets, theequivalent of 56 percent of gross domestic product, up from 43percent just five years ago. The risk in our banking system isremarkably concentrated in these banks, which now control 52percent of all industry assets, up from 17 percent four decadesago. There is broad recognition that Dodd-Frank hasn't solved theproblem it was meant to address -- the power and influence of banksdeemed too big to fail."
Barofsky told Gawker.com:
"The incentives are all still in place for the TBTF banks toaccumulate dangerous amounts of risk in the quest for short-termprofits with the assurance that if their bets do not pay off, they(and most importantly from the perspective of market discipline)and their counterparties/creditors) [sic] will be bailed out by thegov't. Combine that with a lack of accountability forbad/fraudulent behavior, and you have a toxic cocktail that willbring about another crisis. Regulatory reform did nothing to changethose incentives."
Bloomberg News' Bob Ivrey in fact reportsthat, as of as late as May of this year, investors were back inVegas and happily doubling down on the big money tables, andbetting on more bail-outs, and the "too big to fail" strategy.
In other words, as Barofsky told an online audience at Gawker.comin a free-wheeling exchange withparticipants: "We're pretty f*cked."
There is another solution, tried to fortuitous effect in Iceland.The government took ever the banks, minimized the pain, andstarted arresting the bankerswho caused the problem, instead of bailing themout. Recent reports show Iceland outperforming the rest of theEU and its economy buzzing along nicely.
Barofsky wrote in Bloomberg: "The American people should berevolted by a financial system that rewards failure and protectsthose who drove it to the point of collapse and will undoubtedly doso again."
So cynical is the "budget crisis," manufactured by both parties,that World War II veterans who stormed Normandy have been made intopawns at war memorials.
The choice for America is clear. Either wake up, and knock thepoliticians of both parties' heads together next year at the ballotbox, or consign ourselves to Barosfky's F-bomb analysis.
Neil Barofsky is author of the book "Bailout:How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing WallStreet."
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass