BofA's Lewis Against Reinstating Glass-Steagall Act
No, of course not. Because so far, that little arrangement has been working rather well for them - they got obscenely rich, and we got the tab:
NEW YORK -- Bank of America Corp. rebuffed earlier news reports that its chairman and chief executive, Ken Lewis, intended to suggest to President Barack Obama to separate commercial and investment banking.
The Charlotte bank said in a statement, "Mr. Lewis was referring to people's understanding of banks and how they should view the difference between commercial and investment banks in terms of forming perceptions of their various activities."
The CEO "was not talking about reinstating a legal separation between commercial and investment banking," the statement said. Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch & Co., a major investment-banking and brokerage company, in January.
Mr. Lewis, and the leaders of several big banks, met with President Obama in Washington. Following Mr. Lewis' arrival at the White House, Bloomberg News reported that he said a separation of the two businesses should be considered.
The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 prohibited banks from having commercial- and investment-banking businesses under one roof, but the law was repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The change followed the merger of Citicorp Inc. with Travelers Corp. Inc. to form Citigroup Inc.
This a-hole is one of the main reasons people are angry. Boycott the jerks bank!
...is no longer.
Banks don't need us as customers. ...Burnbanke can, does and (will do again) print and give them all the fresh money they need (Zombies need tons of it)
Obama doesnt even have to approve of it, ...although he will say sure.
audit-prosecute-incarcerate
There's also Paulson, as head of Goldman Sachs lobbying to reduce risk-vs-capitol requirements from 12:1 to 60:1. he got his way.
Then there's the Bush administration easing requirements for banks to enter into the CRA program. Not only lending requirements, but reporting requirements as well.
And don't forget the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ruling that they and they alone were enabled by law to investigate lending practices, preventing states from investigating predatory lending practices in their own jurisdictions.
And the SEC allowing foreign exchanges to open unregulated securities trading terminals in NY (the same thing happened in Dubai and London, unregulated securities were being traded worldwide)
And then, the whole SEC approach of letting the market police itself....
it's like, so many steps were required to bring about this perfect storm, you would think it was all planned...
Oh, wait...
It was the SEC meeting of April 28, 2004.
The five largest investment banks were allowed to set their own leverage rate, Merrill was at 40 to 1 went they went bust in September of '08.
They would have done 60 to 1 if they could have.
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
Lobbied the senate in 2001 for an easing of capital requirements.
Bush expanded CRA in 2003.
The OCC had their little turf war in 2003 also
In 2004, the SEC opened up the NY Exchange to foreign terminals.
In 2005, Fannie and Freddie dove head first into the Mortgage backed securities market.
if you look at each step along the road to collapse, and then try to understand why they would chose NOT to enforce what regulations were left, you really do wind up scratching your head.
it's so stupid and reckless, no sane financier would ever involve themselves in this. (T Boone Pickens did not)
It HAD to be a setup....
They knew the fix would be in.
For the people that own the government, the fix is always in.
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
flying ship what these crooks think or want!
Call Congress and tell them to get through to the peoples business...ignore the BS from the corporate raiders.
1.800.828.0498
I share your sentiment fully.
Unfortunately for we the peons, the Congress is driven by campaign contributions.
Completely.
The lobbyists write the laws.
Here is wallstreetwatch.org.
Here from the same site is the very telling Robert Weissman report, 'Sold Out'.
That is what the people of the country have been, SOLD OUT.
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
The fix is in:
The deal is down;
The game is cooked;
The dice are loaded;
The wheels are rigged;
The decks are all marked,
shaved, and stacked;
The dealers cheat,
And the chefs spit in ALL the souffles…
That's just how it is.
Vanessa Drucker on the SEC meeting of April 28, 2004, here.
As for the effect of the CRA, the jury is out. Except for wingnutopia.
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
Were audited in 2000 as ordered by the Gramm-Leach-Blily act.
