print$7.77 Trillion: That’s the amount of money the central bank, chaired by Ben S. Bernanke, “parceled out” during “the bailout to America’s “Big Six,” ostensibly, to rescue the financial system. This according to “Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act” by “Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News.”
Inflating America’s fascistic banking system has cost “more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.” It “lasted from August 2007 through April 2010.” Officially.
Starting in August 2007, when confidence in banks began to wane, [the Fed] created a variety of ways to bolster the financial system with cash or easily traded securities. By the end of 2008, the central bank had established or expanded 11 lending facilities catering to banks, securities firms and corporations that couldn’t get short-term loans from their usual sources.
America’s economy is floating on fiat. (Did I get the number of zeroes right?)
UPDATE I (Nov. 29): Myron, about those who confine their analysis to the Obama years: Some posters on this site, no less (who have yet to read, much less review, The Cannibal), have contributed to the smart alec Mark Steyn’s best-seller status, even trying to promote Steyn’s Obama-centric, limited analysis on BAB.
Unlike our Steyn-supporting readers, one of the man’s reviewers is on to him. Writes
Marsha Dahleeng:
“At first I appreciated Mr. Steyn’s humor. I enjoyed the clever jabs and the way he mocked the left/progressives. After awhile I grew weary of that – I began to skimread past the seemingly endless smart-alecky points and search for text where the author got down to the meat of the subject. Sadly, there was precious little meat, and what little there was, was disappointingly thin.”
“Disappointingly thin,” but predictably so.
UPDATE II: Exactly right, Robert Glisson: this state of affairs has a starting point: government.
UPDATE III: (Nov. 30): George, you credit Steyn with coming out of the Republican closet with some half-decent insights, after some of us libertarains have been doing this, to the detriment of our careers, for a decade at least before warmonger Steyn awoke. To compare a man who goes with the flow to the great Hebrew prophet Jeremiah does injustice to a truly great prophet. Jeremiah spoke truth to power and to the rabble at his own peril. Jeremiah was forced to sleep in the fields, away from home, for fear of the wrath of the people and the powers that be.
I’m no economist but it doesn’t take one nor a rocket scientist to realize that if one continues to over inflate the balloon the ballon will soon self destruct. Our leaders in Washington can’t be oblivious to this fact. With that thought in mind I have to believe that this course is being followed on purpose. That purpose can’t be good.
“http://rt.com/usa/news/fed-trillion-reserve-bailout-401/” Russian TV agrees with your statement and adds that Bernanke pushed Congress to reduce regulations on the large banks as well. This is a misnomer since the banks had their own self regulation before the government imposed its regulations. In the fifties a common joke was that you had to prove you didn’t need a loan to get one. Banks were careful with money. The banks were also careful to enact policies that were not only self protective but profitable. Then we lost the gold standard, government began a whole new method of banking; placing regulations of their own in place of the bank’s former surety. Bernanke didn’t really reduce regulations; he only modified the corrupt system to fit new corrupt government policy. This is why Ron Paul’s effort to audit the Fed has met so much opposition in Congress. Not only will the Fed be exposed but, Congress’s disastrous banking policy will also come to light. Ending the Federal Reserve and removing all banking regulations would probably be better in the end than what we’re going to see, more fouled regulations and policy.
[See post update.]
The Ayn Rand quotes below encapsulate what is occurring in all of Western Civilization and what is pushing the U.S. into the gorge of Socialism / Fascism.
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”
Ayn Rand
Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/ayn_rand_3.html#ixzz1f79SHVBT
“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.”
Ayn Rand
(Note the true intent of the OWS crowds re Money. / Dennis)
Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/ayn_rand_2.html#ixzz1f79ktVKg
The Government’s printing presses, urged on by the Fed, will drown us in a sunami of evil’s Fiat currency. Only Ron Paul states the truth of this matter. Plan ahead wisely.
Is this situation a SNOWBALL?!?!
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d29da7fc-19ee-11e1-b9d7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1f7HrXzi7
What number is greater than a TRILLION cuz here it comes.
At the risk of excommunication from libertarianism, I will float the idea that any bank that is “too big to fail” should be broken up just like the ATT and Standard Oil was. Now, if 5 years later, they wish to merge with ZERO federal guarantees to depositors, that’s their decision. But to have a situation where these institutions can gamble at the financial roulette wheel with bailout guarantees is fascistic obscenity. No one will care if Citigroup – Arkansas or JPMorgan-Montana goes under – so these banks will be forced to be more prudent. Also – any bank that has “guarantees” should be dealing with direct assets, not “derivatives” or “hedges” and should be required to keep the assets or they should lose any federal guarantees. Instead the Goldman-Sachs-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Bernanke gang have made just about the worst of all worlds: instability, corruption, taxpayer bailouts, bubbles, and malinvestment.
Right now, banks are offering fixed rate mortgages at 3.9% for 30 years. With $ 1,500,000,000,000 PER YEAR phony financial printing PER YEAR – are these banks crazy???!!! Bubbles: internet to housing to banking to the dollar itself! Even scarier is that it will all get blamed on the “free market” while we march into the gulag!
By the way, before your “conservative” readers blame all of this mess on Obama (not that he is without sin!) – remember that two of the biggest bankster WHORES are our two favorite adulterous Georgians: Federal Reserve Banker Herman “999” Cain and Fannie Mae “consultant” Newt Gingrich.
[See post update.]
The Fed loans to the “big six” amount to theft on massive scale. If a gangster comes into my home to steal a thousand dollars, I am permitted to defend myself. Bernanke steals many orders of magnitude more from millions of people including me, and the law renders me defenseless.
