The Politics of Greed

The Politics of Greed

Mr. Powell said earlier this month that the episode continued to exert a significant influence on his management of monetary policy.

“The taper tantrum left scars on anybody who was working at the Fed at that time,” Mr. Powell said at a joint appearance in Atlanta with Mr. Bernanke and the former Fed chairwoman Janet L. Yellen.

-      Effects of the 2013 ‘Taper Tantrum’ Linger Over Fed Policy – NY Times

 

By Gregg Wall (7-22-2023) 

 

Inflation (i.e., price gouging) has been in the news the last couple of weeks.  America’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released their numbers on July 12, and Canada released its numbers this week.  And from all the cheering you’d thought the Allied powers had just defeated Germany, but alas, it was not to be.  Inflation still soars, the core inflation figure – which conveniently enough excludes food and retail fuel prices – climbs ever higher, as does the U.S. stock market despite the obvious pain felt by the majority of Americans. Interest rates remain at a highly accommodative historical norm, and Western leaders & politicians consistently fail to address the monopolies and utilities responsible for a global pandemic of greedflation. 

 

The U.S. financial press appears in on the act… the MSM dutifully, and w/out fail, reports out the party line. Seemingly, not a single member of the MSM questions how is it, that gas prices are 50% higher than when POTUS Biden entered the White House, despite America being the most prolific producer of oil & gas on the planet.  No one questions how rents continue to soar another 7.8%, food another 5.7%... all of which comes on top of the price gouging incurred in 2020, 2021, and 2022.  In fact, if anything, profits continue to soar, as America’s boardrooms, C-suites, and monopolists pocket lower cost inputs for steeper profits margins, or in the case of Wall St banks, hoard higher interest rates.  It’s quite the rape. 

 

But despite all the high-fives in the financial media, things apparently are not well: 

 

The oft cited jobs numbers frequently fall short of expectations, as Americans increasingly find themselves in jobs that fail to pay a living wage (let alone allow them to keep up with serial price gouging). 

 

Bankruptcies are rising.  As corporate entities that gorged on free money welfare & financial engineering for years, finally have discovered debt service loads and interest rates more commensurate with their credit and underwriting risks.

 

And the ultimate bellwether on how the economy is doing, POTUS Biden continues to bottom out in the polls.   Seems that many Americans are not drinking the Kool-Aid served up by Bidenomics and members of the MSM. 

 

Hence, the fear and loathing surrounding proposals from economists… at least one suggesting the path forward should be allowing companies to gouge harder, and that the Federal Reserve’s targeted inflation rate should be allowed to climb higher, from 2% to 3%.  After all, why kill a perfectly good stock market rally and a failed Biden presidency with a bummer like a recession?  Let the gouging continue, faster and harder. 

 

The other idea tossed out this week was that the U.S. dollar would weaken as the FED paused on interest rate hikes, because of the lower core inflation number, as central banks around the globe continued to hike. Clearly, a disaster for Americans who already struggle from a failed neoliberal economy, an import driven economy, and a further assault on the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar.  A weaker dollar and a collared FED would be an asset for the stock market, the rich, and asset classes of the rich… and the repatriation of foreign profits back into U.S. dollars by multinationals.   How convenient. 

 

The powerful and the rich always have an angle.  Don’t they? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conveniently omitted from the MSM analysis were two central questions.  First, if globalization, neoliberalism, and oligarchy are the end all, be all of economics, why are Western citizens so angry and upset, why all the strikes, the contrived shortages, the manipulated supplies, the ever-spiraling greedflation?  Why? Why? Why?  The silence is deafening.  Seemingly nobody – particularly the wise boys and girls in newsrooms – has any answers.  Or perhaps the question is indiscrete… after all, why anger the billionaire owners & sponsors of newsrooms?  Why stray from the neoliberal party line, particularly when reporters are getting axed?  

 

The other question that occurred to me, what happened to the tantrums?  I seem to recall the manipulated U.S. stock market went into a swan dive anytime former FED chairs, Bernanke & Yellen, even hinted at QT (quantitative tightening) or a return to normalized interest rates.  Which, shockers, meant that the free money welfare used to transfer wealth from the taxpayer & future generations to multinationals & oligarchs, via interest rate suppression & money printing (aka QE – quantitative easing), continued relentlessly.   The FED put, meaning the stock market was too big to fail, was the order of the day.  QE and easy money (aka welfare for Wall St.) led directly to the consolidated, monopoly economy Americans face today.  You know, the monopolies that are presently ripping off Americans at an alarming rate.  And yet, this time when the FED absolutely had to hike rates, no tantrum.  In fact, the stock market soars, once again, to obscene valuations.

 

Crickets from American & Western newsrooms.  Best not turnover that rock… besides Mr. Bernanke just won a Nobel.  We can’t ask questions of a great American icon, who directly and indirectly oversaw & engineered, along with his peers, the greatest consolidation of the global economy & transfer of wealth the world has ever seen.  He saved us from a great recession, that is to say, Bernanke bailed out systemic corruption, greed, and failed neoliberalism. 

 

And we wonder why the United States and the West suffers so badly.  Americans, like the Hebrews in biblical times, have been wandering in an economic and political desert for forty-three years.  A desert of Reaganomics and failed trickle-down economics... despite the obvious failure, we cannot escape the desert’s and the pharaohs’ grasp.  Political discourse has devolved into culture wars, as Americans grow more destitute and homeless.  Bidenvilles, almost a century earlier called - Hoovervilles, dot the landscape.   

 

And the politics of greed and the great Americans swindle are everywhere.  Accountability, intellectual candor, & honesty are in very short supply.  Those who dare speak truth to power are condemned and silenced.  The American MSM has issued a de facto news blackout on the truth, and we are lost as the planet burns, so as to make the very worst of us obscenely wealthy. 

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2023