Bankers, Bailouts, and Dems... Oh my!!!

 

Bankers, Bailouts, & Dems... Oh my!!! 

 

US authorities are working with their Swiss counterparts as they seek to hammer out a deal for UBS Group AG to buy all or part of its struggling rival Credit Suisse Group AG, according to people familiar with the matter. 

A tie-up between the two banks would be of interest to Washington regulators because both lenders have operations in the US and are considered systemically important in Switzerland. American officials may seek to weigh in on matters that could impact final terms of any deal, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing the confidential conversations.

-       US Authorities Engaged on Possible Credit Suisse-UBS Deal, Bloomberg

 

By Gregg Wall (3-18-2023)

 

Oh my. 

 

Another weekend, more backroom deals w/ zero transparency, more welfare for bankers & the wealthy…  zero rush to resolve banking monopolies, systemic risk, endemic corruption, moral hazard, & massive structural defects in the globalization, neoliberal economy.

 

Moral hazard is the primary business model of all banksters (regional and larger) and ultra-wealthy libertarians.  In short, do as you please and let the public pay the consequences… something about privatized gains and socialized bailouts?

 

The bailouts are all handled by – unaccountable, unelected - bankers, centrals banks, crooks, lobbyists, and regulators now.  To wit, bank lending facilities, QE, and more entitlements and welfare for a privileged few.  The politicians are all hiding under their desks.  Congress and legislative bodies have abdicated once again to central bankers & captured regulators.  Except those very few politicians who assure us: yet another massive bank bailout is not a massive bank bailout.

 

And to think just a couple of weeks ago, Wall St was all a buzz that the US economy was headed for a ‘soft landing.’  Soft landing is code for the FED would pivot to free money, essentially juicing markets, and asset classes of the privileged and powerful.  The birds would sing, and free money welfare would resume raining down like manna from the heavens, or the Federal Reserve.  This most recent bailout, not unlike 2008 and 2020, will mean not a hard or soft landing for bankers, billionaires, and politicians, but instead, a socialist landing for the exceptionally wealthy…  funded by taxpayers, funded by austerity, cuts to public spending, and the continued nation-state credit line looting. 

 

The libertarians are all quiet now.  Just like there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no chest-beating libertarians when another entirely predictable financial crisis hits, and the venture capitalists are all crying for more WELFARE.  But who am I kidding, there’s no crying by the billionaire set, the bailouts and welfare for the kleptocracy are on auto pilot.  And to think the United States and the West defeated the Soviet Union some thirty odd years ago to see American boardrooms & C-suites addicted to and clamoring for an endless river of corporate & multinational entitlements.  

 

Talk about your communists… they’re all here in American boardrooms and executive suites. 

 

It's also one of the great ironies of this age, that labor, mom & pop investors, and pensioners are always used as the excuse for another bailout, greater expansion of the national debt, and yet another wealth transfer scheme.  But once the smoke clears and the dust settles, nobody says a word when banks, billionaires, multinational, and monopolies inevitably cut heads, cut labor, eliminate pensions, gouge consumers (aka labor), offshore the economy, tighten their grip on expense… all in the name of buybacks, dividends, and shareholder value.

 

It's all a lie, just like the fiscally & morally bankrupt free trade, neoliberal economy… which is often little more than a wealth transfer scheme, the banks and the stock market often playing a key role in laundering public/taxpayer money.  Which is why decision making takes not even days, but hours to bailout large banks (preferably over a weekend), while months and months are spent debating BBB, student debt, and any social spending for essential citizens, essential labor.  And always, seemingly, with the same result:  no más, no más!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, all these bank bailouts, endless wars, and socialism for libertarian billionaires wreaks havoc with the national debt… and this debt, in turn, is used as an excuse to demand austerity, as well as, cuts to public & social services.

 

Don’t look now but the citizens are growing angry and upset at having to bear a morally bankrupt economic model – failed libertarianism - and the weight of a bloated & corpulent billionaire, political class upon their backs. 

 

And key catalysts for the latest banking crisis, so far… aside from deregulation, a day trading congress, failed laissez faire, massive structural defects, systemic corruption, TBTF, and a banking system that maintains moral hazard for its foundation… well, that would be the banks themselves (making billions and billions gouging consumers and sending commodities soaring).  That’s right. The banks, combined with a do-nothing congress that refuses to rein in any business interest that pays them… the banks… played a key role (via greed & commodities speculation) in killing the free money gravy train from central banks and the Federal Reserve.  In order to fight inflation/price gouging, and since congress is entirely incompetent & refuses to rein in monopolistic pricing power, the FED had to raise interest rates.  Banks, in turn, who thought the FED would back down, or banks that no longer practiced risk management – or banks that simply set their banks alight, deliberately(?) – have collapsed or will struggle, depending on how much welfare the FED ultimately provides.  The entire financial system, including private equity and shadow banking, is addicted to easy money welfare, provided by their pusher, central banks.  

