This is me.

Darin...

Following

Search


radoration.

an adoration of all things rad

Sep 16th, 2012 @ 11:19 am

Fed Announces More Open Ended Quantitative Easing

This is a big deal: The Federal Reserve announced this afternoon that it would pursue a third round of quantitative easing, known as QE3. And unlike previous rounds, this one has no predetermined end date.

The central bank said that it will continue adding to its balance sheet by about $40 billion each month — essentially creating additional currency and adding it to the money supply — indefinitely. The Federal Reserve also made clear that it will extend its current “exceptionally low” interest rate on federal funds through at least the middle of 2015.

*How is this not the biggest news story?!? The Fed announces that it will just print $40 billion a month until the economy is fixed. How the fuck does that make any sense? The economy is shit, average people are broke, and the Dow is soaring. The whole financial system is corrupt. This isn’t just dumb, it is evil. 

Quantitative easing is frequently described as “unconventional monetary policy,” but the open-ended nature of this bond-buying commitment is unique even by the standards of previous actions. It brings the Federal Reserve closer to a policy idea that’s become known as NGDP (Nominal Growth Domestic Product) targeting, in which the Fed basically says it will continue buying bonds until the economy reaches a certain target level of inflation and growth. This new round of QE isn’t pegged to any sort of economic target, but it does commit the Fed to printing money until, well…whenever it feels like stopping. But taking this idea on its own terms, the Fed’s announcement might undermine the way NGDP targeting is supposed to work. The idea is that the Fed provides both confidence and clarity: It will print money until certain well-established targets are met, and boost demand and economic activity as a result. But without a defined target, the uncertainty still exists.

Comments (View)

Apr 18th, 2012 @ 10:49 pm

Federal Reserve Officials Leave For Wall Street With Privileged Info

One of the few things not redacted in the Fed’s FOIA response is the list of officials who attended each confidential meeting. Many of those people have since left the central bank and gone to work in the financial industry, taking with them privileged information about the Fed’s thinking that is still closed to the public.

Take Susan Bies. A onetime member of the Fed Board of Governors, she was involved with the Financial Stability Forum, an international group of central bankers, finance ministers and the like, and, according to Forbes, ”led the Fed’s efforts to modernize the Basel capital accord.” Bies now sits on Bank of America’s board.

Meredith Beechey is now at Sveriges Riksbank, Paul Connolly is at Eastern Bank/John Hancock Life Insurance Co., and Benson Durham is at the Capital Group Companies. Joseph Gagnon, Michael Gapen and Jon Greenlee have moved on to the Peterson Institute, Barclays Capital and KPMG, respectively. Brian Madigan also went to Barclays, and Nathan Sheets is now at Citigroup.

At least eight other meeting participants have moved on to private financial institutions.

Comments (View)

Mar 22nd, 2012 @ 9:46 am

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail

The bank has defrauded everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed. So why does the government keep bailing it out?

It’s been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. Since then, the Obama administration has looked the other way as the bank committed an astonishing variety of crimes – some elaborate and brilliant in their conception, some so crude that they’d be beneath your average street thug. Bank of America has systematically ripped off almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, depositors, homeowners, shareholders, pensioners and taxpayers. It brought tens of thousands of Americans to foreclosure court using bogus, “robo-signed” evidence – a type of mass perjury that it helped pioneer. It hawked worthless mortgages to dozens of unions and state pension funds, draining them of hundreds of millions in value. 

They’re in deep trouble, but they won’t die, because our current president, like the last one, apparently believes it’s better to project a false image of financial soundness than to allow one of our oligarchic banks to collapse under the weight of its own corruption. Last year, the Federal Reserve allowed Bank of America to move a huge portfolio of dangerous bets into a side of the company that happens to be FDIC-insured, putting all of us on the hook for as much as $55 trillion in irresponsible gambles. Then, in February, the Justice Department’s so-called foreclosure settlement, which will supposedly provide $26 billion in relief for ripped-off homeowners, actually rewarded the bank with a legal waiver that will allow it to escape untold billions in lawsuits.


Comments (View)

Dec 1st, 2011 @ 5:13 pm

A Revelation; The Fed Grants $7.77 Trillion in Secret Bank Loans – The Fed Works for Banks, Not The Rest of America

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a longtime advocate for reform of the Federal Reserve, is sharply criticizing the Federal Reserve today after Bloomberg news reported that the Federal Reserve secretly committed nearly $8 trillion in support to American and international financial institutions during the 2008 bailout. Kucinich recorded a video for his website before going to the floor of the House of Representatives to call upon Congress to reclaim its Constitution primacy over monetary policy.

Kucinich also called threats by ratings agency to downgrade U.S. debt a threat to our national sovereignty.

See Kucinich on the floor of the U.S. House HERE.

See Kucinich’s web address HERE.

“The Federal Reserve extended extraordinary support to financial institutions that crashed the economy with reckless speculation, and on that support many of the firms made billions in profit and paid obscene bonuses. The Fed asked for nothing from these firms in return and that is because the Federal Reserve works first and foremost for the welfare of private financial institutions, not the American economy.

“The message that emerges from these revelations for Americans who have lost their jobs, lost their homes, or watched their retirement nest eggs disappear is that we have unlimited resources available for the banks, but nothing for the American people,” Kucinich stated.

