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"Minority Report in reverse – pre-noncrime."Quote:
Originally Posted by Th'Pusher
Truly an amazing status: govt won't prosecute because the banks are simply too big.
Of course, the Repugs will absolutely, repeatedly obstruct any regs to reduce the planet's exposure to US mega bank cartel
Last time I checked holder was appointed by a democrat. Props to sanders, but this issue needs bipartisan effort to be addressed.Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
Of course, the Repugs will absolutely, repeatedly obstruct any regs to reduce the planet's exposure to US mega bank cartelQuote:
Originally Posted by Th'Pusher
Do really think a Repug DoJ would even bother to admit that?
Not only do I expect him to admit it, I expect him to lean in and fight it. There is ideological symmetry with the right and the left on this issue. What's missing is the moneyed interest in the middle.Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...93A19020130411Quote:
At least three Wall Street analysts this week have written reports about the possibility of the biggest banks breaking themselves up to boost profitability, signaling that investors may be more willing to embrace an idea that is still toxic to some lawmakers in Washington.
New regulations in areas like capital requirements are imposing higher costs on the biggest investment banks, raising doubts about their future profitability. These questions make the biggest global investment banks "un-investable," wrote analyst Kian Abouhossein, who himself works at JPMorgan, one of the biggest global investment banks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
I think you just need to rachet up the capital requirements to the point where they break themselves up for that very reason.
"Releasing shareholder value"
One can only hope. The banking ecosystem would be better served by more, smaller banks anyway.
:tuQuote:
Originally Posted by RandomGuy
Quote:
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."This was a big thing. It was the first time since the crisis that a prominent financial industry group opposed the will of the TBTF banks. I remember covering Dodd-Frank and being told by a number of members in the House and the Senate that the sentiment of many community bankers was for breaking up or at least curtailing the power of companies like Chase and Bank of America, but that the community banking lobby was not yet prepared to take that step.But now, after the London Whale, the LIBOR scandal, the outrageous HSBC settlement and nearly five years of rapacious market-dominating behavior by these state-backed banks, the community banks have finally split off from TBTF.This is another in a series of defections on this issue that in the past year has included many Republican politicians, numerous important financial regulators (even the New York Fed has taken a semi-stand against TBTF) and, hilariously, the creator of Too-Big-To-Fail himself, former Citigroup CEO and legendary lower-Manhattan raging asshole Sandy Weill. Weill was the man for whom the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed back in the nineties, so that his already-completed Citigroup merger could be legalized. But even he came out last year and said we have to break up the banks.Naturally, there was going to be a response to Brown-Vitter from Wall Street. And we got it last week, shockingly not from one of the banks or a lobbying firm connected to the banks, but from the Standard and Poor's ratings agency – supposedly a strict, humorlessly conservative auditor that should always abhor risk and look favorably upon greater safety and security. The very fact that such a company came out against a bill forcing banks to have safer balance sheets is in itself absolute proof of how completely fucked and corrupt our current system is.The S&P report, entitled "Brown-Vitter Bill: Game-Changing Regulation For U.S. Banks", is so incredibly hysterical in its tone that, reading it, one cannot help but deduce that people on Wall Street are genuinely afraid of this bill. The paper essentially hints that forcing banks to retain more capital could lead to world financial collapse, the onset of a new Ice Age, mammoths roaming Nebraska, etc. "The ratings implications of the Brown-Vitter bill, if enacted, for all U.S. banks would be neutral to negative," the report read. In the second paragraph, it reads:If congress enacts the bill as proposed, Standard and Poor's Ratings Services would have concerns about the economic impact on banks' creditworthiness stemming from the transition to substantially higher capital requirements.Having a ratings agency bent to monopolistic bank influence give a bad rating to a piece of legislation designed to . . . curb monopolistic bank influence is a bad surrealistic joke, like a Rene Magritte take on lobbying – Ceci n'est pas une Too-Big-To-Fail!Remember, one of the primary causes of the financial crisis in the first place was the corruption of the independent ratings agencies. In the crisis years, companies like S&P and Moody's and Fitch were so desperate to avoid losing business from the big investment banks (who paid the ratings firms to rate products