Huge Victory for the GOP – Bottom 90% Completely F’d!
by phil - August 7th, 2014 7:05 am
Victory in our time!
They said it couldn't be done, they said that people in a "Democracy" would never allow it to happen but, in the past 5 years we have actually taken 15% of the income AWAY from the bottom 90% of American wage-earners and re-distributed it to the top 10% and, since there are much less of them, it has boosted our top 10% incomes by 115% over the same period!
In the words of the great Winston Churchill (as redefined by the Conservative Bible): "Never was so much taken from so many for so few." As you can see from the chart above, the Reagan Revolution successfully reversed years of gains for the average American and began shoveling all of the economic progresss to the top 10% for the last 30 years but only in the last 5 has this policy gone into overdrive as we have begun to actively TAKE the money from the bottom 90%, Look how rich that makes us – no wonder we are all voting to keep this policy going!
As noted by Zero Hedge:
"Inequality in the U.S. today is near its historical highs, largely because the Federal Reserve’s policies have succeeded in achieving their aim: namely, higher asset prices (especially the prices of stocks, bonds and high-end real estate), which are generally owned by taxpayers in the upper-income brackets.
The Fed is doing all the work, because the President’s policies are growth-suppressive. In the absence of the Fed’s money printing and ZIRP, the economy would either be softer or actually in a new recession."
It's not just our Fed, of course, this morning we are getting more doveish noises from the ECB press conference as Draghi promises MORE FREE MONEY (for those of us with the credit scores or balance sheets to qualify) and that is already (8:30) pushing our Futures up half a point in pre-market trading. We're still watching our bounce levels (and shorting /TF at 1,130),…
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The Next Financial Crisis Hits Wall Street, as Judges Start Nixing Foreclosures
by ilene - October 23rd, 2009 2:40 am
The Next Financial Crisis Hits Wall Street, as Judges Start Nixing Foreclosures
Courtesy of PAM MARTENS at CounterPunch
The financial tsunami unleashed by Wall Street’s esurient alchemy of spinning toxic home mortgages into triple-A bonds, a process known as securitization, has set off its second round of financial tremors.
After leaving mortgage investors, bank shareholders, and pension fiduciaries awash in losses and a large chunk of Wall Street feeding at the public trough, the full threat of this vast securitization machine and its unseen masters who push the levers behind a tightly drawn curtain is playing out in courtrooms across America.
Three plain talking judges, in state courts in Massachusetts and Kansas, and a Federal Court in Ohio, have drilled down to the “straw man” aspect of securitization. The judges’ decisions have raised serious questions as to the legality of hundreds of thousands of foreclosures that have transpired as well as the legal standing of the subsequent purchasers of those homes, who are more and more frequently the Wall Street banks themselves.
Adding to the chaos, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has made rule changes that will force hundreds of billions of dollars of these securitizations back onto the Wall Street banks balance sheets, necessitating the need to raise capital just as the unseemly courtroom dramas are playing out.
The problems grew out of the steps required to structure a mortgage securitization. In order to meet the test of an arm’s length transaction, pass muster with regulators, conform to accounting rules and to qualify as an actual sale of the securities in order to be removed from the bank’s balance sheet, the mortgages get transferred a number of times before being sold to investors. Typically, the original lender (or a sponsor who has purchased the mortgages in the secondary market) will transfer the mortgages to a limited purpose entity called a depositor. The depositor will then transfer the mortgages to a trust which sells certificates to investors based on the various risk-rated tranches of the mortgage pool. (Theoretically, the lower rated tranches were to absorb the losses of defaults first with the top triple-A tiers being safe. In reality, many of the triple-A tiers have received ratings downgrades along with all the other tranches.)
Because of the expense, time and paperwork it would take to record each of the assignments of the thousands of…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site