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Now 12 Too-Big-To-Fail and Too-Big-To-Jail
banks –
0.2%
of
all banks – control 70% of all banking assets.
The
21st Century Glass-Steagall Act (PDF) would reestablish a wall
between
these high-risk practices and commercial banking – which,
as Senator Warren had
put so elegantly, “should be boring.” It would make the
financial system more
stable and secure, she said. Gobs of people have been
clamoring for this kind
of financial and regulatory reform. It would be the
biggest threat to
bankers, their industry, their bonuses, their source
of free money, their way
of life, their egos, their religion even.
“The
banking lobby is simply too strong to allow something like this
to
happen,” said Bob Rice, managing
partner at Tangent
Capital Partners,
in a Bloomberg interview. He thus confirmed just how quixotic the
senators’
stance has become. “We’re having trouble getting the basic Volker rule
from
Dodd-Frank
implemented,” and Senator Warren’s
plan, he said, would go
much further than the
Volker rule.
If
enacted, the law would keep megabanks from holding the federal government
hostage and from forcing a bailout whenever they need
it, only to propagate afterwards with reinforced
vigor their blind
risk-taking and bonus-extraction culture and
their key strategy of
socializing
losses and privatizing gains
– as if nothing had happened.
PS: THINK LONG &
HARD about what bank you choose to do business with (too big to fail & too big to JAIL is about to get a lot worse if people are not
smart about their choices since NO "new" LAWS have been PUT INTO
PLACE TO PREVENT further chaos)!!!
Now 12 Too-Big-To-Fail and Too-Big-To-Jail banks – 0.2%
of
all banks – control 70% of all banking assets. Because of
their
status, they’re “treated differently from the
other 99.8% of the banks and
differently
from other businesses,” the nearly rebellious
Dallas Fed President
Richard Fisher pointed
out.
Verdict
Is In: “The Banking Lobby Is Simply Too Strong To Allow It To Happen”
Thursday, July 18, 2013 at 3:52PM
“A culture of dangerous
greed and excessive risk-taking has taken root
in the banking world”
since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999,
said Senator
John McCain last week when he supported Senator Elizabeth
Warren in pitching
legislation they’d baptized the “21st Century Glass-Steagall
Act.” Senator Warren
told Wall Street, where failure has been rewarded with
bailouts and record
bonuses, that “Banking should be boring.”
Wall Street must have
gotten the willies.
But it was a quixotic moment for
two senators from the
opposite sides of the aisle to stand up to the banking
lobby.
“Big Wall Street
institutions should be free to engage in transactions with
significant risk,”
Senator McCain explained – such as “investment banking,
insurance, swaps
dealing, and hedge fund activities,” Senator Warren clarified
– “but not with
federally insured deposits.”
While the legislation “would not
end Too-Big-to-Fail,” he
said, “it would rebuild the wall between commercial
and investment banking
that was in place for over 60 years, restore confidence
in the system, and
reduce risk for the American taxpayer.”
Senator McCain isn’t
quite the immaculate soul in this discussion: in 2008, as
presidential candidate,
he – along with his opponent Barak Obama – strongly
supported TARP and the
whole principle that these megabanks must be bailed
out at taxpayers’
expense. But TARP amounted to inconsequential
peanuts
compared to the many trillions the Fed was
hand-delivering free of charge
to
the banks, and he never said
squat about that either. But hey, a guy
can change his mind.
The
original Glass-Steagall Act became law in 1933, in response to
the
financial crisis that triggered the Great Depression. It separated
depository banks from
investment banks and worked like a charm.
There were stock-market
crashes, bond fiascos, and bank collapses, as there
should be, but no financial
mushroom clouds formed over the economy. Yet,
starting in the 1980s,
the Fed – ever the banks’ most intimate companion,
rather than a regulator
with teeth – and the Office of the Comptroller began
to chip away at it by
“reinterpreting” certain legal terms.
Congress, after 12
attempts to repeal it, finally threw it out in
1999, with a big nod, victorious
smile, and energetic signature by President
Clinton.
It triggered a wave of
consolidation among banks, hedge funds,
insurance companies,
brokers, private-equity firms, and other
outfits. And it took
these geniuses of bankers only nine years to build up
their empires to the point where they started
collapsing under the weight
of
their bets gone wrong. The Lehman moment
billowed into a
mushroom cloud that
became the Financial Crisis that, after
trillions of dollars
from the Fed, ended with even greater
consolidation.
Now
twelve Too-Big-To-Fail and Too-Big-To-Jail banks – 0.2%
of
all banks – control 70% of all banking assets. Because of their
status, they’re “treated
differently from the other 99.8% of the banks and
differently from other
businesses,” the nearly rebellious Dallas Fed President
Richard Fisher pointed
out [but he isn’t singing from the Fed's hymn sheet;
“Despite the progress
we’ve made since 2008, the biggest banks continue
to threaten the
economy,” lamented Senator Warren. “The
four biggest
banks are now 30% larger than they were just
five years ago, and
they have continued to engage in dangerous, high-risk
practices that could
once again put our economy at risk.”
The 21st Century
Glass-Steagall Act (PDF) would reestablish a wall between
these high-risk
practices and commercial banking – which, as Senator Warren
had put so elegantly,
“should be boring.” It would make the financial system
more stable and secure,
she said. Gobs of people have been clamoring for
this kind of financial
and regulatory reform. It would be the biggest
threat to
bankers, their industry,
their bonuses, their source of free money, their way
of life, their egos,
their religion even.
“The
banking lobby is simply too strong to allow something like this
to
happen,” said Bob Rice, managing
partner at Tangent
Capital Partners,
in a Bloomberg interview. He thus confirmed just how quixotic the
senators’
stance has become. “We’re having trouble getting the basic Volker rule
from
Dodd-Frank
implemented,” and Senator Warren’s
plan, he said, would go
much further than the
Volker rule.
If
enacted, the law would keep megabanks from holding the federal government
hostage and from forcing a bailout whenever they need
it, only to propagate afterwards with reinforced
vigor their blind risk-taking
and bonus-extraction culture and their key
strategy of socializing losses and
privatizing gains – as if nothing had happened.
The
21st Century Glass-Steagall Act was a valiant effort, but now,
only
a week after its introduction, the financial industry has already
declared
victory. It
simply won’t be allowed to happen. And the
risk-taking orgy, nurtured
by the Fed’s addictive and intoxicating flood of
QE dollars,
zero-interest-rate policy, and bailout guarantees must go on.
Alas, there are feeble
signs that it might not....
“The
financial markets have now seen what a world without QE is
going
to look like, and they don’t like what they see,” wrote credit
analyst Michael Lewitt
in The Credit Strategist. So “the mere possibility” of
an end to QE “sent credit markets to some of
their biggest losses in recent
history.”
Read.... Outside
the Box: The Mirror Cracks
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