Bailed out Banks behaving Bad still

[InRareForm]

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/09/18/1163981/do-bailed-out-banks-remain-bad-while-good-banks-behave-better/

[Borat Sagyidev]

More direct correlation is that just about all major politicians have to become corrupt aiding these banks to get elected.

[TDMVPDPOY]

no fkn shit

i got a friend who was part of one of the big collapse during the gfc, so what did he and his partners do? go setup another company, doing the same shit, same fkn principals...expand quick hopefully to make a buck and sell...

[boutons_deux]

now, try to get Congress to regulate the financial sector, and watch the Repugs block every single attempt, while defunding/gutting the recent post-2008 regulations.

the financial sector owns Congress and the Exec, and there's no way to stop it, while the Repugs have packed SCOTUS with JINOs.

America is so fucked and unfuckable, and nobody can refute that.

[coyotes_geek]

Can we please just break up the fucking ban................nevermind. No one cares........

[boutons_deux]

"Can we please just break up the fucking banks"

the financial sector CARES and so breaking them up, or even regulating them, simply won't ever happen.

[boutons_deux]

Wall Street Rolling Back Another Key Piece of Financial Reform

To deal with this problem, the Dodd-Frank Act among other things included a simple reform. It required the financial advisors of municipalities to do two things: register with the SEC, and accept a fiduciary duty to respect the best interests of the taxpayers they are advising.

Sounds simple, right? But Wall Street couldn’t have that. After all, if companies are required to have a fiduciary responsibility to cities and towns, how in the world can they screw cities and towns? The idea was a veritable axe-blow to the banks’ municipal advisory businesses.

So what did Wall Street lobbyists and trade groups like SIFMA (the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association) do? Well, they did what they’ve been doing to Dodd-Frank generally: they Swiss-cheesed the law with a string of exemptions. The industry proposal that ended up being HR 2827 created several new loopholes for purveyors of swaps and other such financial products to cities and towns. Here’s how the pro-reform group Americans for Financial Reform described the loopholes (emphasis mine):

For example, any advice provided by a broker, dealer, bank, or accountant that is any way “related to or connected with” a municipal underwriting would be exempted from the fiduciary requirement. A similar exemption would be created for all advice provided by banks or swap dealers that is in any way “related to or connected with” the sale to municipalities of financial derivatives, loan participation agreements, deposit products, foreign exchange, or a variety of other financial products.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/wall-street-rolling-back-another-key-piece-of-financial-reform-20120920#ixzz271odPmrk

The financial sector is unstoppable, un-jail-able, and of course 100% unaccountable.

[Jacob1983]

Have any of these bailouts in America actually helped a regular person? I'm talking about an American that is either poor or in the middle class.

[boutons_deux]

the financial bailout helped the financial sector, as intended.

the financial sector fucks themselves (see the London whale deal) and everybody else, esp moochers and muppets, as Wall St calls their suckered clients.

[boutons_deux]

A Rare Look at Why the Government Won't Fight Wall Street

The great mystery story in American politics these days is why, over the course of two presidential administrations (one from each party), there’s been no serious federal criminal investigation of Wall Street during a period of what appears to be epic corruption. People on the outside have speculated and come up with dozens of possible reasons, some plausible, some tending toward the conspiratorial – but there have been very few who've come at the issue from the inside.

We get one of those rare inside accounts in The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, a new book by Jeff Connaughton, the former aide to Senators Ted Kaufman and Joe Biden. Jeff is well known to reporters like me; during a period when most government officials double-talked or downplayed the Wall Street corruption problem, Jeff was one of the few voices on the Hill who always talked about the subject with appropriate alarm. He shared this quality with his boss Kaufman, the Delaware Senator who took over Biden's seat and instantly became an irritating (to Wall Street) political force by announcing he wasn’t going to run for re-election. "I later learned from reporters that Wall Street was frustrated that they couldn’t find a way to harness Ted or pull in his reins," Jeff writes. "There was no obvious way to pressure Ted because he wasn’t running for re-election."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/a-rare-look-at-why-the-government-wont-fight-wall-street-20120918?print=true

[coyotes_geek]

Have any of these bailouts in America actually helped a regular person? I'm talking about an American that is either poor or in the middle class.

Your elected leaders who voted for this thing would tell you that the poor and middle class personally benefitted from this via not having to suffer through a collapse of the entire financial system. Just think of it as trickle down in action, brought to you by blue team and red team. When banks get money, YOU WIN!!!!

[boutons_deux]

Private Equity and the 47 Percent

By now, we have all heard of Mitt Romney's recent comments that nearly half of American households are moochers who are "dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them." There is a real irony here. The host of the $50,000-a-plate fundraiser for Romney was prominent private equity manager Marc J. Leder. The private equity firm that Leder co-founded, Sun Capital, has more than once driven one of its portfolio companies into bankruptcy - shedding liability for the company's pension plan and reducing its debt - only to have another of its units buy the company out of bankruptcy. Normally, owners lose their investment in a bankruptcy, but this maneuver allows Sun Capital to retain ownership of the portfolio company after having stiffed the company's creditors and thrown its workers and retirees onto the mercy of a government agency for their retirement income.

Just this past November, Sun Capital took Friendly's, the iconic family restaurant and ice cream parlor it took private in 2008, into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Friendly's used the bankruptcy to jettison the pensions of nearly 6,000 employees and retirees. Outrageous as this seems, Friendly's also sold itself out of bankruptcy to another affiliate of Sun Capital. A key part of Sun Capital's restructuring plan involved shifting liability for the pension plan to the federal government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC).

( aka: private equity gain, public taxpayers loss )

Now, Romney - at the home of the co-founder of a private equity firm that has the distinction of being the firm that took the most portfolio companies into bankruptcy in 2011 - had the gall to cast aspersions on, among others, workers whose retirement savings in private pension plans were wiped out, forcing them to depend on the government for their retirement income. These workers are simply collateral damage to owners who burden companies with unsustainable debt that plunges the companies into bankruptcy while managing to make a profit for the owners and their investors. In the Friendly's case, this appears to be a transparent effort by Sun Capital to take advantage of the bankruptcy process to abandon pension obligations and throw the workers' retirement income onto the PBGC while continuing to keep its ownership of Friendly's. It is surprising that Romney, well known for his time at the helm of Bain Capital, was unaware of the role that he and others at the fundraiser played in contributing to the 47 percent who he says will not vote for him.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/11643-private-equity-and-the-47-percent