It's always about "investment" possibilities

 

I remember when they planned the same thing on the heels of George W's invasion of Iraq.  How'd that turn out?

So we just take an entire country and steal their resources.

Yeah.

Who could have guessed?

 

Too bad all those brilliant economic minds aren't as savvy as the average Democratic voter.

An investment firm working for minorities

h/t Stephen

Attaboy, Joe

But he's almost as bad as Trump about starting sentences and not finishing them.  Okay, maybe not almost, but he does it noticeably.  He's old, folks.

But yes!  Unions!

Nice

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

What Joe doesn't want you to know

Joe Biden’s campaign limited press access to a fundraiser with Wall Street donors on Thursday night, the first time reporters were unable to join the video portion of a virtual fundraiser or hear the presumptive Democratic nominee answer questions.

[...]

The Biden campaign has long touted its open fundraisers as evidence of the former vice president’s commitment to transparency. Since Biden started his campaign, he has allowed a pool of reporters to attend his events. The campaign has also allowed a pool to watch his virtual fundraisers hosted on Zoom. But, on Thursday night, the pool was only given a call-in line, prohibiting reporters from seeing who was in attendance.

[...]

“Tonight’s event was a new format as we enter a new phase of the general election campaign, but we will continue to ensure press access to our virtual finance events as part of our campaign’s commitment to transparency -- one that vastly exceeds anything that Donald Trump and his campaign have offered the American people,” Rufus Gifford, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said in a statement.

  Bloomberg

Continue implies you're doing it now.

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

They're making her ads for her

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

How about a corporate financial transaction tax?

That $6.3 trillion debt bomb upon which corporate America is sitting is now bigger than any in history, eclipsing even pre-2008 levels. The national “economic miracle” Trump keeps lauding is – like his own financial empire – resting on a bed of borrowed cash.

[...]

The problem is, the current administration – and a bipartisan group of Senators – are determined to go the other way, having just rolled back more provisions of the already-weak Dodd-Frank Act. Returning to Glass-Steagall, which was designed to prevent banks from over-creating bad loans and pumping them into the economy via investment banking operations, seems like a distant fantasy.

[...]

A new approach to reining in speculation is needed, which is why the tiny glimmer of good news from late last week was so welcome.

On June 27th, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) became the first co-sponsor to S. 805, the “Inclusive Prosperity Act of 2017,” originally introduced by Bernie Sanders.

  Matt Taibbi

Gasp! Socialism!

The bill is the American version of a Financial Transactions Tax, a plan to raise revenue and curb speculation by attaching micro-taxes to financial transactions. The E.U. moved toward an FTT plan for 11 Eurozone countries in 2013.

The Sanders camp trumpets the plan as a money-raiser – a way to pay for big-ticket social programming like free college tuition. But it also has a huge safety component.

[...]

[E]ven the tiniest financial transactions surcharge could help rein in greed orgies just enough to keep the economy from exploding. In the past, these micro-taxes have been envisioned as a way to pay for the inevitable bailouts in our increasingly deregulated economy.

Sounds like a great idea to me.

The idea is that greedy Wall Street players holding stock they want to sell call several brokers with buy orders to drive up the stock price - known as spoofing.

In a computer-dominated trading environment, the aim isn’t just to move the stock with your own purchase power. The idea is also to trick other algorithmic traders into mass-dumping or buying their holdings.

Using this technique, a single slick operator can generate huge volumes of transactions often without having much or even any skin in the game.

All of this activity has no real economic purpose, other than to move the “tape” for an instant or two and make some over-moussed Wall Street parasite a bunch of unearned money.

A secondary problem is that even in the rare case that authorities get around to identifying and outlawing things like this, they tend not to be able to really do much in the way of enforcement.

[...]

There are countless other schemes HFT experts have cooked up over the years, from “order anticipation” to “layering” to modern variants on the old “wire” con from The Sting, in which traders use computers to take advantage of infinitesimal time differences in the reporting of price changes.

An eye-opening book to read on that last game - high frequency trading - is Flash Boys by Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short. Netflix has just purchased the rights to it for a movie. Should be good.

High-frequency trades currently make up between 50 and 60 percent of all stock transactions in the U.S., which isn’t inherently bad, but it’s not necessarily a positive thing, either. For sure, there’s a ton of economically useless activity buried in that percentage. A financial transactions tax kills three birds with one stone. It raises money, provides a major disincentive to socially useless volume-based trading and decreases dangerous speculative volatility.

[...]

A financial transactions tax might help incentivize Wall Street to once again emphasize true long-term investment, as opposed to spending all day moving piles of money around. As with Medicare-for-all, it might take a while for Americans to accept an idea already embraced in Europe.

Still, a senator from New York signing on to an idea so universally despised by Wall Street is worth raising an eyebrow or two. Hopefully it leads to something more, perhaps even before it’s too late.

If it isn't already.

Good Reason to Do Them Favors While in Office

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

UPDATE:

Man of the People

Donald Trump, the man who positioned himself as the common man's shield against Wall Street, signed a series of orders today calling for reviews or rollbacks of financial regulations.

  Matt Taibbi

Of course he did.

