Politicus USA has the article Bernie Sanders Terrifies Wall Street By Vowing To Keep Them Out Of His Cabinet. Quoting from an interview with Jake Tapper, the article had the following:

Sanders: Unlike many other presidents, they — my Cabinet would not be dominated by representatives of Wall Street. I think Wall Street has played a horrendous role in recent years in negatively impacting our economy and in making the rich richer.

There are a lot of great public servants out there, great economists who for years have been standing up for the middle class and the working families of this country who know that it is an international embarrassment that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth.

However, even the liberal Politicus USA has to throw in a comment that shows how little about Bernie Sanders they comprehend.

If Sanders were to be somehow elected, it would be Wall Street’s biggest nightmare come true. The problem that he would have in governing is the same that President Obama currently faces. If Republicans still control all or any part of Congress after the 2016 election, the Sanders agenda would go nowhere.

In response to this, I replied with the following:

I will add my voice to all the others to point out that even Politicus USA doesn’t get Bernie Sanders. You have a question for him, and he has the answer, but you don’t ask it of him.

Bernie Sanders sent an email to his followers explaining the great mistake that Obama made when he took office. The email promises that Sanders will not make the same mistake.

To paraphrase the email, when Obama took office, he essentially told the huge political organization that he had built to win the race, “You can go home now. I’ll take it from here. I’ll just negotiate on my own with Boner and McConnell.” Many of us tried to catch his attention to tell him what a big mistake he was making. After many years in office, Obama never did figure it out.

Not only has Sanders remarked on this great blunder, but thousands if not millions of Obama supporters noted it too. How can Obama be so blind, given his level of intelligence?

Any comparison of Bernie Sanders to our current President and worst negotiator the world has ever seen is a gross “misunderestimation” of Bernie Sanders.

Now that I have your attention (the “for dummies” phrase seems to be very successful for selling books), I am going to use the simplest example that I can think of to make this point.

Supposing someone asks you, or you ask yourself, how much do I have in the stock market? If you own 1,000 shares (just to use a round number) of various stocks, that’s about the only thing you can say for sure about what you “have” in the stock market. But supposing your questioner is more persistent, and wants to know how much money you have. The logical thing to do would be to look up the stock prices of each company, multiply each price by the number of stocks you own in that company, and then total it up. That is called marking your portfolio to market.

If the average price were $10, you would say, I have $10,000 in the stock market. If you are a small investor, and the stock market is not very volatile, you could probably sell your 1,000 shares right at the moment and realize your $10,000 (minus stock trading fees and taxes).

Now, suppose the extreme case where everybody decided to sell all their shares at the same time, and the only person willing to buy them would only pay $0.01 per share. You’d be lucky to clear anywhere near $10.00.

Where did the other $9,990.00 go? You can’t even say that it went up in smoke, because there is not even the slightest physical trace of that money. So did that money ever really exist?

As you try to tell me that the FED cannot create money out of nothing whenever it decides to, compare that to what mark-to-market did. Mark-to-market is only a concept. It is not even an actual thing with any physical embodiment. No building, no people, and no equipment make up something called mark-to-market. You might say it’s all in our minds. Now you understand what money is worth and how it is valued.

Oh, and what is that $10,000 you could have realized? If you go to the store, you might be able to buy 10,000 candy bars. Or if inflation is running rampant, maybe you can’t. So the people who rail against fractional reserve banking because it let’s banks “create money”, so what else is new? Why don’t you outlaw mark-to-market from creating any money? Can you put mark-to-market in jail if it won’t comply?

Observer News has the article Berniemania! Why Is Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders So Popular?

A very interesting article. One bit of insanity on the Observer’s part in an otherwise very sane article was the following which shows that even some experts don’t really understand the money system.

Some of his proposals, like making all public colleges free, may have unintended consequences.

“You put a lot of stress on the public system, to say you’re going to take away the tuition base. You can’t ensure government funding to make up for it,” said Sharyn O’Halloran, an economist at Columbia University’s School of Public Affairs. “If I’m sitting here trying to allocate scarce resources to benefit society, the economy, I have to allocate them in the most efficient way … if I give a rich kid a free education, I haven’t improved social welfare.”

She just does not understand what scarce resources she needs to be allocating. The colleges and universities are already there. The professors are already there. When we create our own money, this is not a scarce resource. Even if you don’t believe that, perhaps the FED could take back some of the trillions of dollars it created to give to the wealthy, and instead spend it where it will do some good. The stock market bubble the FED has created is temporary. An education is much more permanent.

By the way, if you don’t believe that US money is not a scarce resource in the US, then how do you account for the objective fact that the FED created trillions of dollars to prop up the banks and the rich? All this money, didn’t even create any inflation with the possible exception of stock market prices. I don’t hear rich people complaining about that kind of inflation, do you? (Although I do worry about that kind of inflation, and so should you.)

The FED never should have pumped that liquidity into the economy this way when it has been known for over 75 years that this strategy is not one that stimulates the economy under the then current conditions. When there is no industrial expansion worth investing in because industry is already too big for the shrinking customer base, inserting that much money into the hands of the rich does not expand industry. It does expand stock prices, though. Where else are rich people going to put their money? They either do believe in the greater fool theory, or they think they can get out before the other fools bring the market crashing down.

In case you are wondering, government buying stuff does stimulate the economy. Someone has to produce the actual goods that the government is buying. The government makes up for the shrinking customer base in the private sector. It can do that because we know from the lesson the FED gave us, that US money cannot be in short supply in the US if the FED is willing to do its job.

Naked Capitalism has the article Obama in Retreat Thanks to Elizabeth Warren-Led Opposition to Plan to Appoint Another Corporate Stooge as SEC Commissioner. The article’s opening remarks set the stage for praising what Elizabeth Warren and allies are doing to thwart the Presiden’t plans to weaken regulation.

As readers may know, Obama’s plan to keep the already weak SEC in its role as a rubber stamp to Big Finance is going pear-shaped. Via some unexpected good fortune (Obama owing a favor to Rhode Island senator Jack Reed and Senate conventions that nominations of Senate staffers get approved) the SEC wound up with a new commissioner, Kara Stein, who actually knows a thing or two about banking and has been willing to declare war on a chairman from her own party, Mary Jo White. Stein has been more effective than someone in her spot would normally be by virtue of White being so badly conflicted as to be required to sit out many commission votes, and Stein allying regularly with fellow Democrat commissioner Luis Aguilar to block unduly Wall-Street-friendly measures.

But Obama appeared ready to restore status quo ante by virtue of having Aguilar’s term expire this year. That would allow him to install a more business-toadying replacement.

If you ever needed proof about how dangerous another Obama like President would be, this is another red flag waving in front of you.

We now have one Presidential candidate who recognizes the danger of the excessive power that Wall Street and the big banks have, and how they use it to flaunt the law. His opponent as President might do wonderful, showy things to keep your attention away from the hidden goodies she gives away to the big money interests. People noted that only a strongly anti-communist Republican like Nixon could open the doors to diplomatic relations with China. In the same vein, only a purported Democrat will be able to get away with massive gifts to the big money interests.