Grubstakers - [Patreon Unlock] Episode 154: The Bailout Bill 2.0

Episode Date: April 11, 2020

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 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.

It's the kind of thing that makes the average citizen puke. I look at this system and say, yeah, you know, what's going on? I don't know anything about this man except I've read bad stuff about him. And I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about him. We are more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. The evil has gone.

Hello, welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires, coming to you from the coronavirus epicenter of the United States, New York City. I'm Sean P. McCarthy, joined by my co-hosts, quarantined in their respective New York City apartments. Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffries. Yogi Paywall. And so we're kind of continuing our look at, you know, this tragedy of the coronavirus, everything that's going on, but also with a focus on who benefits. And so we're talking today specifically about this

massive $6 trillion bailout bill that passed through the House and the Senate. And, you know, who really gets the goodies in that thing. And that'll be the and the Senate. And, you know, who really gets the goodies in that thing? And that'll be the focus of today. But, you know, perhaps we'll just start, as usual, with a bit of an update on everything that's going on in New York City and our respective lives and how you guys are holding up throughout this. Because we did just get the news that this has been the deadliest day in New York history, or in New York history of the coronavirus. Another, I believe, 305 residents of New York City died in the last 24 hours. This is April 3rd, 2020.

And we imagine we're at least a week or two away from the peak of these sorts of daily death counts. I wonder if there's a song we could sing about how we imagine we're just at the peak of these death counts. I will say to protect from the coronavirus, my wife has stopped kissing me, so she's protected at least from all of the ills of coronavirus. Oh, so that's the line she gave you, huh? That's right. I was going to say, it'd be nice though, what if we did like the old David Letterman intro where you go like,

from New York, the most infected city in the world. It looks like April 3rd, there were 1,321 deaths in the United States as a whole. So that's, it's not good news, but it's news. Yeah, and I think New York State as a whole is just under half of that. I think New York State is like just over 500 deaths with 305 being in New York City in the last 24 hours. 680 in New York City in the last 24 hours. I watched a video of the Mayor de Blasio on, I think, MSNBC or something. And he sounded extremely alarmed, which was good, because you should be.

No more trips to the YMCA. He said, like, I've been trying to get all of these different resources from the federal government, but they don't have them, and they don't have any timeline for when I'll get them, like ventilators and whatnot. But he kind of was covering up the fact that early on he was downplaying the scenario and he wasn't he should have had this level of alarm from the beginning and there's like a few

you know there's a few people in government who did but mostly they didn't. And he was one of those people. Well, someone posted a picture, uh, just yesterday, I believe of the two train during rush hour. And it was still like cattle car packed. Like there are still just people shoulder to shoulder, uh, standing in that train.

It, they're still making, I mean, I, I don't know who still has to go into Manhattan to clean the empty buildings, but it's clearly who they're making go to work. And it's just, it's still a complete breeding ground for the virus. Well, and you know, that's something that I've been thinking about because, you know, I've talked about a bit how I used to work at

Whole Foods. I used to work at Zabar's. I worked at a few different, you know, grocery stores in Manhattan. So what are the stores that are still open? You know, pharmacies, grocery stores. And I can tell you from my experience, the grocery stores in Manhattan are staffed by people who live in the Bronx. They come down from the Bronx to work in these grocery stores in Manhattan. So what's really concerning to me is these, you know, people who don't have a choice. They have to go to work. They need the money.

They're coming down from the Bronx, then they're going back to the Bronx, very possibly infected. And, you know, you look at where there are pre-existing health conditions in New York, it is those very poor areas of the Bronx where people have, you know, diabetes or high blood pressure or whatever else.

So, you know, it just really worries me that a lot of these workers who are going into the city, and like you're saying, these packed trains are just going to come back, you know, and get their grandmother sick. And, you know, it's just a really tragic situation we're all watching and helpless to do anything about. Did you guys see the report that the Rikers Island inmates were offered $6 an hour to dig mass graves in New York City? Yeah. From a contingency plan from 2008 when Michael Bloomberg was our mayor, that it would be a mass grave for burying up to 51,000 bodies. That's what our normal society is up to right now. We're just using slaves to dig mass

graves. Just the wealthiest country on earth over here. But you know what? At least we're paying the people digging the mass graves this time. The arc of history is long and it bends towards justice. So now people are getting $6 instead of zero to dig their mass graves true they're getting a little bit less than than minimum wage so i mean that's something well yeah there's a um uh i mean not everyone knows this but new york city has this island called heart island which is a literal mass grave island and you can actually look at it on uh google earth and see the wooden coffins stacked like next to each other in a mass grave in progress and this has been going on it's it's one of the things they kind of made a joke about it on kimmy schmidt where um or a nod to it

where this guy who uh it was like a poor guy who just goes to commercial auditions. They're like, and now he will be launched into the East river. I mean, it's, it's essentially that where if you're pouring in New York, you get thrown in a mass grave on heart Island. Um,

that's where I want to get buried. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's probably where we're all going to end up because there's nowhere else to put the bodies in New York. All the, there are a bunch of graveyards in New York and we're all going to end up because there's nowhere else to put the bodies in New York. There are a bunch of graveyards in New York and they're all full. And so, yeah, they're just stacking bodies here.

And they've been stacking bodies, but now it's at an increased clip. And I guess if you're a relative of someone there, you can get a boat, but it's not open to the public, and so, yeah, they're kicking it into high gear now. Yeah, and also just to go back to that de Blasio thing, I do want to mention, you know, news reports were saying that it took his aides threatening to resign to get him to finally close the schools on the Monday that he did, and this was after, you know, two weeks of people saying close the damn schools, you know. So like, you know, I think the federal government is most culpable here, but it is kind of messed up to see Cuomo and de Blasio lauded as heroes when they saw what was happening in Italy, they had a good two or three week window where this city

should have been shut down at least two, if not three weeks before it actually was and even to go back to the to rikers like when people are telling uh or when i i guess it's it's largely the new york times and other news agencies saying that uh cuomo is a big hero but then you look at the the states of the jails beyond people being um you know paid a little extra to dig the mass graves. On top of that, there are reports that they're just out of soap at Rikers. Oh, wow. And people are just stacked in these large rooms, close quarters. There's reports that in one of them, someone had smeared the word shit in shit on the wall.

Just horrific conditions. And, you know, no one's, a lot of these people are, you know, being held on bail. They haven't even been convicted of anything. And Cuomo is refusing to let them out. And then there was this whole hand sanitizer charade where he claimed that he was making inmates, and I'm sure a lot of people have already heard this, he claimed he was making the inmates produce hand sanitizer for New York, and the reality was they were just relabeling existing bottles of hand sanitizer.

Yeah. It's like even when it sounds like they're like, okay, this is really terrible. They're using slaves to do shit. But then you realize it's not even something useful. Right. It's just re-bottling into this like little branding thing for Cuomo. Yeah. It's getting Cuomo elected president. They're not actually making it.

