WC Varones

Don't lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools

End TBTF

Posted by | 4.29.2010 at 4:29 PM

Goldman Sachs and Citigroup enthusiastically endorse the fake financial reform bill circulating through the Senate. That's because it will allow business as usual and won't solve the Too Big To Fail problem.

Enter Senator Ted Kaufman and his merry band of dissident Democrats. They have a proposal: no bank can have liabilities greater than 2% of US GDP. It's eminently sensible, and vehemently opposed by the greedy banksters. The only way to get rid of Too Big To Fail is to get rid of Too Big. There is absolutely no reason these banks need to be running around with highly leveraged trillion-dollar balance sheets, just waiting for a bailout the next time there's a hiccup in the markets.

Summary and FAQs here. Full bill here.

Other blogger perspectives in favor of the bill:

MIT Econ Prof Simon Johnson
ZeroHedge
Denninger

3 comments:

Dean said...: B-Daddy over at The Liberator Today turned me on to this general framework for reform.

Sounds eminently sensible which is precisely why it is eminently impossible.; 4/29/2010 5:28 PM
Anonymous said...: I suspect that while they won’t admit to it, they act in collusion with one another. In other words, they compete with each other but to a larger degree, they also co-operate and compliment one another when they can create gains and profits for the group as a whole.

As explained by the U.S. Supreme Court in Spectrum Sports, Inc. v. McQuillan:

"The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself."

Who's going to step up and be our next T.R.?

Jeff; 4/30/2010 7:09 AM
Anonymous said...: So I'm over on the DOJ website just poking around among the many fraud cases they are following and lo and behold what would I find? Straight out of the Dick Vitale It's Serendipity Baby! file.; 4/30/2010 6:18 PM