Weekly Audit: Banks Get Big Bucks, Consumers Get Bupkis

by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger Last week, the Federal Reserve announced a plan to buy an additional $600 billion worth of Treasury bonds in an attempt to stimulate the economy. On Democracy Now!, economist Michael Hudson argues that the $600 billion T-bill buy will help Wall Street at the expense of ordinary Americans. The Fed justifies the purchase as an infusion of cash into the U.S. economy. The buy-up will certainly be an infusion of cash into U.S. banks. In effect, the Fed will help the government pay back the banks that lent money to finance deficit spending. The hope is that these banks, suddenly flush with cash, will help the U.S. economy by lending money to finance projects that will create wealth and jobs (i.e. opening factories and hiring more workers). However, as Hudson points out, there's no guarantee that the banks are going to use the windfall to build wealth in the U.S. On the contrary, he argues, there's every reason to suspect that they'll invest the money overseas in currency speculation deals. Why? Because the Fed has also put massive pressure on Congress to push China into raising its currency by 20%. The banks know this because the House voted overwhelmingly to approve such a threat in September. If the banks convert their extra billions to Chinese currency, and China raises the value of its currency in response to the threat of an across-the-board U.S. tariff on its imports, then banks that bought Chinese RMB when it was still artificially cheap will reap huge profits overnight. Later in the Democracy Now! broadcast, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz describes how the U.S. employed a similar strategy of currency devaluation to insulate itself against the ravages of the Great Depression, with devastating global consequences: So, the irony is that money that was intended to rekindle the American economy is causing havoc all over the world. Those elsewhere in the world say, what the United States is trying to do is the twenty-first century version of "beggar thy neighbor" policies that were part of the Great Depression: you strengthen yourself by hurting the others. You can’t do protectionism in the old version of raising tariffs, but what you can do is lower your exchange rate, and that’s what low interest rates are trying to do, weaken the dollar. Trade war between the U.S. and China The U.S. and China have a longstanding trade rivalry, but suddenly the two powers seem to be even more at odds than usual. William Greider of The Nation argues that plummeting global demand has ratcheted up tensions as the two exporting nations fight over a dwindling pool of customers. The U.S. accuses China of artificially deflating its currency to make its exports cheaper. In retaliation, the U.S. imposed tariffs on Chinese tires and tubular steel. China, in turn, imposed a tariff on U.S. poultry. As I mentioned above, the House voted 348-79 in September to impose additional tariffs on nearly all Chinese imports if China doesn't revalue its currency, though the Senate has yet to vote on this legislation. The U.S. acts indignant about China manipulating its currency, but Grieder argues that this stance is hypocritical in light of the Federal Reserve's decision to buy an additional $600 billion worth of Treasury bonds from the federal government to help finance the budget deficit. One effect will be to weaken the U.S. dollar, which will make our exports more competitive relative to those of China. Voters reject free-for-all trade In last week's midterm elections, voters rewarded candidates who oppose unfettered free trade, according to Kari Lydersen of Working In These Times. According to a new report by Public Citizen, 60 congressional races were fought wholly or largely on trade issues in 2010. Only 37 candidates favored NAFTA-style free trade pacts and half of them lost. Not all the candidates who won on a protectionist trade platform were advocating a progressive agenda of fairly compensating trading partners, protecting American jobs, and upholding environmental regulations. Senator-Elect Rand Paul (R-KY) argued that the World Trade Organization is a threat to U.S. sovereignty. Anti-union ballot initiatives win big Mikhail Zinshteyn of Campus Progress brings us an update on the anti-union initiatives that appeared on the ballots in many states last week. Voters in Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah approved legislation to preemptively neutralize the already-stalled Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), should it ever become federal law. EFCA, also known as card check or majority sign-up, would allow workers to organize by signing up for a union, instead of going through a grueling National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process, which makes workers sitting ducks for management threats and propaganda. Bean there, done that Move over, Elizabeth Warren. The White House may be poised to appoint one of Wall Street's favorite Democrats to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Andy Kroll and David Corn report in Mother Jones that Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL) is a favored contender for the job if her still-undecided race for reelection doesn't work out. That would be heartening news for Bean's former chief of staff, John Michael Gonzalez, now a leading lobbyist for Big Finance. Bean, who serves on the House finance and small business committees, has received over $2.5 million in campaign contributions from the financial sector over the course of her 5-year career. Bean was also a big beneficiary of the Chamber of Commerce, which vehemently opposed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that created the CFPB in the first place. Bean ultimately voted for the bill, but not before she unsuccessfully attempted to water down the consumer financial protections therein, the very provisions Bean would be tasked with enforcing. "The White House needs to beat back the Bean idea, otherwise they'll look like fools," one Democratic strategist told Corn and Kroll. "This is the craziest thing I've ever seen. She's a tool of the financial industries." This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. 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