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  #151  
Old 03-18-2013, 01:48 PM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

I should have promised myself to stop reading books on the last financial crisis, but I saw Bull By the Horns by Sheila Bair (FDIC chair during the crisis).

A little tidbit I thought which deserved to go here:
Quote:
The gentlemen [at the American Securities Forum] started lecturing me about how it wasn't possible to help "these people," referring to subprime borrowers. "You give them a break," he said, "and they will just go out and buy a flat-screen TV."

So why, I asked, if he felt that way about "these people," did he extend mortgage loans to the to begin with? I will never forget his answer: "Bad regulation."

So there you had it, straight from the heart of U.S. capitalism. It had been okay for the masters of the universe who filled that conference room to shovel out millions of mortgages to people who clearly couldn't afford them because no one in the regulatory community had told them to stop. And if there was a problem now, it was because the regulators hadn't protected these securitization whiz kids from their own greed and corruption.

So much for the self-regulating market.
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  #152  
Old 03-21-2013, 06:25 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Okay, so there are five bills in Congress currently, designed to neuter bank regulation:

HR 677 "Inter-affiliate Swaps Clarification Act" clarifies that banks are to be exempted from Dodd-Frank oversight when they shift around their liabilities and assets among their numerous inter-affiliates; i.e. tentacles. In other words, when Goldman Sachs wants to do some tax, liability, or regulatory dodging by shifting around assets from one of its 3,391 subsidiaries to some other of its 3,391 subsidiaries, it doesn't want any regulatory oversight. Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism where I got the lion's share of this info:
Quote:
The reason this matters is that swaps can be used to move risk, profits, or other economic exposures from one entity to another. And the effect of this sort of arrangement is to tie entities that might have been separated out legally back into one big economic hairball. That would make it impossible to hive them into pieces, so it would also impede legislation aimed at forcing the banks to break up. Think this sort of thing doesn’t happen now? One of the reasons that AIG was not broken up and sold as originally planned was that its property and casualty operations in the US are tethered together in a dense web of cross company-guarantees, turning what on paper are subsidiaries licensed and supervised in 19 states into one operation overseen by no one.
HR 992 "Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act" is an "improvement" for the banks, in that their dodgy investments would now explicitly be subject to bail-outs by the federal government; and an "improvement" in regulation by voiding part of Dodd-Frank. This bill, along with the others mentioned here, are being pimped by ex-Goldman Sachs officer and Connecticut Democrat Jim Himes, who is also the national finance chair of the DCCC, as in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. A slimier low-life you might never hope to meet. This bill is sponsored by Illinois Republican Randy Hultgren. Here's text from the letter from Americans for Financial Reform, opposing this bill:
Quote:
If H.R. 992 passes, it would almost completely eliminate Section 716 of the Dodd-Frank Act. Section 716 bans taxpayer bailouts of a broad range of derivatives dealing activities. Section 716 does not in any way limit the swaps activities which banks or other financial institutions may engage in. It simply prohibits public support for such activities. The practical effect of this prohibition is to force banks to conduct large-scale derivatives dealing activities in a separate subsidiary which is backed by adequate private investment capital, and which is not eligible for government insurance or guarantees. Section 716 was a direct response to the events of the financial crisis, during which taxpayers were forced to bail out the full range of bank derivatives dealing, despite the fact that these activities were not part of the core business of banking. If it goes into effect Section 716 will be a limitation on the ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ culture of Wall Street– the ability of the biggest Wall Street banks to benefit from the upside of derivatives risks while pushing losses on to the public.
And here is why this also is important: banks are already shifting their derivatives into subsidiaries where they have all their depositor's accounts.
Bloomberg, Oct 2011:
Quote:
Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation…

Bank of America’s holding company — the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit — held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades.
...>snip<...
That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.
Why are they doing that? Because if the derivatives go south and they have to pay out money, they are required- by the 2005 bankruptcy revisions law they helped write- to pay out to the people who are first in line, i.e. those with secured accounts- the counterparties holding the other end of those derivatives. John Q. Public's bank account? That is classified as an unsecured account.This means they can raid all those depositor bank accounts to pay the derivatives investors, and then the depositors can go get their money from the FDIC. Short version: the government and the taxpayers and the account holders get fucked, the bank gets much lower losses. Because they passed them on to you.

S 474 is the same bill but on the Senate side, sponsored by North Carolina's Democrat Kay Hagen.

HR 1003, "To improve consideration by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission of the costs and benefits of its regulations and orders." This is a bill to shove the CTFC's head up its ass, so that it spends more time regulating itself and much less time doing its supposed job of regulating derivatives. This one's sponsored by Texas Republican Michael Conaway.

HR 1256
As far as I can tell this is actually the working title of the bill.To direct the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to jointly adopt rules setting forth the application to cross-border swaps transactions of certain provisions relating to swaps that were enacted as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
Basically acts to deregulate derivatives, and exempt overseas swaps- the lion's share of the too-big-to-fail banks' derivatives trading- from regulator oversight and Dodd-Frank. This one is from New Jersey Republican Scott Garrett.

