Wall Street Is BIG Mad At Biden (And Why That's Good For America)
Today we're getting a little nerdy and, trust me, it's worth it.
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Wall Street is very upset with Joe Biden because he’s not letting them blow up the economy again. That’s not a front-page headline you’re going to see in the New York Times. Fortunately, you have your friendly neighborhood ogre for stuff like this.
There Deb and I were, watching “Die Hart” on the Roku Channel. Not “Die Hard.” “Die Hart” with Kevin Hart. Absolutely drop dead hilarious and worth your time. Anyway, Roku is “free” in that it has commercials and this pops up:
Debbie asks me, “What is that?” and my response is, “I don’t know but I’ll bet you money it’s bullshit.”
Everything about it screams “BULLSHIT!” Using a sad Vietnam veteran as the opener. Shifting to working Americans and moms. The dramatic music. The claims of how “Washington” is going to make life harder for average Americans and small business owners. A few buzzwords, “inflation” “an uncertain economy.” It’s all designed to manipulate emotions without actually explaining what the issue is.
It’s about a “capital regulation plan.” What’s that? They don’t say. And the ad is paid for by the “Financial Services Forum” which is…who?
If you’re a huge nerd like I am, those two pieces of information alone will tell you a whole lot about what this is and who is actually pissed off. It’s Wall St. and they’re BIG fucking MAD that Biden is telling them to stop fucking around.
Allow me to introduce you to the FSF:
These are the CEOs of the largest banks/financial institutions in the United States. These are people that I would not piss on if they were burning to death in front of me.
And why would I? That would ruin the flavor of the marshmallows I was roasting, wouldn’t it? Think, people! Think! Who wants pee-flavored s’mores?
So now we know that the people complaining are some of the greediest people on the face of the earth. They run the largest financial institutions in the country that have been directly responsible for destroying the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the world. I am, of course, referring to the 2008-2009 economic collapse caused explicitly by their corruption and recklessness that gave us the Great Recession.1
Are we to believe, for a microsecond, that these same people, who have never given a moment’s thought to the millions of lives they annihilated, are suddenly worried about the impact of fiscal policy on the average American?
Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining, assholes. Also, you’ll ruin my CEO-flavored s’mores.
So what, exactly, are these unfathomably rich and powerful people whining about?
This is where we get a little nerdy. But trust me, you’ll enjoy it because it keeps us safe and it really aggravates rich and powerful assholes. Ha. Ha. Ha.
Here’s a really really simplified version of the 2008-2009 collapse:
A bunch of banks and financial institutions took the money people gave them and invested it. That’s how they make money. They gamble. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. When banks lose too much, they fold. That happens all the time.
But when banks/financial institutions get really big, they start to create their own gravity and distort the market. They can also get greedy and start betting more than they have. This is called “overleveraged.”
Think of it this way, you bet $20,000 on a game but you only have $5,000 in your bank account. You lose and now your bookie wants his money but you can’t pay. Whoops.
That’s what happened to the banks. They made massive bets in the tens or hundreds of billions in the housing market. When those bets started to fail because the housing bubble popped, no one had the money to pay up and, boom, massive financial collapse. If only a bookie had been sent to break the legs of Jamie Dimon, that prick bastard.
If you want to get a better description of this nightmare, watch “The Big Short.” It’s funny, sad, and explains the whole thing so much better than I ever will.
Anyway! After the ratfucks on Wall Street screwed the world, the government did something it rarely does: It grabbed Wall Street by the balls and squeezed.
Now, Obama’s administration didn’t put people in jail like it should have. But it did do something most people didn’t pay attention to because they were too busy being distracted by the GOP’s scorched earth war against Obamacare.
The United States government designated a whole list of banks and financial institutions as either Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs) or Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs). You may know them by the catchier title: Too big to fail.
Ah, ringing a bell, is it? Yeah, that actually meant something for real. It meant the government stepped in and imposed rules and, holy shit, Wall Street was not happy about it. But fuck those assholes. We bailed them out to the tune of about $700 billion and no one went to prison for life. Cry me a river.
Among the other things the government did was tell these greedy pricks that, sure, you can keep gambling, but you have to keep enough money on hand to pay your debts if your bets go sour. Want to gamble $20 billion in the housing market again, go wild, buddy! Just make sure you have $20 billion in liquid assets ready to go at a moment’s notice.
As you can imagine, money sitting still is money Wall Street can’t gamble with and they fucking hate that. They’ve been trying to get out of it ever since but no one has been stupid enough to trust them, apparently not even Trump and his cronies.
That brings us to now. The specific thing Wall Street is crying hot tears of greedy rage over is a new set of guidelines coming down the pike that will increase the amount of money they have to keep on hand in case of a financial crisis. These rules are being updated to keep pace with the changing landscape of global markets. Blind faith that Wall Street would regulate itself is what led to the 2008-2009 collapse and they’ve done exactly nothing to prove they can be trusted even the tiniest bit.
These new rules will protect us and the banks/financial institutions from themselves. They will still make billions but not as many as they want because greedy fucking assholes can never have enough. Thus proving that they can never be trusted again.
That being said, Trump has already promised to undo all of Biden’s environmental regulations if the fossil fuel companies hand him one billion dollars. Do not think for one second he wouldn’t, or hasn’t already, made a similar promise to Wall Street. There’s nothing the CEOs would love more than to rake in billions on risky bets again and then demand another bailout when they nuke the world’s economy.
Want to keep the rabid dogs on their leash, keep Biden in office. Want another economic collapse? Let a rabid dog loose in the White House.
Doesn’t seem like that hard of a choice. Anyone that pisses off Wall Street this much has got to be worth keeping around.
There are 173 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life depends on it.
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This is aside from the constant, never-ending corruption and recklessness that destroys people’s lives every day but the 2008-2009 collapse is in a category all its own.
What a great explanation of a complex financial issue which most people have given up on trying to understand.
You knew this ad was bullshit. I know this ad is bullshit. However, so many people don’t know this and that’s the problem. I have found that most of the people I know that voted for Trump and will vote for him in the next election are some of the least informed people on this planet. It’s like RFK Jr’s brainworm ate their brains too, but I’m no conspiracy theorist.
The Super Tuesday political TV ads in Alabama told some of the most bold-faced lies I have ever heard, yet people here ate them up like ice cream and parroted them back to anyone that would listen from the doctor’s office waiting room to the gas station.
I am all for free speech, but Trump has made lying an art form. Politicians have always lied since the dawn of time, but the lies that are told now are so far beyond “a little white lie”. Trump and his MAGAs have built a campaign of lies that could potentially end our democracy. The media, instead of fact checking these lies, plays right into their hands by nationalizing their dangerous propaganda. I am now at the point where I question most of what I read and hear even when it’s something that I agree with.
Trumper’s failure to use their critical thinking skills when they hear/read something that supports their political/religious/social views willingly accept this data. If the info doesn’t support these views, then it must be all lies. That’s the extent of their thinking. In the internet age, this is inexcusable. Look it up and discern for yourself. Maybe it helps that I have a degree in pharmacy and had to learn how to critically interpret studies. First rule, never take anything at face value.