Phil Cannella – Phillip Cannella News

Phil Cannella: “What does Wall Street think

about the everyday investor, and is it just about the corporate profits? When is it going to be about the investor that has been the backbone of the financial economy in this country?”

Andrew Huszar: “That’s a great question, and I think it’s hard to paint all of Wall Street with one brush, because there are obviously different types of corporations, and some that are better about worrying about investors than others. But I mean if you look at the big banks, it’s clear that this model does not revolve around the everyday American at this point, and you know I was a managing director at Morgan Stanley, a big Wall Street firm, and I thought we had gotten to a point, and this kind of goes back to QE, we got to a point in the financial crisis where we kind of saw that we let these banks get too big and too self-centered and we were going to make some moves to actually, hopefully tweak the model, and just get them a little bit smaller and focused again on us, on the everyday American. And instead, all of what’s been happening, or at least a lot of what’s been happening has been basically doubling down on Wall Street in the last five years. And that’s one of the reasons I ultimately wrote my Op-Ed, was because I feel as if we had this pretty substantial opportunity to see change in the economy five years ago, and yet we’re only going down the same path, and all the public policies that we’re seeing are just trying to recreate the very economy we saw blow up five years ago.”

Phil Cannella: “Has The Fed’s recent actions helped our economy?”

Andrew Huszar: “There’s a reason The Fed exists, and I worked there for nine years, and I believe in the institution, and I believe the people inside are smart and well-intentioned, but I think what’s happened is The Fed has progressively lost perspective, and as Wall Street grew in size, The Fed became more and more beholden to the idea of Wall Street being a huge part of the economy. And so a lot of what we’ve seen post-financial crisis has been this idea of trying to get Wall Street healthy again and hoping that would help the average American. And the reality is The Fed can only operate through the banks. The Fed basically does all of its operations through banks, and my real issue is that all of what we’ve done to put humpty dumpty back together again in terms of the banking sector really isn’t trickling down to the average American. We haven’t seen really a meaningful increase in lending since the financial crisis. We’ve seen The Fed pumping money into Wall Street banks with the idea this would help, and all we’re seeing is the stock market go up in value, which is great, there’s a real question as to how much it’s sustainable, and 10% of Americans basically own 90% of the stock market and so there’s real questions as to how it is really helping the average American.”

Phil Cannella: “Would you say that we are socializing Wall Street’s losses?”

Andrew Huszar: “We’ve come to think of Wall Street, as I think, excessively as the engine of our economy rather than this idea of banks helping to facilitate growth in our economy, and what we’ve done is we’ve allowed, to your point, we’ve capitalized, we’ve kept the profits to Wall Street, but when they start generating losses or they do something illegal and are fined suddenly we’re socializing the losses. We’re suffering the downside as an American public and we’re seeing very little of the upside.”

Hear more from the interview with Phil Cannella and Andrew Huszar on The Crash Proof Retirement Show®. Saturdays at 11am and Sundays at 1pm on Talk Radio 1210AM, WPHT!