Let us go back to some basic principles:
1. Despite bank and Administration smoke-blowing to the contrary, the problem with the so-called toxic assets on bank balance sheets is NOT that they cannot be priced, but that banks do not like the prices on offer from willing buyers. We have read anecdotes suggesting that the gap is as big as bank valuation 90-95 cents on the dollar versus market prices of 30 cents, but the typical example is bank holding price of 80 cents versus market of 30 cents.
So let us repeat, the purpose of this program is NOT price discovery, and any claim along those lines is a lie. The purpose is to keep the banks from recognizing losses that already exist, by reversing them via unloading the paper at a fictitious high price and dumping the loss on the taxpayer.
The more straightforward way to do this would be to require the banks to take the loss (one could lower the haircut a tad if there really was an economic justification for thinking the market value of 30 really was an undershoot, but a gap of 80 versus 30 says pretty clearly that further writedowns are inevitable). And those banks that wind up bankrupt get put into receivership, with the first losses coming from shareholders and bondholders.
2. The public private investment partnership program is thus a very costly way to camouflage overpayment for bad bank assets in lieu of writedowns and some combination of relief (say for impaired banks that still look viable) and receivership. The extra costs come about because for whatever amount of capital is provided by private sources, there must be an expected positive return. And given the risks involved, that return requirement is pretty high. Thus if the bank won’t sell for less than 80, and Uncle Sam is trying to get private capital involved to improve the optics, and private investors provide $6, it is fallacious to think that the taxypayer is somehow $6 ahead. The investor needs to expect $6 plus his return requirement. Say it’s 15% per annum given the risk of the deal. He’s need that investment to be worth $9 in three years (assuming no interim income). If his investment expected to return that much (and how can it be, if the market price for the same paper is $30), there has to be an additional element of subsidy to induce him to participate (maybe he can dump the paper on the TALF? Maybe a friendly bank that has reason to play ball will provide a non-recourse loan for his piece of $9?)
The broader point is that private investors have higher return expectations than Uncle Sam, who is generally happy to get out whole (meaning you tell the public you took no loss, but it would be nice if the government recovered its cost of funding). Merely providing them with non-recourse debt is not sufficient if their investment is still expected to produce a loss. And given their high return expectations, it is more costly to subsidize their participation rather than have the government bear the full cost.
We now see the absurdity of this program and the Treasury’s position. the program is by design a gimmie to the banks, who can dump their dodgy paper on to Uncle Sam. In fact, they are now pretty ham-handedly trying to game the system. And rather than condemning their actions, the Treasury is lamely trying to defend them.
From the Financial Times:
US banks that have received government aid, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, are considering buying toxic assets to be sold by rivals under the Treasury’s $1,000bn (£680bn) plan to revive the financial system.
The plans proved controversial, with critics charging that the government’s public-private partnership – which provide generous loans to investors – are intended to help banks sell, rather than acquire, troubled securities and loans.
Spencer Bachus, the top Republican on the House financial services committee, vowed after being told of the plans by the FT to introduce legislation to stop financial institutions ”gaming the system to reap taxpayer-subsidised windfalls”.
Mr Bachus added it would mark ”a new level of absurdity” if financial institutions were ”colluding to swap assets at inflated prices using taxpayers’ dollars.”
Participating in the plan as a buyer could be complicated for Citi, which has suffered billions of dollars in writedowns on mortgage-backed assets and is about to cede a 36 per cent stake to the government…..
And attract new investments from private investors, limiting the need for the further government funds.
Many experts think it is essential to take these assets from leveraged institutions such as banks that are responsible for the lion’s share of lending, into the hands of unleveraged financial institutions such as traditional asset managers, where they will have much less impact on the flow of credit to the economy.
Banks have three options if they want to buy toxic assets: apply to become one of four or five fund managers that will purchase troubled securities; bid for packages of bad loans; or buy into funds set up by others. The government plan does not allow banks to buy their own assets, but there is no ban on the purchase of securities and loans sold by others.
