Legacy Thread

[basserdan]

As Cable News Obsesses Over a Porn Star, Senate Prepares to Put the Next Wall Street Crash in Motion

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
March 8, 2018


Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Ohio

The U.S. Senate is about to set in motion the next financial crash on Wall Street but you would never know it from watching cable news channels CNN or MSNBC last evening. Both news channels obsessed for endless hours over the Trump-Russia scandal and a hush money payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels, neglecting one of the most critical topics of the day: what was happening on the Senate floor this week.

Some of the most informed Democratic voices in the U.S. Senate are making impassioned and heartbreaking appeals to their colleagues this week on the floor of the U.S. Senate to vote down Senate bill S.2155, which carries the Orwellian title: “The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act.” The bill is a Republican/Wall Street lobbyist masquerade to ostensibly help small community banks but will effectively gut enhanced oversight of banks with up to $250 billion in assets – mega banks by any measure – that want to dodge oversight of their derivative counterparty exposure to the largest Wall Street banks like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup.

On Monday, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released an analysis showing that the legislation “would increase federal deficits by $671 million over the 2018-2027 period” while increasing the probability of a big bank failure.

Some of the most gut-wrenching and poignant testimony came from Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. (Read his full prepared remarks below.) Brown emotionally went off script from his written remarks to explain how families in his zip code in Ohio, 44105, had to deliver the news to their children that they had to put the family dog in a shelter and that the kids would have to leave their school friends because their home was being foreclosed on. Brown added:

“City officials in Cleveland began to hear reports that predatory home refinances were being pushed on borrowers, regardless of whether they could afford to repay the loans.

“Foreclosures began to shoot up in Cuyahoga County – starting with 5,900 filings a year in 2000 and jumping to nearly 15,000 by 2007. My wife and I live in zip code 44105, near Slavic Village in Cleveland, and in the first half of 2007, that zip code – 44105 – had more foreclosures than any other zip code in the country.

“The City of Cleveland went to the Fed and asked it to use its authority to restrain subprime lending.

“The Fed did nothing.”

The Fed actually was doing something. Unknown to the public and Congress, the Federal Reserve was secretly using its so-called emergency lending authority from 2007 to at least the middle of 2010 to provide a cumulative $16 trillion in almost zero interest rate loans to some of the most corrupt banks in the United States and Europe to bail them out of a financial crisis of their own making. It did this while the Federal government provided crumbs to desperate families struggling to keep a roof over their children’s heads.

Continues at:
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2018/03/as-cable-news-obsesses-over-a-porn-star-senate-prepares-to-put-the-next-wall-street-crash-in-motion/