Filed under: 2-party system, Bear Stearns, bernanke, Big Banks, Congress, Federal Reserve, foreclosure, George Bush, Goldman Sachs, henry paulson, housing market, JPMorgan, left right paradigm, liquidation, middle class, nationalization, neocons, Neolibs, Paulson, real estate, Senate, Taxpayers, US Treasury, virginia, Wall Street | Tags: Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
U.S. Taxpayers to pay for Wall Street Banking Collapse
WSWS
July 10, 2008
In speeches delivered Tuesday, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson outlined the ruthless class policy being carried out to place the burden for the financial and housing crisis on the backs of working people.
Bernanke indicated that the Fed would extend its policy of offering unlimited loans to major Wall Street investment banks. The provision of Fed funds to non-commercial banks and brokerage firms, a departure from the Fed’s legal mandate without precedent since the Great Depression, is part of a policy of bailing out the banking system to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The Fed announced its loan program for investment banks last March when it dispensed $29 billion to JPMorgan Chase as part of a rescue operation to prevent the collapse of Bear Stearns.
In his speech, Treasury Secretary Paulson acknowledged that home foreclosures in 2007 reached 1.5 million and predicted another 2.5 million homes would be foreclosed in 2008. But he made clear that nothing would be done to save the vast majority of distressed homeowners from being thrown onto the street.
Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, said that “many of today’s unusually high number of foreclosures are not preventable.” With a callous indifference reminiscent of Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake,” he went on to say that “some people took out mortgages they can’t possibly afford and they will lose their homes. There is little public policymakers can, or should, do to compensate for untenable financial decisions.”
In other words, low-income home owners who were lured into high-interest mortgages by predatory mortgage companies and banks are getting their just deserts! Of course, the Wall Street CEOs and big investors who made billions of dollars by speculating on these loans, creating a vast edifice of fictitious capital that was bound to collapse, are not to be held accountable for any “untenable financial decisions.” On the contrary, they are to be subsidized with hundreds of billions of dollars of credit, ultimately to be paid for by public funds.
The two speeches, presented at a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation forum on the housing crisis held in Virginia, underscore the real social interests—those of the financial aristocracy—that are being protected by the policies of the Fed, the Bush administration, and the Democratic Congress.
Bernanke made clear that his call for an extension of loans to big investment banks is part of a more comprehensive proposal to systemize and regularize federal subsidies and bailouts for troubled banking giants. Particularly significant was the following remark: “Because the resolution of a failing securities firm might have fiscal implications, it would be appropriate for the Treasury to take a leading role in any such process, in consultation with the firm’s regulator and other authorities.” The implication is that the US Treasury should be ready to fund bank bail-outs with whatever taxpayer funds are necessary.
In neither speech was there even a hint that the government has any responsibility to protect home owners, or that the people responsible for the “lax credit and underwriting standards” that led to the current crisis might be called to account by regulators, Congress, or the courts.
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