“It’s an open programme designed to get markets going,” a Treasury official said. But he added: “It is between a bank and their supervisor whether they are healthy enough to acquire assets,” raising the possibility regulators may prevent weak banks from becoming buyers.
Yves here, That isn’t just lame, it is out and out dishonest. The Treasury can and bloody well ought to rein in this kind of thing, but instead it will fob its duty to make sure the program works as promised (ie gets bad assets off the balance sheets of banks that NOW own them, as opposed to those who decide to load up on them for fun and profit). But no, they pretend this isn’t a problem of due to their negligence. More important, it show very clearly that their first and only loyalties are to the banking industry. The public is a mere goose to be plucked. Back to the story:
Wall Street executives argue that banks’ asset purchases would help achieve the second main goal of the plan: to establish prices and kick-start the market for illiquid assets.
Yves here. This too is a baldfaced lie. John Paulson (among others) maintain that there are active markets for these assets. The “oh we need price discovery” is a con job.Back to the story:
But public opinion may not tolerate the idea of banks selling each other their bad assets. Critics say that would leave the same amount of toxic assets in the system as before, but with the government now liable for most of the losses through its provision of non-recourse loans.
Administration officials reject the criticism because banking is part of a financial system, in which the owners of bank equity – such as pension funds – are the same entities that will be investing in toxic assets anyway. Seen this way, the plan simply helps to rearrange the location of these assets in the system in a way that is more transparent and acceptable to markets.
Yves again. Oh my God, do they believe the garbage they shovel out? First, the idea that “the same entities” own bank stock as debt is an utter canard. Pimco, one of the biggest holders of bank debt, is a bond shop! It doesn’t own any bank equity. Ditto for particular pension funds. To imply that all investors are indiscriminate indexers and on top of that, equally exposed to bank debt and equity is idiotic.
Similarly, the notion that equity and debt are fungible, flies in the face of all corporate finance theory. The way to “rearrange” things in this situation is to go pup the capital structure, wipe equity holders out, and swap debt for equity. The idea of rearranging assets in a capricious way (only a very few players are participating in this scheme) and claiming it is somehow superior is rubbish. This is all about shoring up the value of bank bonds that ought to be written down in a very major way.
Third, the very biggest lie is that this is merely “rearranging” the counters within the moneyed classes. This is massive dumping of losses from the investing class onto taxpayers, many of whom have little in the way of retirement savings. The costs the average taxpayer is absorbing is well in excess of what his bank related investments.
The dishonesty of this crowd is just breathtaking. The Bushies were blatantly high handed, while Team Obama prefers the Big Lie and assumes we are all too dumb to see through it.
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So who is to call the administration out on these allegations??
Yes (we) all know who you are. Most people don’t know.
People need to get alot more hungry before anything happens. Tick tick tick…..
So who is to call the administration out on these allegations??
If they’re not more careful, a little old lady who likes to knit.
“The dishonesty of this crowd is just breathtaking. The Bushies were blatantly high handed, while Team Obama prefers the Big Lie and assumes we are all too dumb to see through it”
Amen to the dishonesty!!
Not only too dumb to see through it but also too dumb to DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT!!
How does one teach these gamers a REAL GOOD LESSON?
“Oh my God, do they believe the garbage they shovel out?”
The worst of it is, I think they do.
I wrote the following on NC a few days ago (apologies for quoting myself):
“Geithner’s toxic asset plan, the more I think about it, seems to have been intentionally designed to be opened to gaming by the large zombie banks. Why? Because it keeps them relatively intact with possible up-side at taxpayers’ expense. That way, the U.S. will continue to host some of the most powerful financial institutions in the world and will thus be able to use them as another tool to project influence and power globally. The Obama Administration will be, more or less and directly or indirectly, controlling those institutions. Obama (Summers, Geithner, etc.) will thus be commander in chief of the U.S. financial system too.
This would then be an explanation why a Swedish solution was never seriously considered. The likely outcome of that would have been the dismantling of Citi, BoA, etc.
Geithner’s plan and the Obama Administration’s policy proposals make sense if you regard them as the U.S. Government taking in the major financial aircraft carriers for serious repair with the intention to re-commission them soon.
