I quit Wall Street and decided that it was time to talk more about what was going on inside it, as it had changed. It had become far more sinister and far more dangerous.
~ Nomi Prins
Today, the 'revolving door' connecting our political and financial systems is evident to anyone with eyes. But this entwined relationship between Washington DC and Wall Street is nothing new, predating even the formation of the Federal Reserve.
To chronicle the evolution to where we find ourselves today, we welcome Nomi Prins, Wall Street veteran turned financial industry reformist, and author of the excellent expose All The Presidents Bankers.
In this well-detailed interview, Nomi goes into depth of the rationale and process behind the creation of the Federal Reserve, and more important, how its mandate — and the behavior of the banking system overall — metastasized into the every-banker-for-himself regime of sanctioned theft we now live with.
Chris Martenson: To me, it couldn’t have been more obviously obscene then in 2010, and I believe maybe 2009, right after the big banks had been handed just vast, huge, very favorable handouts and bailouts during the Great Recession — and then they handed themselves record bonuses. I thought optically that was just horrible. As somebody who was inside the banking system: Are they that tone deaf? What’s behind that sort of behavior?
Nomi Prins: Indeed, they have become very isolated.
It began with the period before the 1970s when different people were rising to leadership in banks, and worsened in the 80s when we started seeing people who had more sociopathic tendencies or less ability to appreciate the idea of the public's economic stability being beneficial to growing their institutions. They no longer viewed it as necessary.
And with the advent of the larger futures market, the options market, the derivatives market, and all the off-shore elements of banking that were able to be developed, so much capital was now available and off of the books that the idea of maintaining some sort of a connection to stability policy — or even to whatever the Presidency might want — dissolved. At the same time, all the Presidents that were involved in running the country around that time didn’t ask or require accountability towards financial stability from them.
So there was a bunch of things that were happening at the same time, and that’s why the media does a poor job of critiquing this because they’re not looking at all the strands. None of this is simple. A lot of things happened at the same time to create these kinds of shifts. On the one hand, you have no restraint: you don’t have the Gold Standard anymore, so you have less of a strain on having something physical be reserved against your leverage. You now have this ability of petrodollars being recycled. You have the ability to leverage more debt. You have less humility. You have a more technologically-advanced, less transparent global financial system, so you can make and hide money easier. And then you have ascendancies of leadership in banks and in the government that are OK with all this, and allow it to fester.
It's all defended as some sort of example of a free market and competition — "the best gets the best", and so forth — when the reality is it just destabilizes the entire system and creates an artificiality. We see central banks supporting all of this mess, as opposed to figuring out what the exit policy is — which none of them have a clue about. That’s really where we’ve evolved to.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Nomi Prins (52m:45s)
by pinecarr