They represented only 10% of the total mortgage market at that time and had only a slightly higher rate of default than traditional mortgages.
CRA loans, in 2000, were considered relatively safe.
Expanding CRA to an ever expanding list of non bank financial institutions seemed like a good thing, on the surface.
However, throw in the easing of reporting requirements and the merger of monster sized financial institutions, along with easing of credit by the fed and credit was cheap (for the big players) and easy to hand out.
All of a sudden, mortgages are being pushed down people's throats. Some are forced into what were originally CRA only programs as "pretend" high risk...(black folk got Adjustable rate mortgages at a much higher rate than any other demographic)
See, the CRA had been corrupted from it's original purpose, to ensure private investment in deteriorating neighborhoods, and was now being pushed as a money making vehicle by these new Frankenstein financial institutions...
And the OCC said to Spitzer...You cannot investigate.
I'm not blaming the CRA, I hope you relaize that. But I am bemoaning how the CRA program was corrupted.
Also, even with a higher than welcome number of mortgage defaults, without those falsely rated Mortgage backed Securities and the private insurance derivatives backing those falsely rated securities...these CRA defaults would have only been a blip on the financial map.
It really was..an orchestrated perfect storm. And Trillions of dollars were sucked right out of the American economy in a matter of weeks.
Then Federal Reserve Governor Randall S. Kroszner in a speech before the Board of Governors on 12/03/08: The Community Reinvestment Act and the Recent Mortgage Crisis
here
The emphasis is mine:
This view was reiterated by Bernanke in his most recent appearance before the Senate Banking Committee.
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
If regulations are not passed and enforced then this mess will occur again. No one of any education is not familiar with the Great Depression, the causes, & the regulations set up to prevent it from happening again. Then you get a bunch of republicans and some greedy corporate assholes and it will happen again, and again. Now do the democrats have the balls to pass legislation to stop it now from ever happening again? I am afraid they don't.
The Bangsters swindled until they could not swindle any more.
Then the fix was in so they can swindle again.
Here is five (or more ways) to scam little Timmies new plan.
Did Lewis mention the Treasury/IRS section swindle. No? I didn't think so. Here.
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
Good thing we have a Democratic Congress and White House to stop these things.
"On November 4, the final bill resolving the differences was passed by the Senate 90-8 and by the House 362-57. This legislation was signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton on November 12, 1999."
Aw crap.
90-8 is a veto proof majority. The republican dominated house and senate passed this law in such a way that it had no chance of failing.
Still, Clinton really was a republican light....
then left DC to take over Citigroup and begin the plunder...
You'll notice Bill's shittin in pretty tall cotton these days, too...
The Republicans had less than 60% in either chamber. 90-8 was a bipartisan gift, from both major parties to the crooks.
That's why I hope Obama doesn't go out of his way to engage in "bipartisanship". The two parties can agree on something, and both be dead wrong. Consensus doesn't necessarily mean merit.
Phil Gramm was the power behind the passage of the bill and the date of signing was....Dec 2000. Now can you think of anything that was happening around that time you ignoramous?
GLBA is a total sell out of the American consumer to corporations. (I won't even call them American Corporations, because as you pieces of shit would have us think that an American coporation is owned by a majority of AMerican stockholders....ERRRR NOT)
http://epic.org/privacy/glba/
Lets lookie see some quotes shall we: http://banking.senate.gov/prel99/1104grm.htm
"I believe we have passed what will prove to be the most important banking bill in 60 years. It overturns the key provision of the Glass-Steagall act that divided the American financial system.
"Over time, the market and the regulators have used a variety of innovations to try to undo this separation. As a result, we have substantial competition occurring, but it is competition that is largely inefficient and costly, it is unstable, and it is not in the public interest for this situation to continue.
"The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act strikes down these walls and opens up new competition. It will create wholly new financial services organizations in America. It will literally bring to every city and town in America the financial services supermarket.
