There is no corner of contemporary economic life which is not in thrall to state-sponsored banking, and so no corner of it which is not rigged to favor the players wielding the taxpayer backstop.
American-style fascism only seems most vivid when "banking's" losses are finally socialized through spectacular bailouts. Just as spectacular as the bailouts are the efforts to re-define nearly everything as banking in order to bring it all under its aegis. Think GE, GM, Chrysler, investment banking and AIG. That process of socialized losses continues apace on a smaller scale with every bank failure carefully orchestrated for Friday nights, to which Americans are now so thoroughly inured due to its frequency and efficiency. That is but the ubiquitous residual background radiation of the system's big bang, the collapse of banking's housing collateral, rapaciously used to leverage private shareholder and investor gains.
But even the spectacular blow-ups do not keep our attention for very long. Like the public servants who have succumbed to regulatory capture by industry, our anger is also subject to capture by the power of banking's propaganda, the central message of which is that the collapse of banking as we know it would mean nothing short of civilizational collapse. But it is merely their revolutionary version of civilization, not ours, based as it is on the dictum "How can you respect a man who needs you more than you need him?" Traditional Americans have always believed instead in "Owe no man anything".
Meanwhile the gains accruing to elites manipulating the levers of industries which have installed doors to the government are harder to ferret-out, the heads-they-win side of tails-you-lose. Lately it was LIBOR manipulation which came to the light, which has been rigged for far longer than since the latest financial crisis. Now the municipal bond market's municipal market data index, MMDI, is in the spotlight, according to this story in The New York Times, reproduced here:
Thomson Reuters, which owns Municipal Market Data, said on Monday that it “has been involved in discussions with regulators” about the rates, which influence the prices of bonds and derivatives in the $3 trillion municipal bond market.
The company released the statement after the municipal bond industry’s self-regulator, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, said that its board was “concerned about the transparency” behind the creation of a few indexes used to set prices in the municipal bond market, the most important of which is the M.M.D. index.
What we may find from this is that local taxing districts have been paying way too much for roads, schools, libraries, cops and firemen, providing gains for the few financed once again on the backs of many (property) taxpayers.
