Matt Taibbi with some news that is making bankers very, very unhappy:

Minds are changing on Too Big to Fail. A month ago, it was just something in the air. Now, it looks like we're headed for a real legislative confrontation. And man, is the finance sector freaking.

Last week, on April 24th, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Louisiana Republican David Vitter introduced legislation called the "Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act of 2013 Act," or the "Brown-Vitter TBTF Act" for short. The bill is a gun aimed directly at the head of the Too-Big-To-Fail beast.

During the Dodd-Frank negotiations a few years ago, Brown teamed up with Delaware Democrat Ted Kaufman to introduce an amendment that would have physically capped the size of the biggest banks. The amendment was bold and righteous but was slaughtered on the floor by a 61-33 margin, undermined by leaders of both parties – 27 Democrats voted against it.

Brown-Vitter offers a different and, in a way, more elegant solution to the problem than Brown-Kaufman. Rather than impose size limits, it simply insists that banks with over $500 billion in assets maintain higher capital reserves than are currently required. Companies like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America will have to keep capital reserves of about 15 percent, about twice the current amount.

The bill only has such tough requirements for just those few megabanks, which sounds unfair, except that the aim of the bill, precisely, is to level the playing field. Right now, the biggest U.S. banks enjoy a massive inherent market advantage in that they're able to borrow money far more cheaply than other banks, because everybody on earth knows the government will never let them fail and will always bail them out in a pinch, making their debt essentially U.S.-government guaranteed. Studies have shown that these banks borrow money at about 0.8 percent more cheaply than other banks, and that this implicit government subsidy is worth about $83 billion a year just to the top 10 banks in America. This bill would essentially wipe out that hidden subsidy and make the banks bailout-proof.

As soon as Brown-Vitter was introduced, a very interesting thing happened. The Independent Community Bankers of America, or ICBA, issued a press release boosting the bill. "ICBA strongly supports this legislation," the release read, "and urges all community banks to join the association in advocating passage of legislation to end too-big-to-fail."

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Think of it as the story of two antagonists. One of them was an honest Senator who came to Washington to fight corruption. The other is an arrogant banker who's so sure of his untouchability that he wore "FBI" cufflinks when he made a public appearance last month.

The Senator

Former Sen. Ted Kaufman, whose epic struggle to bring Wall Street to justice was depicted in PBS Frontline's recent episode The Untouchables, made a striking observation on a press call today. "In a private case," Sen. Kaufman said, the Dexia bank's lawsuit "… uncovered reams of emails directly related to the fact that fraud was (allegedly) being committed by JPMorgan Chase."

He was referring to headlines like "E-Mails Imply JPMorgan Knew Some Mortgage Deals Were Bad" in the New York Times and "JPMorgan Hid Reports of Defective Loans Before Sales" in Bloomberg News. Sen. Kaufman added:

"It is just hard to believe that if the Department of Justice had made Wall St fraud a major priority, with the resources they have, they could not have found these same emails and brought these cases."

It's not just that the government wasn't bringing a case against JPMorgan Chase.  Everybody in Washington from the President on down was praising its CEO, Jamie Dimon, claiming he was our nation's smartest and most ethical banker. So were a lot of reporters. Roger Lowenstein's flattering profile of the dyspeptic Dimon remains a classic of the Wall Street flattery genre.

Even Alison Frankel, who has done some excellent reporting in this area, was somehow able to ask only last month (unless her editors wrote the headline for her): "Is JPMorgan Chase the new MBS (mortgage-backed securities) piñata?"

Sometimes a piñata turns out to be a real donkey.

FBI Cufflinks

Wall Street Journal reporter David Erlich sent this to his Twitter followers from the international finance soiree at Davos: "Jamie Dimon is sporting FBI cuff links at #Davos. Sadly he wouldn't let me take a picture of them."

But then, there are a lot of things Jamie Dimon doesn't want coming to light. What message do you suppose he was trying to send with those cufflinks, especially in the wake of the criminal inquiries into his bank's behavior in the "London Whale" scandal?  Peter J. Boyer and Peter Schweizer noted last May that, based on the Justice Department's record of hands-off attitude toward the bank, "JPMorgan Chase has nothing to fear from an FBI probe."