They're just re-bottling. Right. Every bottle of hand sanitizer comes with a little flyer and Cuomo's policy platform on it. So they are doing something useful after all. They're getting this guy elected. I have to say that, so that big hospital ship,

like the Mercy or whatever that came in, and it has a thousand beds. But it says, they're like, we're only going to take patients who we know don't have the virus. And we don't know who the fuck has the virus and who doesn't. So that just means, and they're just like, okay, I guess we'll just not take hardly anyone then. So there's only like 20 people in there. I've seen reports that the dairy industry is flushing milk down the drains to make sure that their milk doesn't implode. Or I mean explode because they keep making milk and they keep having to store it somewhere. And similar things happening with potatoes where billions of kilos are around the world. This article from the New York Times about eight hours ago, with no fries sold, Dutch farmers face billion

kilo potato pile. And these incidents are happening in the Netherlands, in Korea, in the U.S., all around the world, we are stockpiling food that will be wasted. Well, you know, and this exact same thing happened during the Great Depression. When the price of these things collapses to the point where it's like cheaper to destroy it than to even, you know, pay to transport it for free, the only thing that can happen is the government, which right now is totally asleep at the switch should be buying this stuff and giving it to poor people and hungry people which bernie sanders put out a plan today to do just that but again our federal government is totally asleep at

the switch right now this is this is what happens when you tie food to employment so once everyone sort of like health care is tied to employment so is food essentially so if you have all of the these workers out of work then the demand is just destroyed and there's no there's no profitable way to get milk to people anymore so they would rather it's less expensive for them to just throw it out or try and get the government to just buy it and then they throw it out rather than distribute it. Well, it was, yeah,

it was, um, actually he was dropping on, uh, Steven's TV the other day, uh, while he was working and, uh,

playing, um, some news reports. And, uh, one of the things they mentioned, and we're, as Steven,

we're talking about this, uh, is that now that, um, a lot of the, I mean, the restaurant industry has to shut down in mass, a lot of these are over leveraged franchises that suddenly can no longer no longer have an income stream, and are essentially going to be forced into bankruptcy, which, you know, a few episodes ago, we were talking about whether or not there essentially going to be forced into bankruptcy which you know a few episodes ago we were talking about whether or not there's going to be a financial crisis and this could be one

of the things that kicks off you know takes the coronavirus crisis into uh what wasn't a financial crisis and now very well could become one yeah it's like so this whole thing touched off with the virus and the closures and like okay there wasn't any initial debt trigger and we went over that in a previous episode but we had we kind of had a we had a window of time where congress could have acted to avoid any further debt problems that are spawned by the closures later and they're just not doing that so like if you have we just turned off 30 of the economy and they just thought they could switch it on again but you can't do that if the virus is still out there but they're also not they're not giving people the ability to really stay home and you know pay their bills so like they want everyone to stay home but they

don't give them the ability to do that so something's got to give so people still try to make some money on the side or something and then the virus gets, stay tuned for a Grubstaker's Twitch stream. Yeah, so I guess a green shoots of this crisis is that it's going to force Andy to play GameCube for his rent money. But yeah, and no, like you're saying, Steve, the thing is we're still not testing enough and something, you know, the White House said we're considering, I think is And something, you know, the White House said we're considering,

I think is the quote, four days ago, they said they're considering doing random sample testing of all Americans, which is what you have to do, because this thing is totally out of control. We have no idea where it is. You have to do, you know, random sample testing, so you can get an idea of where this virus is. And only when you have an idea of where this virus is, then you can have some sort of estimate as to when you can reopen. But we still are just flying totally blind right now, you know. And so, like, my prediction that I hope does not come true is that New York City is going to end up being a middle case and not a worst case scenario. Because we've talked about how the states are bidding with each other for supplies. Well, New York is a rich, relatively state.

What happens when this comes to, you know, the very poor states that cannot afford to get into these bidding wars for supplies, you know, or the rural places with a hospital 100 miles away? I think this is going to be absolutely devastating for these areas. Yeah. One thing also that might be flying under the radar is that, you know, when someone can't afford to go to the hospital because they don't have insurance, which is, you know, about to be a whole lot of people, it's possible that there's going to be a ton of people who aren't, even if the hospitals have enough ventilators, even if there's enough to take care of people, a whole lot of people are also just going to end up dying in their own

home. And it's entirely possible that when that happens, they may not even be tested for coronavirus or they may not even test the corpses for coronavirus. There are already reports of that happening in Germanyany where uh it's possible the deaths are being undercounted i think it was germany uh it was it was a european country that wasn't spain or italy uh or maybe it was the uk but um uh there are reports that you know the the deaths are being undercounted because you know they're not counting every, or they're not testing every corpse. And so there are lots of people who are going to die of this

that aren't going to be entered into the official statistics. Yeah, they're going to use the bailout bill to set up a slush fund where they'll give you $50 worth of Trump Casino poker chips if you cook the books on coronavirus death stats. Just say like, yeah, looks like a heart attack to me, boss, and you'll be gambling there in no time.

Oh, I should mention just today on April 3rd, a new monthly unemployment report came out, and guess what? It's woefully out of date the very day it came out. Wow. Yeah, because came out and guess what it's woefully out of date the very day it came out and wow yeah because there i was actually reminded of this by an economist friend that um the survey they use

um it's it's only like a two-week uh it's a one or two-week period survey that they always use it in the middle of the month and in the middle of last month was like most of the closures hadn't happened yet for march so the survey doesn't pick up almost like over half of like the jobless claims so when it came out it said it unemployment the official headline unemployment rate rose to 4.4% from 3.3%, I think. And sounds like, okay, that's like, to the average person who sees that, they might say, well, okay, 4.4%, whatever. But that's so far away from reality.

Because we had over 10 million jobless claims, and almost all of them weren't counted by the report. Right. So it's like the very day it comes out, that's just a useless report. I'm sorry. Plus there are those... I mean, the situation is changing by the day, so this monthly report is not going to be accurate. Plus, there were those statistics that showed all of the... There's also that graph that was making the rounds showing the weekly unemployment cases over the last hundred years or so and it where it's you know it has like what look like pretty major spikes

for the great depression and the 80s and the great recession and then it's and then they include the last week and it's several orders of magnitude higher than any of them well not several orders of magnitude but like an order of like 10 times higher than any weekly unemployment, newly unemployed number. Yeah, I mean, if you're looking for like accurate measures or at least sort of accurate ones, I would just go by the weekly jobless claims. Because like the way this depression really is moving forward, like that's the monthly report just won't cut it that's so great that like all these boomers who just never went through anything difficult in their entire lives and spent their entire existence telling us that our generation is soft and now it's like we're the ones who are like not getting government social security as we go through uh like the great depression on crack plus the 1918

pandemic like the great depression's so bad that in graph form, it dwarfs the Great Depression. As though, you know, this is like comparing the moon with the sun. And it's also the second major economic collapse of our lifetimes. I know. I was like, once this all kicked off, or it looked like it probably would, based on what Congress was not doing, I was like, I can't go through this again. Come on, man. Twice? At least we're in college the first time. Yeah, I was safe as a college student, I guess, for the first one.

