Lobbying Bailouts

Putting in context the amount of U.S. taxpayer’s money from the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 U.S. (a.k.a. Bank Bailout) and the amount of money that those bailed out companies spent in lobbying over the last years.

Evidently, there is no point of comparison, but it was interesting to visualize that their lobbying efforts actually acted as “insurance” for their irresponsibility of creating the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

The organizations in question include companies like JP Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, etc. For the chart on the right, I was fair enough to add up to 2008, when the bail out happened, the chart looks like this…

 

* Figures on the left image are calculations by the Center for Responsive Politics based on data from the Senate Office of Public Records. The left side chart taken from http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/

And yet after 2008 lobbying spending continues to grown in respect to previous years. Scary, isn´t it?

So the amount they got for fixing the problem THEY created literally dwarfs the money they spent on bending, shaping or breaking regulation rules of the financial system to carry on their game in the first place. And then there is this IMF report saying “A strong connection exists between financial industry lobbying and favorable financial legislation…”. Seriously, how stupid these guys think people are?

The 2008 crisis situation is as simple as someone deliberately putting his own uninsured house on fire, though receiving the insurance money and walking away with it (with no guarantee that it won´t happen again).

And if that was not enough, they even kept their jobs or were “promoted” to some Government position such as economic advisor to the President or member of the Federal Reserve, which by the way is the organization responsible for “monitoring” and regulating the financial system. Isn’t it funny… and to all extents ridiculous?

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Mexican blogger living abroad and writing about experiences of traveling around México, Italy, India and Spain.

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