First of all, Bernie Sanders should be president of the U.S. Despite the fact that everything Sanders says is exactly what every poll, study and bit of common sense shows the American people are overwhelmingly in favour of, people continue to satisfy themselves into a flimsy, "it'll-be-okay," assumption that Trump won because people were tired of career politicians in the Whitehouse. They wanted a man of the people. Or some other silliness. Has anything like the inauguration "crowds" that were greatly outnumbered by the impressive worldwide women's marches; the endless internet trolling; the opposition to everything Trump says, does or tweets; made it seem like this bozo has EVER had enough support to win an election? And, not for the first time, the fact that the serving president didn't even really win the election is inexplicably being ignored, AGAIN, should give you some idea that things are not fully above board in the politics of the United States. Almost as though it were being run like, oh I don't know, a turn of the millennium investment bank or something.
Check this out. This is an article in which Bernie Sanders calls that right honourable hairpiece havin' cheese doodle a fraud. And he is. Undoubtedly. But he's a businessman. That isn't even an insult to him. He just said he'd protect the middle and lower classes as their president because he needed their votes. Trump's obvious response to Bernie's statement would almost certainly be the widely acceptable shrug and, "It's just business," that is ruining the world. The legislation Donald the Duke is moving to undo was enacted in response to the financial crisis of 2007/2008. The Act's intentions are to provide rigorous standards and supervision to protect the economy and American consumers, investors and businesses; end taxpayer-funded bailouts of financial institutions; provide for an advanced warning system on the stability of the economy; create new rules on executive compensation and corporate governance; and eliminate certain loopholes that led to the 2008 economic recession. So why is El Trumperino trying to get rid of it? Because his fellow businessmen, flunkies and friends, "just can't borrow money!" If you've ever seen, (and truly understood), the documentary, "Inside Job," you will know that the unavailability of funds for these criminal recidivists is a very, very, VERY good thing. If you haven't seen this MUST WATCH movie, here's a not-so-brief summary of the blatant, sociopathic disregard for the public out of uncontrollable lust for personal wealth that created the '07/'08 financial meltdown:
American laws being changed by highly lobbied and funded politicians to help the financial sector is not a new thing. Back in 1998 Citicorp and Travelers merged illegally to become "Citigroup." They broke the Glass-Stiegel Act, which was passed after ANOTHER recession in 1933, in order to prevent banks from engaging in risky investments with their customers' money. For a year, while legislation was being drafted, the federal reserve gave Citigroup and exemption until in 1999 the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was passed overturning Glass-Stiegel, re-establishing Citigroup's legitimacy and opening the door for ANY bank to invest consumers' money frivolously again, like they had in the good old days of the depression. It also cleared the way for some true creative genius in the financial sector. One example was the derivative. Derivatives were complicated and unregulated and by the late 1990's they had become a 50 trillion dollar market. And as soon as anything was done by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to regulate derivatives, they were quickly overruled by government and congress. Then, ANOTHER act was passed by highly lobbied and funded government. The Commodities Future Modernization Act of 2000 was passed to keep derivatives unregulated. You may wonder how they were able to sell this crap to the American public but your answer is in the name of this disastrous piece of legislation. You just weren't hip or modern if you believed in the old ways of business regulation. Ask a person from Iceland how hip THEY are. Or, a person, (evidently in the minority), from the U.S. who knows what actually happened to their country at this time. Unless it's hip to be an absolute sucker, the whole country was walking around naked thinking they were wearing the fashionable new clothes sold to them by a hellishly corrupt group of financial institutions in cahoots with the government of the time. In the best line from ANOTHER movie that should piss you off, "The Big Short," Steve Carrel's character remarks, "You have no idea the kind of crap people are pulling, and everyone's walking around like they're in a damn Enya video. They're all getting screwed, you know?"
So what exactly is a derivative. Well, like art or fashion, sometimes it needs to be complicated in order for supposed experts to be able to maintain the legitimacy of their narratives simply by saying, "Oh well, don't feel too badly if you don't understand. It's complicated. Just TRUST me." A derivative is something made by banks when they combine home loans and other debts like student loans, mortgages, car loans, investment debts, corporate loans, credit card debts, etc. and sell them to investment banks as collateralized debt obligations. You've heard of CDO's. You may have bought one of these harmless, little bonds trying to stretch the 1% interest your savings account offered to something a little more. Maybe even a little more than a government bond, which, as you were told by an investment banker's narrative, held about the same amount of risk. CDO's were popular derivatives sold to investors worldwide. They often contained sub-prime, or very high risk loans, but were always given a triple A rating. Why? Because, in this unregulated field, investment banks PAID the rating firms to GIVE the CDO's triple A ratings. But this is all too complicated to explain. Just trust me... Pretty nice little scam, eh?
With this money-making machine established, banks made more and more, and riskier and riskier loans. In fact, the sub-prime loans were preferred by banks because they had higher interest rates. Got a pulse? You got a loan! During this time derivatives went from a 60 to a 300 billion dollar a year industry and bankers got rich while investors and borrowers lost money and defaulted. There were a few agencies that could have regulated this disaster. The federal reserve, basically Allan Greenspan, could have, but he is ideologically opposed to regulation. The Security Exchange Commission, SEC, was systematically pared down to a staff of ONE by the well funded and lobbied government of the time. At its weakest point, (one worker), the SEC was easily convinced to relax the limits of leverage laws on banks so that they could borrow more and loan more. Leverage just means the amount of actual money compared to the amount of borrowed, or invisible, fantasy money a bank has to work with. Some banks leveraged up to 33 times their actual assets. In a situation like this, the bank only needs a small, (3%), cash payout to render it insolvent. The trend toward bigger and bigger banks being created, like Citigroup, through merger, meant that a lot of these banks were too big to become insolvent. Too big to fail. So insolvency meant bail-out.