Even after JPMorgan Chase entered into enormous financial settlements - for charges that ranged from sophisticated investor fraud to plain old-fashioned Alabama bribery - it was considered somehow déclassé to suggest that the crime wave which occurred on Mr. Dimon's watch should in any way reflect badly on his character or managerial skills.

JPMorgan Chase was the "good" bank, and Dimon the "good" CEO. It was considered "unserious" to imagine that the bank's crimes could be pursued - or, despite mountains of evidence, that they had even been committed.  But somehow Dexia and its attorneys were able to obtain evidence that the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the enormous machinery of our national security state could not - or would not - find for itself.

What did FBI-cufflink wearing Jamie tell the public about that criminal matter, the $6 billion dollar loss that he told investors was nothing? "We did have record profits. Life goes on.”

I think we can guess what the "F" stands for.

The Evidence

The information that Dexia assembled is breathtaking -- and damning. The JPM section of their complaint begins by reminding us that JPMorgan Chase was lagging behind its Wall Street competitors in 2005. Dimon has tried to rewrite history since then by arguing that he was smarter than other bankers and stayed away from the short-term profits of mortgage-backed securities because he was wise enough to see how risky they were.

Nonsense. As the Dexia lawsuit recaps, they were just late to the game. Dimon was desperate to get it on the action, telling investors in the 2006 Annual Report that the unit handling MBS had "materially increased its product breadth and volume" - from virtually nothing to $25 billion in just a year.

Dimon also reassured investors that the unit "maintained its high lending standards" and had "materially tightened" its underwriting - much as he assured investors that the bank had tightened its standards after the 2008 crisis when the "London Whale" unit reporting directly to him wasn't following published standards, and much as he told them that the "London Whale" losses were a "tempest in a teapot" when he secretly knew they amounted to billions.

The emails uncovered by Dexia show that JPMorgan Chase tried desperately to make up for its late entrance into the mortgage feeding frenzy by cutting corners and misleading investors. In fact, the Dexia suit includes documentation which suggests that Dimon had already told a senior executive to sell off the bank's own ownership of these poorly-underwritten securities.

A Forbes magazine story cited in the suit also quote Dimon as saying "This stuff could go up in smoke!"

True Confessions

An internal JPMorgan Chase memo reportedly told staff how to cheat "Zippy," the company's underwriting system, by falsifying information in order to write bad loans. The memo was even entitled "Zippy Cheats & Tricks."

The Dexia filing extensively documents JPMorgan Chase's flouting of underwriting standards, its misrepresentations to investors, and its rewriting and falsification of independent analyses. These acts are strongly suggestive of criminal acts by individuals, as well as civil wrongdoing.

Sen. Kaufman spoke authoritatively about the deterrent effect that criminal indictments have against white-collar crime. Someone is much less likely to commit a white-collar crime, according to studies, if they know that they could be prosecuted. As Sen. Kaufman explained, this deterrent effect is much weaker for drug crimes, whose perpetrators have already faced the criminal justice system. But bank crimes aren't drug crimes - except, of course, when they are.

Sen. Kaufman added: "There have been a number of us saying in the cases against JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the big banks was that one of the problems with the settlements … is that they never had to admit wrongdoing."

The Badge

When JPMorgan Chase was sued over the actions of subsidiary Bear Stearns, it implied that it had only acquired that firm as a favor to the nation - a myth the press has often repeated - and made it clear that it felt it was unfair to be punished for the acts of an organization that was not under Mr. Dimon's supervision at the time. Thanks to Dexia, that particular injustice has now been corrected.

It remains to be seen if the Justice Department will follow Dexia's lead and investigate the compelling evidence of criminal actions at JPMorgan Chase.

Jamie Dimon may believe that he and his peers above the law, but there are still honest people trying to hold them accountable. And he may have those FBI cufflinks, but hey -- Elvis Presley got Richard Nixon to give him a badge from the Narcotics Bureau, and we know how that story ended.

(The press call was part of the Campaign for a Fair Settlement's call for prosecution of Wall Street crimes in the first 100 days of the President's second term.)

Dropping the charges? Wow. Just wow:

Charges against William Bryan Jennings, the Morgan Stanley U.S. bond-underwriting chief accused of stabbing a New York cab driver over a fare, will be dropped, according to Connecticut police.