[Trump] talks a big game when slamming the door on penniless refugees, but curls up like a beach weakling around guys who have more money than he does.

[...]

[Jamie] Dimon, [Steve] Schwarzman, [Larry] Fink and [Gary] Cohn collectively represent a rogues gallery of the creeps most responsible for the 2008 crash. It would be hard to put together a group of people less sympathetic to the non-wealthy.

[...]

The watchdogs who are supposed to be making sure the morons on Wall Street don't blow up the planet all failed: the compliance people within private companies, the so-called self-regulating organizations like the NYSE, and finally the government agencies like the OCC and the OTS.

These companies are now so enormous that they can't keep track of their own positions. Also, in sharp contrast to the propaganda about what brainy people they all are, many of them lack even the most basic understanding of the potential consequences of deals they might be making.

[...]

The enduring lesson of the financial crisis is that in markets as complex as this one, the most extreme danger is in opacity. The big problem is that these egomaniacal Wall Street titans want markets as opaque as possible.

[...]

This is why they want to get rid of the fiduciary rule, because they don't think it's anyone's business if they choose to bet against their clients (as Cohn's Goldman famously did), or overcharge them, or otherwise screw them.

[...]

Trump – a man who doesn't want you to see what's going on underneath his hair, let alone in his books – naturally sympathizes with Wall Street's efforts to keep the markets opaque. The obvious conclusion is that these orders will eventually lead us back to ballooning risk, overheated markets (the NYSE is already soaring) and speculative bubbles.

Frankly, I'm not sure T-Rump caved in the face of these banksters (although I wouldn't be surprised to find out he owes some of them big money).  I think it's more likely that his anti-Wall Street schtick during the campaign was just more of his bullshit to get votes.  He has no more scruples than an actual politician.

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

Draining the Swamp

Trump picking as SEC chief someone who once represented Goldman, Sachs may be the least surprising story of 2017: https://t.co/a7F7x2zAEp

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 4, 2017

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

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.

Unfuckingbelievable

Where are the leakers when you need them?

Obviously not on Wall Street.

Time for Bill to Be Given a Time Out

Bill Clinton took aim at Bernie Sanders supporters on Friday. "I think it's fine that all these young students have been so enthusiastic for her opponent, and it sounds so good, just shoot every third person on Wall Street and everything will be fine," Clinton told NBC News, according to reporter Brad Jaffy. Clinton later said that "that's a joke, it's a total joke."

  Daily Beast

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

Bankers for Bernie

They may be rare, but they do exist.

In 2014, Michael Lewis’ book Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt helped to “pull the scales from off my eyes. It showed me that the regulatory structure was rigged and I could no longer ignore that,” [said Wade Black, COO at the boutique investment banking firm Scarsdale Equities.]

Black said he did not mindWall Street becoming a target of Sanders’ invective. He’d continue supporting the candidate, he speculated, “even to the extent that Bernie’s reforms meant I lost my job”.

[...]

Paul Ryan, a fully signed-up member of that elite club, Bankers for Bernie [is] a managing director at Tripoint Global Equities, an investment bank that works with small businesses.

[...]

“New Yorkers are particularly well positioned to see how the rich are screwing over everybody else. You just have to look at real estate prices – people will take a look at what’s happening across the city and a certain number will be disgusted by it: Bernie speaks to them,” he said.

[...]

For the Bankers for Bernie [...] Clinton’s talk about toughening up the regulators and empowering prosecutors doesn’t go far enough. He may be an investment banker himself, but Ryan prefers Sanders’ pledge to begin breaking up the banks in his first 100 days in the White House over Clinton’s more indirect promises.

“She has a thousand talking points, but when the lights are turned off and all the glare of the election fades, politics-as-normal will return, the lobbyists will get to work, and nothing at all will happen,” he said.

[...]

Ryan admits there is an element of self-interest in his support for Sanders in that his investment firm depends on the financial health of its clients who are hurting. But he also insists that his unusual position as a financier who wants to see major change on Wall Street comes from something more fundamental in him: “Conscience. I have a conscience. We have gone so far down the road of Reagan economics we’ve ended up in downright cruelty. That’s why Bernie must win.”

  The Guardian

I would like to see Bernie become president just to see if it is even possible to reverse direction at this point.

P.S.  If you haven't read Flash Boys, I recommend you read it.

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

Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary Endorses Bernie Sanders

“[Hillary is] the best-qualified person in the field to be president in our current system, but that’s precisely the problem,” [UC Berkeley professor of public policy Robert] Reich said. “The system we have doesn’t work now. It’s corrupted by big money.”

  SF Chronicle

Well, it works for Hillary.

He said Sanders has “the passion and the authenticity” to take on Wall Street and the elites that control the system.

And they could cream him, too.

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

Economist/Public Policy Wonk Robert Reich Looks at the Candidates

The other day Bill Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health plan as unfeasible and a “recipe for gridlock.”

Yet these days, nothing of any significance is feasible and every bold idea is a recipe for gridlock. This election is about changing the parameters of what’s feasible and ending the choke hold of big money on our political system.

I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have.

But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change.

The upcoming election isn’t about detailed policy proposals. It’s about power – whether those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well.