Like I said earlier, I got the lion's share of this info from here, and it is worth reading, but I wanted to share it and try to wrap my own head around it. I'm going to write my Senators and Representatives and ask them to kill these bills that are essentially the banking lobby and their puppets, both Democrats and Republicans (yay bi-partisan cooperation?), pushing through legislation designed to kill Dodd-Frank and any regulation of these economy-destroying behemoths.
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  #153  
Old 03-26-2013, 07:08 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Below is a link to an article at Americablog which succinctly outlines what derivatives are, how they put economies at risk, and why the apparently seven bills in Congress to gut Dodd-Frank (I missed a couple) are worth yelling about.

Worldwide derivatives market could be over $1.2 quadrillion in notional value
Quote:
Futures contracts are gambling — I can bet on the Dow to go down or up, for example — but trading in futures contracts is regulated gambling, in which winners are protected from losers, and in many cases, losers protected from themselves.

Not so, derivatives, in the usual meaning of the word. Derivatives in that sense are contracts between parties who want to trade risks, but they aren’t market-traded. They aren’t standardized. And counterparties aren’t vetted by any controlling institution.

In derivatives trading, the counterparties know each other, the contracts are one-off between the parties directly, and the only guarantee that either party will get paid is trust … or the naked belief that they just can’t lose on this one.

AIG wrote billions of dollars of CDS “insurance” against the mortgage market without having even a fraction of what it would take to pay off claims … in the naked belief that they could collect fees forever and never have to pay out once. When the whole thing collapsed, they were wiped out. And because their “insurance” was part of the balance sheet of AIG’s many counterparties (Goldman Sachs and everyone like them), Goldman Sachs would have been wiped out too
by AIG’s failure (in effect, by their lies and deception).

That’s why the government bailed out AIG — and insisted on giving them 100 cents on the dollar — so that they could pay off Goldman et al. AIG was bailed out to bail out all their counterparties.
Also, for any who are interested, here's the email I sent to all my Senators and Representative.
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  #154  
Old 03-28-2013, 03:21 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Sanders proposes bill to break up the big banks. It'll never pass, but it's a nice gesture at least.
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  #155  
Old 04-03-2013, 04:15 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Wells Fargo in Louisiana was found to be engaged in "systematic, persistent foreclosure abuses," and the appeals court, after years of litigation by the bank, affirmed punitive damages against Wells Fargo of $3.1 million. The two bankruptcy cases which led to this are pretty amazing, in that the first bankruptcy case resulted in Wells Fargo revealing that it was systematically screwing over its clients; after promising to fix their error the second bankruptcy case months later showed that no changes had been made by Wells Fargo, which continued to fuck with the courts and the clients in an attempt to snowball all involved.
Via Naked Capitalism:
Quote:
Bankruptcy judge, Elizabeth Magner of the Eastern District of Louisiana, had found Wells Fargo guilty of egregious foreclosure abuses in a 2007 case, Jones v. Wells Fargo. In it, the bank admitted that the types of overcharges it made in bankruptcy cases were “part of its normal course of conduct, practiced in perhaps thousands of cases.” The judge awarded damages and recovery of attorney fees on top of repayment of the impermissible charges, and ordered the bank to fix its accounting.

Fast forward four months, and another case appears in Mangers’s court with the same sort of verboten charges, proving that Wells has not taken the required corrective measures.
Anyone interested in Magner's ruling can read it here.
Of worthy note are a number of things about this case, and I encourage the reading of the article in full, but one is that Wells Fargo really went the extra mile to screw the clients that were supposedly in bankruptcy and that they were overcharging while violating their contract. From Magner's ruling:
Quote:
While every litigant has a right to pursue appeal, Wells Fargo’s style of litigation was particularly vexing. After agreeing at trial to the initial injunctive relief in order to escape a punitive damage award, Wells Fargo changed its position and appealed. This resulted in:

1. A total of seven (7) days spent in the original trial, status conferences, and hearings before this Court;
2. Eighteen (18) post-trial, pre-remand motions or responsive pleadings filed by Wells Fargo, requiring nine (9) memoranda and nine (9) objections or responsive pleadings;
3. Eight (8) appeals or notices of appeal to the District Court by Wells Fargo, with fifteen (15) assignments of error and fifty-seven (57) sub-assignments of error, requiring 261 pages in briefing, and resulting in a delay of 493 days from the date the Amended Judgment was entered to the date the Fifth Circuit dismissed Wells Fargo’s appeal for lack of jurisdiction;47 and
4. Twenty-two (22) issues raised by Wells Fargo for remand, requiring 161 pages of briefing from the parties in the District Court and 269 additional days since the Fifth Circuit dismissed Wells Fargo’s appeal.

The above was only the first round of litigation contained in this case….
Here's some details of the second bankruptcy case:
Quote:
By September 2005, New Orleans homeowner Dorothy Stewart and her since-deceased husband had filed twice for bankruptcy protection and were having frequent problems keeping current with the payments on the small home they bought six years previous.

On Sept. 12, agents working for Wells Fargo Home Loans generated two “broker price opinions”—estimates, basically, of the value of the Stewart home. As loan servicer, Wells Fargo was in charge of collecting payments and managing a default or foreclosure if the borrowers fell behind.

A charge of $125 for each opinion was posted to the Stewart’s mortgage account. There was only one problem — Jefferson Parish, where the home was located, was under an evacuation order and closed to all but emergency personnel, thanks to Hurricane Katrina.