“I’m aware that the charges are being dropped,” Detective Chester Perkowski of the Darien Police Department said today in an interview. He declined to comment further.

Jennings was accused of attacking the driver, Mohamed Ammar, on Dec. 22 with a 2 1/2-inch blade after a 40-mile (64 kilometer) ride from New York to the banker’s home in Darien. Ammar, a native of Egypt and a U.S. citizen, said Jennings told him, “I’m going to kill you. You should go back to your country,” according to a police report.

Jennings faced assault and hate-crime charges, each of which brings a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He was also charged with not paying the fare, a misdemeanor. He pleaded not guilty March 9.

When last we saw Mr. Jennings, it sure looked like criminal charges looming in his future:

Mohamed Ammar said investment banker W. Bryan Jennings — a $2-million-a-year fat cat for Morgan Stanley — went from being a sweet gentleman he picked up in Midtown to a surly, knife-wielding “drunk” who stiffed him on the $204 fare when they got to Jennings’ Darien, Conn., home.

“I said, ‘You have to pay me. It’s the law,’ ” Ammar recalled at his Queens home yesterday, where he lives with his wife and three children. “He says, ‘What law? You should go back to your own f--king country.’

“I say, ‘This is my f--king country, excuse my language. I’m an American citizen!’ ” said the driver, who is originally from Egypt.

“That’s when he pulled out the penknife . . . He leaned forward and yelled, ‘I’m gonna kill you, motherf--ker!” Ammar said.

“I saw his hand balled up into a fist and I thought he was going to punch me,” the cabby said.

“I put my hand out to protect, and that is when I saw the penknife. He went for my neck first but ended up slashing my hand many times as I was fighting him off . . . My hand was bleeding pretty bad” as Jennings fled on foot, Ammar said.

“He was drunk and out of control, and he could have killed me. That was one of the scariest moments of my life.”

Ammar needed six stitches to close his wounds.

The buzz is that President Barack Obama is pushing hard for a deal with the big banks over the foreclosure crisis in advance of the State of the Union address on Tuesday. Most observers are afraid that the deal will be too small and that the banks will get a slap on the wrist despite playing a major role in creating the financial crisis that led to a recession.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka joined a growing chorus calling for a rejection of such a small deal and calling for an investigation of the banks over potential fraud and illegal activity:

We need to hold banks accountable for the fraudulent practices that brought about the worst economic crisis since the Depression. State Attorneys General have been investigating bank fraud, and these critical investigations must not be undermined by a premature and inadequate settlement. We call on the administration to reject any deal that insulates banks from full responsibility.

We commend state Attorneys Generals like New York’s Eric Schneiderman and Delaware’s Beau Biden for their leadership and courage in calling for a real investigation and relief on a scale that helps the millions of homeowners who face a new wave of foreclosures.

The economy is currently weighed down by $750 billion in negative home equity, so relief on a massive scale is needed to lift home values and stimulate the economy by increasing consumer demand. A comprehensive settlement must force banks to write down underwater mortgages. A sum significantly larger than the rumored $25 billion is needed for the economy to grow and create jobs.

Specifically, the administration must stand strong against the Big Banks and insist on:

1. A full and thorough investigation into problems tied to the residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) market, and

2. A guaranteed minimum amount of money set aside for reducing the mortgage principal of “underwater” homeowners in key states impacted by the foreclosure crisis.

This is an opportunity for the administration to demonstrate leadership and show that it has the political will to do what’s right for homeowners and right for our economy.

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Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

If you saw the Oscar-winning documentary "Inside Job," you may have been surprised to discover that so many high-powered academic economists are essentially bought off by bankers and corporations to publicly support the policies that are so bad for the rest of us, adding a thin veneer of academic respectability with bogus "white papers." If you saw that, this may not even surprise you:

Laura Tyson, the former chair of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, had a column in the NYT today urging patience in addressing the over-valuation of the dollar relative to the Chinese yuan. The heading of the piece identifies Tyson only by her role as a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and her former position in the Clinton administration.

The NYT's identification did not mention that Ms. Tyson is also currently a member of the board of directors of Morgan Stanley. She received almost $350,000 in compensation for her work in this position last year.