"Americans today spend about $350 billion on financial services – on fees and charges and interest. Most people who have looked at the potential for providing financial services under a more rational system believe, as I believe, that there are tens of billions of dollars of savings for the American consumer that will be produced by the reforms of this bill."
{this last one makes me LOL}
And don't fergit Foreclosure Phil
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/05/f...
The next headline should read, "Pedophile speaks out against Stop-Touching-Children Act". That one might be a little less redundant.
It was spearheaded by Congressman Foley
Haha
CAN WE STOP PRETENDING the self-serving ways of these bastards is something we have to support despite the terrible harm their egregiously rapacious policies pose to the rest of the country????
As Bill Maher says - "Maybe it's time to bring back the Guillotine!"
Greed is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
If there is a Hell - this lot are surely going.
In other words, he doesn't want there to be a separation between commercial and investment banking; he wants the White House to help him get people to think there is.
Honestly: "referring to people's understanding of banks and how they should view the difference between commercial and investment banks in terms of forming perceptions of their various activities." How much of a sociopath do you have to be to write that sentence?
Betta fuukin buck...
'thePrez' when asked about regulations the other day in some public forum, said something the other day to the effect that you cannot re-regulate with the old tools, because there were new 'realities.' I paraphrase. Shorter: Don't Drop Your Soap!
No new Glass-Steagall, i.e., no repeal of Gram/Leach/Blilely, either.
"New" instruments.
Which have to get through a "new" and as yet apparently unchastened Congress...
That I am not surprised does not mean I couldn't bite the neck off a beer bottle right now.
Clearly, Gramm (and McCain), Leach, Bliley did us all in and left us holding the bag while they put their billions offshore.
It's time to bring back Glass-Steagall. It was enacted for a reason and now it will be re-enacted with the people's blessing again.
Press your legislators to bring back the Glass Steagall restrictions so this horrendous situation cannot recur - ever!
they 'can't' do any of those things.
Can't repeal Gramm/L/B, can't unrepeal Glass Steagall.
Their hands are tied by the conditions which the enabling legislation of the new regime permitted. They claim they cant go back and make it illegal now.
This sounds like bullshit to me...But I'm used to bullshit, and they're going to do what their owners are paying them to do in any case.
It's been clear that citizen outrage counts with this administration, unlike the criminals who never cared nor consulted the people on anything they did (and it was largely criminal).
Personally, I believe this calls for something even more regulated and stronger than Glass Steagall. This asshat at Citicorp need his butt handed to him.
Boycotting BillO's sponsors is working so why not boycott Citicorp.
Paulson's a total crook and shill. Time to get him under oath or slap his butt in jail.
sorry...meant to boycott Bank of America.
the truth of all of this is, by the time we proles hear about it, the deal is done and consumated.
They don't tell you about stuff when its possible to change it. Only when it is already too late...
Haven't y'all got that yet?
Really?
Don't be silly!
Laws are for the rabble to follow.
Smoke a reefer, go to jail.
Wreck a global economy, oopsie!
They sucked trillions out of the economy, blamed Smalltown America's mortgage defaulting homeowners, then
beggedbribed and threatened the government to give them as much cashola as possible. Great deal for banks. Average citizen? Not so much.But the bestest part is all the "election campaign financing" these same banks donated back to CONgress. Amazing. And still nobody riots. What happened to all that "no more politics as usual" BS that was spouted for months prior to the election? Oh, I forgot, this administration likes to know what it's talking about before it speaks. So they didn't know in February that bailed out banks were donating to CONgress Critters? Ya, right.
There is so much going on in financial land, it makes the mind spin. Why would the head banker from B of A want to cut off a cash cow when as long as Glass-Stegal is dead he's got nothing to worry about? What's wrong with the entire picture of private banking in bed with government? Obama says he wants more transparency, yet billions of our tax dollars fly our the back door of AIG and both the banks and government clam up as to where all of our tax dollars are going. We have politicians like Dodd that chair the Senate banking committee, but gets a deal from countrywide on his mortgage. And people wonder why Mr. Lewis doesn't want to break up a monopoly?