In an April 2008 ruling, Elizabeth Magner, a U.S. bankruptcy judge in New Orleans, rejected the two charges as invalid. She also disallowed 43 home inspections, 39 late charges, and thousands of dollars in legal fees charged to the Stewarts’ account.


Almost every disallowed fee was imposed while the Stewarts were making regular monthly payments on their home, the judge said.

The charges were assessed under circumstances contrary to Wells Fargo policy and were “unreasonable under the circumstances,” she ruled, after spending months unraveling the complicated loan file.

Magner determined that Wells Fargo had been “duplicitous and misleading” and ordered the bank to pay $27,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees. She also took the unusual step of requiring the servicer to audit about 400 home loan files in cases in the Eastern District of Louisiana.

Wells fought successfully to keep the results of the audit under seal, and last summer a federal appeals court overturned the part of Magner’s ruling that required the audit. But two people familiar with the results told iWatch News that Wells Fargo’s audit had turned up accounting errors in nearly every loan file it reviewed.
One of the other important points made was that the regulatory oversight here- the OCC which I've criticized in this thread before- did fuck-all about this. Here's a bankruptcy judge with the fourth-largest bank in the US admitting in court that this is how they do shit, at least in that part of Louisiana- likely involving thousands of individual bankruptcies- and the OCC? Not a peep.
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  #156  
Old 04-03-2013, 10:26 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

I got my settlement check from Wells Fargo. $6.56. I keep forgetting to cash it.
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Old 04-03-2013, 02:52 PM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Penalty for failure to cash settlement check: $125.00
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  #158  
Old 04-26-2013, 03:24 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

So recent bank news:

Banks have been systematically running with Zombie Titles as a strategy to reduce their costs- avoiding property taxes and maintenance costs-which they pass on to the evicted and the local governments, meaning you.
Yves Smith:
Quote:
We’ve written before about the perverse phenomenon known as “zombie title.” Servicers initiate a foreclosure and complete most of the steps, including evicting the borrowers, but then fail to take title to the house. Adding insult to injury, the banks rarely inform the former homeowner of this cynical move. Not only does often find out years later that he’s on the hook for property taxes and in some cases, fines from the local government, but the servicer has made such a mess of title that the owner can’t get rid of the property, unless he takes a quiet title action, which typically can’t commence until five years after the foreclosure was abandoned.

Kate Berry of American Banker provides an update. She flags that this abuse has skyrocketed since 2010, when the GAO estimated that abandoned homes ranged between 14,500 and 35,600. They are now pegged at 35% of the one million homes in foreclosure.

Homeowner advocates are up in arms because both the Fed and OCC have issued guidance requiring servicers to inform borrowers and municipalities if they intend not to complete a foreclosure. They also contend that this is a fair lending practice abuse, since, natch, the borrowers tend to live in low-income communities. And abandoned homes are a blight.

Normal local statutes dealing with vacant properties hit the owner, which is the hapless homeowner, not the servicer.
A lot of the article lambastes not only the banks but also the regulators, who seem to be waving ineffectually from the sidelines; also the potential fallout of these Zombie Titles to the supposed returning home values is covered.

The other thing in the news recently is Banks propagating their own version of usurious payday loans:
MSN:
Quote:
People who might never turn to a storefront payday lender for an emergency loan can now get a paycheck advance from many big banks. Not everyone celebrates the trend.

“This is loan-sharking,” said Kathleen Day, spokeswoman for the Center for Responsible Lending, which has been tracking these high-cost loans. “It doesn’t make any sense to give people a loan they can’t afford and that leaves them worse off.”

The four major banks that offer the loans -- Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Fifth Third Bank and Regions Bank -- say that assessment isn’t accurate. They insist their versions are typically less expensive than storefront or Internet payday advances and provide a valued service to customers.

Some of those customers agree. Amy Dykstra of Davis, Calif., said she used payday advances from Wells Fargo as well as from a credit union. Wells Fargo charges $7.50 for each $100 borrowed, which translates into an annual percentage rate of 274% for a 10-day loan.
...>snip<...
Although payday advances offered through banks are somewhat cheaper, with interest rates averaging 225% to 300%, the pattern of repeated borrowing is similar, Day said. A report released last month by the center found the median bank payday borrower took out 13.5 loans in 2011, and over one-third of borrowers took out more than 20 loans. Payday advance users were twice as likely to incur overdraft fees as other customers, since banks typically take the loan amount automatically from their checking accounts, whether or not there’s enough cash to cover the payment.
Regulators are looking into curbing this practice. One wonders how it cropped up:
WaPo:
Quote:
The proposed guidance is modeled after rules the OCC issued in 2000 that barred banks from engaging in direct payday lending. Banks circumvented that guidance by tying their short-term loans to direct deposits.
There are a number of banks engaging in this: Wells Fargo and US Bank are the biggest names of the group.
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  #159  
Old 04-30-2013, 04:59 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Legal marijuana's all-cash business and secret banking - Apr. 29, 2013
Cnn money Last September, he received a letter from his bank -- which he prefers to not name -- that made matters worse: "After a thorough assessment and evaluation, it is with deep regret that [we] will cease offering banking services for medical marijuana/cannabis businesses and/or facilities," it read.

