Oh that financial reform bill is so awful, so horrible. It might keep you from selling your baseball cards on e-bay! It might make pay-pal go under! It might make it impossible to buy (gasp) that dream of every Real American — A Harley “Frickin” Motorcycle! Oh mercy, Sadie, pass me the smellin’ salts! I swear I’m about to faint!
How do I know all this? Why that liberal-islamo-socialo-fascist rag, The New York Times told me so. So it must be true!
WASHINGTON — Mars, the maker of M&M’s and Snickers, wants to make sure it can continue dabbling in the derivatives market to protect the price of sugar and chocolate for its candies.
Harley-Davidson is worried that its dealer-financed loans to bikers will fall victim to new federal financing regulations. And eBay is concerned about possible restrictions on PayPal, a subsidiary, in moving money in the Internet marketplace.
I guess rampant unemployment in a “jobless” recovery caused by Wall Street’s unregulated manipulation of the housing and commercial real estate markets prior to 2008 (when the whole house of cards fell down) isn’t good enough. I guess Goldman Sachs (and how many others) ripping off your pension funds and money market funds and 401K funds to the tune of BILLIONS of DOLLARS by betting against the very manure pile of unregulated derivatives (CDOs, CDSs and whatever Abacuses) and then gaming the government bailout funds (i.e. TARP) so that they got paid first and before anyone else wasn’t bad enough..
No friends, the New York Times is here to tell us that Main Street doesn’t want the banks re-regulated, Nosireebob. It wants the things to stay just the way they are. Really.
Far afield from Wall Street, the intense debate over the overhaul of financial regulations by Congress is attracting some unlikely but powerful players. More than 130 companies from the manufacturing, retail and service sectors have retained high-powered lobbyists to weigh in on, and often oppose, the regulatory system being debated this week in Washington, according to an analysis of lobbying records by The New York Times.
You know what I think? I think the six largest banks in America (they are by the way, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Company, Wachovia Company, Wells Fargo and US Bancorp – tied with Capital One Financial for 6th place) the ones that now control assets equal to “63 percent” of our country’s Gross Domestic Product have been on the horn to their clients.
Along with Goldman Sachs, of course, smoking their fresh Cuban cigars after their most recent round of bonuses for the first three months of 2010 — FIVE BILLION DOLLARS while people who don’t commit fraud in a daily basis are losing their jobs, their homes and their health insurance.
And I believe that those same banks and Goldman Sachs’ lobbyists have been burning up their email, i-phones, i-pads and blackberries to give talking points to the lobbyists that their clients have been railroaded into hiring. And I believe that this is a scare campaign being waged to stop any financial reform and re-regulation of the banks and financial institutions in its tracks.
And I think the New York Times is a willing co-conspirator in that campaign.
So, why is this happening? Here’s one reason — no more unregulated derivatives trading which sank the economies of countries like Greece and the destroyed the budgets of hundreds of municipalities and local governments and even school districts across the United States if financial reform passes.
David DiCarlo, an Erie-based JPMorgan Chase banker, told Barker and the school board on Sept. 4, 2003, that all they had to do was sign papers he said would benefit them if interest rates increased in the future, and the bank would give the district $750,000, a transcript of the board meeting shows.
“You have severe building needs; you have serious academic needs,” Barker, 58, says. “It’s very hard to ignore the fact that the bank says it will give you cash.” So Barker and the board members agreed to the deal.
What New York-based JPMorgan Chase didn’t tell them, the transcript shows, was that the bank would get more in fees than the school district would get in cash: $1 million. The complex deal, which placed taxpayer money at risk, was linked to four variables involving interest rates. Three years later, as interest rate benchmarks went the wrong way for the school district; the Erie board paid $2.9 million to JPMorgan to get out of the deal, which officials now say they didn’t understand.
“That was like a sucker punch,” Barker says. “It’s not about the district and the superintendent. It’s about resources being sucked out of the classroom. If it’s happening here, it’s happening in other places.”
A sucker punch that the Big Banks have been getting away with scot free for years. TWELVE BILLION DOLLARS in such shady deals over the last four years in Pennsylvania alone according to the Bloomberg report I just cited above. Now multiply that by fifty states and thousands of local governments and national governments worldwide, and you can see why the BIG SIX (and Goldman Sachs, never forget them) don’t want this money tree going away anytime soon. , even if it means driving local governments into bankruptcy to fuel their greed for unearned illegitimate fees :
While JPMorgan has been relatively unscathed by the subprime crisis that hit Bear Stearns Cos., Merrill Lynch & Co., Lehman and other Wall Street firms, a little-known part of the largest bank in the U.S. made a tidy profit peddling a different kind of corrosive debt to hundreds of counties and school districts earlier this decade.