Those loans allowed the banks to remain solvent and pay bonuses to the undeserving employees who made the bad decisions that got them into that mess. The stockholders in those banks didn’t take the loss that their bad investment should have required. And, those loans added 13 billion to the “big six” bank’s capital through the extra margin they made as a consequence of the below market interest the Fed charged.
I’m outraged by this theft by the Fed on behalf of the “big six”. The Fed took billions from all of us fiat currency holders and gave it to the “big six” using the weapon of inflation of the fiat currency supply and eventual consequent devaluation of the dollar.
Adding up all the Fed transfers of fiat currency to the banks totaling 7.7 trillion as the referenced article did could be misleading. The “big six” never had anything close to 7.7 trillion of extra fiat currency at any one time. During the period of the short term loans the banks were repeatedly making payments back to the Fed. Comparing the 7.7 trillion to the country’s production, while adding dimension to the outrage, can also further support a false impression.
The real subsidies to the “big six” banks were the total additional line of credit of 480 billion (no more than that was loaned at any one time) and the 13 billion of extra retained earnings made possible by below market interest charged on that line of credit.
The fascist fraudulent Fed engaged in theft through inflation of the fiat currency supply and the crony socialist banksters were in receipt of stolen goods. All that was made possible by the criminal gang in Washington who rely on the ignorance of citizenry they claim to be protecting. The arguments against these alarming crimes are sound enough without using technically true and scary big but ultimately non-relevant numbers as the referenced article does.
AND another c. 13 trillion went to prop up the European banks at the same time. Fact is, tho, the Fed can “print” and get away with it so long as the dollar remains global reserve currency. Which won’t be much longer. The upcoming Isramerican assault on Iran will spike oil prices to >$300/barrel, kill the dollar, and bring down the entire debt Ponzi. Presumably the globalists expect to erect their neo-feudal World State upon the ruins. Maybe they’ll get away with it. Maybe they won’t.
[Compassionatefascist, aka Tribly, has been sneaking emails past me, when he can, given there is only one of me spread thin. …]
Off topic but expressing my disappointment with humanity I guess. Trilby or CF is only one of many that continues to say that the US is destroying governments in the Middle
East to help Israel in Israel’s desire to conquer the Middle East. (Yes satire) Recently a commenter on Yahoo made a better statement. The US wants to destroy Israel but can’t; because we would look worst than NAZI Germany, so they attack Middle Eastern countries in the hope that the Middle East will take their anger against the US out on Israel. Mission accomplished and our hands are clean. The Muslims only did what Muslims have been threatening to do for half a century. Since we have overturned every friend Israel has in the Middle East and instituted Islamists in their place, I would say that the latter theory has more possibilities than the former. Since Israel is just about the only economically stable country in the world, that makes sense.
Wow. Marsha Dahleeng really nails Steyn perfectly. I confess, I too once admired Steyn (very briefly.) I have many friends who absolutely worship him. They’re mainly female friends … I think it’s the accent they dig.
If fascist’s scenario above has a high probability of being is correct, would those who vote be logicly required to consider voting for Obama if they believe him less likely to start that potentially disasterous war? Thankfully, As a non-voter, I am saved the massive intellectual dissonance required for voting. The lesser of two evils is still evil and by extention unpredictable. Besides, as P. J. Orourk advised, “Don’t vote, it just encourages the bastards.”
In defense of Mark Steyn – as if he needed it.
He is entertaining. He can hardly be blamed for not being an everyman for everyman out there. He’s not an intellectual peddling theories, -isms, third, fourth, or fifth ways. He makes no claims to John the Baptist status, pointing to or anointing messiahs to lead us out of the wilderness.
It seems it has fallen upon him, or he has taken it upon himself, to be a secular Jeremiah of the secular times (lamentations) and the times to come (prophecies). Steyn, as did Jeremiah, laments on our manifold miseries, our national ‘sins’, our ruin and desolation, warns of our demise, and recalls us to our traditions. That his audience gets him and that he has made them aware is no small thing. [See comment in post.]
It’s not my intention to make too much of Steyn only to note that he is too belittled (a Thomas Jefferson coinage, by some accounts).
Marsha is right about Mark Steyn. His books are entertaining, but lacking in specifics. His first book “America Alone” was entertaining to read. But he played fast and loose with his numbers on Muslim immigration and birth rates in Europe. This makes it more a work of fiction rather than fact.
His latest book “After America” was quite a disappointment. Not only was it lacking in specifics. His smart-ass humor, so good in “America Alone”, seemed to have taken a holiday. I do not recommend this book at all.
Ms. Mercer:
In my defense…
I did say it was not my intention to make too much of Steyn. My use of Jeremiah was of a generic type not as a model. I would no more make of Steyn a Jeremiah than Obama a messiah. Whether Steyn goes with the flow I wouldn’t know, haven’t read him often or long enough to know. As for him coming late to what others have long seen and understood – it’s something I’m willing to overlook for this reason: Steyn’s audience is not those versed in Burke, Kirk, or Mercer. He speaks to a different audience in aphorisms and parables and he calls out the nonsense and insanity where it is otherwise unavailable – the MSM. I don’t know his effect for a fact but I suspect he has moved some to concern and some to action – and good for him if that should be the case.
Hey George…One must start learning to read with “Dick & Jane & Spot” before one is able to read and comprehend “THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE”. Therefore, I agree with you in that Steyn provides a starting point – a humorous one at that – for those who have omitted reading the more serious writings of others. Remember, all journeys start with the first step.
[Are we to take away from your letter—as someone who posts on BAB regularly—that you would recommend that the woefully misguided who begin with Steyn, be directed, by the likes of yourself (who patronize Steyn), to a site like this one and its companion ilanamercer.com? We hope so.]