Davis hasn't banked openly ever since.

To create distance between him and the pot business, he started an unrelated holding company.

More than a dozen interviews with dispensaries and growers in Washington show this kind of secret banking is a common practice.

CNNMoney asked the nation's largest retail banks with operations in Washington about their policies for small marijuana businesses. HSBC didn't respond. JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo said they don't serve the industry, citing federal law. Bank of America didn't respond but has previously stated that it turned away marijuana-related business clients after warnings from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration five years ago.

Of Course HSBC didn't respond, they were too busy laundering money for drug cartels. Wouldn't want to break any drug laws though, so cash from medical marijuana, that's unacceptable.
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  #160  
Old 05-05-2013, 03:11 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and David Vitter (R-Louisiana) Have introduced legislation to impact Too-Big-To-Fail Banks.
Matt Taibbi points out not only the aim of the bill, but an interesting set of allies:
Quote:
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 sounds good, but it is suggested by Lynn Stuart Parramore that this is a half-measure.
Via Alternet:
Quote:
...there were other financial institutions that were NOT commercial banks that were also extremely dangerous. Remember Lehman Brothers? It was an investment bank, rather than a commercial bank, and it would not be covered under Brown-Vitter. So was Bear Stearns. Does the name AIG ring a bell? Astonishingly, the bill asks nothing new of the giant insurer that we actually did bail out in 2008 to avoid complete meltdown. Giant hedge funds like Long Term Capital Management, which nearly went belly-up in the late 1990s and got a bailout, would also escape the requirements.
...>snip<...
The right question to ask is, why would anyone seek to exclude the non-commercial banks from Brown-Vitter?
...>snip<...
In the realm of finance, big insurers, big commercial banks, and large investment houses extensively compete with each other and many of their activities overlap. The big banks now have the upper hand, and they should certainly face restrictions. But giant insurers like AIG should also have to put up more capital because they, too, put the rest of us at risk. If we focus all our attention on big banks and forget the risks posed by other types of firms, we could set ourselves up for a nasty shock when one of them collapses.
...>snip<....
...Sherrod Brown and David Vitter both have strong ties to the insurance industry and have received a high rate of donations from that sector (see Vitter’s donations here, and Brown’s here). Both lawmakers have received more money from the insurance industry than from commercial banks. In a recent article, “Senators tell Feds to back off bank-centric standards for insurers” you can see Brown and Vitter making arguments against tightening restrictions on insurers that are actually very much like those the big banks are making against their bailout bill. As always, if you want to know what’s going on in Washington, follow the money.
While I am all for commercial and non-commercial entities to be required to have greater capital requirements, and even more so for size limitations on economic gravity wells like these, I still would argue that Brown-Vitter is an improvement over not having Brown-Vitter.
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  #161  
Old 05-13-2013, 11:36 PM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

So some bank notes:
H.R. 992, the Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act bill, is in committee and appears to be the most likely of the heap of shitty bills to be passed. This is the bill that would do away with parts of Dodd Frank and make government bailouts on derivatives allowed. Banks have been actively shifting these derivatives into the same parts of the banks that are FDIC insured- where all the public's regular accounts are- so as to leave the taxpayers on the hook if those derivatives go belly-up. By all accounts the House Financial Services Committee is already far along towards securing lots of donations from the banks while they prepare to send this through.

Also more info on the Brown-Vitter bill.
Yves Smith has offered her calculations on why Brown-Vitter is not useful here; mostly involving tightly coupled systems, as an introduction to this longer piece by Bill Black, detailing why the bill misses the regulatory marks. From Bill Black:
Quote:
Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and David Vitter (R-LA) have introduced a bill entitled “Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act of 2013.” It is a miracle of modern staffing that Vitter, who loves polluters as much as his prostitutes, was able to pull himself away from demanding that President Obama’s nominee to run the EPA answer over 600 questions and join Brown in proposing the bill. Under Obama, bipartisan bills have a dismal fate because the Democrats negotiate away key elements necessary to create a good bill and add provisions that make parts of the bill harmful – just to pick up a few token co-sponsors – and then the Republicans kill good parts of the bill anyway and try to enact the bad parts.

Brown-Vitter (BV) exemplifies all three problems. It would fail to achieve its desirable goals even if it became law. It would help the largest fraudulent banks continue to cripple effective examination. The Republicans will kill the well-meaning parts of the bill and try to enact the bad parts of the bill that are so bad that they are criminogenic.

One of the most essential actions we need to take is to eliminate systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) (the rough dividing line is any bank with > $50B in liabilities). Dodd-Frank did nothing effective to end SDIs. So BV could be a sensible, even vital reform if it were drafted to end SDIs and if it were enacted. It was not drafted to end SDIs and it will be weakened before it is killed.

BV’s harmful provisions, by contrast, will likely be made worse by amendments. Those harmful provisions may become law.
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  #162  
Old 06-06-2013, 05:08 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Hey, everybody, it's Goldman Sachs! Busy shoveling horseshit.
Goldman Forget About Too Big To Fail - Business Insider
Quote:
Goldman Sachs wants you to believe that Too Big To Fail banks do not actually enjoy a funding advantage.