like mortgage-backed securities) that these companies often gave embarrassingly overenthusiastic grades to a generation of toxic assets.The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in its final report placed blame for the crisis squarely on the shoulders of these firms. "The three credit rating agencies were key enablers of the financial meltdown. The mortgage-related securities at the heart of the crisis could not have been marketed and sold without their seal of approval," the FCIC report read. "This crisis could not have happened without the rating agencies."So intellectually compromised ratings agencies were guilty before, because they were too quick to help Too-Big-To-Fail banks sell bad products into the world marketplace.Now, an intellectually-compromised ratings agency is helping sell the very Too-Big-To-Fail system in an attempt to beat back a reform bill – an agency that once stated explicitly that it does not take public positions on legislation.Years ago, Standard and Poor's was involved a similar situation. In the mid-2000s, the Senate was considering creating a regulatory body with receivership powers that could have oversight over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. S&P, seemingly doing the bidding of Fannie and Freddie (which wanted no part of any new regulatory oversight), warned that such legislation might lead to a downgrade of the so-called Government-Sponsored Entities, or GSEs. In other words, if you pass this bill, we're going to take a financial axe to Fannie and Freddie.When then-Senator John Sununu asked then-S&P president Kathleen Corbet if it didn't seem to her like the ratings agency was meddling in the legislative process by issuing such a dire warning, Corbet testily replied in the negative."First of all, Senator," she said. "Standard & Poor's does not advocate positions on any legislation."With that in mind, here are some of passages from S&P's new report, "Brown-Vitter Bill: Game-Changing Regulation For U.S. Banks":If the requirements force banks to deleverage, a credit crunch could ensue and the U.S. economy might be thrown off course . . . the U.S. banking industry could become less competitive in world financial markets . . . All in all, the bill's goal of ending TBTF could lead to unintended consequences – a destabilized financial system.So Standard and Poor's does not advocate positions on any legislation, mind you. It just thinks the world as we know it will end if this particular bill passes.In reality, of course, about the only things that would be "destabilized" if TBTF ended would be the compensation packages for a small group of overpaid banking executives like Jamie Dimon. Another consequence might be that ratings agencies would actually have to work for a living, and earn reputations for honesty and integrity in the market, instead of getting endless streams of free money from big banks to give sparkly AAA ratings to every half-baked security or derivative instrument their obese, Fed-fattened clients cranked out.Some of the other arguments in the report were amazing. Standard and Poor's seemed particularly concerned about the effect such a bill would have on banks' ability to raise money, either by borrowing or by selling stock:We see broad implications for investors in bank-funding instruments, both debt and equity. For instance, so far, bank equity investors have not been totally enthusiastic about the pace and scope of financial regulation, particularly in relation to expected returns on equity. The draft legislation is hardly making it more attractive, in our view, and the prospect of lower returns and considerable dilution is likely to turn equity investors away.This doesn't sound like it, but it's really an extraordinary passage. The ratings agency here is admitting that banks that have the implicit support of the United States government and have virtually unlimited access to free cash from the Federal Reserve are still having trouble getting people to invest in their futures.Rather than finding in that fact a shocking and horrific truth that desperately requires public action – that even the awesome advantages of Too-Big-To-Fail no longer outweigh the fear investors have about the big banks' opaque accounting and risk-heavy business strategies – S&P instead concludes that it's somehow worse to fix the problem than it is to allow these cancerous firms to continue to underperform under the current system.The report goes on to talk about the consequences for such banks in a world where they would have trouble raising the needed cash. "Faced with little to no access to equity markets," S&P writes, "the largest banks would be forced into asset sales, divestitures, or would simply need to break up."Right. That, or they could reform their compensation structures and freeze dividends during their transitions from casino operations to actual job-creating, business-supporting banks. But since paying themselves less could not possibly be contemplated, executives from the biggest banking firms probably would jump straight to mass breakups if the bill passed."They're basically saying, 'How do you expect bankers to keep up their extravagant lifestyles and meet these crazy safety