31,000 March on Wall Street...

I have not seen much coverage of this action. If the Tea Party had marched on Wall Street you would have seen wall to wall coverage on Fox News! This is from the aflcio blog.

31,000 Deliver Message to Wall Street: Fix The Mess You Made

by James Parks,








Some 15,000 union members and other progressives on the ground and another 16,000 virtual marchers got Main Street’s message to Wall Street today: Good Jobs Now! Wall Street Must Pay! Marchers in New York carried the names of virtual marchers on stickers as they marched toward the statue of the Wall Street bull.

Led by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, union members and activists from National People’s Action (NPA), NAACP, Move On and others took over Wall Street during the afternoon rush hour for a march and rally. When the marchers got to Wall Street, there were so many that they filled up two streets.

At the rally, Trumka told the cheering crowd:

We’re here today for the folks who were played for suckers in the casino economy and will be silent no more. And the message we bring is this: Wall Street, fix the mess you made.

America lost 8.5 million jobs because of the financial crisis created by Wall Street, Trumka said, and now is 11 million jobs in the hole.

We need to go back to basics, where good jobs, not bad debts, drive our growth. An economy where Wall Street is the servant, and not the master of Main Street.

Workers in the public sector and education talked about how deep budget cuts are strangling schools and public services.

NAACP President Benjamin Jealous told the massive crowd that this is the time to take back America from the Big Banks. He said while money can buy votes, money can’t vote and all the newly registered voters in the 2008 election will make a difference in 2010.

Trumka laid out three simple steps the Big Banks can take to start paying back for the damage caused by their risky actions

Stop fighting Wall Street reform. Stop acting like what happened to our economy was some kind of accident, like a meteor fell on us. Take some responsibility for what you did. Call off the lobbyists.
Second-Stop speculating and start lending. We bailed you out, it’s far past time you started lending to Main Street.
Third-Take responsibility for the clean-up of the mess you made. Pay your fair share of the cost of creating the jobs you destroyed.
During the rally and march, hundreds of participants joined a text messaging action and called Goldman Sachs, telling the Wall Street giant to stop opposing meaningful financial reform. In addition to the mass of people taking part, hundreds watched the event in a live webcast (see clips at www.aflcio.org/wallstreet) and commented live throughout the march and rally, many showing the deep hunger across the country for action to create jobs and restore our economy.

Some of the comments included:Kevin Hansel/IN: WALLSTREET- IT’S OUR MONEY AND WE NEED IT NOW!!!!!

Rita: After living through a lay-off lasting 11 months, I’m working 3 part time jobs for less pay! Stop the destruction of the working class! Solidarity Now!!!

Donna:TRUMKA CAN LEAD US INTO THE FUTURE! GOD BLESS HIM!

Liz: TAKE THIS MARCH NATIONWIDE!!!!!!!

CWA 7019: Shame on you Wall Street!

Today’s march and rally followed a week of actions spearheaded by unions and the community affiliate Working America at shareholder meetings across the country.

Wall Street: Betting on all sides.

Sam Webb is the chairman of the Communist Party USA. This is an interesting article especially his quotes from Ben Bernanke. It is surely true that Wall Street firms bet on all sides. This is common and a form of hedging but then what Goldman Sacks did along with Paulson and company was truly sleazy and a reason for the SEC to make charges--taking a brief break from watching pornography I guess. Paulson and Goldman knew that the securities that they were bundling and selling to investors were going to tank and so they in effect sold them short. We will have to wait and see what comes out of the regulation bill but given that Wall Street provides plenty of funds for both parties and has on top of that plenty of lobbyists and inside connections it is unlikely that the bill will hurt them much. The stock markets are not dropping but going up.! This is from peoplesworld.

Betting on all sides
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by: SAM WEBB


If you listened to the recent testimony of Wall Street executives before the bipartisan commission looking into the financial crisis, you would think that they were mere innocent spectators to it all.

That takes a lot of .... You can fill in the blank.

Did the Masters of the Universe really think that housing prices could only go in one direction - up, that investor risk was a non-issue in their financial games, that economic turbulence was a thing of the past?

I know that many economic theorists peddled these notions in recent years, actually going back to the late 1970s. Federal Reserve Bank governor (now chairman) and former Princeton economics professor Ben Bernanke, for example, asserted in a speech in 2004:

"One of the most striking features of the economic landscape over the past 20 years or so has been a substantial decline in macroeconomic volatility. ... Several writers on the topic have dubbed this remarkable decline in the variability of both output and inflation 'The Great Moderation.'"

Then the supposedly erudite Bernanke went on to say:

"The increased depth and sophistication of financial markets, deregulation in many industries, the shift away from manufacturing toward services, and increased openness to trade and international capital flows are other examples of structural changes that may have increased macroeconomic flexibility and stability." (my italics)

Such was the conventional wisdom of the economics profession and too many politicians, Republican and Democratic alike.

