"An Absolute Coup for Wall Street"

Here's a Damning indictment of Quantitative Easing (Printing Money), which was supposed to boost the economy and make more money available to loan out to the American people:

Despite the Fed's rhetoric, [the] program wasn't helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American. The banks were only issuing fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever credit they were extending wasn't getting much cheaper. QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash.

Trading for the first round of QE ended on March 31, 2010. The final results confirmed that, while there had been only trivial relief for Main Street, the U.S. central bank's bond purchases had been an absolute coup for Wall Street. The banks hadn't just benefited from the lower cost of making loans. They'd also enjoyed huge capital gains on the rising values of their securities holdings and fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed's QE transactions. Wall Street had experienced its most profitable year ever in 2009, and 2010 was starting off in much the same way.

So, who wrote this? A fiery, class-warrior marxist? A marijuana-fuelled OWS rabble rouser?

No. It was written by Andrew Huszar, a former Federal Reserve official who quarterbacked the Fed's 1.25 trillion bond purchases during the first Quantitative Easing.  Here's more, from the same article:

Having racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in opaque Fed subsidies, U.S. banks have seen their collective stock price triple since March 2009. The biggest ones have only become more of a cartel: 0.2% of them now control more than 70% of the U.S. bank assets.

As for the rest of America, good luck. Because QE was relentlessly pumping money into the financial markets during the past five years, it killed the urgency for Washington to confront a real crisis: that of a structurally unsound U.S. economy.

Despite these indisputable facts, partisan democrats still dutifully play the old game of "blue team good, red team bad," defending President Obama by crowing about how great the stock market is doing. Does anyone else find this absurd? I thought the Democrat party was for the people, and the GOP for the fat cats?

Don't blame President Obama. He's just faithfully carrying on previous Demican-Republicrat policies of taking care of DC's #1 political constituency: Wall Street.

H/T to Jim at Conservatives on Fire.  He blogged on this first.