standards?'" is how one analyst put it to me.There are many other loony arguments in the report. It claims that by going farther than the Swiss Basel III international accords would in demanding bank safety, the U.S. would be "abandoning its seat in global banking reform," which might make the U.S. banking industry "less competitive in world financial markets." But this is exactly the opposite of the truth – by taking these bold steps, the U.S. would very much be acting as a leader in global banking reform, and the increased safety and transparency of our banking system would make our banks more competitive globally, not less.But the craziest part of the S&P report, to me, is the conclusion. "It is tempting to assume that we would raise credit ratings because higher capital increases creditworthiness to bondholders," the agency writes. "However . . ."Here the S&P is saying: "You might think, just because we're a ratings agency that's supposed to always think safety and security are good things, that we think increased safety and security for these banks is a good idea. However . . ."So what's the "However"? Well, it talks about the banks having a lessened ability to lend (although they're not lending now – they're still sitting on over a trillion and a half dollars in excess reserves just in their Fed accounts!), about the growth of shadow banks, about decreased profitability of the big-six banks. But then they come to their big money-shot conclusion:Under our methodology, we would potentially no longer factor in government support if we believed that once large banks are broken up, we would not classify these banks as having high systemic importance.Translated into English, what they mean is: If this bill passes, these banks would no longer be Too Big To Fail. So we'd probably have to downgrade them.Well – duh!Not only is this an explicit admission that Dodd-Frank didn't fix the Too-Big-To-Fail issue (Wall Street has long insisted that Dodd-Frank was more than sufficient to deal with the "moral hazard" problem), it's a crazy thing to say out loud. S&P writes about having to factor out the implicit government backing of big banks as though that would be a bad thing. But if implicit government support is the only thing keeping the ratings of these companies even as high as they are now, that means they really should be rated lower, in a true free market.And Standard and Poor's is, what – against admitting that?It's nuts. A true capitalist auditor would be sick to the point of vomiting at having to upgrade a company based upon its sleazy co-dependent relationship with the government. This report expresses just the opposite, and shows how backwards things have gotten on Wall Street.I've talked to a number of people on the Hill and in finance in the finance sector in the last week and they all say the same thing. The tone of reports like this S&P thing, and op-eds by other bank-friendly critics, are more strident and desperate than we've seen previously and suggest a genuine fear that this bill may pass.There are others who think that the bill isn't designed to pass, that it's more designed to bully the banks into supporting Dodd-Frank and/or the Basel accords, which banks spent fortunes lobbying against but are now, humorously, suddenly being hailed in the finance sector as sensible and perhaps-sufficient solutions to Wall Street's problems.But even some of those critics admit that there are endgames here where Brown-Vitter makes it out of the Senate Banking Committee (where South Dakota Democratic chair Tim Johnson is currently seen as an obstacle to this bill passing) and goes to a vote, where of course anything might happen. The banks, after all, know that their current level of popular support outside of their cash-buttressed Beltway bubble is hovering somewhere between nuclear waste and bowel cancer. A public referendum on their continued state-sponsored existence is not in any way desirable, even if it's a longshot to pass.
Wow. ^ didn't paste as I expected. sorry.
this won't pass, but anyway
In Brown-Vitter Bill, a Banking Overhaul With Possible Teeth
The biggest banks have done an excellent job of delaying and undermining the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law and staving off criminal investigations into wrongdoing.
Maybe, just maybe, they’ve been too successful.
Senators Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Ohio, and David Vitter, Republican from Louisiana, introduced a bill last week that calls for two things: making the giant banks much safer and tying regulators’ hands to prevent them from using taxpayer money to save a failing financial institution.
If the bankers who blew up the financial world had been held accountable, the popular fury that fuels this bill would have dissipated by now. And if Dodd-Frank were fully in place today, instead of being bogged down in the courts and in the halls of Washington regulatory offices, there would be no political momentum behind such an effort.
Now, we will see whether the bill is simply a barbaric yawp of anger at the big banks or something with actual force. It probably won’t get passed, but its underlying premise cannot be dislodged from the Washington conversation.
