Category: Profiteering of A Corporate Nature That REALLY Hurt Taxpayers and Society

Pardon Party – BONUS POST

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It’s not hard to see where the brain-dead president-elect is going.

Here’s a song on it.

PARDON PARTY

sung to the tune of “Garden Party” with apologies to the Estate of Ricky Nelson and whomever else the rights may concern.

Trump’s planning a pardon party, to RE-lease his old friends.
A chance to exchange political favors, and bury wrongs again.
After his inauguration, he’ll clear all their names.
They won’t have to face prison.
Things’ll stay the same.

And that’s THE Right now.
Trump learned his lesson well.
You KNOW he’ll pardon his current base.
And he’ll, try to pardon himself.

People’ll come from miles around.
All his cronies’ll be there.
Trump’ll bring more corruption.
There’s impunity in the air.

And over in the courts,
much to no one’s surprise,
the judges will hide their quid pro quos,
doubling down on lies.

And that’s THE Right now.
Trump learned his lesson well.
You KNOW he’ll pardon his current base.
And he’ll, try to pardon himself.

He’ll play them all the old songs,
access is why they’ll come.
Everyone knows he’s brain-dead.
On their plans, they’re staying mum.

Trump’s appointing his favorite sycophants.
They belong to him.
He knows the regulators won’t do their jobs,
but just be willfully dim.

And that’s THE Right now.
Trump learned his lesson well.
You KNOW he’ll pardon his current base.
And he’ll, try to pardon himself.

Trump will open a Pandora’s box,
at the border and on trade,
playing Fox viewers while his profiteers,
will have it made.

Taxpayers-lose at this pardon party.
The donors make the bucks.
If you don’t see this political fact,
we’ll never get out of Trump’s muck.

And that’s THE Right now.
Trump learned his lesson well.
You KNOW he’ll pardon his current base.
And he’ll, try to pardon himself.

And that’s THE Right now.
Trump learned his lesson well.
You KNOW he’ll pardon his current base.
And he’ll, try to pardon himself.

Confessions of A Wall Street Analyst


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The Book of the Week is “Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst, A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market” By Dan Reingold with Jennifer Reingold, published in 2006.

The author happened to become a telecommunications-industry stock analyst, hopping from one big-name investment bank to another. This, at the start of about two decades of an excessively deregulated, gravy train of greed on Wall Street: the early 1990’s. He described his job as requiring lots of reading and writing, and as having long, long hours. He got to travel around the world to meet his contacts, and gossip with industry competitors. The compensation he collected for doing so was obscene.

The U.S. government had just acted on a wave of anti-trust sentiment, so competitors were scrambling to game the situation. Telephones were going wireless, while their service providers were merging like crazy.

The author detailed the changes in the industry, including how it became corrupted by the usual suspects– greedy Wall Street workers. These included analysts and the departments that trade securities on behalf of their clients and their employers’ compliance departments who looked the other way on the LAWS against analysts’ getting inside information from the said departments.

For example, if the banking arm told an analyst that a certain company was a takeover target before information in connection therewith was publicly disclosed, the analyst could write a report recommending that his employer’s clients (which ranged from huge pension funds to little investors and everyone in between) buy its stock. That is one kind of insider trading.

In the mid to late 1990’s, the author witnessed various episodes in which one particular analyst at a competing big-name investment bank was manipulating the system. There was circumstantial evidence that he was receiving inside information on the stocks he was touting. Later on, one telecommunications company turned out to be not just “cooking the books” but scorching them. The resulting mess turned out to be the largest accounting-fraud scandal to that date.

