banking

trickle-down intervention

Submitted by antarchi on November 17, 2008 - 01:33

The standard ‘trickle-down’ argument against redistribution (through progressive taxation etc) is that instead of making the poor richer, it makes the rich poorer. However, this apparently anti-interventionist attitude actually contains an argument for the current state intervention: although we all want the poor to get better, it is counter-productive to help them directly, since they are not the dynamic and productive element; the only intervention needed is to help the rich get richer, and then the profits will automatically spread down to the poor. Throw enough money at Wall Street, and it will eventually trickle down to Main Street. If you want people to have money to build, don’t give it to them directly, help those who are lending it to them.

— Slavoj Zizek

Don't just do something, talk

11 facts about the biggest banks

Submitted by antarchi on October 22, 2011 - 15:19

1. Bank profits are highest since before the recession…: According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., bank profits in the first quarter of this year were “the best for the industry since the $36.8 billion earned in the second quarter of 2007.” JP Morgan Chase is currently pulling in record profits.

2. …even as the banks plan thousands of layoffs: Banks, including Bank of America, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Credit Suisse, are planning to lay off tens of thousands of workers.

3. Banks make nearly one-third of total corporate profits: The financial sector accounts for about 30 percent of total corporate profits, which is actually downfrom before the financial crisis, when they made closer to 40 percent.

4. Since 2008, the biggest banks have gotten bigger: ... the nation’s biggest banks — including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo — are now bigger than they were pre-recession. Pre-crisis, the four biggest banks held 32 percent of total deposits; now they hold nearly 40 percent.

5. The four biggest banks issue 50 percent of mortgages and 66 percent of credit cards: Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup issue one out of every two mortgages and nearly two out of every three credit cards in America.

— Pat Garofalo

Eleven Facts You Need to Know About the Nation’s Biggest Banks

knowingly scr*wing the proles

Submitted by antarchi on October 8, 2011 - 23:43

The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.

— Rothschilds

The Rothschild brothers of London writing to associates in New York, 1863

letter to an extremist

Submitted by antarchi on June 5, 2011 - 17:45

Dear David Cameron,

I neither voted for you, nor do any of your policies or positions represent my interests. Your enormous majority means that I have no representative under this so-called democracy - and am not likely to have one for as long as I live in this constituency. But I would like at least to be added as a statistic: someone who finds your policies abhorrent, dangerous, and imbued with the most distasteful ideology which both fails to understand the difficulties normal people face and which threatens to kill off the structures and social values which have been built up over centuries.

You will kill off people too: this is happening already. If you look at the suicide rates of people with mental health, forced to undergo humiliating, unsympathetic and narrow 'work assessments' you will see that these have increased just in the time you have been in power. If you look at the closure of care homes and removal of care for the elderly and mentally ill, you will see that you are already condemning these people to an even more miserable existence, through no fault of their own. If you look at the record of commissioned out (privatised) health and social care services, you will see that they are both more expensive and of lower quality than those provided by the NHS.

making money out of nothing

Submitted by antarchi on May 1, 2011 - 01:54

Chart and the following quotes are taken from OneGoodCut:

Bank of England 2007 Q3 Quarterly Bulletin, p 377:

“When banks make loans, they create additional [bank] deposits for those that have borrowed the money”

Bank of England 2007 Q3 Quarterly Bulletin, p 405:

“The money-creating sector in the United Kingdom consists of resident banks (including the Bank of England) and building societies”

Bank of England 2007 Q3 Quarterly Bulletin, p 378:

“… changes in the money stock [i.e. the total amount of money in the economy] primarily reflect developments in bank lending as new deposits are created.”

Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and Member of the Monetary Policy Committee - Speech to BGC Partners, 21 January 2010.

“…banks extend credit [make loans] by simply increasing the borrowing customer’s current account…That is, banks extend credit by creating money.”

Martin Wolf, Chief economics editor of the Financial Times (9th November 2010)

“The essence of the contemporary monetary system is creation of money, out of nothing, by private banks’ often foolish lending…”

Question from OneGoodCut to the BOE:

“When a commercial bank makes a loan to a borrower, does the commercial bank in effect create new money? In other words, when a bank makes a loan to a borrower, is that ‘money’ just created out of thin air?”

Bank of England response:

“When banks make loans, commercial banks do indeed create much of the money in the economy.”

let's be generous to barclays

Submitted by antarchi on February 20, 2011 - 02:22

UPDATED:
Correspondence with Evan Davis

Good old BBC. Let's try as hard as we can not to make the banks look too bad.

Nearly all outlets are reporting that Barclays paid out less than 1% of its stupendous profits in corporate tax:

The Guardian
Sky News
FT (uses Barclays' own initial declaration of 11.6 bn in profit, which gives the 1% figure for corporate tax.)
The Daily Torygraph (yes, even them)
The Mirror
The Daily Mail (uses 11.6 bn figure)

The Independent ... manages to bump it up to 4.5%

And the BBC?

This page on the BBC says 'Barclays has revealed it paid £113m in corporation tax to the UK in 2009, 2.4% of its £4.6bn global annual profit.'

This page (BBC) says 'Barclays has said it paid £113m in corporation tax in 2009, which was 2.4% of its global profit.'

Evan Davis reveals all in his morning chat with Joe Lynam on the Today programme:

ED: First just tell us what the profits are, because the Guardian calls it 11.6 billion pounds of profit
JL: ... and Barclays say that was correct for 2009. But then they changed the number when they released their figures this week on Tuesday, so they .. they're now saying that the official figure that they should have said last year was £4.6 billion. Both the Guardian and Barclays are correct, because they sold a huge management company called BGI for around 7 billion, they then took that back off the profits that they had ...
ED: So let's call it ... let's call it 4.6 billion, be generous to Barclays, which makes it a rate of 2.4%...

'Let's be generous to Barclays'!!?

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