[...]

[A recent Princeton study concluded:] “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.”

Instead, lawmakers respond to the moneyed interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.

It’s sobering that Gilens and Page’s data come from the period 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its “Citizens United” and “McCutcheon” decisions. Their study also predated the advent of super PACs and “dark money,” and even the Wall Street bailout.

If average Americans had a “near-zero” impact on public policy then, their impact is now zero.

[...]

[A] few months ago when I was on book tour in the nation’s heartland: I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump.

At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide. But as I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains.

[...]

If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, and who understand that the political-economic system is rigged against you and in favor of the rich and powerful, what are you going to do?

Either you’re going to be attracted to an authoritarian son-of-a-bitch who promises to make America great again by keeping out people different from you and creating “great” jobs in America, who sounds like he won’t let anything or anybody stand in his way, and who’s so rich he can’t be bought off.

Or you’ll go for a political activist who tells it like it is, who has lived by his convictions for fifty years, who won’t take a dime of money from big corporations or Wall Street or the very rich, and who is leading a grass-roots “political revolution” to regain control over our democracy and economy.

  Robert Reich

So I guess we can pick, but then what? We have zero impact on public policy. Can either one of them fix that?

There are 167 more economists and financial experts signatures on this document.

The Rich Get Richer, Etc.

[Bernie] Sanders took offense when [Lloyd Blankfein, longtime CEO of Goldman Sachs], in a 2012 segment on “60 Minutes,” said, “You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people’s expectations” that they will get their full Social Security and Medicare benefits because “we can’t afford it.” Blankfein advocated an increase in the eligibility age for both programs as well as other cuts because “entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.”

Soon afterward, Sanders excoriated Blankfein in a speech from the floor of the Senate.

SANDERS: Sometimes there is no end to arrogance. … Lloyd Blankfein is the CEO of Goldman Sachs. … During the financial crisis Goldman Sachs received a total of $814 billion in virtually zero-interest loans from the Federal Reserve and a $10 billion bailout from the Treasury Department. … And now with his huge wealth he is coming here to Washington to lecture the American people on how we have got to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for tens of millions of Americans who are struggling now to keep their heads above water.

Just a few weeks ago on Bloomberg TV Sanders returned to the subject, citing Blankfein as a Wall Street executive who “really irks me” because such executives “make huge sums of money, help destroy our economy, they come to Congress and [...] say, ‘You’ve got to cut Social Security and you’ve got to cut Medicare and you’ve got to cut Medicaid.’”

That’s what Blankfein was responding to on CNBC last week when he said, “To personalize it, it has the potential to be a dangerous moment."
  The Intercept

For Bernie, maybe.

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

Wall Street Reformer: Hillary Clinton

Not on your life.

I owe almost my entire Wall Street career to the Clintons. I am not alone; most bankers owe their careers, and their wealth, to them. Over the last 25 years they – with the Clintons it is never just Bill or Hillary – implemented policies that placed Wall Street at the center of the Democratic economic agenda, turning it from a party against Wall Street to a party of Wall Street.

[...]

More than 23 years following Bill Clinton’s election, Wall Street is very much intertwined with the Clintons: they helped fundamentally change Wall Street, and Wall Street fundamentally changed the Democratic party.

[...]

They championed free trade, pushing Nafta. They reformed welfare, buying into the conservative view that poverty was about dependency, not about situation. They threw the old left a few bones, repealing prior tax cuts on the rich, but used the increased revenues mostly on Wall Street’s favorite issue: cutting the debt.

Most importantly, when faced with their first financial crisis, they bailed out Wall Street.

[...]

The use of bailouts should have also been a reason to heavily regulate Wall Street, to prevent behavior that would require a bailout. But the [Clinton] administration didn’t do that; instead they went the opposite direction and continued to deregulate it, culminating in the repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999.

[...]

Wall Street now had both political parties working for them, and really nobody holding them accountable. Now, no trade was too aggressive, no risk too crazy, no behavior to unethical and no loss too painful.

[...]

Hillary Clinton continues to receive large donations from top bankers. Ask anyone who has spent the last two decades on Wall Street which politicians have worked for them the hardest and most will grudgingly admit it’s the Clintons. I doubt that will change anytime soon.

  Chris Arnade in The Guardian

What's Going on Here?

Why would Karl Rove want Hillary defeated?  There may be personal reasons, but I my guess would be that it's because he doesn't think Bernie Sanders can defeat a GOP candidate.  That seems short-sighted.  Maybe he thinks Bernie Sanders would bow to Wall Street once in office if he actually became President?

Hours before Sunday night’s Democratic debate, a conservative super PAC launched a new television ad campaign in Iowa spotlighting Hillary Clinton’s ties to the financial industry [titled: Wall Street in the White House? Iowa deserves better than Hillary Clinton.]

[...]

The group behind the ad is American Crossroads, a conservative super PAC affiliated with Karl Rove, a former senior advisor to President George W. Bush. The Wall Street Journal wrote in July that Rove is “deeply involved with the organization.”

[...]

[T]he sector that has donated by far the most money [more than $9m] to the group is the “securities and investment” industry

  IB Times

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