You know what group that I'm... I got two things to say. Do you guys see that thousands of Zoom video calls were left exposed on open web? This article just came out like a few hours ago, but basically, you know, Zoom, as we all know, has grown. They reached more than 200 million daily customers or users last month, up from 10 million in December. But apparently, a whole bunch of them were left up and the videos viewed by the washington post included therapy

sessions and orientation for workers doing telehealth calls somebody teaching someone how to do a brazilian wax and they're just all up on the open web right now and eric yuan is like oh we're working on our security but they're just those fucking idiots yeah he doesn't give a shit he didn't give a fuck like yeah as we said it's it's riddled with um security issues and it it they don't want to do anything about it because it makes it harder quote-unquote harder to use in other words it's just not a quick link to click on exactly and the second thing i want to say is like i know this seems fucked up but you know those people that were stockpiling the n95 masks or the clorox wipes and then they

were forced to give it up by uh authorities because they were basically being harassed online by people that found out that they were doing this there's a vice article about one person storing clorox wipes and then somebody else storing N95 masks. And so the government came in and took them all from them. I think those people were correct. I don't get why if Amazon or a fucking bank hoards and then it fucks over human beings, that's okay. But these entrepreneurs seeing a tragedy come up and taking advantage of it are being penalized for being the social

engineers that they are by predicting the future crash coming our way. They're just smart investors. They're value investors. Exactly. Yogi, I do the contrarian takes on this podcast. No, I remember seeing so many people on Twitter and the internet just be like, oh man, fuck these pieces of shit. And I'm like, I don't know, after doing over 150 of these episodes when it comes to pieces of

shit it's rarely the people on the ground i'm also watching the wire right now and so all of my all of my research has been riddled with like yeah this is good research but the major above me won't let me won't let me put this on air, you know. Well, actually, though, that is an interesting point you make, Yogi, because, you know, these what you call small business hoarders are being demonized. But, you know, literally Amazon's job is to be a big business hoarder. And nobody gives a shit. Amazon can literally go, hey, you sell diapers, diapers.com, but we want your website. You don't want to sell to us?

We're going to undercut all of your products and sell them cheaper until you sell your company to us. That's totally okay. But my man Carl wants to buy 18 pallets of N95 masks before a virus comes to the U.S. And fucking not only are U.S. individuals not recognizing this, but our own government is fucking up and not even realizing what's going on. he in car my friend does but he's being penalized for it well that's interesting because i'm remembering there's a story uh in brooklyn a guy had a million and 95 masks and the fbi fucking kicked in his door and seized them he apparently spit on the fbi agents um

and you know so i read that and i was like, I wouldn't ask until he got what he deserved. But then you stop and you think it's like, well, the FBI is not kicking in Amazon's door. They're not kicking in Walmart. They're not grabbing their masks. And that's what should be happening. The government should be seizing these things from all private actors,

but they're only doing it to the small fish. And we are pitiful industrial planning. We can't even make these masks in this great country of ours so it's just stupid yeah i've got these i mean the whole i've got this um i bought this uh mask so that uh like months ago like last october or something so that cold air wouldn't make me cough when I bike because I'm a delicate boy. And it's, um, I,

I found it. I, it's this like fancy, like wraparound mask that has Velcro and it's got N 99 replacements. Oh, and, um, I,

you're, you're taking away like two masks from doctors i'm just thinking about how funny it would be if uh the fbi listens to this episode and seizes andy's mask i've got that and i've got in 99.9 great yeah i've got an n99 with like two refills and then i've also got a full-on respirator for when i was just like uh really into mixing resins and um just dangerous chemicals that you're not supposed to breathe in um in my tiny apartment um and so dude the only people to survive are going to be the people who have like gas mask bongs just like the laziest members of society all have the respiratory equipment necessary to

survive this pandemic now i have to come to them and they're just like well well motherfucking well well now like i wear this mask outside and people like hey where'd you get that and i'm like i i got a month ago off off amazon i don't i i'm sorry i can't like i feel like it's it's become this weird status thing to have this weird mask that i was afraid to wear on my bike because it looks so fucking corny and now it's like the the cool thing and like even the n99s like those are so thick that you can't really um it's really hard to actually breathe with the things in. And so now I'm thinking of replacing it with a couple coffee filters or something to just cutting up coffee filters.

I don't know if that's an equivalent to an N95, but it might... Andy, we get it. You're a hipster N99 mask you should okay you had it before everyone else and now when people see you rocking it they're like yo man that's pretty cool and you're like yeah you know i was wearing this shit before anyone thought it was cool but and now you want to misuse the equipment as well not even put the filters in but put coffee filters because you're such you're such a hipster malpractice with n95 masks is your new thing because we're all going to be doing it in a

near future not using those masks i can't breathe with it yeah you're not supposed to breathe andy that's the new rule no breathing outside andy at like some cool brooklyn party standing like six feet away from everybody else being like yeah I mean I guess the N95 mask is pretty cool but you know I've got the latest the N99 mask. Your social like back once we're done with the virus panic and people don't have to

distance anymore you're just like your social capital plummets because you have like all of the all of your mask and like fake concern. You just have a ventilator it's unfortunate too because like you like the apparently the mask isn't going to do much to protect you um it's mostly to protect other people and you know i had kind of a um uh i came down with something maybe it was a cold maybe it was the coronavirus because it's been going on for a couple weeks.

But when you breathe out of it, it's got these kind of little flaps so that the air, when you breathe out, goes out easily. But what that means is that you're still spreading when you wear it. And whenever you see a mask with a like a little um kind of plastic thing like it looks like a regular like mask for spray painting but it's got a little plastic thing sometimes with the 3m logo on it that that's a little thing so that when you breathe out the air comes out easier but what that means is that it's completely uh it's not filtering the air that goes out when you breathe out so the efficacy of wearing those even to protect other people is questionable andy at the party like yeah i kind of like 3m more when they

were just making those like small batch n99 masks i don't really like when they like went mass production on the n95s oh man i mean yeah the masks are good now but have you if you tried them before corona man it was a whole different experience it's it's not just about making the masks anymore man you know the fame came into the thing i just want to um announce now that uh the grubstakers now have three mustaches uh it used to be two uh now we're up to three we're still waiting on steven to um come around in solidarity come on jeffrey you're gonna put no scruff underneath your nose i could let it grow yeah this will be a social experiment Let's just see if it's possible. It can't be worse than Sean's facial hair.

