The market has climbed not because of increased productivity, or the delight of a retreating recession, but because the Federal Reserve is handing out newly minted Greenbacks in exchange for worthless garbage cyber-dollars that cannot be sold to anyone with a brain other than Beanie Bernanke and his Federalies. Single payer loan dealer Wall-Street bankers.
This is a bailout. Let us admit it now! If I gave you real money for Monopoly money, that would be a bailout. I would be saving you from looking stupid and from sure disaster.
The Wall Street banks gambled on making money from bundled debt securities in order to cover loans and deposits hoping to make billions from gullible suckers. This was all done off the bank's balance sheets and from the back rooms of a quiet, shadow banking system that would make Tony Soprano proud. These risky sales were made away from the public's eye. These deals were out of view from the handful of Bush regulators still on the job, and not hanging out at the local unemployment office. Unfortunately, these risky pieces of paper went up in flames as subprime loans went south taking down those home values and related over-extended personal unpaid debt.
So, Ben "Bailout" Bernanke could not have his rich, greedy banker pals lose their upper crusty lifestyles and end up in the pit with us middle-classites. Oh no; anything but that, Ben!! They have worked way too hard scamming working America to be knocked off their elitist pedestals.
Bernanke does not care to make any of these greed-lusting socialists accountable and responsible for their pre-planned fraud upon the American worker. The Fed holds only $709 billion in Treasury bills to pay for the bailouts and junk collateral exchanges at the Primary Dealer Credit Facilities discount window. Drive by and pick up your fat 2.5% government subsidy. So far, he has visibly given away $230 billion of the $709 billion in only one week. What a spending spree! Once that is gone, Beanie will head down to the basement printing press to pull an all-nighter rolling dollars off the copier.
The facts are that in spite of these "exchanges", there has been an $8 trillion housing bubble and foreclosures pile up. As home values fall further, some are scooping up bargains; yet, the question still remains, will those bargains lose more value over the coming weeks/months/year? Jobs continue to be lost. (Two consecutive months of actual job losses.) Prices continue to eat away at expendable incomes. And, for most Americans, they cannot afford to go into further debt. These giddy bankers really don't want to loan out money. It just is too risky. Instead, they take OUR Federal Reserve T-bills and rush over to Europe and buy Euro-backed bonds because they are worth more than the dollar. Back To The Greedy Future.
Is the Justice Department concerned? Are they going after these "gambling swindlers" with billions in their trust funds and beach houses? No.
Dean Baker, a smart progressive economist, with great ideas, suggested that the Fed should just take over such failed banks, kick out the top brass and restructure the operation with more
competent managers with a goal to sell the thing once they make it solvent again. Why cannot we do it, to? Oh, I forgot, Bush is still president and Reed and Pelosi run Congress. Oh, silly me!
What will the giddy Stock Marketeers, from Bernanke Brothers Studios, do when they realize that we are really in a credit crunch, and maxed out on it, too? If Americans will not, or cannot borrow another dime, then the flow of credit stalls, the nation's economy grinds down, the dollar falls further, and gold prices increase along with consumer prices causing a deepening recession and inflation. Remember, the developing world, such as India and China, are in great need of what we need, too.
We can thank decades of Regressive (credit to David Michael Green for the term) policies shipping away jobs, gutting our manufacturing sector and bringing about an approaching $9 trillion national debt, a $700 billion trade deficit, and a $500 billion budget deficit. And don't forget a $2000/second war budget.
The Bush Regressives want our economy and standard of living to fall so far down that labor costs are par with China and India instead of stabilizing our standard of living and building it back to a place close to where it once had been. Instead of reinventing America into the World's Greatest Green Show on Earth, they want to bring us the "more wars" Regressives, who want to perpetuate the war machine, while, at the same time, raising the national debt by borrowing more to make it run, and subsidizing their corporate cronies who produced the war machine with OUR tax dollars. When will America say enough is enough?
