Tag: Too Big to Fail

Yippee !  Wall Street is saved !

Senator Sherrod Brown’s (D OH)  amendment 3733 on the Financial Stability Act bill, to break up the Big 6 Banks into smaller ones that couldn’t take down the entire nation’s economy if they failed, itself did not pass the vote in the Senate this evening, failing by a spectacular 61 noes to 33 yeas, with 6 senators too timid to approach the subject.

http://www.senate.gov/legislat…

Not all bought and paid for yet:

YEAs — 33 votes

Begich (D-AK)

Bingaman (D-NM)

Boxer (D-CA)

Brown (D-OH)

Burris (D-IL)

Cantwell (D-WA)

Cardin (D-MD)

Casey (D-PA)

Coburn (R-OK)***** Republican

Dorgan (D-ND)

Durbin (D-IL)

Ensign (R-NV)

Feingold (D-WI)

Franken (D-MN)

Harkin (D-IA)

Kaufman (D-DE)

Leahy (D-VT)

Levin (D-MI)

Lincoln (D-AR)

Merkley (D-OR)

Mikulski (D-MD)

Murray (D-WA)

Pryor (D-AR)

Reid (D-NV)

Rockefeller (D-WV)

Sanders (I-VT)

Shelby (R-AL)*****   Republican

Specter (D-PA)*****  ex Republican

Stabenow (D-MI)

Udall (D-NM)

Webb (D-VA)

Whitehouse (D-RI)

Wyden (D-OR)

_______________________ end of people who don’t like Great Depressions and financial chaos

___________   Begin list of Senators who liked that Citizens United Ruling by the Supreme Court:

NAYs — 61

Akaka (D-HI)

Alexander (R-TN)

Barrasso (R-WY)

Baucus (D-MT)  a small, cold, scenic state of tiny population,  which votes with Utah.  wtf.

Bayh (D-IN)  does you wife get more insura/pharma stock options for this ?

Bennet (D-CO)

Bond (R-MO)

Brown (R-MA)

Brownback (R-KS)

Burr (R-NC)

Carper (D-DE)   meh. typical.

Chambliss (R-GA)

Cochran (R-MS)

Collins (R-ME)

Conrad (D-ND)

Corker (R-TN)

Cornyn (R-TX)

Crapo (R-ID)

Dodd (D-CT)  looking for that Golden Parachute……

Enzi (R-WY)

Feinstein (D-CA)  meh.

Gillibrand (D-NY)  really, Kirsten, how could you

Graham (R-SC)

Grassley (R-IA)

Gregg (R-NH)

Hagan (D-NC)

Hatch (R-UT)

Hutchison (R-TX)

Inhofe (R-OK)

Inouye (D-HI)

Isakson (R-GA)

Johanns (R-NE)

Johnson (D-SD)

Kerry (D-MA) meh. first no public option, an excise tax, and now this.   you still suck.

Klobuchar (D-MN)

Kohl (D-WI)

Kyl (R-AZ)

Landrieu (D-LA)  say, how’s the Gulf doing, Ms. Mary of Louisiana?

Lautenberg (D-NJ)

LeMieux (R-FL)

Lieberman (ID-CT)  suing Atty General Holder over the tragic Ft Hood shooting information release, too

McCain (R-AZ)

McCaskill (D-MO) midwestern Blew Dawg who thinks she’s a hot shot financial whiz.  ya huh. not.

McConnell (R-KY)

Menendez (D-NJ)

Murkowski (R-AK)

Nelson (D-FL)

Nelson (D-NE)  at least he’s consistently not on our side

Reed (D-RI)

Risch (R-ID)

Roberts (R-KS)

Schumer (D-NY)  wants to be next Majority Leader after making us all get biometric cards. Swell.

Sessions (R-AL)

Shaheen (D-NH)

Snowe (R-ME)

Tester (D-MT)  meh. These netroots Dems.

Thune (R-SD)

Udall (D-CO)

Voinovich (R-OH)

Warner (D-VA)

Wicker (R-MS)

__________________   chickenhearts

Not Voting – 6  

Bennett (R-UT)

Bunning (R-KY)

Byrd (D-WV)  okay, you’re old and frail.  pass. barely.

DeMint (R-SC)

Lugar (R-IN)

Vitter (R-LA)  you don’t have enough diapers to clean anything up

Dallas Fed chief calls for breakup of ‘too big to fail’ banks in New York speech

BRENDAN CASE, The Dallas Morning News – March 4, 2010

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher traveled to New York to trumpet a message he’s told Texas audiences before: Banks that are too big to fail are too big to exist in the first place.

Speaking Wednesday at the Council on Foreign Relations, Fisher said big, systemically important banks should be dismantled before regulators have to deal with another crisis like the one that nearly brought down Wall Street and the rest of the U.S. financial system in late 2008.