That the performance of the U.S. economy would have been better applying an alternative solution and that most of the other alternatives would have been more equitable is beside the point.
It is up to the citizens of the U.S., really, to protest against them banking the cost of maintaining the U.S. financial empire.”
If Obama and Geithner had come to London yesterday for the G 20 with the Citis and BoAs of this world in parallel being sent to the Chapter 11 scrap yard, then the political clout of U.S. would have been significantly reduced.
I prefer to think that the rationale for the Geithner plan (risky public/public partnerships with the up-side diverted to a few, selected, interest groups) is geopolitical, in which case it can be rationalised. If, on the other hand, it is plain vanilla corruption, things are just getting a lot worse.
It’s a shell game, but the sick part is that the plan removes all the shells from the table except the one labelled “taxpayer”. Ooh, I wonder where the toxic waste is? Under shell number one or under shell number one?
Madoff was pretty clever and stole a decent amount of money. Willie Sutton was a famous thief. Bonnie and Clyde has panache. But this, folks, will go down in history as the greatest theft in history.
In the end, how much will be spent on the bailout? 15 trillion? 20 trillion? How much of that will be stolen? Some might argue “all of it” and I would not disagree.
This is the biggest robbery in history. A poor black man in South LA get stopped up for DWB; the cops find a joint in his pocket; he goes down for five years. A rich white man steals one hundred billion dollars; he gets stocks options, car, apartment, healthcare, directorships, cash, and invitations to the White House.
America, you should have learned something back on 9/11 but you didn’t.
Crony capitalism in the US…
Here is a link to an article written by Simon Johnson, ex chief economist at IMF. The whole piece is too good to miss. Some excerpts:
Emerging –market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit – and, most of the time, genteel-oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon – correctly, in most cases – that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.
…
In its depth and suddenness, the US economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets… There’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity (apart from the obvious debt repayment problem): elite business interests – financiers, in the case of the US – played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice
I also find Edward Griffin’s view on Fed/Treasury extremely convincing (yet still a mainstream media taboo). Some quotes:
Fed is a cartel – a banking cartel consists of a group of large powerful private banking interests who brought in government as partner in order to use the federal law to enforce cartel agreements….
Inflation is a hidden tax…
Here is a video link:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6507136891691870450
OH CAN YOU SEE, BY THE CRIME AND THE GREED.
WHAT WE PROUDLY HAILED AT THE WALL ST. LAST REAMING OF US.
WHOSE BROAD GRAFT AND BRIGHT MINDS THROUGH THE PERILOUS FIGHT.
AND THE PEOPLE’S RED GLARE, THE DERIVATIVES BURSTING IN AIR.
GAVE PROOF THROUGH THE NIGHT THAT OUR MINDS WEREN’T THERE.
O! SAY DOES THAT STAR-SPANGLED BACKSIDE WAVE.
O’ER THE LAND OF THE FREE AND HOME OF THE MINDLESS CONSUMER.
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore.
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave.
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In Good is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
skippy….ready to cop a bucket load, but ready for the fight. I put my ass on the line how bout you.
Typos:
"a problem of due to their negligence" => either "a problem of due diligence" or "a problem due to their negligence"
"job.Back to the story:" => "job. Back to the story:" (a space after the period)
"to go pup the" => "to go up the" (I assume that's what you meant)
I salute your endeavour, Yves, as well as your steadfastness in maintaining a depth of feeling – something which I personally can not do. I am feeling uncomfortably numb.
@Swedish Lex:
That would make sense. I don't see it as a good long-term strategy, because it assumes that other countries will not be forced to go to war, directly or indirectly, with the US soon enough.
The taxpayers will demand aid to help cope with the debt and will be given immense inflation. Thus, everyone who doesn't have inflation-adjusting assets will be shorn somewhat equally.
I salute your endeavor, Yves, as well as your steadfastness in maintaining a depth of feeling – something which I personally can not do. I am feeling uncomfortably numb.
