Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Rape and Pillage: Financial Sector Rinses & Repeats


I read in the Wall Street Journal this morning that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs "Got help from Fed on tests" (July 3, 2018, A1):
Federal Reserve officials told Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley that they were about to flunk a portion of the annual stress tests but offered them a deal to avoid an outright fail and continue paying billions to shareholders.
According to the article, written by Hoffman and Clozel, the Fed offered an
"unprecedented option" to the banks to freeze payouts and receive a pass although the banks "failed the quantitative portion of the exercise, which tests whether bank capital levels stay above regulatory requirements" (Hoffman & Clozel, a2).

So, basically, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were allowed to hand out dividends despite inadequate capital reserves!!!!

This pass was one among several "unusually accommodating" aspects of the Fed's offer.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
"has largely stopped initiating new investigations and wants the consumer-finance regulator to be less antagonistic to the businesses it regulates." (Hoffman & Clozel, A2)

Alberto Ramos of Goldman Sachs stated to the Wall Street Journal that:
"We now have an administration with a super-presidency that has very few constraints on power, so we'll have to see how he exercises that power" (cited in Whelan & Harrup, July 3, 2018, B11)
But oh wait. That quote came from another news article. Ramos wasn't describing the Trump administration as a "super-presidency" with very few constraints on power. Ramos was describing Mexico's new left-leaning president.

Goldman Sachs would hardly be so uncouth to criticize the administration that is allowing the banks to erode their reserves designed to prevent crisis by paying out "investors."

Rape and Pillage are the new norms for public policy, having jumped from the for-profit sector to government itself.

6 comments:

  1. Gulpers are not content with destroying everything. Want it to burn

    ReplyDelete
  2. These are the kind of black hearted trolls that exist in this fake, rotten degenerate shithole country . Their kick in life is to kill endangered species. It is the ownership society! They call themselves human or establishment. Psychopathic trump supporters-fascists. Senseless killings gulpers , psychopaths
    https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/03/american-woman-hunts-kills-giraffe-for-sport

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hunziker writes about the nuclear threat too. How can things have gone so.terribly wrong and in the exact opposite way of electing a govt that might not be complletely insane? Global warming events worse than 2 large asteroid impacts. Worse than diansaur extinction event.

    https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/03/american-woman-hunts-kills-giraffe-for-sport

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wrong article
    Here is the Hunziker article
    https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/03/three-climatic-monsters-with-asteroid-impact/

    ReplyDelete
  5. What will be left after this one? Maybe not much

    ReplyDelete
  6. The internet sucks. Time to get off the internet

    ReplyDelete

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