As time passes, I am becoming increasingly convinced that Wall St. is not located in the bustling lower Manhattan financial district. I now believe that Wall St. is located in an exotic and happy place where candy cane light posts lead the way to the fantastic chocolate and marshmallow palace, a mere 2 miles walk from the realm of reality. What’s worse, ladies and gentleman, is that Wall St. appears to not represent the interests of the American People as well.
Today Ben “Edward II†Bernanke, our all knowing and all seeing Federal Reserve Chairman, announced a plan to inject liquidity into financial markets through a complex and intricate loaning plan, which will give capital to ailing financial markets. In addition they are playing with temporary reciprocal currency arrangements, which is an overly intelligent way of saying their playing around with loan agreements to other countries to make investment more enticing. You know, it’s about time they made temporary reciprocal currency arrangements more accessible to foreign nations, I sure know it will make my life better.
Forbes magazine is calling the Fed Chair “Super Ben†and Wall St., much to no one’s surprise, got excited, taking the Dow up 400 points.
So, let me get this straight, the Federal Reserve opens up the treasury, loaning out $200 billion in U.S. treasury notes and now life is candy and sunshine? That’s great! I guess things are better again. Inflation isn’t increasing at an alarming rate while wages remain stagnant. Oh and the cost of oil isn’t the highest IN HISTORY. I’ll bet that whole mortgage crisis thing has blown over too.
Oh wait, I’m being told that ALL of the above mentioned problems are still getting worse. To be fair, there isn’t much that Bernanke can do. We are in a crisis known as “STAGFLATION†where inflation rises and the economy sputters. Those who remember the 70s will remember that word well. Just don’t tell Wall St., they’re likely to take it the wrong way.
Every day I see bad financial news and the stock market goes wild the other way! They get all excited about declines in consumer electronic sales, automobiles and high oil prices because it means that “Super Ben†will bring them another interest rate cut.
I’m starting to think that Wall St. doesn’t care about us poor lowly middle and lower class citizens. We are just the lower 90% after all. They seem to have focused their attention to the “Great Decoupling†which will allow multi-national corporations to profit off foreign markets even if the U.S. fails. Gee, how nice of them. Wall St. doesn’t matter to US, it matters to THEM, they’ve just got us all hoodwinked.
Well maybe they’re not as smart as they think they are. Let’s break it down:
Wages remain the same, however inflation is on the rise. Food, gas, gadgets, goodies, vacations and entertainment all cost more than they used to. People, in turn, stop buying gadgets, goodies and vacations while reducing consumption of food, gas and entertainment. Orders for cheap Chinese labor decline, vacations and European imports hurt Europe & the world. The world reduces consumption. Now what? Are multinational corporations going to move to Vietnam to sell crap to China? Oh wait, that’s already starting. Hmmm, now what? I see no answers to this question in Super Ben’s fantastic plastic credit machine. I see only questions.
Inflation is a much harder genie to get back in the bottle than an economic downturn, however Bernanke seems to be more concerned with the later. Otherwise he would be using the fed’s other tool, regulation & enforcement.
We’re in serious trouble folks! In fact, the whole world is. We have a President that is utterly incompetent on the economy, an increasingly expensive war and now we have a Fed Chair that is more concerned with perpetuating the status quo, utterly obsessed with keeping markets free and self-destructive. I’ve heard Republicans, like Tony Blankley, former staffer to Newt Gingrich, call Bernanke out of step with reality and now he is the golden knight on a mythical and ailing horse called the free market. Even Greenspan has broken with Bernanke on key issues, like when he recently said that the chance of recession is 50% or greater, a clear break from Bernanke’s claim that was even spun by one media outlet as a “head to head” showdown.
What they don’t get that as long as we here at the bottom suffer, we spend less, so they make less. It seems to me that we have put too much stock in this failing system called free-market capitalism. The free-market doesn’t exist, only Oligarchy & Oligopoly.
The cause of the decline in our society is not in partisan politics, it’s in ideology and aristocracy. Democrats today are farther to the Right of Richard Nixon when he was President which means Republicans are hovering near fascism. Too much you think? Look again. Fascism aligns government with corporations, starts preemptive wars of conquest and uses scapegoats to maintain power. All the while they pay us as little as they can get away with, claiming it’s bad for business and keep what they have with an iron fist. Liquidity in the economy is silenced as the rich get even richer. Greenspan claims we would already be in a recession had the corporations and ultra wealthy not had so much capital on hand. Sounds to me that the corporations and ultra-wealthy elite have more money than they need, had they not been so greedy, we the consumers would have the money and there would be no damn recession in the first place. Conservative ideology has failed. In the end it’s just about greed.
Look around you my fellow Americans. What do you see? Do you see the promise of Reagan’s America? That’s exactly what you got. Less spending on you, more on the things they love, like war, and a hefty bill for your children and grandchildren to boot. Greed is supposed to regulate the society? What it really does is make a world driven by money to the point where everyone is just a jerk who steps on each other to get ahead, like that Twilight Zone episode. Meanwhile THEY get rich, THEY take what’s yours, THEY blame it on minorities, claiming the powerless somehow have this magical power to take power from the hands of the few.
Look out for number one? More like divide and conquer.