That's like, however bad it gets, it can never be better than Yogi's because Yogi has an amazing beard and it cannot be worse than Sean who insists on having a terrible beard all the time. I'll grow my neck beard. But I guess we should transition to the subject of the episode today, our main focus. And I think kind of how I wanted to lead into that is talking about insider trading.

Because we did an episode recently about the senators and congresspeople insider trading on this coronavirus news. And with this big slush fund that just passed through Congress, I think we're going to see a lot more of that. And actually, I wanted to start with a Reuters article, which talks about new research from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Stanford University, the University of Cambridge and IESC Business School. And I'm quoting from Reuters, they found insider trading profitability jumped dramatically during the 2007-2009 global financial crisis and subsequent government bailout. And they specifically looked at the $700 billion troubled asset relief program, the original 2008 bailout. online this month found evidence of abnormal trading by politically connected insiders 30 days ahead of the TARP infusions, which either boosted or hit company share prices depending on the situation. And, you know, they go through the methodology, but basically they looked at,

you know, officers and directors at 497 publicly traded institutions between 2005 and 2011. So before and after the bailout. And what they found was during the period over which TARP funds were dispersed, the one month ahead future returns between purchases and sales by insiders with political connections was 8.89% versus 2.81% for those without political connections. So what this study proves pretty conclusively is that there was massive insider trading around the previous government bailout, and the amount of money they're putting into this one,

you know, it dwarfs the previous one. So we have to imagine that there will be another wave of insider trading as the Trump administration starts doling out this money. Yeah, it seems pretty clear that money, corruption, and our government go hand in hand in hand. So they have the same oversight institutional setup as the TARP program, but for an even larger pile of money. Right. And not only that, something we'll talk about is wallstreetonparade.com, which is a great resource I really recommend to people.

But they found language within the bill that passed through the Congress, which essentially makes FOIA, it makes it so that the Federal Reserve in their meetings about how to distribute this money does not have to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests until either the president says the emergency is over or the end of the year, whichever comes first. So essentially, they don't have a legal requirement to keep notes because the only reason we know what the Fed did with a lot of the money the last time is they lost a court battle over the Freedom of Information Act. So it is very possible that this time around, we just don't know where billions of these dollars end up going. So billions of these dollars could just go into fucking Ivanka's pockets, theoretically? Well, because like, so this is the thing, like the law, you know, the Democrats got a thing in there that says the Trump, family members of Trump, as well as members of Congress are not allowed to benefit from this. But Trump in a signing statement said that he's not going to turn over any documents to this

inspector general that the Democrats set up. He's not going to respond to any document requests. He's not going to recognize them at all. They now by law don't have to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests. They don't have to keep documents and then just quoting from vox earlier last week trump declined to commit to exempting his business interests from bailout funds telling reporters quote let's just see what happens unquote and so like i was saying on twitter and i honestly believe this if trump advisor if trump's advisors were smart they would tell him just put the entire 4.5 trillion in the trump corporation and yeah just let you know delta airlines let boeing let them all go bankrupt and then just buy them out from trump you can own this entire country you know trump should just do a leverage buyout of the entire country and then they'll have no choice but

to deal with him he'll'll own everything. Just buy California. Yeah, so it has, to me, just like fundamentally what I'm reading from the bill is it's a larger pile of money with the same or worse oversight as the 2008-9 bailout bill. So it has sort of like a board of trustees type thing in Congress in theory, and the inspector general. But we already know from the previous experience that they weren't enough to prevent what seems

a lot like fraud from occurring last time, so why would it work this time with more money? Right. And like, and that's the insane thing where this bill passes through the Senate 96 to zero, it passes through the house on a voice vote. So you don't know how your congressmen voted. They're all going to say they were against this a year from now. But, you know, it's like, and it's, it was entirely like, you know, what Naomi Klein talks about in the shock doctrine where you have this crisis of coronavirus, and they saw how can we use this to get something crazy great for our donors.

And that's where, you know, the main part of this, the $4.5 trillion for Wall Street comes from that. It has nothing to do with the coronavirus crisis. It's just a massive slush fund where, I mean, it feels like we've got the worst of both worlds. Like, we don't have a national financial system. We don't have a state bank. We have the state as backstop for a bunch of private banks. Like, these banks can't exist without trillions of dollars of public money infusions. So, you know, private profits and public money.

Well, they were just enjoying lattes and avocado on toast too much you know they really weren't looking at their money the way they should be focusing on retirement and and metamucil uh boeing is one company that approached the government for a bailout and if you look at their balance sheet i mean like they they don't even really need one so that's the government for a bailout. And if you look at their balance sheet, I mean, like they, they don't even really need one.

So that's sort of like one difference with this time that makes it so disgusting is that companies that don't even need bailouts are asking for money. Right. So like you could make the case that maybe the airline industry is especially hard hit and okay. They need some sort of bailout, albeit with strings attached. Well, they're probably going to get one, but some sort of bailout albeit with strings attached

well they're probably going to get one but there's not going to be any strings attached and on top of that boeing might get a bailout and they don't even need one well what was it uh boeing said that um when it was floated that boeing would have to give um some control over to the government, they immediately were like, okay, well, we don't really need the bailout. We can find other ways to get money. It's like, well, if you're going to be like that about it, we don't need it.

Yeah, and then, of course, Congress's reaction was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We'll give you the money. This was just an idea we had. We don't have to do that. What we really care about is giving have to do that. Yeah. You know, we, we really, we, what we really care about is giving you money.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. And that's the thing is like, you saw some stuff going around about how, you know, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi got played because Trump said, oh,

I'm just going to ignore the inspector general. But no, this is exactly what both parties donors want it. They saw a crisis and they're like, Hey, we have a great opportunity to get a ton of free money from the government. So, you know, it is just something where each side, the Democrats and the Republicans, have enough plausible deniability to point at the other side and say, oh, you know, they stacked it up with giveaways. We had no choice but to go along with it.

But in reality, both parties got exactly what they wanted. And, you know, it's just a situation where I think the corruption in our government has reached a level that it wasn't even at 10 years ago. Yeah, definitely. And I think Citizens United actually played a big part in that. We've talked about it a bit on the Koch brothers episode about how that really just brought billionaires into almost total control of our political process. But the previous bailout, you know, had, I think it was 24, 25, 26, somewhere in that range, votes against it in the Senate. This one had zero votes against in the Senate, and they didn't even bother to record a vote in the House. It's just so clear that this is entirely being done, our

country is entirely being operated for the benefit of the wealthiest donors and they saw an opportunity to get some free money from the public purse from this crisis I just want our listeners to know that when Sean said zero he did it in the same vein of the white power symbol he didn't just do pointer finger middle finger ring finger no no no he went thumb to pointer and then three up in the air to let you all know that the subliminal messaging that's going on this show continues even through Skype

word yeah Yogi's Yogi's beginning his pivot to pivot to MSNBC commentator so he's he's got to throw us under the bus now we're taking it back we're taking it back. We're taking the symbol back for drug stakers.