The Brown-Vitter bill calls for the banks with more than $500 billion in assets — I’m looking at you, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — to have capital reserves of 15 percent. That’s a much higher standard than exists today, especially because the current requirements have weak definitions of capital and total asset size.
The banks have rounded up a bunch of critics, led by the likes of the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and the lobbying firm Hamilton Place Strategies, the volume of their lamentations most likely in direct proportion to the hourly rate they bill their clients. They invoke terrifying, talismanic statements: the bill is a “punishment” to big banks. It is simplistic, impossible, will render American banks “uncompetitive,” lead to financial crises and probably cause tooth decay.
This naïve bill would force the giant banks to raise too much capital and would hurt the economy as the companies were forced to shrink or break up. Standard & Poor’s is one of the observers warning of a financial crisis. And who better to know than the people who brought us the last one?
Goldman Sachs and S.& P. estimate the big banks might be forced to raise $1 trillion or more. That’s a lot, so much that the leviathans’ agents cry out that they couldn’t sell that much stock. But they don’t have to raise it all at once. And they can retain their earnings and stop paying dividends in addition to selling shares.
In putting that argument forward, they don’t realize they make Senator Brown’s and Senator Vitter’s case for them. If investors are so terrified of the big banks that they won’t buy their stock, that’s a terrific problem. Most of the big banks trade below their net worth, an indication that investors don’t trust them. Brown-Vitter might actually help banks by restoring that trust.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/deal...ossible-teeth/
the financial sector is untouchable, unstoppable.
you only wish, boutons. life ain't that simple.
political power is real.
the power is with the Congress, controlled by UCA/1%, NOT by the fully disenfranchised people. The "people" won't even have candidates that represent them first, and certainly NEVER enough candidates elected, aka Congressional votes, to address America's real problems, rather than addessing/protecting/enriching themselves and the UCA/1%. America is a kleptocratic plutocratic rentier society, not a democracy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
IT'S THAT SIMPLE
you're like the hedgehog who only sees one big thing. unfortunately for all of us, your mouth only says one thing too.
YAY,,,, my preferred solution has an actual bill!!Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
WOnder how long before the TBTF lobbists corner it in an alley and dump the body in the Potomac...?
While Boutons may be over the top in the way he puts that particular bit, I am struck by the paucity of lobbying groups in Washington for poor single moms and the working poor families in this country.Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
When we as a country allow our goverment to be essentially run by money, people get ground up in the process.
Especially given that the kinds of people Romney directed his "47%" comments at are the ones who can fund all manner of think-tanks and policy papers to supply the media outlets they control with ready-made plausible sounding propaganda. Given Romney's doubling down on that schtick I can't help but wonder that the majority of the plutocrats in this country don't feel the same way.
Given the kinds of things drummed into the information bubble that the right wing in this country prefers to live in, it worries me.
you always miss the big picture to fuck around uselessly, academically, sterilely in silly details.Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
"political power is real" and it does not rest with Human-Americans, but with Corporate-Amercans, 1%, plutocratic politicians. Start from there see how silly your "political power is real" is a source of hope-y and change-y.
Those, silly, silly details. Tsk tsk.
no money in it, nor any grand political payoff.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandomGuy
(Democratic Party used to do a bit of that on its own time but has since moved on to greener pastures, I gather.)
it is neither silly nor sterile to point out that business must lobby government to get what it wants in the law.Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
the two are not coextensive: government regs and rules apply, with meaningful costs attached to compliance and contumely.
pretending political power no longer exists is just that. pretending.
(shrugs)
political power exists, I pose no strawman that it doesn't.Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
It's just that UCA/1% hold all the significant political power, not Human-Americans. An overwhelming majority of Americans want b/g checks, Congress kills it.
govt rules and regs exist, but loopholes, weak enforcement dominate, combined with defunding, compromised, corporate-friendly regulators, and Congressional intimidation render rules and regs ineffective.
The "financialization" of the US economy, where the finance sector occupies a huge slice of income, HURTS the 99%, hurts America, benefits only the 1%
Two New Papers Say Big Finance Sectors Hurt Growth and Innovation
Titled, Why does financial sector growth crowd out real economic growth?, its analysis of why too much finance is a bad thing is robust and compelling. This article is a follow up to a 2012 paper by the same authors, Stephen Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi, which found that when finance sectors exceeded a certain size, specifically when private sector debt topped 100% of GDP or when financial services industry professions were more than 3.9% of the work force, it became a drag on growth.
