We have kind of a composite fuck-the-banks topic spread out over the 1% thread and the Occupy thread, but here is an official serious one.
I don't think we've mentioned JP Morgan's $2 billion$3 billion derivatives loss of the exact type that the Volcker rule would prevent from fucking up national/global credit markets. Also, kind of exactly the same thing that happened three to five years ago, remember when that stuff happened before? Anyway, since then Morgan chief and 1% cat's-paw Jamie Dimon has spent a lot of time crowing about how stupid and awful the Volcker rule would be, and how it would cost poor JP Morgan $400 million in compliance costs.
Is $400 million more money or less money than $3 billion? This must be one of those Wall Street things that you have to be an equities trader to understand. Fortunately, no lessons will be learned again. There has been no need for lessons since Clinton handed the financial industry its prize with the repeal of Glass-Steagal in 1999, and damn, things have been great since then.
And then today one of Goldman's lawyers fucked up and accidentally told the truth. It isn't really surprising or shocking anymore, but I'm enjoying the read so far. It's basically about how Goldman Sachs (surely an isolated incident of a couple of bad apples, and not at all indicative of any larger cultural problems on Wall Street, and definitely nothing that merits freedom-killing regulation) engaged in substantively fictional trades to artificially manipulate the value of certain stocks.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
On this, there's no killer blurb to quote. It's all killer blurb from start to finish. If you ever wanted a concrete basis to your opinions about how these guys operate, right here it is. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I think I just read is a well documented instance of straight up fraud.
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Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant
When I was a kid, we had a small town bank with a teller and a bank manager. My dad would go in and the manager would loan him money and we could get in and out in about 30 minutes (2-3 hours in kid waiting time). The teller lady had a big ledger book to record the day's activities and would give us lolli-pops.
When I went to college I got an account at a bank in the big city. The teller called me sir and didn't give me a lollipop. I had to wait in line and the manager didn't know me. There were personal bankers and assitant managers and drive throughs and ATMs.
Banking went downhill from there.
Nation's Bank swallowed up everything in the area and Satan's Bank was born. It's changed names 5-10 times now trying to hide it's true identity. But I'm not buying it. I use a large privately owned bank here in the state that, though big, still operates under a more traditional bank model; like not selling our mortgage to someone else, etc.
Investment Bank is as close as you can get to an oxymoron and not be one.
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Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.
An Arizona trust filed a securities-fraud lawsuit in which it seeks to represent all investors who lost money on the stock as a result of alleged misstatements by the bank about its losses. In the second case, an individual investor asked for damages on behalf of the company from Dimon, the bank’s board and other executives. Both suits were filed late yesterday in Manhattan federal court. In the fraud suit, the trust seeks damages for investors who bought JPMorgan stock from April 13, when Dimon called concerns over the bank’s trading risk “a complete tempest in a teapot,” to May 10, when he disclosed the trading loss publicly.
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Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant
I was listening to APM's MarketPlace the other day, and Heidi Moore's analysis hit me as exactly on target:
Quote:
Ryssdal: Here's the thing though Heidi, you'd think we'd be smarter now because of that whole financial crisis thing.
Moore: No. We have the memory of goldfish. But the problems are also persistent, to be fair. I mean, the real question here is how do we make our banks profitable and are we really ready to accept less profitable banks? I can tell you that the people making $20 million a year are not ready to accept less profitable banks, so this is their kind of magical thinking. They take these big risks because they want the big revenues, they want Wall Street back the way that it was, but the way that it was is the wrong place to be. And there's no acknowledgment of that yet. We need to get Wall Street to acknowledge the trouble that it's creating for itself instead of seeing this as a government problem.
Ryssdal: Yeah, which you haven't heard Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, talk about at all. Let me ask you this, though, Heidi. What are the odds that banks not as strong as JPMorgan -- which is the strongest bank out there -- that other banks are doing this?
Moore: The odds are very strong. In fact, Moody's is worried about a number of those banks. Standard and Poor's is taking a look at how it measures risk for those banks as well. There's a Wall Street saying: There's never just one cockroach in the kitchen. So if JPMorgan -- the biggest and supposedly the smartest bank in the country -- is taking these risks, why would anyone else not be taking the same risks? They are under the same pressures. Where are they going to get those profits? Where are they going to get those revenues? It's the equivalent of not being able to pay the bills and taking your last $20 and going to Vegas.