I seriously hope that AG Cuomo keeps sniffing out where our tax dollars have gone.
they got obscenely rich, and we got the
tabshaft (without Vaseline).Fixed it for you.
Having paid for the government they wanted they naturally expect to be serviced as was expected. That plainly being the point.Yes?
What part is/was not understood again?
Not surprised in the least they don't care about the USA only about what they can get out of us. These re-regulations are going to be a hell of a fight, after all it took the depression to get many of this regs on the books. What's it going to take now?
I have a recent e-mail from democrats.com that advocates breaking up the banks and has a petition folks can sign. I really get tired of hearing that "corporation X is too big to fail", especially when we turn around an take failing corporations and merge them into existing behemoths whereby the situation becomes "corporation X+Y is way to big to fail". On the other side of the coin, when there are too few players in any market, we go from free-market capitialism—more or less— to monopoly capitalism. So we the people lose when these behemoths run aground and when they doing fine they grind us under their heels!
One refrain we've been hearing throughout this fiasco is the notion that a financial corporation is too large to allow to fail. Then, that was coupled with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which allowed the "too big to fail" corporation to recklessly gamble, leaving main street with the tab.
I think we're being extremely stupid in not repealing the laws that don't work, and reinstating the laws that worked for decades. I think Obama is getting a little too much advice from Wall Street. Geithner’s überRegulator to police the financial industry is very risky.
Economist James Galbraith from yesterday's DemocracyNow.
“And again, to me, that is deeply problematic, because we’ve got banking institutions that are so large at this point, they’re so complicated, so opaque, so deeply involved in offshore tax havens, shell corporations and complicated derivatives, that they can’t be managed, let alone regulated.
The top executive officers didn’t know, to a very large extent, or at least by their own testimony, they didn’t know, the risk exposure of their own institutions. And they made catastrophic mistakes on the scale of tens and scores of billions of dollars, because they didn’t have effective internal controls. And if you don’t have the internal controls, there’s just no way that an outside regulator can get a grip on the systemic risk that the institution may be causing. So my view is, if you want to have a system that has appropriate checks and balances, the institutions in that system have to be of a scale such that the regulators, which Secretary Geithner properly said yesterday must be strengthened, but they also have to have the basic capacity to deal with the institutions that they’re regulating.”
Best way to do that is reinstate Glass-Steagall
than just reinstating Glass-Steagall. There seems to be a greater poison that is circulating through the financial markets arteries as well as government, and it's this all too cozy combination that arises from campaign contributions to politicians from the very industry their supposed to be watching. The best examples are the over $100,000 in contributions that both Dodd and Obama received from AIG alone. we the tax payers are supposed to believe that our elected officials are outraged at these bailouts? Please, give me break.
I have often stated that this country is a government of the Corporation, by the Corporation and for the Corporation. In other words, we're a corporate oligarchy, fed our false choices by the corporate media.
I'm sure that if Obama hadn't indicated that he would be a pliant corporate stooge, that we would have had a nightly benediction from the Reverend Wright on the evening news for a couple of months preceding the election.
Trouble with this is, if Obama screws up the economic recovery, and I have my doubts on relying on Geithner, then the rest of the Democratic agenda will be derailed.
So, after decimating both the national and international economies with their obsessive greed and recklessness, tne Bankers have learned exactly...... NOTHING.
Big surprise.
I'll say it again, these corporations aren't too big to fail, they're too big to EXIST. They are illegal monopolies that endanger the country, and should be trust-busted like YESTERDAY.
..right here in these posts somewhere, Reinstate Glass-Steagall! No one "replied" and now look, 43 comments.
So, its an old idea whose time has come because now that someone else is thinking about it, it must be good idea now.
Its never a good idea until its somebody else's.
Mickey: "It was an epiphany. Do you know what an epipany is?"
