Wall Street's culture of greed is back stronger than ever. Despite the recession and bank bailouts, Wall Street bankers are heading for record payouts.
But what makes this really outrageous is that it's all been made possible by the Federal Reserve. Shahien Nasiripour at the Huffington Post reports that nine banks, five of them non-Americans, were able to borrow at an a low rate of 0.0078% from the Fed. Yes, 0.0078%. That's money for nothing.
With so much cheap money, they could afford those outrageous pay rises while the rest of the world convulsed in the financial meltdown.
Indeed, the same goes for the European banks. The Federal Reserve is now the world's banker, the lender of last resort.
In extraordinary revelations, we discover that big non-US banks like Barclays and the Swiss outfit UBS were lining up for money from the Fed during the financial crisis. The Fed provided a mind-boggling $3.3 trillion in aid.
Plenty of cheap money to go around to help line the bankers' pockets.
Still, don't for a moment think that the Fed was saving the world. It was just cleaning up the mess it had created through securitized loans, exported through to banks around the globe. Dodgy securities underpinned one of the big American exports to places like London, Iceland and Ireland, making bankers there very rich.
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