A 20,000 to 1 Return

Would you like to know that for every $1 you put down, you would get back $20,000?

Sound impossible?

It isn't. That's the kind of return the Wall Street banks are getting on their lobbying effort.

And this isn't lobbying in the dark old days of the 1990s. Not back in 2007 or 2008. This is the return they got on what their lobbying dollar spent in the first 3 months of 2009 returned.

It is a pretty sweet deal. They bought the US Congress for $13.5 million and that "investment" returned them $220 billion.

Read all the gory details here.

OK, to be honest. The lobbying wasn't to get the $220 billion. The lobbying was to get rules favourable to them on compensation, to ensure that new rules credit card debt wouldn't interfere with their profit-making activities, and that bankruptcy courts wouldn't get new powers to change the amount owed on a house bankruptcy. I used the numbers to simply point out that corporations lobby big bucks to get really big benefits. As the author of the blog points out: they spent the money to buy lawmakers to write the laws they wanted. The $220 billion just happens to be how much they have pocketed from bailout money. Of course the two are not related. That would be adding insult to injury! So I'm being silly to talk about a 20,000 to 1 "return".