WALL STREET ROOTS FOR HILLARY, TRASHES TRUMP

Wall Street is betting on Clinton re-entering the White House in the 2016 election. Main Street is far weaker in the influence game.

Flush with funds and with almost the entire media serving as a PR vehicle for Hillary Clinton, while demonising Republican contender Donald Trump, conventional wisdom goes that the 8 November electoral battle has already been decided. Hillary will, according to the pundits, win, and the only question is how big the victory margin of the Democratic Party candidate will be. Such confidence is based on the former Secretary of State being the favoured candidate of Wall Street, which sees Donald Trump as unsympathetic to its demand for primacy in economic policy. The Clintons have been close to Wall Street for nearly three decades. Small wonder therefore that the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (which had placed severe curbs on the financial industry) was repealed by President Bill Clinton in 1999. Since then, Wall Street has had the upper hand over Main Street in the world’s biggest economy. Steadily, the financial services industry has dominated traditional manufacturing, a consequence of which has been the closure of hundreds of thousands of enterprises that failed to meet the financial tests of Wall Street, the sole purpose of which was to ensure a copious flow of dividend and other income to mega investors as well as top executives of major companies. Simultaneously, the volume of the financial industry grew, reaching the astonishing sum of $120 tril- lion in value, an absurdity in an economy that is more than ten times smaller in size than such inflated estimates.

The valuations may have been imaginary, but the profits made by the financial sector were not, and these have dwarfed those earned by manufacturing enterprises. Many of the latter were taken over by funds and stripped of their assets, so as to generate huge profits on the sale. Long-term value and considerations such as equity and jobs were thrown aside in the quest for immediate returns on investment. As income distribution is much more skewed in the financial services industry than in manufacturing, with most in the former earning low levels of compensation, but a handful being billionaires, the middle class in the US has become poorer on an average since the 1990s, while income inequality has reached levels not seen since the 1920s. Seeing this, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt implemented his New Deal for the overall population of the US