Note: The actual cash is printed up as required by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. If a bank's demand for cash rises, they go the Fed and ask for more of these paper notes (cash), and the amount is deducted from the bank's "cash reserves." All banks are required to carry a certain minimum amount of "cash" on their books -- called reserves -- to meet demand from depositors who want to withdraw funds. Those withdrawals can be paid with a check, electronic transfer or with paper currency. And when banks have more paper money than they need, they send it back to the Fed. That amount is then added to the banks' "cash reserves." (In effect, the pieces of paper are replaced with electronic bits in the bank's computer system.) The Fed also controls the size of the nation's money supply.
Hence the web of (bank-generated) debt that binds us all, from which some people (the banksters and those whose political campaigns they fund) say there is no escape.
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Last January, when Obama sided with Paul Volcker's plan re-impose the Glass-Steagall Act, which would have led to a kind of breaking up of the big banks -- they would have had to separate their investment/gambling operations from their traditional banking operations -- the stock market began to fall apart, almost as if it had been prompted to do so by powerful actors operating behind the scenes who wanted to send a message to Obama and the nation: "Don't bring back Glass Steagall, or else!"
Also consider the day of May 6th, earlier this year, when the audit-the-Fed bill got the guts cut out of it. What might have prompted Congress to lose its nerve? Answer: There was a sudden, thousand-point drop in the Dow, which no one could explain, which once again begs this question: Are there persons unknown, operating behind the scenes, who can cause such things to happen when they want to deliver a message regarding pending legislation that might 'rob' the rich of the proceeds from their favorite scams? Then too, also on that day, there was the proposed Brown-Kaufmann Amendment that would have broken up our nation's six largest banks. It was rescinded after the mysterious thousand-point drop. Coincidence? Perhaps not. Perhaps a message was being delivered: "Don't mess with us; this is what we can do to you."
Do we finally have legislation in place that will prevent another economic meltdown?
No, there will be no such prevention until the big banks are no longer "too big to fail." This means they need be broken up one way or another. They either have to be nationalized the way the Swedes nationalized their banks when those banks got into similar trouble, or they have to be taken into receivership, re-staffed with government-appointed executives, reorganized, repaired, with their books cleaned up (i.e. toxic assets sold for whatever price can be gotten), and then, eventually, the banks would be sold back into the private sector.
Goldman Sachs is an investment bank that became a bank holding company overnight, which gave it the privileges of commercial banks, which means that it was suddenly able to borrow money at almost zero percent interest, and use that money to speculate (i.e. gamble with) in the stock and derivatives markets. And given the fact that 80% of Goldman's fantastic profits come from such speculation (with the use of high-frequency trading programs that give them a decidedly unfair advantage over other traders), this privilege they were granted (by "our" government) is essentially a license to steal from the rest of us!
How can we possibly cope with this?
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