Pam and Russ Martens — Federal Bank Regulator Drops a Bombshell as Corporate Media Snoozes

Last Monday, Thomas Hoenig, the Vice Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), sent a stunning letter to the Chair and Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. The letter contained information that should have become front page news at every business wire service and the leading business newspapers. But with the exception of Reuters, major corporate media like the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, the Business section of the New York Times and Washington Post ignored the bombshell story, according to our search at Google News.

What the fearless Hoenig told the Senate Banking Committee was effectively this: the biggest Wall Street banks have been lying to the American people that overly stringent capital rules by their regulators are constraining their ability to lend to consumers and businesses. What’s really behind their inability to make more loans is the documented fact that the 10 largest banks in the country “will distribute, in aggregate, 99 percent of their net income on an annualized basis,” by paying out dividends to shareholders and buying back excessive amounts of their own stock.

Hoenig writes that the banks are starving the U.S. economy through these practices and if “the 10 largest U.S. Bank Holding Companies were to retain a greater share of their earnings earmarked for dividends and share buybacks in 2017 they would be able to increase loans by more than $1 trillion, which is greater than 5 percent of annual U.S. GDP.”...

Hoenig also urged in his letter that there be a “substantive public debate” on what the biggest banks are doing with their capital rather than allowing this “critical” issue to be “discussed in sound bites.”

Much more in the post.

Wall Street On Parade
Federal Bank Regulator Drops a Bombshell as Corporate Media Snoozes
Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Even the "owners" are getting ripped off

The plunder of wealth by the oligarchs and elites has reached levels where even the "owners" of enterprises are being ripped off.

Remember George W. Bush and the "ownership" society? That was a euphemism for, "We're going to cut your wages and salaries, make jobs hard to get and fast-track the flow of wealth up to the top. So if you want a piece of the pie, you'd better become an owner, like, own stocks or assets or something. Own a business."

So that's what most people did because they had no choice. Jobs became scarce so they either had to take a risk and start a business (most fail) or, they were forced to scrimp and save and add, monthly, to their 401k's and other retirement vehicles that mostly invested in stocks. They became "owners."

This directive continues on today under Obama, so don't think that he is not part of this scheme. He is.

I'll leave aside for a moment that the banksters and other Wall Street "geniuses" nearly killed everybody's savings with their wild casino games (and many people still haven't recovered), which in the end we had to pay for with higher taxes and more cuts in spending (taxes), leaving us profoundly ripped off.

But some of us still had our stocks, either held directly or through those retirement plans and we were happy and placated, because stocks came back and dividends grew--not by much--but they grew and we felt as if that ownership society thing was finally paying off like they told us it would.

Oh really?

Well, take a look at these two graphs. One is corporate profits as a percentage of GDP and the other is dividends as a percent of personal income.

Corporate profits as a percent of GDP

 Dividends as a percent of Personal Income

As you can see, profits are at an all-time high as a percent of GDP, whereas dividends are not even though profits and stock prices are.

So what's happening here?

The only explanation is that the executives running these enterprises (who are, in 99% of the cases NOT the real owners) are taking more and more for themselves and giving us--the real owners--less. In fact, it almost looks like, if dividends rise too fast, as they did coming out of the Great Recession, they will deliberately slow the pace of  wealth sharing because they need to take even more for themselves.

And you wonder why stock analysts are now saying valuations are high? BECAUSE PROFITS ARE FLOWING INTO THESE MOTHERFUCKERS' POCKETS. THAT'S WHY!

This is once again a blatant screw job by elites and oligarchs who are really nothing more than a bunch of corrupt, scumbag mafia and they have taken control of our lawmakers our government and our lives. 

We really need to take back control of what is rightfully ours. This shit's gotta end.