enhanced_deficit
Member
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2013
- Messages
- 28,575
There is no proof that groups behind riots were funded by same entities who gained from this crisis but MSM did a good job keeping public attention to those shiny topics while mostly ignoring what happened behind the scenes to the tunes of $Trillions.
Granted anti big-debt Tea-party didn't have wherewithal to handle this situation, where were GOP/Dem political establishments, Deep State and media owners while all this went on?
If this reporting is valid, almost seems like "Iraq War bloodbath-Halliburton money baggers 2.0" type situation when wars profiteers milked a crisis.
BlackRock Authored the Bailout Plan Before There Was a Crisis
How the COVID-19 Bailout Gave Wall Street a No-Lose Casino
In late April Marko Kolanovic, a financial analyst for JPMorgan Chase, wrote to clients with good news. Pandemic aside, investors should expect stock prices in S&P 500 companies to return to record numbers some time early next year!
“The S&P 500 should attain previous all-time highs,” Kolanovic wrote, “if the monetary measures are sustained.”
The key part of this phrase was the last bit, “if the monetary measures are sustained.” In countries that did not have a Federal Reserve Bank shooting a bazooka of cash daily at Wall Street, Kolanovic suggested the coronavirus would result in a 30 percent decline in the present value of earnings.
Though this is a Trump bill — El Pompadour is so determined that the CARES Act be remembered as his work, he fought to get his signature on relief checks — it passed unanimously, by voice vote in the House, and 96-0 in the Senate.
Talk to Democrats on the Hill and they will tell you this is a bailout to be cheered and supported, nothing like the 2008 rescue. This time is different, the argument goes: Three-quarters of the money goes to real people.
This is true, if one squints and uses a narrow definition of “money.” The $2.3 trillion imagines $560 billion for “individuals” (including $300 billion in cash payments, much by way of the famed $1,200 “Trump” checks), plus $377 billion for small businesses, as well as $339 billion for state and local governments, and $100 billion for hospitals and other health care providers, plus some aid for students and children.
Technically, “only” about $500 billion of the congressionally passed rescue package goes to “big business.” Moreover, the big-business aid ostensibly comes with a range of draconian-sounding conditions barring greedy hijinks, meaning no layoffs, no stock buybacks, no big bonuses, etc., if companies want the handout.
The loophole comes via $454 billion created as part of that big-business package. This “emergency fund” will be dumped into a “special-purpose vehicle” used to backstop further lending by the Federal Reserve.
That $454 billion is designed to grow by a factor of 10 or more. “We can lever up to $4 trillion,” said Steve Mnuchin, playing the “free-spending Goldman Sachs-trained Treasury secretary” role that apparently is a prerequisite for financial-disaster narratives in modern America.
Democrats early on expressed concern about old-school Tammany Hall-style graft, i.e., that the fund would be used to invest in businesses with connections. “We’re not here to create a slush fund for Donald Trump and his family,” is how Elizabeth Warren put it.
However, once Democrats won superficial oversight concessions (including the creation of a Congressional Oversight Commission), Warren and everyone else in the caucus approved the “slush fund” concept, despite the far more radical issues it poses than individual graft.
The CARES Act “slush fund” imagines a future in which markets for all financial products are stressed, perhaps permanently, by lockdowns. In place of a heartless free market of panicked investors who might want to cut their losses and sell, the plan is to simulate real buying and selling of financial products like mortgages and bonds with directed deployments of the Fed’s endless trillions.
And they will be endless. As Fed chief Jerome Powell put it, the Fed is “not going to run out of ammunition” in the war against the economic crisis. Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform said, “The Fed’s perspective on this is, they want to create normalcy.” But what does “normal” mean in an economy that may be changed forever?
Investors were fleeing stocks, bonds, money-market funds, etc., in the first weeks of March for the perfectly logical reason that most businesses suddenly looked like dicey investments. But the instant the Fed announced its new purchasing programs, most of these markets bounced back nearly all the way up.
Major bond funds that were on the brink of failure on March 23rd — like BlackRock’s $30 billion LQD fund — rebounded and recovered nearly all of their value in the next days. The S&P 500 sank 34 percent in 23 trading sessions at the beginning of the crisis, then after the Fed’s announcement on March 23rd, rose 27 percent in its next 16 sessions. The NYSE Composite hit a low of 8,777 on March 23rd, then started a long march back up over 10,000 and then 11,000 from that day forward.
Investors have begun following the Fed. Analysts are encouraging clients to “buy what the Fed is buying,” because “the stimulus seems to be endless.” The boom isn’t in any particular kind of company or product, but in the Fed itself.
“The Fed is the market, and all the big players know it, while the real economy will stagger far behind,” is how Nomi Prins, author of Collusion and an expert on central-banking policy, puts it.
This plan is getting support from both the right and the left. Wall Street analysts are cheering Fed chief Powell’s decision to act “forcefully, proactively, and aggressively” to forestall financial collapse, while liberal economists seem to cheer the spectacle of the government abandoning harrumphing conservative rhetoric about fiscal restraint to invest massively in the economy.