The Bloomberg report is the result of a court-ordered release of over 29,000 pages of Federal Reserve documents and records of more than 21,000 transactions. Through direct lending, loan guarantees and enhanced lending limits, the Federal Reserve supported national and international financial firms with as much as $7.77 trillion as of March 2009. The $7.77 trillion provided dwarfs the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) cap mandated by Congress.  

Congressman Kucinich introduced legislation that would impose transparency on the Federal Reserve. The National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act, HR 2990, would incorporate the Federal Reserve within the United States Treasury. The bill would establish fiscal integrity, reassert Congressional sovereignty and allow the federal government to correct crippling national deficiencies in infrastructure repairs and education nationwide by spending money into circulation without increasing the national debt or causing inflation. 

Learn more about the NEED Act here.

Reblogged from words of love and despair.

Comments (View)

Nov 29th, 2011 @ 3:36 pm

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B

*How can anyone justify this? The Fed is a horrible entity with the power to prop up failed businesses. This is not capitalism.

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

Comments (View)

Oct 19th, 2011 @ 4:53 pm

Federal Reserve Now Backstopping $75 Trillion Of Bank Of America's Derivatives Trades

This story from Bloomberg just hit the wires this morning.  Bank of America is shifting derivatives in its Merrill investment banking unit to its depository arm, which has access to the Fed discount window and is protected by the FDIC.

This means that the investment bank’s European derivatives exposure is now backstopped by U.S. taxpayers.

*One thing I think most people can get behind - END THE FED!

Comments (View)

Oct 4th, 2011 @ 8:12 pm

The American Dream By The Provocateur Network

*Wow. I watched this entire video. It is quite informative but it does take a very simplified look at the economic mess. And I am all for anything against the Federal Reserve. 

Comments (View)

Aug 26th, 2011 @ 5:29 am

How the Banks Received $1.2 Trillion in Secret Loans during Financial Crisis The Fed’s Secret Liquidity Lifelines [bloomberg.com] reveals when and which banks and other companies (e.g. GE, Ford, Toyota) received over $1.2 trillion in public money between August 2007 and April 2010. Bloomberg News had to aggregate and analyze over 29,000 documents to discover over 21,000 different loans, which can know be analyzed and contrasted with each other. In practice, the collection of line graphs show the exact dates the loans occurred and were closed for a specific company plus the historical market value of that company. Peak borrowing amounts, borrowing timelines and average balances can be easily compared. From HuffingtonPost: The scope of the Fed’s private lending had previously only been guessed at, but figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Bloomberg News show that the nation’s central banker issued loans to more than 300 institutions between August 2007 and April 2010, including over 100 loans of $1 billion or more. While the Fed’s loans likely helped to prevent a complete implosion of the global banking system, analysts say they fear the loans may have contributed to an atmosphere of complacency on Wall Street. Banks that received emergency cash infusions during the crisis may now believe the Fed will always be there to bail them out of trouble, the thinking goes. “It is a classic case of moral hazard,” Dimitri Papadimitriou, president of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, told The Huffington Post. The Federal Reserve itself had argued that the details of its emergency loans should be kept out of the public eye, claiming that the reputations of the firms involved could suffer if they were seen to be taking money from the government in order to stay afloat. Many of the banks that borrowed from the Fed had previously appealed to the Supreme Court to keep those records secret. However, an invocation of the Freedom of Information Act forced the Fed to release more than 29,000 pages of documents, revealing the extent to which the financial sector relied on Federal Reserve dollars during the worst days of the crisis.

How the Banks Received $1.2 Trillion in Secret Loans during Financial Crisis

The Fed’s Secret Liquidity Lifelines [bloomberg.com] reveals when and which banks and other companies (e.g. GE, Ford, Toyota) received over $1.2 trillion in public money between August 2007 and April 2010. Bloomberg News had to aggregate and analyze over 29,000 documents to discover over 21,000 different loans, which can know be analyzed and contrasted with each other.

In practice, the collection of line graphs show the exact dates the loans occurred and were closed for a specific company plus the historical market value of that company. Peak borrowing amounts, borrowing timelines and average balances can be easily compared.

From HuffingtonPost:

The scope of the Fed’s private lending had previously only been guessed at, but figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Bloomberg News show that the nation’s central banker issued loans to more than 300 institutions between August 2007 and April 2010, including over 100 loans of $1 billion or more.

While the Fed’s loans likely helped to prevent a complete implosion of the global banking system, analysts say they fear the loans may have contributed to an atmosphere of complacency on Wall Street. Banks that received emergency cash infusions during the crisis may now believe the Fed will always be there to bail them out of trouble, the thinking goes.

“It is a classic case of moral hazard,” Dimitri Papadimitriou, president of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, told The Huffington Post.

The Federal Reserve itself had argued that the details of its emergency loans should be kept out of the public eye, claiming that the reputations of the firms involved could suffer if they were seen to be taking money from the government in order to stay afloat. Many of the banks that borrowed from the Fed had previously appealed to the Supreme Court to keep those records secret.

However, an invocation of the Freedom of Information Act forced the Fed to release more than 29,000 pages of documents, revealing the extent to which the financial sector relied on Federal Reserve dollars during the worst days of the crisis.

(Source: infosthetics.com)

Comments (View)

Archive · RSS · Theme by Novembird