__________________ In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie...
It's weird, but I guess not surprising, to read the financial press and observe how much it has internalized the whole innocent Wall Street as victim narrative.
Melissa Daly, who worked at Goldman Sachs and merger specialist Brunswick Group and now runs the eponymous MFD Communications, says she’s a fan of the under-siege bank chief’s strategy of mea culpa on overdrive.
“The easiest thing to do right now would be to hunker down, keep journalists at arm’s length and decline to comment,” Daly wrote on her blog today in a regular commentary called, naturally, “The Daly Dose.” “It’s commendable that the executives at JPM appear to want to set the record straight, admit to faults, show their pain and demonstrate that they are not infallible.”
Hm, former banker, now communications consultant...says she loves what Morgan executives are doing...is it possible that she might have been hired by, oh, JP Morgan? Is that even conceivable? Or does Bloomberg regularly report on what random consultants say on their blogs?
Forbes has a couple of pieces. The first one simply does not see what the big deal is, and bemoans people alleging securities fraud just because of maybe securities fraud? He's probably right that these particular suits will probably never go to trial. Duh. Like 95% of all cases. Only one paragraph really irks me:
Quote:
Neither suit alleges what would seem to be a key part of any fraud claim: Motive. Instead, both firms merely say that Dimon and other JPMorgan executives engaged in a scheme to prop up the bank’s stock when they knew or should have known the loss was ballooning inside the $360 billion investment portfolio. Both use the nasty word “fraud,” but Univer explains that’s a legal term of art that can encompass a reckless disregard instead of intentional, Bernie Madoff-level crime.
He kind of makes up an element of fraud ("motive") and then says that the complaint doesn't even allege that element he made up, and then whines about how fraud is a nasty word, and then notes that actually "fraud" has a specific legal meaning that may be different from the one he just made up.
The other Forbes piece is just some straight up balls-gobbling hero praise for Jamie Dimon, and how you dumb poors don't even know about stressful times.
Quote:
The front-page story in the Journal paints a portrait of a conflicted but resilient Dimon, who had to say goodbye to trusted executive Ina Drew, the CIO chief who stepped down after trading losses, and sat down for a glass of vodka after a stressful few days last week.
Quote:
But more troubling is a story further back in the Journal Friday, which calls into question whether the losses were the result of something more widespread than one bad trading strategy.
What? No. It is probably just one bad trading strategy, because this is pretty new to Wall Street.
And to give credit where due, I should note that this Barron's piece is actually pretty good. It almost fooled me at first, but it is just awesomely sarcastic.
Quote:
Above all, we respectfully suggest he try to steer the inquiry away from the somewhat peculiar fact uncovered by the Times that the bank's Strategic Income Opportunities Fund was on the other side of the fatal trade in which an overly zealous trader in London managed to lose those billions. The fund owned around $380 million of the very same insurance on corporate debt the trader (aka the whale) was frantically dumping.
Presumably, this demonstrates that yes, Virginia, there is a Chinese wall that ensures that one part of a banking goliath like JPMorgan Chase (ticker: JPM) is not necessarily privy to what another of the bank's discrete operations is up to. Only a cynic like a Federal Reserve governor would see it as evidence of being "too big to manage." Thank heavens not everyone thinks that way -- life would be so danged dull, save for the heart-pounding financial bubbles and crises that such giant creatures routinely make possible.
I am beyond ready for less profitable banks. But they probably don't care about my opinion.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
That message: tax Wall Street to relieve the growing problem of inadequate health care.
The centerpiece of the rally is a call for a Robin Hood tax, a small levy of 50 cents or less on $100 of trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives and other financial instruments that could raise up to $350 billion every year in revenue, NNU explained in a statement.
Details under the spoiler, because I write long-ass posts.
1. Break up too-big-to-fail banks. Remember when the Housing Bubble collapsed, and pretty much every major bank was insolvent? Yet the government hesitated to actually do anything but shovel loans at them, arguing that the gargantuan size of the banks themselves prevented a reasonable takeover by the FDIC- the logistics involved in dealing with any failed bank holding 10% or more of the nation's deposits would require an army of people and years.
Total assets held by the six biggest U.S. banks increased 39 percent to $9.5 trillion on Sept. 30, 2011, from $6.8 trillion on the same day in 2006, according to Fed data.
A newly-released study from the Congressional Research Service bolsters claims that the nation's largest banks profited off the Federal Reserve's financial crisis-era programs by borrowing cash for next to nothing, then lending it back to the federal government at substantially higher rates.
