Episode 154: The Bailout Bill 2.0

We discuss the continuing and worsening covid-19 emergency in New York City and take an in depth look at the $6 trillion wall street relief bill (The CARES Act) that just passed congress. It's getting money directly to the people who need it most in this crisis: too big to fail banks who just had their junk bond portfolios blow up.

Citations:

• Amazon’s Bezos, Other Corporate Executives Sold Shares Just in Time. (Wall Street Journal)
  Overview of some mighty convenient stock sales that took place after a classified congressional briefing on covid-19 but before the bottom fell out of the stock market. Jeff Bezos personally sold over $3 billion of stock in the first week of February.
• CARES Act Waives FOIA requirements until end of 2020 (Wall Street On Parade) (Internet archive)
  The CARES Act, which creates a $4.5 trillion Wall Street bailout slush fund, also allows the Fed Board to conduct meetings in secret with no legal requirements to maintain documents or turn them over for FOIA requests. It's entirely possible we never know who gets much of this money.
• Insider Trading Rampant After 2008 Bailout (Reuters)
  Reuters overview of a study finding that insider trading on government connections was rampant with the 2008 TARP bailouts. We can expect the same thing to repeat with this current bailout.
• Fed Puts Blackrock in Charge of Buying Up Its Own Junk Bond ETFs (Wall Street on Parade)
  As part of the CARES Act bailout Blackrock has been selected by the Federal Reserve to manage its corporate bond buying program. Under the terms Blackrock is allowed to use public money to buy its own bonds including highly risky (and possibly even worthless) Junk Bond ETFs. You just can't get more blatant than this.