The Wall Street firm recently put out a paper with the mild title of "Measuring the TBTF effect on bond pricing." It argues that the commonly-held view that TBTF banks can borrow cheaply because bond investors expect the government will support them used to be a little bit correct. Then it became very correct during the financial crisis. But now is totally incorrect.
...>snip<...
The Goldman researchers are practicing a bit of sleight-of-hand here. The argument about TBTF funding has never been predicated on the absolute funding levels of banks or the funding of big banks relative to small banks. Rather, it's that the expectation of government support lowers the cost of funds relative to what they would be otherwise.

To put it more simply, the TBTF funding argument is that Goldman, with implicit government support, pays less to issue bonds than Goldman without support would.

Reading the Goldman report, you might come away thinking that the principle difference between Goldman—or JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup,Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley—on the one hand, and the smaller banks was simply size. But that's not true. The TBTF banks take on far more risk and far more debt than smaller banks.

Take UnionBanCal, the San Francisco subsidiary bank of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. It is a big bank with around $97 billion in assets. But Goldman, with $938 billion in total assets, is ten times the size. At the end of the last quarter, Union had a tangible common equity ratio of 10.5 percent; Goldman's was 6.95 percent. This means that where Goldman could be rendered insolvent by a 7 percent drop in the value of its assets, it would take a drop of greater than 10.5 percent for Union shareholders to be wiped out.

This example is a pretty good illustration of the difference between smaller banks and the TBTF variety. The average smaller bank has a tangible common equity ratio of between 9 percent and 10 percent. None of the six TBTFers has a tangible common equity ratio greater than 7 percent.
Heard a tangential report today on investment, that talked about how managed funds often take a percentage point off the top just to manage your funds, as opposed to indexed funds, that usually charge you closer to 0.1%; the same report pointed out that managed funds usually perform worse than indexed funds and charge you more- yet people still buy into managed funds. It reminded me of the fact that the 401(K) plan through my work used to be managed by Goldman Sachs, and when you looked it over Goldman was taking 1%, but often 1.5%, to manage those stocks and treat you like a chump.

This is why Goldman Sachs still exists, despite its clear track record of fucking its clients, aka "muppets", as they like to call them. People engaged in stock transactions are often not actually rational! Don't tell AynMisesLibertarian, it may be more than his little heart can bear.
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  #163  
Old 06-07-2013, 09:04 PM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Quote:
Originally Posted by chunksmediocrites View Post
So some bank notes:
H.R. 992, the Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act bill, is in committee and appears to be the most likely of the heap of shitty bills to be passed. This is the bill that would do away with parts of Dodd Frank and make government bailouts on derivatives allowed. Banks have been actively shifting these derivatives into the same parts of the banks that are FDIC insured- where all the public's regular accounts are- so as to leave the taxpayers on the hook if those derivatives go belly-up. By all accounts the House Financial Services Committee is already far along towards securing lots of donations from the banks while they prepare to send this through.
[/B]
I actually just finished an email thread with a staffer from my representative - because this one in particular got my goat enough to write in.

I'll quote him because it's a damn site easier than paraphrasing what he said,
Quote:
H.R. 992 would permit a bank to retain equity and commodity swaps with its customers in the bank, but continues to prohibit engaging in certain “structured finance swaps” (defined as swaps related to asset-backed securities) that are not for hedging purposes or explicitly otherwise exempted by the banking regulators. The bill also treats US branches of foreign banks the same as US banks.
That explanation seems to bear out in the bill itself,
Quote:
(d) Only Bona Fide Hedging and Traditional Bank Activities Permitted-
‘(1) IN GENERAL- The prohibition in subsection (a) shall not apply to any covered depository institution that limits its swap and security-based swap activities to the following:
‘(A) HEDGING AND OTHER SIMILAR RISK MITIGATION ACTIVITIES- Hedging and other similar risk mitigating activities directly related to the covered depository institution’s activities.
‘(B) NON-STRUCTURED FINANCE SWAP ACTIVITIES- Acting as a swaps entity for swaps or security-based swaps other than a structured finance swap.
‘(C) CERTAIN STRUCTURED FINANCE SWAP ACTIVITIES- Acting as a swaps entity for swaps or security-based swaps that are structured finance swaps, if--
‘(i) such structured finance swaps are undertaken for hedging or risk management purposes; or
‘(ii) each asset-backed security underlying such structured finance swaps is of a credit quality and of a type or category with respect to which the prudential regulators have jointly adopted rules authorizing swap or security-based swap activity by covered depository institutions.
‘(2) DEFINITIONS- For purposes of this subsection:
‘(A) STRUCTURED FINANCE SWAP- The term ‘structured finance swap’ means a swap or security-based swap based on an asset-backed security (or group or index primarily comprised of asset-backed securities).
‘(B) ASSET-BACKED SECURITY- The term ‘asset-backed security’ has the meaning given such term under section 3(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (15 U.S.C. 78c(a)).’;
So, I'm a little more tolerant of the bill now. I still suspect that it has effects that I don't understand and benefit the banks unduly and in inappropriate ways, but it's a long way away from my fears of a new AIG-type bailout.
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  #164  
Old 06-08-2013, 12:21 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

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Originally Posted by specious_reasons View Post
I actually just finished an email thread with a staffer from my representative - because this one in particular got my goat enough to write in.

