Greed and The Elite in America - The Takers on Wall Street Still Have Reason to be Jolly
Financial industry insiders are grousing about a big downturn in annual bonuses. They should be thanking the rest of us - bombshell new research shows - for their continuing awesome good tidings.If you think something is a little wrong with this, if you think America has gone a little off the rails, if you think greed and corruption has taken the place of capitalism, than you're what conservative Republican refer to as a commie liberal enemy of America. If you and a lot of other people work hard to make a pie and a few people run off with it, leaving the vast majority with a few crumbs - who are the bad guys? The people who only got the crumbs? That is what conservative Republicans want you to believe. If you believe otherwise, if you're a sane rational American, than you're not being patriotic.
Wall Street’s power suits aren’t humming along, this December, with all the holiday jingles. Bankers, traders, and law firm partners are quite frankly feeling kind of foul. End-of-year Wall Street bonuses, experts predict, are going to be down from 2010 levels — by as much, on average, as 35 percent. [Bonuses might be reduced, but at $1.8 million on average, there's still plenty to be jolly about in Wall Street. Photo by Benjamin Dumas.] Bonuses might be reduced, but at $1.8 million on average, there's still plenty to be jolly about in Wall Street. Photo by Benjamin Dumas.
Total 2011 pay for the typical bond-trading managing director at a top Wall Street securities firm will likely be off, says analyst Michael Karp, nearly 40 percent.
But those typical managing directors should be able to survive the holidays quite nicely. Bonus cuts will leave average high-powered bond traders with $1.8 million for their daily labors in 2011. The average U.S. worker would have to labor 43 years — an adult lifetime — to take home that same $1.8 million.
In other words, by any real-world yardstick, Wall Street’s finest are doing just fine. And they owe their good fortune, blockbuster new research makes clear, to the generosity of Uncle Sam’s one and only central bank, the Federal Reserve.
During the financial meltdown, a new analysis of 29,000 pages of previously secret documents shows, central bankers at the Fed shoveled out an incredible $7.77 trillion in dirt-cheap loans to the nation’s financial institutions.
This massive wave of low-cost loans, note the Bloomberg news analysts who broke the story last week, amounted to a bailout over ten times larger than the $700 billion funneled to banks via the Treasury Department’s controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
Bloomberg reporters had to win a court case to access the stunning new bailout data. How stunning? The $7.77 trillion the Fed committed to the nation’s financial industry, observes Bloomberg, equaled “more than half the value of everything produced” in the entire United States during the key crisis year.
To put the bailout in more homespun terms: The Fed provided banks the equivalent of over $25,000 per American.
The nation’s six biggest banks — J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — grabbed $460 billion of the secret loans. Morgan Stanley took in $10 billion in publicly visible TARP bailout dollars and $107 billion from the hidden Fed loan program.
Woman Upset With Obama Apologizes After Breast Cancer Diagnosis. Some people seem to think they live in a bubble in which nothing bad can happen to them.
