Tag: Financial Terrorism

The “too-big-to-fail” banks brought the world economy within hours of utter collapse in September 2008 through a chain reaction of insolvency and counter-party risk.  The fuse was lit, only to be serially and temporarily retarded by massive government infusions of taxpayer money approximating the size of our entire GDP.  A prudent response would have been to dismantle any risk-taking institution that might be considered to be “too big to fail” in any future scenario, to create a more distributed (not all eggs in one basket), and more robust system that could easily withstand isolated failures.  This was not done.  In fact, just the opposite occurred.  The banks took the massive infusions of cash and became even  fewer, bigger, and more prone to systemic failure.

Goldman Sachs:

“We consider our size an asset that we try hard to preserve.”

Or as Lloyd Blankfein might say: We embiggen ourselves!  

Simon Johnson explains the “logic” and purpose of becoming “even bigger and failer” after the first near total collapse of the global economy:

As John Cochrane, a University of Chicago professor and frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal puts it, “The incentive for the banks is to be as big, as systemically dangerous as possible.”

This is how big banks ensure they will be bailed out.

Financial terrorism using the threat of a “financial weapons of mass destruction” is a feature, not a bug.  Holding Americans (and the rest of the world) hostage to financial terrorism is a feature that the Obama administration clearly supports by inviting the perpetrators of financial terrorism into key posts in the White House.  Try crashing those gates, Kos!  You might need some help from non-Democrats.

The Federal Reserve is fully committed to Wall Street, as well.  Fueling asset speculation by giving cheap (to the banks) taxpayer-backed money to the rich, while not one of its two mandates (of full employment and price stability) is now the Fed’s primary goal.  The Fed has abandoned its mandates of full employment and price stability in favor of letting the rich get richer by gambling with our money.  

This comment (from the previous link) explains the Fed’s strategy:

The Fed agenda is quite simple: fuel asset speculation in the hope of provoking a price inflation that will validate outstanding debt. Why can’t this work? Because the debt is owed by wage earners whose incomes are undermined by globalization.

Of course, as the comment implies, a lot of the speculation is being done in emerging markets overseas (draining away productive capacity and jobs at home) and in commodities, such as food and fuel, making everyday living ever more painful for 90% of us, while the lugals save their own bacon and embiggen themselves.

Don’t expect home prices to rise or even stabilize, even after 50-some-odd straight months of housing price declines.  We’re still a long way from rock bottom.  Of course, it’s not just the wage earners whose assets are impaired.  The government and all of its government-sponsored entities, including the six largest banks and Fannie and Freddie, will simply be the last to fold.

The real economy, including the surplus eaters (you and I), can literally drop dead.  Now.

The hits just keep coming for the Empire of Avarice, the Great Satan that is Goldman Sachs. As Matt Taibbi’s brilliant expose The Great American Bubble Machine continues to spread across the internet there is chaotic shuffling around the feeding troughs by Wall Street’s big piggies. It is now conventional wisdom on both the street itself and the whorehouse in D.C. that there must be a savage campaign to use the pocket media to take down Taibbi with extreme prejudice. The good ole bread and butter “conspiracy theorist” tag is to be the weapon of choice. According to this story by the Independent’s Stephen Foley, the Great Satan’s oily mouthpiece chimes in with these old warhorses (Propaganda 101) –

In keeping with the hyperbole of the row, Goldman’s wonderfully arch spokesman Lucas van Praag described the piece as “an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories,” adding: “Notable ones missing are Goldman Sachs as the third shooter [in John F Kennedy’s assassination] and faking the first lunar landing.”

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing. ”

– Charles Bukowski



The dazzling propaganda onslaught conducted by the financial sector has been shock and fucking awe as the amazing resuscitation of the FIRE industry roars into the next quarter. A dirty as a pig in shit corporatist media waged total war against reason, morality, facts, history and the law itself in allowing the treasonous looters from Wall Street bounce back off of the ropes and reassert their control over the government and the country at large. Now under the cover of the saturation coverage of the Michael Jackson freak show (I doubt that I will see this shit end in my lifetime) the still annoying little trickles of doom, like the impending implosion of Arnoldland are stomped on by gatekeepers who just play another card from the Whacko Jacko deck of jokers. Face it people, we are fucked! With the celebrity infatuated lemmings in this rotting from the insides empire it is only a matter of time until they start seeing the great one’s ghoulish visage appearing on tortillas and grilled cheese sandwiches. If there were such a thing as a truly American Jesus it would be Michael Jackson. Neverland will become the bastardized equivalent of Lourdes, Jerusalem and Graceland uniquely spliced together to resemble our sick, twisted and mutated national DNA.