Much of the discontent registered Tuesday was driven by memories of the last financial crisis and the bailout of the well-connected on Wall Street. From David Stockman at zerohedge.com:
America’s voters fired their ruling elites last night. After 30 years of arrogant misrule and wantonly planting the seeds of economic and financial ruin throughout Flyover America, the Wall Street/Washington establishment and its mainstream media tools have been repudiated like never before in modern history.
During the course of the past year, upwards of 70 million citizens—–59 million for Trump and 13 million for Bernie Sanders—-have voted for dramatic change. That is, for an end to pointless and failed wars and interventions abroad and a bubble-based economic policy at home. The latter showered Wall Street and the bicoastal elites with vast financial windfalls—-even as it left 90% of Flyover America behind, where households struggled with stagnant wages, vanishing jobs, soaring health costs, shrinking living standards and diminishing hope for the future.
The voters also said in no uncertain terms that they are fed-up with a “rigged” system that has one set of rules for establishment insiders and another for everyone else. In essence, that’s what servergate, the Clinton Foundation pay-to-play scandals and the trove of Wikileaks DNC/Podesta hacks was all about.
Indeed, in his brawling style, the Donald in effect convinced a huge slice of the electorate that the Clintons amounted to America’s leading crime family. And while he may have exaggerated the extent of their personal crimes and misdemeanors, the latter functioned as a proxy for the beltway racketeering that has become the modus operandi of the Imperial City.
Stated differently, the people did connect the dots. There is a straight line from repeal of Glass-Steagall by the Rubin-Clinton democrats in the late 1990s through the resounding repudiations of the Clintons last night.
This string includes the M&A roll-up of the giant Wall Street banks after 1998; the subprime mortgage scams, housing booms and subsequent crash during the next decade; the panicked multi-trillion bailouts of the Wall Street gambling houses in the fall of 2008 and the lunatic spree of central bank money pumping that followed; the soaring stock market fueled by the Fed’s free money that arose therefrom; and the egregious global fund-raising and shakedowns of the Clinton Foundation and personal wealth accumulations by the Clinton’s personally, capped by Hillary’s notorious $250,000 off-the-record speeches to Goldman Sachs.
What happened was that during the eight Obama years, Washington essentially borrowed $10 trillion, or nearly as much as the first 43 presidents did over 220 years, while the Fed expanded its balance sheet by 5X more than had happened during its first 94 years of existence.
This feckless resort to monumental public borrowing and money printing did generate a faux prosperity in the Imperial City and a $25 trillion gain in financial wealth among the gambling and financial asset owing classes at the top of the economic ladder. But the bicoastal elites in Washington, Wall Street and Silicon Valley and its environs, luxuriating in their good fortune, essentially assumed that all was fixed and all was forgotten from the dark days of the financial crisis.
Not at all. The rubes remembered. No one in America supported the Wall Street bailouts except a few ten-thousands Wall Street operators, hedge funds and other gamblers; and the politicians and Keynesian policy apparatchiks who saw it as a new route to power and spoils.
To continue reading: “The Jig Is Up: America’s Voters Just Fired Their Ruling Elites”
