Tax the Rich Every Last Penny Until the Money Banks Stole is Replaced

Too many people believe the political and media propaganda that we have overspent and we must cut back.

Keep reminding them that the banks overspent, thinking mortgage collateral—houses—would rise in value to cover it—in fact, on the assumption that housing prices would rise indefinitely. They spent money they didn’t have, giving themselves massive bonuses for doing it, then, when the housing market collapsed, they told governments, governments!, they were too big to fail, and told governments, supposedly our governments, they had to give them £$trillions from national treasuries—our money collected as taxes—to replace the money the inept bankers had lost on junk mortgages and junk bonds. What did we have to do with it?

We have already paid the banks—the money they were given was not the government’s money, it was our money, entrusted by us to governments for nation wide social use—yet these governments, supposedly our governments are making us pay again, through enforced austerity measures that have nothing to do with us overspending. Tell them to stuff their austerity measures that hit everyone except the super rich, and to get every penny back from the rich leeches who do nothing and deserve nothing of ours.

Funding of Leading Credit Rating Agencies Must Change

Lloyd B Thomas Jr, a Kansas State professor of economics and the author of The Financial Crisis and Federal Reserve Policy, a book about the financial crisis, says:

Standard and Poor’s, Fitch, and Moody’s—the three leading credit rating agencies—behaved very poorly during the housing and credit bubbles of 2000-2006. Many buyers of mortgage backed bonds can only purchase those rated AAA. The rating agencies routinely stamped mortgage backed bonds and related derivatives AAA without carefully examining the quality of the individual mortgages that backed them.

This failure of the rating process helped feed an enormous expansion in the pipeline of credit to the housing sector, and its inevitable collapse after 2006 is the primary cause of the nation’s economic problems today. Many of these bonds were junk bonds because of the inferior quality of mortgages backing them. He continued:

These credit rating agencies have been funded by the very investment banks that built the toxic mortgage backed bonds and related securities.

It led to corruption of the ratings process as Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch engaged in a “race to the bottom”. Such obvious conflicts of interest and poor performance are why the way leading credit rating agencies are funded should be changed:

Standard and Poor’s knew that if it failed to rate a mortgage backed bond AAA, the investment bank would take it’s business to Fitch or Moody’s, which would likely rate the bond AAA to collect its million dollar fee for its rating service from the investment bank. Clearly this obvious conflict of interest needs to be corrected by implementing a new way of funding the rating agencies.

How much evidence of corruption in the higher echelons of the country’s financial sector, and the rich minority that benefit from it, do we need to get enraged?