These and other Wall Street shenanigans (that were bunched together in the course of a decade!) resulted in the usual harm to society and more excessive wealth for the wealthy; more specifically:

  • The perpetrators (the offending workers and their employers) got a “slap on the wrist” in the form of chump-change fines from regulators, while collecting excessively large fees for servicing the merger transactions and advising their clients on what to trade when– while admitting no wrongdoing;
  • The mergers resulted in massive layoffs of working-class people;
  • Taxpayers paid for the salaries of the regulators who bragged about how great they were in catching and punishing the few white-collar criminals they did nab; and
  • Unsurprisingly, the author retired before he got nabbed but he claimed his employment contract contained no pay-for-performance provision with regard to his employer’s investment-banking revenues.

Anyway, read the book to learn a boatload more about Wall Street’s goings-on in telecommunications from the 1990’s into the single-digit 2000’s, and the author’s career.

The Trading Game

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The Book of the Week is “The Trading Game, A Confession” by Gary Stevenson, published in 2024. This blogger highly encourages the reader to peruse the entire “Wall Street” and Economics categories of this blog in order to gain a better understanding of financial matters and economics.

In March 2007, the 1987-born author began working on the Fixed Income Trading Floor at the Short Term Interest Rates Trading Desk in the Foreign Exchange section of Citibank in its London branch. He had grown up in a tough, poor neighborhood in East London. He beat the odds for someone of his demographic group, considering the fierce competition in both getting accepted to a prestigious university and getting a job in currency trading.

Stevenson nurtured an aspiration to make lots of money. Fortunately, his talent and hard work in mathematics allowed him to score high on standardized exams. He attended the London School of Economics where he rubbed shoulders with mostly male, wealthy elitists whose fathers gave them a leg up in life, and whose futures were almost guaranteed to be bright. At school, when he won a game involving hypothetical securities trading, Stevenson’s life turned around. For, he won an internship which turned into a career.

After a few lucky breaks and bold moves on his part, the author was just hitting his stride in work-experience when he happened to be at the right place at the right time to earn extremely large financial gains from a triple-whammy disaster. In March of 2011, about twenty thousand people died in Japan due to an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown of three power plants. Amidst the resulting financial turmoil and previous turmoil of the 2008 worldwide financial crises, Stevenson made a percentage of the millions upon millions of dollars he earned in currency trading for Citibank.

Stevenson alone in his department had been correct in gaming the situation. Everyone else had been wrong and they lost money. Nevertheless, he was still emotionally troubled. He bore two major similarities with Alan Turing– another genius: social dysfunctionality, and indifference to how he looked and what he wore.

Stevenson was one of the proverbial three kinds of people (geniuses in the minority)– the kind who knew what was happening and made things happen. The vast majority account for the other two kinds of people– brainwashed, unwashed masses who watched what was happening, and then still wondered what happened.

In the early 2010’s, the author came to the realization that there would NEVER be economic recovery of any financially-struggling countries in the European Union while the Swiss National Bank kept interest rates at or below zero. The other traders in his department optimistically kept repeating that interest rates HAD to rise sooner or later, because they had bet wrong.

But, the tiny percentage of the super-wealthy, super-powerful people of the world sought to maintain the then-status quo, because it made THEM even richer, and the poor, poorer, as the cliche goes. The income inequality of the world would eventually result in a slave-based economy (as existed in ancient times) all over again.

Read the book to learn much more of Stevenson’s personal and professional life, and his times. As is well known, the United States is one of the major economic superpowers of the world, and its politics are part and parcel of that. Here’s a little ditty on its momentary political situation.

LET THE BEST TEAM WIN

sung to the tune of “Let the River Run” with apologies to Carly Simon, BMG Gold Songs C’est Music and Tcf Music Pub Inc.

[Spoken: We’re all on edge,
waiting for the savior,
gaping with alarm
at the immature behavior.]

Let the best team win.
Let’s all peaceFULly watch the changes.
Come the new, new Washington.

Brilliant ideas rise.
The media lies, about, and smears them.
And celebs get themselves in your face.

It’s asking for the taking,
blaming, deep-faking.
Oh, Americans are aching.
We’re all on edge,
waiting for the savior,
gaping with alarm
at the immature behavior.