As COVID-19 deaths hit record numbers, Trump oversees a historic wealth transfer to the super-rich
A analysis from the Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies – Program on Inequality (IPS) documented that in the span of three months, "the U.S. added 29 more billionaires while 45.5 million filed for unemployment."
Advertisement:
The Washington Post reported that on June 14, the Federal Reserve estimated that "more than $6.5 trillion in household wealth vanished during the first three months of this year as the pandemic tightened its hold on the global economy…. roughly equivalent to the economies of the United Kingdom and France combined."
As Chuck Collins, Director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good, observed, "since March 18th, the US Billionaire class has seen their wealth increase by 20%, or $584 billion, since the rough beginning of the pandemic."
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/taibbi-covid-19-bailout-wall-street-997342/
Related
April 8, 2020
BlackRock Takes Command
by Joyce Nelson
The mainstream financial press has been remarkably quiet about the Federal Reserve’s appointment (March 24) of BlackRock to manage its massive corporate debt purchase program in response to the Covid-19 crisis. That silence might have a simple explanation: you don’t slag your boss if you know what’s good for you.
BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink may now be the most powerful man in the world, overseeing not just the Fed’s new (potentially $4.5 trillion) corporate slush-fund, but also managing $27 trillion of the global economy (even before the March appointment). As the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock already was managing $7 trillion for its global corporate investor-clients, along with another $20 trillion for clients through its financial risk-monitoring software (called Aladdin).
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/08/blackrock-takes-command/
Finance Giant BlackRock Faces Activist Heat for Investing in the War Machine
Divest from the war machine, protesters tell the private equity giant
Anti-war campaigners and members of CodePink demonstrate outside Blackrock's offices in Manhattan on Wednesday, May 23, 2018. (Photo: Sarah Eckel-Dalrymple/CodePink)
On Wednesday of this week, on a dreary morning in Manhattan, anti-war protesters gathered to turn up the heat on the world’s most powerful private equity giant, BlackRock. Attendees carried a plethora of signs and chanted a variety of demands, but their main focus was on holding the massive investment company accountable for its controversial activities—mainly investing in the manufacturing of deadly weapons—within the United States as well as around the world. For the progressive anti-war and women-led Code Pink, BlackRock had to cease making a “killing on killing.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/...ock-faces-activist-heat-investing-war-machine
BlackRock profits in a time of crisis
Image by REUTERS/Elias MarcouBy Nancy Mancias, CODEPINK Divest from the War Machine Campaign
With little government support and corporate accountability, humanitarian aid workers are scrambling to address the refugee crisis in the wake of the global pandemic, COVID-19 (coronavirus).
Granted anti big-debt Tea-party didn't have wherewithal to handle this situation, where were GOP/Dem political establishments, Deep State and media owners while all this went on?
If this reporting is valid, almost seems like "Iraq War bloodbath-Halliburton money baggers 2.0" type situation when wars profiteers milked a crisis.
BlackRock Authored the Bailout Plan Before There Was a Crisis
How the COVID-19 Bailout Gave Wall Street a No-Lose Casino
In late April Marko Kolanovic, a financial analyst for JPMorgan Chase, wrote to clients with good news. Pandemic aside, investors should expect stock prices in S&P 500 companies to return to record numbers some time early next year!
“The S&P 500 should attain previous all-time highs,” Kolanovic wrote, “if the monetary measures are sustained.”
The key part of this phrase was the last bit, “if the monetary measures are sustained.” In countries that did not have a Federal Reserve Bank shooting a bazooka of cash daily at Wall Street, Kolanovic suggested the coronavirus would result in a 30 percent decline in the present value of earnings.
Though this is a Trump bill — El Pompadour is so determined that the CARES Act be remembered as his work, he fought to get his signature on relief checks — it passed unanimously, by voice vote in the House, and 96-0 in the Senate.
Talk to Democrats on the Hill and they will tell you this is a bailout to be cheered and supported, nothing like the 2008 rescue. This time is different, the argument goes: Three-quarters of the money goes to real people.
This is true, if one squints and uses a narrow definition of “money.” The $2.3 trillion imagines $560 billion for “individuals” (including $300 billion in cash payments, much by way of the famed $1,200 “Trump” checks), plus $377 billion for small businesses, as well as $339 billion for state and local governments, and $100 billion for hospitals and other health care providers, plus some aid for students and children.
Technically, “only” about $500 billion of the congressionally passed rescue package goes to “big business.” Moreover, the big-business aid ostensibly comes with a range of draconian-sounding conditions barring greedy hijinks, meaning no layoffs, no stock buybacks, no big bonuses, etc., if companies want the handout.
The loophole comes via $454 billion created as part of that big-business package. This “emergency fund” will be dumped into a “special-purpose vehicle” used to backstop further lending by the Federal Reserve.
That $454 billion is designed to grow by a factor of 10 or more. “We can lever up to $4 trillion,” said Steve Mnuchin, playing the “free-spending Goldman Sachs-trained Treasury secretary” role that apparently is a prerequisite for financial-disaster narratives in modern America.