Notice that this finding alone is damning as far as policy in the US is concerned, where cheaper debt, deregulation, more access to financial markets, and “financial deepening” are all seen as virtuous.
And the big reason is one that is no surprise to anyone in the US, that finance has been sucking “talent,” as in the best and brightest from a large range of disciplines, ranging from mathematicians, physicists, the best MBAs (which remember could be running manufacturing operations or in high-growth real economy businesses) and lawyers. The banking sector’s gain is Main Street’s loss. From the abstract:
In this paper we examine the negative relationship between the rate of growth of the financial sector and the rate of growth of total factor productivity. We begin by showing that by disproportionately benefiting high collateral/low productivity projects, an exogenous increase in finance reduces total factor productivity growth. Then, in a model with skilled workers and endogenous financial sector growth, we establish the possibility of multiple equilibria.
In the equilibrium where skilled labour works in finance, the financial sector grows more quickly at the expense of the real economy. We go on to show that consistent with this theory, financial growth disproportionately harms financially dependent and R&D-intensive industries.
And how does this come about? One big reason is that financial firms like to lend, and to lend against collateral rather than business earnings. That drives lending to collateral-intensive activities, most of all real estate, which is not all that productive from a societal perspective:
In our model, we first show how an exogenous increase in financial sector growth can reduce total factor productivity growth.2 This is a consequence of the fact that financial sector growth benefits disproportionately high collateral/low productivity projects. This mechanism reflects the fact that periods of high financial sector growth often coincide with the strong development in sectors like construction, where returns on projects are relatively easy to pledge as collateral but productivity (growth) is relatively low.
And the access to funding then drives where resources go:
Next, we introduce skilled workers who can be hired either by financiers to improve their ability to lend, increasing financial sector growth, or by entrepreneurs to improve their returns (albeit at the cost of lower pledgeability).3,4 We then show that when skilled workers work in one sector it generates a negative externality on the other sector.
The externality works as follows: financiers who hire skilled workers can lend more to entrepreneurs than those who do not. With more abundant and cheaper funding, entrepreneurs have an incentive to invest in projects with higher pledgeability but lower productivity, reducing their demand for skilled labour.
Conversely, entrepreneurs who hire skilled workers invest in high return/low pledgeability projects. As a result, financiers have no incentive to hire skilled workers because the benefit in terms of increased ability to lend is limited since entrepreneurs’ projects feature low pledgeability.5 This negative externality can lead to multiple equilibria. In the equilibrium where financiers employ the skilled workers, so that the financial sector grows more rapidly, total factor productivity growth is lower than it would be had agents coordinated on the equilibrium where entrepreneurs attract the skilled labour.6
Looking at welfare, we are able to show that, relative to the social optimum, financial booms in which skilled labour work for the financial sector, are sub-optimal when the bargaining power of financiers is sufficiently large.
And remember, even though the authors blandly mention “the bargaining power of financiers” the model does not include the further distortion seen in many advanced economies, of laundering subsidies to the housing sector through housing finance or tax breaks.
And they test their model against real economy outcomes:
Here we focus on manufacturing industries and find that industries that are in competition for resources with finance are particularly damaged by financial booms. Specifically, we find that manufacturing sectors that are either R&D-intensive or dependent on external finance suffer disproportionate reductions in productivity growth when finance booms. That is, we confirm the results
in the model: by draining resources from the real economy, financial sector growth becomes a drag on
real growth.
The impact is large:
We find unambiguous evidence for very large effects of financial booms on industries that either have significant external financing needs or are R&D-intensive. We report estimates that imply that a highly R&D-intensive industry located in a country with a rapidly growing financial system will experience productivity growth of something like 2 percentage points per year less than an industry that is not very R&D-intensive located in a country with a slow-growing financial system.
