@Wally
"Wall Street banks recorded record profits for 2021. As the Financial Times noted, they milked the underwriting fees from Fed-based borrowing and profited from mergers and acquisitions. They have pumped their profits, fueled by
roughly $5 trillion in Fed spending since the beginning of the pandemic, as Matt Taibbi points out, into massive pay bonuses and stock buybacks. "The bulk of this new wealth—most—is being converted into compensation for a handful of executives," Taibbi writes. "Buybacks have also been rampant
in defense,
pharmaceuticals, and
oil & gas, all of which also just finished their second straight year of record, skyrocketing profits. We're now up to about 745 billionaires in the U.S., who've collectively seen their net worth grow about $2.1 trillion to $5 trillion since March 2020, with almost all that wealth increase tied to the Fed's ballooning balance sheet."
"As history has repeatedly proven, organized labor, allied with a political party dedicated to its interests, is the best tool to push back against the rich."
www.commondreams.org