Make okay okay again. Also, this may not be worth noting, but we are in the golden age of stupid acronyms on coronavirus response packages. The bailout bill is officially titled the CARES Act, which is Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security. Get the fuck out of here. And then there's an even worse one, which is Andrew Cuomo's executive order, which is the uh andrew cuomo's executive order which is called pause and that is a policy that assures uniform safety for everyone they couldn't even have made it like pant they couldn't even made the pandemic or the p for pandemic it's just

policy that assures uniform safety for everyone like we're just a bunch of fucking toddlers enough with these forced acronyms and then they didn't even you didn't even use pandemic come on they didn't even yeah 10 point policy that assures uniform safety for everyone it's like a someone who writes in to Dan Savage. Right, right. Yeah, this is our new doc bill. It's Don't Observe Cash Flow. And if you oppose it, you are disrespecting the doctors who are on the front lines of this pandemic.

Did you guys cheer at 7 p.m.? Did you go out your windows and cheer for our healthcare professionals? Are you not a true citizen of the world? Oh, shit. When was that? Every day at 7 p.m. If you're not out making noise out your window, you don't respect nurses, doctors. You got to support the medical staff

and the essential employees right now, everybody, just like we do with troops and the CIA and all other entities that may be killing people secretly. I'm doing something more important, which is saving the kingdom of Hyrule. Oh, okay. Well, that's an essential service, so you're the one that we're cheering for.

Yeah. I'm like that Japanese audience that saw the first screening of Star Wars I actually believe silence is the highest form of respect I can show

to our medical professionals to not even disturb them with noise I well okay I didn't do

the 7pm one but I went out at 8pm to cheer on the Twitch streamers who have been going this whole time. Like, entertaining people who are stuck at home. Out my window, I can see the Brooklyn Hospital Center. And the last handful of weeks, there have been these two red-tailed hawks that have been circling the hospital every other day, basically.

And at first, a few weeks ago, pre-coronavirus pandemic, safety regulations and stuff, you see some big old birds at your window. You're like, oh, fucking cool, hawks. But now when I see it, it just seems like the vultures are slowly getting ready. They're like, all right, not too much longer until the death permeates this entire area. Yeah, they're like uh they're like that one that one looks pretty weak i bet i bet if the two of us work together we can lift it

yeah i think that uh they have a nest on top of the brooklyn technical high school oh oh we've these are the ones we've seen right yeah you guys saw these birds yeah i i've yeah i've seen those and i i just imagine someone just dragging themselves to the hospital on the verge of death and then they see a squirrel and then just watch it get killed and they're like well that's that's not a good sign now i'm just imagining somebody at the hospital laying on their deathbed, looking out the window, and then seeing Yogi in sweatpants eating popcorn and staring at them. How dare you think I eat popcorn in sweatpants? I'm not some sort of fucking Cretan plebeian that would eat popcorn while watching people die. No.

Me? I'd go for a fancy meal, like some Nutter Butters. Something sweet. When Yogi eats popcorn, he does it in active wear. With Gatorade or Blue Powerade by my side because I'm going to build up a sweat. But before we talk a little bit more about kind of the details of the bailout bill, I did just want to highlight a bit of a follow-up again to our congressional insider trading episode. A bit of a follow-up where we talked about, you know, these congresspeople, these senators who get these briefings trading on inside information.

But something we only kind of touched on is that if you're a donor to these congresspeople, senators, if you're a powerful business person, if you have connections, you're also going to get access to that inside information. And there was a Wall Street journal article guys i gotta go uh there was a wall street journal article that came out recently quote the title is amazon's bezos other corporate executives sold shares just in time they talk about jeff bezos unloaded about 3.4 billion in amazon stock in the first week of February, right before the stock market peak. Yeah, $3.4 billion in Amazon stock. And he unloaded it right after this January 24th classified Senate briefing on coronavirus, where they, we don't know exactly what they said, but they probably said this is going to be like the 1918 pandemic. Because, you know, one of the senators present at the

briefing said something to that effect later. But I just want to quote one thing from this article, quote, more than 150 executives and officers individually sold at least $1 million worth of stock in February of March this year, after having sold no stock in the previous 12 months, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. And they go through a couple of the people involved in this. It includes Mark Rowan as a co-founder of Apollo Global Management. James Murin is the CEO of MGM Resorts. He sold a bunch of MGM Resorts stock right before the bottom fell out of that.

Apparently, the CEO of BlackRock, Lawrence Fink, also sold at least $25 million of his company shares February 14th. And they go through some examples, but just, you know, dwell on that for a second. 150 different executives and officers sold more than a million dollars worth of stock, having sold no stock in the last 12 months. And they all sold right at the peak of the market. So these people have access to information that you do not. They are not necessarily any smarter than you. They just have better government connections. You know who the rest of the stockholders are?

You with your 401ks. Yes. They dumped onto you and your retirement plan. Well, they took your money and ran. Yeah, basically. Which is a common theme in the upper echelon of the elite, to take your money and run. As we are currently seeing with our stock market and how it's been gutted, people that have a lot of money are using the time to take to their advantage and profiting as much as they can.

Oh, are millions of people going to be affected and thousands, if not more going to die? Yes. But if you invest in Johnson and Johnson right now, you can make three cents on the dollar. That's more important. This is like,

this also goes into why people are fighting Bernie Sanders so hard. And you know, the finance industry. It's not just because they're opposed to people getting health care. or just these programs with a lot of private money that is contributed by individuals who don't necessarily control it. As soon as you take systems like that out of private hands and investors and replace it with a government-run program, suddenly these people don't have as much money to play with and make money off of. And that is an existential threat to these people. And so it's not just that they don't want people to have healthcare, it's that they know that as soon as those dominoes stop falling, the free money machine is going to get shut off. Yeah. We've said it before, but the 401k system or the defined contribution plans for workers that replace the defined benefits plans of unions. the only reason people accumulate wealth the only reason workers try so hard to accumulate wealth

generally is to secure their basic needs such as like this basically just comes down to shelter medicine and food and education like for them or their children and like those are sort of the main concerns so like if you start this is if you start trying to guarantee basic goods as just like a human right or something that takes away a need for people to build wealth on a massive scale and wall street is currently how they do it by managing big pension funds and 401ks and stuff so they make money off those fees it doesn't matter what direction the stock goes they just get fees for managing it all these huge asset managers and like if you have medicare for all or if you guarantee like public housing or something or or

um have like a food program. Wall Street correctly interprets that as existential threats to themselves. So it's like it's a really stark division of interest there between Wall Street and Main Street. Yeah, it's like you look at a lot of these like hedge fund billionaires and their personal net worth is