As the credit crunch froze lending globally, causing stock markets to plunge, local officials who say they trusted JPMorgan faced a crisis of their own. Wall Street’s drive for profits over the past decade has backfired on towns, cities and counties that borrow in the $2.7 trillion municipal bond market. […]
These come in municipal bond and derivative deals that have turned poisonous. Unlike JPMorgan, which has benefited from federal bailouts, the towns and schools the bank has financed have received no help from Washington.
That’s a lot of moola to protect, and a lot of rubes in and out of government to make your profits from, like a parasite that keeps sucking its host dry until it dies, and then moves on looking for the next poor sap to tap ( I know, mixed metaphors out the wazoo, but can you blame me?).
No, these Big Banks don’t want the Federal Government re-regulating their cozy “free market” con game, those “Too Big to Fail” banks whiny little Mitch McConnell keeps saying — lying through his teeth as he does so — he wants to put a stop to by killing the Democrat’s financial reform bill. After he held a secret meeting with Bank Lobbyists to coordinate their mutual strategy, naturally.
Nor do the Big Banks want to lose access to their essentially free money from the Federal Reserve Window. Nor so they want to have to actually have to hold cash in reserve to cover these unmitigated risks. Hell, there are sheep still to fleece. And they sure as hell don’t want to be downsized and broken up like the Trusts of old from Teddy Roosevelt’s days (you know TR, that famous Republican Reformer and cousin to the hated traitor to his class, Franklin Delano Roosevelt?), as a bill recently introduced by Senator Sherrod Brown, Democratic Senator from Ohio proposed:
“The major issue is to keep the banks from getting too large to begin with,” the lead sponsor of the bill, Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, said Wednesday. “Too big to fail is too big. That’s where we need to be much more aggressive.”
As concern about the risk posed by the biggest financial institutions percolates among populists in Congress and at the Federal Reserve, the lawmakers plan to offer the bill as an amendment to the pending Senate legislation, which could reach the floor as soon as Monday.
The bill would cap the amount of nondeposit liabilities of any one bank — effectively, the amount the bank borrows in various ways to finance its operations — at an amount equal to 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of the size of the economy. For major financial firms that are not banks, like the American International Group, Metropolitan Life or GE Capital, the financial arm of General Electric, the cap would by 3 percent of G.D.P.
The bill would reinforce a 1994 law that bars any single bank from holding more than 10 percent of the nation’s total deposits, or about $750 billion. In the years since then, large firms have obtained waivers or used loopholes in the law to exceed that ceiling. Three institutions — Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase — are over the limit now, and would have to lose the excess within three years.
So, I understand that the Banks have a vested interest in killing reform, but why does The New York Times give them a free piece of its valuable paper and online estate to run an infomercial against the reform bill? I mean, listen tyo who they quote for their “report.”
“I don’t think the level of concern could be any higher,” David Hyatt, vice president for the National Automobile Dealers Association, said Monday. “There’s a sense of urgency. And we’ve got to raise awareness about why this doesn’t make sense and why it’s anticonsumer.”
Like the automobile industry, many financial sectors unrelated to Wall Street are seeking exemptions — or “carve-outs” as their Washington lobbyists call them — to shield themselves from the impact of the new regulations. Unless a bipartisan deal is reached first, those exemptions are likely to be considered as amendments once the legislation reaches the Senate floor for a final vote, probably this week.
As Mr. Colwell, the Check ’n Go lobbyist, suggested, much of the concern from the private sector has focused on what the legislation could do, and disagreement is wide over what it actually would do.
Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who is chairman of the Banking Committee, said Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC that it was a “red herring” for opponents to suggest that the legislation would harm ordinary businesses and reduce the number of jobs.
Oh that dreaded word “anticonsumer” has appeared. We don’t know why the bill is anticonsumer, but it just is. I ask you, is that journalism, or is that the Times giving a tongue wash to the industry (financial services) that yanked its chain and said “heel girl” like any good master does when his pooch gets out of line?
Well I’m afraid that question is for smarter people than me. They will have to figure out all the Byzantine plots and Machiavellian maneuvering by “friends of the Times” that ended up with this sorry excuse for journalism that oozed out from under the foundations stones of the preeminent newspaper of this nation of ours. Let’s just say I can smell the head of a rotting fish lying in the middle of the street as well as the next guy and leave it at that.