Brad DeLong, earlier this week, flagged another important article on why finance has become a productivity drain by Thomas Philippon, titled Finance vs. Wal-Mart: Why are Financial Services so Expensive?
Despite the financial services industry having so much bigger and supposedly more efficient firms, the cost of financial intermediation is higher than in 1910. How is that possible? Is it all the new and improved looting? It’s even simpler. It’s Keynes’ capital markets as a casino problem:
…the current financial system does not seem better at transferring funds from savers to borrowers than the financial system of 1910.
The role of the finance industry is to produce, trade and settle financial contracts that can be used to pool funds, share risks, transfer resources, produce information and provide incentives. Financial intermediaries are compensated for providing these services. Total compensation of financial intermediaries (profits, wages, salary and bonuses) as a fraction of GDP is at an all-time high, around 9% of GDP. What does society get in return? Or, in other words, what does the finance industry produce? I measure the output of the finance industry by looking at all issuances of bonds, loans, stocks (IPOs, SEOs), as well as liquidity services to firms and households.
Measured output of the financial sector is indeed higher than it has been in much of the past. But, unlike the income earned by the sector, it is not unprecedentedly high. Historically, the unit cost of intermediation has been somewhere between 1.3% and 2.3% of assets. However, this unit cost has been trending upward since 1970 and is now significantly higher than in the past.
In other words, the finance industry of 1900 was just as able as the finance industry of 2010 to produce loans, bonds and stocks, and it was certainly doing it more cheaply. This is counter-intuitive, to say the least. How is it possible for today’s finance industry not to be significantly more efficient than the finance industry of John Pierpont Morgan?… Technological improvements in finance have mostly been used to increase secondary market activities, i.e., trading. Trading activities are many times larger than at any time in previous history. Trading costs have decreased, but I find no evidence that increased liquidity has led to better (i.e., more informative) prices or to more insurance
This is another damning finding from a policy perspective, in that the bias of regulations has been strongly toward promoting more market liquidity. Readers may recall that we’ve been skeptical of that premise for years, noting that in the stone ages of our youth, investors were not terribly bothered by limited liquidity in large and important markets like corporate bonds. Yet the SEC and the Fed have been all in with the “more liquidity is better” program, with the SEC pushing for lower and lower transaction charges (which has the perverse effect of leading financial services firms as trading counterparties to be fleeced rather than good customers to be nutured) and promoting high frequency trading, and the Fed allowing derivatives to grow like kudzu, out of the belief (among other things) that they would facilitate price discovery in cash markets.
And of course, an overly costly financial services sector on a raw transaction level again drains resources from other sectors.
As the Tax Justice Network noted,
…an oversized large financial sector is not the Golden Goose providing benefits for all, but a cuckoo in the nest, crowding out and harming other sectors and society.
Winston Churchill summarised:
“I would rather see finance less proud and industry more content.”
Indeed.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/...+capitalism%29
Remedies? one would be sales/transactions TAXES on every financial trade. Force banks to divest from non-banking (eg, infrastructure, distribution, real estate) sectors.
I think the VERY first would be to make income = income; no more of a break for income from capital gains. If anything, tax that higher, and lower the rate on earned income. Gotta encourage the best and brightest OUT of the financial sector.Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
BigFinance extorting Dems/Warren to back off, or else they get a financial bullet to the head
Wall Street Firms Threatens Democratic Party After Call To Break Them Up
The Too Big To Fail banks are none too pleased with Senator Elizabeth Warren’s call to break them up so they no longer pose a systemic risk to the financial system and economy. According to a report Reuters, the banksters are now telling officials in the Democratic Party that they will withhold campaign contributions if the party does not distance itself from progressive positions on financial reform.
The message was intended to isolate Senators Warren (D-Mass), Brown (D-OH), and any others in the Democratic Party who stand against Wall Street being above the law, beyond regulation, and always guaranteed a bailout.The banksters did however say that they had no problem with Hillary Clinton and were planning on donating to her campaign - shocking.
Representatives from Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, have met to discuss ways to urge Democrats, including Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, to soften their party’s tone toward Wall Street, sources familiar with the discussions said this week.
