Worried about whether you can afford a proper holiday this summer?
Or that your factory/office is about to close down due to the recession?
Well, there’s a group of people who are doing just fine.
Here’s an extract from Alex Brummer’s excellent article in today’s Daily Mail on how the taxpayer has helped pay for these lavish bonuses:
Surviving investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, the Barclays offshoot BarCap and Morgan Stanley have been able to become so profitable so quickly because many of their competitors (including Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns) have collapsed.
Others such as the Royal Bank of Scotland and Citigroup are incapacitated.
What is not being recognised, however, is that were it not for the enormous amounts of public money poured into the global monetary system by national governments, those surviving banks would also be in dire trouble.
The figures are mind-boggling. Estimates compiled by leading economists suggest that the aid provided so far by our government to the banking system is as much as £1,269billion.
In the U.S., the total has reached £6,415billion, while in Europe, where governments have still to fully confront the losses, the figure is £1,007 billion.
Without these enormous bailouts, which may not be recouped by the taxpayer for at least a decade, financial groups such as broker-dealer Goldman Sachs might never have been able to have stayed afloat.
In other words: Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the poor.
Nationalise the Losses, Privatise the Gains.
And there won't be any change in the situation until the vast majority start to show a little bit more anger at the way the 'Masters of the Universe' are continuing to enrich themselves at our expense.
3 comments:
Where did this ' recouped by the taxpayer' bit come from? This is the first I've heard about us getting any of it back; I'd understood that we were going to have to do with out schools, hospitals, civil liberties... you name it, to afford this kindness to the stinking rich - be reduced to peonage in effect. So we're going to recoup it in a decade? Pull the other one - I'm sure all the ways the banksters can avoid that one will spring to mind, without me speculating on them here.
The 'recouping' I might believe would involve nationalising the banks, closing all tax havens ( in UK territories anyway), and a requirement that all bankers (and offshoots) and any UK citizen with over £1M, be subjected to rigorous financial investigation by some 'untouchables' - Jehovah's Witness accountants maybe - and be found guilty of fraud, treason and you name it, and have their money and their persons seized.
The rich do not experience recessions. Nor will they pay the price to clean up the mess...
Charlie Marks
"The rich do not experience recessions."
Worse than that, Charlie, a lot of them benefit from recessions, picking up cheap stocks and shares in fire-sales which increase in value rapidly after the recession.
The whole financial 'industry' is a scam, it always has been from the birth of banking in early-modern Italy, Holland and England. It needs to be taken into public ownership along with the railways and energy industries.
- questionnaire
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