Hash-Tag US Banana Republic

“When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed.”  – Francisco d’Aconia “Money Speech” from “Atlas Shrugged”

The surest sign that a country has become a Banana Republic is the extreme redistribution of wealth. The wealth skew between the upper 1% and the rest started to accelerate in 2008, when the Fed began to slowly hyperinflate the money supply.  Mayer Rothschild famously proclaimed “give me control of a country’s money supply and I care not who makes the rules.”  That is the proclamation not only of someone who understands and knows how to apply monetary theory but of a misanthropic dictator characteristic of the attributes of a Banana Republic.

The United States has become the biggest Banana Republic in history. Blatant, unabashed corruption and an unimaginable degree of wealth redistribution effected by those who have control of the money supply. Moreover, those who were elected or appointed to protect the public from the greed and corruption of corporate America, specifically and especially the Too Big Too Fail Banks and the Military Industrial Complex, have been well paid off to look the other way. That is the definition of a Banana Republic. And this commentary is not addressing the highly problematic, yet covered up, dealings of the current “President” and his son.

I bring this up because Wall Street On Parade has presented more evidence that the U.S. has devolved into a corrupt, self-dealing Banana Republic: “The Fed Is Subsidizing the Money Market Funds Operated by Larry Fink’s BlackRock as BlackRock Manages a Big Part of Jerome Powell’s Wealth:”

Last year, during the financial crisis, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell held five confidential phone calls with BlackRock’s Chairman and CEO Larry Fink. The first call on March 19 lasted 30 minutes; there were two calls in April, one on April 3 and one on April 9, both lasting 15 minutes. A phone call between Powell and Fink on May 13 lasted 30 minutes; and one on November 20 lasted 10 minutes.

That’s a total of 100 minutes that the Chairman of the central bank of the United States spent on the phone with the man who heads the company that is also managing a large portion of Powell’s wealth through its iShares Exchange Traded Funds. The dates and times of the phone calls come from Powell’s publicly-released daily calendars.

Powell’s phone calls with Fink continued this year. On February 5, Powell held a 30-minute phone call with Fink. On March 1 of this year, there was a bizarre hour-long virtual meeting between Fink and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and Fed staff. (Powell’s daily calendars are only currently available through August of this year.)

There is the growing impression that Fink is functioning in a consultant capacity to the Federal Reserve while his company, BlackRock, also manages a significant part of Powell’s wealth. See this report: BlackRock Authored the Bailout Plan Before There Was a Crisis – Now It’s Been Hired by three Central Banks to Implement the Plan

But wait, there’s more:

The Fed also gave BlackRock three no-bid contracts in 2020 to manage the Fed’s corporate bond buying programs. Under those contracts, BlackRock was allowed to buy up its own Exchange Traded Funds.

Now we are learning from Crane Repo Data, that a big chunk of the Fed’s overly-generous Reverse Repo operations have landed in BlackRock money market funds. Crane Repo Data reports that as of September 30, BlackRock Liquid FedFund money market held $84 billion of the Fed’s Reverse Repos while its BlackRock Liquid T-Fund held $65 billion.

This is now the United States.  A bastion of corruption and elitist self-dealing that signals a  hyperbolic wealth-grab ahead of an epic collapse. You can read the rest of the Martens’ report here:  LINK

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