Bullshit. What do you think zero percent interest rates are? That is a direct transfer of wealth from you and I to the banks. It is an ongoing ginormous bailout.
Refi your home.....you will get it back. Renegotiate your line of credit on your business. You will get more back.
This is how it works. The Fed loans money to the banks at 0%. The banks buy Treasuries earning 1-3% interest and pocket the spread between that and the 0% cost of the Fed loan. Then they pay themselves hundreds of millions in bonuses. Where do you think those profits and bonuses come from? It comes directly from you and I. The majority of investors like retired people and those terrified of the casino that the stock market has become, who are buying Treasuries right now, are not getting market rates for loaning their money. They are getting artificially suppressed rates.
No kidding. And why is that? I'll tell you why.........the Feds want people putting their money to work......if not in the stock market, then buying some real estate. Stop playing it safe and invest in your country.
If the free market was allowed to function, US rates would be far higher at our level of Debt to GDP. This is what Quantitative Easing (aka money printing to buy Treasuries and MBS, CDOs, CMOs) does. It suppresses interest rates by the Fed introducing massive Fed demand for bonds, which takes away the free market power of the bond vigilantes. You see. the bond vigilantes would SELL Treasuries and increase the spread (market interest rate) on sovereign debt for dodgy countries like the US and Greece. But the Fed has stepped in to provide artificial demand through QE and ZIRP, effectively trouncing the free market and reversing the decline in Treasuries. In return the banks get recapitalized in exchange for stealing money from savers and investors and in exchange for driving up prices of everything due to the destruction of the value of the dollar.
Your free markets are the excuse CEOs use to pay themselves millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses. Free market proponents were the ones who ruled during the Bush years.......as CEOs' salary increases accelerated and the average guy's remained static and got screwed. You were the ones who pulled or ignored the regulations on Wall Street, the banks and real estate companies. You were the ones who said gov't was too big and it was hurting us........so all governance pretty much stopped.....giving us the disasterous repercussions of Katrina in NOLA.You are the ones who want us to go back to the days before the Depression when recessions like we had in 2008 happened every few years instead of every 40-50 years. You are the ones who have screamed about taxes since the Reagan years and now taxes are as low as they have ever been and you all are still not satisfied.
All of this is thinly disguised theft. It is a government sanctioned Kleptocracy. It is fraud, theft, criminal, and smacks of Communism. It is Centrally Planned Economy. It is EVERYTHING that we fought against England for in our Revolutionary War.
No, it is not. That's crazy talk. It suggests person who doesn't understand communism and how that was not the ~ism that ruled Russia and her satellites. It suggests a person who doesn't understand why the American revolution was fought.
You know, MM, if your argument was grounded in mostly facts I might agree with you.....but it is not. You intermix some truths with ideolgy and some ideological hysteria. We are not the colonies and DC is not England. We do have some control over what happens to us and how we are taxed. However, too many Americans are not willing to exercise that control. Turnout for US presidential elections is less than 50% of registered voters and worse for local elections. In Europe, its 60-70%. You don't vote; you lose. Only since 2008 have Americans paid attention to what's happening with their gov't. Americans are culpable......no one else.
So stop trying to put the blame everywhere but where it belongs.
you give up too easily what our Founding Fathers fought for. I refuse to sanctioned this theft from the 99% to the top 1%. Hell, from that angle, I'm more of a defender of the masses than you are. Your defense of Obama and Geithner is just because they are Democrats. But what they are doing is very un-Democrat. I would expect Bernanke and the any other GOP member to do what they are doing, because they always take care of Wall Street. But you know we're in deep shit when the Democrats thumb their nose at the 99% and instead protect the top 1%.
MM, our FF would not have a clue as to what's going on now.........they would be aghast that minorities and women can vote. They would not have a clue in regards to our financial affairs. At best they practiced a quasi democracy. They had big ideas but it was for future generations; not theirs. Please don't glamorize the FF into something they weren't; after all, most of them were slaveowners. |