This is relevant to the piece because Morgan Stanley has extensive business dealings in China. It is likely that Morgan Stanley would benefit from having the dollar remain high against the Chinese yuan, since this means that its dollar assets will go further in China. In other words, the position being advocated by Ms. Tyson in this piece happens to coincide with the interests of the company on whose board she sits.

It is entirely possible, that Ms. Tyson came to her views on the dollar and yuan without any consideration of its impact on Morgan Stanley. However, the NYT should have informed readers of this potential conflict of interest.

As far as the substance, her argument that there is little link between the value of the dollar against the yuan and the U.S. trade deficit with China is weak. When China raised the value of its currency against the dollar in 2005, many other nations followed suit. This led to a substantial decline in the U.S. trade deficit measured as a share of GDP. (The only relevant measure.) It matters little to workers in the United States whether the improvement in the deficit came in trade with China or other countries.

Also the plea for patience must be seen in a context in which tens of millions of workers are unemployed or underemployed with little hope for any improvement in sight. Deficit hawks in both political parties (including many of Ms. Tyson's former colleagues in the Clinton administration) have closed off the option of further fiscal stimulus. The current political context also seems to offer little hope for more expansionary monetary policy.

Glad to see the unions keeping the heat on the banks over Social Security (and mortgage foreclosures, too, as in the above video). Remember, there's probably a Morgan Stanley office near you -- why not join the fun yourself?

[Yesterday] more than 150 members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) protested the deficit commission's proposed cuts to Social Security outside of the DC offices of Morgan Stanley. One might ask, why did union members protest outside of a big bank's office when it is the President's commission that is proposing to cut Social Security?

UE Director of Organization Bob Kingsley had the answer. "We are gathered here at the scene of the crime," Kingsley said. "Morgan Stanley and the other big banks are the source of the plan to privatize and cut Social Security."

Union members also noted that Erskine Bowles sits on the board of Morgan Stanley. Erskine Bowles is co-chair of the bi-partisan "National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform," whose mandate is to find ways to reduce the federal deficit, but which has instead made Social Security its primary target. According to liberal activists, the deficit commission is widely expected to come out with recommendations after the election - too late for voters to have a say - and to call for raising the retirement age to 70 and other cuts in Social Security benefits.

In the late 1990s, Bowles served as President Clinton's White House chief of staff. Bowles negotiated with Newt Gingrich a plan to partially privatize Social Security. That deal fell apart in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal when Republicans called for Clinton's impeachment according to Steven Gillon, author of The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation. A decade later, Erskine Bowles has been assigned to the Deficit Commision in order to build support among his former Democratic colleagues for cutting Social Security in order to lower the deficit.

It wasn't even close.

I'd suggest that anyone who hasn't done it yet should find a small bank and move their accounts. Clearly, the people we elected aren't going to do anything about these monster banks:

A move to break up major Wall Street banks failed Thursday night by a vote of 61 to 33.

Three Republicans, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John Ensign of Nevada, voted with 30 Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, in support of the provision. The author of the pending overall financial reform bill in the Senate, Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, voted against it. (See the full roll call.)

The amendment, sponsored by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), would have required megabanks to be broken down in size and capped so that their individual failure would not bring down the entire system.

Under Brown-Kaufman, no bank could hold more than 10 percent of the total amount of insured deposits, and a limit would have been placed on liabilities of a single bank to two percent of GDP.

In practice, the amendment required the six biggest banks -- Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- to significantly scale down their size. It was touted as a way to end Too Big To Fail.

Though top Obama administration officials have not publicly opposed the amendment, its leading economists have opposed ending Too Big To Fail simply by breaking up the nation's financial behemoths. Austan Goolsbee and Larry Summers have both fought back against this idea, as has Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

"This is certainly a defeat for those who are concerned about the dangers of financial concentration in this country," Kaufman said in a statement after the vote. "Some causes are worth fighting for, and for me, the concern about the risks 'too big to fail' banks pose to the American economy and people is deep and profound given the economic tragedy millions of American have endured. I believe the debate itself -- though failing to gain a majority of votes -- has helped to change attitudes about the degree of financial concentration and power these megabanks now represent."

Now this is exactly what we've been worried about: that Wall Street would successfully push Obama for an early end to economic stimulus (which also includes extended unemployment benefits, by the way), just as bankers and Republicans did with FDR in 1937 - tipping the country right back into recession. (Krugman's been sounding the alarm for a while.)