I'll quote him because it's a damn site easier than paraphrasing what he said,
Quote:
H.R. 992 would permit a bank to retain equity and commodity swaps with its customers in the bank, but continues to prohibit engaging in certain “structured finance swaps” (defined as swaps related to asset-backed securities) that are not for hedging purposes or explicitly otherwise exempted by the banking regulators. The bill also treats US branches of foreign banks the same as US banks.
Here's the short version as far as I can tell: Dodd-Frank doesn't prohibit equity or commodity swaps in any form. What Dodd-Frank does is say that because many of these swaps are basically private unregulated bets between two parties, rather than traditional banking, and not easily scrutinized by regulators, that such activities are not to be held in common with funds insured by public safety nets, and not subject to bail-outs. That means a bank can build an entity that does that kind of derivatives trading, and fund it privately- but no public bail-out for your black box bets. Exceptions are already in Dodd-Frank to cover swaps and hedges considered to be part of "traditional banking".

Here's Matt Taibbi's description of this bill and what it does:
Quote:
H.R. 992 would "repeal most of Dodd-Frank Section 716" of the Dodd-Frank Act. This section, also known as the "Lincoln Rule," was one of the hottest of hot potatoes during the negotiations for the Dodd-Frank bill (see here for more details).

That portion of Dodd-Frank began with a simple, bold statement:

Quote:
"Notwithstanding any other provision of law," it read, "no Federal assistance may be provided to any swaps entity with respect to any swap, security-based swap, or other activity of the swaps entity."
In other words, no matter what other laws are written, the federal government doesn't bail out any "swaps entities" or "activities of the swaps entities."

This sounds great, except Congress then decided on an exception or two to that law – among other things, federally-insured banks would be permitted to engage in swaps trading, so long as it was for "bona-fide hedging" and "risk-mitigation efforts."

Put another way, so long as the bank is merely guarding against loss, such behaviors are okay and bail-out-able.

But we've already seen that banks call pretty much anything hedging. In the case of the infamous London Whale trades – which were the very definition of stupid, reckless, doubling-and-tripling-down on insane billion-dollar bets high-stakes gambling – Chase and Jamie Dimon tried to call that activity hedging.
Later, of course, in the Senate, Dimon was forced to admit that the trades, er, maybe were not hedging at all.

The lesson of this is that no law that allows "hedging" as an exemption will have much teeth, because most banks can find a way to call almost anything they do hedging.

But apparently this wasn't enough. This new bill in the House baldly expands the universe of trading activities that we may later have to bail out. It's actually written that way – check out this summary of H.R. 992, the "Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act" (God, I love the names):

Quote:
Declares the prohibition against federal government bailouts of swaps entities inapplicable to: (1) a foreign banking organization supervised by the Federal Reserve; and (2) an insured depository institution or a U.S. uninsured branch or agency of a foreign bank that limits its swap and security-based swap activities to hedging and similar risk mitigating activities (as under current law), non-structured finance swap activities, and certain structured finance swap activities.

In English, this just means that in addition to hedging, which we banks think is pretty much everything we do, we'd like to be eligible for bailouts when we engage in "non-structured finance swap activities and certain structured finance swap activities."


If you read the fine print, what they mean by "certain structured finance swap activities" are swaps of a type and quality "to which the prudential regulators have jointly adopted rules," i.e. to be determined later during the rule-making process.

So to sum up, we banks would like to remain eligible for bailouts when we engage in hedging, which we think is everything we do, and also additionally when we engage in "certain structured finance swap activities," which will mean whatever we tell the rule-makers it means after the bill is passed.
This is part of what Taibbi sees as a constant, annual pressure by wall street lobbyists to roll back financial reform- what little we got of that.



Here's part of the text from the open letter opposing HR 992, from Americans for Financial Reform:
Quote:
It is important to recognize that the statutory Section 716 contained in the Dodd-Frank Act is already the result of a bipartisan compromise in the Conference Committee for the bill. This bipartisan compromise added numerous exemptions to the original ‘Lincoln Amendment’ passed in the Senate, addressing the objections of some regulators to aspects of the original version. Section 716 now exempts swaps referencing assets traditionally part of the business of banking -such as interest rate and foreign exchange swaps - from the ban on taxpayer bailouts. It also exempts bona fide hedging derivatives that are genuinely designed to reduce risks related to insured depository activities, allowing such hedging derivatives to remain within the depository institution. These and other exemptions permit banks to retain swaps that are legitimately part of their banking business, with no need for placement in a separate subsidiary.

This legislation goes well beyond these already broad exemptions and effectively eliminates the Section 716 ban on government bailouts of derivatives dealing activities altogether. It would expand the list of instruments that could receive a public bailout to include almost all types of derivatives. If this bill were passed, derivatives dealing in commodities markets (e.g. oil and gas markets) and in credit default swaps such as those that created the losses at AIG would once again be permitted to remain within the public safety net. Almost no swaps activities would have to be ‘pushed out’ into separate subsidiaries. In addition, the bill would add a new Section 716(n) that completely exempts foreign affiliates of Wall Street banks from any restrictions on U.S. government bailouts of their derivatives activities. Since a large proportion – likely over half – of Wall Street derivatives transactions are transacted through foreign affiliates this provision alone would effectively make all of Section 716 unenforceable. Permitting U.S. taxpayer bailouts of derivatives dealing in foreign bank subsidiaries, as this bill would do, is a particularly egregious expansion of the public safety net.