On top of the $700 billion TARP program loans, that actually had some qualifications and transparency, there were the $7.77 trillion in secret money lent them by the Fed.
Quote:
Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.
“TARP at least had some strings attached,” says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”
Bankers didn’t disclose the extent of their borrowing.
A solution: update and modify the Riegle-Neal Act of 1994. That was the act that said a bank could not hold more than 10% of the nation's deposits; the problem is the way the government accounts for the technical definition of a bank (as opposed to a federal savings bank or an industrial holding company), and because they do not count organic growth; as a result all the major banks are now over 10% each. It makes more sense to cap this at 5%, and require banks exceeding this percentage (organically or otherwise) to divest or split.
2. Reinstate Glass-Steagall. Banks were prohibited by law from indulging in investment house activities, in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash. This prevented the stability risks inherent in banks playing at the Wall Street casino, and removed any need or desire for the government to act as a final guarantor- investment firms normally aren't covered by FDIC or federal guarantees. The removal of this rule with the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (AKA the Modernization of Financial Services Act) of 1999, made the crisis possible. This is the biggest regulatory need that would cut off a large number of these problems at the knees. Dodd-Frank and the Volcker Rule would help, but both of these are being serially watered down and lobbied away.
3. Regulate high-frequency trading (HFT). High-frequency trading uses computers to make huge numbers of micro-second trades using complex algorithms. Today, HFT accounts for 60% of the daily trades in the market.
There are a number of ways to do this, but one of the easiest solutions is to instate a very low tax on each trade. This makes this HFT practice much less profitable; other ways involve requiring a certain amount of time between trades.
Part of the issue here is looking at the purpose of banks, and markets. Ideally the issuing of credit and the investment in industry is to help make economies function to benefit society. In a market economy banks and investors are useful. But there is a whole subset of banking and investment that is predatory, that siphons money out of markets and economies to benefit the richest. HFT is one of those practices.
4. Regulate derivatives. Okay so this can be confusing. Derivatives are essentially contractual bets on future outcomes. On any future outcomes two parties care to bet upon. Investors use them to hedge, to leverage debt, and to speculate. So let's look at scale for a second. All the government budgets in the world combined total under $15 trillion. The world economy is valued between $64 trillion to $74 trillion. The amount of derivative bets out there- in an unregulated market? $228.72 trillion. Here's an infographics to try to wrap your head around what that would look like in physical currency.
One problem is that the banks among others have been lobbying aggressively to prevent derivatives from being actually regulated. NYT Dealbook April 17, 2012:
Quote:
As federal regulators put the finishing touches on an overhaul of the $700 trillion derivatives market, a major provision has been tempered in the face of industry pressure.
On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are expected to approve a rule that would exempt broad swaths of energy companies, hedge funds and banks from oversight. Firms would not face scrutiny if they annually arrange less than $8 billion worth of swaps, the derivative contracts tied to interest rates and commodities like oil and gas.
The threshold is a not-insignificant sum. By one limited set of regulatory data, 85 percent of companies would not be subject to oversight. After five years, the threshold would reset to $3 billion; it is the same amount suggested by a group of energy companies in a February 2011 letter, according to regulatory records.
When regulators first proposed the rules in late 2010, they set the exemption at $100 million. At that level, only 30 percent of the players would have been excused from the oversight, which was mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law.
5. Prosecute law-breakers. No one involved in the Housing Bubble collapse and subsequent financial meltdown has seen a second of jail. There are tons of players in this field of criminals, guilty of defrauding their clients, with paper and email trails to show their culpability. There have been wrist-slap fines, sure- usually amounting to less than those banks and firms profited by their frauds. But Magnetar? A fine. Goldman Sachs fraud? No indictments. All the states that had lawsuits against the banks? Pressured to settle by the Obama Administration, and for really crappy outcomes for the public, and great outcomes for the banks. John Corzine at MF Global? No charges. Greg Lippmann? Nada. Jeffrey Verschleiser? Promoted. Why? Because the banks and the financial industry run in the highest levels of political and financial power in this country, and they have been allowed by our government- partially composed by their servants or members- to be unregulated, even by law. The regulatory agencies are mostly captured, and are actually applying pressure to avoid investigation or prosecution in part because of their own culpability. The revolving door to the halls of power in government is a who's who of financial sector people.
