The
six largest banks in America have over 10 trillion dollars in assets,
equivalent to 54% of the GDP of this nation. This is wealth, this is
power, this is who owns America.
Ten
years after the big crash of 2007-08, caused by the Wall Street
mafia, sending waves of financial destruction around the globe, the
awful Trump administration that literally put the Goldman Sachs
banksters in charge of the US economy, wants to reset the clock bomb
of another financial disaster by deregulating the financial sector!
And guess what: the corporate Democrats followed again!
Putting
aside that Russiagate fiasco, Bernie Sanders was one more time the
only voice of resistance against the Wall Street mafia in a
hypnotized by the banking-corporate money US senate.
As
Bernie stated:
Just ten
years ago, as a result of greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on
Wall Street, this country was plunged into the worst economic crisis
since the Great Depression.
The
official unemployment rate soared up to 10% and the real unemployment
rate jumped to over 17%. At the height of the financial crisis more
than 27 million Americans were unemployed, underemployed or stopped
working altogether because they could not find employment. 15 million
families - as a result of that financial crisis - lost their homes to
foreclosure, as more and more people could not afford to pay their
mortgages. As a result of the illegal behavior of Wall Street,
American households lost over 13 trillion dollars in savings. That is
what Wall Street did 10 years ago.
Believe
it or not - and of course we are not going to hear any discussion of
this at all - the four largest banks in America are on average 80%
bigger today than they were before we bailed them out
because they were "too big to fail". Incredibly, the six
largest banks in America have over 10 trillion dollars in assets,
equivalent to 54% of the GDP of this nation. This is wealth, this
is power, this is who owns America.
If any
of these financial institutions were to get into a financial trouble
again, there is no doubt that, once again, the taxpayers of this
country will be asked to bail them out. Except this time, the bail
out might even be larger than it was in 2008.
Bernie
is right, the facts are all there, except that, again, he is the only
one who speaks about it.
Recall
that according to chapter
20 conclusions of the US Financial Crisis Inquiry
Commission, “As a result of the rescues and
consolidation of financial institutions through failures and mergers
during the crisis, the U.S. financial sector is now more concentrated
than ever in the hands of a few very large, systemically significant
institutions.”
Recall
also that in December 1, 2010, the Fed was forced to release details
of 21,000 funding transactions it made during the financial crisis,
naming names and dollar amounts. Disclosure was due to a provision
sparked by Bernie Sanders. The voluminous data dump from the
notoriously secret Fed shows just how deeply the Federal Reserve
stepped into the shoes of Wall Street and, as the crisis grew and the
normal channels of lending froze, the Fed effectively replaced Wall
Street and money centers banks in terms of financing. The Fed has
thus far reported, without even disclosing specifics of its lending
from its discount window, that it supplied, in total, more than $9
trillion to Wall Street firms, commercial banks, foreign banks,
corporations and some highly questionable off balance sheet entities.
(Much smaller amounts were outstanding at any one time.)
Bill
Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of
Missouri, states:
In the
savings loan debacle, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, George Akerlof
and Paul Romer, who until recently was Chief Economist to the World
Bank, wrote that economists didn't realize - because they lacked any
theory of fraud - that deregulation was bound to create widespread
fraud and a crisis. Now, we know better if we learn the lessons of
this crisis, we need not recreate it.
Very
conservative, anti-regulatory people hold the White House and key
positions in the House and the Senate, and the first thing the
industry does is gut regulation. Why? Because it makes the CEOs so
wealthy to run these frauds and predation. It's not necessarily good
for the banking industry, but it is extremely good for the most
senior leaders and they are the ones, of course, who hire and fire
the lawyers and the lobbyists, and effectively hire and fire key
members of Congress.
Apparently,
our memories are indeed so short that we have learned nothing from
the 2008 Wall Street crash. Bernie Sanders (and probably Elizabeth
Warren to some extend), are left alone again to fight against the
Wall Street mafia because, apparently, the rest of the US political
class has been bought from it.
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