I predict Bernanke will withdraw anything that makes it look like they don't have faith in a spring recovery, hoping to use it as a placebo effect.

And as to the millions of us still looking for work, and whose unemployment checks are about to run out? Morgan Stanley responds that there's "never an easy time to do it." I hope Mr. Roach has a big yard, since we're all going to be camping in it:

Jan. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Morgan Stanley Asia Ltd. Chairman Stephen Roach said U.S. policy makers should start to exit emergency stimulus measures now if the economic recovery is as strong as they say it is.

“There is never an easy time to do it,” Roach said on Bloomberg Television today. “The longer they wait, the greater the chance they sow the seeds for the next bubble. So I’m in favor of an early exit strategy.”

The Federal Reserve on Dec. 16 pledged to keep interest rates “exceptionally low” for an “extended period” even as officials said financial markets were healthy enough to allow most emergency lending programs to expire at the end of this month. Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his fellow policy makers cut the benchmark rate almost to zero in December 2008.

“We’ve seen the most extraordinary monetary stimulus on the record in the 15, 16 months post-Lehman Brothers,” Roach said. “We’ll have to see the most extraordinary withdrawal of stimulus on record” and “if this recovery is as strong as Bernanke and markets think it is, the time to exit is now.”

Data since the Nov. 3-4 Fed meeting showed that “economic activity has continued to pick up and that the deterioration in the labor market is abating,” the Open Market Committee said in a Dec. 16 statement. “Financial market conditions have become more supportive of economic growth,” while the economy is “likely to remain weak for a time,” policy makers said.

You know, I always said the Democrats would be just as easily bought as the Bush Republicans, but that doesn't make it any easier on my stomach. Howie Klein:

Or, you might want a different kind of candidate from one who isn't even in Congress yet and already selling her ass to K Street whores who represent Countrywide Mortgage and Morgan Stanley. How about making a donation today to the grassroots candidate for the seat, Doug Tudor? You can do it here.

By the way, if you can't quite remember who Allen Boyd (Blue Dog-FL) is, please recall that when George W. Bush wanted to push his bill to kill Social Security as "bipartisan" he only managed to find one "Democrat" to co-sponsor it. That's Boyd, the fella bringing Lori Edwards around Washington to meet all the lobbyists. Boyd is on the Budget Committee and on the Appropriations Committee. He's taken in $1,048,609 from the financial sector-- but not because they're buying his votes; only because he's so handsome and debonair.

I just don't know what the best options are here, but I'm not feeling reassured that the people advising Geithner were making so much money from the people they're supposed to be regulating:

Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Some of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides, none of whom faced Senate confirmation, earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other Wall Street firms, according to financial disclosure forms.

The advisers include Gene Sperling, who last year took in $887,727 from Goldman Sachs and $158,000 for speeches mostly to financial companies, including the firm run by accused Ponzi scheme mastermind R. Allen Stanford. Another top aide, Lee Sachs, reported more than $3 million in salary and partnership income from Mariner Investment Group, a New York hedge fund.

As part of Geithner’s kitchen cabinet, Sperling and Sachs wield influence behind the scenes at the Treasury Department, where they help oversee the $700 billion banking rescue and craft executive pay rules and the revamp of financial regulations. Yet they haven’t faced the public scrutiny given to Senate-confirmed appointees, nor are they compelled to testify in Congress to defend or explain the Treasury’s policies.

“These people are incredibly smart, they’re incredibly talented and they bring knowledge,” said Bill Brown, a visiting professor at Duke University School of Law and former managing director at Morgan Stanley. “The risk is they will further exacerbate the problem of our regulators identifying with Wall Street.”

Gee, ya think?

[...] Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams said the department needs people with a deep understanding of markets and the financial system, especially as it works to fend off the worst recession in half a century.

“The secretary thought that the best way to utilize their talents was to allow these individuals to provide advice to the secretary on policy issues through appointments as counselor,” Williams said.

All of Geithner’s counselors are subject to federal ethics rules, including a pledge to avoid contact with their former firms for at least a year, Williams added.

Most officials at the Treasury who have been approved by Congress come from academic, legal or non-Wall Street backgrounds.