Lucas,
Wall Street banks are behaving like parasites draining the blood from our economy.
These "too big to fail" institutions — which survived their own recklessness only because We the People bailed them out — have become more bloated than ever.
Ever unsatisfied, the Big Banks are now literally hoarding basic goods, like fuels and metals, that are essential to feeding our families, heating our homes and growing our economy.
Tell the Federal Reserve: Ban the Big Banks from stockpiling physical commodities.
Goldman Sachs — one of the Wall Street titans we bailed out in 2008 — is a prime example of why the financial industry should be forbidden from buying up commodities.
Here's just one example of what's happening:
Not far from Detroit, Goldman Sachs owns 27 warehouses stocked with thousands of tons of the aluminum needed to make cans for vegetables, beans, soda, sardines and so on.
In an elaborate scheme only Wall Street could cook up, Goldman shuffles the aluminum from warehouse to warehouse, exploiting rules designed to stabilize the metal market in a way that instead lets more and more aluminum pile up and go unused.
The longer the aluminum sits locked away in its warehouses, the more Goldman rakes in — hundreds of millions so far. Meanwhile, warehousing the metal hurts consumers and manufacturers by artificially inflating the price of any product packaged in an aluminum container.*
Goldman Sachs' absurd scheme has cost American shoppers more than $5 billion over the past three years.
That's enough to employ 100,000 people for a year at a $50,000 salary.
Tell the Fed: Forbid Wall Street from buying up fuel, metal and other basic materials that have nothing to do with banking.
It's time to stand up to Wall Street's schemes to suck the lifeblood from our economy.
Thanks for all you do,
Rick Claypool
Public Citizen's Online Action Team
action@citizen.org
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*To learn more, read A Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold in
The New York Times.