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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (103134)	10/15/2011 11:12:06 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Three factoids underscore that inequality: ¶The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans. ¶The top 1 percent of Americans possess more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent. ¶In the Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007, 6 5 percent of economic gains went to the richest 1 percent. As my Times colleague Catherine Rampell noted a few days ago, in 1981, the average salary in the securities industry in New York City was twice the average in other private sector jobs. At last count, in 2010, it was 5.5 times as much. (In case you want to gnash your teeth, the average is now $361,330.) More broadly, there’s a growing sense that lopsided outcomes are a result of tycoons’ manipulating the system, lobbying for loopholes and getting away with murder. Of the 100 highest-paid chief executives in the United States in 2010, 25 took home more pay than their company paid in federal corporate income taxes, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. nyt/Kristoff

To: tejek who wrote (103134)	10/20/2011 9:59:54 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

And frankly, I am much more freaked out by GS than I am by say US bank. The average US bank is acting like the small child caught doing something bad and sent to the timeout corner. They are working to be better and regain their credibility However, GS and MS do not care what the rest of us think.........they will manipulate the system and screw whomever to get their profits. Tejek, you need to read more about these banks. Let's take Bank of America. That is not only the typical US bank, but defines the typical as the top tier banking institution in the country. They have a huge trading desk with something between $50 trillion and $70 trillion notional worth of derivatives. Say what? I thought you said that the revenue streams of GS and a typical bank are different? Well, when it comes to derivatives, those little thingies that caused the 2008 collapse, they are all in it eye-ball deep. But it gets worse. Bank of America decided that the risk from their derivatives portfolio was too high. So what they just did in the last week was transfer $53 trillion of those derivatives over to their subsidiary that handles Mom and Pop depositors. Yep. You see the Mom and Pop depositors and that entire subsidiary is insured by the FDIC. So if they go belly up, everyone gets paid by the FDIC, which means the American taxpayer. So what did Bank of America just accomplish? They transferred an enormous amount of risk from their own books to that of the taxpayers and they did it with the full throated support of Bernanke and the Fed, over the objections of the FDIC. This is criminal behavior. It is stealing. It is also why after 20 years of banking with that institution, I removed all my money a month or so ago and have opted to bank with a local bank that doesn't get involved in those shenanigans. So keep believing that you are a liberal man of the people, while you support the criminal banksters that are raping this country's taxpayers blind and causing all the economic mayhem we see today. And keep supporting Obama who is backing all these nefarious policies with his action, even as he whispers sweet nothings to the public. You may be fooled, but I am not.