I need some questions/talking points from those of you who understand the economic stuff....
🧐 Research Wanted 🤔
We have a Senate candidate who is a filthy rich investment banker. We need to be feeding him questions about the role of the Fed and other pertinent things but I don't understand it well enough to phrase the questions. We've got to sink this empty suit and quickly. Any help appreciated...
What we find is that while median wages and salaries have increased by a paltry 9% over the past 35 years, corporate income is up 250% and Wall Street income is up almost 800%. And so over the decades this story line about policies targeting the middle class is absolutely, in every way, a total and complete fabrication. This chart doesn’t happen by accident nor could it be the result of honest mistakes. The above results expose the hidden agenda perpetrated by Congress and the Fed. The middle class is a patsy in a system designed to do exactly what it has done. International trade agreements and excessive money printing do help Wall Street and Corporate America but do not help the middle class. This is made absolutely clear in the above chart. And if you are one of those typically shallow regurgitators of the theories you’ve been told, well tell it to the facts above. It’s been said since about 2000, it has not been a recession, but a robbery!!
In 1980, the size of the world’s financial assets was equivalent to global GDP; in 2008, total financial assets were three times global GDP. In the 1960s, financial organizations accounted for 14 percent of corporate profits; by 2008 that had risen to 39 percent, further evidence that investment in the real economy is being abandoned in favor of speculative investment in the casino economy. In 2007, according to Paul Mason, UK pensioners had 30 percent of their pensions invested in speculative hedge funds, up from 5 percent just six years earlier. Canadians are hugely naive in largely thinking this is a US issue. The Bank of Canada was nationalized by the Mackenzie King government in 1938. King took the Keynesian message to heart and created interest-free money to help the country overcome the Depression, and the Bank of Canada still retains in its constitutional right to do so (but it doesn’t). In 2010, Canadians paid $165 million daily in interest charges on governmental debt of $519 billion — this is equivalent to $136 a week from a family of four. According to Richard Priestman and Connie Fogal, between 1939 and 1945 the Bank of Canada produced 62 percent or more of the national money supply interest-free. From 1945 to 1975 the Bank of Canada provided a significant proportion of capital for public needs — at a nominal rate of about one percent. A major source of low-cost capital to lend was the private Canadian banks that were obliged under Keynesian policies to hold statutory reserves interest-free in the Bank of Canada, which the public bank could then lend out for public works and benefits. Over many years this put over $120 billion in interest-free money at the disposal of the Canadian government. Inflation and speculative lending could be reined in by the Bank of Canada requiring the private banks to increase their statutory reserves to slow down credit expansion where necessary. Total federal debt in Canada was only $37 billion in 1975, and 22 percent was owed to the Bank of Canada. However, following the lead of Thatcher and Reagan, the Brian Mulroney government, which came to power in 1984, moved away from the statutory reserve system to so called “free markets” and the deregulation of the banking sector. Real long-term interest rates on Canadian government debt, which were 0.7 percent in 1980, escalated to 8.4 percent in 1984. After the policy shift, interest payable to the private banks on borrowing rose to levels from $5 billion to $8 billion a year on loans that had previously been virtually interest free. The use of the Bank of Canada to fund public projects has declined radically since. Interest rates on government debt rose to ranges of 6 to 18 percent in the 1980s, and the public debt soared to $408 billion in 1991 and then to $585 billion in 2000.