The New Oligarchs of Wall Street
I call them the ‘Titans of Wall Street,’ others refer to them as the ‘Lords of Finance,’ and there are books outlining their pillaging exploits. Either way, they amount to the same thing when this phenomena occurs in Russia, India, China, Argentina or late 19th-century Victorian England — we are now, in America, living in a Plutocracy, and the true wielders of wealth and power in our nation are the Oligarchs. Like I said, the ‘Titans of Wall Street’. And they just plundered our national Treasury for the paltry sum of $7.5 Trillion — a substantial portion, billions, of which will end up as “executive compensation” or in the ‘Net Profit’ line of corporate balance sheets. Further the outrage, the CEOs in the financial industry, using U.S. taxpayer bailout funds, have ramped-up their lobbying efforts to lobby Congress for regulatory policies that “disadvantage” consumers, and that fail to hold them accountable for bringing our economy to its knees. That’s right, they are using our money to benefit themselves, to our detriment!
Further, we learn now that the Financial industry executives — err, I mean the Oligarchs — want to maximize their profits on the backs of consumer credit cards by increasing their already exorbitant, I say extortionary, interest rates and inexplicable fees. In their efforts to further laden consumers with debt burdens they have increased their lobbying hoards to rally Congressional support even as they met the bulwark of President Obama’s, and his young Wall Street bred protege, Treasury Secretart Tim Geithener, stiff efforts to secure consumer protections from industry abuse.
To paraphrase Marcellus, ‘something is rotten in the state of [America]’ when outrages against the public interest by a few, wealthy, powerful corporate Titans while an increasing number of the rest of us struggle over stagnant earnings, or lost jobs, to meet our most basic daily needs. America is not a banana republic, but we’re beginning to look more like one. You may see why from the HuffPo article by Julie Satow below:
America may be more like an emerging market than we realize.
That is the analysis by an increasingly vocal and influential professor at MIT, Simon Johnson. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, just like the emerging markets he has spent his life studying, the U.S. has created a system whereby Wall Street “oligarchs” have monopolized and cannibalized the economy. At the same time, Washington regulators have been rendered ineffective, seduced by their aura of wealth and power.
Johnson’s solution is, in part, to use anti-trust laws to break up these too-big-to-fail institutions, and for regulators to intensify their oversight of the smaller banks that result. “In the last decade, the attitude took hold in the U.S. that what was good for
Wall St: Opiate of the masses
Big Finance on Wall Street was good for the United States,” Johnson testified before the Joint Economic Committee earlier this week. According to this “belief system,” Wall Street “benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were critical to America’s position in the world.” Demonizing Wall Street is the nation’s latest obsession, and Johnson’s stance seems to fit right in with the zeitgeist. But the idea of deconstructing the system that has created these Wall Street oligarchs, such as we haven’t seen since the days of J.P. Morgan (the man), is not a perspective from the far-left fringe. On the contrary, it is gaining support both among well-respected economists and Washington insiders.
Columbia professor and Nobel Laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, agrees with Johnson’s views: As the former chief economist of the World Bank, “if I had come and visited the United States, we would have cut off all aid to the United States. It wouldn’t have passed muster,” he testified at the Joint Economic Committee hearing. Read entire story here.