Through the hate and all.
It’s who we are:
Place a trail of desire
on the White House lawn.

It’s asking for the taking.
Just hold on now.
Democratic convention will be a show
you’ve never even seen in political history.

Oh, Americans are aching.
We’re all on edge,
waiting for the savior,
gaping with alarm
at the immature behavior.

It’s asking for the taking,
blaming, deep-faking.
Oh, Americans are aching.
We’re all on edge,
waiting for the savior,
gaping with alarm
at the immature behavior.

Let the best team win.
Let’s all peaceFULly watch the changes [watch the changes]
Come the new, new Washington.

Pity the Billionaire

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“It is as though the frightening news of recent years has driven them into a defensiveness so extreme that they feel they must either deify the system that failed or lose it altogether.”

No, not the Republican Party in connection with Donald Trump.

The Republican Party in connection with Republican voters’ gullibility in believing the Right’s propaganda machine that rationalized away Wall Street’s unmitigated hubris and unconscionable greed amid the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008-2009. As is well known, the rich were made richer and poor, poorer in the second half of the single-digit 2000’s. The GOP’s clever aftermath-messaging led to big wins for them in the 2010 midterm elections.

The Book of the Week is “Pity the Billionaire, The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right” by Thomas Frank, published in 2012. This short volume described how the political group called the Tea Party (“TP”), a subset of the GOP, whipped an alarmingly high number of Republican voters into a hysterical rage against the Obama administration’s handling of bailouts of financial institutions and foreclosed-upon ex-homeowners.

It appeared to be counterintuitive, that the TP raged against bailouts for bankers, brokers and lenders. After all, taxpayers were forced to reward these greedy perpetrators of the economic disaster. Through flawed reasoning, though, the TP propagandized that capitalism should be free of any and all economic intervention from the government, whether in the form of regulation or assistance. They pretended to be an enemy of big business, screaming “Socialism!!!” at the government’s every move. They did this because the resulting continued excessive deregulation would make Republicans wealthier and more powerful, and each trait would feed on the other ad infinitum. As ought to be well known– politics cannot be divorced from economics.

The TP was really pushing for 100% pure, capitalistic Libertarianism. Under the “you have two cows” scenario (look this up on the Web): you can do with the cows whatever you wish, whenever, wherever. Also, remove: ALL regulation from all aspects of American life, taxation and social safety nets. And to make the situation truly American, throw firearms into the mix and see what happens. Absent rule-of-law, sanity and civility, the resulting ruthlessness would evolve into (judging from the federal-level administrations’ gyrations of the most recent thirty years) a dictatorial kleptocracy (sort of like Zaire (aka Congo) in the 1980’s), and then anarchy, not unlike… Somalia (?)

Fortunately, a sufficient number of Americans– despite most politicians’ cronyism with big-money donors– clung to the country’s democratic underpinnings (reasonable regulation, taxation with representation, and social safety nets) to weather the storm. The author harshly criticized Obama and his Democratic party for not punishing the morally bankrupt financiers and enforcing the law in helping the bankrupted borrowers. It is possible the president felt it was worth selling his soul to those big-money donors; he wouldn’t have been reelected otherwise and wouldn’t have been able to accomplish more of his agenda. His Democratic party, too, was too nice to get down in the gutter and use the GOP’s sleazy propaganda techniques.

Anyway, read the book to learn of how the pronouncements of the TP and Glen Beck and the contents of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged influenced numerous voters in 2010, and other reasons the nation’s political history unfolded the way it did in the early 2000’s.

Exorbitant Privilege

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The Book of the Week is “Exorbitant Privilege, The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System” by Barry Eichengreen, published in 2011.

“Often these individuals had little professional training, there being no meaningful federal or in some cases, even state licensing requirements.”

No, the above refers to neither tax preparers nor life coaches.

The author was referring to the bandwagon-jumpers who worked for lenders taking advantage of the excessive deregulation that resulted in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis in America.