Solution: Public outcry and pressure for equal application of rule of law, and public outrage and refusal for the government to broker and pressure for wrist-slaps. No more retroactive immunity, no more allowing the clock to run out on the statute of limitations for financial crimes, no more sheltering. This one is tough, because these are friends and allies and the political elite themselves, and our nation is veering heavily into a two-tiered system where telecoms get retroactive immunity for crimes, previous administrations get carte blanche for torture and war crimes, banks and wall street gets a pass on prosecution mostly, and at best get a few fines.
Some of the suggestions above apply more to the Wall Street side of the equation, and if Glass-Steagall is reinstated then things like HFT and derivatives become a issue for the regulation of Wall Street rather than the banks; as it is now the big banks are vastly linked in with Wall Street.
All these suggestions above are regulatory in nature, and while good and necessary changes, they do not challenge the underlying problems: A.) the predatory aspects of capitalism; B.) neo-liberal globalization policies, that exacerbate the credit bridge extended in the US to cross the trade gap and stagnating wages, as capital is rewarded for leaving the country, along with jobs; and C.) The complicity and corruption of the government in its failure to regulate.
The banks deserve plenty of scorn and outrage, but the crony capitalism system in place requires a corrupted government to work, and some of the ire should be reserved for those in government who allow regulatory agencies to be captured, who are swayed by lobbyists and donations to weaken regulations, who go to work for the financial industry minutes out the door from their government position, who underfund regulation and block investigations, and who protect the criminals from prosecution. And it is up to us to apply pressure from below to create consequences for the elected, and to not forget.
It is with trepidation in light of government corruption that I also posit the solution that banks could be nationalized, a position supported by Joseph Stiglitz among others; even if considered too big to fail, they are too big to allow to run unregulated and indulging in risks to the entire economy.
Yves Smith has an opinion piece in the NYT, and gives her suggestions for what to do about bank risks. She includes reinstating Glass-Steagall, considering limiting what banks are allowed to invest in, actually enforcing the Volcker Rule and Sarbanes Oxley, and getting rid of credit default swaps..
Quote:
A less radical idea would be to eliminate credit default swaps over time (they are too embedded in current practice to ban them; banks need to be weaned off them). There are no socially valuable uses for the product. Contrary to defenders’ claims, they aren’t a good way to short bonds (not only does it deal with only one attribute of bond risk, it does so badly: payouts in actual credit events on credit default swaps vary considerably, and are generally less than payouts to holders of real bonds). These swaps were the driver of the crisis. They were the mechanism that allowed real economy exposures to risky subprime bonds to be multiplied well beyond the number of actual borrowers and thus cause vastly more damage.
Yves Smith runs the site Naked Capitalism, which has great daily updates on banks, Wall Street, legal wrangling, media coverage, and government regulation or lack thereof, and discusses underlying principles. One of my favorites.
The Senate Banking Committee is responding to outrage over the news that J.P. Morgan lost some $3 billion in customer money because of a risky trading strategy. The committee is preparing for two hearings with regulators, and Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD), chair of the committee, is hoping that Jamie Dimon will testify in the near future. “Our due diligence has made it clear that the Banking Committee should hear directly from JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon,” Johnson said in a statement last week.
Luckily for Dimon, the professional staff in charge of managing the banking committee will be quite familiar to him and his team of lobbyists. That’s because the staff director for the Senate Banking Committee is none other than a former J.P. Morgan lobbyist, Dwight Fettig.
Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch wealth-management unit was fined $2.8 million by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for overbilling customers by $32.2 million over an eight-year period.
Merrill Lynch charged the fees to about 95,000 accounts between April 2003 and December 2011, FINRA said in a statement today. New York-based Merrill Lynch, which was acquired by Bank of America in 2009, lacked an adequate supervisory system to ensure that customers were billed in accordance with their contracts and disclosure documents, the regulator said.
The purpose of regulation is in practice to prevent bad practices and penalize rule breakers. But as Yves at Naked Capitalism points out, it is pretty clear that BofA and its absorbed Merrill Lynch still profited off of the over-billing, even after subtracting the fine and the returned monies. How exactly is that a disincentive, FINRA?
