Monday, November 7, 2011

This is why there's an Occupy Wall Street movement

Because government helps banks, but it doesn't help you:
The largest banks are larger than they were when Obama took office and are nearing the level of profits they were making before the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, according to government data.

Stabilizing the financial system was considered necessary to prevent an even deeper economic recession. But some critics say the Bush administration, which first moved to bail out Wall Street, and the Obama administration, which ultimately stabilized it, took a far less aggressive approach to helping the American people. 
“There’s a very popular conception out there that the bailout was done with a tremendous amount of firepower and focus on saving the largest Wall Street institutions but with very little regard for Main Street,” said Neil Barofsky, the former federal watchdog for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, the $700 billion fund used to bail out banks. “That’s actually a very accurate description of what happened.”
A recent study by two professors at the University of Michigan found that banks did not significantly increase lending after being bailed out. Rather, they used taxpayer money, in part, to invest in risky securities that profited from short-term price movements. The study found that bailed-out banks increased their investment returns by nearly 10 percent as a result.

3 comments:

Notorious Ph.D. said...

And yet they can't lower my interest rate on my credit card.

namefromthepast said...

If only the occutards could understand government is not there to help them and that they are merely useful idiots.

Read today that during the GWB years banks made 79 billion over 8 yrs, in the 2.5 yrs with BHO 83.5 bil. That's takin' to the man!!

namefromthepast said...

If only the occutards could understand government is not there to help them and that they are merely useful idiots.

Read today that during the GWB years banks made 79 billion over 8 yrs, in the 2.5 yrs with BHO 83.5 bil. That's takin' to the man!!