Here’s the headline that topped yesterday’s Yahoo Finance web site, a headline for an AP story: “Obama implores top banks to increase lending.” And here’s the dictionary definition of “implores:” begs, urgently entreats, beseeches.
So in the view of this headline writer, based on the story written about our President’s meeting with bankers, Mr. Obama is begging, urgently entreating, and beseeching these greedy buglers who nearly destroyed the world economic system (and may do so yet), bankers who now make their own money by trading stocks with money from the Fed they borrow at no interest, to help do a little something for the rest of us.
Besides begging, urgently entreating and beseeching, what else has this administration done to check the proclivities of these bankers? Check the Bloomberg web site today for the answer. According to a story posted there, no U.S. authority has put into force “a single measure that would transform the financial system.”
While the unseemly, profoundly embarrassing scene between our President and top bankers in Washington was taking place yesterday, two of the banks being begged, urgently entreated and beseeched were doing a little something for their own top managers. Wells Fargo announced it would repay about $10 billion in TARP money, and Citigroup said it would repay some $20 billion, steps that will allow both banks to do what bankers do best these days — give each other bonuses without interference by the government.
These latest TARP paybacks, the New York Times noted in an editorial of its own today, didn’t come about because these two banks were healthy again. No indeed. But because these two banks are raising money from “investors” (i.e. other banks who are the big traders on Wall Street these days and who give their own top people big bonuses). Banks now, it seems, don’t have to stay in business by lending to small companies or consumers, they make their money trading stocks with cheap money from the Fed — which petty well explains why the stock market is up more than 60 percent this year while the Main Street economy staggers.
Ah, but wait, you say. Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and even the President himself, are now saying nasty things about banks. Boy, that has hurt the small group of predators who are giving themselves more than $140 billion in bonuses this year. Oh, yeah. You can see the pain on these bankers’ faces — the pain caused by forcing themselves not to laugh out loud.
There was a chance when Obama first came into office, a chance the rotting, rigged and self-serving financial system of this country might have been truly reformed to the benefit of all. The time when this mattered most, when it was still possible in any real sense, is past. So now we get the hot air and shame-shame gestures from a fast hollowing out administration.
You wuz out president, Mr. Obama. You shoudda protected our interests.