Still, I doubt that the "titans" of finance, who manipulate money and markets 24/7, embraced this "wisdom" entirely. Unlike university professors, they have to pay attention to what is happening in the real world. The bottom line is what guides their behavior, not high-sounding generalizations resting on unrealistic assumptions (free, efficient and self-correcting markets, for example).

So assuming that I am right, that financial executives themselves, unlike the free-market theorists, kept at least one eye on the real world, and further assuming that they aren't just plain stupid, why did they continue to invest in bundles of subprime mortgages of deteriorating quality in terms of return and risk? Why didn't they reconsider their investment bets in a ballooning and increasingly unsustainable housing market in which prices got so out of whack with actual value?

The short answer is that financial firms operate in a very competitive capitalist market in which there are internal and external compulsions to accumulate higher and higher profits in the short term. (That get-rich-quick compulsion was aptly summarized by economist John Maynard Keynes, who famously said: "In the long run, we are all dead.")

The longer, and more revealing, answer is that a few giant firms dominate the financial industry, and with size comes competitive advantage - resources and connections, an ability to make deals on both sides of the market (when it is going up and when it is coming down) - and an assumption (backed by earlier precedent) that the government will bail out these same firms when trouble arises. As a result these "too big to fail" financial institutions are both unafraid to ride the speculative wave as long as it lasts and also nimble enough to pull themselves safely out of turbulent waters when the wave breaks - so they think.

In other words, the financial giants are positioned to win no matter what the outcome. There is no better example of this phenomenon than Goldman Sachs. As the Security and Exchange Commission complaint alleges and as Michaels Lewis's new book "The Big Short" discusses in some detail, Goldman Sachs (and probably other financial giants) played all sides of the market and, not surprisingly, broke laws while doing it and suckered the government into cleaning up its bad bets with taxpayer dollars.

To be more specific, Goldman was drowning in mounting piles of worthless securities and was effectively insolvent (more liabilities than assets), as many of its bets on subprime mortgages went sour (not all of its bets though, because it shrewdly and apparently illegally bet that the housing bubble would burst - "shorting" the market - which brought billions into its coffers).

In the meantime, Goldman executives, arguing (correctly) that financial markets occupy a strategic position in the overall economy and relying on their web of connections with the White House, Congress and federal agencies, rushed to Washington and demanded ransom money and a Wall Street fix to the market meltdown. Washington quickly obliged.

In hindsight, President Obama and congressional Democrats, for whatever reason, and there is more than one, missed an opportunity to insist that the biggest financial institutions be placed under public democratic control or, more modestly, broken up and scaled down in size. Public opinion, shaken by the enormity of the crisis and seething with anger towards Wall Street, could have been mobilized to support such far-reaching measures.

Now the moment is less opportune. Nevertheless, anti-bank anger continues and some form of financial regulatory reform is going to become the law of the land. The question is: will the new law have teeth?

Will it break up "too big to fail" banks?

Will it bring the shadow banking system (hedge funds, private equity firms, etc.) and derivatives (financial instruments that bet on the future price of housing mortgages, interest rates, currencies, etc.) under tight control?

Will it establish a consumer protection agency with real power to rein in credit card companies and the like?

Will it increase leverage requirements (money on hand at financial institutions to cover outstanding bets on financial instruments, such as stocks, bonds, futures, swaps, options, etc.)?

Will it guarantee that regulators will be tough on and independent of financial institutions?

Will it provide for public oversight of the regulators and the Federal Reserve Bank?

Will it prohibit banks from selling derivatives and other exotic financial instruments?

Will it contain a tax on financial transactions?

All this will be decided soon. Much will depend on the bargaining posture of the president and the mobilization of the American people for real regulatory reform. So far the labor movement and its leadership are setting the pace. The rest of us need to get on board.

Wall Street Banks and other Financial Swine get Swine flu Vaccine first!

Of course as the article notes the institutions played by the rules and simply put in their requests for so many doses. No doubt those rules in actual operation manage to favor the big financial corporations. I wonder if there are other rules like that? This is f rom Huffington Post.




Wall Street Banks Getting Swine Flu Vaccine Before Many High-Risk Groups (VIDEO)
NOTE: BusinessWeek originally broke the news of Wall Street banks and other large employers receiving early batches of the H1N1 vaccine. Read their entire story here.]


While thousands of at-risk Americans wait, some big Wall Street banks have already secured the hard-to-find H1N1 vaccine for their employees.

Building on a story that BusinessWeek broke, NBC reports that employees at the New York Stock Exchange, bankers at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and employees at the Federal Reserve have all received swine flu vaccine doses to administer to their employees.