Keoni: "NOT NOW MICKEY!"
agrees there is a need for regulation big time. What you won't get is this administration or CONgress reinstating this act. Won't happen. They have a direct account with these banking entities for "campaign" donations. Bribery by any other name is still bribery.
"Bank of America Corp. rebuffed earlier news reports that its chairman and chief executive, Ken Lewis, intended to suggest to President Barack Obama to separate commercial and investment banking."
Well, duh.
But why should we care what he recommends to Obama? Who the hell is supposed to make the laws in this country? Isn't it our responsibility to drown out the voices of the lobbyists and scare "our" Congress into reinstating the Act?
We the American Public should care, because he has access to the President that Joe Six-pack doesn't. Mr. Lewis can make arguments that we don't need a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, just better enforcement of the laws already on the books. The problem being that the currently existing laws don't do jack about the crimes (IMO) that led to this crisis.
Preamble;
"Wilson came of age in the decades after the American Civil War, when Congress was leading — "the gist of all policy is decided by the legislature" —and corruption was rampant."
Wilson defeated both former president Theodore Roosevelt and the incumbent president William Howard Taft to win the election of 1912.
Wilson secured passage of the Federal Reserve system in late 1913 in exchange for campaign support. He took a plan that had been designed by conservative Republicans—led by Nelson W. Aldrich and banker Paul M. Warburg, along with Wilson's close adviser Col. Edward House, at Jekyll Island—and pressured an initially reluctant Congress to pass it. [Note] The afformentioned has been contradicted by this information I've come across, "“The claim that the Federal Reserve Act was a modified form of the Republican Nelson Aldrich (RI) plan was also made in Glass' day, and it was a notion he detested."?
RE:
It was Woodrow Wilson who suggested an altruistic board of governors appointed by the executive branch. Even though he may not have entirely liked that idea, Carter Glass(Glass-Steagall) and his sharp tongue helped guarantee the bill's passage.(See Footer)
A more well known example is the Federal Reserve System, which is also partially governed by a board of governors.[1]
Carter Glass of "Glass-Steagall" fame, seemed uneasy from what I've read, regarding the appointment of a "board of governors" either because President Wilson desired an altruistic makeup or maybe the board of governors idea itself?
[1]
→ → →Board of governors [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_Governors ]
→ → →Members of the Board [ http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/def... ]
FYI ~ The seven members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. A full term is fourteen years. One term begins every two years, on February 1 of even-numbered years. A member who serves a full term may not be reappointed. A member who completes an unexpired portion of a term may be reappointed. All terms end on their statutory date regardless of the date on which the member is sworn into office.
The Chairman and the Vice Chairman of the Board are named by the President from among the members and are confirmed by the Senate. They serve a term of four years. A member's term on the Board is not affected by his or her status as Chairman or Vice Chairman.
So "Ben S. Bernanke" as chairman and "Donald L. Kohn" as Vice Chairman, serve their 4 years, though they can remain seated on the board for a total of 14?
Wilson saw this as a campaign to free the nation’s banks and businessmen from monopolistic control.(1)
(1)~( http://www.geocities.com/pthomas.geo/federal.... )
Study the symptoms not the virus...
of the Federal Reserve System, 1914-Present.
►( http://www.federalreserve.gov/bios/boardmembe... )
Amended: Interesting obsevation(See above "led by Nelson W. Aldrich and banker Paul M. Warburg")???
Partial List below,
Vice Chairmen Date of term
Frederic A. Delano Aug. 10, 1914-Aug. 9, 1916
Paul M. Warburg Aug. 10, 1916-Aug. 9, 1918
Study the symptoms not the virus...
Bernie Madoff is opposed to Ponzi scheme criminal prosecutions....!!!!
Link Please? √ Thanx
Study the symptoms not the virus...
It's Greed not Terrorists that will bring down our country. With the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the banks have taken our country hostage and the bailouts are nothing more than ransom money. These people are criminals and need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
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