close to the total amount of money that they control with their hedge funds and you have to ask yourself how does how does someone who controls a certain amount of money suddenly have you know uh like a net worth that's approximately like a third of all that money. And that's because, you know, they're skimming so much of it off for themselves, profiting basically off of people's retirements. And I'm sure money that goes into like other things like insurance, you know, a lot of that money that people pay into insurance, you know, it gets reinvested.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Stephen, but I'm pretty sure a lot of that money gets reinvested into, you know, financial vehicles, not unlike hedge funds. And it's another money machine for people yep yeah and you know i want to emphasize that we are a comedy podcast before i say this next thing but um you know like just dwell on that for a second your congress people your senators they find out at the end of january that this is going to be the 1918 pandemic all over again. They don't tell you. They don't warn the public. They go tell their donors. They tell their donors what's up so their donors can dump stock. And then not only that, once it's clear to everybody how bad it is, they don't pass a bill to help you. They pass a bill to help their donors. So their donors,

after dumping all this stock, can get a free spigot of government money. So I guess my question is, how long until it's relevant that we are the most armed country on the face of the earth? Which I am saying as a comedy podcast host. Well, the scary thing with that is that all the armed people, they're also getting told by these politicians

that it's a hoax or it's caused by, uh, some kind of foreign power. And, you know, a lot of these people are generally pretty malleable and, uh, that actually, you know, it's, it's fun to say like, oh, well, the chickens are going to come home to roost for these policy people. But the reality is it's probably going to be something much more cruel for some of the most marginalized people in the country already. Yeah. It seems like the Titanic is sinking and the captain, instead of making sure everyone has lifeboats, is going, you know what?

I need a lifeboat and maybe my family and a few friends, but everyone else, fuck them. Actually, to take that Titanic analogy one step further, a lot of the survivors said that some of the bravest people on the Titanic were the musicians who played as the ship went down and um you know helped everyone to at least you know have have something beautiful and all those musicians died and i'd like to think that us podcasters are carrying on their legacy um did you know they say the bravest musicians actually made their patreons free for one month when they knew the Titanic was sinking.

But, you know, so with the time we have left, I want to just kind of go through the quick highlights of the bailout bill. You know, just kind of some of the things we've been referencing here. I just read through like a brief Vox write up of it. I'm not going to read the entire thing, but there's a $500 billion loan program, and about $50 billion of this is for passenger airlines, cargo airlines, businesses that are necessary to national security. But then the other $450 billion of this goes to a special fund overseen by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and the Federal Reserve to, quote unquote, provide liquidity to the financial system. And so we've been referring to this $4.5 trillion number when the actual bill says it gives them $450 billion. But why that's relevant is this $450 billion lets the Federal Reserve set up

what are called special purpose vehicles, and each of these could be leveraged 10 times. So every dollar in assets it has, it can borrow another $10 and lend it out. So $450 billion gets leveraged 10 times, can become up to $4.5 trillion. That's why we're referencing this. And special purpose vehicles are kind of like, well, they were used by Enron, I know. They were used in the previous financial crisis as well. Steve, is there anything you'd like to explain to our listeners about special purpose vehicles? Well, they typically, so like the Federal Reserve has what are called open market operations going on all the time,

buying up government securities or lending out some funds and collateralizing them. And we went over that in a couple episodes ago but they also have the special purpose facilities that they need congressional oversight or at least like like a blanket authorization to do so the treasury congress authorized a So the Treasury, Congress authorized an amount of capital against which the Federal Reserve could lend for these special purpose vehicles. And they're able, they have to maintain a 10% capital ratio so they can effectively, if you want to think about it this way multiply that capital base by 10 percent and lend out quote that money and but this isn't like this isn't just something to control like to control short-term interest rates or something it's just directly lending to industries

and it's not only banks either so you can have like a facility that is helping out boeing or something right and because you know we mentioned about the foia disclosure we might never know everything they do with this giant pool of capital yeah um and then you know we mentioned there's uh the democrats got language in there that a special inspector general would go would be set up in the Treasury Department who's supposed to report to Congress on what they're doing with all this money. Trump in a signing statement said he will not allow any reporting to Congress without his permission, won't comply with any of the IG's request for documents. So this sets up a congressional panel to review these IG reports, but they're going to be empty blank reports. Like this guy's not going to know any more than the rest of us.

So I mean, this is just completely toothless oversight. And you know, it's been written about and I think it's true. Steve Mnuchin has suddenly become the most powerful Secretary of the Treasury in the history of the planet. He has 4.5 trillion to play with. And I guess we should just mention a couple other things in this bill. $150 billion for state and local governments. You might have heard most adults making less than $75,000 a year are going to get a check for $1,200. One check. That's what you get. That's your bribe.

Fucking worthless almost. You just get eaten up by your bills after one month. Right. Less than that even. Half of less less rent plus you have to file your taxes first and so they delayed taxes until july but you know a lot of fucking good that's gonna do if you can't like get your money until you do your taxes yeah so if you have if you have a direct deposit on file with the irs that's how it will come. If it seem like a loan but I think they just worded that in a way that it's means tested like above 75,000 you get less and less and less so they're gonna check your income and then if you made more than 75,000 they're gonna give you less all the way down to zero but yeah so but it's just

something where, like we were just saying, like, this is clearly not adequate for this crisis, because, you know, the one, I think the best thing about the bill is, of course, you know, Bernie helped get the extra unemployment insurance, you know, $600 extra per week, in addition to, like like the base state level for four months, an expansion of who qualifies for it. So I think they really bought themselves four months. And then what happens at the end of the four months, we don't know. But what we do know is a lot of these jobs are not coming back. And I think this is a real problem that I don't think they're going to fix. I was amused that one of the main republican talking points against

the unemployment insurance thing was well now those insurance unemployment insurance are so good that people who still have a job will just quit so they can get it i'm like well first of all you can't quit of your own volition and then receive unemployment insurance in a lot of cases but secondly i would say that if there is a discrepancy between lower wage workers and unemployment insurance that's more of an indictment of our woefully inadequate minimum wage law for most of the country that's not that's not like a inadequacy of the bill this is like one of like the few sort of good parts of the bill yeah like thanks to bernie sanders it's it's an extra 600 per week uh and an additional um 13 weeks of unemployment benefits which speaking personally

uh for the next few weeks i'm going to be making more money than I've ever made in my life. And I'm, I'm getting my, I, I, I'm getting my donations back in, in spades. And the Sanders campaign better fucking like Blair this shit. On a megaphone because he is giving people more money,

uh, through his work to add extra unemployment benefits. Um, he, I mean, through that work, he's giving people more money than any politician has ever given anyone. And I mean,

