Food for thought

~ susie

Matt Taibbi on the bank bailouts:

I have no doubt there were mountains of improprieties committed before and during these transactions. I think in the end we’re going to find out that the emergency bailouts of 2008 were really a wide-scale government-aided effort at consolidating financial power, in which the taxpayer was asked to fund a series of lucrative mergers that greatly limited consumer choices and made the entire financial system markedly less transparent. To me there’s a dangerous precedent involved when you have one group of investors who get all their news from the papers, and another group of active traders who are on the phone with the Treasury and the Fed in real-time as they marionette the economy.

Published by susie

2 thoughts on “Food for thought”

  1. speaking of the Fed and the Bailouts, Guess who just lost in the SCOTUS:

    The justices today left intact a court order that gives the Fed five days to release the records, sought by Bloomberg News’s parent company, Bloomberg LP. The Clearing House Association LLC, a group of the nation’s largest commercial banks, had asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The order marks the first time a court has forced the Fed to reveal the names of banks that borrowed from its oldest lending program, the 98-year-old discount window. The disclosures, together with details of six bailout programs released by the central bank in December under a congressional mandate, would give taxpayers insight into the Fed’s unprecedented $3.5 trillion effort to stem the 2008 financial panic.

    good news. Bernanke’s gonna be pissy today.

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