SRF Heavy Industries

When you lead off with a link, and that link goes to a couple thousand words of financial system diatribe, you can pretty much guarantee either people aren’t going to click it or, if they do, they aren’t going to come back. I’m taking a gamble, but I believe there’s a good reason to do so:

Matt Taibbi explains via Rolling Stone the scams that will keep our economy — and the world’s — from recovering as long as these people are loose on Wall Street.

If you read that, you really can skip the rest of this post. If you didn’t, here’s the upshot:

Economic recovery has not arrived. At best we are reinflating the bubble despite the huge leak in the balloon. That huge leak is described in the number of scams Wall Street is using to siphon off TARP/bailout funds into individual tailored pockets in very expensive suits.

For instance, the Fed lowers interbank lending rates to 0% to reload banks with liquid money for the purposes of loaning it to small businesses and new mortgages. You’re a bank. You borrow $100 billion. You look around for a good investment worth loaning $100 billion to. You decide to buy Treasury bonds, which pay back at 3.75% interest. Hooray! You borrowed $100 billion from the US Government at 0% interest, loaned it back to them at 3.75% interest, and for a year of doing NOTHING USEFUL with $100 billion, you have earned $3.75 billion in PROFITS, which you may now split between shareholders and distributing as bonuses and blow on coke and whores.

It would have been better for the Fed to have just written a check for $3.75 billion, handed it to Goldman Sachs for coke and whores, and done ANYTHING ELSE with that $100 billion.

And this is the LEAST scammy trick described in the above article.

NOW please go click. Forward the link to your Senators and Representatives. Ask them whether they will be standing between you and Wall Street when things go down or beside you with a pitchfork in their own hands.

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