UBS

Monika Mitchell ~ The Federal Reserve – Helping the Rich get Richer

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Good Business International | November 29, 2011

BNP ParibasAs the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to throw light on the economic hardship of the 99%, the United States Federal Reserve continues to do its part to widen the economic gap between Wall Street and Main Street. The new plan is to purchase $545 billion worth (that’s a b) of mortgage-backed securities from the biggest banks in the universe – the ones who created the toxic debt in the first place. And that is on top of the $2.3 trillion (that’s a t) already vacuumed up by the Federal Reserve’s defaulting debt sucking machine.

So here we go again – one more time. The Federal Reserve is giving away taxpayer billions to those who deserve it least: the commercial and investment banking bond holders that crashed and burned the financial system and continue to be the biggest beneficiaries of government aid. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, otherwise known as Uncle Ben, has authorized another unstimulating stimulus on top of the other unstimulating stimulus programs since the fall of 2008.

Bloomberg reports that the Fed “will start another program next quarter, [serving] 16 of the 21 primary dealers of U.S. government securities that trade with the central bank.” So who are these primary dealers? Let’s see….Merrill Lynch (now part of BofA), Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Nomura, Jeffries (highly exposed to MF Global), HSBC, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, JPM, UBS (a mess), RBS (didn’t they go bankrupt?)! Yup – the Fed is absorbing another half trillion dollars worth of the fruits of the 99%’s labor to the same folks who did them in.

This means that on top of the $700bn TARP funds authorized by Congress in October 2008, the Federal Reserve has authorized WITHOUT Congressional approval the purchase of nearly three trillion of mortgage-backed securities that nobody else wants. These paper docs might even be worthless.

Well, it proves one thing – crime does pay if you don’t call it a crime. The real crime is the one-sided backdoor bailout that continues to flow from the autocratic playbook of the Federal Reserve. Where have our democratic principles gone? Where is government of the people and by the people? Who are these “officials” making unilateral decisions for the American public who have never been elected to any office?

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The Fed Bailouts: Money for Nothing

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Alan Grayson (Open Mike Blog) | RS_News
December 6 2011

FedOPINION | I think it’s fair to say that Congressman Ron Paul and I are the parents of the GAO’s audit of the Federal Reserve. And I say that knowing full well that Dr. Paul has somewhat complicated views regarding gay marriage.

Anyway, one of our love children is a massive 251-page GAO report technocratically entitled “Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance.” It is almost as weighty as that 13-lb. baby born in Germany last week, named Jihad. It also is the first independent audit of the Federal Reserve in the Fed’s 99-year history.

Feel free to take a look at it yourself, it’s right here. It documents Wall Street bailouts by the Fed that dwarf the $700 billion TARP, and everything else you’ve heard about.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I’m dramatizing or amplifying what this GAO report says, so I’m just going to list some of my favorite parts, by page number.

Page 131 – The total lending for the Fed’s “broad- based emergency programs” was $16,115,000,000,000. That’s right, more than $16 trillion. The four largest recipients, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, received more than a trillion dollars each. The 5th largest recipient was Barclays PLC. The 8th was the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, PLC. The 9th was Deutsche Bank AG. The 10th was UBS AG. These four institutions each got between a quarter of a trillion and a trillion dollars. None of them is an American bank.

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It’s True, Bankers Really Do Control the World

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by Catherine McLean | Common Dreams
October 25 2011

WINTERTHUR, Switzerland – Here’s a gift to Occupy Wall Street protesters around the world: you now have scholarly proof that banks control the world.

BarclaysThe study says the United States takes home first prize with 24 companies cracking the list of the top 50 most powerful global firms. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, also known as ETH, have published a paper that argues just 147 companies account for a large chunk of the total economic value of all the transnational companies around the world. No exact dollar figures, but it’s obviously a vast sum.

Among the top 50 corporations, 45 operate within the financial industry. Barclays PLC is the most powerful, according to the ETH study, followed by such well-known names as JPMorgan Chase & Co., UBS AG, and Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc.

The United States takes home first prize with 24 companies cracking the researchers’ top 50 list, followed by the U.K. with 8, France with 5, Japan with 4, and Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands tying with 2 companies each. Canada has one company in the researchers’ top 50: Sun Life Financial, Inc. secures the 35th spot.

The research shows “a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions,” authors Stefania Vitali, James Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston wrote in their study entitled: The network of global corporate control.

“This core can be seen as an economic ‘super-entity’ that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.”

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