“US Banks Report Record Profit in Third Quarter”
TRUMPERNOMICS: SERVE THE FAMILY AND THE SUPER
RICH.... work out no-string bailouts later!
"Yellen warned indirectly of a surge of
debt as a result of Trump’s plans to
slash corporate taxes, dramatically
increase military spending and provide
a financial windfall for corporations
awarded infrastructure contracts."
US stocks hit new highs following Senate testimony by Fed chief
US stocks hit new highs
following Senate testimony by Fed chief
By Barry Grey
15 February 2017
15 February 2017
Wall Street liked what it heard from Federal
Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, who testified Tuesday before the Senate
Banking Committee. All of the major US stock indexes, spearheaded by bank
shares, closed at new highs, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average gaining 92
points to end the day at 20,504, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index notching a
nine point increase to close at 2,337 and the Nasdaq picking up 18 points to
finish at 5,782.
The S&P 500 financial index rose 2.8
percent, with shares of Goldman Sachs gaining 1.29 percent and Bank of America
rising by 2.82 percent.
Yellen’s appearance, her first before Congress
since the inauguration of Donald Trump, was officially for the purpose of
introducing the Fed’s semi-annual Monetary Report to Congress, as mandated by
the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins law. The twice-yearly event, hailed when the law was
passed as a means of promoting full employment, was long ago reduced to a
hollow ritual. On Wednesday, Yellen will complete the process by testifying
before the House Financial Services Committee.
In her opening remarks and her responses to
questions from committee members, Yellen reaffirmed the US central bank’s
intention of gradually raising interest rates while keeping them at
historically low levels. In terms of monetary policy, this suits the major Wall
Street institutions, which stand to extend their record profits even further
under conditions where credit is still cheap but higher rates guarantee better
returns on loans.
The banks were also pleased by Yellen’s stated
support for Trump’s executive order mandating his treasury secretary, the
former Goldman trader Steven Mnuchin, and his top economic adviser, former
Goldman President Gary Cohn, to work with the Fed and other government bank
overseers to roll back bank regulations. Trump issued the order two weeks ago
as part of his stated policy of dismantling the 2010 Dodd-Frank bank act, which
imposed minor restraints on the banks following the Wall Street crash of 2008.
While Yellen, urged on by Democrats on the Senate
committee, defended Dodd-Frank, she repeatedly stated her support for
“mitigating” the regulatory “burden” on financial firms and declared her
support for the “core principles” laid down in Trump’s order.
There was considerable discussion during the hearing
on the impending resignation, announced last Friday, of Daniel Tarullo, the Fed
Board of Governors member who served during the Obama administration as the
central bank’s point man in enforcing the Dodd-Frank regulations. Tarullo’s
resignation brings to three the number of vacancies on the seven-person Board
of Governors, giving Trump an opportunity to significantly shift the balance at
the Fed even more strongly in favor of Wall Street.
In her opening remarks, Yellen painted a
generally rosy picture of the US economy while acknowledging that the gross
domestic product rose by only 1.9 percent in 2016, the same as 2015. This is by
far the slowest rate of economic growth for any period designated by the
government as an economic “recovery” since World War II. The main negative
feature to which she pointed was chronically low productivity growth.
What she did not explain is that low
productivity growth is linked to a low level of productive investment. This, in
turn, reflects the degree to which the so-called “recovery” from the Great
Recession is centered on the stock market and the speculative and parasitical
activities of banks and hedge funds, rather than the real economy.
Yellen also hinted at the potentially negative
impact on the economy of uncertainty over fiscal and “other” policies of the
Trump administration. She warned indirectly of a surge of debt as a result of
Trump’s plans to slash corporate taxes, dramatically increase military spending
and provide a financial windfall for corporations awarded infrastructure
contracts.
“I would also hope,” she said, “that fiscal
policy changes will be consistent with putting US fiscal accounts on a
sustainable trajectory.”
There was little discussion, either in Yellen’s
remarks or in the ensuing question-and-answer period, of the “America First”
protectionist trade and monetary policies of the new administration. This is
under conditions where attacks by Trump officials on Germany and the euro,
China and the renminbi, and multi-lateral trade agreements in general have
provoked sharp rejoinders from nominal US allies.
