Bread and Circuses to Distract Us - And the Band Played On

"The Bloomberg article dropped this bombshell nugget on what Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo had spent on share buybacks and dividends since 2017:

“From the start of 2017 through March, the four banks cumulatively returned about $1.26 to shareholders for every $1 they reported in net income, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.  Citigroup returned almost twice as much money to its stockholders as it earned, according to the data, which includes dividends on preferred shares.  The banks declined to comment.”

It appears that the Fed has been doing the exact same thing it did during the financial crisis of 2007 to 2010 – hiding the truth from the American people while it makes trillions of dollars in secret loans to the largest Wall Street financial institutions.

And just who is the New York Fed?  It’s one of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks but it’s privately owned by multinational corporations, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, whose executives rotate on and off its Board of Directors.  Adding to the insanity of this structure, the New York Fed is the supervisor of these same bank holding companies and it can also create trillions of dollars at the push of an electronic button to make emergency loans to bail out these banks when its supervision proves to have been a dud.

The icing on the cake of this Faustian bargain is that the New York Fed contracts out the operations of its bailout programs to the very banks taking money from the bailouts.  You can’t make this stuff up."

WSOP,  Bloomberg Drops a Bombshell on the Fed’s Big Bank Stress Tests Set for Release Today


“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

Josef Mengele

Stocks were falling over night, again.

They managed to pull up to pretty much unchanged, tradingly weakly on very light volumes most of the day.

And mirabile dictu, they rallied quite briskly on hot money and hot air into the close.

Unless something untoward and inconvenient happens, the wiseguys will likely try to paint the tape green into the end of the second quarter.

Gold and silver made it through the expiration fairly well, and silver even managed to gain back the cheap shot it took yesterday.

The dollar gained a little once again.

The distractions and diversions intended to provide cover for the looting, which historically have been called 'bread and circuses' are running hot and heavy. The masters of distraction are engaging people's worst sides and turning them into useful idiots for the moneyed interests.

Well, there will be hell to pay. It will most likely be 'the mother of all collapses.' But that is for the future.

They know what they are doing. Trump and the Congress know what they are doing. They do not care. They are getting paid.

And so no one can see it coming.

Have a pleasant evening.