Courtesy of Pam Martens
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton at First Presidential Debate, September 26, 2016
Yesterday, building on the momentum afforded her by a series of articles in the New York Times, Hillary Clinton asked the audience at a campaign stop in Toledo, Ohio: “What kind of genius loses a billion dollars in one year.” Clinton was referring to the New York Times revelation on Sunday that Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return showed a loss of $916 million. (See video clip below.)
If Hillary really wants to know what kind of genius can lose a billion dollars in one year or $6.2 billion in the case of traders at JPMorgan Chase, she should ask the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon. The $6.2 billion London Whale loss at JPMorgan Chase is far more scintillating a feat since it involved wild derivative gambles in London in 2012 using the taxpayer-backstopped, insured savings deposits at the largest bank in the U.S. The U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations conducted an in-depth investigation and report of the matter. The Chairman of the Subcommittee at the time, Senator Carl Levin, stated that JPMorgan “piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits, manipulated risk models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public.”
In fact, New York City, where both Trump and the New York Times hail from, is filled to the brim with Wall Street geniuses who have wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars in shareholder equity or completely destroyed their Wall Street banks through unsound business models while reaping windfalls for themselves. Compared to these guys, Trump is a piker.
For the past three consecutive days the New York Times has deployed its front page as something akin to a Super Pac advertising medium to boost the campaign prospects of Hillary Clinton by sacking the business acumen of Donald Trump. (The editorial page of the New York Times has also twice endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, calling Trump “the worst nominee put forward by a major party in modern American history.”)
While we are certainly no fan of Donald Trump, we have to ask ourselves two essential questions: (1) why is the Times creating a gag-worthy, revisionist history of the scandal-plagued career of Hillary Clinton and (2) why has the Times allowed its hometown’s largest industry, Wall Street, to become a criminal enterprise right under its coddling nose, leading to the unprecedented transfer of wealth from the 99 percent across America to the pockets of the super wealthy of New York City and its environs.
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