Good Business International | November 29, 2011
As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to throw light on the economic hardship of the 99%, the United States Federal Reserve continues to do its part to widen the economic gap between Wall Street and Main Street. The new plan is to purchase $545 billion worth (that’s a b) of mortgage-backed securities from the biggest banks in the universe – the ones who created the toxic debt in the first place. And that is on top of the $2.3 trillion (that’s a t) already vacuumed up by the Federal Reserve’s defaulting debt sucking machine.
So here we go again – one more time. The Federal Reserve is giving away taxpayer billions to those who deserve it least: the commercial and investment banking bond holders that crashed and burned the financial system and continue to be the biggest beneficiaries of government aid. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, otherwise known as Uncle Ben, has authorized another unstimulating stimulus on top of the other unstimulating stimulus programs since the fall of 2008.
Bloomberg reports that the Fed “will start another program next quarter, [serving] 16 of the 21 primary dealers of U.S. government securities that trade with the central bank.” So who are these primary dealers? Let’s see….Merrill Lynch (now part of BofA), Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Nomura, Jeffries (highly exposed to MF Global), HSBC, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, JPM, UBS (a mess), RBS (didn’t they go bankrupt?)! Yup – the Fed is absorbing another half trillion dollars worth of the fruits of the 99%’s labor to the same folks who did them in.
This means that on top of the $700bn TARP funds authorized by Congress in October 2008, the Federal Reserve has authorized WITHOUT Congressional approval the purchase of nearly three trillion of mortgage-backed securities that nobody else wants. These paper docs might even be worthless.
Well, it proves one thing – crime does pay if you don’t call it a crime. The real crime is the one-sided backdoor bailout that continues to flow from the autocratic playbook of the Federal Reserve. Where have our democratic principles gone? Where is government of the people and by the people? Who are these “officials” making unilateral decisions for the American public who have never been elected to any office?