But that just wasn't greedy enough. Before we get to the bail out, first, another advent to an already ticking time bomb, securitization. AIG was almost single-handedly the culprit here. A credit default swap is basically insurance on an investment like a CDO. But unlike regular insurance, investors can also take out insurance on YOUR CDO. These too were kept unregulated by highly funded and lobbied government, so 50 people could have credit default swaps on YOUR CDO. If your CDO goes bad or defaults, you get some money from AIG, and 49 strangers, who were cheering for hardships to befall all the borrowers that made up your CDO, collect money from AIG as well. This just made every CDO 50 times worse for the financial market because, again unregulated due to government owned by the financial sector, the CDS providers were not forced to put away enough money to offset the obvious future disaster. Instead, workers at AIG bought private jets, coke, hookers and beach houses while money rolled in from people buying credit default swaps. So did CDO salesmen. No doubt they put lots away for themselves in tax shelters too so we still don't know how rich they got during the CDO/CDS heyday. It got so bad, and this is where I almost punched my TV screen watching the despicable greed on the faces of the lying perpetrators, that financial institutions were buying CDS's against their OWN CDO's, telling the CDO buyers about how safe their investments were, paying Moody's to give them triple A ratings to support this crap, while trying to make them Unsafe and DEPENDING on them defaulting so they could collect on the CDS's against them. Think of all the people who lost savings and retirement funds. These were mostly low or middle class people. The ones who ALWAYS pay for the greed of the rich.
Think I'm wrong? What happened? You know what happened. Loans got foreclosed on by the thousands, CDO's failed, and SOME of the CDS buyers, (in all likelihood the bank owned CDS paid out first), made money until there was no money left. Banks and investment banks were all leveraged to the hilt so CDO and CDS buyers just lost all the money invested in them. They would have been better off at the 1% interest in their savings accounts. This was a massive national Ponzi scheme. The money the CDO and CDS buyers invested against, succeed or fail, just wasn't there! NObody had planned for this!
So, the American tax payers, and I don't think I need to point out that, as near as makes no difference, this doesn't include the rich, OR Trumplestiltsken.
They get hit up by congress for a 700 billion dollar loan. And then congress bought credit default swaps on that loan. Probably. That's what happened in 2008. The architects of the whole financial crash, the CEO's, board members, executives of the banks and investment companies, ALL got nice raises and/or severance packages FROM the 700 billion! There was a time when the banks were all declaring bankruptcy and the entire financial sector was feeling vulnerable when some of them spoke out and said, fucking unbelievably, "We should have been better regulated. We're sorry, and it won't happen again, but, geez it's not all our fault." But then they got the 700 billion and the heyday staggered on.
Since then there was Obama, a guy who said he was going to bring regulation back, but couldn't because Wall Street was already running the country. You probably remember as well as I do how fast his "Yes we can" face became "Shit! I guess we can't." Larry Summers was his chief economic advisor for crying out loud! This is a guy in the middle of EVERY big bank and bad investment firm that purposely caused the crash for their own Wolf of Wall Street lifestyles. How often do you think THEY agreed?
The idea of regulation has been demonized in educational institutions and private firms all over America. And probably elsewhere. Guys LIKE Larry Summers are going into major educational institutions and giving "Wolf of Wall Street," and "Wall Street" speeches talking about how greed is good and if we don't make these obscene amounts of money, someone else will, and my favourite, "Hey, it's just business!" Conflict of interest has been eliminated. The lobbying, funding and campaign contributions continue, and Trump's appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, will see that it continues since he's well known for encouraging money in politics. Just about every appointee to every post is a gozillionaire fox in the henhouse so the world control budget money has been well spent on the deregulation of the country, or really the corporation, of the United States. And their best purchase so far has been the fake election of Donald Trump. After all the crap we KNOW these monsters did, and plenty we can be sure we still don't know, you are a moron to believe the financial appointment of Trump into the Whitehouse is just conspiracy theory. This could very well have happened, folks. I, for one, believe it did.
The last crisis affected a lot of countries. Not just America. If history repeats itself, with a tighter global economy, the next purposely created recession could be a veritable global depression. But the guys at the top, including Donald Scumbag Trump, don't give a crap. They just want lots and lots of money. He doesn't look like a great reformer, does he?
There have been bright spots. The E.U. has really shifted back toward regulation. Some signs have been shown that emerging global economies are trying to use their own currencies instead of American dollars to limit the influence of America on the global economy. And in education, which is sadly already WELL on its way toward privatization around this messed up world, THIS is happening in the U.S. Say no to Betsy! But this is what worries me about this guy. Yes, he hates women and Muslims, and there are other big issues that are disracting from what I believe to be the truly scary thing about Trump: what he's going to do to the world financially. Will he and the considerable forces of evil behind him succeed? We shall see...
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