Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Not to Jump the Gun, But...



While Hillary Clinton has spent the presidential campaign saying as little as possible about her ties to Wall Street, the executive who some observers say could be her Treasury Secretary has been openly promoting a plan to give financial firms control of hundreds of billions of dollars in retirement savings. The executive is Tony James, president of the Blackstone Group.

[...]

James, though, is a longtime Democrat — and one of Clinton’s top fundraisers. The billionaire sculpted the retirement initiative with a prominent labor economist whose work is supported by another investment mogul who is a big Clinton donor. The proposal has received bipartisan praise from prominent economic thinkers, and James says that Clinton’s top aides are warming to the idea.

  IB Times
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that's where she takes us.
The proposal would require workers and employers to put a percentage of payroll into individual retirement accounts “to be invested well in pooled plans run by professional investment managers,” as James put it.
Like the ones that invested our money in securities packaged with subprime mortgages?
In other words, individual voluntary 401(k)s would be replaced by a single national system, and much of the mandated savings would flow to Wall Street, where companies like Blackstone could earn big fees off the assets. And because of a gap in federal anti-corruption rules, there would be little to prevent the biggest investment contracts from being awarded to the biggest presidential campaign donors.
Oh what a surprise.

Because the criminality of the financial institutions leading up to the world-fucking economic collapse in 2008 was never prosecuted and no meaningful reform was implemented, so they can still do whatever the fuck they want.

Sorry, but I'm reading Matt Taibbi's book Griftopia about the whole criminal sordid affair that seems to have gone somewhere down the memory hole, and it's really infuriating.

If the Republicans couldn't privatize Social Security, maybe Hillary Clinton can.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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