Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties 
Project. He is the author of the Simon and Schuster book Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, which Business Insider called “one of the year’s best books on how to rethink capitalism and improve the economy.” He also worked for a member of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 2008 financial crisis. (See his full C.V. at the American Economic Liberties Project).
Mr. Stoller was recently interviewed by Democracy Now where he critiqued the Congressional Pandemic Relief Bill. He describes not only the American pandemic response under Trump, but the formulation of this “relief” bill a “total system failure.”
Here are a few excerpts from that interview. You can watch or read the entire interview here.
“Well, I mean, it’s not really a $2 trillion bill. It’s more like a $6 trillion to $10 trillion bill. So, one of the reasons you can tell that the bill is packed with corporate goodies is that, you know, Congress is debating and trying to figure out, oh, you know, is it $2 trillion, a bunch of money for hospitals or money for cities, and meanwhile, a couple days ago, Larry Kudlow is on a press conference and says, “Actually, this is a $6 trillion bill.” And it’s like, how does a bill go from $2 trillion to $6 trillion without anyone really noticing? And the answer is, there’s a bunch of stuff in there — and, you know, there are people on Wall Street chattering about how it’s actually going to be $10 trillion, because, you know, what’s another four? And that’s how you know that the bill is just packed with stuff for Wall Street, for large monopolists.
“And it’s done through a variety of opaque slush funds — the Federal Reserve, the FDIC guarantees a bank debt. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that, you know, some of us who worked in the financial crisis noticed, paid attention to, said, “Oh, that’s where they’re stealing all the money.” And so there’s a bunch of stuff in there that’s going to get to Boeing and airlines, that we know about, has been reported. There’s also a bunch of stuff that’s going to get to the hedge fund guys that are bunkering down in their underground wine caves or whatever. And meanwhile, the stuff that we need, for normal people — the ventilators, the unemployment — you know, that’s going to dribble out. Small business is going to dribble out.
“And so, what you’re going to see is the $4 trillion to $6 trillion to $8 trillion of basically no-cost or low-cost guaranteed credit is going to be used by Citibank, JPMorgan, and then any big monopolist or large company that can get access to it, to buy up their competitors and buy up small business, who are obviously now in a really distressed state because they don’t have any revenue. So that’s what’s going to happen.
“And all of this stuff that’s happening, the handover of power to Wall Street, is happening under the really cynical guise of helping people in a pandemic. A lot of this money is going to go to — some of the money is going to go to hospitals. Some of the money is going to go to help people in the pandemic. So there’s some good stuff here. That, of course, is going to dribble out on the rickety infrastructure of the Small Business Administration and unemployment insurance. Our government has been hollowed out, so this stuff isn’t going to get out quickly.
“If you have — basically, if you have an account at a large bank, if you’re a wealthy investor like Goldman Sachs, there’s a whole set of programs that you can get access to at the Federal Reserve — at least this was the case in 2008, and the Fed says they’re setting up similar structures — where you can borrow from the Fed, and you can gamble with it. And then, if you lose — right? — in your gambling, then the Fed will — you don’t have to pay the loan back to the Fed. So, that’s one of the — you know, and this is one of the programs they say, “Oh, we need to provide liquidity in the markets,” or various other really super boring things that sound like — you kind of go to sleep when you’re like, “Oh, all these alphabet soup programs and all this kind of jargon.” But that’s really what it is. It’s just, you know, “heads, I win; tails, you lose.” And that’s a lot of what these programs are.
“I mean, the Fed has already hired BlackRock, which is one of the world’s largest asset managers, to manage this multitrillion-dollar bailout, and they’ve said that BlackRock is going to be allowed to participate in the bailout. So they’re running the bailout, and they’re participating in the bailout. They’re already stealing, before the vote, the bill has even passed the House.”
