Zerohedge has David Stockman's impressive speech at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, September 26, 2013:
The median U.S. household income in 2012 was $51,000, but that’s nothing to crow about. That same figure was first reached way back in 1989--- meaning that the living standard of Main Street America has gone nowhere for the last quarter century. Since there was no prior span in U.S. history when real household incomes remained dead-in-the-water for 25 years, it cannot be gainsaid that the great American prosperity machine has stalled out.
There's more :
The top six Wall Street banks in 1989 had combined balance sheet footings of $0.6 trillion, representing 30 percent of the industry total. Today their combined asset footings are 17 times larger, amounting to $10 trillion and account for 65 percent of the industry.
Much more:
Never mind that the first $2.5 trillion of QE has done virtually nothing for jobs and the Main Street economy or that we are now in month number 51 of the current economic recovery--- a milestone that approximates the average total duration of all ten business cycle expansions since 1950. So why does the Fed have the stimulus accelerator pressed to the floor board when the business cycle is already so long in the tooth----and when it is evident that the problem is structural, not cyclical?
The answer is capture by its clients, that is, it is doing the bidding of Wall Street and the vast machinery of hedge funds and speculation that have built-up during decades of cheap money and financial market coddling by the Greenspan and Bernanke regimes. The truth is that the monetary politburo of 12 men and women holed up in the Eccles Building is terrified that Wall Street will have a hissy fit if it tapers its daily injections of dope.
So we now have the spectacle of the state’s central banking branch blindly adhering to a policy that has but one principal effect: namely, the massive and continuous transfer of income and wealth from the middle and lower ranks of American society to the 1 percent.
The great hedge fund industry founder and legendary trader who broke the Bank of England in 1992, Stanley Druckenmiller, summed-up the case succinctly after Bernanke’s abject capitulation last week. “I love this stuff”, he said, “…. (Its) fantastic for every rich person. It’s the biggest redistribution of wealth from the poor and middles classes to the rich ever”.
Indeed, a zero Federal funds rate and a rigged market for short-term repo finance is the mother’s milk of the carry trade: speculators can buy anything with a yield----such as treasuries notes, Fannie Mae MBS, Turkish debt, junk bonds and even busted commercial real estate securities--- and fund them 90 cents or better on the dollar with overnight repo loans costing hardly ten basis points.
Not only do speculators laugh all the way to the bank collecting this huge spread, but they sleep like babies at night because the central banking branch of the state has incessantly promised that it will prop up bond prices and other assets values come hell or high water, while keeping the cost of repo funding at essentially zero for years to come.
If this sounds like the next best thing to legalized bank robbery, it is. And dubious economics is only the half of it.
Anyone who wants to know what's going on in America today should read this speech.