if that's not a better case to become president, uh, I don't know what is, I don't know. Joe Biden sexually assaulted a woman. And I mean, if that's not a better case to become president, I don't know what is. I don't know. Joe Biden sexually assaulted a woman. And I mean, that seems pretty presidential these days. Well, you know, I know the Sanders campaign follows my Twitter for strategy advice. But if anyone there, if anyone there is listening, I would I would just like to say, you know, we mentioned earlier in this episode, Bernie's bill as to what to do. He wants to give every American $2,000 a month to stay home. In addition to like these other benefits we mentioned with regard to, you know, feeding hungry people, using the Defense Production Act to get the government totally involved in the supply chain of medical supplies, etc, etc. And you know, what I would say to the Bernie campaign is if you have any money in the tank, just put the fact that you want to do this on television ads in

any place that is still going to vote. Because you know, if this doesn't wake people up to Bernie's message, what he's proposing to do during this crisis versus what everyone else is proposing to do, if that doesn't wake people up, then then nothing was going to. So you might as well just roll the dice on this. And, you know, I think he has a very persuasive argument for what is to be done from here. A fundamental shift is going to happen in this country, whether or not it's for you or against you. So at this point, the main thing to learn is that if action is not taken right now, it will lead to problems in the future because of inaction yep and you know one thing i've noted on uh you know ever since that episode we did um about sean's

tweet uh all of bernie's backgrounds just wall to wall american flags big flags medium flags he's wearing an american flag necktie that is very uh respectfully folded according to army specifications that's right his is he wears a suit that's uh kind of like the question mark guy but it's an american flag with 20 lapel pins on each side like military badges yeah i liked when he he began his fireside chat by uh slapping someone who he said spit on a vietnam war veteran i thought that was a nice touch um oh yeah but just like a couple last highlights from this bill it gives 100 billion to hospitals which you know again the government should just nationalize these things, but they get $100 billion in cash. It gives $50 billion to increase medical equipment capacity

and $367 billion in loans for small business. And people have pointed out these loans for the small businesses are going to have much more burdensome paperwork than if you get to walk through the velvet rope and go see the Federal reserve and get your big pile of cash hey maybe we should um uh dip into that and finally get some merch going you know it's true like apparently on twitter people were saying like they they might just be shoveling money out the sba so we maybe we could get some grub stakers bucks we have we have we are small business owners we have a small business let's get a loan uh let's get some grub stakers bucks we have we have we are small business owners we have a small business let's get a loan uh let's get some merch going and if that loan goes up uh we uh you know we walk away and uh we suddenly have the billionaires boys podcast yeah we do an ibg ybg

i'll be gone you'll be gone we were thinking we were thinking of laying off our 100 staff but um we could get a loan. If we get one of the loans, we can actually keep them all on payroll. I don't know, Steve. Laying off 100? I think we got to lay off all 500 of them. We have a Grub Stiggers call center, actually. It was kind of an afterthought when we were setting up the company but it actually exploded so we we get audited and they're like it says that your list of uh employees it's just a bunch

of twitter handles um that correspond to all the twitter accounts that follow you is that um but so at the time we have left i just want to go through a couple articles on WallStreetOnParade.com. This is by Pam Martins and Russ Martins. They write about, they're the people who broke this FOIA secrecy thing. They quote from the bill itself. It says the Federal Reserve Board, the chairman and the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System, if they determine in writing that unusual and exigent circumstances exist, the board may conduct meetings without regard to the requirements

of Section 552B of Title V U.S. Code during the period beginning on the date of enactment of this act and ending on the earlier of the date of which the national emergency is declared by the president to have ended or the year terminates. So again, just quoting from the article, this could mean that the American taxpayer may never learn why it went into into debt to the tune of $455 billion if no records are being maintained until, of course, conveniently after Donald Trump's re-election. And then, you know, it also talks about, they also have another article about, we've mentioned the very strange power that Steve Mnuchin is going to have over this, where it's not just the Federal Reserve.

Like, they talk about these exchange stabilization funds, and they highlight from the law in italics that the Secretary has considerable discretion in the use of ESF resources. If the financing is used to finance foreign governments, all operations require the explicit authorization of the Secretary of the Treasury. The money can be used with the approval of the president. It may deal in gold, foreign exchange, and other instruments of credit and security. So, you know, it kind of goes through. You can look at the article for more detail. But it says that this is going to be an operation done hand-in-hand with the Secretary of the Treasury, and Steve Mnuchin will have a wide breadth of oversight of where this money ends up going. And, you know, because he's a robo-signing, home-stealing fraudster, that is not particularly encouraging to me.

Well, I hope they bail out our friends at Deutsche Bank. The proud American behemoth, Deutsche Bank. I want to do a future episode on it just because we've got a little, we're running close to our limit on time here. I want to do a future episode on Deutsche Bank because my pet theory, and I don't have evidence for this, but I believe it, is that Deutsche Bank is the new BCCI, where we did that whole episode about how this is like a bank used by like drug cartels and terrorists and intelligence agencies. This is an off-the-books criminal bank. And then it goes under in 91. Well, all those people still need an off the books criminal bank so some bank has to replace

bcci and why not deutsche bank well i one thing um i i thought was delightful was that in a similar vein uh hsbc uh before the coronavirus thing uh hit like they were just going through extreme layoffs not long after El Chapo Guzman was sentenced to life in prison. Right. Don't look into why 20 tons of cocaine were found on a JPMorgan Chase shipping freighter you know uh for this episode i looked at doja bank and i found this book that came out recently called dark towers by david enrick and it covers doja bank from its uh inception this month or sorry last month would have been their 150 year anniversary which they almost celebrated but coronavirus certainly cut into their celebration. So they literally canceled that party and decided to

cut bonuses for managers and stop layoffs, including Citibank and a few other banks. And I wasn't able to read the book, and we'll cover Deutsche Bank in a future episode, but from the interviews I watched with the author, David Enrich, he basically describes Deutsche Bank funding Donald Trump after his bankruptcy. casinos, hotels, all of his bullshit in the 90s and early 2000s. And whatever hands between Trump and Russia today are linked to Deutsche Bank from that time period. And David Inrick in one of these interviews mentioned that there was a lawsuit against Deutsche Bank that said, hey, release your financial documents for the last 20 years, and the Trump organization actually sued for that information to come out. And so we don't know why.

It could be as simple as, oh, Donald Trump isn't a billionaire, he wants to hide that, or it could be something as obvious as people connected to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin have directly benefited by putting money in Trump's pockets and he's trying to hide that speculation certainly is not valid in this moment however there is some nefarious deeds going on with Deutsche Bank and it's all going to be coming up to a head very very soon I actually read two of those Dark Tower books, and my main takeaway is that Stephen King should not be allowed to write black character dialogue. He has two modes, magical black woman

and wildly racist caricature. Hey, Stephen King, why does it gotta be black man? Yogi, I was joking when I said you were auditioning to be an msnbc commentator but i'm not sure now uh but you said they sued to stop it from coming out not to make it come out right the documents yeah correct yeah i believe that was 2016 when that came out but i i will read this book and uh dark towers deutsch bank donald trump and an epic fall of destruction came out february 18th, 2020.