(A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, which is why central banks rush in and paper over banking crisis after banking crisis with trillions & trillions, to prop up the kleptocracy's house of cards.  The American people are little more than collateral damage and roadkill, just like Ukrainians, to the great evil that runs this country.)

 

And that’s possibly the greatest crime of the 2008 financial crisis, aside from the bailouts themselves, the free money regime… an ocean of free money that spawned cartel, consolidation, endemic Washington corruption, gross wage & wealth inequality, M&A, monopoly, and the resulting price gouging we see today. 

 

And as for bankers and billionaires deliberately sabotaging their own banks, the economy… in the name of greed, to make a fortune gambling against a specific bank or the U.S. banking system… it’s really not that hard to imagine (especially if you’re a libertarian billionaire, perhaps, with a grudge against the Federal Reserve and you have a vested interest in crypto).  Or perhaps the aim of blowing up and taking down SVB was merely to create panic and push the FED to pivot?  There are any number of possible motivations, including political.

 

No, when cruelty and lying are standard operating procedure in American boardrooms, C-suites, and government … it’s not hard to imagine at all.   

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2023

LIBERTARIAN

LIBERTARIAN

 

Smith believes, in a way that few neoclassical economists seem to accept, that there is a “natural” price for goods—a price that takes in the cost of making them and a profit for the makers—and a “market” price, and that these two are not always the same. The market is susceptible to pressures from the masters and dealers to keep prices unnaturally high. Smith does not think that “government is the problem”; he thinks that the producers’ compact against the consumers is the problem, and that the producers, because they are concentrated and rich, are usually able to make the government take their side. It is the proper function of the state to prevent the dealers from ganging up on the customers: “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” For Smith, the market moves toward monopoly; it is the job of the philosopher to define, and of the sovereign state to restore, free play.

-       Market Man, The New Yorker

By Gregg Wall (3-4-2023)

The libertarian is the lowest form of primate, seemingly without morality & almost entirely without conscience.  All id, all narcissism, the libertarian seemingly possesses none of the mitigating features of the conscience or mind.  That is, humanizing qualities, or what Freud referred to as the ego and superego.  These individuals operate almost entirely in a bubble and truly believe they owe their success entirely to themselves.  Consumers, labor, their fellow man are merely ants under their feet, an after thought.  And few, if any, libertarians recognize the success they owe to society.  Their disdain for government is legendary, except a government and politicians that genuflect to their power & can be harnessed in the service of greater power still. 

Those libertarians that do not grab hold of a dying American dream are wedded to hierarchical structures, and often take out their frustrations, from the abuse they receive from a predatory elite, on disenfranchised communities, like LGBTQ+, foreigners, minorities, ‘the other,’ and women.  Of course, greed is nothing new to the human condition, and in fact, the DSM labels hoarding as a mental illness.  How mental health professionals do not recognize the accumulation of vast sums of wealth as mental illness, probably has more to do with who doctors, mental health care professionals, and scientists ultimately take their orders from.  For the libertarian is often a psychopath, a sociopath.  For their greed and self-centeredness often knows no limits; their obsession with wealth often knows no limits. 

The only thing the comes close on the evolutionary scale is the penultimate, the vast majority of career American politicians.  

It should be lost on no one that the happiest places on earth are Northern European social democracies with a heavy reliance on the state, a strong social safety net, and public healthcare.  That is to say, where the worst tendencies of greed and libertarianism have been held in check.  The antithesis of these well run Northern European social democracies would be none other than the United States, where empire, greed, little or no safety net, societal division, and colossal amounts of debt have run the nation directly into the ground (not unlike America’s partner in crime, the UK, another empire, or supernova that has burned out from gross mismanagement & systemic looting by a predatory few). 

The extraordinarily wealthy, almost without exception, tend to be right-wing, support fascism, or at the minimum support so-called social moderates – centrists, who are corporatist in nature and bow down to privilege and wealth.  The extraordinarily wealthy, almost without exception, tend to be libertarian.  The means to their ascension to economic power, almost without fail, is aggregated economic power: cartel, manipulated markets, monopoly, TBTF institutions, and state welfare.  The means to their ascension to governmental power, almost without fail, is: endemic corruption, money in politics, societies that are poorly educated and may have a huge morality deficit.  Authoritarian regimes lend themselves to libertarians, but so do democracies in name only, especially two-party systems that gravitate towards divide & conquer politics.  Having a foreign enemy – an existential threat – has also proven useful for concentrated wealth and power.  Capture of the MSM, the executive, judicial, legislative branches of the state are crucial to the kleptocracy, the libertarian.  The ultra-wealthy libertarian, the plutocracy, also comes to control fiscal, monetary, regulatory, and tax policies.  From which, a great share of their wealth is derived and redistributed to them, directly & indirectly by the state. 