Bank officials said the idea of withholding donations was not discussed at a meeting of the four banks in Washington but it has been raised in one-on-one conversations between representatives of some of them. However, there was no agreement on coordinating any action, and each bank is making its own decision, they said.
JPMorgan in particular seemed to be throwing its weight around and has reportedly only donated a third of its usual annual contribution to the Democratic Party. JPM has faced numerous civil fines from the Obama Justice Department and still faces the possibility of a criminal prosecution until the statute of limitations kicks in later this year.
Maybe JPM is waiting until the Democratic White House let’s them off the hook before giving the party their bribes.
http://firedoglake.com/2015/03/27/wa...break-them-up/
BigFinance would prefer a Repug plutocrat as President (they gave Bishop Gecko 10:1 vs The Muslim in 2012), but they LOVE hard-core establishentarian Hillary just as much. And, if elected, her DoJ, Treasury, and SEC will will LOVE them back.
11 years on, little has changed, the TBTFs are bigger and more powerful than ever.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020...l-problem.htmlQuote:
The Office of the Controller of the Currency just fined Citibank $400 million for being a really poorly run bank. The Fed also sanctioned Citigroup, the holding company, for being generally lousy and for violating past promises to stop laundering money, but the Fed’s punishment was more on the order of having Citi write ten thousand times on a blackboard, “I’m a very bad bank and I promise to do better.”
Oh, and probably more consequential to Citi is a ban on making new acquisitions until the regulators think Citi has sufficiently fixed its controls.
I’m not making that up. It sounds a lot like CalPERS, which is truly alarming for an institution of Citi’s scale and ability to generate financial black holes.
First, from the OCC’s press release:
The OCC took these actions based on the bank’s unsafe or unsound banking practices for its long-standing failure to establish effective risk management and data governance programs and internal controls….In other words, this action was a sighting shot. The normally bank-friendly OCC has warned it could go as far as ousting top executives and board members if Citi doesn’t get its house in order.
The agency also issued a cease and desist order requiring the bank to take broad and comprehensive corrective actions to improve risk management, data governance, and internal controls. The order requires the bank to seek the OCC’s non-objection before making significant new acquisitions and reserves the OCC’s authority to implement additional business restrictions or require changes in senior management and the bank’s board should the bank not make timely, sufficient progress in complying with the order.
Even allowing for the fact that risk control at banks is designed to be eyewash, the OCC Cease and Desist Order makes it sound as if no one at Citi is controlling much of anything. For instance:
(4)The OCC has identified the following deficiencies, noncompliance with 12 C.F.R. Part 30, Appendix D, or unsafe or unsound practices with respect to the Bank’s data quality and data governance, including risk data aggregation and management and regulatory reporting:The OCC added that senior management and board oversight were inadequate.
(a)failure to establish effective front-line units, independent risk management, internal audit, and control functions as required by 12 C.F.R. Part 30, Appendix D;
(b)inability to develop and execute on a comprehensive plan to address data governance deficiencies, including data quality errors and failure to produce timely and accurate management and regulatory reporting; and
(c)inadequate reporting to the Board on the status of data quality and progress in remediating identified deficiencies.
The Fed had similar problems with Citigroup and added a few others, like reneging on promises to stop money laundering and foreign exchange market rigging, which had resulted in nearly $1.3 billion in fines in 2015:
WHEREAS, the most recent supervisory assessment of Citigroup issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (“Reserve Bank”) identified significant ongoing deficiencies in implementation and execution by Citigroup with respect to various areas of risk management and internal controls, including for data quality management and regulatory reporting, compliance risk management, capital planning, and liquidity risk management;As Benjamin Lawsky demonstrated when he led the New York State Department of Financial Services, any foreign bank caught out money laundering, and particularly being a recidivist, got hit with serious fines. By contrast, the Fed is giving Citigroup lots of homework, including putting some items on the board’s desk:
WHEREAS, Citigroup has not adequately remediated the longstanding enterprise-wide risk management and controls deficiencies previously identified by the Federal Reserve, including in the areas described above and those addressed in (i) the Consent Order issued by the Board of Governors on March 21, 2013 to remediate outstanding deficiencies in Citigroup’s anti-money laundering compliance program and (ii) the Consent Order issued by the Board of Governors on May 20, 2015 to remediate outstanding deficiencies in Citigroup’s compliance and control infrastructure relating to its foreign exchange program and designated market activities.
