The bank bailout and the Forbes 400 - World Socialist Web Site
▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/08/pers-o08.html
The bank bailout and the Forbes 400
8 October 2014
Six years ago this past Friday, the US Congress passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which established the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, the first of the bank bailouts. It was followed by a series of Federal Reserve and Treasury programs that allocated some $7 trillion in free loans to the financial system.
The day after the passage of TARP, October 4, 2008, the World Socialist Web Site offered the following analysis: “The [Bush] administration has invoked the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression in an attempt to terrorize the American people into accepting the greatest transfer of public resources to the financial elite in history…[The bailout] will facilitate an ever-greater concentration of wealth that can only produce a drastic deterioration of living conditions and the undermining of basic democratic rights.”
