Remember the 2008 Wall Street Bailout that infuriated everyone?

That was amateur hour compared to the 2020 Corporate Bailout.

It's like comparing a street thug stealing a woman's purse to a viking raiding party sacking a town.

Where to begin? Let's start with oversight.

The 2008 bailout didn't have nearly enough oversight to prevent abuse, but it at least had to report to the GAO every 60 days, and Congress every 30 days.

The 2020 Bailout has completely done away with all oversight.

First of all, Trump intends to censor the Inspector General.



Trump, though, said Friday he believes the Inspector General needs his permission in order to make such reports to Congress. “I do not understand, and my Administration will not treat, this provision as permitting the [the Inspector General] to issue reports to the Congress without the presidential supervision,” he wrote in a signing statement.

Then Trump fired the Inspector General for the bailout, leaving no oversight on the disbursement of these funds.

Then today we found out that there would be no oversight on the loaning side either.



Tucked into the recent recovery bill was a provision granting the Federal Reserve the right to set up a $450 billion bailout plan without following key provisions of the federal open meetings law, including announcing its meetings or keeping most records about them, according to a POLITICO review of the legislation.

...

Experts say the change could lead to key information about the $450 billion bailout fund, such as which firms might benefit from the program, remaining inaccessible long after the bailout is over.

The Fed loves secrecy. Not just for itself, but also for the banks it protects.

Just a few weeks ago the Fed released a report titled “Value of Opacity in a Banking Crisis.”



So here we go, as to why it’s important for “authorities” to lie about banks during a crisis. It’s not directed at households, as we’ll see in a moment – but at corporations, hedge funds, PE firms, state and local government entities, and other institutional bank customers whose bank balances by far exceed deposit insurance limits and that would yank their mega-deposits out of that bank at the first sign of trouble.

An organization that supports lying to the public while managing trillions of dollars, now has unlimited money and no oversight.

Even today the Fed lied to all of us by portraying it's plan to start buying up junk bonds as something that "will assist households and employers of all sizes and bolster the ability of state and local governments".

Households, state and local governments, and small businesses don’t issue junk bonds.

Lack of oversight is only the start of the problem of the bailout.

Let's look at the crooks involved (so far).

Citigroup is one of the banks selected by the Small Business Administration to handle billions of dollars earmarked in the stimulus bill to help small businesses.



Citigroup’s Citicorp subsidiary was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, a criminal felony count brought by the U.S. Department of Justice on May 20, 2015 for its role in rigging foreign currency trading. Its rap sheet for a long series of abuses to its customers and investors since 2008 is nothing short of breathtaking.

The Federal Reserve has hired Blackrock to steer tens of billions of dollars in bond purchases, again, despite pricing and selling assets for the government at the same time it was helping private clients buy similar assets in 2008.

I lack the ability to sum this up catastrophe properly, so I'll let someone else do it.



According to the language in the recent stimulus bill (CARES Act) passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump, together with an interview Fed Chairman Jerome Powell gave to the Today show on March 26, the nationalization of bad debts will work like this: the U.S. Treasury will hand $454 billion of taxpayers’ money to the Federal Reserve. The Fed will, in turn, hand the bulk of this money to the New York Fed. The New York Fed will then create Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) using the $454 billion as loss absorbing capital (equity) to leverage its purchases of bad debts to $4.54 trillion. Ostensibly, if debt markets keep sinking and the New York Fed needs to buy up more bad debts from the global banks and multinational corporations, Congress and the U.S. Treasury will put the U.S. into ever deeper debt to oblige our multinational overlords. (Before the last financial crisis, U.S. national debt stood at $11 trillion. It has more than doubled in a dozen years to the current $24 trillion. Much of that growth resulted from fiscal stimulus measures to shore up the U.S. economy that multinational banks on Wall Street destroyed in 2008.) So far, the Fed has newly announced it will be engaging in outright purchases of corporate bonds in both the primary and secondary markets, exchange traded funds, asset-backed commercial paper along with its ongoing purchases of Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities. It is also making trillions of dollars in revolving loans to multinational trading houses against collateral that includes stocks. (Former Fed Chair Janet Yellen was on CNBC recently advocating for the Fed to consider outright purchases of stocks and junk bonds, effectively nationalizing those markets as well.)

In theory, a currency's value is based on what the central bank holds in its vault.

So this central bank will be holding Collateralized Loan Obligations (just 6 months ago CLO's were a bubble about to pop), ETF's, and junk bonds in its vault.

Literal junk.

And it will be using criminal organizations to purchase this junk by the billions, with no oversight of any kind, while lying about it.

What could go wrong?