Within 120 days of this Order, Citigroup’s board of directors shall submit a written plan acceptable to the Director of the Division of Supervision and Regulation that describes the actions it will take to execute its oversight of the matters identified in this Order. The plan shall include the following four items:Oh, and Citi has to talk to the Fed often about its progress.(a) actions that the board of directors will take to hold senior management accountable for executing effective and sustainable remediation plans by committed deadlines;
(b) actions the board of directors will take to ensure senior management improves, and thereafter maintains, effective and independent enterprise-wide risk management, and that internal audit findings are effectively remediated;
(c) actions that the board of directors will take to ensure that senior management incentive compensation is consistent with risk management objectives and measurement standards; and
(d) actions that the board of directors will take to ensure effective reporting to the board of directors that will enable it to oversee management’s execution of the matters identified in this Order.
Now, you can blame the disconnect between the pretty serious-sounding deficiencies and more-bark-than -bite regulatory action to the business-friendly Trump Administration. Or you could attribute it to the lack of high profile stories of harm resulting from these gaping control failures. The Fed and OCC may be telling themselves they got to Citi before it did a Wells Fargo to itself.
However the other reason for soft gloves treatment is that Citi is a bomb that can’t be disarmed. Citi controls a unique payments system that is critical for all but the very largest companies doing business overseas. The really big boys can afford to have multiple foreign banks in their major offshore markets. For the others, a system called GTS provides essential plumbing. As we explained in 2010, when the press and pundits were still debating what to do about Citi:
GTS [Global Transaction Services] is a big cash management/information service. It is also a bread and butter earner for Citi. Per the Journal:As we explained in later posts, due to crisis liquidity measures, Citi’s dependence on GTS-supplied deposits plunged. There was a window when it would have been feasible to force GTS to be spun out but the officialdom lacked either the alertness or the will to recognize that.Otis Otih, the treasurer of candy maker Mars Inc., uses GTS to handle most payments to employees and vendors of Mars operations in 68 countries. “Citibank is the only truly, truly global company for us — I don’t see any alternative,” he says.Yves here. GTS is a big piece of what makes Citi a difficult to disarm bomb. One of the swords of Damocles that the big bank had over the officialdom is that, prior to the crisis, it had $500 billion of uninsured foreign deposits. If Citi looked wobbly, sensible depositors would withdraw funds, and that could quickly morph into a run. Moreover, the any other international bank with meaningful cross border deposits could come under scrutiny…
As an example of what the unit allows multinationals to do, an Asian subsidiary of a European company can deposit funds with Citigroup locally and the money will instantly show up on the ledger of the parent a continent away. The system makes it easier for corporate treasurers to manage their finances, and many corporate and government clients outsource a wide range of other finance work to GTS….
Executives told officials with the Treasury Department and the Fed that GTS’s technology and presence in more than 100 countries made it too dangerous for the U.S. to let Citigroup collapse….
While Citigroup is primarily known for its retail banking and credit-card businesses, the GTS unit is increasingly integral to the parent company’s functioning. Clients that move funds through GTS leave a lot of cash on deposit at the unit, which funnels the money to other parts of Citigroup for lending or other uses. GTS’s deposit-gathering muscle has grown more important since the financial crisis began, now providing about 40% of Citigroup’s $800 billion of deposits.
The Journal argues that GTS is essential to Citi. This is rubbish. GTS is a sophisticated payments system and a source of low-cost deposits. It may provide a foot in the door, and help deepen some relationships, but let us face it, cash management and payments systems are at best assistant treasurer relationships at big companies. Proof of the pudding: it is a no-brainer that companies like Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and UBS are doing complex, high margin transactions at companies that are also using GTS.
They are beginning to act as a cartel.Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
Nothing will happen until we get a handle on the ocean of cash flowing into campaigns from Citizens.
FUCK.