AdHocSolver
AdHocSolver's JournalThe stock market is a Ponzi scheme enabled by repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act...
...and aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve keeps bank interest rates low on deposit accounts, thus stealing the value of depositors' assets, and providing Wall Street with cheap (essentially, free) money to artificially pump up the stock market, just by throwing money at it.
The corporate insiders give themselves bonuses and stock options to make huge profits off of the "improvement" in the stock prices, and corporations merge to eliminate competition, while improving profit margins by eliminating now "redundant" employees from the newly merged company.
The way the inflation numbers are calculated is a joke. Anyone who has been buying fruits and vegetables for the past 15 years is aware of the significant price hike in essentials such as food.
As long as corporations control world trade through agreements like NAFTA, the WTO, and their ilk, the main requirement to enable the middle and working classes to have control over their lives, the ability to obtain an income through gainful employment, will not happen.
There is NO "global" economy. The general price level in the United States is too high relative to countries such as China, India, and Bangladesh such that Americans cannot survive on the low wage rates in those countries.
The manufacturing of everyday types of goods such as clothes, shoes, appliances, hardware, furniture, tools, and more has to be brought back to the U.S. in order to keep the flow of money circulating within the U.S. economy.
Nothing else will save the U.S. economy from collapse.
Between the loss of jobs (i.e., the loss of income to Americans) and the corporate tax evasion enabled by foreign tax havens, real capital is being drained from the U.S.
Real capital is being replaced by the Federal Reserve with "funny money" that is increasing U.S. debt at an accelerating rate. This is an unsustainable situation.
This will inevitably lead to global economic collapse. In fact, this is the end game for Wall Street and the 1 percent. Then the Corporations will offer to "save" the planet by privatizing everything.
Welcome to the new feudalism.
You are the only one, so far, who understands the Republican strategy re women voters.
Republican strategy rests on the fact that many Americans have been "educated" to have authoritarian personalities.
This makes them question their own judgement on every debatable issue.
The Republican strategy, in this case, is to flood the public consciousness with propaganda that suggests that the women's interpretation of their experience is "incorrect".
This instilling of authoritarian traits into the American psyche is what allows the Republicans to get people to "vote against their own self-interest."
This phenomenon goes beyond its effect on religious views. It explains why propaganda works, even when the propaganda is blatantly counter to reality and the facts.
What progressives have to do is reinforce the questioning of the right wing propaganda, and propose a progressive course of action that would benefit the population that is affected by the issues.
The response of the government was merely to bail out the crooked bankers.
The crooked bankers are still in control of the banks and still stealing the assets of the middle class.
What the government should have done is kicked out the crooked bankers, and forced the banks to renegotiate the bad mortgages and other bad debt promoted by the banks and sold to investors.
The only response the government needed to do was to guarantee depositors' assets so that there wouldn't be a run on the banks by depositors to withdraw all of their money.
There was no need to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the crooked bankers to cover the losses caused by their fraud.
The Fed influences interest rates by its ability to increase and decrease the money supply. Basically, when the Fed makes money cheaply available to the banks, the banks don't have to pay higher interest to depositors to attract deposits.
This process is explained in more depth on the Internet. A good place to start is at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy
The bank fraud was intentional.
One significant act that shows that the fraud was intentional was repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.
The Glass-Steagall Act prevented the large banks from merging into "too big to fail" banks, which was an integral part of the scam.
People with bank savings accounts are losing money every day with connivance of the Fed.
Banks pay depositors 0.1 percent interest on the money they deposit in a bank account.
At the same time, banks charge customers 14 percent or more on credit card balances. That is a "spread" of 14 percent divided by 0.1 percent ( 0 .14 / .001 ) which equals 140 times.
The trivial amount of interest banks pay their depositors doesn't even keep up with inflation.
People who keep their savings in banks are losing their principal merely by having their money there.
The excuse used by the Fed for keeping interest rates low in order to "stimulate" the economy is pure nonsense. If the Fed wanted to use monetary policy to promote spending, they would lower credit card interest rates to, say, 5 percent, and raise interest rates on deposits to, say, 3 percent, to put more money into the hands of people who would spend it.
Current bank interest rates extract money from the economy which is one reason for the sluggish economy.
The Fed's interest rate policy is merely another aspect of trickle-down economics in which wealth is extracted from the middle class into the pockets of the wealthy.
In order for the "invisible hand" to work, there has to be competition.
From the original article:
(snip)
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A wave of consolidation that started in 2008 has left four U.S. airlines — American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines — controlling more than 80 percent of the domestic air-travel market. Discount airlines such as Allegiant Air and Spirit Airlines have grown at breakneck speed but still carry a tiny fraction of overall passengers.
That control of the market has enabled the bigger airlines to charge more for tickets and not worry about being undercut by the competition. In addition, the airlines are taking in about $3.3 billion a year in fees. The result: record profits.
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In the days of the robber barons, the corporations formed cartels to set prices and control output.
So, the government passed antitrust laws.
These days, companies buy each other, or merge, or are purchased by so-called investment companies, and accomplish the same goals: limit supply and set prices by eliminating competition.
To protect the public, government has to set policies that promote competition and regulate in the public interest.
The last 20 years or so has seen the gutting of government regulatory authority. An important example is the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which, for the most part, separated commercial banks from investment banks (Wall Street securities firms).
