Courtesy of Pam Martens.
The Trading Desk at the New York Fed Has Speed Dials to Wall Street Firms and Bloomberg Terminals
Starting last July, the share prices of the biggest banks on Wall Street have been on a steady downward trajectory. That trend heated up yesterday with Citigroup and Bank of America both dropping over 6 percent by the close of trading. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were down by over 4 percent. All four of the banks set new 12-month lows in intraday trading.
A strong argument can be made that much of the public’s lack of confidence in these complex banking and gambling behemoths is a result of the dark curtain that has been drawn around their operations. Evidence is piling up that government regulators of Wall Street no longer see themselves as the protectors of the people but as the protectors of Wall Street’s secrets.
The American historian, Henry Steele Commager, once wrote that “The generation that made the nation thought secrecy in government one of the instruments of old world tyranny and committed itself to the principle that a democracy cannot function unless people are permitted to know what their government is up to.”
In that vein, on his very first day in office, January 21, 2009, as the U.S. economy was in tatters from the greatest era of Wall Street corruption in the history of the nation, President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency. Two months later, under the President’s orders, the U.S. Attorney General’s office issued detailed guidelines on how government agencies were to respond to public and press requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
We’ve been living in a dark hole ever since when it comes to Wall Street.
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