This is also know as combat fatigue, been there, just breathe, it will fade.
skippy
And oh,the banks just got mark to market suspended on these “hard to value” assets.So what is to prevent them from marking them up prior to the sale through this program? This would also ensure that scrutiny of this scam at a later date becomes very difficult since “judgement” was used to mark these.Overall,I have a feeling the banks will manage to mark these up enough to sell them at no loss relative to current marks,accounting for the financing they provide to asset managers to buy their own assets.
Sometimes the correct course of action is not the most expedient.
John Hussman:
Steps to Stability – Needed Legislation
1) Enable the receivership of distressed bank and non-bank financial institutions (including bank holding companies), encouraging voluntary debt-equity swaps as an alternative to the receivership / conservatorship of insolvent institutions.
2) Stabilize insolvent financial institutions through receivership if the bondholders of the institution are unwilling to swap debt for equity. In virtually all cases, the liabilities of these companies to their own bondholders are capable of fully absorbing all losses without the need for public funds to defend those bondholders. Receivership involves defending the customer assets, changing the management, wiping out the common stock and a portion of the bondholders’ claims, continuing the operation of the institution in receivership, and eventually selling or reissuing the company to private ownership, leaving the bondholders with the residual. Massive bailouts using public funds are unnecessary, as are disorganized Lehman-style failures.
3) Allow “toxic asset” purchases using public funds only to the extent that the entire issuance of various securitized mortgage pools can be purchased “all or none” at a moderate percentage of face value. This would allow the underlying mortgages to be restructured – ideally writing them down to a similar percentage of face – reducing their foreclosure risk, and increasing the likelihood that public funds will be recovered.
4) Act quickly on foreclosure mitigation. Establish a Treasury conduit to administer (but not guarantee) property appreciation rights on restructured mortgages, again encouraging voluntary restructuring, using the Treasury conduit as a coordinating mechanism (additional details below).
5) Allow bankruptcy judges to substitute a portion of foreclosed mortgage obligations with equivalent claims on subsequent property appreciation. “Push-down” of mortgage principal without offsetting compensation rights to lenders should be emphatically avoided.
The banks are no longer insolvent. Heck, the former toxic assets just became collateral. Hurray ! Better hurry up and get your stocks.
This definately negates the need for taxpayer “investment”.
Do I sense Joe Lieberman in the room ?
“Not only too dumb to see through it but also too dumb to DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT!!
“How does one teach these gamers a REAL GOOD LESSON?”
We’ll see.
How to act? One encourages and helps form mass demonstrations and general strikes a la Ukraine a couple of years ago. Then you drag anyone serving in government and all lobbyists of any description to a huge sports stadium and hold show trials. Then you draft a new constitution which forbids government service by anyone ever having held office or serving in the buracracy going back four generations. You literally remove the human filth from the system, that’s how.
So Yves, the system _is_ a game. Or at least such has been the state of high finance since onselling and making book on it supplanted lending and underwriting. It has long mattered not whether the deal nets out so long as the numbers look look good until the deal goes down; we simply see the continuation of that kind of here.
What has struck me most for the past year, since Marcy 08, is the stupendous arrogance of the American governmental executive in its actions. And as you say the scale if not the face of that arrogance has only _increased_ since the New Lot were sworn in. Do they believe what they are telling us? Well in my view that believe that they are telling us what is good for us. Or better what is good for THEM, and that the rest of us don’t matter a damn as long as we don’t stink while they trundle us down the street in a chair on wheels to the PayDay Loan shop and hold our rigid fingers about a pen to sign over our check forevermore. With the Repubs we knew on the evidence of eight years (and really eighty years) that they had a complete contempt for their country, due process, and anyone anywhere earning less than six figures net per annum; one expected arrogance and self-dealing. With the New Lot, they have the audacity to tell us that they know whats best; they how have never run a lemondade stand for a profit but feel entitled to lie to our faces about their acts and goals. Arrogance of literally incredible scale near matched only by their ineptitude.
