These are the people who claimed to want unbridled capitalism, so let them have it. Cut off the latest handout, also known as QE2, and see how they do without their sugar daddy. They're complete frauds and our political leaders in Washington continue to be as gutless as ever. The Wall Street crowd is not nearly as important as they think they are. Even worse they provide little, if any, benefit to society. It's sickening to see so many Americans struggling to get by while Wall Street sucks up more and more easy money from the government. Here is yet another reason why Ben Bernanke was a bad choice for the Federal Reserve. Giving the Fed the freedom to extend so much influence over the economy is an equally bad decision. Disgraceful, but typical.
Wall Street’s biggest banks, rebounding after a government bailout, are set to complete their best two years in investment banking and trading, buoyed by 2010 results likely to be the second-highest ever.
The five largest U.S. firms by investment-banking and trading revenue -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley -- will likely have a better fourth quarter than the previous two periods, driven by equity underwriting and higher volume in stock and bond trading, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Even if this quarter only matches the third, the banks’ revenue will top that of any year except 2009.
The surge has come after the five banks took a combined $135 billion from the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and borrowed billions more from the Federal Reserve’s emergency-lending facilities in late 2008 and early 2009 following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Since then, the firms have benefited from low interest rates and the Fed’s purchases of fixed-income securities.
