So JP Morgan Chase and other bailed-out Wall Street banks are reporting record profits in recessionary 2009. But those profits aren't from home loans, credit card lending, or business loans, which are all losing money. No, Wall Street's record-high profits are from securities trading. So what are they trading? Derivatives and bad securities, aka lottery tickets and crap.
The top 5 banks account for 97 percent of the $204 trillion derivatives market, which is mostly traders trading with other traders, not retail investors. There's nothing new about their legalized gambling, but never before has their gambling been funded by zero-interest loans from the Fed Reserve, and backed up by taxpayer guarantees.
What's also new is Wall Street's gaming of the Federal Reserve, which is paying huge spreads on Wall Street's re-selling of toxic bonds. Mind you, I'm not talking about banks selling toxic debt already on their balance sheets, which the Fed had already agreed to buy; I mean sleazy Wall St. traders going out and buying additional junk priced at 10 or 20 cents, and then selling it back to the Fed for 50 cents, for example. Thus the Fed is sucking all the crap out of the market and paying top dollar for it, at our expense, so that these Wall Street f*%!ers can pay each other multi-million-dollar bonuses, as if nothing happened, as if they didn't wreck the world economy and mortgage our grandchildren's future.
And sure, the big banks may have paid back most of their TARP loans, but given the above, and given that they have received favorable one-time tax breaks and suspension of debt-equity requirements, that should be no surprise to anyone.
It's torch and pitchfork time, folks. These soulless, amoral SOBs need to be taught a lesson the hard way.
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