President Barack Obama has taken some very real steps to help ordinary people, but his administration's efforts to save Wall Street have far outstripped any support of workers.
Regulatory reforms are moving through Congress at a snail's pace and the wreckage from the mortgage bubble is increasing. Wage cuts are more widespread today than in any era since the Great Depression, even as bankers capitalize on taxpayer bailouts to score epic profits and outsized bonuses.
One economy is for the rich and the upper middle class, the other economy is for everybody else.
So how can a few big banks make so much money while the rest of the economy suffers? The kind of banking that helps the economy is a simple business of taking deposits and making loans. But a lot of what we now call "banking" really just consists of making bets on just about anything you can dream up.
"Banks aren't using all this cheap money to increase lending. They're using it to fund bigger and bigger bets in the fixed-income secto, like junk bonds, credit default swaps, subprime loan securitization, interest rate carries, collateralized debt obligations, and all the rest of Warren Buffett's financial weapons of mass destruction.'"
The banks continue to gamble,only noe its with OUR MONEY. A host of big finance companies have reported earnings in the past week, and the numbers are ugly: JPMorgan Chase reaped $3.59 billion in third-quarter profits and Goldman Sachs is planning to payout $23 billion in bonuses from speculative trading, while Bank of America and Citigroup are hemorraging money on mortgages and credit cards. The Wall Street casino is alive and well, but anything that is actually tied to the real economy is a disaster.
According to a new report from the U.S. Treasury, lending among the largest recipients of the Troubled Asset Relief Program fell by 17% from July to August. Small businesses can't cope with the cutoff in financing.