Last week, European
Central Bank Chief Mario Draghi denied Trump’s charges of a deliberately
undervalued euro, and the Financial Times editorialized: “If
it continues this course, the Trump administration is a clear and present
danger to the global trading and monetary system. Other countries must stand
ready to resist bullying, and not to let the US drive wedges between them.”
In the question period of Tuesday’s hearing,
Republican senators generally attacked Dodd-Frank as an intolerable burden on
the banks and impediment to economic growth. They echoed Trump, who has called
the law a “disaster,” and his advisor Gary Cohn, who claims the law “shackles”
the banks.
For their part, the Democrats
characterized the law as a major
reform of the banking system and
defended the regulatory status quo. In
reality, Dodd-Frank is a toothless
reform that was passed as part of the
series of measures by which the
Obama administration rescued the
banks and the financial aristocracy at a
cost of trillions of dollars.
characterized the law as a major
reform of the banking system and
defended the regulatory status quo. In
reality, Dodd-Frank is a toothless
reform that was passed as part of the
series of measures by which the
Obama administration rescued the
banks and the financial aristocracy at a
cost of trillions of dollars.
It was enacted in large measure to provide
political cover for the bank bailout and the “quantitative easing” monetary
policies that pumped trillions of dollars of virtually free money into the
financial markets, fueling a three-fold-plus rise in the Dow and a further
transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. It has done virtually nothing to
rein in the banks, which have recorded record profits even as the real economy
has stagnated and tens of millions of working people have grown poorer.
The most absurd and brazen defense of Dodd-Frank
was offered by the representative of the supposed left wing of the Democratic
Party and ostensible scourge of Wall Street, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth
Warren. In her round of questioning, she prompted Yellen to debunk Republican
claims that Dodd-Frank was hamstringing US banks, preventing them from lending,
and weakening them in relation to foreign banks.
She defended Dodd-Frank essentially on the
grounds that it was a boon to Wall Street, declaring that “our banks” are
making “record profits,” that “commercial and consumer lending is robust,” and
that “our banks are blowing away our competitors.”
She held up an issue of
the Wall Street Journal with the headline “US Banks Report
Record Profit in Third Quarter” and urged that it be entered into the record of
the hearing.
TRUMP SIGNALS OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS THAT BETTER LOOTING IS UP
AHEAD.
The chief motivating factor behind the rise on Wall Street is
the
understanding that the incoming Trump administration
will not only carry out
policies to benefit the financial elites,
but that responsibility for
implementing this agenda will be
in the hands of some its foremost
representatives.
“This nation no longer is a democratic republic...rather it has
become a tool of the super-rich members of the above mentioned
elite who pre-select our presidents based on their cooperation and
complicity with the elite’s ultimate goals. Obama has, in their
opinion done superbly carrying out the plans well laid out for him
by his backers.”
Wikileaks exposes Obama’s bankster-infested
administration!
BARACK OBAMA …… the banksters’ RENT BOY!
“Citigroup’s recommendations came just
three days after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the
Troubled Asset Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion
in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single
biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion
in cash in the form of a government stock purchase, plus a $306
billion government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-related
assets.”
MUCH MORE HERE:
“As president, Obama not
only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a
single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for the orgy of speculation and
swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and
he personally intervened to block legislation capping
executive pay at bailed-out
firms.”
“So
when Clinton was hobnobbing with Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013,
while investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman and the other
Wall Street banks were still ongoing, she was consorting with a man
who belonged in prison.”
CRONY
BANKSTER LOOTING OF AMERICA
THEIR GOLDEN AGE OF PLUNDER IS NOT OVER!
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS
NOR INFESTED HIS ADMIN WITH BANKSTER CRONIES MORE THAN OBAMA!
And
while the Obama administration worked systematically to bail out the banks and
make the financial oligarchy richer than ever, shielding the architects of the
Great Recession from criminal prosecution, it did impose fines for some of the
banks’ grossest swindles, including the sale of worthless subprime
mortgage-backed securities, the rigging of key global interest rates such as
the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), drug money laundering, illegal home
foreclosures and other illicit activities.
BARACK OBAMA , HIS CRIMINAL
BANKSTERS AND THE LA RAZA
MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS….
There’s more than one way to
destroy America’s white middle class!
HSBC laundered hundreds of
millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug cartels responsible
for the deaths of tens of thousands of people over the past
two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million of known drug
trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for
dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
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