Repeal of Glass-Steagall, critics argue, "permitted Wall Street investment banking firms to gamble with their depositors' money that was held in affiliated commercial banks."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act
Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act was effectively accomplished by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999.
(snip)
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It repealed part of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, removing barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies and insurance companies that prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company. With the passage of the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies were allowed to consolidate. Furthermore, it failed to give to the SEC or any other financial regulatory agency the authority to regulate large investment bank holding companies.[1] ”The legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
A year before the law was passed, Citicorp, a commercial bank holding company, merged with the insurance company Travelers Group in 1998 to form the conglomerate Citigroup, a corporation combining banking, securities and insurance services under a house of brands that included Citibank, Smith Barney, Primerica, and Travelers. Because this merger was a violation of the Glass–Steagall Act and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, the Federal Reserve gave Citigroup a temporary waiver in September 1998.[2] Less than a year later, GLB was passed to legalize these types of mergers on a permanent basis. The law also repealed Glass–Steagall's conflict of interest prohibitions "against simultaneous service by any officer, director, or employee of a securities firm as an officer, director, or employee of any member bank".
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Notice in this paragraph that the Federal Reserve does NOT work in the public interest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93Bliley_Act
Low interest rates will NOT stimulate the economy.
That is the same fraudulent claim that reducing taxes will stimulate the economy.
Both claims are based on trickle-down economics.
The economy will be stimulated only by increasing demand, that is, by increasing spending on goods and services.
The way to increase demand is to put money in the hands of those who will spend it.
This requires distributing spending so as to give income to the working and middle classes who will spend it, NOT the banks and NOT Wall Street, which suck the money out of the spending loop, and essentially are hoarders of money.
So, how should monetary assets be distributed to improve the economy?
Government should spend money on products and services that improve economic development such as infrastructure, education, health care, and research and development.
Another way to increase demand is to bring off-shored jobs back to the U.S. That means getting rid of one-sided, corporate-written trade agreements like NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO, the IMF, and scuttle trade agreements such as the TPP.
Bringing outsourced jobs back to America will automatically increase wages as demand for workers increases.
However, to help the middle and working classes and increase demand in the near term, the minimum wage should be raised now to stimulate the economy.
The interest rates being kept low by the Fed are the interest rates on depositors' accounts, while the banks keep interest rates on credit card balances at 14 percent and higher.
This policy is the absolute reverse of what the banks should be doing to stimulate the economy. Middle class consumers are getting nothing for keeping money in a bank account, while the banks take a huge chunk out of middle class assets via high interest rates on loans (especially credit card balances) that the middle class could use to spend on goods and services.
The Fed is working for Wall Street, not main street. The Fed is not the solution. The Fed is part, a big part, of the problem.
Stockman's criticisms of the Fed are valid, but his assumptions and reasoning are flawed.
While Keynesian economics may be cited by the Federal Reserve as the rationale for its policy of easy credit, its activity is actually promoting "trickle down" economics for the benefit of the 1 percent.
As Stockman suggests in the article, easy credit is being used by those who already have some significant wealth as "free money" to "gamble" in the real estate and stock markets.
Keynes' postulated that governments should spend money on infrastructure to provide jobs and income for workers who would then be able to purchase goods and services (increase demand) and thereby grow the economy and create more jobs.
The Fed, by keeping interest rates artificially low, is actually damaging the economy, by cheating depositors out of a realistic return on their savings. Unemployed people cannot borrow and spend money when they have no income to repay the loans.
Moreover, bank depositors earn less on their savings than the current inflation rate so they lose principal.
Meanwhile, the wealthy get essentially "free" money to rig the stock market, buy out existing American companies and ship the jobs to China, and send the profits to tax havens such as the Cayman Islands.
Federal Reserve policy is NOT the solution to our economic problems. The Fed is a primary CAUSE of our current economic problems.
Capitalism is NOT an economic system. It is a religion.
The suckers (i.e., the non-1 percenters who "gamble" in the stock market) hold fast to the fiction that they can "beat" the system and come out the winner.
As in any gambling system, the house always comes out ahead by taking a cut of the gambled money. The 1 percent always comes out ahead. The money (the "capital gains"
of the few winners among the 99 percent comes not from the 1 percent, but from the losses incurred by the losers among the other 99 percent.
The results are that some of the 99 percent make some "profit", a larger share of the 99 percent loses their "investment", and the billionaire players who rig the system take a big share of the losses of the 99 percent not won by the 99 percent that gained some "profit".
The 99 percent who refuse to see how the system is rigged are of the same mind-set as the climate change deniers. They refuse to understand the way the capitalist system actually works.
Their faith in the capitalist system is the same as the religious fundamentalists who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and that Adam and Eve rode around on dynosaurs.
Interestingly, and unfortunately, the fiction of the mythology called Capitalism is more ingrained in the population, than the mythology of Creationism.
Wall Street and the banks work the stock market to run their Ponzi schemes.
The information at the link you provide helps explain how it works.
Reading the comments section at the link is also informative.
The stock market is NOT an indicator of the health of the REAL economy.
How quickly people forget Enron, as well as the boom-and-bust of the stock and real estate markets driven by "bad" mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.
The "value" of the Stock Market is based on the supposed validity of "trickle down economics" and the existence of Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy.
In the current economic situation, the real winners in the stock market are the 1 percent who can manipulate stock prices by buying and selling large blocks of stock in a coordinated way.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-15/cluster-central-banks-have-secretly-invested-29-trillion-market
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