America Convulses in Pain, Fed Bails Out the Wealthy
What’s so insidious about the Fed’s bailouts of investors in hedge funds, mortgage-REITS, stocks, bonds, leveraged loans, and other often risky assets? The destruction of capitalism.
By Wolf Richter. This is the transcript of my podcast last Sunday, THE WOLF STREET REPORT. You can listen to it on YouTube, and you can find it on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and others.
We’re in an economic meltdown like I’ve never seen before. Tens of millions of people have lost their jobs – and so suddenly, that the government data to track them has fallen into chaos, with different agencies reporting data that is all over the place and contradicting each other. None of these systems were designed to track this type of sudden collapse of the labor market during a pandemic.
Then there are the many small businesses that have had to shut down or lost most of their customers and revenues. And these entrepreneurs have no idea if they can make it through this period.
Over the past three months, about 110,000 people in the United States have died from the coronavirus. That number is still growing every day at a rate of about 1,000 deaths. But the efforts to slow the spread of the virus and save lives have caused enormous economic damage.
And people’s frustration and anger with racial injustice has boiled over, and they’re frustrated and angry over a host of systemic issues, including the inequality of economic prospects, and there have been big protests every day around the country for well over a week.
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