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Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Change We Are Having A Hard Time Believing In

All during Obama's campaign for President, he repeatedly promised that he would change how Washington works. He also promised to take better care of the middle class, e.g., us. Now the score card is beginning to be clear.

The Treasury dumped Billions of dollars into big banks so they could modify "toxic" (their word, not mine) loans. There are roughly 4 million homeowners who need to modify their loans but only 9% (360,000) of those loans have been modified. Two of the big banks have even worse records. Wells Fargo has only modified 6% of its loans and Bank of America is even poorer at 4%.

We have talked about the obscene bonuses being awarded by Goldman Sachs and others as U.S. household incomes continue to decline, but here is brass ring to watch.

A bond trader who works for Citibank earned a bonus of $100 Million by trading in oil futures and driving up the price of gasoline. There are apparently no questions about the legality of his contract. But here is the kicker! We own a substantial portion of Citibank's stock, e.g., we own the damn place.

So here is where the score card gets filled out. The administration has done very little to help home owners and even less to create jobs for ordinary folks, so watch to see how they handle the $100 million pay day.

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