Timmy G has labored mightily and delivered of himself this banksters’ bastard monstrosity, but Son of Moloch is an abomination upon the land. —But sez I, let ’em try, ’cause that hies nearer the day we’ll all get Biblical on their anti-collectivist asses.
“Wall Street executives argue that banks’ asset purchases would help achieve the second main goal of the plan: to establish prices and kick-start the market for illiquid assets.”
– With a little collusion, the banks could quickly be able to “establish” prices at 100% of book. Crisis solved!
@Richard Kline.
Didn’t know you had it in you.
skippy….applause
“And rather than condemning their actions, the Treasury is lamely trying to defend them.”
Required Gap analysis.
Who obviously does the Treasury view as their constituency vs. who should be their constituency.
Do we even need this PPIP now that FASB has decided to allow banks some leeway in M2M (marking assets to “ordinary” market prices rather than “fire sale” market prices, however that’s supposed to be calculated)? I mean, banks can just make all of the problems go away with the stroke of a pen now, right?
That only the biggest financial players can even bid for these toxic assets is what convinced me the game is fixed.
The RTC invited everyone to come in and shop at their store. Not only did this allow the public to participate in bargain hunting it also got the RTC higher prices as local investors could afford to pay more for distressed assets as they had knowledge of the local market.
I might be very willing to invest in some whole loan a bank wanted to sell especially if I could get a low cost non recourse loan from MY government. However, I’m about 10 billion short of qualifying to be part of Timmy’s exclusive club.
Will someone explain to me what is the difference between these folks and a mafia?
They truly believe they are above the law and their arrogance seems to have doubled or tripled since the crisis began. They use to steal in the cover of darkness now they do it in broad and have the nerve to tell you there is nothing you can do about it.
Where is the law? How can anyone feel safe?
Hi Yves. Two points.
1) In my very basic understanding of finance it sounds like banks being under pressure to sell bad assets and declare losses are in a situation similar to an investor with a margin call. Our attitude towards the latter is, sucks to be you – you plays the game and you takes your chances. Why shouldn’t Citi get the same response? (Don’t answer, I know I know.)
2) I’m hearing more about Pimco these days. Why aren’t people making note of Greenspan’s involvement with them? It seems reasonable to think that his influence could be playing a big role in the fierce resistance of the bond market to taking a haircut.
@Swedish Lex
Your explanation makes a whole lot of sense.
For comparison, it has been said that many of the actions taken by Russia in the last 10 years are first, and foremost, about repairing its ability to project power, economic efficiency or fairness be damned. Hence the consolidation of the energy industry, a key lever of Russian power, and the expelling of western energy majors (not coincidentally Russia is now “undemocratic”).
The effective takeover of the financial system in the US (and necessary concessions to cronies) is the financial equivalent of the energy consolidation in Russia.
Viewed in this light, the effective subsidy by the taxpayer is deliberate — it buys the support of the players in industry and assures their cooperation.
I suspect the obviousness of these motives will become more apparent in the years to come. Chinese and Russian sabre-rattling over the USD reserve status are just the beginning.
If only the czar knew!
Who remembers these classic words from the Firesign Theatre:
MRS PREZKY: But… this is a bag of sh*t!
ANNOUNCER: But it’s really GREAT sh*t, Mrs. Prezky!
The one issue I didn’t see addressed here is this:
Many believe that some large banks are hopelessly insolvent. The banks themselves don’t believe that. At most they may believe that they have a temporary problem, for which the government is providing a solution, also temporary. And in some cases, if only the “challenged” assets were properly priced, they would have no need for temporary government assistance. So, under this scenario, the government comes in and shuts them down. The bank holding companies sue (as Wamu, Inc. has done) for billions in damages or seek injunctive relief to undo the receivership – tying up the government for many months in costly litigation. In other words, the assumption seems to be that a receivership will be done by fiat, without vigorous and litigious protest from the banks.
I see PPIP as a rather elaborate (and expensive) way to get a third party valuation that will be persuasive, if not to the banks, at least to the courts. Call it paying for an appraisal.