Ironically, and despite claiming the mantle of the free market, libertarians only care about the accumulation of power and wealth.  Cartel and monopoly, in particular, are the antithesis of capitalism and markets… no, what the libertarian is ultimately after is nothing more than hegemonic control, power, and unlimited profits (from which, they believe their positions of power are unassailable).  Which is exactly why most libertarians ultimately become statist.  For nothing better legitimizes their despotic power than state sanction (holy water & indulgences).  Hence, massive hypocrisy… To wit, the biggest socialists on the planet tend to be our hard charging libertarian, who would likely be wealthy in their own right, but have been made catastrophically wealthy by the state. (Here, it’s no accident that libertarians ultimately come to resemble the communist state, where the means of production are placed into the hands of a predatory few, where power is both absolute & despotic.)  And in the ultimate twist, the very raiding of state assets & socialism … that has made the billionaire, the multinational, the oligarchy so very wealthy …  is openly demonized & reviled by the libertarian, the media, and the politician. 

Decay, a dearth of innovation, massive debt, a heavy reliance upon old technologies, systemic division & poverty are often characteristic of societies that have given greed and libertarians free rein, as well as the fate of all empires.  Religious fundamentalists often play a key role, with the zealots given just enough room in a society to divide it, perhaps even devolve into theocracy.  Any day society is riven in two, by social issues and religion, is a great day for libertarianism & oligarchy.   Ultimately, because wealth has become concentrated into the hands of a few, the society becomes top heavy and begins to wither and die… the constant need for profits means privatization takes hold and new businesses form to carry out state services, public services, and the result is catastrophic debt & stagnation.  The public becomes jaded and upset because ultimately privatization and the private sector are revealed to be frauds (just another means to loot the state & kickback to corrupt politicians).  The very worst form of privatization are defense contractors and the overreliance upon debt and war to keep the profits & war machine rolling (and at least temporarily sate libertarian desires).  Libertarianism (aka laissez-faire) has become so unhinged & unchecked that an entire industry – private equity – is dedicated to looting companies balance sheets, stealing from their credit lines, crushing labor, and destroying competition, jobs, and economic opportunity.  PE executives will tell you otherwise, how many people they employ, but their results and the extreme concentrated wealth tell us an entirely different story (and all PE executives & owners are libertarian, almost without exception).

Due to the blind greed surrounding the cult of libertarianism we see gross disparities in society, with the tax burden shifted upon the majority, the disenfranchised, with higher rates of taxation.  We see gross disparities in pay, indentured servitude, the exploitation of child and prison labor.  We see the poor preyed upon and even incarcerated.  We see jobs, the economy, opportunity, and the tax base exported offshore for the exploitation of global economies & governments, played off one another in a race to the bottom.  All of which serves to place families and labor in a highly precarious situation: either ground down to apathy and no longer willing to work, or exceptionally desperate, willing to work for slave wages, nonliving wages.  In the end, humanity and society are sacrificed upon libertarianism’ altar, sacrificed upon the globe’s plantation economy.

And the Earth itself burns and floods, the ground and water saturated in chemicals and plastics.  The air fouled and the Goddess’ beautiful creation is destroyed.  

This is libertarianism. 

 

 

 

 

 

Is it a genetic defect?  Some atavistic defect in our DNA, nature or nurture, all the above? Can greed and libertarianism be cured, like a disease or virus, before humanity and the planet are destroyed?  And where the hell is the vaccine? 

One of the hallmarks of the last 43 years of globalization & laissez-faire is that our highly corrupt duopoly & oligarchy refuse to discuss the obvious failures centered around libertarianism, our monopoly economy, supply-side economics, & trickle-down tax policies.  Instead, we get breezy one-liners about, ‘Don't count America out.’  Few, if any, are counting America out.  It’s failed private and public leadership, on the other hand… greed as a central ruling ideology, on the other hand… those failures are obvious and clearly must be addressed. 

And that’s another key characteristic of our libertarian economy & government, the endless gaslighting and lies.  The fact that the career politicians & MSM fail to address so many key issues and stories of our time.  It’s all dismissed as everything is fine, everything is great, couldn’t be better, by the gerontocracy and the New York Times.  When clearly, everything is not okay.  Not when 33% makes less than $15 and 36% work Gig.  Not when 40% can’t afford health care and 63% live check to check… no amount of gaslighting and lies makes any of this acceptable.  Not when CEOs make 400 times the average worker’s pay. 

Trust us, is what the government said, after the Norfolk Southern rail disaster, but no one is in a trusting mood, after the two-party system has been revealed to be a fraud, after consumers and labor have been preyed upon, after health care – in the United States – has become a luxury item for the bottom half.  Not when Dems run on BBB, student debt relief, and then consistently fail to deliver…  but debt and money are no object for corporate welfare & endless wars.  No one is in a ‘trusting mood,’ when an out-of-control police state preys upon the American people. 

The longer I live, the more I have come to realize that so many of the economic & political constructs, that the American people have abided by for decades (e.g., libertarian industrial policy, globalization, QE, trickle-down, supply-side, GDP & growth as measures of economic wellbeing) … are all failures and lies, that benefit the rich exclusively. 

Clearly the center can no longer hold, clearly libertarianism is a dead end … best consigned to the ash heap of history.

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2023