Maybe this guy did coronavirus. Maybe he's trying to fucking up his book sales. You know what I've been thinking about? What if coronavirus happened to stop the podcasters? What if we were getting too strong? Choppo, Comptown, Red Scare, the Grubstakers gang, the New York Times couldn't stop us, but they thought coronavirus might.

They almost got one of your Kickstarter sucks. They almost took out Mike Hale. Oh, no. They came back just as strong, if not stronger. They knew I was just about to start going to comedy open mics again, and they had to prevent me from becoming the bill hicks of my generation oh man it's gonna be so weird um i'm really glad we stockpiled those hundred ventilators you know have you guys seen the conspiracy about the connecting the earthquakes

tom hanks and epstein and coronavirus. Basically... Wait, what earthquakes? Okay, so there's earthquakes happening in Idaho, Salt Lake City, and there's actually one that just happened as of this recording at 942 in Los Angeles. And the theory is that coronavirus doesn't exist. The global elite are creating tunnels and bunkers in LA, Salt Lake City, and Idaho, and they're hiding bodies of people

that they've been stealing and saying it's Corona, but really it's for their own nefarious deeds. Who knows? Adrenochrone? Maybe. But that is a conspiracy that I've come across recently that's made me very happy. The funny thing about that is that there's a kernel of truth to it but it's completely unrelated um which is that yes the elites are causing earthquakes not the la or probably idaho ones but like we covered it in

the wilkes brothers episode that like you know fracking and wastewater disposal are creating massive seismic activity in um uh oklahoma and um it is completely caused by just profit chasing no i thought the kernel of truth was that ellen degenerous really is under house arrest and is withdrawing from adrenochrome she's going through terrible adrenochrome withdrawals. How do you look that young? How do you dance that sharp? How do you break the gay barrier in this country and still be profitable?

Listen, Ellen, we'll keep your adrenochrome, but I know he was a wildly homophobic president, but you gotta revive his image. I don't care how many baseball games you have to go to, how many apologies on air you have to do, you gotta revive W. Just buys paintings. He needs help.

But I just want to highlight two last articles from Wall Street on Parade. Again, Pam Martins and Russ Martins, they talk about, this is April 2nd, 2020, the balance sheet of the federal reserve that skyrocketed over it grew 557 billion dollars in just one week so the federal reserve currently has a balance sheet of now 5.85 trillion dollars and there's a lot of speculation they'll probably go up to 10 trillion dollars um but they also talk about in

this article about one of the special purpose vehicles is called the primary dealer credit facility. They use this same special purpose vehicle in the 2008 financial crisis. And just quoting from the article, three Wall Street trading houses and their London trading units received almost two thirds of the 8.95 trillion in cumulative loans from the primary dealer credit facility during the 2008 financial crisis. Those three firms were Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch. So they speculate that these three will probably end up receiving the lion's share again of last time they got $8.95 trillion in these loans. And they also make the point, apparently, these loans are supposed to come with collateral,

but by law they're only allowed to accept quote-unquote good collateral for loans. But the last time around, they were accepting stock, which seems pretty nakedly illegal because if the stock market is falling 5% a day, that is not good collateral for a loan. But of course, the Federal Reserve can just ignore the law and do this and get away with it,

and now there's no record-keeping requirements. I think it's time we get back into Bill Still and his rants about the money changers at the Federal Reserve. He's probably having a renaissance right now. I started calling my dick good collateral. Just write that on a piece of paper and hand it to them. Gary, you want some good collateral? I got that good collateral.

And then the last thing I wanted to mention was BlackRock. We'll have a future episode about Larry Fink, the billionaire behind BlackRock. But I just wanted to point out, you know, there's been some talk online about the fact that BlackRock is going to be overseeing part of this Federal Reserve lending program. And they are actually allowed to buy their own assets under this program. So, you know, again, from Wall Street on Parade, they talk about BlackRock is one of the main sellers of these high yield ETFs, these junk bond ETFs, which have, you know, a bunch of bad corporate debt packaged into ETFs. And they were just getting, you know, wiped out in the market crash.

But now they've got to deal with the federal reserve where they will be running facilities for the federal reserve and according to the terms of assignment blackrock will be allowed to buy up its own corporate bond etfs as well as those of its competitors so this is like so disturbing where why are they the ones in charge of running this thing they're gonna bail themselves out this is a little bit like a leveraged stock buyback like functionally yeah if they well if they actually do use the this loan proceeds to do that buying your own assets that's like jerking off to your own nudes right and just quoting from wall street on parade, the Federal Reserve is going to set up three facilities to buy investment-grade corporate debt, as well as investment-grade corporate bond ETFs, as well as mortgage-backed securities. And who is going to be running these facilities for the Federal Reserve?

Of course, BlackRock. And they point out that BlackRock's investment grade ETFs rallied dramatically on the news. So as soon as the market heard that BlackRock was going to be running this facility, these three buying operations for the Fed, and would be allowed to buy their own ETFs, of course, they rallied and became a very solid investment again. So I mean, again, this is what this crisis is being used for as we record the highest death toll in New York City up to this point. And, you know, we might be seeing higher. And this is what the political leaders are using this crisis for, to bail themselves out, bail out their friends of their junk bond ETFs.

Right, right. Have a big government backstop, stop. And everybody who's rich gets richer and the poor don't get a fucking thing. Speaking of, um, high death tolls in a future episode. Um,

I think we might have to hurry up with the, uh, British Royal family episode. It seems to be making the rounds around there. Yeah. All right. Well, um, it seems to be making the rounds around there yeah all right well um you can look for future episodes of on larry fink from blackrock as well as sandy weill from city group we will talk more about the bailout what the fed and the treasury secretary are doing and you know follow this and follow the wall street people who are getting a big spigot of free money from the government again um but uh thank you for listening stay safe stay indoors and we apologize for these delayed episodes you know it's uh it's been tough out

here even though we're all safe but just reading the news is extremely depressing and i have a lot of empathy and a lot of hurt for everything that's going on right now. Yeah, and rest in peace to Bill Withers, truly an inspirational musician who I think was a pioneer in how he chose to live his life and pursue his career, and to everyone losing their lives and jobs and everything else right now.

It's certainly a very scary and dangerous time, but the only thing that must remain for us to proceed is hope. And with that, this is Grubstickers. I'm Yogi Paywall. I'm Steve Jeffries. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Stay tuned to Twitch if you want to see Andy get stuck on a level for four hours.

I'm going to be using shamelessly using walkthroughs. Weak. Alright, bye. Bye, thanks.