There are other problems with PPIP – possibility of gaming it, being one. And FASB’s action may have upset the government’s strategy. I’m not suggesting that it will work. I just haven’t seen the adversarial aspects discussed.
I was too busy to get up and change the channel, so I ended up listening to CNBC all day yesterday.
It started off with in-studio guest, Captian Shit-For-Brains from BofA. They lit into him with searing questions like, “how is moral among the Merrill people?” Once again I had to listen to how I was a bastard for forcing money on him.
Throughout the day, all I heard was giddy laughter and “bottom!”, “bottom!”
Larry Kudlow once again explain very carefully to the American public why regulations and transparency are bad for real American Americans.
Finally, Rain Man came on to literally declare, “it’s the end of the depression.”
I kept thinking that if I worked there, what kind of contraption I could construct that would allow me to spray a full 30 rounds from an AK-47 into my face.
If anyone has that station turned on in the presence of children, then they are child abusers. You don’t teach children to become victims, and you don’t teach children to worship dishonesty and ill-gotten gains.
I think Sesame Street should have a 1-minute stock picking segment where they slowly pronounce the names of a few companies and think of something colorful to say along with it and the kids can shout out yummy or stinky.
Then we would all have financial advice that is honest, from the gut, and would produce the same returns as listening to deceit.
As for the government, I’m going to send them a photograph of the money I owe for taxes this year. They can make as many copies as they want.
You too can protest on April 11th with others of a mind to deal with the banking industry.
http://www.anewwayforward.org/demonstrations/
psychohistorian
Swedish LEx:
“I prefer to think that the rationale for the Geithner plan (risky public/public partnerships with the up-side diverted to a few, selected, interest groups) is geopolitical, in which case it can be rationalised. If, on the other hand, it is plain vanilla corruption, things are just getting a lot worse.”
I see, so the geopolitical angle has been a winner these past 60 years?
The government under President Obama, through his economic team of Geithner/Summers/Bernanke, are supplying the muscle so the Wall Street bankers can the use the PPIP program to rob the US Treasury, in broad daylight, of a trillion dollars and have the corporate TV propaganda media cover the crime up. Disgust for slimy Democratic and Republican politicians and the effete financial ruling class is intense, words fail me!
anon @4:01 AM,
think of it as state capture. while not generally admitted, this is a structural feature, i.e. the legal-political arrangement called ‘the state’ is always captured, its simply a matter of which class or class segment is in control.
what we’re seeing today is a moreless logical outcome of, on one hand, the decline of industry, and on the other, the turn to finance and increasingly speculative activities that began, this time, during the 1970s.
not to draw a sharp line between the two hands since they can fuse into something once called ‘finance capital’ in which – for a period – the dominant partner is the financial…apparently just what mr. change et al believe, are told, they must perpetuate and know no better.
Anon 9:21 writes:
“Will someone explain to me what is the difference between these folks and a mafia?”
The "stars & stripes" and the anthem. Nothing much else different.
Sung to the tune of Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend: (Apologies, Marilyn, wherever you are :-))
“A kiss from a fan may be quite sentimental
But banksters are a prez’ best friend!!”
Great post! Would you like a Link Exchange with our blog COMMON CENTS where we blog about the issues of the day?
http://www.commoncts.blogspot.com
Ho skippy, when I wax wroth I spit barbed clauses and flaming geletinous adjectives from a bottomless magazine. I have not begun to spite!
So Anon of 9:21, a majority voted them in so they can act under color of authority. That’s the appropriate phrase, btw, read nothing unseemely into it, sez I.
«Larry Kudlow once again explain very carefully to the American public why regulations and transparency are bad for real American Americans.»
But of course! And the real rationale is that they make it harder to MAKE MONEY FAST (at someone else’s cost), which is all that Real Americans want.
«You don’t teach children to become victims,»
Well, you do if they are the children of that 80% of losers, of not-Real Americans. That helps them fit in in the great scheme of things, where in Real America losers LOSE.
«and you don’t teach children to worship dishonesty and ill-gotten gains.»
Well, in Real America winners do whatever it takes. And losers admire them and despise themselves.