Courtesy of Pam Martens
Since Wall Street’s felony counts last May (see “Related Articles” below) and the unleashing of ever more creative ways to fleece the populace, it’s getting tougher and tougher to find people willing to shill for the Wall Street claptrap that it’s been punished enough and it’s time to put the bashing to rest. It’s getting tougher — but not impossible.
Matt Winkler, the Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, wrote an opinion piece and appeared on Bloomberg TV last week to regurgitate the threadbare “Stop Bashing Wall Street. Times Have Changed” refrain. Winkler starts off with this premise:
“One of the reasons the American economy is performing better than any of the largest in Asia and Europe is that its regulators have repaired the damage of the financial crisis and the worst recession since the Great Depression. Led by the Federal Reserve, they replaced incentives for reckless speculation with catalysts for old-fashioned credit creation backed by levels of capital that are unprecedented in modern times.”
If the U.S. economy is doing better than Europe, it has less to do with the banks than with the fact that when Obama took office the U.S. national debt was $10 trillion and now it’s $19 trillion. Washington has resuscitated today’s economy on the backs of the next generation. That $19 trillion doesn’t include the other $4.5 trillion hiding out at the Federal Reserve from buying up the drek from Wall Street banks’ balance sheets. The Federal Reserve had a balance sheet of only $800 billion before its three rounds of drek buying began (a/k/a quantitative easing).
Winkler also fails to note that the U.S. economy has been growing at a rate barely able to fog a mirror, despite the trillions spent in pump priming. As Steve Ricchiuto, Chief U.S. Economist at Mizuho Securities USA, told CNBC in February 2015:
“…there’s also this wrong concept that I keep hearing over and over again in the financial press about this acceleration in economic growth. That isn’t happening. Last month we had a horrible retail sales number. We had a horrible durable goods number. We’re likely to have a very disappointing retail sales number coming forward. This month we’ve had a strong payroll number – we say everything’s great. It’s not great. It’s running where it’s been. It’s been the same thing for the last five years. There’s no improvement in the economy.”
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