“The dangers posed by too-big-to-fail banks are too great,” he said.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and others have said Congress should pass a law giving regulators “resolution authority” to close down failing financial companies.

http://www.dallasnews.com/shar…

That is Good News, sort of.

President Obama is now perhaps the foremost contender for the Worst President Ever epithet.  Stealing that crown from Bush was a virtual impossibility, but Obama appears to be up for the challenge.  Obama said he recognized the need to change course, he was elected on that basis, and he expressly resisted change at every opportunity.  The endemic fraud of the Bush administration has more deeply retrenched in the persona of Obama.   The slick marketing campaign around the concepts of change we can believe in, we can do better, and yes we can was utterly fraudulent.  In the most charitable characterization, whatever self-justifying internal narrative propelled him to stump on change, his conception of change is now shown to be completely at odds with the public’s understanding.  This gulf of understanding is only bound to widen.  It wouldn’t be surprising to see The Gulf of Understanding completely militarized before this Presidency ends.

Americans apparently aren’t too concerned about wars of aggression, torture, illegal wiretapping, the rule of law, the separation of powers, the constitution, and so on, nor do they care much about how the US economy works, but they do care about their pocketbooks.  Not surprisingly, Obama’s fraudulent image is souring most saliently in the public’s attitude toward the bank bailouts, and more generally, the economy (Recall that his election was only cemented when the economy turned sharply south; that’s when Obama left McCain doddering in the polling dust).  Most of the economic damage was probably irreversible before Obama even took office, but he supported Bush’s actions wholly, upped the ante after taking office, and he’s been going “all in” ever since.  

During the SOTU, Obama said something quite attention-grabbing:

“We’re working to lift the value of a family’s single largest investment — their home [..]”

Like George “This sucker could go down” Bush before him, Obama was referring to the DEBT-o-nation of actual mortgages underlying and triggering the chain reaction of mortgage backed securities that are still set to take out lower Manhattan and the rest of the global economy like a controlled demolition.  The entire scheme was nothing less than the biggest fraud ever committed, and a lot of people were on to it at its early stages.  Spitzer, for example, wasn’t taken out for whoring.  Thus, the problems of the TBTF have only gotten bigger and failer.

Unfortunately, the debt-o-nation continues apace.

Neil Barofsky says gub’mint bail-out is not only a big fat fail, but has exacerbated the risks:

from the SIGTARP Executive Summary, pdf

The substantial costs of TARP – in money, moral hazard effects on the market, and Government credibility – will have been for naught if we do nothing to correct the fundamental problems in our financial system and end up in a similar or even greater crisis in two, or five, or ten years’ time.  It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date.

• To the extent that huge, interconnected, “too big to fail” institutions contributed to the crisis, those institutions are now even larger, in part because of the substantial subsidies provided by TARP and other bailout programs.

• To the extent that institutions were previously incentivized to take reckless risks through a “heads, I win; tails, the Government will bail me out” mentality, the market is more convinced than ever that the Government will step in as necessary to save systemically significant institutions. This perception was reinforced when TARP was extended until October 3, 2010, thus permitting Treasury to maintain a war chest of potential rescue funding at the same time that banks that have shown questionable ability to return to profitability (and in some cases are posting multi-billion-dollar losses) are exiting TARP programs.

• To the extent that large institutions’ risky behavior resulted from the desire to justify ever-greater bonuses – and indeed, the race appears to be on for TARP recipients to exit the program in order to avoid its pay restrictions – the current bonus season demonstrates that although there have been some improvements in the form that bonus compensation takes for some executives, there has been little fundamental change in the excessive compensation culture on Wall Street.

• To the extent that the crisis was fueled by a “bubble” in the housing market, the Federal Government’s concerted efforts to support home prices – as discussed more fully in Section 3 of this report – risk re-inflating that bubble in light of the Government’s effective takeover of the housing market through purchases and guarantees, either direct or implicit, of nearly all of the residential mortgage market.

Stated another way, even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.

Congrats, Bush, Obama & The Rubinites!  This one is going platinum.  What was once just “Bigger and Deffer!” is now “Biggerer and Defferer!”

Wall Street is sick. And its illness is Unchecked Greed. … The bug is call OPM.

Their fever has risen so dangerously high, that the Wizards of Wall Street, the Captains of Industry, for the most part see your assets as their “playing chips”.

Your Money, is their Bread and Butter.

Exploiting and Levering OPM (Other People’s Money) is the key to their  Extreme Wealth.

This contagion on Wall Street has reached such a point, that one of those “Captains of Industry” has been speaking out against it.  He has been working to “right the ship” of speculative, reckless investing, using our OPM, as the collateral.

Jack C. Bogle, founder and CEO of the Vanguard Group, is one of those “old school” investors — you know, that we should be “investing in a better future“, NOT just a “better bank account“.

Jack has listed the symptoms of this wide spread illness — NOW if only we could find some “Doctors” wise enough to quarantine the Damage …

The Damage unregulated greed has done … before they try to “go for broke” AGAIN …