They told me that North Korea has some nice ,uber regulated bank
gogo live there
__________________
"There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian."(Murray N.Rothbard)
"Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue."(Ayn Rand)
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"(Margaret Thatcher)
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
the US has the most left-wing president ever and guess what??all the crisis and all these "crash" are happening under the iron hand of his regime,when the governament is spending and regulating like no tomorrow
you all live in a parallel world where all the natural laws of LOGIC and ECONOMICS are suspended in the name of a religion(Marxism or Keynesianism)
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"There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian."(Murray N.Rothbard)
"Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue."(Ayn Rand)
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"(Margaret Thatcher)
I heard Somali pirates are offering loans to ailing countries and are financing development in their own country. You should move there AML I foresee big opportunities for Libertarians.
LOL Obama's iron-handed regime! Yeah, it's just like that.
They told me that North Korea has some nice ,uber regulated bank
gogo live there
I can also look at Canada, which has stricter banking rules than the US, and has had no bank bail-out needed. No banks in Canada collapsed or failed after the housing bubble popped. Why wouldn't we want that, again?
I really get a kick out of the Libertarian view that government interference is what caused the problem with banks- FDIC means individual consumers of bank products aren't doing their due diligence and get all lazy; encouraging home ownership and the existence of GSEs are the "real" problem; Fed interference and regulating banks at all causes the problems of today.
The only area where I can find common ground is that bank bail-outs- both the public TARP funds and the secret $7 trillion in loans and guarantees given to banks- create a moral hazard with investment banks risk being guaranteed by taxpayer funds.
In every other way I find the Libertarian position on regulation ludicrous, especially considering that after the Great Depression, regulation increased and the banks actually functioned as banks. When they were steadily deregulated again over the last four decades, we have had the S&L Scandal, and now the housing bubble. JPMorgan would not have had a hedge that big so as to lose $2-$3 billion, nor would they be underwritten by taxpayers, if Glass-Steagal were still in effect, if Sarbanes-Oxley were actually enforced, or if Dodd-Frank or the Volker Rule were enforced- all regulations the banking industry rallied and lobbied against.
Imagine a true free market,what would have happened?
This is the LOGICAL SCENARIO:
1) the banks who received the bail-outs failed
2)the self-correcting power of free markets fixed everything
3)???? everyone profits
What happened:
1)Big Government pushed for the bail-out,Obama and Keynesian economics(Krugman,DeLong,Stiglitz...all usual suspects)were the Master-head behind this
2)The banks were forced to accept the bailout and make more risks
3)?????economics failure
__________________
"There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian."(Murray N.Rothbard)
"Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue."(Ayn Rand)
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"(Margaret Thatcher)
all Left-wing, egalitarian, multiculturalist thought start from five broken premise:
1)They believe you can change human nature. They believe in the old Savage Myth that "oooh people are born good,capitalism makes them greedy and nasty". IT IS NOT. People are greedy and nasty because it is human nature to care only for themself and some family members and few friends and fuck everyone else.
OPEN A FUCKING HISTORY OR ECONOMICS BOOK.
FREE-MARKET CAPITALISM IS THE ONLY SYSTEM COHERENT WITH HUMAN NATURE
2)They believe in the religious myth that " free markets don't always lead to an equilibrium "
3)They don't understand that people are driven by incentives,so if you tax the rich they will simply stop to produce for all of us prefering leisure time or will go to others country
4)they are egualitarians and believe in the bullshit they learned in their sociology/philosophy/failures class like "the importance of social forces" "people are determined by the enviroment " and so fucking stupid dull bullshit
They don't understand that some individuals and races are better due to genetics
They claim to be "atheists" then rejects survival of the fittest social darwism.
They don't understand that things such anxiety,low IQ,autism etc are caused by BROKEN GENES and not by "the enviroment"..
They reject the science of economics(chomsky once said that economics is a pseudoscience),the science of Psychology(Foucault blame psycologists for all the evil in the world),of evolutionary psychology
5)Leftists have a "female brain".....they rejects male(especially alpha males) feature like competion,agressivity,the need for an hierarchy,the natural superiority of some over others etc Basically all reasons why we have BALLS ...eeek they even refuse Gun rights because "oh noes!! Weapon kills!!",pinko-fags
They have a vulgar effemminate thinking-pattern,they are basically caricature of all the homosexual stereotypes(with the exception that very few gays conform to the stereotype). This is the manly reason why,while I believe that fundie religious conservatives are basically retards,I loathe the members of the left far more than the member of the right and prefer an alliance with a neocons than an alliance with leftists
__________________
"There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian."(Murray N.Rothbard)
"Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue."(Ayn Rand)
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"(Margaret Thatcher)
Last edited by AynMisesLibertarian; 06-22-2012 at 05:50 PM.