H.R. 992 is supported by major Wall Street banks for one simple reason – because it is cheaper for them to engage in derivatives dealing when their activities receive a public subsidy through access to the taxpayer-supported safety net.
The Dodd-Frank Act requires banks to find private risk capital to fund their derivatives dealing activities, instead of relying on public support. Derivatives operations have been at the center of numerous banking and financial scandals over the past two decades. Segregating these activities into separate subsidiaries, away from the portions of a financial institution that have access to public support, will help protect taxpayers from the threat of bailouts, restore private market discipline and benefit the entire financial system. If this bill is passed, however, these protections will be lost.
Quote:
Originally Posted by specious_reasons View Post
I still suspect that it has effects that I don't understand and benefit the banks unduly and in inappropriate ways, but it's a long way away from my fears of a new AIG-type bailout.
I'll look for more information, and I am certainly not an expert in financial reform. But there's a reason wall street lobbyists support the fuck out of this bill, that negates a section of the already weak-tea Dodd-Frank Act. And I will bet dollars to donuts they don't support HR 992 for any reason other than banks profiting on the backs of the public.

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  #165  
Old 06-08-2013, 04:56 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

More details regarding HR 992.
NYT Dealbook, May 2013: Banks’ Lobbyists Help in Drafting Financial Bills
Quote:
WASHINGTON — Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves.

One bill that sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month — over the objections of the Treasury Department — was essentially Citigroup’s, according to e-mails reviewed by The New York Times. The bill would exempt broad swathes of trades from new regulation.

In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington, Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.)
...>snip<...
And as its lobbying campaign steps up, the financial industry has doubled its already considerable giving to political causes. The lawmakers who this month supported the bills championed by Wall Street received twice as much in contributions from financial institutions compared with those who opposed them, according to an analysis of campaign finance records performed by MapLight, a nonprofit group.
...>snip<...
The passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, which took aim at culprits of the financial crisis like lax mortgage lending and the $700 trillion derivatives market, ushered in a new phase of Wall Street lobbying. Over the last three years, bank lobbyists have blitzed the regulatory agencies writing rules under Dodd-Frank, chipping away at some regulations.

Citigroup and other major banks used a similar approach on another derivatives bill. Under Dodd-Frank, banks must push some derivatives trading into separate units that are not backed by the government’s insurance fund. The goal was to isolate this risky trading.

The provision exempted many derivatives from the requirement, but some Republicans proposed striking the so-called push out provision altogether. After objections were raised about the Republican plan, Citigroup lobbyists sent around the bank’s own compromise proposal that simply exempted a wider array of derivatives. That recommendation, put forth in late 2011, was largely part of the bill approved by the House committee on May 7 and is now pending before both the Senate and the House.


Citigroup executives said the change they advocated was good for the financial system, not just the bank.

“This view is shared not just by the industry but from leaders such as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke,” said Molly Millerwise Meiners, a Citigroup spokeswoman.

Industry executives said that the changes — which were drafted in consultation with other major industry banks — will make the financial system more secure, as the derivatives trading that takes place inside the bank is subject to much greater scrutiny.

Representative Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, was among the few Democrats opposing the change, echoing the concerns of consumer groups.

“The bill restores the public subsidy to exotic Wall Street activities,” said Marcus Stanley, the policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit group.

But most of the Democrats on the committee, along with 31 Republicans, came to the industry’s defense, including the seven freshmen Democrats — most of whom have started to receive donations this year from political action committees of Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and other financial institutions, records show.
Here's a list of the members of the House Committee on Financial Services.
Here's the list of the six who voted against it, from Occupy Wall Street. I edited out email contact links in the quote that you can get from the article itself.
Quote:
Only six members of Congress, out of sixty-one total committee members, decided that this risk was too much. That Wall Street has won enough fights. Six out of sixty-one. The only six who dared to not roll over for Wall Street are: Rep Maxine Waters (D-CA), Rep Keith Ellison (D-MN), Rep Steven Lynch (D-MA), Rep Velazquez (D-NY), Rep Mike Capuano (D-MA), and Rep Al Green (D-TX).
Mother Jones covers much of the same here, also with a side-by-side comparison of the CitiGroup draft to the bill wording.

Sorry for the long quotes. I am still working on greater brevity.
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  #166  
Old 07-14-2013, 05:46 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

JPMorgan Chase has been in the news recently. Turns out its own internal audits show an error rate in their filed lawsuits (primarily against credit-card holders) of nine percent.
Matt Taibbi:
Quote:
...reporters got hold of an internal bank survey of its credit-card collections suits. It turns out that Chase's own survey found that huge numbers of lawsuits filed by the bank contained errors.
From the article:
Quote:
The bank studied roughly 1,000 lawsuits and found mistakes in 9% of the cases, said people familiar with the review.