In particular, NBC reports that Goldman Sachs has received 200 doses of the vaccine -- the same amount as Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. Wall Street banks, like many other companies, put in requests for the vaccine but seem to have had something of a leg up on securing doses.

Dr. Nancy Schnyderman, NBC's chief medical editor, chimed in on this seeming disparity:

"I think they probably played by the rules, there are corporations all over the country who put in there dibs...But, what a sore eye for Wall Street. Wouldn't have been lovely if they had said, look we put it in our dibs, we played by the rules, but we're going to donate our 200 doses."
Some corporations seem to be getting the doses before doctors and hospitals. Here's more from Schnyderman:

"If we know that the distribution is the weak part of this entire thing, why not put doctor's offices and hospitals at the top of the line, and say to corporate America, no matter who you are, you're you're going to have to go through clinics and hospitals like everyone else."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/05/swine-flu-vaccine-banks-g_n_346907.html&cp

Wall Street Culture unlikely to change

Note that many of the big trading firms are doing quite well during all this turmoil. There seems to be no sign that a stricter regulatory regime is in the offing so taking risks and greed will not be prevented from causing the same problems in the future.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080322/wall_main.html?.v=3


Wall Street Culture Not Likely to Change

NEW YORK (AP) -- Wall Street investment bankers got
another lesson about the dangers of risk-taking this
past week with the downfall of Bear Stearns Cos. The
question now obviously is, how long will it last?

Those bankers, many of whom lived through market
debacles like the dot-com bust at the start of this
decade, turned out to have very short memories. And so
analysts believe the sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan
Chase & Co. for a stunning $2 per share ultimately
won't have that much of an impact on how Wall Street
conducts business.

In fact, bankers and traders are under even more
pressure to reap big returns because of the ongoing
credit crisis, and risk is just part of the game.

"There's an old saying on Wall Street that, for
traders and bankers, you'd have to take a normal 30
year career and distill it to 15 years," said Quincy
Krosby, chief investment strategist for The Hartford.
"This whole episode might change Wall Street for a
little while."

Krosby believes that Bear Stearns' near-collapse,
which followed the company's investing too heavily in
risky mortgage-backed securities, might force some
bankers to change their ways in the short term. But it
won't be enough to temper the financial industry's
relentless pursuit of money.

Indeed, the past decade has seen a number of investing
fiascoes that Wall Street doesn't appear to have
learned much from. Krosby noted the go-go Internet
days - when untested high-tech companies reaped piles
of cash in public offerings. The lesson then was,
don't put a lot of money into a venture that isn't on
fairly solid ground - but mortgages granted to people
with poor credit are quite akin to high-tech firms
that had never turned a profit. In both cases,
investors gleefully looked past the risk.

Now investors are smarting from what happened to Bear
Stearns. And traders are somewhat chastened, for now.

Erin Callan, the chief financial officer for Lehman
Brothers Holdings Inc., said her firm has certainly
become more wary about the risks it takes amid the
credit crisis. However, the market's gyrations also
offer Lehman's army of traders an opportunity to make
money.

"We just try to come in, and run the business the best
way we can," she said. "But, you can't survive if you
take no risks at all. All we can do is plan in this
environment, making sure we do all the things to
optimize running the firm."

It seems there's little that will change an industry
and a lifestyle attached to Wall Street, which is
thought of by Americans as more than just the center
of free-market capitalism. Its culture attracts men
and women with a swashbuckling mentality - smart,
aggressive risk takers with the potential to become
very rich.

And, their skills in trading and investment banking
were proven this past week - even after news of Bear
Stearns' buyout.

Chief executives at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs
Group Inc., and Lehman Brothers pointed out that
trading desks played a big part in offsetting massive
mortgage-backed asset write-downs, which have ticked
past $156 billion for global banks since last year.

As the three companies released first-quarter earnings
data, Morgan Stanley said equity trading revenue
surged 51 percent to $3.3 billion. Revenue at its
fixed-income sales and trading group dropped 15
percent to $2.9 billion, but it was still the firm's
second-highest performance ever despite having to
write down $2.3 billion linked to subprime mortgages
and leveraged loans.

And that pleased investors. Morgan Stanley had its
largest gain in more than a decade on Wednesday,
climbing 18.8 percent to $42.86. Rival investment
banks also had their best week since 2001.

But, investors shouldn't get too comfortable - the
investment banking industry, and Wall Street in
general, still have a long way to go before they can
be called healthy. It's not just the credit market
problems that are an issue, it's also the struggling
U.S. economy and its potential to hurt other
countries.

"Until we feel more certain about the worldwide
economies, we don't see things picking up
dramatically," said Goldman Sachs CFO David Viniar.
"We just need to keep plugging away."