The author listed some factors favoring, and some disfavoring the American dollar’s ability to maintain its global power as a currency and store of value. However, one major factor the author completely neglected to mention (a glaring omission) was that of cryptocurrencies.

Anyway, Brooksley Born, head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, raised the alarm in the late 1990’s on the excessive deregulation that was to lead to the subprime crisis. She deserves more of a historical footnote than she has since received, because sadly, greedy alpha males are better propagandists than prescient, conscientious public-officials such as she.

The author contended that one major reason the American dollar will continue to maintain its dominance in the world, is that other industrialized nations can’t agree on what financial instrument should replace the American dollar as a stabilizer of the world’s other currencies. The greenback has compiled a longer history of trustworthiness, value-consistency, related liquidity-maintenance, and other benefits, in connection with transactions and international trade balances, more than any other instrument. China’s policy of keeping its central banks’ foreign-reserves balance a secret, reduces China’s currency’s trustworthiness.

The powerful U.S. government backs up its currency through treasury bonds and bills, while a (sometimes contentious) collective of European countries (not one government) must agree on how to act when a monetary crisis rears its ugly head. It stands to reason that disagreement or indecision leads to uncertainty, which leads to instability, and a possible worsening or hastening of, the collapse of modern civilization.

The aforementioned are just a few reasons why 54 countries pegged their currency’s values to the American dollar, while 27 pegged theirs to the euro, as of 2009. As is well known, the George W. Bush administration did a number on the U.S. economy, as “… tax cuts and unfunded spending increases [on two extremely expensive wars and a Medicare drug benefit] pushed the budget from surplus in 2000 to a structural deficit of 4 percent of GDP in 2007-2008.” The next two years saw the American government’s debt explosion at its worst.

The author outlined several possible (yet raucously controversial) ways to keep the American dollar globally powerful, through cost-cutting:

  • In a period of non-war– less defense-spending;
  • Reforming healthcare;
  • Raising the retirement age– less pension spending;
  • Liberalizing immigration policy — helps fund Social Security going forward; and
  • Increasing taxes of all kinds.

Read the book to learn a lot more about how the American dollar has fallen in stature in recent decades, and about other geopolitical international: monetary, financial and economic issues; explained for laypeople.

Boomerang

The Book of the Week is “Boomerang, Travels in the New Third World” by Michael Lewis, published in 2011. As the effects of the early 2000’s financial shenanigans began to be felt around the world, the author traveled to newly impoverished countries (Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and the United States) to try to understand their situations, economically, politically and culturally. Human nature is such that very few people see the big picture before it’s too late. Besides that, it takes a long time for the victims to learn who really instigated and funded insidious propaganda campaigns or nefarious activities, if they ever do learn.

Kyle Bass, investment banker from Dallas, raised the alarm prior to the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, but was shouted down by greedy alpha males with hubris syndrome. So he bet against the sheep and made a killing. But he believed the lowest-risk alternative to the securities market was physical gold, and nickels.

Iceland saw the U.S. in the 1980’s enjoying its material wealth, and wanted a piece of that. Iceland’s prime minister David Oddsson ushered in tax cuts and privatization, and greased the wheels of trade. In this way, the government was enticed into the vortex of excessive-deregulation-induced capitalistic greed. Around 2000, fishing industry regulations produced a maximally efficient, maximally profitable oligopoly that prompted Icelanders who weren’t in the fishing industry, to engage in aluminum smelting, and other economically rewarding careers.

The internet has facilitated the forming of relationships between hegemonic financial entities and overseas suckers. Beginning in 2003, young adults in Iceland found that speculative trading in stocks and currency was much more lucrative than fishing.

Ironically, Iceland– whose economy was based on fishing– was ready to take the bait, and become the fish. The former fishermen thought they’d succeed in the financial-services industry because fishing and money-management both involve risk-taking. However, the former requires specific physical and survival skills; the latter, knowledge and experience in the securities markets, business, economics and politics. Icelanders had none of the latter.