"Any rate above zero is high," said one person familiar with the bank's conversations with regulators.
Thirteen states, as well as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a primary banking regulator, are investigating Chase's insanely sloppy practices in the area of credit-card collections.
...>snip<...
The story is actually far worse than is being described in the papers. It involves allegations of a rather complicated scam tied to secondary sales of credit-card debt – it's easier to sell credit card debt when a judgment has already been obtained, so it seems companies like Chase will go to great lengths, including mass robosigning and other abuses, to obtain judgments.

Chase is the headline target of these new investigations, but most analysts believe the same exact things go on at other banks and credit companies. Once the bigger state lawsuits gain momentum, we're likely to find out, as we did in the foreclosure scandals, that faulty paperwork and perjured/robosigned affidavits pervade the entire consumer debt industry.
A couple notes: the link inside the quote is to the WSJ and behind a paywall. Secondly, don't hold your breath for the OCC- mentioned in the article- to do much in the way of reigning in Chase or any other bank; they are greatly captured by the industry and have no teeth, except of course to block states from prosecuting predatory lending, among their other infamies.

Oh, and let's see how JPMorgan Chase is doing for its account holders. Mark Karlin via Truth-Out:

Quote:
If you are a working stiff and can squirrel away $250 to put in a Chase "savings account," Chase will pay you 12.5 cents a year (.05% APY at a "standard rate"). Furthermore, if you don't make any transactions, they will charge you $4 a month, meaning that you will be left with $202 at the end of a year, plus your 12.5 cents.
Surely if you put more into savings, then they will give you a better rate? Why yes:
Quote:
...even the premium "Chase Savings Plus" still only gets .15% interest. To break that down, that would equal a $150.00 return on every $100,000 lent to Chase each year.
Hey, thanks JPMorgan Chase, for providing essential banking services. What would people do without you, other than be less poor, of course?
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  #167  
Old 07-21-2013, 08:25 PM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

trying to embed a fb video -

- okay, seems to have worked, but I think I prefer Chuck's youtube link :V:
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  #168  
Old 07-21-2013, 09:16 PM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Here it is:

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  #169  
Old 07-21-2013, 09:44 PM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

The facebook embed doesn't show up at all for me in Firefox, but it turns up fine in Safari. Anybody else getting that?

ETA: derp, I forgot I have an extension to block facebook stuff on pages other than facebook. :stoopid:
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  #170  
Old 07-22-2013, 02:39 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Michael Flatley isn't from Ireland?

Now that's a scandal!
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  #171  
Old 08-07-2013, 06:56 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Another good reason to buy your beer in bottles.

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  #172  
Old 09-13-2013, 04:58 PM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Boston Globe - In fiery speech, Warren calls for limiting size of banks

Quote:
Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who entered politics as a critic of big banks, used a fiery speech at George Washington University Law School marking five years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers to renew her call to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, aimed at limiting the size and scope of banks, which are federally insured.
Awesome. I'm on board with that. lol, is anyone else besides Warren in Washington concerned about this?

Quote:
“It would reduce ‘too big’ by dismantling the behemoths,” she said. “Big banks would still be big – but not too big to fail or, for that matter, too big to manage, too big to regulate, too big for trial, or too big for jail.”

The act was repealed during the Clinton administration. Her bill to reinstate it is cosponsored by senators John McCain, an Arizona Republican, Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, and Angus King, a Maine Independent who often sides with Democrats.
McCain? Color me freaked out. Hope the bill passes. Wild guessing it won't...

Quote:
Warren said that the four biggest banks have grown 30 percent since the financial collapse, increasing the “too big to fail” problem that forced the government bailout and hurt the overall economy. She said despite the flaws of the financial overhaul known as Dodd-Frank, “I would have voted for it twice.”

She blamed “intense pressure” from the financial services industry for preventing regulators from writing 60 percent of the rules required under the Dodd-Frank legislation.”
, since Washington hasn't even implemented, let alone enforced, most of Dodd-Frank yet. It's been five years since the catastrophuck. Time flies.
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  #173  
Old 09-14-2013, 12:07 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

Quote:
“I would have voted for it twice.”
VOTER FRAUD ITT! :youmad:
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  #174  
Old 10-14-2013, 11:53 PM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

The too-big-to-fail have been getting too-bigger. Pam Martens via Wall Street on Parade:
Quote:
According to March 31, 2009 data from the FDIC, there were 8,246 FDIC insured institutions with total domestic deposits of $7.5 trillion. Four institutions, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup, four institutions out of 8,246, controlled at that time 35 percent of all the insured domestic deposits.

Now fast forward to June 30, 2013. According to FDIC data, the 8,246 banks and savings institutions have melted away to a new total of 6,940. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup, now control a combined $3.511 trillion in domestic deposits, a stunning 58.8 percent of all 6,940 U.S. banks’ domestic deposits of $5.966 trillion. The market share of these four giants has increased by an astonishing 24 percent in just 4 years.
The same brief article points out that banks are still failing at ten times the rate they were before the CDO housing-bubble collapse.
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  #175  
Old 11-11-2013, 04:30 AM
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Default Re: Official fuck the banks thrad

I haven't really been following what's going on, but here's an article from Taibbi:

Chase Isn't the Only Bank in Trouble | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
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