The six largest banks in America have over 10 trillion dollars in assets, equivalent to 54% of the GDP of this nation. This is wealth, this is power, this is who owns America.









Ten years after the big crash of 2007-08, caused by the Wall Street mafia, sending waves of financial destruction around the globe, the awful Trump administration that literally put the Goldman Sachs banksters in charge of the US economy, wants to reset the clock bomb of another financial disaster by deregulating the financial sector! And guess what: the corporate Democrats followed again!





Putting aside that Russiagate fiasco, Bernie Sanders was one more time the only voice of resistance against the Wall Street mafia in a hypnotized by the banking-corporate money US senate.





As Bernie stated:





Just ten years ago, as a result of greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, this country was plunged into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.





The official unemployment rate soared up to 10% and the real unemployment rate jumped to over 17%. At the height of the financial crisis more than 27 million Americans were unemployed, underemployed or stopped working altogether because they could not find employment. 15 million families - as a result of that financial crisis - lost their homes to foreclosure, as more and more people could not afford to pay their mortgages. As a result of the illegal behavior of Wall Street, American households lost over 13 trillion dollars in savings. That is what Wall Street did 10 years ago.





Believe it or not - and of course we are not going to hear any discussion of this at all - the four largest banks in America are on average 80% bigger today than they were before we bailed them out because they were "too big to fail". Incredibly, the six largest banks in America have over 10 trillion dollars in assets, equivalent to 54% of the GDP of this nation. This is wealth, this is power, this is who owns America.





If any of these financial institutions were to get into a financial trouble again, there is no doubt that, once again, the taxpayers of this country will be asked to bail them out. Except this time, the bail out might even be larger than it was in 2008.









Bernie is right, the facts are all there, except that, again, he is the only one who speaks about it.





“As a result of the rescues and consolidation of financial institutions through failures and mergers during the crisis, the U.S. financial sector is now more concentrated than ever in the hands of a few very large, systemically significant institutions.” Recall that according to chapter 20 conclusions of the US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission,





it supplied, in total, more than $9 trillion to Wall Street firms, commercial banks, foreign banks, corporations and some highly questionable off balance sheet entities. (Much smaller amounts were outstanding at any one time.) Recall also that in December 1, 2010, the Fed was forced to release details of 21,000 funding transactions it made during the financial crisis, naming names and dollar amounts. Disclosure was due to a provision sparked by Bernie Sanders. The voluminous data dump from the notoriously secret Fed shows just how deeply the Federal Reserve stepped into the shoes of Wall Street and, as the crisis grew and the normal channels of lending froze, the Fed effectively replaced Wall Street and money centers banks in terms of financing. The Fed has thus far reported, without even disclosing specifics of its lending from its discount window, that(Much smaller amounts were outstanding at any one time.)













Bill Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, states:





In the savings loan debacle, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, George Akerlof and Paul Romer, who until recently was Chief Economist to the World Bank, wrote that economists didn't realize - because they lacked any theory of fraud - that deregulation was bound to create widespread fraud and a crisis. Now, we know better if we learn the lessons of this crisis, we need not recreate it.





Very conservative, anti-regulatory people hold the White House and key positions in the House and the Senate, and the first thing the industry does is gut regulation. Why? Because it makes the CEOs so wealthy to run these frauds and predation. It's not necessarily good for the banking industry, but it is extremely good for the most senior leaders and they are the ones, of course, who hire and fire the lawyers and the lobbyists, and effectively hire and fire key members of Congress.