Unsurprisingly, when the money started rolling in, the newly rich started to buy houses and cars they couldn’t afford. Human nature is also such that, when people move numbers around on a screen, they don’t feel like they’re moving real money. The bankers and traders in Iceland were borrowing tens of billions from foreigners in the short term, “…then re-lending the money to themselves and their friends to…” overpay for a large financial stake in other banks, sports teams, and other assets. Astute sellers saw the writing on the wall, and left Iceland holding the bag.

European regulators were asleep at the switch. If U.S. financial institutions had been the targets, or had been engaging in such activity, there would have been more early awareness and safeguards in place, in fending off hostile takeovers.

The Americans have their lawyers, directors and officers, and consultants as the first line of defense. Their financial institutions didn’t play the fool the same way major banks in Iceland did. They were largely the lenders and sellers, not the borrowers. But they still got in trouble (!), and also needed adult supervision going forward to bail themselves out.

Incidentally, the SPAC affiliated with former U.S. president Donald Trump needs to continue to find foreign entities (like those that Iceland’s became) with whom he shares the same ethics (or lack thereof), to establish his new media empire. Here’s a little ditty about the situation thus far:

FUN, FUN, FUN

sung to the tune of “Fun, Fun, Fun” with apologies to the Beach Boys.

Well, he’s got his base’s-money
and he’s cruising to his next train WRECK now.

Seems like he forgot all-about
the REAsons he was banned from Big TECH now.

And with the hate-speech blasting
with over-whelming noise full of DRECK now.

And he’ll have fun, fun, fun
till the hackers take his network away.

(Fun, fun, fun till the hackers take his network away.)

Well, the Dems can’t stand him
’cause he’s STILL hogging media space now.

(He’s still hogging space now, he’s still hogging space.)

He gives American politics
a persistent Nix-onian face now.

(He’s still hogging space now, he’s still hogging space.)

A lotta critics try to nail him
but he spins a propaganda chase now.

(He’s still hogging space now, he’s still hogging space.)

And he’ll have fun, fun, fun
till the hackers take his network away.

(Fun, fun, fun till the hackers take his network away.)

Well, he knew all along
that his foes were getting wise to HIM now.

(He needs a new crew now, he needs a new crew.)

And since his stunts are getting old,
they’ve been wishing that his fun is all through now.

(He needs a new crew now, he needs a new crew.)

And things are coming to a head
and his lawyers got a lot to do now.

(He needs a new crew now, he needs a new crew.)

And he’ll have fun, fun, fun
till the hackers take his network away.

(Fun, fun, fun till the hackers take his network away.)

And he’ll have fun, fun, fun
till the hackers take his network away.

(Fun, fun, fun till the hackers take his network away.)

wo wo wo wo woo woo

(Fun, fun, fun till the hackers take his network away.)
(Fun, fun, fun till the hackers take his network away.)
(Fun, fun, fun till the hackers take his network away.)
(Fun, fun, fun till the hackers take his network away.)
(Fun, fun, fun till the hackers take his network away.)
(Fun, fun, fun till the hackers take his network away.)

Anyway, in October 2008, the party was over for Iceland. Lots of fire insurance was bought, and lots of Range Rovers were set on fire. Finally, in February 2009, the aforementioned Oddsson was ousted as head of the central bank.

The story in Greece was that the government was corrupt, overpaid and overstaffed. No tax collection took place because 2009 was an election year. Corporate employees only (not the self-employed) were the only workers who paid income taxes. All three hundred Parliament members evaded real-property taxes through dishonesty. Cash transactions with no paper trail facilitated the evasion of sales taxes throughout the country. There was wilful ignorance (unbelievably sloppy accounting) that masked just how serious the financial crisis was.

Read the book to learn much more about other aspects of the crisis– the alarm-raisers in Iceland, Ireland and the United States, the one protestor in Ireland, the German mentality, and the responses of a few local American politicians.