Democrats early on expressed concern about old-school Tammany Hall-style graft, i.e., that the fund would be used to invest in businesses with connections. “We’re not here to create a slush fund for Donald Trump and his family,” is how Elizabeth Warren put it.
However, once Democrats won superficial oversight concessions (including the creation of a Congressional Oversight Commission), Warren and everyone else in the caucus approved the “slush fund” concept, despite the far more radical issues it poses than individual graft.
The CARES Act “slush fund” imagines a future in which markets for all financial products are stressed, perhaps permanently, by lockdowns. In place of a heartless free market of panicked investors who might want to cut their losses and sell, the plan is to simulate real buying and selling of financial products like mortgages and bonds with directed deployments of the Fed’s endless trillions.
And they will be endless. As Fed chief Jerome Powell put it, the Fed is “not going to run out of ammunition” in the war against the economic crisis. Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform said, “The Fed’s perspective on this is, they want to create normalcy.” But what does “normal” mean in an economy that may be changed forever?
Investors were fleeing stocks, bonds, money-market funds, etc., in the first weeks of March for the perfectly logical reason that most businesses suddenly looked like dicey investments. But the instant the Fed announced its new purchasing programs, most of these markets bounced back nearly all the way up.
Major bond funds that were on the brink of failure on March 23rd — like BlackRock’s $30 billion LQD fund — rebounded and recovered nearly all of their value in the next days. The S&P 500 sank 34 percent in 23 trading sessions at the beginning of the crisis, then after the Fed’s announcement on March 23rd, rose 27 percent in its next 16 sessions. The NYSE Composite hit a low of 8,777 on March 23rd, then started a long march back up over 10,000 and then 11,000 from that day forward.
Investors have begun following the Fed. Analysts are encouraging clients to “buy what the Fed is buying,” because “the stimulus seems to be endless.” The boom isn’t in any particular kind of company or product, but in the Fed itself.
“The Fed is the market, and all the big players know it, while the real economy will stagger far behind,” is how Nomi Prins, author of Collusion and an expert on central-banking policy, puts it.
This plan is getting support from both the right and the left. Wall Street analysts are cheering Fed chief Powell’s decision to act “forcefully, proactively, and aggressively” to forestall financial collapse, while liberal economists seem to cheer the spectacle of the government abandoning harrumphing conservative rhetoric about fiscal restraint to invest massively in the economy.
As COVID-19 deaths hit record numbers, Trump oversees a historic wealth transfer to the super-rich
A analysis from the Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies – Program on Inequality (IPS) documented that in the span of three months, "the U.S. added 29 more billionaires while 45.5 million filed for unemployment."
Advertisement:
The Washington Post reported that on June 14, the Federal Reserve estimated that "more than $6.5 trillion in household wealth vanished during the first three months of this year as the pandemic tightened its hold on the global economy…. roughly equivalent to the economies of the United Kingdom and France combined."
As Chuck Collins, Director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good, observed, "since March 18th, the US Billionaire class has seen their wealth increase by 20%, or $584 billion, since the rough beginning of the pandemic."
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/taibbi-covid-19-bailout-wall-street-997342/
Related
April 8, 2020
BlackRock Takes Command
by Joyce Nelson
The mainstream financial press has been remarkably quiet about the Federal Reserve’s appointment (March 24) of BlackRock to manage its massive corporate debt purchase program in response to the Covid-19 crisis. That silence might have a simple explanation: you don’t slag your boss if you know what’s good for you.
BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink may now be the most powerful man in the world, overseeing not just the Fed’s new (potentially $4.5 trillion) corporate slush-fund, but also managing $27 trillion of the global economy (even before the March appointment). As the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock already was managing $7 trillion for its global corporate investor-clients, along with another $20 trillion for clients through its financial risk-monitoring software (called Aladdin).
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/08/blackrock-takes-command/
Finance Giant BlackRock Faces Activist Heat for Investing in the War Machine
Divest from the war machine, protesters tell the private equity giant
Anti-war campaigners and members of CodePink demonstrate outside Blackrock's offices in Manhattan on Wednesday, May 23, 2018. (Photo: Sarah Eckel-Dalrymple/CodePink)
On Wednesday of this week, on a dreary morning in Manhattan, anti-war protesters gathered to turn up the heat on the world’s most powerful private equity giant, BlackRock. Attendees carried a plethora of signs and chanted a variety of demands, but their main focus was on holding the massive investment company accountable for its controversial activities—mainly investing in the manufacturing of deadly weapons—within the United States as well as around the world. For the progressive anti-war and women-led Code Pink, BlackRock had to cease making a “killing on killing.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/...ock-faces-activist-heat-investing-war-machine
BlackRock profits in a time of crisis
Image by REUTERS/Elias MarcouBy Nancy Mancias, CODEPINK Divest from the War Machine Campaign
With little government support and corporate accountability, humanitarian aid workers are scrambling to address the refugee crisis in the wake of the global pandemic, COVID-19 (coronavirus).
